I am currently at the first hour of a 16 hour fast. I have an app for this that helps me keep track of when my body is burning sugar and when it is eating fat. I once had a job that took care of this for me, keeping me so busy that I would forget to eat for 8-12 hours at a time. These days I factor in my 6-8 hours of broken sleep and a late breakfast to cover the time. I haven’t had any problems yet and even squeezed in a 20 hour fast because, well, I was busy at work. Four days into the year and I already have my 2-3 workouts in for the week. Even with the holiday I have stuck to my 1-2 drinks per week. My calorie count is down at the moment with the fasting keeping me from snacking on the off hours.
Yesterday I was supposed to have my new dumbbells arrive only to have a message from Amazon that UPS “delayed” my package. I don’t know what exactly this means but I wasn’t too happen to see that it was delivered to my city this morning at 2:30am and wasn’t delivered today when it is already two days late. New years resolutions are already hard enough, it doesn’t help when somebody else sabotages what you are already going to sabotage yourself.
Two books I finished so far include: Braided Creek by Jim Harrison and In Search of Reagan’s Brain, a Doonesbury annual from 1980-81. Neither of them were a “deep” read, one being poetry and the other a collection of newspaper comic strips. I’m still reading anything I can get my hands on when I have the time, and so far, 2 books in four days isn’t bad. I have been books on order that I received a discount on from Ebay. These were the missing Will Self books that I don’t have in my library and while I should be upset that I spent the money instead of putting it towards my mortgage it should be pointed out that Will Self is not found on the shelves of book stores in the states. Eventually I will find some crude thing he said about this great country of ours. Perhaps he made fun of our “Freedom Fries” or wrote a short story about Trump’s small mushroom shaped penis, who knows. Either way I look forward to these books and march should be a self-indulgent time.
I received a letter in the mail from my mortgage company informing me that I was more than 90 paid up in advance. I didn’t know that paying your bills was a problem. Perhaps my extra money made them want to spend it on postage thanking me for being so punctual on my payments. Or maybe they noticed that I could end up paying off the principle early, eliminating what is owed in interest and therefore losing the company some money over the long haul. I’m thinking of framing this beautiful piece of office literature as a reminder that I annoyed someone enough by paying my bills ahead of time that they felt they had to send a message that I was tampering with their books. And here I thought they only wrote you when you were 90 days behind, not when you were ahead.
Forty minutes ago, I turned 40. It hasn’t really hit me yet and I don’t feel any different. The difference I have noticed is from the things I have been doing over the last year that have slowly changed my life. There is a series of things that I did that have added up and made things better in my life including this blog. It started with having my daughter. Things were tough that first year and while she remains a challenge in many ways, things have gotten better. Realizing I needed to be a better man, a better person for her and my wife I started with some little things.
1. Less TV. I have to agree with David Foster Wallace on this one. Television is an addiction and one that barely offers anything in return. I still enjoy the occasional movie but having anything good to watch is rare. If I spend more than five minutes trying to find something to watch I turn it off.
2. Write every morning. Only on the weekends do I lose the chance to write something. Otherwise I try to put down at least 1500-3000 words. Currently I am working on a new trilogy of novels so I try to write a chapter a day. I also stopped listening to music during this time and write with the sound of my daughter playing in the background.
3. I stopped watching the news. This was a big one and it serves many purposes. The news made me depressed and pissed off half the time. Once I cut that out, I had a better outlook on life. My mind was able to focus more on the important things instead of what was happening in places that really didn’t affect me. I had less stress and my productivity grew. This also created more time to focus on what I really wanted to be doing.
4. Jordan Peterson. In his 12 rules for life Peterson discussed ways to improve your life and move in a direction you wanted to go. The following things are a result of listening to his lectures and reading his book.
5. Make friends with people who want the best for you. I started becoming picky with who I spent my time with. If I left a place feeling worse afterwards the odds were, I didn’t want to spend time with them. Life is too short to hang out with crappy people and in the end, I started to spend more time with people who wanted to better their lives and the lives of those around them. This led to doors opening and opportunities being presented. My friend Steve has always been a guiding light and an inspiration. Ben teaches me to be okay with my trashy side and enjoy myself from time to time, without guilt. Tai Po encourages me to move ahead with following my dreams. Mustafa helps me question things that I never really thought about before.
