Jack Deadmen has become a fixture in Punk Literature and ever since I reviewed his book, Nobody Special, I enjoyed learning more about his noir characters. He has a style that parallels J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, and some moments of Hunter S. Thompson with the substance of Charles Bukowski. So, here's the one and only Jack Deadmen!

Jack! I am so happy to join you on this awesome event! You got a new publication coming up! Talk to Gyps' about it! What's it all about?

Jump on into it and leave the weird for later? [Jack smiles. I know he hates this part of being an author, which is why it's so fun to dig right into it with him!] Cursed is the Road to the American Dream is the long-awaited prequel to Nobody Special: The Death of Johnny Salinger. It's a wild, decade-long journey where we come to find out what brought Johnny to the dreadful end he faces in Nobody Special. It takes place as Southern California's throttle-wide-open second wave of Punk reaches its peak, and the famed writer and poet is struggling to find meaning after the tragic death of his fiancee, which he feels responsible for. The book takes us from the beginnings of his infamous Venice Beach Hell House and the angst-fueled craziness there, party-crashing, spoken word shows and drug binges, and a nice road trip that Johnny takes with his fiancee's sister, Kim, across the South West to New Orleans on a quest to fulfill a sort of bucket list, though they're hoping to find hope or redemption along the way, despite being fully committed to driving off a cliff if that's what it will take to outrun the feelings of conflict and doom they've been accumulating. About a third of the book is a road-trip-love-triangle-ghost-story in a way, in that Johnny and Kim have always known they were supposed to be together, pining and feeling guilty about Kim's sister intervening, and then they're left to deal with these imagined ghost-feelings once she's dead. Throw this whirlwind in front of the already brewing storm of Johnny's rising fame and lifestyle, and you get a damn fine story. [I don't say anything, just to see how far Jack will put up with his own discomfort ... he smirks.]

So, punk rock with a Beat element, a Midget stripper, crazy writers and poets and freak people ... hiccups of happenstance versus fate ... and illicit-laden shenanigans at a place called Hell House? A fine backdrop, indeed.... And now I'm jumping onto the lifeboat of the book's jacket that boasts: "Intoxicatingly nostalgic, Cursed is the Road to the American Dream is gritty, lust-for-life storytelling infused with punk rock Benzedrine" ... which I feel is the perfect way to sum things up. God, I hate this part. I could talk about the mechanics and elements of a story, front and back and sideways, but to give the Reader's Digest synopsis? Fun. I need a manager. The shortest version of this answer would be for me to just say that I set out to write my favorite book, and I couldn't release it until that's what it had become.

How is this publication different from Nobody Special?

That's so much easier! Cursed is an epistolary novel, same as I'd chosen for Nobody Special, meaning it's in diary form, but more along the lines of how Bram Stoker approached Dracula in that it's a collection of entries from several characters, instead of it being written just by Johnny Salinger. So, we get three different perspectives through Johnny, Kim, and Rue ... which adds a lot to the story; and since we get to hitch a ride inside everyone's heads for a bit, we come to understand why they're behaving and thinking the way they do--because, ultimately, nobody's disclosing the full truth to anyone else, just like what happens to all of us in real life. I think a lot of what a person chooses to do in life has a lot less to do with their actual options than we'd like to think, and more to do with what they perceive their options to be, based on what's being presented and how life outside of them is being interpreted through what they think they know.It's a comedy of errors? Let's go with that. All through the book, the reader will know more than the individual characters do, which is going to make you want to scream at the pages sometimes ... and, of course, those pages are soaked with gin, wine, blood, and heroin, along with some other things that have dripped on them along the way. Not mine ... I'm talking about the characters here. It's got my blood, sweat, and tears, sure, but the characters definitely had their own way with these pages. Another difference is this: In The Death of Johnny Salinger, Johnny's ruled by his head and Kim's ruled by her heart. Halfway into Cursed, you see a major shift for both, where their polarities switch sides, unfortunately for them the change happens simultaneously, which becomes part of their downfall. All of this is complicated by the return of a childhood love of Johnny's, who's hunted him down and disrupts their lives simply because it's Fate's plan for it to happen, despite what any of their hearts actually want out of life.

