Interesting find while cleaning out a box of papers: The original draft of the prologue and first chapter of Namesake. This is from late 2009. It’s handwritten because I wrote it during a couple of shifts at Bank of America, where all computer activity was logged so I didn’t want them to see what I was doing between phone calls, but now I do a good bit of the initial draft of Namesake material by hand.

I posted up the typed version of the prologue last year, but I’d forgotten about the first draft of chapter 1. The prologue was one of those rare instances where it was nailed on the first try, but Isa and I went through four or five radically different revisions of chapter 1 before we settled on the plot there, and then there was another revision (adding in Jack) while writing it.