Douglas Stewart

And, you know, I think oftentimes we we sort of don't talk enough about how we have to forgive our parents for their shortcomings and their failings in our own personal lives.

And and John is certainly going to feel the rewards of that or the lack of rewards of it.

And so I write every other word a billion times.

But until I know the opening line, I feel like the novel can't quite start.

And funnily enough, once the line lands, I never change it.

I might sort of polish it ever so slightly, but it always stays in its essence.

Well, actually, I'm not quite sure yet where I'm going with number four.

I have some ideas, but right now I feel a little bit like a fallow field.

And, you know, this has been an 18-year project for me, these three novels.

From the first word of Shuggie to the last word of John took 18 years.

And it is my reckoning with Scotland, a changing Scotland and masculinity and especially the parts of masculinity that I could never express when I lived in Scotland.

And then I never saw captured in literature, you know, the queer working class experience.

And so I think that's the project sort of complete.

And I realized the other day, if you took Shuggie and you took Mungo and then you took Cal as characters and you had them meet in 2026, they would almost be the same age altogether.

And I thought, maybe I'll write a romance where they all sort of are in a love triangle, these three men.

And somebody said to me, some wit said to me, you could have them meet at a self-help group for terrible mothers.

And I thought that might be a good opening line.

But I feel like I'm leaving Scotland now, at least in my fiction.

I can obviously never leave Scotland, but I'm going to leave it in my fiction.

And I wrote a short story that was in The New Yorker recently called A Private View.