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The Man Who Wouldn’t Die
In 2015, frustrated by the wall of gatekeepers that makes it so hard to get a literary agent, I went ahead and self-published a book on my prison experience, Ink from the Pen. After the thundering reception of a few score Facebook friends, it basically went the route of most memoirs, self-published or not. A few copies sold a month, despite excellent reviews on Amazon by those aforementioned Facebook friends.
I’d known all along that I had to leverage the story that wasn’t in the book — everything that I did to get to prison in the first place. It’s frankly so outrageous and hard-to-believe that I would have almost certainly been accused of writing A Million Little Pieces on steroids. More than that, I found that time incredibly painful to revisit — much harder than writing about prison, actually. But I finally buckled down and wrote: Breaking Brokebad: A True Gay Crime Story I Wouldn’t Believe if I Hadn’t Lived It .
It got a whole 8 claps. Woo-hoo!
But I had something I could tweet to crime reporters and podcasts to see if they would find it intriguing enough to do a much higher profile story on. I got very, very lucky. Nathaniel Penn, of GQ Magazine, responded immediately. He pitched the story to higher ups, and they approved. He flew down to L.A. to interview me within a month.
