Everything Counts: On Authorial Intent, Discovery, and the Life Hidden in the Work
Note: The reflection below was written on July 8, 2025, in the days leading up to Matt McAvoy’s review of Coming of Age, Coming to Terms. At the time, I had no idea how he would respond. I was bracing for the possibility that he might dismiss the project as indulgent or overwritten — or worse, that he might find it underwhelming and derivative, given the involvement of AI.
Instead, his review — published July 16, 2025 — was everything I could have hoped for and more. You can read it here, but the short version is this: he got it. Not just the companion volume, but the entire project — the emotional architecture, the evolving authorial awareness, the risk and the reward of digging into your own work to see what’s really there.
For that, I am deeply grateful.
What follows is the essay I wrote while still in that liminal space — awaiting verdict, uncertain if the project had achieved what I hoped it might.
I asked author/editor/professional reviewer Matt McAvoy to do an editorial review of The Wake of Expectations…in three parts — what eventually became Becoming Calvin, Growing Pains, and The Age of Unbecoming. I’d long toyed with breaking the book into a trilogy, but never pulled the trigger until circumstance forced my hand: Matt had a word limit on his reviews.
I found him after BookAwardPro recommended his services, then spent an afternoon watching (really listening to) his YouTube course on fiction writing. He talked about the reasons people write — among them therapy — and how characters are the most important element of fiction, even more so than plot or dialogue. It struck a chord. I knew right then I wanted him to review A Pleasant Fiction, too. So, I reached out to see if he’d be open to something bigger than a standard one-off critique. To my relief, he agreed. I genuinely enjoyed watching his reactions unfold in sequence, curious how slicing up the novel might shift the reading experience.
Later, I floated the idea of sending him the companion volume. I wasn’t even sure it made sense to have him “review” it. I wasn’t having it professionally edited, and I knew I wasn’t going to sell it. I mostly just wanted him to read it — to see if it changed how he perceived the entire enterprise. And now, as I write this reflection, I’m imminently waiting for that feedback, theorizing — with a little help from my AI assistant — what he might be thinking, and whether this sprawling, deeply personal experiment landed the way I hoped.
Matt has actually taken a little longer with his review of the companion than he did with the reviews of each of the books. I can’t decide whether that’s a good sign or a bad one. Maybe he’s just busy (or on holiday), maybe he’s slogging through it, or maybe, just maybe, he’s actually pausing to consider it more deeply than the books alone demanded. That’s the hope, anyway.
Because the companion is different. It’s not another story to be consumed and filed away. It’s a series of arguments, explorations, even provocations. It’s me stepping in and saying: yes, you thought these were funny, messy, honest books — and they are — but also there’s more. It’s me drawing back the curtain, pointing out the grief architecture beneath APF, the present-tense choir tour that stands as a last gasp of pure living before everything turns retrospective, Dani’s trauma disguised as fickleness, Enrique as a Jungian shadow, even the scene with the gun that reads so differently post-Columbine than it would have in the early nineties, when the story begins. It’s the companion that gently argues: no one can get all of this on the first pass. Not even me.
And that’s maybe the most uncomfortable truth buried in all of this: I didn’t set out with a master plan. The conscious authorial intent wasn’t to craft some intricate literary puzzle. It was simply to be honest — to tell an emotionally true story, drawn from life, but sharpened, heightened, made bearable or comprehensible through narrative. Authenticity was the mission. Which means if there’s meaning in there — and clearly there is, given how the companion draws it out — it’s meaning borne out of that authenticity. Intentional in the sense that it grows naturally from telling the truth in fiction as best I could, even if not always consciously planted.
So then what is the companion? Is it a revelation of authorial intent, or something else? Because so much of what it explores — the hidden symmetries, the quiet philosophical stakes, the psychological echoes — was uncovered long after the books were written. Some of it was excavated in private grief, some through countless conversations, some in dialogue with AI that helped me see what was always there but hidden under the noise. That’s a different kind of authorship. Maybe it’s post-authorial intent. Or maybe it’s simply the older me reading the younger me’s story with new eyes, finding fossils I didn’t know I’d left behind.
Which circles back to Matt. Maybe he’s wrestling with this too. Maybe he’s taking longer because he’s not just reviewing a book anymore, he’s re-reading his own earlier impressions. The companion implicitly dares any careful reader to go back and see if the book doesn’t hit differently after APF and the essays. It suggests that your first read wasn’t wrong — it was the only read you could have then. But the second read, knowing what you now know, is necessarily transformed. That’s not just literary gamesmanship. That’s how life works. We live forward and understand backward (as Kierkegaard famously put it), if we ever understand at all.
So what will Matt conclude? There’s really only two broad possibilities, though they fracture into a thousand shades. He might decide that I have delusions of grandeur — that I’m reading too much into work that’s ultimately just an honest, funny, sometimes poignant slice of life. Or he might find himself saying, holy shit, there’s so much more here than I noticed on the first pass. That what seemed loose and anecdotal was quietly threaded with grief, identity, loss, the fraught complexities of love and friendship, the subtle tragedies of who drifts away and why. That all those supposedly inconsequential moments actually counted, just as Ben says in the book: Everything counts.
And of course there’s the wildcard of the AI. Because this is also a project that openly used AI to probe, to test ideas, to uncover thematic skeletons. Not to write the novels — those are fully mine — but to help me as a reader of my own life and work. Some people will find that unsettling. Others might see it as a fascinating new model: an author collaborating with a machine to become a sharper critic of his own subconscious. Is that still authorial intent? Or is it something stranger and maybe even more honest — the product of multiple minds, human and artificial, digging together into the same emotional soil?
Which leads to the last, maybe most important question: does it matter? Does it matter how much was consciously embedded versus how much was later excavated? I don’t think it does, because meaning in art is always a three-way partnership: what the author originally intends, what the text itself contains, and what the reader overlays from their own scars and joys and private fears. That’s why no two people read the same book. That’s why even I don’t read the same book I wrote all those years ago.
At the end of the day, the book is what it is, however it got there. However it grew. Whether by design, accident, subconscious layering, or post-hoc excavation, the final text is what enters the world — not the process. And its contribution to the conversation remains the same. What matters is that it says something, that it stirs something. That it resonates, challenges, provokes, or consoles. However it came into being, it’s now out there, alive in the quasi-semiotic interplay between author, text, and reader. The meaning is in the meeting.
And maybe Matt will stay with his original reading—of Wake in particular—seeing it as mostly charming, funny, chaotic, sometimes profound, often profane — but ultimately what he thought the first time. (A Pleasant Fiction, of course, always landed with more weight.) Either way, that’s valid. Because the books were never meant to be decoded like puzzles. They were meant to be lived in — to feel funny, sad, familiar, uncertain, like life itself. If later they reveal more to him, to me, to anyone — or not — that doesn’t make the meaning any less real. It just makes it alive.
Javier
© 2025 Chapelle Dorée Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. This content may not be reproduced, distributed, or modified without permission.
Further Viewing: Matt McAvoy’s Course on Writing
If you’re curious about Matt’s philosophy on why we write — or just want to explore the practical framework that first convinced me he was the right person to critique my work — here’s his free introductory course on YouTube:
It’s well worth your time — whether you’re an author looking to refine your own work or simply interested in the craft and business of writing.
