From The Authors

An Introduction to the Authors

Chapter 1. The Dream

The Paper Business
What Every Writer Dreams About & If it Happened to me, It Could Happen to You
Term Papers & Smut: Writing for the Lazy & Socially Moronic
Sheehan I
Chase The Dream
Sheehan II
Take a Chance
Sheehan III
The Blueprint for Authorship Success
Sheehan IV

Living the Dream

Cheaters Inc.
Sheehan V
The Dirty Secret of Academics
The Miracle
The Homework Biz
In High Gear
The Life of Vodka, Netflix, Sex, & Essay Writing
The Essence
Get a Real Job
My Writing

Awakening

GO WEST
Whata Ya Wanna Know?
The Half Chinese-Half Canadian
Actually Living The Dream
The Problem Only Drunk-Girl Could Solve
Is This My Immortality Project?
S.A.T.A.N.
BIG Writing Awards, blah-blah-blah...
DILDO LITERATURE
Five major secrets to becoming a Fabulously Successful & Rich Author
Thank You For Not Reading
Staying True

The Reality End of the Pen

It Takes a Lot of Booze to Write like a monk
Hey Online Writers; Here’s How I Made 3/4’s of a Million $’s Writing
What The Unethical Therapist Taught Me
Writers Beware of This Mistake
The Craft’s Lessons
My Immortality Project: Becoming Beloved for All Time
My Teacher Resentment: The Hero Teacher
Miracle Emails From Out of the Blue
Capitalism’s Devaluing of Art & Motherhood
What Charles Bukowski Can Teach You About Being a Writer
Too Valuable to Sell
If At First, You Don’t Succeed...You Know the Rest

Author’s Note

One of my writing colleagues has been after me to write this prose version of my unbelievable story of “making it” as a writer. Now that some of my poetry is being distributed to a wider audience, his position, narrowed down to a single point, “Yer never gonna earn anything writing poetry, especially YOUR poetry, which doesn’t even rhyme! But you got online attention, so now’s the time to tell your story.”

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I cannot take credit for developing the paper business, referred to as term paper mills or cheating sites. The practice of buying term papers long existed, and the idea came to me watching what might have been an ABC Afternoon Special, though I am unsure. The barely memorable show involved a man selling essays out of a bodega. As a child, I did not fully understand the business, but it struck me as odd, explaining why the essay seller in his little store never left me, perhaps foreshadowing my future.

I read a lot as a kid, and though a terrible student, I enjoyed writing and practiced a rote learning method of rewriting poetry, like Casey at the Bat and The Raven, stealing style and meter for my pitiful and immature words. In sixth grade, I wrote my first novel on looseleaf, which I hid in my room, too embarrassed to show anyone. The story, stolen from the early eighties action movie plots, involved a friendless boy struggling against bullies whom a martial arts instructor took as a student to teach the secrets of Ninjutsu, Hapkido, and other deadly practices. Now able to fend off the bullies, he is targeted more by fellow middle schoolers and their teachers bent on his destruction. They kill his master, the only man who cares, and fighting a great battle, he kills many of the bullies.

Rooted in this tragic masterpiece, one of the inspirations to write reveals as an escape. I seriously doubt any burgeoning author undertakes the craft with the intent to uncover wisdom. From what I witnessed, most authors escape, but escape limits not to the narrative and often manifests in the writer’s goal to achieve the fantasy refuge afforded by capitalism’s proliferation of trade fiction. These writers see themselves as Stephen King and Suzanne Collins, scribing their way to fame and fortune, interested little in divining truth or understanding. They envision book tours, media engagements, and standing in the spotlight giving speeches, never knowing the literary substance lacking that makes those acts worthy.

A lucky few will stumble into fame regardless of topic or talent, but most will fail. “Fail” sounds harsh, but it is a well-deserved fate for having put no time or effort into learning except to avoid using adverbs and the proper length of a chapter, as though these lessons defined skilled writing. They argue how plot elevates the novel to greatness more than writing skill and how they naturally story-tell and merely pay the bottom-feeding editor to place their commas. They hold these opinions because their writing method outputs satisfactory stories that blind them to the need to write and rewrite a sentence to sculpt meaning. Sadly, their dollar sign dreams of signing books make them the rule of literature, not the exception, since everyone must kneel before the currency in God We Trust, regardless of merit or skill.

Still, the litterateurs, prose crusaders, and word samurais, defending meaning in the elite authorship army, of which I consider myself a loyal soldier, must also eat. Finely crafted story cannot sate the starving artist! Unlike my bastard, trade-fiction siblings envisaging themselves sitting between Brad Pitt and Jenna Ortega, awaiting best picture award made possible by their timeless novel, the literary champions already deduced the enslavement of the authorship pipedream and life-stealing production line that stamps out trade fiction — enforced by capitalist values.

