I was facing a dilemma. On one hand, if you can't get in with a publishing company that has their own marketing budget or connections, then you have no one to help you spread the word. On the other hand, I could hand over what I'd written to one of the Twelve Step programs - AA, Alanon, CoDA, NA, OA, GA, etc. There were two problems with this:

First, if I did this they might publish it as "program approved literature", but they might not, or they might make complete and drastic changes to it. I've written this book the way I wrote it for multiple reasons, but the main reason is to make it as accessible to every single person as I can. Allowing other people to own and change what I wrote could destroy the value in the effort I've made to make this material as accessible as possible. Second, once a program publishes something as "program approved literature" it is, by default, not approved literature for any of the other twelve step programs, and I believe the material in my book is applicable to all programs, so I could be severely limiting the potential benefits people could have if they find my book and write it off because it "belongs" to one program or another that they don't identify with.

For better or worse, I've decided to retain ownership of what I've written. I wrote it the way I did for multiple reasons, and I can only hope that I can share this information with as many people who need to see it as I can.

Sharing knowledge by writing a book is a "force multiplier". It took me over a decade to learn what I've written, but can learn it in a matter of hours. Also, I only had to write it once, and now it can help a hundred, or a thousand people. I hope the things I'm sharing here can help change the world, maybe even after I'm gone.

Fans? What fans? If you're a fan, please find me on social media and let me know. Even people with a million books sold sometimes go to events and have 10 people show up. You'd be shocked how very, very few people who consume media ever let the creator know. I'm sharing what I've learned because I hope it can help people. I'd like to know if it does.

I don't consider myself a fan of horror, but right now I'm cohosting a podcast called Horror Makes Us Happy. We (lightly) psychologically profile creators in the horror biz to see if we can dig up the deeper reasons people love horror. You can find us at HorrorMakesUsHappy.com

I've moved around a lot. I've lived in Milwaukee, Chicago, Philadelphia, Columbus, and multiple places in New Jersey and Florida. I've always loved accents, slang, regional dialects, and I've always been aware that reading is often like hearing someone speak in your mind. I write like I speak, but my editing process is the tricky part.

I write in a flow-of-consciousness pattern, which often means I write the same thing multiple times until I find the exact way I want to say it. Then I have to go back and edit out a lot of that duplication, but I also have to edit my final draft into something that reads clearly and easily. So in the end my text may not be exactly as I'd speak, but is maybe, hopefully, a more advanced version of myself. It's a version of me that's had the time to think, and perfect what I want to say and how I'm saying it. That rarely happens in real life.