Draft

Chapter Twelve — The Second Application The discovery was an accident. The accidents, in this story, are always the important things. The planned things are the things that go wrong. The accidental things are the things that open the door. The accident happened in the lab in Virginia, the warehouse Read more

Chapter Eleven — The Village The General’s name was Halloway. General Marcus Halloway, United States Army, three stars, deputy commanding general for the region. He was fifty-nine years old, six feet tall, built like a man who had once been lean and was now merely large, with a jaw that Read more

The contractor was a small company in Virginia with a name that sounded like an office supply distributor and a contract that did not exist in any database that the contractor’s own employees could access. The company’s actual work, performed in a facility that was officially a warehouse for medical Read more

Chapter Nine — The Agency The office is in a building that does not appear on any public map of the area. The building is in Northern Virginia, in the band of office parks and government annexes that stretches from McLean to Chantilly along the Dulles Toll Road, and it Read more

Chapter Eight — The Inventor The research park outside Raleigh is called Research Triangle Park, which is the kind of name a region gives a thing when it is proud of the thing and not quite sure what to call it. The park is a long rectangle of corporate campuses Read more

He is sitting in a folding chair against the back wall, where the contractors are supposed to sit, with a notebook on his knee that he is not writing in. The room is the front room of a concrete house with a tile floor and a single ceiling fan that Read more

MAKING OF A PRESIDENT Chapter Four — The Conversion and the Senate Seat Draft 1. Approximate length: 4,000 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: walk the reader through the Ohio Senate primary of 2022 and the conversion narrative that preceded it. By the end of the chapter the Read more

MAKING OF A PRESIDENT Chapter Six — The Reader Trusts Me Now Draft 1. Approximate length: 2,500 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: consolidate Part One and prepare the seam to Chapter Seven. The chapter is short on purpose — the reader has been reading reportage for five Read more

MAKING OF A PRESIDENT Chapter Five — The Ticket and the Money Behind It Draft 1. Approximate length: 4,000 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: walk the reader through the vice presidential selection in July of 2024 and the unprecedented public coordination of the technology billionaire network in Read more

MAKING OF A PRESIDENT Chapter Three — The Book That Was a Resume Draft 1. Approximate length: 3,800 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: explain how a memoir written by a Yale Law student in his late twenties became a piece of political infrastructure. By the end of Read more