Knowing this truth resolves us to uphold literature’s honor, credibility, truth, and wisdom by Davinci-ing the art of word to divine meaning for all humanity to marvel. We resolve to accomplish this task against poverty’s threat by producing writing so valuable that the dollar djinni has no choice but to grant profit. To this end, the innocent child outcast scrawling his first novel becomes the Machiavelli bodega or e-commerce entrepreneur, term paper seller secretly writing masterpieces because the dollars earned justify the literary ends.

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Table of Contents

From about age sixteen, I wanted to be a writer, though not so much to have to write. I flunked H.S. freshman English with all its chattering about punctuation, spelling, gerunds, and dangling participles; I even had to go to summer school, where I managed a C-. Yep, not so much to write as to “have written.”

My first big wave of “making it” occurred when I was still too young to realize it was happening. Reading my poems on Seattle’s KPBX public radio program while still an undergraduate student and having a young co-ed tell me she was embroidering a decorative pillow with a line from one of my poems were signs of success that I didn’t yet appreciate or recognize. I wanted to be famous and beloved and maybe even earn enough money to avoid having to work at jobs I didn’t like, which happened to be anything except writing what I wanted to write, which has never amounted to work for me.

Though making money mattered little, recognition of my writing mattered greatly to me. Being recognized, even though it was not on the household name level of recognition, was encouraging and kept me writing in my early years despite feeling anything I wrote mattered little.

Right after college, being published in small press magazines in both the U.S. and Australia, where I lived for a couple of years, gave me a Hemingway-type sensibility about myself. Some of the editors of these small press magazines were famous award-winning poets and writers themselves, and their interest in accepting and publishing my poems felt good and allowed me a tiny glimpse of success, but nothing like what was coming later. Still, making it is something that happens to you and inside you, whether you can see and feel it or not. I wanted fame, a lot of money, and gorgeous women lining up to touch the hems of my garments.

Skip ahead to a little over thirty years later.

No, I mean it. You can skip those decades when I earned my livelihood in many jobs, most of which eventually fired me. I plunked away at writing, mostly poetry, where the proper use of punctuation, spelling, gerunds, and dangling stuff didn’t matter so much. Despite my promising early start and success, I felt like a failure as a writer.

Like Charles Bukowski and many other writers, who eventually achieved success, things hadn’t gone quite the way I planned. A lot of pretty bad things happened to me, many of which I brought on myself, some not so much but occurred anyway. While surviving these things (sometimes just barely surviving), I gathered writing material: unique and horrifying.

I gave up writing for a decade, from my mid-twenties to thirties, until my son Sheehan was born. He rapidly displayed profound disabilities. Sheehan wasn’t just “developmentally delayed.” There wasn’t any “delay,” as in, “your flight is delayed.” Sheehan’s plane would NEVER land. After several years of suicidal ideation and self-pity, I returned to writing with a new mission and new passion and told Sheehan’s and my story.

So, the story of how I “made it” is the story of Sheehan because had he not been born as messed-up as he was, I’d have never written my novel Stuck in Neutral, which launched my author career at age fifty-two. The worst thing to happen to me was a predicate to the best thing. Go figure. Life huh?

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Table of Contents

Laboring in a bar as an eighties kid provided the opportunity to clean the establishment on Saturday mornings. Wiping down tables, sweeping, and mopping paid the slightly above minimum wage of three-fifty per hour along with all the money dropped by drunks during the night. The job sucked but didn’t matter, being a necessary effort to obtain success and happiness karmically promised through diligence, hard work, and time.

While sweeping the bar, the owner, Bill, entered the establishment, bringing the threat of annoying drunk talk. Bill’s booze-inspired conversations garbled in nonsense but sometimes proved worthwhile when he divulged information or exploits he shouldn’t.

Unencumbered by professional ethics, sobriety, and age of majority restrictions, Bill drew wisdom from a relentless, daily routine of fucking waitresses and blowing coke in his office. Standing in the doorway watching my broom sweep dust across the floor, his body swayed in inebriation as he pointed near my position. “Son, you’re going to do well in this world. Just remember, if you do the work other people don’t want to do, you’ll make a fortune.”

Bill turned and staggered to the office to get some needed sleep as I returned to sweeping. A glance at the dirty floor revealed a twenty-dollar bill in the trash. Unknown at the time, the drunk restaurateur gave me the blueprint for success. I smiled and pocketed the twenty with a laugh. That Bill might be right.

