What is the name of the book and when was it published?
99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses has been available since November 2013 from CreateSpace. After various tweaks to the text, I declared its official publication date as March 1, 2014. Really, you could pick any date between November 2013 and March 2014.
What’s the book’s first line?
Jack wants me to wire an illegal rental he’s building behind his house in Mountain View. He’s a Lockheed space engineer on medical disability. I get the sense that the disability is in the psychological realm. Like, he’s half crazy. It’s in the eyes.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
Short Pitch: Joe repairs homes. With each job, he enters somebody’s private world. Revealing a life. Or changing it. Here are 99 slices of adventure in the construction zone.
Longer Pitch: For forty years Joe Cottonwood has crawled under houses and crept through attics to make a living. With each job in home repair, he enters somebody’s private world. Revealing a life. Or changing it. Joe has made every mistake and met every kind of homeowner—the good, the bad, the profoundly weird. For anyone who has ever built (or failed to build) a project from a simple bookshelf to an entire house, here are 99 lessons learned, human encounters, slices of life in the construction zone.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
I’ve been keeping a journal since forever. On New Year’s Eve in 2010, I decided on an impulse to start blogging about repairs I’ve done and clients I’ve met, using my journal to remember my adventures as a carpenter, plumber, electrician. And it just exploded out of me. I loved writing about the humane side of construction — not the how-to but the who are — the people, the moral boundaries, the personal tests that construction puts you up against. For six months I wrote a new story every day. Then I took a breath and slowed down. The blog was called 365 Jobs, and I quit after about 400 entries over two years time. It served as a rough draft for this book.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
It’s a memoir, so the main character is me. I’ve published nine novels over four decades but never hit the big time, so construction has been the day job. I’ve never asked for a grant or a fellowship to write — I’m kind of an independent cuss — and the academic life would give me hives and screaming fits, so I chose working with my hands, my body. Keeping it real.
Who do I remind you of? I feel some kinship with Studs Terkel. If I were to choose an actor to portray me in the movie of my life, I’d go for Wilford Brimley. Not Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
Everybody has at least tried to build something, so everybody can relate. One of my Amazon reviewers said, “Even my husband read it and loved it and he is not a ‘reader’.” And it’s humane. As another reviewer said, “I found that reading a few pages before turning out the light made me feel like I was falling asleep in a decent and caring world.”