What kind of characters are involved in this novel?

No one who we could consider sane, or socially acceptable, or who you'd want to accompany you to your cousin's wedding, which leaves a lot of room for a really good fucking time and a ton of dysfunction, though that brand of wildness leads to a shit storm of ensuing darkness too. There are some characters we haven't met yet, and of course everyone who Johnny talked about in Nobody Special gets a chance to take the stage, which is a blast, because every character in the book, even the ones who just stop by in passing, are bigger than life. Let's quote another snippet from the back cover of the book to answer this question, shall we? "[Johnny] Salinger is joined by an unforgettable cast of uninhibited misfits who carry a brazenly raw and sometimes burlesque cocktail of narratives." Simply put: They're simply mad.

Alice in Wonderland mad?

Madder. Though, "crazy" is relative. What's normal to one person is utterly insane to someone else, and visa-versa ... a cannibal would likely think us nuts for chomping into a Snickers bar, and we think they're nuts for flossing their teeth with somebody's braces, but to them a human ear is just a tasty side dish, right? With that said ... there is some relatively crazy shit that goes down in this novel, though I promise it has nothing to do with cannibalism. Mind you, it was the '80s we're talking about here, and unless you were part of the scene back then, I mean deep into it, the trip can be a lot like getting shot out of a cannon head-first into a giant pile of culture shock.

Did you take it too far?

"Too far" is relative, as well, right? Maybe I did. Some people may want to take a Brillo pad to their brain afterwards, while others will go, "yeah, that's about right ... he gets it." It will come down to the life experiences of the individual readers, of course. There are those who thought a few things went too far in The Death of Johnny Salinger, but this one may go a bit further, I suppose. Kim's a bit of a raunch at times when left to her own devices, and Johnny is Johnny. But the point was never to make the reader uncomfortable, it was about allowing the characters to be true to themselves at the cost of my own embarrassment; I'm taking one for the team. If a character wanted to do something and it was in line with their personality and personal history, then I let them do it. This is a Jack Deadmen novel, after all. If you're expecting Mary Poppins to be smiling while she's dusting the mantle, you've got the wrong book. When my wife was reading it, she would give me these silent looks now and then ... and when it got to the point where I could no longer guess what part she was at, I started to have some second thoughts, but the characters kept saying "don't you touch a fucking thing! This is my story!" A good writer would know when to censor the characters they've created, but great writer refuses to.... Damn, that last line was pretty good. I was just thinking how Hemingway might throw his two cents in.

That was your Hemingway?

That was my Hemingway.

What did you love best about writing this piece?

Spending time with the characters from a safe distance. I really dig those times when I'm writing, and I'm not really there anymore, and I'm unaware of my hands, and my conscious manipulation of the words vanishes... like when you're in a movie theater and the auditorium disappears, there's no more screen, and you're just "there." That sweet spot ... that's the drug of writing for me, and there was a LOT of that while working on this novel. I also loved loaning my hand to Kim for her to write her entries, and I'll miss that. It was truly freeing to be Kim and to drop the masculine facade for a while, and allow myself to feel things deeper; I think a woman's feelings are truer than a man's in a sense, and it's a damn fine thing to feel raw truth running through your veins; men will deny this because we're brainwashed into the typecast. If a woman wants to feel what it's like to be a man, take a piece of your soul and put it in chains, keep pretending you're not affected by anything until you're truly not, and then get used to the inward sad face. It's a drag. Kim's a lot of things that I'm not, which is always fun to be a part of ... to write so deeply that you become somebody else. I wish I had her confidence, lets leave it at that. But I also enjoyed sharing head-space with the other characters as well. I really dig getting under someone else's skin, especially if they're up to no good, because as a person I'm pretty straight-laced. People interest me. Monkeys doing people things is hysterical to me. People doing monkey things, that's pure gold ... that's a body I want to slip into and then throw on some roller skates and feel things out ... be free for a little while, right?

