Joe Nelms's Blog

"In his riveting, searing debut, Joe Nelms forces his main character, Christian Franco, through a self-imposed, bone-crunching wringer that is painful to watch. And yet there is an ineluctability to the process which makes it impossible for us to stop watching; we feel compelled to witness a man break himself down because we understand it is his only hope of redemption, as tenuous as that may be. Perhaps "The Last Time I Died" is most disturbing when we understand that Franco's is the hand turning the crank of his own destruction; perhaps it is most disturbing when we realize that his story is but a laser-focused rendition of the small ways we each punish ourselves for our perceived misdeeds in the hope of some reconciliation. Perhaps this book is most disturbing when we see that Franco is just like us, as we are just like him. Every person owes it to himself to read this powerful, punishing, and, amazingly enough, hopeful novel."

- Garth Stein, NY Times Bestselling Author of
The Art Of Racing In The Rain


So, yes. This feels amazing. Love this guy.

"THE LAST TIME I DIED is a maelstrom of brilliant prose—dark, delectable, devastating, and utterly, utterly compelling. If this is Joe Nelms’ debut, watch out, world. Chuck Palahniuk fans will love this book."

- Sara Gruen,
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Water For Elephants

Just to reiterate, Chuck Palahniuk fans will love this book.

That's what you call a dream come true.

How great is this...?!!!

"Joe Nelms' masterful debut is a heat seeking missile headed straight for your gut, and, be warned, it does not miss its mark. THE LAST TIME I DIED asks one simple question: how far would you go to recover your lost childhood, to get back to that state of grace before what happened happened, before you set out to lay waste to your own life and the lives around you, of those you love the most? The harrowing answer is the narrative of this wonderfully written book --- to the doors of death and beyond, until there's nothing left to lose and only one thing to gain. The White. Like a junkie, once you pick up this book, you do not put it down until all the dope is gone."

-Robert Goolrick, #1 NY Times bestselling author of
A Reliable Wife and Heading Out To Wonderful

"From page one this novel thrust you into the fraught mind of a man whose life was ruined before it even began, a nobody trapped inside his own lethal obsessions, and the effect is so gripping, so tragic and chilling, that you wouldn't escape even if you could. With stark searing prose and keen insights, Joe Nelms will make you feel what it's like to dive headfirst into disintegration just to discover who you truly are and finally get some peace. The story will tattoo itself to your psyche. You'll be glad and grateful."

- Jeff Backhaus, author of THE RENTAL SISTER

I once heard a comedian say “If you’re friends aren’t scared, you’re doing it wrong.” I think it was Chris Rock. Or Dave Attell. Or Dave Attell talking about Chris Rock. Or somebody else. The point is there are more good stories and rich characters in your everyday life than you can write in a lifetime. Watch. Listen. Look around. Talk to strangers. Everyone’s got a story.

Everyone.

Of course, as a writer, I must preface this advice by telling you that most of what I write is original, cut from whole cloth. Made by my brain because I'm such a proud genius.

But the truth is I watch and I listen. A lot.

Anyone who knows me has heard me respond to a funny story or clever joke with the phrase “Ooh, mine now.” I would never use what someone says word for word or even in a form they would recognize, but I do take what they unwittingly offer that fits my agenda and weave it into stories and characters.

I steal.

Tell me a secret, have a conversation, confess a quirk, or just let me watch you for a little while. I’ll find something. A few years ago, I met a guy at my daughter’s ballet class who mentioned he was employed as a “security observation technician” – he sat in a room in a sub-basement of a law firm remotely sorting through employee (lawyers, partners, receptionists, paralegals, everyone) emails, listening to their voicemails, and keeping track of when they came and went. He knew everything. Affairs, porn, corporate espionage, you name it. Fascinating, right?

It’s mine now.

Ballet Dad got sucked in, reshaped, renamed, rewritten and regurgitated as a supporting character in a novel I was writing at the time. I already had the character partially formed in my mind. I knew I wanted him in some sort of cool job where he worked behind the scenes. I knew his personality, what he looked like and what his name was. But I didn’t know what he did for living. And then I went to ballet class. Bingo.

There’s a whole world of fascinating people and behaviors and motivations and jobs and lifestyles out there. Go get them. They can only make the story you’re telling richer. Write them down before you even know what you’re going to use them for. Trust me, you’ll use them.

