A Globe-Hopping Memoir of Disaster and Discovery is a travel memoir about my adventures as a soul-searching workaholic who set a goal to experience all seven continents in seven years as a true anthropologist, not just a travel-merit badge winner. Through those years I stumbled into and out of relationships, contracted pulmonary edema in Peru, and summited Shackleton’s peak on South Georgia Island. I learned why the Irish value a good craic while Scandinavians cherish lagom, witnessed the difficult truths of life in a Moroccan orphanage, and ultimately met my wife. Along the way I had plenty of time to contemplate the different ways people pursue happiness– or, sometimes the reasons they don’t. While I didn’t end up chucking my day job to be a forklift driver on the White Continent, my journeys did result in me leaving my career, selling my house, and living the life less traveled with my wife and son.
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Your thoughts are not your own… After botching the arrest of the governor’s son, Commander Jake Travissi is banned from law enforcement. The workaholic LAPD cop spirals into depression… until he is given a rare second chance. The price? Volunteer for Chip implantation and join Homeland Security’s experimental Anti-Terrorist Unit. The Personal Chip or P-Chip allows the subject to take drugs with no ill effects or call a friend while surfing the web without a phone or computer. It’s a smart phone scaled down to the size of a pin-head and grafted into your brain.
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The enemy lies within… A nano-virus pandemic grips the world in hysterical fear. The only cure is the implantation of a Personal Chip into the brain. Jake Travissi returns to civilization to discover his former LAPD colleague Joaquin Parks is now the head of a church accused of nuclear terrorist acts around the world and Jake is asked to assassinate him. Meanwhile, the dawn of Artificial Intelligence and the promise of immortality could be just around the corner…   With his fiancée Tomoko Sakai and his faithful Husky Lakshmi, Jake is thrown into the center of a conspiracy engineered by an international group of powerful men and women who call themselves The Consortium. The Consortium’s goal is to end Free Will and establish absolute control over the world.
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The child of darkness is light… Through the viral form of the Chip, The Consortium has solidified their rein over the Earth. Freedom’s last hope lies with the free colonies on the moon, Artificial Intelligence, and the will power of Jake Travissi. But another AI is born from the minds who would control us, and he has no interest in the weakness of flesh. Having lost everything, Jake joins the resistance in the ultimate battle to bring back free will. From tank battles in Riyadh to sabotaging the International Space Agency’s station in orbit around the Earth, Jake is sucked into a maelstrom of conflict, which lands him on the moon to face the solar system’s most vicious foe, an AI named Constantine who feels humanity’s exit from the universe if long overdue.
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Islanders is a memoir about my battle with suicidal depression as I attempted to emulate Henry James Thoreau while writing my first novel. In 1996, I was a struggling screenwriter in Los Angeles, working a day job at Paramount while waiting for my big break and growing increasingly depressed by the trajectory of my life. After a porn company refashioned my artful horror-comedy screenplay into a straight-to-video disaster―the greatest success I’d yet achieved as a writer―I escaped to Beaver Island, in the middle of Lake Michigan, thinking I could hoist myself out of depression by writing the great American novel. As fate would have it, my Thoreauvian idyll ended with me staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, with my own thumb on the trigger.
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If a bulletproof action hero were to exist in the real world, would he throw a fit about not fitting in? If a born loser who couldn’t break into Hollywood found a new sense of purpose by joining a terrorist group, would he still be a wannabe filmmaker? Now suppose L.A.’s Chief of Police was suffering from a brain tumor during a surprise attack and the FBI agent on the scene practiced medieval medicine. What would happen if you placed all these characters in a hostage situation at a major film studio and tossed in some A-list movie stars as captives?
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