How long has this one been in the making?

In the beginning, it was a piece that fell out of a book I'd written in 1988, the setting mostly. Later, it grew into an Improv script, and then it became two screenplays. One was called "Nobody Special," and the second was "You're Everything." After the film production of Nobody Specialburst into flames back in 2004, the screenplays sat for a while. In 2007 I started to write the original script in the novel form. That's when The Death of Johnny Salinger was actually born, through a sort of beautiful accident. In the Nobody Specialscript, the first three pages are about Johnny at the end of his life, he's about to commit suicide, and then the rest of the story was about how he got there. But I kept getting hung up on those three pages, so I skipped over them. About halfway into what is now Cursed is the Road to the American Dream, I returned to those three pages and wrote The Death of Johnny Salinger -- originally I thought it would be a nice companion piece for this current novel, but it turned into it's own book. Once it was completed, I went back to writing the novel that's coming out now. So, it's taken a while. And a lot happened along the way that derailed the train more than once. Last year I lost my father and my father-in-law, about six weeks apart, which blew up the tracks completely, and it took a while to get the train moving again. Another reason it took so long to finish (I'm almost a year behind the originally targeted release date!) is because I was honestly enjoying hanging out with the characters, and I just didn't want to say goodbye. It can be a heartbreaking thing to do. After a while I believe there's a part of the brain that doesn't know the difference between a character you've bonded with in a book, and someone you've come to know in your real, waking life. I think the same happens for dreams. Up until I was about twelve, I would often have dreams where I was accompanied by a twin sister. I've checked with my mother, and she claims to be fairly certain about my never having a twin. [Jack laughs.] I'm going to believe her, because that's something you'd think she'd notice. But, those dreams were so real that every time I would wake from them, I'd miss her. So, I grew up with that thought in the back of my head, that haunting "what if" thought. That haunted feeling I had is much like the haunted feeling Kim has when she loses her sister, which also occurs for Johnny, but in a different way: in the book, it mentions that he had a twin sister who died at birth and that he carries that loss with him. I was hoping that by those two dealing with it, then they might help me work out my own bullshit.

Did it work?

Nope.

Wait. You're almost a year past the original release date, but the cover says "Twentieth Anniversary Edition."

Indeed, it does! The reader's experience starts before they even open the cover. In The Death of Johnny Salinger, Johnny references the Cursed book (aka "Nobody Special"). In Cursed, there's a Forward and Afterward written by Kim, and she talks about how it's been 20 years since Johnny's "death," and that she's chosen this anniversary to re-release Nobody Special under the title "Cursed is the Road to the American Dream," and that she's added chapters that weren't in the original publication (the source material being the "You're Everything" script). There's a red herring here, because Johnny says in the first book that if he fails to kill himself, then his next book would be called "Cursed is the Road to the American Dream." The two books run together like a well-oiled machine, and I think it runs pretty smoothly; but yeah, it's all part of the illusion so the reader can immerse themselves in the experience, and everything's done very methodically in order to blur the lines of "Fiction." In fact, Kim tries to convince the reader that it's not fiction at all.

So, there's a chance Johnny is real, and he might still be alive?

You're funny.

Who or what is your influence in your writing?

