John Wick meets Johnny Mnemonic in a nail-biting cyberpunk technothriller about a courier on the run from his own Guild

Corporations fall, gangsters are killed, but no-one messes with the Couriers Guild.

When Armand Pierce first became a courier ten years ago, he had an attaché case connected to a titanium cuff grafted into the bones of his wrist, and took an oath: the delivery is everything. He can run, fight—kill, if he needs to—but the package gets where it’s going. It’s the Guild’s guarantee, and since the internet went down in the Cyber Wars, all business, legitimate or otherwise, depends on it. Otherwise, he dies.

So Pierce knows he’s in deep trouble when he arrives at his latest destination to find his payload missing, his case mysteriously empty. Something strange is going on: something that’s already cost three couriers their lives, and threatens to upend the global order. And Pierce had better get to the bottom of it, before the Guild, catches up to him.

The Ideas Aren’t Ready Until They’re Ready

Writing The Price of Everything was a more educational experience than any other book I’ve written. Partly, that’s because it simply took me so long to write it.

Some of the ideas for the book had been rattling around in my brain for well over a decade. I thought then and I still think today that they are fascinating and compelling. But the stories I first tried to write them into were not. They didn’t do the ideas justice. They were lame.

But I didn’t give up on them, or at least not permanently. And I’m glad I didn’t. Whether it was because I was becoming a better writer, or the world was changing in ways that made the ideas more relevant or compelling, or simply because the ideas themselves needed to mature, not in a decrepit, falling apart, death is inexorably approaching and my knees are killing me kind of way, but, you know, to become wiser and more distinguished. What I’m trying to say is, I learned that sometimes an idea simply isn’t ready until it’s ready.

The Book Isn’t Ready Until It’s Ready, Either

While some of the ideas in the book have been in my head for decades, some of the words have been on the page for almost as long.

I started writing the first draft back in 2015 (and as an outliner, that means I’d already been working on it for some time). Now, to be fair, in that time I also wrote four other novels (and another almost completed, plus a couple more ghostwritten), as well as several screenplays and a bunch of short stories. But this book required a lot of revisions, even reconceptualizations.

My wife and I jokingly call The Price of Everything “my most celebrated work” because of how many times I declared it finished (drafts, edits, revisions) and insisted we toast its completion. Only to find out it wasn’t done.

And then I’d get back to work.

It was hard. I mean, I know how important it is to kill your darlings sometimes, but we’re talking several generations of darlings, entire extended families of darlings. And these weren’t just personal favorites: they were objectively legitimate darlings.

But they didn’t fit. They didn’t work. Not in this book, or what this book was supposed to be. And so they had to go. (Truth be told, I saved them all; you don’t really have to kill your darlings, you just have to lock them in the basement.)

Sometimes Slow Can Be Better

I have always strived to be a fast writer, to be productive. Maybe even prolific (I mean, not like my pals Chuck Wendig or Jonathan Maberry—give me a break, I’m only human). But working for so long on this book, on so many iterations of it, has shown me the benefits of taking such time.

I’ve always been an outliner, always depended on knowing where I was going when writing a story. (And yes: however many revisions there were, that’s how many outlines there were.) But over the years I’ve come to appreciate almost as much the way outlining helps me get to know my characters intimately before I start writing that first draft, instead of getting to know them along the way.

A similar benefit accrues from working on a book for so long. As I said, I worked on many other projects while I was writing this one, but The Price of Everything was always in my head—maybe not front of mind, but in there. And the whole time it was, I was gaining a deeper and more nuanced understanding of those characters.

Part of the premise of The Price of Everything is that, with the internet cratered by cyberwar, the economy once again runs on cash. A guild of elite couriers moves the new super-high-denomination currency around in attaché cases chained to titanium cuffs grafted onto the bones of their wrists. The couriers swear an oath: The delivery gets where it is going or they forfeit that hand, and effectively their life. I think it’s a fascinating premise, but I had to live with the idea for some time before I grasped how deeply disturbing and metaphorically relevant it was: an economy so inequitable that young people agree to be disfigured—and potentially even forfeit their lives—in order to protect some billionaire’s money.

Writing all those different iterations helped, as well, giving me the opportunity to see these characters in different situations, different worlds or timelines or dimensions. It gave me a much deeper understanding of them.

The same is true of the themes of the book: wealth disparity, the rise of American oligarchs and the billionaire class—and how that has exacerbated our failures to confront climate change. The longer I and the book were allowed to steep in these themes, the more they became intrinsically interwoven into the story and the characters. Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when one is writing dystopic fiction these days, the world has leaned into the story. Good for the book; bad for the planet.

I Am Stubborn AF

Something else I learned in writing this book is about me. For better or for worse (and there are definite downsides to it, believe me), I am tenacious. Or maybe stubborn. Very likely both. At many times during this book’s long road to publication there were very good reasons to put it aside forever and say, “Well, I tried.”

There are many costs to writing a book, including opportunity costs—millions of other things you could be doing, including writing other books. I’ll never know what else I could have written in the time I spent writing this one, because I was too stubborn to give up on it. But I do know this: I love this book. I love how it ended up and how it got there. And I hope readers will love it, too.

One More Thing…

As always, I learned a lot while researching this book. Here’s one little factoid that raises all sorts of questions:  Of all the pieces of paper US currency in circulation, the most common isn’t the single (14.9 billion) or the twenty (11.1 billion), but the hundred dollar bill. There are 19.2 billion C-notes in circulation, more than any other denomination.

Jon McGoran is the author of ten previous novels for adults and young adults, including the YA science fiction thrillers Spliced, Splintered, and Spiked, the science thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up, numerous short stories and novellas, and licensed work for The Blacklist, The X-Files, and Zombies vs Robots. A freelance writer, writing teacher, and developmental editor and coach, he lives outside Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth, a librarian. For more, visit www.jonmcgoran.com

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