Save As

Save As performs one operation. It leaves the original file where it is, creates a second file, and refuses to continue until you have given that second file a name. The naming is not optional. You cannot hit enter on an empty field. Whatever you type becomes the permanent label for the version of yourself who was awake at that hour, and the software does not care whether you were thinking clearly when you typed it.

There is a folder on my drive called TERMS. It was called AFTERTASTE for the first three months. Sixty-three files. The first is aftertaste_notes.docx, saved at 03:12 on a Tuesday, 412 words, most of them a list. By file eleven the naming has stopped being descriptive and started being editorial: aftertaste_v11_CUT THE FLIGHT.docx. By file thirty-four it is terms_v34_this is the one.docx, which was followed, nineteen days later, by terms_v35.docx. File fifty-eight is terms_FINAL.docx. File sixty-three is terms_FINAL_v6_actually.docx, and that is the one that went out.

Aftertaste was accurate for what I was doing at the time. It is the taste that stays in your mouth after you have eaten something that had gone off — you did not know while you were eating it, the information arrives late, and it arrives in the body before it arrives anywhere else. I kept that title for three months, and for three months the book was a report on the taste. Complaint, organised into chapters.

The rename happened at file twelve. Terms of Living is a list of conditions I set for myself, and I could only call it that once I had started writing it that way.

Aftertaste is still on the cover. It is the subtitle now — Aftertaste of Modern Love — set small and underneath, which is the correct arrangement and took me a year to arrive at. Save As leaves the original where it is. It only requires you to name the new one.

The title followed the work.

That folder is the only honest record of the last two years. Everything else is a story I could tell in different orders depending on who is listening.

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There is a version of my biography that people find satisfying, and it goes like this: something ended badly, and out of the wreckage came a book. It is a clean structure. It has a cause and an effect and it requires nothing of me except that I stood in the right place when the material arrived.

Here is what the material actually did. It sat in a note on my phone for four months before it became a file at all. It did not organise itself. It did not develop a second act. Grief is an enormous quantity of unsorted input — hours of it, in no order, most of it repetitive — and left alone it stays exactly that. aftertaste_notes.docx is 412 words of a man listing things in the dark. Nobody shortlists that.

What turned it into a book was fifty-two Saturdays and two rules applied to every page: cut anything that made me the hero, cut any word that was not doing work. Some drafts ran to 65,000 words. What survived both rules is 42,000. It is a short book. The long version had more scenes in it and most of them were there to be admired, including the best thing I wrote that year, which came out at file eleven for exactly that reason.

Heartbreak is the raw stock. It arrives at everyone. What happened after is on me — the hours, the cuts, the rejections logged in a spreadsheet with a column for date and a column for whether they bothered to say why.

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I know what the other route looks like because I costed it out.

There was a bar four minutes from my flat and I know it was four minutes because I timed it in the first week, the way you time things when you are deciding how much trouble you are prepared to be in. I could have gone every night. I could have done the acceptable version — the eight months of visible recovery, the gym, the tan, the soft-launch of somebody new in a story with the location turned off, the caption about being in a good place. That arc is available. It has a script and an audience and people applaud you for completing it on schedule.

You are supposed to heal in the shape other people can recognise. Glow up. Get out there. Let it soften you. The arc is popular because it is legible from the outside, and it asks the person watching for nothing at all.

I wrote the book instead. The Worst Boyfriends Ever went out on 6 January 2025, and it went to #1 in Gay Humor and #2 in Gay Romance on Amazon — which is to say, for a stretch of days, in two categories, on one retailer, it was the thing people were buying. A rank is a moment. It is not a property of a book. But it happened because of what was in the file, and what was in the file happened because I put it there.

Then came the fourteen months between the two books, which have no narrative in them at all. The mailing list that went from 40 people to a number I was embarrassed to say out loud. The metadata. The categories. The countdown emails, written in advance and scheduled by a man with no evidence that anyone would open them.

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Terms of Living was written against the shape.

Books in this territory have a standard architecture. The wound, the spiral, the wrong person who teaches you something, the right person who arrives in the last forty pages, the epilogue in which the narrator is calm. I removed the arrival. There was no rebound, so there is no rebound in it. Nobody turns up in the last forty pages to explain me to myself. The manuscript ends with a logistical problem and a Tuesday.

The first cover was plain type on a plain ground. It was fine, and it was a placeholder for a decision I had not made yet. Two weeks before launch I paid for a second one: black, TERMS OF LIVING in red thread pulled through the surface, and at the bottom right a needle with the thread still running out of it. The sewing on that cover is not finished. The needle is still in hand.

There is a scene in the book where I sew a bag shut. I had left another city with more in it than the bag was built to hold, and the zipper gave out under the weight and the side came open. The only thread I had was red, out of a hotel sewing kit. I sat on the floor and closed it in the wrong colour because that was the colour available.

A stitch is a repetition that cannot be undone by wanting it undone. You go back with a blade and take each one out on purpose, or it stays. And the red shows. A visible repair tells you the thing failed and somebody sat down and dealt with it.

The red on the cover is that red.

I wanted the conditions on the outside of the book, in a material that would not let me quietly revise them. Save As gave me sixty-three chances to change my mind. Thread gives one, and then it asks you to be serious.

I set the launch for 27 March 2026, one week after my birthday. I have told people it was a decision about the quarter. It was a present.

Two editors told me the ending had no lift. I kept it. It is now shortlisted for The Letter Review Prize for Books, January to April 2026, from a field the judges called fierce. I want to be precise about what that means: a shortlisting is two people, signing off as Kita and Ol, deciding the file was worth their time. It does not settle anything. It is a line in an email that arrived at 19:46 on a Sunday, from a Submittable no-reply address, while I was doing something else.

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Here is the part that keeps the rest of it honest.

I did not choose work over drinking because I am built better than the men at the bar. I chose it because both do the same job and only one of them gets called discipline.

Save As is a very efficient way of not sitting still. Every time the document got close to something I could not look at directly, there was a legitimate, professional, entirely defensible task available: a title to fix, a rank to check, a paragraph to move. terms_v34_this is the one.docx was not a breakthrough. It was a man who had run out of things to reorganise and needed a new file to open so he would not have to sit in a quiet room with what had actually happened to him. I outran it. I outran it for two years and sixty-three files, and the running produced a book, and the book is good, and both of those things are true at the same time as the running.

I still claim the work. The credit does not shrink because the engine was partly avoidance — the hours were still mine, the cuts were still mine, the year of unglamorous administration was still mine. It just means I do not get to describe any of it as healing. It was output. Healing is a separate and much slower file that I have barely opened.

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The folder is closed now. TERMS, sixty-three files, 2.1 GB including the cover drafts, backed up in three places, which is more places than I have backed up anything else about that period.

There is a new folder next to it. One file in it so far, saved last Thursday at 09:04, and I gave it a stupid name because it is early and the naming stops mattering somewhere around version thirty.

The dialog box opens. It wants a name before it will let me continue.

For the first book's messier origin story, read How I Wrote The Worst Boyfriends Ever. The second book is the longer record of what survived the revisions: Terms of Living.