Entering college at eighteen and leaving the retail food career for a job at a bank raised my hourly rate to six-twenty-five, instilling a lucky feeling and a sense of life moving in the right direction despite being broke. More importantly, the bank provided experience, networking, and an accidental mentor who added wisdom to the success formula.

Betty, a seventy-something bank customer, routinely made deposits and conversed with the tellers. Handling her transactions one day, I noticed a publishing house name printed on her check, which led to the question of her being a writer.

She smiled. “Why yes, I am.”

Lost in the shuffle of career choices gave authorship appeal but felt impossible, spurring interest in her journey to authorship. Imploring Betty’s wisdom stretched her grin with prophetic words. “Son, you should know there’s no money in writing fiction unless you’re really lucky. If you write a chemistry textbook, this might be a good avenue for success because schools need textbooks, but you need to be a chemist. Now, I write smut, the literature family’s bastard no one wants to acknowledge. If you can write smut, you can make a ton of money because there’s a huge demand for dirty books. You see, few people read quality fiction since most people can barely read. Even newspapers must write articles at a fourth-grade level. My advice is to write what people need and want, and you’ll do fine.”

Betty left as I stared at her check printed with an amount three times my weekly pay. Reminded of Bill and that Saturday morning in the years prior summoned the question: could it be true all you had to do to make money was write crap that people wanted or needed?

Fate provided the answer in the coming weeks while sitting in the E-lounge at the community college. A visibly frustrated Mary Jane entered and slumped in the chair across the table. The beautiful Italian girl’s troubles provided the opportunity to earn some nice-guy credits desperately needed for a date. “What’s wrong?”

She whipped her long, lovely hair in a quick shake of the head. “I messed up so bad; I have a two-page essay due in like an hour and forgot about it.”

I smirked. “Oh, that’s no big deal; give me the directions.”

Handing me the directions, she moved to the same side of the table, distracting me with her hotness, but determined wielding of pen and paper forged an essay in about twenty minutes.

“See if that works.” I handed it to her.

She sighed in relief, “Thanks. It would have taken me forever to write that.”

“Really?”

She frowned. “I hate writing papers.”

She departed for class as essay writing machinations identified a market, and after leaving school, I purchased a top-of-the-line Smith Corona word processor. With the help of Mary Jane, people began requesting service and paying for essays. Quickly, a portal opened to a wondrous place of hot Italian sex, paper writing, and partying. The ease of market entry shocked less than the ever-growing business that quickly rivaled the pay of the banking job. The simpleness of obtaining customers from word-of-mouth paled in the marketability Mary Jane suggested while smoking weed after having sex one evening. “Dude, you should just go to the people who need the papers the most, the jocks. They’re all idiots.”

She was correct. Returning to school the next day to visit the lounge occupied by football players, I found a jock who shared my astronomy class. “Hey Martin, do you know anyone who might need help writing papers? I am trying to earn some extra money.”

“Yo! You just don’t know. We got to maintain our grades, or we can’t play. If you can help us out, I know about five guys who would pay you.”

Paper after paper written for dumb jocks increased as they found me almost daily in the E-lounge. Often, they presented directions and money, but sometimes jocks didn’t understand their mental inferiority and attempted to write the papers. This effort resulted in commendable but futile efforts returned by professors requiring revisions. Revision work provided much entertainment as Mary Jane stood on my sofa in her underwear and recited the jock papers while smoking a joint.

“One night, I went to bed and dreamed I was a woman.” She tilted her head and closed her eyes. “When I woke up, I found I no longer had a penis and balls. I had a furry bush where my balls and penis used to be.” Her eyes and mouth widened in surprise. “Yes, I had a vagina, and I decided to explore my new vagina.”

Smoke billowed from her mouth as she read in a peal of laughter, and witnessing her antics justified paper writing, and soon, the fun and money earned outstripped the banking job’s torment. Clearly, the job hindered the new career path and needed to go, and I would like to say I stormed into the bank and defiantly told them, “I quit!” Instead, several months passed before a night of drunkenness caused termination, but life progressed swimmingly anyway.

Like all good things, hot Italian love and term papers ended in time, with the beautiful lover disappearing into the ether of young adulthood as work absorbed me. Paper writing was a thing of college, not a real job, and certainly not meant to be a career. In the aftermath of education, attempts to write books and publish met with defeat, and time wore on in a day-job doldrum that paid the bills and then some.

Read Part 5

Table of Contents

1.

Lindy felt the early tugs, her womb becoming tidal and loud, the fetus, turning, crying out a tiny beast. A braying sigh.

He calls to her. He calls to her.

