The Bugs

Who are your favorite authors?

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My favorite dead author is Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite living authors are Charles Yu and George Saunders. I appreciate the absurdity, humor, and humanity in all of their writing.

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Why do you want to be a writer?

 

The main reason is because I love fiction’s potential. It’s only constrained by the limit of my imagination. The other main reason is because if I’m able to pull this off—that is, be a Writer—then I won’t have to work a traditional 9-5, which I don't really enjoy.

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How did you approach writing parts of The Bugs from the POV of a Bee?

 

Fortunately, I did not bind myself by any scientific consensus regarding Bees and their nature. Some stuff I pulled form how we’ve observed bees, but as far as I know, there is no peer reviewed paper that says Queen Bees can communicate with any other Queen Bee across the planet in the 6th dimension.  So, imagining things like this, I acted somewhat freely with the Bee’s POV.

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What inspired you to write this book?

 

The idea for The Bugs was in my head for almost a decade. The seed of the idea was planted back in college. I was, well, I was really high working on a creative project that I no longer remember. A fly was on my desk just sitting there, seemingly staring at me. I shooed it away and it flew back to the same spot and it kept (in my mind) staring at me. My stoney baloney brain imagined the fly was an alien CCTV device and that thought quickly spiraled into all flies are alien CCTV, here to monitor humanity. 

 

That silly idea about flies never left my head. Then, when I was caretaking an off-the-grid lodge in western Maine, the idea blossomed into a story that included bees, spiders, mosquitoes, and all of the other bugs out there.

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What was your publishing journey? What did you do before writing?

 

Until I found writing, there was never any job I wanted to do forever. My life has taken a circuitous route to this point.

 

After college, I opened and ran my own food truck. After the food truck, I was the caretaker of an eco-lodge in the woods of western Maine. There, I was responsible for managing a crew that would cook breakfast lunch and dinner—from scratch—for cross country skiers and mountain bikers going hut to hut. After that, I sold a bunch of solar panels; then I was the VP of marketing for an indoor vertical farming company; I worked for a digital marketing agency after the indoor farm; and then I started a business with my wife, Hanson’s Anatomy, which is kind of a cool story.

 

I first imagined my future as a writer about the time I was caretaking the eco-lodge in Maine.

 

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What’s the cool story behind Hanson’s Anatomy?

 

My wife is an amazing human being. To study in medical school, she illustrated her notes. The study guides she created were beautifully detailed and colorful. As one does, she started sharing some of her notes on Instagram and quickly gained a couple thousand followers. With my background in digital marketing, I built a website and ran some social media ads. Her following grew a lot and we started selling a surprising amount of study guides online. Enough that the income was far outpacing my marketing agency corporate salary. So, since Hanson’s Anatomy required less time and made more money, in May of 2020 (read: right at the beginning of covid), I quit my comfy work-from-home job to run an online business. I figured it would allow me more time to write, which it did.