NEWS RELEASE
New ebook charts beleaguered Fourth Estate newshound through tale of excess and search for redemption
LOS ANGELES—C2H6O: The Annihilation of the Blossoms is a just-released novella by Southern California writer D. E. Clayton.
This sobering, sometimes darkly comic and humorous story captures three days and nights in the life of Jack Markgraf, a middle-aged newspaper reporter who has seen too much blood, too much death, too much of the mundane—and not enough alcohol. Or so he thinks. An experienced and opinionated journeyman journalist, Jack obsesses as much over the painstaking creation of a fine martini—and the nightly rearrangements of his oversized Beatles wall posters—as he does about perfection on the job and the need to tell “good stories.”
He’s a martini man first and foremost, but he loves it all—Chilean cabernets; Hungarian reds; tequila and mescal; tall, golden lagers; the sweet, orange-flavored liqueur. It’s all okay with him—until finally it isn’t.
Jack stumbles through boozy nights, intense days at the newspaper, and the nuanced spirit paths that somehow manage to discover him, while snapshot-like memories of his past flash before him. Ultimately he comes to a sloppy reckoning with his drinking fixations, but is it soon enough? Or too little, too late?
This book is a good read for anybody involved with, or interested in, the world of newspaper journalism and the drinking life that often complements the sometimes grim and onerous grind of daily news gathering. The pace is brisk. Clayton writes from the perspective of one who has suffered the romantic allure of the drinking-and-writing life, and Jack Markgraf’s quest for sobriety, recovery, and personal transformation will especially resonate with those readers who have traveled the same or similar paths.
(The book is set in the early 1990s, a dozen years after the 1980 death of John Lennon. Jack, in his early 40s and a child of the 1950s, is stuck, a bit, in the Sixties.)
C2H6O: The Annihilation of the Blossoms is published by O’Baoighill Publishers and has been designed by 52 Novels (www.52novels.com) for reading in ebook format. Length: 21,000 words, approximately.
Inquiries: Elka Andersdottir (obpub@earthlink.net).
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“A hero’s journey at the crossroads of fiction, fantasy, and blurred memoir.”
— D.E.C., Riverside, California
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Author Biography
D. E. Clayton (a pseudonym) has worked in magazine, newspaper, and book publishing for more than 30 years as a writer and editor. Originally from Northern California’s Bay Area, he attended public schools in Southern California and was an honors student and all-league basketball player in high school. After dropping out of a leading research university, Clayton later earned degrees elsewhere in journalism and law. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for 19 years in Southern California’s Inland Empire region; prior to that he briefly wrote for and edited a music and entertainment industry trade journal based in Hollywood. Most recently he has worked as a technical writer and book editor in the computer software industry. Before his career in print and digital publishing, Clayton labored as a movie theater usher, bus driver, shower stall fabricator, print shop bundler, hardware salesman, dishwasher, housepainter, janitor, warehouseman for a greeting card company, pizza cook, and bartender.
