Whenever I need inspiration, I walk over to my bookshelf, pluck a book, open it up, and sniff the pages. It’s amazing how well that works.
Nick Miller
Hi, I'm Nick Miller. I like to write things.
My debut novel, "Isn't It Pretty To Think So?", will be released in early 2012.
You can start reading the novel here or order a copy from Amazon.
Join my mailing list for updates, ask me or email me.
My debut novel, "Isn't It Pretty To Think So?", will be released in early 2012.
You can start reading the novel here or order a copy from Amazon.
Join my mailing list for updates, ask me or email me.
Chapters 1-3 of my novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? are now available for download here. I hope you enjoy. I truly appreciate all the wonderful support.
The airport wasn’t just clean, it was shiny, like the glass frame of my college diploma hanging on the wall in my mother’s living room or the wine glasses set around the table for my father’s dinner parties; shiny like the veneers on the housewives who lived in my childhood neighborhood or the Mercedes my bosses drove.
On that night, I would have been more comfortable in a dirty airport—a place where cancelled flights forced travelers to crowd together on the floor and use their luggage as pillows, their jackets as blankets; a place that pulsated through the entire night with the chatter of whiskey-drinking storytellers, all settling into the cozy dirtiness.
—An excerpt from my forthcoming novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? The first 40 pages have been uploaded here.
“I hate the taste of alcohol—beer, wine, whiskey, all of it,” he said to me once, a statement which bemused me initially because he was always drinking.
But there came a time when I understood that it was never about the actual act of consumption or the actual act of sex for Parker; rather, it was about doing what he could to keep the deadness alive within him. His pain didn’t thrive within the deadness, it prospered within the aliveness. It latched on to hope and ambition. It proliferated in love. It succeeded in passion and concern and enthusiasm. But, as Parker had discovered, his pain withered in apathy and detachment and indifference.
—An excerpt from my forthcoming novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? The first 40 pages have been uploaded here.
Thomas Wolfe, God’s Lonely Man
“
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people — not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.
”
Whenever the refrigerator starts to make a sound after I’ve been staring into it for too long, I get the impression it’s angry and feel rushed. #chilloutfridge
When we awoke to the summer-afternoon streams of yellow sunlight, tinged with a leafy green from passing through the trees, Tatiana and I rested in the white sheets until they became extensions of our nude bodies: they became Tatiana’s wings and her bonnet and her dress; they became my cape and my hood and my jacket. Together, we went on white-sheet expeditions to the far corners of the bed, leaving imprints of our bodies along the way, and explored each new spot with the wide-eyed bewilderment of young travelers discovering beauty off the beaten path.
Sometimes we talked as I lay on my back and tossed a pillow into the air while she lay on her stomach and swung her foot down on the bed and raised it back up again. Sometimes, we rolled over to our own corners of the bed, curious about the experience of a solo journey, but soon, starting with the outstretched tips of our touching fingers, followed the path back toward each other until we were intertwined and as close as any young lovers in the world had ever been.
The distant, muffled sound of people lunching in the hotel restaurant—forks against plates, glasses clinking, people chatting—was soothing background music mostly because it reminded us that whatever was happening in our world was far more intimate, as if we had discovered something everyone else sought but had not yet found; they were close, near to our paradise, but we would surely have more time to revel in our togetherness before they uncovered our secret.
It was an afternoon free of doubt and meaninglessness and screams and tears, measured not in the minutes and hours of the human clock but by the slow-swaying, unremitting rhythm of the branches outside our window, their only mission to lull us toward tranquility. Sometimes they succeeded too well and we took naps. Only in the evening, when the thought of a meal began to rouse us, did we remove ourselves from the bed and reacquaint ourselves with our feet.
—An excerpt from my forthcoming novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? You can start reading the novel from the beginning here. Every Monday and Thursday I’ll add more sections of the book at that link until it’s officially released in the spring.
