Are you in your twenties and wondering what’s up with your parents? My first book might offer a bit of insight.
”A dark comedy about the psychological damage inflicted on American workers during the difficult economic and political climate in the new millennium.”
A recent Twitter conversation, copied below, inspired this blog post. Re-reading my response to bro-patriarch prompted me to think,“Whoa…my dude, there it is: Chris Maley’s audience, also why he writes for them, succinctly stated.”
Without meaning to, I came up with a brand positioning statement for my fiction. As the insight percolated inside my skull, it gave me the idea to pitch my first book, Fearkiller (Volume 1), to the segment of adult readers who were children during the years it takes place.
My dark comedy about living in fear to stay employed is set in the first decade of this millennium, a time when the practice of layoffs got hooked on steroids. What used to be an occasional, unfortunate aspect of doing business became a control mechanism to keep the masses in line while simultaneously lining shareholders’ pockets.
2000–2010 normalized layoffs. If you’re in your twenties, your folks grew up in a different world than you due to income inequality. While your folks’ folks faced the possibility of losing their jobs, employers weren’t as quick to reduce headcount in the 1970s and ’80s. Back then, shareholders didn’t get excited about goosing the stock price via company-wide firings like they do today.
Whatever mutated twenty years ago, it’s becoming uglier. This blog post is about events that I could not have imagined when I was writing the first draft. Back in 2011 and 2012, no way I could have fathomed that, in 2024, companies would use AI to write fake job postings in order to terrify current employees. At the same time, though — DAMN, this dishonest energy screams disciplinary fish food. (Inside joke, sorry.) The character at the beginning who gets beaten to death with a hammer, he’d be all about using AI to scare the minions.
Folks older than you young whippersnappers have told me that Fearkiller carried them back to 2000 to 2010. My emotional-roller-coaster of a tale got them to reflect on those years.
I set out to write a dark comedy. Unwittingly, I ended up producing a work of historical fiction as well.
And maybe my dark comedy/historical fiction book will be your next read. It’s dark in a lot of places, but it might help you know your folks a little better, which would make it some kind of self-help book, in a random, roundabout, kinda-sorta-but-not-really way. Let my unreliable narrator named Job Creator tell you about 2000 to 2010, a time that changed him. And all of us.
#authors #resist
Also posted on my site. Earlier posts:
• A gigantic thank you, from me to Rush Limbaugh.
• World events since I released my first book.
• Open letter to a picture of myself back in cubicle life, 2003-ish.