And his voice moves against her flesh, an undulation, his kick a caress. His moment moaning, a lover’s groan of touching, trying to find that home, that light, he swims his lament to be.

2.

From the hospital room in January, I watch the ice, the city in ice sinking below us, and I watch the strangers in rubber gloves slip their hands inside Lindy, slip their fists and wrists into her, feeling for him.

The night passes into daylight, daylight into anxious night. Their hands are translucent in rubber gloves, her slime glistening along their fingers, her vulva, purple, swollen like a black eye or a cut deep on the scalp.

The baby’s pulse races and screams at all those hands probing.

I hold Lindy close and I count her breathing. I feel her breath in my face. I think about the baby’s breath, try not to think it, force a jovial patience, wait, eat sandwiches, watch the ice of the city watch the smoke stacks of the city and cars moving slowly over snowy roads.

I dream a remembering of Lindy, crossing the living room, bare feet padding across our blue carpet; I dream her moving in slow strides, strands of blonde hair shifting across her face, her smile, her breasts jiggling under her tee-shirt. She glides to me, deliberate and certain. After eight years of marriage, she takes my hand, whispers, “it’s time to make our baby.” I follow her.

I dream this baby to hurry, slowly, to take what it needs and hurry, slowly, so that nothing will stop our coming together.

The baby cries out, still inside her, and I watch and wait, slowly, slowly, I watch and wait.

3.

At the end of two days they take Lindy away, into the room where they might have to cut her.

I follow, confused, swept into a nightmare of red and black and running in place while the bogeyman comes.

The forceps are silver and shiny, and he holds them near that hole in her.

He says things to us and we nod, numb, exhausted, dumb as beasts, dumb as can be.

I am at her head speaking softly, it will be all right, our baby’s coming, it might be a boy, it will be a baby, baby, oh baby, just breathe. You’re doing so goooood oh baby, baby.

Nurses in blue uniforms move around us, circle like stupid birds around the doctor, his voice thick with authority.

He slides the silver steel inside her. I cannot see, but I guess her hole looks like an animal wounded, red, blue veins on an old man’s hand.

I watch and wait, whispering to Lindy, trying to be there but feeling my failing because I keep remembering other women. I remember them in cheap motels. I remember in an alley off city streets, and I remember, even, making this baby. I pushed myself hard inside Lindy, wanting to feel her feel it come. I remember my mother, drinking, bouncing off the walls, bunny-hopping off to bed my father drinking with her, both of them gone, gone away.

I always remember my grandfather hung himself in the back room of our house. I was four and in my jammies and Grandpa was swinging by his neck.

The steel is inside Lindy, and she breathes like an animal, and the doctor buzzes and the nurses hover, and I don’t want to remember anymore.

And they make him come.

He is purple and covered in muck, his face pinched from the steel he cries out, sucking air and begging, and I gasp, laugh, ride the light and love and dream of no more pain or loss– no more grandpa swinging from the light fixture, neck the color of a swollen vulva, no more Mommy giggling away away away, no more women I don’t know, wrapped around me in blind escape.

I dream hard the dream of knowing him, this baby boy coming to us;

Sheehan, Sheehan, of knowing and only remembering, And being with Sheehan.

He is out, hanging in the doctor’s hands, slick and red as a skinned animal.

I hold scissors and in the blue bright blush of surgical lights, I set the blades to the puce-white cord still connecting him to Lindy.

Something spins slowly around us, doctors, nurses, friends, Lindy, me, this new life blinking, confused, covered in meconium skin purple-white as a dead man’s forearm flesh.

When I press the blades together a single drop of blood, almost black in the blue light, seeps along the stainless steel and I hear the flesh separating, feel it ripping along the sheen of silver smeared barely waxen.

A single bird, small, leaps inside my chest, turning to pure spirit to pure joy as we watch, crying.

Could my father have felt this when he first saw me? Could his father before him? My grandfathers? Sheehan’s grandfathers?

The snip of my scissors sets him free. Sheehan, he becomes Sheehan now, and that bird inside me wings free too, wings, wings its way inside me.

Read Part 6

Table of Contents

Distant seemed the dream of becoming a literary fiction author I once indulged while working crap jobs in my late teens and early twenties as publishers rejected queries. Even those who took the time to tell me why they rejected the work now faded over the years. Such rare responses once inflated false hope to work the craft, correcting and striving for their approval until finally succumbing to billpaying that necessitated more work and less writing. Fourteen years passed working in moving and storage, beating out all aspirations. Jobs enslaved, offering too much money to walk away but not enough to tolerate the bullshit: ever-increasing hours, less pay, managing thieving addicts and drunks, and a sense of utter futility. That guy who once dreamed of writing books didn’t seem just distant but foreign as though I lost some intrinsic piece of me.

