Chris Orcutt has done the impossible. Bodaciously True & Totally True, Episode One, Bad Boy, debuts this coming Tuesday, January 20th! Orcutt posted a brief look at what went into writing this monumental work of literature.

For over ten years, or 3,697 days to be exact, I’ve been working on a novel about teens in the 1980s. The novel eventually became so long (over a million words, and twice the length of War and Peace) that I had to split it into nine books or episodes.

The result, Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig, An ’80s American Teen Epic, dramatizes the lives of Ace and his friends in a rural-suburban high school setting. (By the way, it’s much better than I’m making it sound; I’m terrible at condensing my million-plus words into book jacket copy.)

I wrote Bodaciously to be a story for and about my generation—Gen X—a generation that has long been unappreciated, marginalized, and misunderstood. I wrote it to give people my age an escape back to a simpler time, a time when all of life was ahead of us and we didn’t have the internet, AI, tracking, and algorithms in our lives. I wrote it to give the younger generations (and future generations) some idea of what it was like to be a teen in the mid-1980s. And I wrote it for readers, not critics—for people who just want an enjoyable book that keeps them reading.

Read the whole thing at Chris’s blog. Then get ready for the ride of the century!