6. Bear your responsibility. I don’t hesitate to get things done that need to be done anymore. These days if you want something done, not just right, you do it yourself and get it out of the way. This helps with stress and because of this I have accomplished more in the last few months than I have in the last two years. Nothing ever got done by putting it off.
7. Appreciate what you have. There was a good chance that my daughter wasn’t going to be with us for very long when she was born. I have a wife that loves and supports me. I know of people who have crappy cars and can’t keep a roof over their heads. Some people have massive amounts of debt and forget how they got it. I like my car. My wife and I own three houses. I could go to the store and buy this laptop. I have a job that pays well and I enjoy. Sure, I have other dreams am I am working my way towards them. Hell, I was even able to go out and buy podcasting equipment without worrying about how I was going to pay for it. Life is looking pretty good.
8. Enjoy the little things. I enjoy smoking a pipe. It gives me time to reflect and I have met some very interesting people along the way. My YouTube friends, you know who you are, are a wealth of entertainment and knowledge.
9. Read. I listen to audiobooks at work and have enjoyed the works of Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Will Self and many more. There is more to learn about my craft and these people have helped greatly.
10. Set goals. In the coming month I have three books being released on Amazon. Daisy came out today. I didn’t plan or expect to put out so much in a short period of time but sometimes you have to go with the flow. I started a podcast with some friends and have a second one offering free serialized audiobooks to those who want to listen to them. I don’t know where this path is going to take me but so far, I am enjoying the ride.
11. Drink less. I don’t drink like I used to and for the most part I don’t miss it. The last time I really indulged was with a friend and it was a moment that wasn’t surrounded by the drink. These days I regard it as a celebration, one to enjoy with friends. I used to enjoy a glass of wine while writing or before bed but now it doesn’t have the same appeal and I feel much better for it.
My thirties were a roller coaster and thankfully they are ending on a good note. I have seen divorce and death. Saw the birth of my daughter and married a wonderful woman. My finances are no longer the struggle they once were. I have friends I enjoy spending time with that make me feel like a better person. My hobbies are simple and the only thing I wish I had more of these days is time. We all get the same amount of it in the beginning, a lifetime. How we use it is up to us and these days I want to get the most out of it that I can. I have reached that halfway point; some say its only downhill from here but I would like to thing that I’m moving up. The list of things I want to do is growing and so is the list of things I have accomplished.
I had a plan for this year, one that would hopefully put me back where I was a few years ago but times are changing and I am having trouble keeping up. I spent weeks coming home from work and recording an audiobook for Audible in the hopes of reaching a market that was out of my reach before. I enjoy audiobooks, hell for the most part it’s the only way I get to read these days. I spent more grueling hours editing the material, making sure it fit the specifications for the site and in the end, there were issues with the files. This isn’t the end of the story.
I still have hours of material that is waiting to be heard. This Sunday some friends and I will be recording the first of what could be many podcasts. It’s a chance to hang out, have some fun, talk about what whatever we want and plug our stuff in the meantime. Originally, I thought we would have to go through SoundCloud, an expensive site that I had used in the past and manually connect the podcast to Apple, Spotify and all the other sites, a huge pain in the butt. Then someone on Instagram pointed me towards Anchor.fm where they connect you with sponsors and connect your podcast to all the other outlets for listeners. In the end dear reader, you ended up with not one but two podcasts for your future enjoyment.
I started the Typing Piper Classics podcast where every week I upload a new segment of my audiobooks for your listening pleasure. The first episode is available now. I’m starting out with Daisy the book that I spend so many hours recording. I have a backlog of material at the moment which means I can focus on writing new material in the meantime for this blog and Amazon. I hope that you will join me on this new adventure and maybe something special will become of it. Who knows, in the future if things go well, I can afford to have some professionally produced audiobooks created in the future.
Also, Golden will be released on July 1 on Amazon as an eBook and in print. It’s a Novella length memoir and if you have been reading this blog then you might have already read it. There isn’t that much new material, the original post have been cleaned up and I will be happy when I have a printed copy sitting on my shelf at home. Daisy and Motherf*cker, my year as a degenerate cook, are still scheduled to come out early June.
While all of this is happening, I will continue to work on the 5-year anniversary editions of the After the Day series and those will start being turned into serialized podcast later this year. My schedule is full and if you don’t see me on here for stretches of time know that I am likely working on something new. Outlines have been written for an upcoming trilogy, working title is After America. My plan for this is to have the whole trilogy written when it is released. I figure if people can binge watch Netflix why wouldn’t they want to binge read a new series? These will be longer books than what I have been producing lately so don’t expect it any time soon. Know that there will be material coming out in the meantime but something big is one the way.
