oh, he is falling in love

"johnny boy" by twenty one pilots & the first chapter of NEVER BEEN SHIPPED

Did you know that my Top Artist for 2024, according to my Apple Music, was Twenty One Pilots? Did you know that was based almost entirely on the fact that I was fever-dream drafting Never Been Shipped in January of that year, and Twenty One Pilots was all I was listening to at that time?

Anyway. I love this song, which is I think an underrated gem in the band’s catalog, and which is the song I paired on NBS’ official playlist with chapter one, where you meet John for the first time. (Well, in this book — he appears as a side character in With Love, from Cold World!) Micah is *Princess Jasmine Voice* not a prize to be won, but still the idea behind this song is very thematic for John, who’s conscious of the fact that in the band he was the second guitarist, he wasn’t the one who “got the girl” the first time around, in general all his life he’s felt . . . not quite good enough.

Since we’re only a few weeks away from Never Been Shipped coming out (and already I’ve seen early copies making their way to people!), I thought I’d share the first chapter with you. If reading teasers isn’t your thing, these cute little gray divider lines separate the excerpt from the rest of this newsletter, so you can also just scroll down till you see the second one :)

Otherwise — here we go:

---

John didn’t need new strings. He could’ve easily bought them in the month he had before the cruise would set sail, could’ve ordered them online and had them waiting at the house by tomorrow morning. Hell, he probably had several unopened packets of strings already in his guitar case, or shoved deep in his underwear drawer, or slid carelessly somewhere under his bed.

It was a delay tactic. He knew it, and he didn’t care.

The bell on the door to the music shop tinkled overhead as he stepped in, already comforted by being surrounded by instruments — the wall of electric guitars hung up for display, the row of amps to test out, the drum kits and xylophones and keyboards set up where kids wouldn’t be able to help themselves when they walked by. The only downside was that his favorite clerk wasn’t behind the counter, but that was okay. He’d be in and out.

Except John had never made a quick trip to a music store in his life, and he certainly wasn’t going to start today, when the whole point was to put off the inevitable. He wandered over to the guitars, his eyes drawn to one with a sunburst paint job and a fifteen-hundred-dollar price tag. He took it down from the wall and plugged it into an amp.

“Sir?” The freckled clerk — he couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old — came over before John even had time to play the May I help you? riff. “I’m sorry, sir, you’re not supposed to touch the guitars.”

John knew that. There was an index card with that very message printed on it, stuck between the strings. Sometimes John played around it if he was just looking to fuck off for a second, other times he removed it entirely if it was interfering with his ability to play.

“Sorry,” he said. “Usually I come when Gary’s here, and he always lets me get them down myself.”

The clerk’s face brightened for a second at the mention of Gary’s name, then dropped again. “I get it, but customers really aren’t allowed to —”

And then the clerk’s face changed completely, and John knew with a sinking feeling exactly what was coming. As a teenager, John had been in a band that had released a couple albums, toured the world, and most memorably, performed a song onstage at a fictional prom for fictional shapeshifter characters in a TV show that aired at eight, seven Central.

“Wait, aren’t you — I mean, weren’t you —” The kid wouldn’t be able to remember John’s name. Probably he’d never known it. But that was the problem with appearing in a single episode of a popular TV show fifteen years ago, and also the problem with having his distinctive black curly hair. John got recognized a few times a year, which wasn’t too bad, definitely wasn’t as bad as it used to be, but was still a few times too many as far as he was concerned.

There was no point in denying it, though. John had tried that tactic a few times, and it was seldom convincing and only made him feel like a dick.

“John Populin,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake the kid’s. “I played guitar in ElectricOh! back in the day.”

“You played Nightshifters prom,” the kid said. “That song —”

And then, to John’s horror, the kid started singing it. “If Only,” the one hit from his one-hit-wonder band. The big, surging high notes all came in the bridge, but it was a low note at the end of the first verse that John had always thought was the sneaky hard one to nail. You almost had to half speak it, and done badly it could sound discordant, like you’d made a mistake.

When Micah sang it, it had always sounded like a warm, intimate purr directly in his ears, like he was listening to her voice through headphones even when she’d been projecting to the back of the venue.

“Yup, that’s the one,” John said now, cutting the kid off before he could get to the lyrics that still felt like a stab to his gut, even all these years later. “Surprised you watched that show. Seems a little before your time.”

“Everything’s streaming now. And my girlfriend watches all that old teen crap. The one about the brothers who hunt supernatural shit, the one about the brothers who play basketball, the one about the brothers who live in that sick house and the guy with the eyebrows plays their dad . . .”

“That’s right. I’d forgotten Ryan got adopted.”

The kid blinked down at John. “Huh?”