Different elements of my writing have been influenced by different people, movies, novels. Big Sur, The Outsiders, Catcher in the Rye, The Shining, those books made deep impressions in me growing up. The style, at times, during these two novels, I borrowed a bit from Jack Kerouac's playbook, there's no secret about that, and that was intentional. But you're right about Thompson and J.D. Salinger being influences, and we might as well throw in a little William S. Burroughs. Music influences me a lot. While I was working on this, I had compiled soundtracks for each scene, which I would listen to while I was writing; it really sets the tone for me, and it's a practice I'll likely continue with. But, the biggest influences for me are always the characters themselves. I'm a bit of a Method writer.... [Jack pauses, like he's reliving some sort of memory that would be a great anecdote here, which I can tell he's also deciding not to share.] Suffice to say, I do my best to stay out of the way and let the characters do their thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm just the vessel they're using to get the words on the paper. It's when I'm not writing that those other influences start hitting me, because I start thinking about what it all means, all the things that have happened in the book, and the things that are on their way ... which can be maddening. Stephen King's book, On Writing, had an impact on me years ago too, especially in how I see my role in the writing process. He describes a story as a "found thing." It's something that already exists, and we find and excavate it like archeologists, filling in the lost pieces when necessary, and how the quality and completeness of the story ultimately depends on the care you used while digging it up. But, yeah, the characters themselves are the biggest influence. They usually know what's going on before I do. Now that I think more about your question, though, I could really go off in a hundred directions with it. I guess that everything I've ever heard, thought, experienced in my life ... all of it ... "the Everything," as Johnny would say ... that's the biggest influence of all. Shit, it's hysterical that it's the easiest questions that become the hardest to answer, isn't it? Such is life.

For housekeeping reasons, do you kill off any characters?

Never. All the time. Never. I'm not a fan of it. I feel like that happens a lot in a series, whether it's a novel or a T.V. show, and I feel like I know when it's being done because of a housekeeping issue or to raise audience interest, or to introduce another character, or maybe because they're getting in the way. In my opinion, if a character is getting in the way then you had a shitty character to begin with. And if you've written yourself into a corner so tightly that you're forced to kill off a character to escape?.... please, take a vacation from writing ... I see killing off a character for any of those reasons as creative murder. Listen, think about it, if a character is any good, a writer and their reader take that character into themselves as someone they actually know, and so I like to think of them as real people. I mourn their loss when it happens, but when I'm writing from their truth I never feel like I'm actually the one deciding their fate. I really do let them take over, so it's more organic; if they die, it's just the natural course of things based on where they're heading as people. I've actually done the opposite of what you're asking, though, sure. Jesus, which is worse? I confess that I've tried to intervene at times, to try and save a character from something terrible, but it never works out when I do that. Here's my disclaimer, though, because I know where we're heading with this: I'm handling this question like a vial of nitroglycerin, because I don't want to give anything away, but people do fall out in this book, yeah ... but it's not my fault ... I don't want to get any letters from fans who are pissed off that certain characters bite it ... address the hate mail to the character's house, not mine. It's the character's fault for living like they do. As a writer, I'm the equivalent of a doctor who tells their patient that they should quit smoking, but I'm not gonna stand outside of their house with a fire extinguisher just in case they light one up.

What do you want your readers to gain from this book?

A good ride. I wish the book came with a safety bar, so there'd be no turning back once you start the first page, like boarding a rollercoaster. It sucks that I know you'll get interrupted by life ... reading a book now days, with all the distractions, it's like being on a rollercoaster and then putting the ride on pause, mid-loop, so you can go make dinner. Momentum gets lost. Seriously, I want you to feel like you've been somewhere. I mentioned on the JD Facebook page a while ago that I want the reader to feel like they've been on a journey worth the taking, one where you look at things differently than when you started out. I want them to go to an honestly dirty and special place, sad and wonderful all the same. I want them to feel like a child who entered a burnt out Texaco to take a leak, but comes out as an adult, asking, "What the hell happened while I was in there?" I like taking people along with me to dirty places. I don't mean dirty as in risque, but dirty as in lived in, archaic and everything's breaking down. I feel home there: the old movie theater with the torn screen that no one goes to anymore; shanties with wind chimes made out of pounded-out silverware, and a couch made out of the backseat of an old Chevy; a broken down carnival, decaying in a pile of rust; the coffee-stains on the make up table in the dressing room at a forgotten strip joint where a lonely stripper named Scarlet Fever has applied her lipstick for the past thirty years despite the fact that no one's shown up to whistle at her for the past two decades -- the far left corner of the haunted mansion at Disneyland -- the depressed table at the Marmont in Hollywood. To me, the feeling that comes with those types of places, that feeling is home. Those places have stories that need no words to be told. A crack in the wall or a dead mosquito on a hotel window sill both have a lot of deep things to say if you listen with the right ear, they have stories behind them. Sad moments that are beautifully meaningful; it's not hello/goodbye, there's a history there and you can tell from one look, and then it haunts you ever after. I know there are others like me who would rather have a busted up, rusty 'ol trombone hanging on our walls instead of an original Picasso. That's the part of me that I want to share with others through this book. It's meaningful, even though it might be ugly at times, which is sometimes the most beautiful kind of thing. Some people want to take pictures of Sleeping Beauty's castle, but I'd rather go skinny dipping in the moat.