-Matthew Gilman
After a week of disappearing, Nick finally reappeared. Sam was able to reach him, and just as we had thought he was in California, but not in the way we were hoping. She girlfriend’s divorce was being finalized, but this only came up after a long and elaborate story about meeting with producers and the show being bought by a studio. Sam passed us word and a meeting was scheduled a few days later.
The Skype call was pointless. Nick was walking around a house with his iPad and kept losing signal and there were large patches of the conversation where we couldn’t hear him and wondered if the call was lost. We couldn’t hear the information we were being given and as far as we knew the job was almost done. We sat back and waited.
Nick said the meeting had been cancelled. He retreated back to Bellevue and the project continued. In the meantime he continued to pressure me to write the novels for him, the book versions of the show we were working on. It didn’t make any sense. The plot and the season weren’t even near completion and he wanted me to start writing a book that wouldn’t fit the end product of the show. After my last refusal Nick found someone else.
Two people were brought in around this time, a man who had worked in television doing commercials for different companies and a writer like myself. The director I was not familiar with and had never seen any of his material. He seemed to be a nice guy that knew what he was talking about and was very professional during our meetings. He also, to his credit, made it a point during the meetings to reduce time by cutting off Nick and focusing the conversation on the task at hand. Nick did not like this at first but the risk of losing someone who currently did work in television was too great. A few weeks later, with too many projects on the table, the director left and things started to unravel.
The writer was a retired gentleman who had written over 30 westerns on Amazon and was doing well for himself. Nick had never read any of his books but thought a western was a close fit with the show we were making. It wasn’t the writer that pissed me off in the end it was Nick trying to get rid of me.
“He has over 30 books Matt, how many have you written?”
“12.”
“How many did you say you have sold in a day?” Nick asked the new guy.
“Oh, I’ve seen a hundred sold in a day.”
Nick acting like this guy was Stephen King compared to me. I couldn’t compare myself to this guy and Nick shouldn’t have been either. He was retired, money coming in that he didn’t have to work for anymore and all the free time in the world to continue writing without the worry of bills being paid. And yet, Nick acted like I was a failure because I was not like this guy.
I couldn’t believe how agreeable this new guy was. He was excited to be brought into the project, he kind of reminded me of myself when I started. The real kick in the pants came when Nick assigned me to show the new guy where all the files were in the system with character profiles and the several versions of the plot that had never been finalized. Everything was up in the air and waiting for Nick’s approval until he had some moment of genius on the toilet changing everything again.
“This isn’t the time to start working on a book.”
“This is exactly the time.” Nick argued. “I want to have this out when the show it about the air.” Even if the show had been bought weeks ago the soonest it could have aired would have been a year and most shows are shelved indefinitely for years until they are forgotten about. Nick couldn’t publish a book because the studio would have bought those rights as well. He had no idea what the fuck he was talking about or doing. The meetings had gone back to Nick’s rants about AA and his capitalist ambitions. My own book sales had dwindled and I wasn’t close to having anything new in print.
I never showed the new guy where the files were. Sam was in charge of organizing the information and he lived with Nick. The only purpose of Nick doing this was to rub it in my face that I had turned it down and I am still glad to this day that I had.
I sent an email the next day that I was done, going back to writing on Amazon, I would no longer be working on the show. For once Nick was humble in his response. An email was sent to the rest of the group, remember I was being carbon copied for all emails, wishing me the best. After that everything went downhill.
For over a year I was still getting emails about the project, meetings, and possible investors. Pictures of Nick with middle eastern men and white guys with gold chains hanging just above their hairy bellies started to appear in my email. Then silence.
Sam contacted me a year after I had left the show. Nick had disappeared again and wasn’t returning emails or phone calls. Todd was still working on the script but without the leader there was nothing they could do. Sam tried to bring me back into the project to have Nick’s attention and finally finish things. The night we were supposed to Skype and play catch up I became violently ill and canceled less than an hour before the meeting. It was never rescheduled and a week later there were emails about Todd leaving the show.
“If that guy thinks he doesn’t need our money while he’s driving Uber to pay bills he’s mistaken.” Nick wrote in an email. “I understand that things are tough but he’s not worth what he’s asking. Low ball him, he’ll fold and take what he’s offered. He’s desperate.”