John didn’t know why he was letting himself get drawn into this conversation. “That’s a lot of brothers,” he said instead, then gestured down at the guitar he was still holding. “Is this the only finish you have in stock for this one?”

“What you see is what we have,” the kid said, which of course John had already known. He wasn’t in the market for a new, expensive guitar anyway. John got by — he was still living off his royalties from “If Only,” which he had a co-writing credit on, and then supplemented that income with various corporate events and weddings he played with one of his cover bands. He lived with housemates to split the rent, he stayed home most nights he didn’t have a gig, he kept his wants and needs small enough that they didn’t take up too much room.

He set the guitar carefully back up on the wall. The Please ask a sales associate for assistance card was a little askew, threaded between the strings, and so John nudged it straight again. Strings. He had come there for strings.

He didn’t wear a watch and didn’t feel like taking out his phone, but he probably only had forty-five minutes before the meeting at the record label’s offices started, and he really didn’t want to be late. He hated being late.

“Can I just get a couple sets of tens?”he asked the kid.

“Of course,” the kid said. “Electric? We have D’Addario nickel-wound, we have —”

“That’s fine.”

The kid led him over to the front of the store, where he grabbed a couple packets from behind the counter and set them next to the cash register. “What are you playing now?” the kid asked as he started to ring John up. “Let me guess. A custom Fender? A Les Paul? Wait, wait, one of those boutique brands, like a —”

“A Squier Telecaster, mostly.”

The kid reacted to that like John had given him something sour to eat. A moment of surprise, then disgust, and then a badly masked neutrality like he wanted to spit it out but knew it wouldn’t be polite. Probably the kid hadn’t expected a rock star — even a former rock star — to admit to playing what was essentially a student guitar. The thing had come with a mini amp and a chord book, and had cost three hundred fifty-nine dollars after tax. John should know. It had taken him an entire summer of mowing lawns to save up for it.

He’d never been a rock star — certainly had never felt like one. Micah, on the other hand. She’d been a star from the moment he’d met her, with her long, sunset-colored hair and the way she lit up a room and the power she had to put everything she was feeling into her voice until you could feel it, too.

It had been thirteen years since he’d last been in the same room as her. Ten if you counted that concert in L.A. — which he didn’t. He had no idea if she still wore her hair long, if she would light up when she saw him or shut all the way down, if she had anything to do with music anymore. But he guessed all it would take was another forty-five minutes or so, after he got his receipt for this transaction that was taking forever, after he jumped into his beat-up Toyota Camry and drove across town. After he arrived at the offices for the record label that made more money off his music than he did, which had cast him out like he was nothing after the band had blown up, which wanted him now to smile and play those old songs on a Nightshifters cruise in what they’d assured him over the phone was a “great opportunity.” After he sat down at a table across from people he hadn’t seen in over a decade, but who’d once been the most important part of his life. After he saw her, who’d once been practically his whole life.

And then he’d finally know.

---

Whew. Okay. There it is! The first chapter of my next book, fully live. Nerve-racking! Did you know I typed that entire thing out by hand, using various objects to try to hold the book open while I did so? I did it because I love rote typing (ANY EXCUSE TO SHOW OFF) and because it reminded me of the time I straight-typed Dr. Manette’s letter from A Tale of Two Cities for some English project I had to do and only later was someone like “you could’ve probably found the whole text online and just copied and pasted it?” LEAVE ME TO MY CRAFT! IT WAS ARTISANAL!

What I was actually trying to say was I typed that excerpt by hand so if there are any errors, forgive me, they are (probably, hopefully) not in the final book.

left: rows of guitars; center: a rack of D'Addario strings; right: a Squier Strat that comes with a case and an amp

And here are a few annotations for this section, just for fun:

• A lot of my life has been spent in music stores like this, so I know them quite well! (I couldn’t help but put a music store scene back in Love in the Time of Serial Killers, too.) My husband is a musician; I’ve been learning guitar (not super actively in the past couple years, which is why I’ve plateaued); both my kids are into music, etc. So all this stuff about constantly buying new packs of strings, taking display guitars down to play them — the May I help you? riff being a Wayne’s World reference! — is all very familiar to me.

• The Nightshifters show is meant to be a fictional amalgamation/homage to a lot of those kinds of CW shows of 2005-2015 or so. When the kid lists the three shows with brothers that he’s been watching lately, that’s the vibe. (I won’t name the shows here only because it’s more fun if you can guess/recognize them.)

• I’ve also always loved when real bands play at proms in TV shows/movies, and felt like that was SUCH a thing in that era in particular (Save Ferris, The Donnas, Letters to Cleo, etc.).