I hope you all enjoyed the holidays. I’ve begun posting, as promised, sections of my novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? on Scribd. Tonight we’ve started by posting the first twelve pages and we plan to keep adding more (every Monday and Thursday) until the official release date of the novel. I hope you enjoy it. I’m so grateful for your support.
Here is the link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/76958798/Book-One-Isn-t-It-Pretty-To-Think-So-Draft
My novel is going to be released by Fernando French Publishing sometime in early 2012. It will be published in good old-fashioned paper form and e-book format. Because I’m very eager for all of you, my longtime supporters, to read it, I’ve decided to start sharing some of it earlier than the release date. My novel is divided into three parts: Book 1, Book 2, and Book 3. On Monday, January 2nd, I will start releasing Book 1 to my Tumblr followers and will continue releasing sections of Book 1 in order (every Monday and Thursday) until the full novel is released by my publishers.
I’m so grateful for the encouragement and continued support you all have given me over the last year. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. Message me if you wish. Also: my Twitter.
I never planned to love her nor, despite my intense loneliness at the time, use her to fill the emptiness within me; rather, I was interested only in saving her, without any idea how, from the hellfire that engulfed her. My love for her came later—long after I knew about her passion for learning—in the flash of a summer glance around a table set with two dinner plates and two glasses of wine.
I lay supinely on the couch, sipping the final third of a palm-warmed beer, and mulled over thoughts that, over the last few years, had become very familiar to me. Long ago I came to the realization that loneliness would forever be a part of me and, soon after, decided that I should embrace it rather than fight it—that way, something good might come of it, I told myself.
I remembered I went through much of high school and college keeping mostly to myself; my friends hovered around just long enough to know that it was probably too much work to remain my friend. I concluded, at the time, that people at such a young age just want to be around other people who make their own lives easier. Thus my understanding of “friend” became: someone who makes someone else’s life easier. I thought about how unlikely it was that I had ever made anyone’s life easier.
I figured the theory also applied to romantic relationships but, along with wanting someone who made their lives easier, girls wanted someone who fit into their plan—whatever it may have been. I never had a girlfriend in high school and it wasn’t until the middle of my freshmen year in college that I met a girl who told me she wanted nothing from me other than to teach me things; thus my entire breadth of (still limited) carnal knowledge was attributable to that girl for quite some time. Later in college, I did get to know a few more girls, not girls who thought I fit into their plan but, rather, girls who had just gotten out of relationships with other boys who had once fit into their plan.
I finished my beer, grimacing as I swallowed the last warm mouthful, and wondered what had roused my recurring memories. Change. That was it. Lately I had become increasingly frustrated by my unwillingness to bring change into my own life and, naturally, I had turned to my own history for any clues about why I was the way I was.
—A tiny excerpt from my forthcoming novel: Isn’t It Pretty To Think So?
Literature, Je t’aime.
I’ve learned much on the journey of writing my first novel. I learned, for example, that my first draft was more about storytelling and less about writing. My scariest realization happened when I went through my first draft for the first time and realized that the writing was pure shit. After I calmed down in knowing that my story was still intact, I acquainted myself with the act of rewriting and, with each subsequent rewrite, I watched my style evolve, I cut out many of my darlings that I was, at one point, so proud of writing (it’s strange how a section you once loved so much no longer has a chance), and, perhaps above all, I realized how much time it takes to polish an entire manuscript (I originally wrote 600 pages; I now have around 350 pages).
There is one remaining section of the novel I need to rewrite and polish. Of course, I could just turn over the manuscript and be done with it but I’ve worked too hard and too long to do that. I want it to be right. I’ve asked my publishers for more time and they’ve given it to me (you can read the announcement here).
I really appreciate all the e-mails and messages from some of you who are excited for my novel’s release. Don’t be disillusioned. You would want me to make sure it’s ready. Enjoy the holidays. My novel will be ready and released in early 2012.
If you have any questions or thoughts, talk to me.
You can still pre-order the novel on Amazon or read the first two chapters.
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