Good morning John,
and welcome to "Hank Green sits on the floor of a hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee."
There's an event going on here
It's for people who run and own independent bookstores.
It's been fascinating, very cool to talk to all these weird people who work very hard.
I'm here basically to tell them to like my book, I guess?
My book that they cannot currently read,
but, uh, it's coming out September 25th. It's got a release date, John!
I've always wanted to write a book -- is a lie.
I, for a long time, have wanted people to read a book that I wrote -- is more accurate.
And I've analyzed this and I think it's because when I read books, when I've read books,
they have an outsized impact on me.
This of course happens with other media, but for me
most of the creations that I have consumed,
that have deeply changed the way I see the world, have been books.
Like it's a cliche that you lose yourself in a book
but that doesn't mean that it's not extremely profound,
like the act of actually losing yourself.
Like I know what that is.
I know What it's like for the world to disappear around me
and for all the words to be turning into this virtual reality experience in my mind.
Imagining that I could be a person who would do that to someone else someday
was mostly the hubris of youth.
Like you see somebody doing something amazing and you're like I can do that amazing thing too.
But really you don't want to do all the stuff that's necessary to get there,
you just want to have had it happen.
And over the years I have written a lot, but I have mostly written nonfiction.
I've written hundreds of thousands of words
of essays that have been turned into video blogs.
And honestly I've written probably
over a hundred thousand words of tweets,
but I also did start fiction projects and then abandoned them several times
and then finally a few things fit together
And I realized that I was writing something that was actually going to get finished.
There's a moment and in songwriting where I feel that way where I'm like "Oh, I have this song...
I just need to put in the work for the song to be finished."
And that's way before you finish the song.
The first thing that happened is I found a character -- at first just one,
but then others later -- that I cared about really deeply
and I needed--I needed to know her story.
I just got caught up in her the way I get caught up in a good book.
There was no way to finish reading her story without writing it.
The second piece -- which was maybe first? --
but like wasn't as important was finding scenes, these moments in her life that were so
bizarre and wrenching that I needed other people to know about them.
So I had those two things. I was going through the book,
and I kept stopping and it wasn't getting done.
And then I found a third thing that pushed me all the way through to the end.
I realized that there were a number of things that I really wanted to say
that I was pretty qualified to talk about,
but that I couldn't fit into any of my current methods for communicating with people.
Like it wasn't gonna be a four minute long video.
Things about how the internet radicalizes us,
about how fame is so destructive and dehumanizing,
and like the intensity of the responsibility that having power brings
and how overwhelming and crippling that can be.
And also how having power makes you want to use your power to get more power.
So a bunch of stuff.
So that, along with the knowledge that I was gonna be able to get agents
and publishers to read this book because I'm John Green's brother, thanks for that John,
is I think how I managed to sit down and write a book over and over again until it was done.
I'm very pleased and honored and proud that I am gonna have this thing in the real world.
I feel very lucky.
Uh, John thank you for all of your support and your kind words about the book.
I'll see you on Tuesday.
Quick questions: Yes, you can pre-order to the book.
You could do it at your local bookstore.
You can do it at links in the description.
It'll definitely be coming out all at the same time in Canada, the US, and the UK, I think also Australia.
It will also be in these languages.
The release dates for those languages might not be September 25th,
I don't know yet.
Not all pre-orders will be signed. John set unrealistic expectations
and I'm bringing it back down to reality.
And if you're an audio book person there will be an audio book as well released at the same time.
And I will be around in the comments if you have other questions.