• I love this observation John makes about the low note being the hardest one to hit because it shows how much he pays attention; how much he values not just the big flashy parts but the quieter, more intimate moments; how much he still thinks about Micah and that song. Plus, I can attest when I’m singing along to stuff in the car that sometimes it IS those low/almost conversational notes that are hard to hit and not sound stupid, because the dynamics are so much more nuanced that you really need good pitch and control. Neither of which I have! (Micah does, though.)

• Mention of John’s housemates! Yes, Asa and Lauren and Kiki and Elliot have little cameos in this book.

• The WAY I have been thinking like, I am about to be Squier Telecaster’s biggest brand ambassador¹; this is John’s guitar of choice (for several reasons, but he DOES think it has surprisingly good tone for such a relatively cheap guitar)! I’ve been like, what does it take for Squier to SEND ME A GUITAR, what if I got a Never Been Shipped wrap to put on it, what if I did their little Fender play lessons and I’d be a little brand ambassador posting my guitar learning journey with THEIR PRODUCTS which they would of course provide to me for free :) in exchange for the advertising :) Anyway, I’ve gotten delusional. And I already have a Squier Telecaster guitar lol, it’s what I play when I get around to playing.

• I was a little nervous about this starting scene for the book, because it’s relatively quiet and it’s in John’s POV. But I also have always known that this is exactly where the book is supposed to start. I like seeing John in this place that feels so comfortable to him, dealing with the residual traces of the fame that make him so uncomfortable, on the precipice of this big meeting that he knows will change everything because it’ll put him back in contact with people who meant so much to him but he hasn’t seen in so long. Back in touch with Micah <3.

. . . and *Napoleon Dynamite voice* there’s more where that came from, if you go to the dance with me, because you can preorder Never Been Shipped to read the rest after June 10! Or request from your local library! I know if you subscribe to author newsletters you hear this kind of stuff all the time, but these things are SO IMPORTANT because they’re how booksellers/librarians decide how many copies to put out on shelves, etc. So I really appreciate any support — it means a lot for this book in particular, which in many ways was me writing through my own complicated feelings on the intersection of business and art.

And if you preorder from my local indie Tombolo Books, I’ll personalize your book any way you want (just put your request in the Comments section of your order!) and you’ll also get some swag, including this ElectricOh! art print my good friend Sarah Corrente designed for me:

Currently reading . . . My Sylvia Plath deep dive continues, so I’ve been listening to Maggie Gyllenhaal read The Bell Jar on audiobook. I’ve also started Lauren Kung Jessen’s Yin Yang Love Song, which is already such a delight. He’s a rock star cellist in need of someone to fake date (and then fake break up with) to maintain his heartbreaker cred; she’s an herbalist who could use a celebrity to help promote her family’s business; the summary promises “all it takes is one kiss — and a whole lot of unexpected chemistry — to land both of them in hot water” and when I read shit like that you have no IDEA how quickly I’m turning pages anticipating that moment of combustion. Sometimes I have to slow myself down, like a baby drinking a bottle too fast. You’ll get gas, Alicia! Swoony romance novel gas. This simile is breaking down.

watching . . . My family needed a palate cleanser show after LOST, something relatively short and low stakes before we jumped into our next family show, so we’ve been watching American Ninja Warrior on Netflix. I usually spend the first few episodes going lolol no way, count me out, then an episode of thinking wait maybe I could do anything I put my mind to???? before returning to lolol absolutely the fuck not. I think I hurt my elbow holding my phone too long the other night while I was doing some Happy Color and listening to an audiobook, so that’s the level I’m starting from. “I don’t need easy, I just need possible,” one of the contestants said in something I found legit inspirational, but also . . . I do think I might prefer easy? Can we circle back to easy for a minute?

listening to . . . Speaking of my 2024 “Year in Review” music wrap-up, my algorithms are always fucked. I primarily use Apple Music, so that’s my truest summary, but it gets skewed by stuff like my writing playlists that I hyperfixate on while writing a draft, or even by this newsletter. (BREAKING MY SILENCE TO FINALLY ADMIT THAT “ANTS MARCHING” BY DAVE MATTHEWS BAND WAS MY TOP SONG OF 2024 WHEW I AM SO EMBARRASSED BUT NOW ALSO FEEL SO FREE GETTING THAT OFF MY CHEST WAS SOME BRENE BROWN SHIT). Meanwhile, I use Spotify mostly for any public-facing playlists I make, like ones for my books or ones I compile using comments on Instagram giveaways with song recommendations. Recently, I did a giveaway for an ARC of Never Been Shipped and an ARC of Rachel Runya Katz’s Isn’t It Obvious? that yielded 4+ hours of piping hot fresh music, and I’ve been listening to that lately. Trying to stay hip! Trying to stay relevant! It can’t literally ALL be the same songs over and over, we gotta get some new blood in the mix!

1. Even if I didn’t make this list of famous guitarists who play Squiers, which is just rude.