Where This Started

Here's what this place is, in one breath: I'm writing a novel called The Descent, and I'm publishing it here as I write it — the chapters as they're finished, and posts like this one about how it's all being made. The site is brand new. The book is not. The book is older than some of the people who will read it, and I think you should know that story before any other.

Sometime around 2002 or 2003, an idea popped into my head. I wish I could tell you where it came from — a documentary, a dream, a conversation I've forgotten. I honestly don't know. It arrived the way the best ones do: uninvited, fully formed enough to be dangerous, and impossible to put down. What if the oldest monuments on Earth weren't what we think they are? What if they were built for a reason we've completely forgotten?

So I started developing it. Notes, then more notes. I researched how you're even supposed to write up a story idea and learned there's a word for it: a treatment. So I wrote one.

Back then I was working at Buca di Beppo, and I shared what I was building with a coworker of mine named Teresa. She read it and she really, really liked it — more than liked it, she pushed me to keep going. Every writer remembers the first person who took their idea seriously. Mine was Teresa. If you ever read this: thank you. Look what you started.

Then, 2004. I flew to London to run the London Marathon, and on that trip I went to Stonehenge. Two things hit me at once, and they almost contradict each other. First: it's smaller than you expect. I'd built it up in my head as something colossal, and the real thing is almost modest. Second: I was in awe anyway — more, somehow, because of the smallness. What got me standing there wasn't spectacle. It was the undertaking. Somebody moved those stones. Somebody brought them across that distance and configured them just so, at a staggering cost, for reasons they found completely sufficient — reasons we no longer know. I stood there asking the question that became this book: why would you build this? What would have to be true for this to be worth it?

The idea never left after that. It rode along with me for twenty years.

Then last October, I finally started building it for real — me and my amanuensis, my writing partner (that's a whole story of its own). Seven months of gathering two decades of fragments, auditing them, and repairing the story's spine. And now this site, where you get to watch the rest happen in the open.

Twenty years from idea to first public page. The chapters are coming. The stones waited this long — you won't have to wait nearly as much.