To Todd’s credit he didn’t fold. He made his offer to what it would cost to stay on the show and when they didn’t agree he left. Todd was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and that was his downside as well. Things might have been changing for him. As someone who would always agree to what was being offered being in a financial hotspot was making his spine grow and I knew that he had learned something while working on this project.
There was a long list of insults and complaints once Todd left. The shit talking had reached epic proportions. Suddenly Todd was the worst human being on the planet and wasn’t worth the work he had put in. Nick was convinced they would find somebody else and they would be a real professional this time, but it never happened. That was the end of the show. Emails continued, mostly sending questions about the cable bill to Sam. The show was never mentioned again and soon the emails stopped as well. Either Nick was no longer using his email or he stopped linking me and everyone else to his account.
The show was never bought, it was never completed, and while I had worked on it for years, I have to admit it was something that I never would have chosen to watch if it was on television. I learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. When you smell bullshit run away. Know what your time is worth. Do not work with people who can not focus on the task at hand. If you find yourself feeding someone else’s ego run away. Don’t work for someone who knows less than you.
Nick’s advice for life would boil down to one thing, marry rich. Out of all of his stories, comments about his hot daughter, the gaining and losing of money over the years, the one thing he always went back to was not marrying the rich Jewish girl. Nick had a habit of directing his attention to anything other than what he should be working on. I could only imagine what that would have been like if you added your dick as a wingman to the situation. These days you can find Nick on a cruise ship or in southern California. The show is a forgotten relic, Walden has been abandoned, my writing career is still recovering. Nick had dreams of being a Vegas star at one time, memorizing the American song book and recording his own album, and while he gave the appearance of being a man of the world it became obvious to those who knew him, he was more like Dolemite than Sinatra. A human tornado came to down, upended my life, filled my head with promises and fantasies of greatness, and in the end left with little to show for it.
In the end all I got was this blog post and a flannel shirt.
I met my wife through an online app, no joke. I was working for the county and while cleaning the old Nazareth College campus I hid in the main ballroom, watching the deer eat from the lawn and opened the Tinder app. It didn’t take long for her picture to appear. She was cute with dark brown hair and green eyes. There was only the one picture and her name with nothing written in the profile. I swiped and moved on. Twenty minutes later she popped up again. This had never happened before.
There were five pictures this time, a written profile and the words American Splendor popped out. Not only did she know of the classic American comic book but she added it into her profile. I had to meet this person. I swiped again and we instantly had a match. The rest of the night we messaged back and forth. Working opposite shifts it would be a while before we could meet in person. This waiting game would become our regular routine.
With an increase in Skype meetings there was talk among Todd and I about a pay increase. Nick didn’t like it at first, treating the topic like we were forming a union. We were receiving the same low pay for ever increasing hours and a rise in verbal abuse. These days nothing seemed to be satisfactory. Todd and I were assigned to put together character profiles with little more to go on than the characters ethnic background. We were expected to create a character out of thin air that would fit with the show. we Skyped a couple times that week, went down some profile sheets to create a background, strengths, and weaknesses. When it was time for the next Skype meeting, we spent 20 minutes going over the profiles and explaining who these people were. In the end, Nick expected more.
Here was the trick with Nick. What he wanted was what he envisioned in his head. He didn’t want to put it on paper but have someone else do it. To be slightly off from his image was to be completely wrong. That was the meeting where I told him “do it yourself next time.” Todd and I had worked to squeeze in meetings for this one project and all we heard was “I was expecting better. It’s flat. There is no substance. What the hell were you guys doing?” That was when we started demanding more money. It came slow at first. Nick was trying to assigned a number of tasks to us and as if we had the same thought, we started saying no.
There was a long list of uncompleted assignments that kept lagging behind and Nick would move ahead as if the scene in question didn’t really matter. Each of us would be given three to four assignments and the more we were given the sooner our next meeting would be. We were coming close to have full time jobs with this project on $300 a month. We had better things to do.
“If you could rewrite that scene, do these three characters profiles and clean up that file folder by the next meeting I think we could make some headway.”
“No.” I said. “I’ll rewrite the scene but the other stuff needs to go to someone else.” Sam had a knack for creating his own task and Nick went along with it. We were constantly changing online storage systems and switching to different programs for things. It was confusing and just as we became accustomed to using one platform it would change because “this is better.” The explanation never fit and we were left using something that was completely foreign to us.
The books I had uploaded to Amazon before joining the project were starting to sell. I had money coming in from several places and this was paying the least amount from them all. I had some leeway on what I wanted to do and should be doing.
