That’s me, your author. I was born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I enjoyed an idyllic semi-suburban childhood and graduated from the local public schools. I earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Rutgers, then picked up a master’s in journalism from the University of Illinois.
In my twenties I held a number of typical demoralizing jobs for an idealistic liberal arts graduate, including assistant editor of Rubber Age and managing editor of Container News. At Time-Life Books I was assigned to write about plumbing fixtures. After 18 months of gainful unemployment (during which I burrowed into dozens of great books and saw my first essays published), I survived seven years as chief copywriter at a Long Island publishing company where the annual turnover rate sometimes topped 100 percent.
In 1985 I moved from New York to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Why? I was finally offered a “grown-up” salary as advertising copy chief at Day-Timers, the original producer of old-fashioned personal organizers. (People still wrote on paper then.) My work there won six advertising industry awards, none of which dampened my cheerfully morose view of the business world. In the evenings, after everyone but the night watchman had left for the day, I crafted over 900 “disgruntled definitions” for The Cynic’s Dictionary (Morrow, 1994) on my office computer.
After 14 years at Day-Timers, I called it quits and leaped into the perilous world of freelance writing and consulting. I wrote around 120 darkly humorous essays, now collected in three e-books: Extremely Dark Chocolates, Lifestyles of the Doomed, and The World Is My Obstacle Course. As Richard Bayan (my “serious” professional alter ego), I’m the author of the classic advertising thesaurus Words That Sell and its spawn, More Words That Sell, both published by McGraw-Hill.
In 2007, in a valiant (but doomed) attempt to bridge the widening gap between liberals and conservatives in America, I created The New Moderate, a blog for embattled centrists. I finally gave up after 15 years.
I married late and divorced early, but not before collaborating on my masterpiece — a multi-talented son named Guy. I’ve relished my years as a Dad.
Since 2001 I’ve been living in a converted Victorian livery stable in a tree-shaded corner of Philadelphia, lately joined by my lady friend Ronda and her affectionate feline. (My own cat hasn’t warmed up to her furry housemate yet.)
Wish me luck, and buy my books!
The Life of Jeremy Dodo 