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1.

On his third day we are back home. There are three of us now, and many others, all our connections compounded by friends, the TV chattering, kitchen awash in coffee cups, cereal boxes, a constant drone, “Don’t wake the baby” in a stifled laughter. Lindy’s fat breasts, dripping watery milk, thick with it.

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I posted an ad on Craigslist and offered writing services for fifteen dollars per page. By Saturday morning, I received a few messages, mostly spam, but one of them, a college kid named Ji-hu, became my first client.

Ji-hu sent me a message asking for a sample of my writing, but lacking any academic papers, I rewrote one of my girlfriend’s old college papers and emailed it to him. Ji-hu messaged me back that day, and we arranged a meeting at a local coffee shop.

On my way to the coffee shop, I experienced a moment of hesitation, questioning the rationale and the ethics of my actions, recognizing some irrevocable nature of this decision. Life’s turning road gave me pause, something I had not felt since deciding to be a writer.

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1.

Sheehan is on Lindy’s breast, trying to suck, when he arches his back, turns a gasping purple-red, bites down hard enough so that Lindy cries out. A dozen times a day he has these fits; tiny gums clamped, muscles contracted, his limbs and spine, usually so limp, become hard as overcooked meat. He writhes a swirling scream, a demand against wind and stone, sunlight and water.

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In the eighteen years since writing college papers, the career that once paid well frustrated me with less money and ever-increasing hours. The “real” job betrayed me, and from that treachery rose a vision of Mary Jane standing in her underwear, laughing, and reading jock papers. Could it be the answer?

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1.

Months break over us. Sheehan is dead only he eats, breathes, defecates, trapped inside some kind of being that no one will ever understand. Which makes us twins, he and I. Twins in our blood, in our double-jointed thumbs, in our jaw lines, in our slender arms and legs, in our eyes, both vacant now; in blood and sinew and spirit we’re twins, descendants of my father hating me, of his father, who killed himself to escape us all. We are father and son all right. And all of it keeps spinning out and down like a bird falling to a perfect death.

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I collected the maximum unemployment while paid under the table for homework, and between unemployment, Ji-hu, and his friend, I earned plenty of money to pay my bills.

I worked hard to get back into the swing of academic writing while also looking to expand the business, which led to building a website. I never built a website but found a low-cost tool through my email provider and soon created my first crappy-looking eCommerce.

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1.

His sleep is a small precious stone, gentle as the fingers of a warm breeze. I open my eyes, watch him breathe, let the gun drop slowly to the floor.

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Towards the end of the first year of the homework business, I experienced a growing frustration towards students and teachers due to spending so much time and energy writing stupid answers to stupid questions,

What’s your view of psychology, and how does it affect your ability to help people?

What a joke. Half the questions in online classes were opinion-based, and the idiot students still couldn’t answer them correctly. The students (and often the teachers) couldn’t write and seemed illiterate since they didn’t read discussions or responses beyond the first sentence. Still, students passed every class. Clearly, something was wrong.

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In 1998, I sold my first novel to a major NY publisher after a lifetime of trying. It felt like a miracle (it WAS a miracle). I turned fifty in December ’97 and had pretty much given up all hopes and dreams by then. Almost immediately, luck grew. The kind of luck you pray, work, and dream comes your way like “A Star is Born,” type of bullshit that never really happens to anyone you know, much less yourself.

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The great thing about working from home is surrounding yourself with hot women. If I learned one lesson from my tenure in moving and storage with ugly people: it’s better to be around good-looking people. No more toothless crack whores and dope heads. No more trailer-trash drivers and helpers who looked and smelled like they bathed in a public toilet. No more. Now, time dedicated to hot women at the gym, the track, and in my building.

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For the next decade and a half, I traveled the world, all expenses paid, earning a six-figure income via royalties, honorariums, and options. The pretty women of all walks of life who once took me to their beds to rescue me disappeared because it became obvious to the world I didn’t need any rescuing. I made it. Fame and wealth replaced pity-fucks with admiration and interest in my career.

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For a time, length uncertain, life progressed in a blur of vodka, Netflix, sex, and term paper writing. For years, I believed writing a paper impossible while inebriated, but one day, while editing an assignment in an alcohol haze, a memory from high school returned. While tripping on acid in my car before school, I wrote an essay. How had I forgotten this feat? 

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Have you ever wondered what it feels like to create a work of art that touches millions of hearts and minds? To see your vision, your passion, and your message spread inspiration across the world? To know you made a lasting impact on the culture and history of humanity?

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