Do your characters, words and/or storyline come to you right away? Or is it a process to come up with an idea?

Things come to light a little at a time. This may seem weird, but most of my stories come to me through a flash of the ending first, and then I have to step back and figure out how the hell it all got there. Sometimes I see the birth of a new story like a movie trailer. I'll see a situation and a few characters, and if I'm intrigued, then I'll go see the movie (or, in this case, write it), if not, I dump it on an ever-growing heap of brain trash. Actually, I suppose I treat the whole process of a story a lot like a filmmaker. I have a script (literally, in this case), and then once the sets are in place and everyone's been cast, it all takes on a life of its own, bigger than I imagined ... often times going off script completely. Hard to explain, really, because every project's been a little different during the creative process, but what I just said does seem to be a true element for all of them. It makes me think of Ron Howard as a director. I was an extra in the movie Ed TV with Matthew McConaughey and Ellen DeGeneres, and Ron Howard would do this wonderful thing: after he got the shot he wanted, if he felt the actors were aching to try it differently, he would say something very sweet like, "Now, let's do one for you," and he'd let the actors do whatever they thought would be the best way to play the scene. That's how I try to approach my writing; I'm going into each scene like a Last-Shot Ron Howard.

Do you base your characters on real people? If so, what characters have you based on anyone real?

