Fight Forever Pre-Sale Is Live!

(With a discussion of some bonus content you can't find anywhere else)

The pre-sale for Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami is up and running for the next two weeks! You can read all the details and place your orders here at the Hybrid Shoot Indiegogo link.

The book features a beautiful cover by Eunice Lai, amazing interior illustrations by Jaime Shelhamer, and words by me. Signing up for the pre-sale lets the publisher know how many copies to print—as an independent publishing company, they don’t have a lot of margin for error. It also lets you avoid Amazon, if that’s important to you (international readers, alas, will have to get the ebook or wait for Amazon. The ebook will be usable in any region, however!)

Cover by Eunice Lai

This is a chonky book at 422 pages, and the ebook pre-sale price delivers a great value of 1.2 cents per page! That ebook version will be available shortly after the pre-sale ends in mid-March. If, like me, you prefer to hold a physical book in your hands (at this length, also excellent as a weapon in an unsanctioned wrestling match), those should be shipping in April.

While writing Fight Forever, I’ve spent a long time trying to answer this question: what exactly is this book? I can’t call it a history or a biography, because maybe 80% of it is purely fictional–you wouldn’t write a biography of Mark Hamill full of earnest descriptions about the trauma he suffered when Darth Vader cut off his hand, or guessing at his state of mind when he blew up the Death Star.

There’s some scenes in Fight Forever that take place backstage, behind the curtain. But even those scenes are only in the book if they are part of the overall Kevin-and-Sami narrative, things that they’ve talked about publicly that have become part of the characters and their arc. Their conflicts with Jim Cornette, their friction with CM Punk, their friendship with Super Dragon—all of these things have eventually been incorporated into their fictional story as well, from moments in promos to the golden PWG-referencing patches they wore to the ring in Los Angeles to win the tag team titles.

So this book is not exactly a history. It’s not really a biography. I gnawed at the question, frustrated, and finally came up with something closer to an answer: it’s more like a movie novelization.

When a popular movie comes out, often there’ll be a person whose job it is to write up a novelized version of the movie, describing the events in print. Often the resulting book includes the author’s best guesses about the mindset of the characters involved (many of which are open to interpretation, and you may well disagree with mine!) But it’s generally an attempt to translate into print some kind of visual medium, to tie together a series of scenes and images into a written narrative.

People have been writing Star Wars novelizations for half a century now. I bet very few of those writers ever got a chance to talk to George Lucas about his vision.

But I got to talk to the equivalent of George Lucas for my book.

---

It honestly had never really crossed my mind that I’d be able to talk directly to either Kevin or Sami about Fight Forever. So I’d approached the story like that movie-novelization writer, focusing on what was public knowledge and trying to synthesize all of it. Actually, a better analogy might be a novel based on a video game, because Sami and Kevin’s story is not a single unified text like a movie. Because of the branching, dense nature of a video game, they have subplots, characters, references that a player could miss entirely on a given playthrough.

In the same way, wrestling has so much data, so many shoot interviews, so many promos, it’s almost impossible to consume all of one wrestler’s work, and even harder to figure out a coherent narrative from it. And I was so busy trying to ferret out that coherent narrative that I couldn’t focus on breaking through the WWE walls to talk to its creators.

Luckily for me, my publisher did.

I was visiting my father at the time, still reeling from my mother’s death a year before, sitting on the floor of my childhood attic room going through her jewelry and her old letters and wiping my eyes. My phone lit up with a notification: WWE has agreed to an interview with Kevin and Sami tomorrow afternoon. Are you available?

Yes. Yes, I was available.

And so in August 2024 I found myself perched awkwardly on the end of my childhood bed, my husband frantically checking sound levels and video quality just off-screen, waiting for Sami and Kevin to enter a Zoom call.

---

We talked for about two hours, two hours of their very precious off-time, and it was an invaluable experience. Not for collecting facts—I must confess here that I was overwhelmed, inexperienced at interviewing, and basically failed utterly at getting fresh factual information from them. But really it wasn’t factual information I needed from them anyway, because Fight Forever is so based on the public record. What I got from the interview was something much more valuable: a glimpse into the way the two of them interact off-screen, the way both of them talk about their careers, the way both of them talk about wrestling. From the very beginning, when Kevin shows up six minutes late and Sami cheerfully scolds him for it, they were charmingly effusive. They talked about being perfectionists who are notoriously difficult to work with, they talked about all the people they owe a debt of gratitude toward, they talked about their different strengths in storytelling.

And they talked about El Generico: the challenges of building a character who doesn’t speak, the pain of saying goodbye to him, whether he will ever be seen again. It’s in talking about the luchador that the most interesting material came out, because Sami just hasn’t gotten many chances to talk at length about his alter ego from Tijuana. That’s the area that held the biggest surprise for me, which happened when—

Well, I have to leave you something to look forward to, don’t I? I wrote up the experience for the very end of the book. It’s a coda to the whole sprawling text, a moment that goes beyond synthesis of past information, and a way to finish up a book about a story that will never truly be finished, that has already charged past the boundaries of the covers onto fresh new pages.

Sami and Kevin are embarking on a whole new chapter of the story of their careers, endlessly circling the questions and themes that have haunted their shared career, through the highs and lows of their friendship. I hope Fight Forever works as an introduction to those highs and lows, and illuminates those themes.

Back cover by Jaime Shelhamer