GENERATION ZERO
In the middle of two musicals, a pandemic, poverty and failing kidneys, Sean reverts to what he should have been doing all along: writing his life down. In the odd moments he had between other responsibilities, he started writing on a variety of fronts, and now a small spate of eBooks should be the result. Two in particular will be interesting to launch on iBooks and Google Play. The first is “Generation Zero,” written when Sean was 26 and a “mindfuck” to edit now a quarter of a century later, says Sean. The second is “Anxious Moments,” subtitled “a writer lost in a world of images,” which nicely sums up its content.
GENERATION ZERO
Generation Zero
A mysterious talent comes out of the blue into the life of a Manhattan literary agent, and strange things begin to happen as love and murder interrupt a literary life. Set in the Galapagos, Goa, Andalucia, the Amazon, the tin mines of Bolivia, Sanibel Island, the Serengeti and the Maldives, “Generation Zero” is a seminal example of the impotent rage felt by the children of ecocide. The monster book of 500+ pages was written by Sean in a three-month burst beteen journalism trips to Africa and South America. Paul Marshall’s right hand mand Alan Bomser became the novel’s literary agent, but Sean’s colon cancer changed plans, and the book remained a single binder of Xeroxed pages until Covid came along. And a new health issue.
In July 2020, as the world turned upside down with a lethal virus straight out of the movies, Sean got insurance coverage when Maryland expanded medicaid in response to the pandemic. His first visit to a doctor for a check up revealed dead kidneys. Straight to dialysis was the diagnosis. Except Sean made some immediate changes to diet and underwent a nice puncture to his bladder to allow urine to flow more freely. The kidneys had basically drowned: hydrophrenology. Sean went onto the kidney transplant list, but for more than a year has managed to avoid going onto dialysis. His condition is in the “severe” category with a GFR of 19, and dialysis starts a GFR of 15. In uly 2020, his GFR was 14. It has been in the 18-20 range, with a peak of 23 and a low of 16 since then. Everyone is cautiously pleased but the price has been six UTIs, with the attendant treatments of antibiotics, oral and intravenous. Needless to say, a side effect of all this has been existential anxiety. Perfect for a writer
ANXIOUS MOMENTS
Existential angst . . . perfect for a writer
Four years ago Sean’s creative partner Sandra Bishop was struck by a series of strokes to her spinal column. She was plunged into unimaginaable pain, and she and Sean created a suicide pact that waned or waxed according to her pain levels, which for two years was usually around 7 out of 10 and never below 4 out of 10. Two years before those strokes, a huge influence on both their lives, the photojournalist Ingo Juliusson, died in Reykjavik of a rare blood cancer at age 43. These two people and their dreams and dooms formed the structure of this eBook by Sean, filled with photo-essays in 170+ pages of vivid originality. The book has one video link to complete, and will then be loaded up as a ePub file to iBooks, where it will be available free of charge to readers. A link will be placed here when the book is “live.”
These two books, one in paper, and one as eBook, join a list of other completed books that have simply not been posted to the public. For what reasons, Sean cannot say. “I have no idea why there is this compulsion to create without sharing,” he says. “It’s as if I don’t want to actually let th elittle kids out of the house, which is a sentimental infantilism no writer can afford.”
There is a series of romances about his work with the Internet Pin-up Kyla Cole, a series of eBooks that now number 13. These have been posted to some degree on Atavist (now discontinued) and BeHance, the creative portfolio site for Adobe professionals. There is a huge journal of his trips to India in 1984 and 2000, an ePortrait of the Viking actress/model Maya Nelson Wolfsdottir, an account of his 22 trips to the Arctic to shoot the aurora borealis from 2002 to 2016, and a long portrait of the designer Daniel Donnelly, who is also the subject in Sean’s movie “Material Man.”
Sean’s book about his childhood and his father, “Skipper,” is available in paper from Blurb, and as audio on this website. A fantasy story about his life atop Laurel Canyon and two ill-fated trips to Beirut is also on Blurb as a photo book called “God Died in Hiroshima.”
