Hey everyone, it's been a minute. I've been heads down, writing novels, composing music, disappearing into projects the way that I do. I looked up and it was summer. So here I am. Consider this a special summer catch up. If you're new here, this is overthinking the awesome, and the short version of the whole show is this I don't think you're busy, buzzing never shuts up, brain is broken. I wrote a whole book arguing it isn't. The brain isn't the problem. The problem is where you point it. That constant hum of analysis, it's not a bug, it's horsepower. The only question that matters is what you aim it at. Point it at a field of daisies and demand it find landmines, and it will. I bring that up because it's secretly what today's whole episode is about. I've been pointing my brain at one very specific thing this year. A Los Angeles Noir novel called No Clean Hands. And I want to tell you about the strange, two-person reason it exists at all. Which brings me to a confession. That is the entire business plan. And I'm aware of how that sounds. The first person is me. I make the thing I want to exist in the world, the thing that scratches my own specific itch, with no committee in the room and nobody's permission pending. The second person is my best friend. He has been the sole audience for the Marv Slocum books since the very beginning. I send him chapters a few at a time, and then I wait for the verdict. When he roars, I know I've got it. When he goes quiet, I know I have to go back, burn the chapter down to the foundation, and salt the earth where it stood. There is no focus group on earth more honest than a bored friend. And there is no review more precise than the sound of someone you love putting their phone down so they can keep reading. I'm David Cosgrove. This is Overthinking the Awesome. Today the awesome I'm overthinking is my own book, and the two-person reason it exists. So two people. Let me defend that because it sounds insane, and it is only mostly insane. Everything beyond those two people, the wider world, the algorithm, the reviews, the sales rank that updates every hour like a heart monitor. Whatever. Truly, uh whatever. If the wider world finds these books and loves them, wonderful. I'm thrilled. The door is open. Come in, sit down, there's coffee and probably snacks. But I did not build any of it for the wider world. And the instant I start to, I can feel the work goes stiff and polite and dead in my hands. Two people are the entire intended audience. Everything else is weather. Quincy Jones said it better than I ever could. He said The moment you start thinking about money in the creative process, God walks out of the room. He believed making art for money or fame strips it of something sacred. He thought melody itself was the voice of God. And I've come to think he was just flatly correct about music and about everything else. Here's the thing nobody tells you. Writing for two people isn't small, it's the opposite. When you only have to satisfy one impossible to fool reader and yourself, you stop hedging, you stop softening. You feed a beloved retiree to a crocodile because it's funny and because your best friend is going to lose his mind, and you do not for one second wonder whether it tests well. That's not a limitation. That's freedom with a name and a phone number. I've been talking about closed rooms, about making a thing for its own sake, with real care, and not for the crowd. So let me tell you about somebody who actually lives that. This episode is brought to you by Westwood Provisions in Simsbury, Connecticut. Westwood Provisions makes candles and handcrafted goods, the kind of thing that's made by an actual person who cares how it turns out. Light one of their candles and the whole room changes. It's craft, real craft. The stuff you can tell somebody meant, which is the whole spirit of this show, so it's a good fit. A maker who makes the thing right because that's the only way worth making it. Go follow Westwood Provisions on Instagram and see the work for yourself. Simsbury, Connecticut. Beautiful stuff. Let me tell you about Marv. Marv Slocum is forty seven years old. He's from Van Nuys. His hands sweat constantly, biblically. His suits look like he slept in them because he did. He looks older and more defeated than forty seven has any right to look. And here's the central fact of that man. Marv doesn't mean to destroy anything. His destructions are never intentional. They're the natural consequence of proximity. Marv is a weather pattern. Weather doesn't mean to flatten your town, weather just is. And the being is the destroying. He leaves a trail. He has always left a trail, and the trail is wet because his hands sweat, and the wet is identifiable, and the identifiable is what they follow, from the bungalow to the bar to the apartment, to the people he loves. That's the engine of no clean hands. A decent man who cannot stop being a catastrophe, moving through a Los Angeles that is happy to bill him for the damage. Kirkish Reviews called it, and I'm going to read this to you directly because I've earned exactly one moment of shameless self quotation per episode, and this is it. Delightfully funny, playful, and bloody LA Noir. Delightfully funny, playful, and bloody. That's the whole thesis right there. Laugh first, flinch later, sometimes in the same square inch of a sentence. Because that's what the two person audience taught me. My friend doesn't laugh at jokes that are safe. He laughs at the ones that shouldn't work. The grin you feel guilty about, the moment where something monstrous happens, and you catch yourself smiling before your conscience files its objection. You can only write that if you're not thinking about the room, if God's still in the room and the committee never got in. Now here's the part I can't fully explain. There's a character in these books named Del Piambo, eccentric electronic musician, ties to organized crime. He drifted in early and never left. I also compose electronic music, under the name Del Piambo. I want to be clear that I named the character before I fully understood what I was doing, which is either evidence of a subconscious at work or evidence that I should be under observation. And when Kirkus reviewed the book, they described that character, the eccentric electronic musician with the criminal shadows, almost exactly the way I described the music, without knowing the music existed. The fictional double started informing the real one. The character has things now that the musician doesn't. Grief, allegiance, and a body count. And somewhere down the line, the musician is going to write something the character earned. The line between the author and the thing he made turned out to be thinner than the craft books admit. It was always going to be. That's not a bug in writing for two people. It's the whole reason it works. When there's no wider world in the room, the only material you have is yourself. So you use it, all of it, even the parts you didn't mean to. Speaking of things that show up and change your room, this episode is also brought to you by RJG Flowers. There's a moment in every noir where somebody should have sent flowers and didn't, and it's the whole tragedy. Marv Slocum has never once, in six books, sent flowers to anyone. It's a character flaw. It might be the character flaw. Don't be Marv. RJG Flowers is an award winning florist that makes genuinely gorgeous arrangements for the birthday you almost forgot, the apology you owe, or the I was thinking about you that lands better than any text ever will. Beautiful flowers, real ones, sent by a person who, unlike my detective, has their life together. Go follow RJG Flowers on Instagram. The arrangements alone are worth the follow. Then go make somebody's day. So that's No Clean Hands, a funny, bloody Los Angeles noir about a sweating man who ruins everything he loves by standing too close to it. I wrote it for me and for one friend. And for the sound of him putting his phone down. But here's the part that surprised me. But here's the part that surprised me. The books you write for two people are, somehow, the only ones anybody else ever seems to want. The private joke is the thing that travels. The stuff made for the crowd dies polite and forgotten. The stuff made in a closed room for an audience who could not be fooled occasionally slips out of the door and finds strangers. So if you're one of those strangers, welcome! The door's open. There's coffee and yes there are snacks. I genuinely did not expect you, and I'm genuinely glad you came. And here's where it loops back to the thing I opened with. This whole book, this whole obsessive, sweating, eccentric electronic musician project is what happened when I stopped pointing my overthinking brain at Oh, do people like me? And pointed it at how do I make one specific person roar with laughter? Same engine, same horsepower, same brain everybody kept telling me to quiet down. I just aimed it at something worth obsessing over. That's the whole show, really. Your mind isn't the problem. Pointed at something you love, made for someone you love, and every once in a while it slips out the door and finds strangers. No clean hands is available now. Kirkus Reviews liked it. My best friend roared, what else can I say? Everything else is weather. I'm David Cosgrove. This has been Overthinking the Awesome, thanks to Westwood Provisions and RJG Flowers. Go read something made by somebody who meant it.