Today's special guest is author
Scott Nagele
The following is my August 18, 2011 Five Star review:
I'm still basking in the afterglow of the best laugh I've had in years.
I'm just going to say it. Temp: Life In The Stagnant Lane by Scott Nagele was the funniest thing I've ever read. I started laughing on the first page and didn't stop until I finished the book. No, wait, that's wrong because I'm still laughing about it. Several times I had to put my Kindle down and reach for a tissue because I was laughing so hard, tears were rolling down my face and I couldn't see to read. If you are looking for laugh out loud, bust your gut funny, this is the book for you.
Another thing I really loved about this book was the way it was written. I felt as though I was sitting in my living room with a good friend and he was telling me funny things that had happened to him. I encourage everyone to download a sample of this book. I promise you that you will not be disappointed. Once you've started reading it, you won't be able to hit that "Buy now with 1-Click" button fast enough.
A little about Scott Nagele:
I started writing my first novel when I was 12. I finished writing my first novel when I was 32. It was a different novel, slightly better than the one began 20 years prior, but still the work of a writer with a long way to go.
The current mile marker.
To date, I have written six novels, a YA book, and many short stories. Some are published; some are not. I have had a handful of pieces accepted by literary journals; some of them have actually made it to publication. But as far as big agents, or big publishers, taking an interest in my work, well, I'm in the same boat as nearly everyone else on this ocean. That is the boat that drifts from rejection to brush-off and back again. Rather than becoming discouraged, I've spent my energies in the past several years investigating avenues for self-publishing (including ebooks). There is no golden ticket here, but there is hope, which is the single morsel a writer needs to carry on.
Scott's Books:
I’m always impressed when I hear a writer talk about the inspiration for their book. Often, their stories are so touching that they make my spine tingle or bring a tear to my eye. That is to say that they would bring a tear to my eye if I weren’t such a manly man who doesn’t allow such things to happen.
Whenever I hear these great stories of inspiration, I think about what it was that inspired me to write Temp: Life in the Stagnant Lane. I have to think about it for a long time on account of no soul-stirring story rushing to mind right away. It’s kind of like asking an eight-year-old what inspired him to stuff a firecracker into a hornets’ nest. It’s complicated. The eight-year-old might not be able to put the web of sound reasoning behind his actions into words, but in his heart, he knows there was a good reason why it had to be done.
Writing Temp was just something that had to be done. Nobody else was doing it, so I stepped up and took the hornets by the horns. That’s just the sort of stand-up guy I am.
Like Gary Gray, the protagonist of Temp, I have worked as a temporary employee, as a retail manager, and as a non-essential employee in the halls of academia. As anyone who has this combination of life experiences will tell you, if you can get them to stop crying long enough to say anything, you can’t take the work personally if you want to hold on to any sense of self-respect.
A lot of crap rolls downhill at temporary workers, people on the front lines of retail sales, and folks at the lower end of higher learning. This crap can easily make you want to cry; if you want to survive, you learn to laugh. So I guess, my inspiration for Temp is all the people I have known who were put in a position to cry, but laughed instead: the survivors.
Gary Gray and his girlfriend, Gwen, are emblematic of the survivors I have known. They choose to laugh when it might be easier to just break down and cry. You can beat them down, but you can’t make them quit, and sometimes you can’t even convince them that they are actually fired. Such people deserve to have their stories told.
There are a handful of nasty characters in Temp. These are the ones rolling the crap down the hill. People sometimes suspect that they know who my inspiration for one or more of these characters is, but in truth, they are composites of different people I have run into, and afoul of, in my various lives.
I like to think that the nasty folks in Temp are kind of fun and interesting. None of the crap rollers I have known in real life are either of these. This alone should be proof that my characters are not based on any individual from real life. The real, live crap rollers might be fun to impersonate for a couple minutes at the company Christmas party, but after two minutes of pretending to be them, you just want to take a scalding hot shower and go cry yourself to sleep somewhere. Inspirationally speaking, they are just the many corpses from which one builds his fictional Frankenstein, in hopes that Frankenstein will be much more interesting than the sum of his parts.
So there, in a cracked nutshell, is the story of the inspiration behind the writing of Temp. To sum up, well, see, I kind of had this firecracker, and there was this hornets’ nest, and, well, it’s complicated.
Doesn’t it just bring a tear to your eye?