Advance Readers Wanted

Hold Without Taking — out October 15, 2026

I spent three years growing monkey puzzle trees in a basement in Indiana. Eight of them are still alive. Somewhere in there I wrote a novel with one of them in it.

The book (Amazon link)

In 1998, Emma Ellis times her son’s falls with a stopwatch.

Colby is nine. He has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a wheelchair somewhere in his future and not much road after it, and a Darth Maul figure he has personally improved with a Sharpie. Emma is twenty-eight, divorced, taking night classes, and building a GeoCities page to raise money for a chair she cannot make herself picture him in.

One night, exhausted, she hides a wish inside a broken line of HTML where no one will ever read it.

She wakes in a forest with no roads, no engines, and no people.

What she finds there is not a laboratory. It’s an archive — a living one, that keeps whatever was said often enough and loses whatever was said precisely. It can tell her a cure exists. It cannot tell her the dose.

She comes home with five verbs and a houseplant.

It’s a novel about caregiving as logistics, memory as infrastructure, and the difference between holding something and taking it.

What I’m asking for

A free ebook now, and an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads on release day.

Honest means honest. If you don’t finish it, don’t review it. If you think it’s a three, say three. I’m not offering to review your book in return, and I’d rather you didn’t offer either — Amazon detects reciprocal reviewing and removes everything on both sides.

Amazon asks that you mention you received a free copy. One line is enough.

Before you sign up

It’s long. About 127,000 words. Give yourself three weeks.

Content: progressive childhood illness in a child, medical deception, drug use, a self-injury moment, and human extinction. It is not a sad book, but it is not a light one.

Formats: PDF, or audiobook if you’d rather listen. Testing a clone of my voice vs BookyAI and including both.

Who this is probably for: readers of The Overstory, Station Eleven, The Time Traveler’s Wife. People interested in disability and caregiving written from inside the logistics rather than from a distance. People who like a speculative premise that stays attached to a kitchen.

Who it’s probably not for: anyone wanting a fast read, a clean miracle, or a tidy ending.

One more thing you should know

This book was drafted with BookyAI and then heavily edited over the past month. I’ve been publishing the measurements as I go: about 62% of the final sentences still appear word-for-word in the original machine draft, and I cut roughly 23,000 words getting there.

I’m telling you up front because you’ll find out anyway, and because I’d rather you read it knowing. If that’s disqualifying for you, I understand completely, and you should skip it. If it makes you curious, check out my blog series on AI benchmarks. Full case study on this book and further analysis coming soon.

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