I like to think of every element in the book as being a character, from the locations to the "props" ... even Johnny's car, this Rockabilly cherried-out 1963 Lincoln convertible, it's its own character in a way. The places they hit on their road trip, I want you to feel like you're there. And none of them are clean and new, everything has a history to it, I want you to feel like there's something more that's there; something deeper; nothing is truly surface-level; I want the reader to miss the locations as we leave them, just like the characters we've come to care about, and I want the reader to be wishing they could go back. A few of those locations are inspired by real places, and a couple are made up or put somewhere else for the sake of anonymity ... or to avoid lawsuits. Even the source of Johnny's raven quill, which he writes "Nobody Special" with, becomes a sadly meaningful and mysterious character itself, if only for a few sentences, because of how it finds him. But, you're talking about the human characters. Some are based on real people, yes. Some show up unexpectedly without invitation. Laila the Midget, for example, was never part of the original Nobody Special script. It wasn't until I was working on The Death of Johnny Salingerthat she just happened to walk into the room, originally as a guest (I thought). And then while I was working on Cursed, there's a moment when Kim realizes that Laila actually lives at Hell House with Johnny. I found out when Kim found out. Some characters are born on the spot and it's difficult to put a finger on their origin. Maybe I was Laila in a past life ... back when I was working at a burlesque sideshow back in 1932; or maybe I was the freak show barker and she was the love of my life who refused my proposals because I didn't have any knuckle tattoos. I don't know. I'll get back to you on that. Other characters are highly influenced by someone else, but to talk about it feels a little like explaining to the audience how a magic trick is done before you show them the trick ... but I'm game. Johnny's grandfather: I always pictured Tony Curtis playing that role, so I wrote it as though Tony himself was the character I was writing about. Johnny's a patchwork of people, but mostly he's me ... a lot of me, I suppose ... I guess we should ask my wife about that ... me mixed in with Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison, which makes for a dangerous mix, especially inside Johnny's head ... he's almost this exhausted word warrior who's been in battle with himself for so long that it's pushed him to a razor-sharp edge that's too painful to stand on for too long, so he's left to decide if he's got it in him to do another battle, which he knows is coming, or questioning if he should jump, and he's quite aware of the cost he would pay for making either decision ... all the while, he can hear the proverbial marching of the ghost soldiers at night, right? With adding this notion that he's at war with this legion of different versions of himself, I saw a way to make him into an interesting character who you might root for more than pity, and I think he becomes a mirror for a lot of readers. He's got this fascinating and wild life that he doesn't know how to cope with, and he's relying on all the wrong people to help him manage it ... but then there's this terrible moment when he realizes he's the one leading all of them, which is a whole different kind of lost. Rue is a lot like a borderline Ally Sheedy from The Breakfast Club mixed with a bit of Fairuza Balk. Run with that. Kim actually has some personal aspects to her: like Johnny, she's another collage of several people. In the original script she played a completely different role, in fact, she was just a very close friend of Johnny's who was basically his anchor to sanity. Back then, she was very much based on a friend of mine who probably kept me on this earth during a very dark period in my life. But, over time, as the character evolved, Kim took on a bunch of other people, and the back-story between her and Johnny takes a drastic turn. She's got a bit of Mary Stewart Masterson in her along with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and I suppose she's got a bit of Amanda Palmer going for her as well. Dex is another one who evolved ... based on nobody, he was heavily influenced by somebody later. When we were in pre-production on the movie in 2003, we cast Nick Ganas (aka "Skippy Spiral," actor, musician, vaudevillian extraordinaire; you can see Skippy in the trailer we made back in 2003 for Nobody Special). After Skippy was in my head, Dex took on a whole new life ... and then one day, Dex showed up to work and he was his own creation altogether. V.C. is based off of this girl I used to see at these parties back in the '80s, who always seemed to be wearing these "anti-clothes" that were not so much as worn as they were just something she kept falling out of; it was very distracting to hold a conversation with her. And, contrary to what my mother will think (love you, Mom!), Johnny's mother and step father are lightly based on my ex's parents (God help me if they ever see this). And, sure, there's others, but for the sake of friendships and family politics, I'll pretend I forgot a few details.... Then there are some people who show up who simply play themselves ... meaning, I asked permission to use them, and then I tried to put them on the page as closely as I could to how I thought they might act in those settings: Jack Brewer from Saccharine Trust is one, The Adicts play a swanky party that's been crashed by the Hell House kids, and then there's Chuck E. Weiss who we meet up with in New Orleans ... and, yes, our own Ginger Coyote shows up for an appearance. There's an old Indian who enters the story about halfway, during the road trip part of the book, who is a cross between Chief Dan George and my uncle Howard (rest their souls). The New Orleans barkeep at Jack Thoreau's tavern is a splice between Tom Waits and my father ... though there's some question as to whether he might actually be Tom Waits ... I don't know ... read the book and make up your own mind. Ask Chuck.

What is the inspiration behind the title of the book?

It's a line in the book that came from my own personal belief that the American Dream itself isn't cursed, but the road that gets you there definitely is ... I think that's why so few attain it, because of all the shit that happens along the way.

What do you hope your readers gain from all your works so far?

An adventure, while also practicing to look deeper into everything. Sure, some people need to balance out, because they look too deep, but I think that's the exception more than the norm. Maybe gain a little self awareness, I suppose, with a bit of entertainment along the way ... with a twist of lemon. One review of The Death of Johnny Salinger mentioned that I was very self-aware, and I am, to a fault. The internal dialogue never lets up, and it's constantly engaged with what's happening around me and in me, always processing. It's exhausting, and that's a part of Johnny that's undeniably me. But I think a hell of a lot of people lack that, and the world would be a much better and kinder place if everyone remained fully present and engaged with awareness and keeping perspective open on the scheme of things. It takes practice, but I think both books do a pretty good job of giving the reader a taste of what it means to be self-aware, and maybe it might kick start a few people to see things from a more humanistic perspective. But, the other goal, of course, is simply amusement. I want people to have a good and meaningful time, while experiencing it from the safety of their favorite reading spot.

