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My double novel featuring Bleach and Blackout, explores a group of people living in the moment, yet not necessarily aware they are in the moment, but rather wasting time to get to the next point in their lives.  Is it boredom, or more a feel of today’s generation and lack of cause, or motivation to find a cause?  Bleach is more the type of in your face read that forces you to either accept or not accept the lifestyle being led, there really no room for the in between.  Blackout details more of these same characters pulling from their past and being forced to use instinct, rather than wait for life.  It’s a story about living.

Bleach opens during the last 60 seconds of 2003 in a bathroom where a girl lay dying and a jaded 30-year-old named Jeremy, who navigates the reader through the endless repulsiveness of the world, watches. Before diving into an explanation of what the is going on, Jeremy doubles back eight days where you find him in the office ready to embark on a vacation back home to the Midwest.  The question is whether Jeremy makes it back to New York.

The entire story builds up to the climax of the “The Party” on New Year’s Eve where all the men are dressed as prostitutes, all the women look like pimps and decadence and debauchery dictate the rules. Everything seems to be spiraling out of control, and Jeremy realizes there are no guarantees for him or anyone else.

Blackout picks up two years after Bleach in Las Vegas where Stoner and friends are celebrating his bachelor party complete with strippers and crack cocaine.  The ride home is blurry and the next morning in Los Angeles brings a surprise when Stoner’s friends, Chip and Jeremy, wake to find police officers and a dead body they are allegedly responsible for, but neither can recall.

In Bleach and Blackout, the distressing feeling isn’t in the situations, but rather the soulless characters.  Bleach is a very real, in that pretty much any one of the scenes could happen, the horror is that they all happen.  Jeremy heads home for the holidays to find his friends are all still the same and quickly he falls back into the routine of drinking and BYOH (bring your own heroin) parties.  Reliving past New Year’s Eve parties with conference calls back to the office as the story leads up to the mother of all cross-dressing parties.  Blackout, the sequel, starts off in Las Vegas at break neck speed, then moves to Los Angeles the next morning where the main character wakes with the worst hangover, a gun stuck in his mouth.  Again, individually there is nothing unbelievable, but think about that one hangover you had back in college and take a deep breath, because you only woke up with a headache.