I began writing this book in something like the year 2008, when I was around the age of 22.
It’s not autobiographical. But at the same time, it’s not not autobiographical. Many of my childhood friends will instantly recognize certain locations, certain people, certain events.
But if you think of my real life as a mosaic, it’s like I took the tiles and rearranged them into a very different picture.
In my real life, there was a boy named Drew. In Pass, there are two boys, named Conor and Ashleigh. Neither of them is either of us. Both of them are both of us.
(Both of them are also more than that. Neither of them is just a collection of Duncan-fragments and Drew-fragments.)
But I began the book in part to try to process and understand what had happened to me, and what had happened to Drew, and what had happened to the friendship we’d had, which by 2008 we didn’t have anymore. Some part of me believed that telling the story of Conor and Ashleigh might bring me some measure of healing, and closure, and peace.
(I couldn’t get it from Drew, which I’m pretty sure is my own fault.)
I tinkered with the story off and on, sometimes spending a month writing every day, other times going weeks without opening the file. By 2015, I had reached what felt like the halfway mark, an important internal sub-climax.
The novel stalled.
At first, I thought it was merely on hiatus. I took up another writing project, intending to spend a year refreshing myself, building skill and readership, refilling my reservoir of motivation.
But that project took six years, instead of one, and when it ended, I only managed to write one more chapter of Pass before stalling again.
In the summer of 2025, I began to feel restless. Pass began to itch at me again. I decided that I would, in fact, finish it, after a decade of almost no progress, as a thirty-nine-year-old coming up on forty. I decided I would spend October filtering back through everything that I’d already written, lightly revising and regrounding myself in the world and the characters, and then would do NaNoWriMo in November and carry my momentum forward until the story was complete.
What I found, when I returned to those decade-old pages, sort of shocked me.
I say “sort of” because there wasn’t anything in them that I didn’t expect. I have a keen memory, and I hadn’t forgotten any of the events that I’d already written.
But it was like revisiting your childhood playground as an adult, or watching a movie you haven’t seen in two decades. I had learned things, in the intervening years. I had come to discover that I am (and had always been) autistic. I had changed careers multiple times, and lived in multiple houses, including one that was rather ambitious. I had experienced mild but repeated abuse, first at the hands of a partner and then later at the hands of an employer. I had gotten married, bought a house, had a kid, gained access to black and green.
And from that perspective, when I picked up Pass again for the first time in years, what leapt out at me almost immediately was that Conor, my protagonist, was not okay.
I had already known that he was not okay, vis-a-vis the events of the story. Protagonists are rarely content, satisfied people. Pass very intentionally begins on a day of confusion and despair, and the aftershocks of the inciting incident echo throughout the first half of the story.
But there were also many, many ways in which Conor was not okay that I hadn’t recognized, back in 2008. Hadn’t recognized, and hadn’t intended. It was like telling a funny story from your childhood and getting back looks of confusion and concern. There were things about Conor that I had written, thinking that they were completely normal (or at least a kind of normal) that I now see with tenderness, and empathy, and (sometimes) horror.
Conor was not okay, and he didn’t know it, and he was moving through the world with only the barest awareness that something wasn’t right.
And as I worked my way back through those early chapters, I realized that I didn’t want to change Conor. I didn’t want to undo it.
But I did want to fix it.
I wanted to help.
(I never had a little brother. Conor, along with multiple real-life actual protégés, fills that gap up, a little. Makes it just a tiny bit less yawning.)
Suddenly, the back half of the novel came alive for me. I had always had a relatively clear skeleton—a sense of what events would take place, how various relationships would shift and change. I knew where the story was going, in an abstract, clinical sense.
But now there was flesh and blood growing on the bones. Now, I understood something about the why of it all, that I had been unable to see back in 2008, or 2015.
I have some acquaintances who are fairly “woo,” who believe in fate and auras and crystal vibrations and so forth in a way that I have little patience for. I think that those friends would tell me that Pass went on hiatus for so long because it had to—because the universe was telling me that I had not yet learned what I needed to learn, in order to be able to finish it. That I knew, on some level, that I wasn’t ready to carry Conor through to the end of the story.
I … don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s how the universe works, and I don’t believe my unconscious was holding me back with any sort of wisdom or foreknowledge.
But I am grateful, in retrospect, for the fact that I was unable to finish. I appreciate that the ten-year break gave me the chance to learn things I didn’t know, and didn’t know I needed to know. I feel like the novel is far better, far stronger, as a result of my (somewhat) greater understanding, my (somewhat) higher perspective. I think that I’ve been able to carry Conor—
(And Ashleigh, and Guyler, and Timothy, and all of the other characters, Ms. Palmano and Holt and Conor’s parents and Devon Green and on and on and on. Jennifer was scarcely a character at all, in the original plan, and her sudden appearance on Conor’s radar halfway through the story is something I’ve decided to leave in, because it feels true to life in an important way.)
—through to a different and better place than I would have ever been able to reach, had I made it to the end in 2015, or 2018, or even 2021.
2008 Duncan was confused, in the exact same way that Conor is confused. That’s more than half of why I started writing the book.
2026 Duncan has the advantage of having been able to put the story on hold, and go out and spend ten whole years gathering all kinds of experience (and maybe even a little bit of wisdom), and then coming back to find Conor right where I left him, in the pit of despair, waiting for me to push play.
And he has (I hope) benefitted, from this little quirk of time travel. We’ve gone from figuring it out together, page by page, two equally lost and damaged boys, to me being able to be a teacher, of sorts. An older brother, a mentor, an invisible spirit guide shepherding him through the storm (and sometimes sending other characters to carry him).
And there’s healing in that, for me. Closure. Peace. Pass is not the happiest of stories, but it feels complete, in a way I wasn’t sure it ever would.
I hope it feels that way for you, too, in the end.