How do you see your writing style as a whole in terms of how it has evolved?

Sharper? I suppose it's that. Unfortunately I have to throw that knife off a cliff. The next book is in a totally different genre, and I'll be saying goodbye to the epistolary approach, which I'll miss. I'm not sure about the evolution part, other than I've learned from my mistakes. Writing diary entries through three different characters, if you want to do it right, is a nightmare. You not only have to stay consistent with unique rhythms, but everyone writes differently, down to techniques and quirks and spelling. Rue spells "through" as thru, seems like a minor detail, but when you add up a bunch of little details like that it makes a huge difference when you're switching between characters throughout the book. Another small detail might be that Rue uses a lot of xxx for ellipses, while Kim loves a good semi-colon to separate thoughts, and Johnny digs a nice, clean dash. Johnny speaks a lot in threes and omits a lot of commas and he also has different approaches in style when writing what he's seeing as opposed to what he's feeling. It becomes a lot to juggle. Ahh! There's a more truthful answer to your question: I've become a really good fucking juggler. The next part of my evolution is this: before I start writing my next book, I first have to unlearn a lot of bad habits that I took on while writing this one! At one point, I'm pretty sure I forgot which direction a proper question mark points.

How have you grown from Nobody Special to Cursed Is The American Dream?

I feel like I've graduated. It's a diploma of sorts. I have a huge part of my life that's come to a close, and now I'm like, "What's next?" What do I do now that I don't have these characters constantly bugging me to add this line or change that scene for them? Especially when it's been going on for half my life. It's like working at a circus and they sent all the clowns and the monkeys home. Suddenly the Big Top is quiet and my family's in the bleachers saying, "Hey, yeah, great show ... remember us?" I suppose the characters of the new book will take care of that hole when I get there. As far as growth between the two "Nobody Special" books, though, growth's a strange concept, because I had to work backwards since Cursed is not only a prequel, but one that backs up in time halfway into the book. Yeah--there's a prequel in the middle of the prequel--holy hell! I suppose I've gained more patience, but I've also learned to set some of my neurotic perfectionism to the curb. That's it exactly. I lost a lot of that while writing the second book, and it's something I don't miss one bit. I would trade "sometimes perfect" for "consistently good" any time ... because always striving for perfect can get in the way of a lot of progress. There's a part of my writing that's very Woody Allen neurotic (sorry, Woody), and it's a drag when he shows up, which used to happen ... all ... the ... time.... Now, it's just a friendly call once in a while.

Is there another project in the works?

There's something that's already completed in the very rough-draft stage, and it has a title. I'm taking the summer off to catch up on some needed time with my family, and then I'll start back up in September after school starts. We're going in another direction altogether with this one. No Johnny, no Kim, no running from fate ... wait, OK, fate may be a major bitch of a nemesis in this one too, even more so. I don't want to divulge too much, except that I'll say it's a psychological thriller along the lines as if David Lynch and Roman Polanski co-directed the original Psycho. Enough said. I'd love to meet up with you at "Tanner's Grove" to talk about it when the time comes.

Is it called Tanner's Grove?

No. But it sounds like a great place to visit.

What do you want to say to Punk Globe Readers out there?

I agree with the good Dr. Thompson, in that if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Learn to live the life you want, and make it count in a loving way. Leave this place better than how it was given to you. I've been shooting for that myself. And, thank you for the ongoing support and encouragement! I feel like I have a family here at Punk Globe. You guys rock, with a capital HELL YES! And thank you to my readers; I truly appreciate anyone who has a kind word to say ... and a copy of my book in their backpack. And to other writers? Whatever you fear, whatever you love most, mix those two together ... those are the things we need to write about. Oh, and "Spend more time on the Ferris Wheel." That's my gig and it's working. Except when it breaks down ... though that always sucks; I'm afraid of heights.

Jack, you are a joy and so is your work, it is compelling, riveting and I can't want to see more! Thank you so much for an insightful interview!