Exploring Career Suicide

Day two in Bend, Oregon. Since my camp host gig ended yesterday I filed for Unemployment this morning which has become even more Orwellian:

Take a video selfie!

But I have a warm room with a bathtub so I can’t complain.

The most recent book, Career Suicide Comes in Twelve Colors, is a collection of stories and character studies written over the past eleven years. What is a character study? A character study is a “what if”: What if Kurt Cobain had lived to be fifty? What if Depeche Mode broke up in 1981? What if Bob Dylan had died in the 1966 motorcycle accident and reproducing the accident became a right of passage for upcoming musicians? It’s exploring a different chain of events for the people in question. The new book is half character studies and half stories includng one Chuck Palahniuk helped me edit when he was my teacher. None of them were long enough to be stand alone projects so I collected them until I had enough for a book.

I am going to be honest with you: I have a very loose grasp of “branding” and “marketing.” What is my brand? Okay…you have The American Outback which is non-fiction, sort of living off the grid and doing your own thing. Then you have my fiction, which is very modern and “edgy” and probably more urban or suburban. What do you do with that? It’s something I am still trying to figure out. In the meantime, I will keep putting out books whenever they are ready. This sort of clueless fumbling could be seen as career suicide, which is what led to the title of the story book. The previous title was Stories to Get Me Sued, which is also apt. I just write, you know? I follow inspiration by writing out stories or going places in my van. That’s my life now...