My kids recently put two-and-two together and realized that since I started university at the age of 20 that there was a two-year gap after high school. They were aghast. They clearly questioned whether this college dropout had the qualifications necessary to be their dad.

That two-year gap is something I am reticent to discuss, particularly with people expected to look to me as an authority figure. I did a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to during that time. I had a lot of fun. I encountered challenges. There were times I felt like I was in a movie… or a book.

I wrote a book. That’s what I did during those two years.

That was the goal all along. I’ve said in this space before that ever since second grade creative writing class I’ve wanted to be a writer. That dream was cemented during my junior year of high school when I won the National Council of Teachers of English writing award.

I always knew I was the best writer in the country. With that award I had the proof.

At least that’s how my 17-year-old, inflated ego saw things. I was the best. (Mind you, 600 other students won the same award.)

That award was a double-edged sword. On one side, it gave me the confidence to pursue writing as a career. On the flip side, I stopped studying form, style, and basic grammar because I already knew it all.

It was embarrassing that in my 30s I was still dangling my participles and using commas the way a kid uses sprinkles at the buffet’s soft-serve station. I had a really good editor in Tokyo that cracked down on my lackadaisical approach to grammar.

That’s when I finally cracked open the old college textbooks (I did eventually graduate) and bothered to read them. I keep a battered copy of Strunk and White on my writing desk at all times.

Getting back to 1997. At the suggestion of my father I dropped out of the University of Northern Iowa two days before classes started. My bags and boxes were setting at the top of the stairs ready to be moved into the dorm.

I remember calling my dorm mate that day, this guy I had never met, and telling him I wasn’t going to move in. He decided at that moment to drop out of college as well. My apologies to his parents.

My dad’s point was that he wasn’t going to pay for me to flunk. I was already working at a bar on campus and most of my nights ended at 5am on a couch in somebody’s basement.

My dad was 100 percent right, because a few months later my best friend flunked out of UNI after barely attending any classes. He was studying theatre… in Iowa. Most of his theatre classmates had machinations to move to New York City.

Free as birds and with the world wide open to us, instead of NYC, in February 1998 my friend and I decided to move to Boston. Neither of us recall how we landed on Boston. I think its probably because my favorite show was Cheers and my favorite band was The Pixies.

After a month of sleeping in our car and staying at the Boston youth hostel, we found a one-bedroom apartment that we shared with another college dropout and his pregnant girlfriend.

We bought a four-track recorder and spent our nights recording songs with an acoustic guitar and a conga drum and a toy keyboard we bought from a convenience store.

My friend would go to the roof of our apartment building and practice soliloquies. I decided to write a book. I didn’t know what to write about.

I was way too much into Jack Kerouac at the time. I read On the Road three times. I was also a Hemingway fan, and I was determined to coin the title for our generation, participles be dangled.

I thought, “What would be the edgiest, most poignant thing I could write about?” So I wrote about my own funeral. This thought was inspired by the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song, “Lay Me Low.”

I wrote the scene. I continued writing extra chapters. None of them were in order. None of it made much sense. None of it was written very well.

After nine months in Boston my friend got accepted to acting school in New York. I returned to Iowa in October, but it was too late to enroll in school for the fall 1998 semester. I applied and got accepted to the University of Iowa for fall 1999.

I had some time to spare. I spent four months in San Diego with my brother where I worked briefly for the Sierra Club and briefly for Starbucks and lived off 39-cent cheeseburger Thursdays at McDonald’s (limit 20-per-customer). Then I spent the summer as a canoe guide in the Boundary Waters. All the while sporadically working on my book, by this time titled The F-Man Himself.

“The F-Man Himself” is something I randomly wrote in my high school schedule book. I never could remember why I wrote it, or what it meant, but I liked the sound of it.

During my first semester at the University of Iowa I took a beginning creative writing class and for the final assignment I wrote the final chapter of The F-Man Himself. I shared the chapter with my professor and told her my intentions to publish a book. She gave me a blank stare.

Still, my book was finished. I had written the next great American novel. Now what?

Well, what I had done was save the manuscript on a used laptop my dad got for free when his company was throwing out all their old electronics. That laptop promptly died.

Here is where I have to thank Mike Devin. He was able to pry open the laptop and recover the memory, saving the file to a floppy disk. I promptly went to the university print lab and printed out a copy (charging it to my student account, which was paid for by my parents).

