My Books I Sexy Brief, Part One, "Jibba And Jibba"

I wrote the first draft of my first attempt at a novel when I was 19 years old, on winter break from my freshman year at Ohio University. Like the Jibba narrator in the story, I was working as a temp: cold-calling various corporations on behalf of some telecommunications company, receiving extremely brief, rude, impatient responses to the questions that I myself loathed asking. Then one day I discovered a phone number that, when dialed, would just ring forever, and because I felt a book leaping out of me, I proceeded to dial that number every time the writing urge came on, and I would pin the phone to my ear with my shoulder while I scribbled Jibba’s story on a yellow legal pad the company had provided for us to make notes on. I hand-wrote page after page, and when I got home at night I would transcribe the pages into a Word document, which I would send to my friend Pat, who seemed to be enjoying the story. Then the job ended, and also the winter break, and I sat down before heading back to college and furiously typed out the rest of the story until it reached its (open-ended) conclusion. I was happy with it, and my friend Pat also seemed to like it. But I never sent it anywhere besides to Pat and a few other friends: It was my first ever attempt at a novel, and it was only like 30,000 words, and I am an extremely diffident person. But following the completion of that first Jibba story, a long-term plan started to develop: “I have more or less written a book, and now I am challenging myself to write another, better, fuller book. After I have proven I can do that, I will write a third book, which I will submit to be published.” 

There is more to come regarding my novel Jibba And Jibba, but in the story of these stories, the Jibba plot-line falls away for a while, because besides the columns I wrote for the student-run paper at Ohio University (I can’t link you to them because evidently the journalism and IT programs at OU have completely fallen apart, as the archives of my columns from the early 2000s don’t exist anymore), I started turning my novel-oriented attention toward the second book, toward a desire to create a classic piece of literature, after having so thoroughly delved into Palahniukian modern silly darkness with the story I’d just completed.

But I wouldn’t finish that second book until after I graduated from college and moved to Los Angeles.