A different kind of letter. No coffee in it. Well, that is not quite true, and that turns out to be the whole point.
Before any of this existed, I wrote a novel. It is called It Smells Better Than it Tastes, which is where this newsletter got its name. It is up on the site now, free, and I figured the person who wrote it should be the one to explain himself.
That person publishes as Oliver Franklin Anderson. It is a pen name, mine. When I decided to write a book, that is the name I went to, and the place. Same initials, different room.
Fair warning before you scroll. It is adult fiction and it earns the label. The sex is explicit, the language is profane, and the narrator apologizes for none of it. If that is not what you came here for, skip this one, no hard feelings, and I will see you next time with coffee.
Here is Oliver.
The story took me 11 days to write. The actual writing was a blur. I just kept writing until I couldn't write anymore. Which, as you will see, didn't take long at all.
Everything after that took a year and a half. Editing, an editor's pass, my own intense edit, another editor's pass, my last revisions. Sourcing an ebook conversion company. Spending way too much time finding a cover artist. Getting depressed about the whole thing and finding the energy to push through anyway.
So what does somebody like myself talk about? The book. Myself. But not too much, though. I can only take myself seriously for a short time.
Here is the first sentence of it:
My two favorite sounds in the world are the sound of the first cup of coffee hitting the bottom of a white coffee mug, slowly filling to the top, and
I will let you find out what the rest of that sentence is. It is the reason the book carries a warning, and it tells you everything about the man narrating it. He is honest about exactly two things, and coffee is one of them.
Which brings me to the part I have never told anyone here.
The coffee came from the book.
Mark drinks coffee. It is the one ritual in his life he does not phone in and does not lie about, and I could not write that honestly without knowing what he knew. So I started making more of it. I got a French press. I read about coffee, and then I stopped reading about it and started actually paying attention to what was in the cup. I wanted to understand what a coffee lover is, not what one sounds like.
I never put it back down. Everyday Beans, the videos, this newsletter, all of it started as research for a character.
On whether the book is autobiographical, purely made up, or a sprinkle of both: imagination is absolutely incredible. But reality and living forces creativity out.
But still, why did I write this story?
The simple answer is that I wanted to provoke the idea of choices. How important it is to follow through with our choices, even when other people see them as risky and try to discourage us. And that any decision made has real consequences.
Mark, the shining light of the story, depending on how you see him, showed me that I can have true compassion for him. A person who is lost, angry at the world, not happy with himself, who so badly wants to throw everything and every person out of his life, and feels that is the only act that could ever make him happy, is a challenging paradigm to swallow whole. Even though, on the outside, Mark's world seems the opposite.
Interesting, right? Well, it probably is a yawn fest to you. But think about that for a minute. What you see on the outside is not what is true at the root. We humans are constantly lying to each other, but probably lie to ourselves even more. The question is, which lies hurt more?
Near the end, he drives to the coast in the dark to watch a sunrise, which is not something the man from that first sentence would ever do. He gets there early and has to wait for it:
The act of the earth waking up is slow. Nobody, even if they wanted to, could speed up the rising, it does it on its own clock.
I don't know if seeing the sunrise compares to the smell of fire-roasted coffee beans, but they have similar feelings of being alive.
I wrote that long before I ever wrote a word about brewing. I have been saying some version of it ever since without realizing where I got it.
I put my whole heart and soul into this book. Vomited my soul onto it, if I am being honest with you.
To happy reading. To getting lost, found, and wrapped up in a made-up world. To escaping your real world for a very short time.
-OFA
About 100 pages. Free, no strings. Adult fiction: explicit, profane, unapologetic.
If you would rather hear it than read it, I sat down and talked the whole thing through on camera: Coffee Journey Meets Life, about sixteen minutes.
"Just keep reading. I've got you."
Here's to the journey. Yours and mine.