At some point I printed out more copies and shared it with friends. Someone told me he was at a party where people were in a bedroom tripping acid and reading my book to each other.

That was the biggest compliment I have received to date.

When I started dating my wife Lisa in 2003, I only had one copy of The F-Man Himself left. I bequeathed it to Lisa. She bound it in a three-ring binder and preserved it for the next 20 years.

Which brings me to today. When we moved to Singapore in 2021 my dependent visa didn’t allow me to work. Once again I was allotted the perfect opportunity to write a novel. A good one this time.

I did it. I wrote a proper-length novel. I called it Montuga. I loved it and I sent it out to literary agents to find out how much they loved it.

Nobody loved it.

I was back to square one. I had a novel I wanted to publish, but no publisher. The few contacts I had in the publishing industry recommended self-publishing. I wasn’t interested because I wanted to focus on writing best-selling novels and let somebody else do the hard labor of printing them and marketing them and selling them.

I didn’t wanna have to do a TikTok.

Then as I learned more about self-publishing, the more attractive it became. First off, I had just come out of the online journalism world where news is instantaneous. In the 24-hour news cycle, today is one day too late.

When I worked for the magazine, editors and writers responded to emails post-haste. The Slack app at the bottom of my laptop dashboard blinked with notifications like the errant turn signal of a retiree in the left lane of I-80.

Then, unemployed and lonely in Singapore, I tried to enter the fiction world. I soon found that in this realm you receive an email response six months later, if you’re lucky.

I’m 46 years old. I don’t have time to wait. With everything I did to my body between 1998~2003 I could be dead in six months.

Self-publishing it is. I get to design my own covers.

I am sure regular readers of this blog remember in my last post that I announced that my brother and I launched Hayseed Press.

My purpose for doing so was three-fold:
1) To self-publish my own novels
2) To have a home base in America to write freelance articles
3) To provide editorial services to other self-publishing authors

The problem is I have never published a book. I’m not yet ready to publish Montuga, the book I wrote last year here in Singapore. It needs a few more serious rounds of editing.

But I did have another book to publish. The F-Man Himself.

Thankfully I brought the three-ring binder with me to Singapore. This past summer I spent two weeks transcribing the document. As I was typing up this 20-year-old ancient tome I quickly realized that I was not in fact the greatest writer and this was not the next great American novel.

It was quite the opposite.

The main character’s age changed regularly because I couldn’t remember how old he was. One character’s name was grossly misspelled. It was 70-some pages of narcissistic fluff. But it was my narcissistic fluff and it was beautiful.

I spent even more time fixing the inconsistencies and writing additional chapters to fill in the holes. My friend Emma, a children’s book author, bless her heart, took the time to proofread the final manuscript.

In my description, I call The F-Man Himself a love letter to ’90s teenage angst.

I wrote, “This poetically dark take on the coming-of-age tale portrays the idyllic generation that got swallowed up once the chaos of the internet age was triggered.”

My family and my high school friends appear in the book in some form or another. In real life these are wonderful people to whom I am forever grateful and the characters in the book in no way reflect their personalities. Some of the events are based off of real life. Most of it is made-up BS.

The story is a personal snapshot of who I was at the turn of the century, an aimless youth searching for my place in the world. It was painful to reread some sections as they ripped off band-aids I thought were tossed in the trash long ago.

Some parts were fun and whimsical, and I was a bit proud of myself for having written it.

At the end of the day, I had a book that didn’t totally embarrass me. I still don’t want strangers to read it or god forbid critique it. I did want to publish it. Rather than self-publish on Amazon where it might fall into the wrong hands I published The F-Man Himself on a new print-on-demand service called Mixam.

You can order the book through them and they will print it and ship it to you. As of now the service is only available in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Germany, and Australia. Sorry friends in Japan and Singapore, The F-Man Himself isn’t available to you just yet.

(But if you really would like a copy let me know and I can figure something out.)

As of February 4, 2025, after more than 25 years, I am a published author. The F-Man Himself is available to the masses. New York Times Bestsellers List here we come.

To help me achieve this goal, you can purchase your own copy of The F-Man Himself at the link below (maybe). Stay tuned for more titles available from Hayseed Press.

Thank you to you all for your support. Some of you have been subscribed to this blog for decades and without your moral support I wouldn’t have continued on this journey.

And maybe one day I will let my kids read this book and they will be proud of their old man. Most likely they will be weirded out. C’est la vie.

Peace and Love.