Many people ask me when the sequel is coming out for “It’s Always 9/11”. It’s the most common question I get. I hesitate to tell them my answer, which is “never”. The book ends where it began, on the Lost Coast, leaving Tessa at a pivotal moment where her life is about to change forever. I as a writer and you as a reader have accompanied her on the journey to that point. We are all free to speculate where the story goes from there, and I certainly hope that my readers do.

Trilogies are all the rage. Maybe it’s something about the number three; more likely people want answers. They want resolution. Sometimes a trilogy is an effective way of dealing with a very long and complex story that’s too overwhelming for one reasonable-length novel to hold. But more often they are an excuse for boring, bloating detail or overextended stories that never live up to the promise of the first of the series. “Oryx and Crake”, by Margaret Atwood, is one of my favorite novels of all time, but the second and third books of the trilogy (“The Year of the Flood”, “Maddadam”) are middling science fiction tales, leveraging off the brilliant insights of the first book. Even Lord of the Rings, probably the first ever trilogy and arguably the best, has an awful lot of battles and political intrigue bloating the narrative. If I was to write a sequel to “It’s Always 9/11” it would end up being a war story, and I don’t want to write about war. It’s the lead-up to open conflict that counts.

I hope the characters in “It’s Always 9/11” —Tessa, Larry, Holden, Griffin, Lucille, Teddy, even Rob—resonate and linger in your mind. I hope you imagine their future. But the book ends in a present moment. There are questions, and there are trajectories, but no answers and no resolution. The future is always unknowable, in fiction and in life.