I'm lucky enough to have a supportive family. I'd not published anything when I started The Bargain, and yet my wife indulged my early-morning writing sessions and put up with my irritability in the afternoons and at night. The early mornings, sitting in a dark room with a dark roast coffee and the soft glow of a computer monitor for company, was a necessity. We had two small boys, and another soon to come. If I wanted to see them at all, I had to write in the thin light of dawn.
The book itself was very much a discovery process for me. The story existed, and it was my job to figure out how to tell it. In the years of writing and revising, I came to understand the characters in ways I hadn’t when I first began. I found that they wanted their stories told as much as I wanted to tell them. Connor Reedly, the reluctant hero, becomes a kind of Jonah, a kind of Abraham, a kind of Noah—preaching an Old Testament kind of message in a New Testament world: Repent, or face destruction.
The Bargain was a compilation of ideas that revolved around a small desert town. Essentially, it asks a tricky question: what determines righteousness. And while we live in a world of people who often look at the world with a sense of monochromatic morality, The Bargain seeks to put a face on so many of us who live in the gray areas. At the heart of the book is a man’s love for his dying wife, but what he discovers in the pursuit of saving her is much deeper, it’s something that runs through us like an underground river.
In the same way as the prophets of old, Connor Reedly learns as much about God as he teaches others, and even more. His is a change of necessity, a change that started long before he rolled into Hailey, California. The people he imagines he's saving are, in a way, saving him and his wife.
The articles he writes cut to the heart, and they stick with you. I wrote this book hoping you'd remember it for years, and come back to it often. I want it to offer you something new on each read-through. My humble hope: that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.