This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lucas Schaefer, whose debut novel, The Slip, is out today from Simon & Schuster. The novel, replete with cases of fluid and mistaken identity, follows the story of a missing teenage boy and explores the transformative power of boxing. Set in the summer of 1998 in Austin, Nathaniel Rothstein is sixteen years old and a new face at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Under the guidance of Haitian-born ex-fighter David Dalice, he begins to feel more comfortable in his own skin—until, that is, it’s no longer his own. Then one night, he vanishes. Across the city, Charles Rex, now known as “X,” has been undergoing his own adolescent transformation, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works. More than ten years later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, leading him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The search that follows involves a cast of characters that comprise a daring portrait of sex and race in America. Elizabeth McCracken writes, “How can a book be uproarious and thought provoking, devil-may-care and philosophical, as full of life in all its ugliness and beauty and strangeness as Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip? Complicated and comic, this is a novel about what it means to long to be otherwise, with a mystery at its heart, as well as love and ruthlessness and the kind of crazy imagination missing lately from American fiction.” Lucas Schaefer holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas in Austin. His work has appeared in One Story, the Baffler, Slate, and other publications. He lives with his family in Austin.
Lucas Schaefer, author of The Slip. (Credit: Greg Marshall)
1. How long did it take you to write The Slip?
I began working on the book in 2013, so over a decade. When I first started The Slip, I thought I was writing a linked story collection. All my stories were many thousands of words over what typically constitutes a short story. I’d go onto Duotrope and search for magazines publishing 11,000-word short stories. Do you know which magazines were doing that? None of them, because that is not a short story! Eventually I realized, Lucas, you are not tidy, you are not concise, you are a novelist and this is a novel. But it took me a second.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The Slip has a mystery at its center—a missing boy—and there are many intersecting plotlines that take place over many years related to that core mystery. So, the big challenge was structural. How do we tell this story, and in what order? I was very fortunate to have an editor, Tim O’Connell, who deeply understands structure. The book he initially bought was like a house made of pretty good material that hadn’t been put together right. There was some nice hardwood flooring but it sloped a little, and the windows were shiny but didn’t close all the way. So, he helped me tear it all apart and rebuild.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a project, I try to write every day, usually in the mornings. I find if it’s not going well, I’m very preoccupied with word count and how long I’m writing for each session, and if it is going well, I don’t really care. And I always write at home, with brown noise on. Every now and then I’ll try writing at a coffee shop or a bar and invariably end up with no words down and needing to pee.
4. What are you reading right now?
My husband and I have a seven-month-old, so currently There Are Cats in This Book by Viviane Schwarz (Candlewick, 2008) and Good Thing You’re Not an Octopus!(HarperCollins, 2006) written by Julie Markes and illustrated by Maggie Smith, a beautifully illustrated book about every type of bug there is. It’s pretty catch-as-catch-can when it comes to adult reading, but in my spare moments I’m reading Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel, Theft (Riverhead Books, 2025), and The Imagined Life (Knopf, 2025) by Andrew Porter.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
It’s been fun to see and be a part of a new crop of Austin writers emerging in the last few years. In the first half of 2025 alone, Callie Collins published Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine (Doubleday), and Ashley Whitaker had Bitter Texas Honey (Dutton), and Carrie R. Moore’s short story collection, Make Your Way Home (Tin House), which I’m super excited about, is coming in July. Alejandro Puyana, the great Fernando Flores—there’s a lot happening in Austin. I’m not sure it’s a question of wider recognition—plenty of these books are getting well-deserved attention—but Austin has a thriving literary scene, so it’s nice to see it increasingly represented in publishing, too, and I hope it’s a trend that continues.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I finished the final pass of The Slip maybe a week before the birth of our son, and since then have been in baby-rearing and publicity mode, so I haven’t yet had the experience of writing seriously while raising a child but…I foresee challenges! That said, I always write better when I have a set of hours to get the job done rather than an entire day to while away, so maybe it’s too soon to say.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When I sold the book, I wasn’t given a publication date. Tim, my editor, took a real It’ll be ready when it’s ready approach. It wasn’t one thing he said, but an entire attitude: Let’s take our time and get this right. That is a real gift. As a writer, you work so hard to get the book deal and then you’re desperate to get the thing out into the world. But making something as good as it can be is more important than making it fast. I was very lucky to have people in my corner who believed that, and who gave me the time and space to make the book the best version of itself.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Slip, what would you say?
I wasn’t writing seriously in my twenties, and didn’t start grad school until I was thirty, and then I took twelve or so years on The Slip, and I always felt so behind. So, I think I’d just say, “It’s fine.” Take your time. I was so sure other people were judging my tortuous path, and the truth is no one cares. We’re all dealing with our own nonsense and not paying that much attention to anyone else’s. I’d also tell myself, “It’s not even that tortuous!” I used to think that my path to publication was, like, epic, but as I’ve met more writers over the years, I’ve realized it was pretty typical. A book takes a long time to write, and a long time to publish. So, you know, take a breath!
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Slip?
When I first moved to Austin in 2006, I started working out at Lord’s Boxing Gym and spent many afternoons and evenings there over five or six years. One wonderful thing about Lord’s—and this is something I tried to replicate with the boxing gym in my novel—was that it felt like everyone was there. There were men and women, people of every age and race and skill level and body type and personality. It was both an ideal introduction to boxing and boxing gyms, and to my new city. This was in my pre-serious writing days, so I didn’t know I would one day write a novel set largely at a boxing gym in Austin, but those years and experiences were essential to the creation of The Slip.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I don’t know if this is advice, per se, but I’ve benefited from writing mentors who have encouraged us—their students—to lean into our idiosyncrasies, into whatever makes us us. I love when you open a book and know who wrote it without looking because the voice or the style is so distinct. We confront enough corporate-ish, everything-sounds-the-same dreck out there in our daily lives that I think us fictioneers have a responsibility to not add to it.
