Listen.

Why Every Book in the Trilogy Begins with the Same Word

12 February 2026 ~ 2 min read

Every book in the Cosmic Janitor Trilogy opens with an Author’s Note.

Every Author’s Note at the beginning of the novel begins with the same word: Listen.

It wasn’t planned. I wrote the first one—“Listen: you are about to read a story about a janitor who accidentally started unraveling the universe”—because it felt like the right way to begin. Direct. A little urgent. The way a musician counts in a band before the downbeat, or the way a teacher says it when the room is too loud and the lesson matters. I’ve spent years standing in front of classrooms asking students to listen—not just hear, but listen—to music from traditions they’ve never encountered. That word is in my bones.

When I sat down to write the Author’s Note for Book 2, the same word came out. And I realized it wasn’t repetition. It was the same invitation with a different meaning. In Book 1, “Listen” means: pay attention to the silence between the notes. The universe is mostly empty space punctuated by spectacular noise. John Cage understood this. Beethoven understood it even when he couldn’t hear. The first book asks you to listen for what’s quiet.

In Book 2, “Listen” means something harder: pay attention to the discord. Not the harmony—the friction. The Morrígan doesn’t bring peace. She brings necessary conflict, the dissonance that keeps the cosmos from collapsing under the weight of its own harmony. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere because the audience wasn’t ready for what dissonance could teach them. Book 2 asks you to listen for what’s uncomfortable.

In Book 3, “Listen” means: pay attention to the wrong answers. The right answer to a cosmic crisis isn’t profound—it’s seventeen dimensions of Cork arguing over a pub quiz and somehow arriving at truth through collective wrongness. Vonnegut understood that the universe prefers bad jokes to good explanations. Book 3 asks you to listen for what’s absurd.

Silence. Discord. Absurdity. Three books, three kinds of listening. A composer learns all three. You listen for the rests, because they give the notes meaning. You listen for the dissonance, because it’s where the tension lives. And you listen for the wrong notes, because sometimes they’re the ones that crack open something true.

That’s why each book begins the same way. It’s not a stylistic choice. It’s a tuning fork. One word, struck three times, and each time it hums at a different frequency. If you’re reading the Trilogy, that’s all I’m really asking of you. Listen. The rest will follow.

— Liam