I met Sarah at a local bar downtown. Her friends were going to a concert for the Fried Egg Nebula and when I arrived, I notice the boyfriend of the other girl was someone I went to high school with. Casey was a character straight out of Dazed and Confused and the first thing that popped into my mind was having a music class with him. He had done a report on The Doors and while giving the oral presentation he jumped off a table and yelled “Mom, I want to FUCK YOU!” according to him this was an actual event in Jim Morrison’s life. We shared stories and before the first hour was over, I knew that I wanted to see Sarah again. I wasn’t fully confident of my bullshit meter but a common thing that would happen with meeting someone new was the cringe of hearing someone talk. Was there substance, was her IQ higher that her shoes size, did she watch reality TV? In the first few words I could tell if this was someone I could have a conversation with. I had friends in the past that would say “you don’t fuck her mind.” These people now have kids with people they can’t stand, life is not going well for them.
Few months later I was being paid a little more. Things were going well with Sarah and the show. There was talk of a meeting with producers to have it picked up. Nick made promises of working as a writer after it was bought but I did my own research, rarely did the people who created the show work on these things. The company writers were brought it to make necessary changes, it became company property and the last thing they wanted was someone else coming in and telling them what it really was. I just wanted out.
Sarah and I were hanging out with my friend Steve one night. He asked how my books were doing and when I looked it up on my phone, I was about to receive a $3000 payment from sales three months prior. Things were going really well. This should have been a news flash. I should have quit the show and went to writing novels full time. There were a lot of things I should have done. After investing so much time, a trip to Seattle, and putting up with incompetent leadership how could I walk away with nothing more than a small paycheck?
Every week we heard the same thing, the meeting was coming. It was like watching Game of thrones every week and waiting for winter to arrive. This was starting to appear as a bullshit gimmick to motivate us to work. Then Nick disappeared.
We didn’t hear from him for a while. Sam thought he had gone to California to make a deal but how could we know for sure? With our jobs done until the next meeting there was nothing else to do, we sat back and waited.
Today turned out to be a big day for getting things done. The proofs for Daisy arrived unexpectedly early and I did a small photo shoot for the cover of Motherf*cker: My year as a degenerate cook. This morning I wrote a new chapter for the second book titled Rob’s Lament and that clocked in at 2000 words.
Daisy is available for pre-order now and I’m currently recording the audiobook version which should conclude this week, then comes editing. I am still writing material for Motherf*cker but the plan is to release it on June 8th for the one-year anniversary of Anthony Bourdain’s death, three days after Daisy comes out. Am I crazy? Yes!
I doubt I will have the audiobook recorded for Motherf*cker but the print version and Ebook should be out. While creating the cover for Daisy I wanted to have three separate covers for each version, but cover creator had other plans for me. The image that was voted the best one for the Ebook also ended up as the cover for the printed version. As for the audiobook, I haven’t gotten far enough to find out how that will go.
Yesterday I posted three sections of my upcoming book Daisy. The purpose is to encourage people to comment and add thoughts to what works, what is missing, and what to cut out. As I write and rewrite the book I will post more for feedback along the way. This isn’t the only thing I am working on at the moment.
Last night, I started recording the audiobook version of a previous book titled Hobbit Baby; a Father’s journey through the NICU. This is a short book and journals the 91 days my daughter spend in a NICU when she was born four months early and weighed 1 pound 5 ounces. I’m using this as a practice run to relearn the ins and outs of using Audacity again and editing sound files for an audiobook. I had used Audacity in the past for podcast that no longer exist but the last time was a year ago. Recording audiobooks is not as labor intensive as writing a book from scratch so I am hoping to put a large dent in my catalogue this year. That leads me to my other project.
This is the five year anniversary of my first book After the Day. I was never happy with how that book started out, unedited, poorly written, and never truly fixed along the way. For the five year anniversary I am working on a complete rewrite of the first three books and releasing them with audiobooks, something else I missed out on when I first publish. I hope to get things right this time and enable myself to move on and forget about that series once and for all without regret.
I will post updates on here when things are scheduled for release. Audiobooks will be something new for me and while I have some experience I will be selling them for a reasonable price since I am recording at home. My house is quiet in the middle of the night when I record but my equipment isn’t exactly the best for such projects.
So, there it is, my year in a nutshell. You’re welcome to come along for the ride.
The Collapse Experiment 