Succession Planning

Nick Porter graduates with a journalism degree and no journalism job. The plan is simple: transfer his retail employment to the store near home, keep applying, and be gone as soon as something better comes through.

He is still there.

Succession Planning is a novella about the particular trap of being good at a job you never meant to keep. Set across a single stretch of employment in a slow, slightly broken drug store; where the freezer alarm has been going since the blackout, the manager texts at 3 a.m. about whether to watch Elf, and someone is always in line for a promotion nobody actually wants. It follows Nick and his coworkers through the slow, almost imperceptible process by which a placeholder becomes a career.

Told in retrospect, with the warm precision of someone who can see exactly where everything went wrong and still cannot quite explain why he let it, Succession Planning is a funny, melancholy, and sharply observed portrait of early adulthood: the comfort of staying, the cost of leaving, and the specific indignity of being very good at something that was only ever supposed to be temporary.