And you won't be alone. One of my favorite authors lifted a line that went on to live forever from his half-lucid wife as she gave birth: I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world. A beautiful little fool. Those probably weren't the exact words that came out of Zelda Fitzgerald's mouth, but had Scott not snatched them out of the air and reworked them to suit his purposes, they would have been lost. Gone, gone, gone. But he was notorious for that kind of thing. Plundering personal relationships, looting dialogue from trusting friends, stealing, stealing, stealing. That's what he did. Thank god.

Find the Zelda's in your everyday life. They’re there and, if you’re open to it, there’s plenty of raw material just waiting for you.

Picasso once said “The good ones borrow, the great ones steal.” I think that’s remarkably appropriate for this discussion on how to use your friends and loved ones without credit. Probably not how he intended it to be used, but then again, that’s kind of my point.

It’s mine now.

(Or “Thank God my early bosses were nice enough to beat the shit out of me.”)

You know the movie scene(s) where the eager young rookie cop shows up at the station and gets assigned to work with the salty old veteran who tells him Everything you learned at the Academy is bullshit. You’re about to learn what a real cop does.

That was kind of how my career in advertising started.

Only no one actually told me my degree was bullshit. They just dumped a pile of fifteen assignments on my desk and said they’d see me in an hour. An hour! In college, I had three months to do twelve ads.

My job was to write. To start, I needed five to ten options for each headline. Good ones. And as a newly welcomed member of the real world, I knew that if I didn’t write, I would have been fired. And if I got fired, there was every chance I'd have to leave New York. And if I left New York, I didn't know if I'd ever get back.

So I wrote.

I wrote and wrote and wrote those headlines. Some sold. Some didn’t. And then I wrote and wrote some more. After a while I got good enough that someone started letting me write scripts for radio commercials.

So I wrote.

I don’t know the exact number, but I’d bet David Lubar’s trophy case that I wrote over a thousand radio spots in a few years time. Good ones.

Then someone let me write some television commercials. The pattern continued and, soon enough, I was running my own group and working with big directors and making good money.

But here’s what happened in the mean time.

My boss threw chairs at me. My boss told me I was worthless. My boss stole my ideas. My boss threatened to send my scripts back to my old English Lit teacher to show her what a horrible writer I was (those same scripts eventually sold to my client and got produced). All different bosses, same mentoring style.

The point is I took a beating.

When the words weren’t what my boss expected. When someone had pitched the same idea an hour earlier. When my boss was aggravated he hadn’t thought of the idea himself. When she was in a mood. Whatever. I took a beating.

For years, no matter how good I thought my scripts and headlines were, no matter how delightful my mother told me they were, no matter how impressed my girlfriend was with them, I got the bejeezus kicked out of me by bosses who would often offer no more advice than Go back. Do it again. But better this time.

So I wrote.

I wrote good commercials and print ads and tag lines and whatever else was needed and a lot of it sold to clients and that made me valuable enough to hold on to and beat some more.

The beauty of this system is that you very quickly come to the realization that if you really, really have to, you can write. If you’re looking at being thrown out of the agency because you don’t nail that Campbell’s soup commercial that’s due in seventeen minutes, you nail it. You write the script. You write the headline. You write the tagline. And then you write a few extras on the way to your boss’s office.

Goodfellas came out the year I graduated. Not sure if my old bosses were big fans of the film, but looking back, I can see where they might have gotten some inspiration. Me = Billy Batts. My boss = De Niro and Pesci tag teaming me.

Only my career didn’t get buried in an unmarked grave upstate. I lived. Because I wrote.

I’m not here to tell you what an amazing copywriter I was. I wasn’t. But I did discover a little secret that changed everything – Shut up and write.

Eventually, I left advertising to write movies and television shows and novels. And the legacy of my ad career is this: Zero writer’s block.

When I work on a screenplay, there is no such thing as I’m not feeling it. When I write a novel, there is no excuse good enough for me to not put my five hundred to twenty-five hundred words on paper every single day. No one is beating me up anymore, but the scar tissue that remains is maybe the most valuable thing I own.

Find your own Pescis. Be your own De Niro. Kick the shit out of yourself everyday until you can write on command.

I promise you if I can do it, you can.