I knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer from an early age. In seventh grade in South Jersey, a story I wrote was read by my teacher to every class she had in one day, which was a big boost to my confidence at the time. The story was an extrapolation of a trip I had taken to Puerto Rico the previous summer, and some violent fantastical events ensued involving a machete.
Eventually the more I read, the more it seemed writers went out and had a lot of experiences. They worked a lot of jobs. I may have gone a little too far in that regard before I finally decided to start writing novels again, starting with Collapsity.
I have worked as a: bike messenger in DC, stringer journalist, commercial fisherman in Alaska, book buyer @ Amazon in their first year, maker of international sales reports @ Starbucks corporate HQ, door to door fundraiser for Sierra Club/WashPIRG, payroll specialist @ WAMU, auditor @ IBM, mover of mega-fabric info @ Nordstrom’s HQ, assistant in the model’s wardrobe closet at old Bon Marche in-house advertising office, video game tester, vegan prep cook, insurance claims adjudicator, federal government clerk, trailer checker, waiter, assistant to a real estate sales manager (also assnt to: DC film publicist, some pharmacists in South Park, the COO and CEO’s assnt at Harborview), day laborer (ditch-digging, construction, cleaning the insides of massive, drydocked fishing boats) and life guard – are just some of my past day jobs. I didn’t do them all very long – and some were just temp jobs – and I certainly didn’t do them all well. Some, in fact, I did badly. But in a culture that often thinks you are what your job is, I got to try on a lot of faces, and see how it felt in a lot of people’s shoes.
Additionally, I have volunteered as an intern for the Smithsonian publicity department, an extra in a John Waters film, a production assistant on one of Seattle’s worst independent movies and at Left Bank Books in the Pike Place Market.
But really, I always wanted to be a novelist.
