I wrote Firenze on a Dell Axim X3 with the Think Outside Stowaway folding keyboard. I wrote most of the novel on my lunch break in the Columbia Tower atrium in Seattle around 2003/2004. The Axim had a “Windows Mobile” operating system and I’d connect it to my big old PC each night at home and download what I’d written that day.
Those were not the easiest times for me. I was a new father and sleep deprived. The dot com bubble had burst after 9/11 and I’d traded my cool remote dot com jobs for a soul crushing corporate job. I was having some doubts about giving up California for rainy Washington State.
I’d written Mountain View with extreme optimism. A desire to get that awkward period between adolescence and adulthood down on paper before I forgot what it felt like. I probably sent it to 100 agents. Got a lot of requests, a lot of very nice letters back from some big names in publishing. I wrote Kato shortly after moving to Seattle from San Francisco in a kind of furious/fuck it, I’ll just write something jokey and fun. But then I was told by people close to me it didn’t have a chance in the publishing world at that time. So I sat on it.
Then life happened. I had this idea about not being able to appreciate things in the moment. I had some other ideas I was still turning over in my mind from both Mountain View and Kato. But Firenze was a struggle–I had so little time to work on it. On this funny little device and folding keyboard in this big bustling atrium. Wearing corporate casual–khakis and a blue button up. Getting texts on my Nokia 3310.
I was definitely listening to a lot of Radiohead back then. Hearing Amnesiac takes me right back to that time and place.
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