Burning turns 3

What started as a caper about copper thieves and murderous mennonites ended as a mediation on losing children and a sense of place in West Virginia.

Burning Without Knowing turns 3 today. It is the longest of my published novels (for a few more months, at least) and was somehow the easiest to write.

It's chock full of hidden references and secrets to real-life experiences, but many of those things are still too raw to talk about. Most famously, it includes an epilogue about leaving West Virginia, which I wrote two months before ever knowing I was leaving West Virginia myself. I credit the ending with helping me cope with abandoning The Mountain State.

I don't want to make a terribly long post about it, so in honor of its birthday, here are some trivia nuggets. I'll eventually do an In the Country Dark-style chapter breakdown that will elaborate on a lot of the story.

• Writing started in earnest immediately following In the Country Dark's publication.

• A test chapter was written in 2017. The main character then was a young man named Clint Pepperdew.

• Clint was changed to a young woman to offset the fact that In the Country Dark consists almost entirely of male characters.

• Shawna's Newfarmer's first name came from someone from southern WV who I used to follow on Twitter. She had a very interesting aesthetic, though that and geography is where their similarities end. Newfarmer came from a name I saw in a tax delinquent list. Before that, Shawan's last name was Naughtinger.

• The title Burning Without Knowing came from an episode of NPR podcast It's Been a Minute during a segment called Three Words. The host at the time, Sam Sanders, and his guests would pick three words to describe the week. The week in question involved a total solar eclipse, and there was a lot of discussion about not staring at the sun for fear of retinal blindness. One of the guests' three words was Burning Without Knowing, which is how retinal blindness from staring at the sun too long is described. This event also plays into the plot of the novel.

• Sam Sanders is aware of the title and gave his blessing via tweet just before the book's release.

• The alternate title was In the Country Weeds, which became the Part I title.

• Even though it was released in 2022, the book was set in 2024. This was done to coincide with another full eclipse that year. It was also because a lot of plot points from In the Country Dark turned into accurate predictions before the book's eventual release. I wanted to give the story a two-year buffer so that predictions would have more time to play out, should the same thing happen.