Jonathan Gabel pictured with wife Miranda
Can you give a brief description of what Private Destiny is about and what inspired you to write it?
Private Destiny is centered on the character of Rick Thompson, an ex-junkie investigative journalist who is struggling to find work and is tempted day in and day out to fall back into heroin addiction despite all the junkies around him falling prey to The Sickness. That is until the his ex shows back up to his apartment with something that gives him a bigger story than he could have ever wanted.
It’s a first person view of a man who has devolved to cynicism after realizing he has been fed lies his entire life, and while struggling to find meaning he clings to anything that might push his life forward.
The entire book is about how we embrace the delusion and comfort of fantasy in order to feel in control of, or even just ok with, our own lives and the world around us, and how over time if these fantasies are embraced they can rot into conspiracy and paranoia.
It’s a meditation on storytelling itself, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, from small lies about our adventures to big budget motion pictures and lifestyle fantasies, and how they shape our relationship with the truth of reality we can sit in, but still be blind to, daily.
It’s also an honest look into a man broken by this system, and a call for radical empathy for such characters. A call for a realization that we could all be the worst of us if given the same circumstances. I open with the quote by Terence “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
And I feel that says it all. A call for mankind to take this silly idea of choice and control off the table.
It’s what’s dooming us all; it’s why the world is ending. Which is the last focus of my book. A grieving of that fantasy life promised to us in the last century and a realization that even when this life is gained it is ultimately funded by countless wars and the pillaging of third world countries. And now this philosophy of infinite growth is cracking away. You commented in your review that I was prone to ranting in my work, and yes, I'd say in parts that is true, because once you realize the ruse that’s being pulled, that anger needs to go somewhere, and it seems to me that anger is useless anywhere but in art.
Private Destiny is also a reflection on coping with dual identity. I know for sure within me there are two selves. There is the clean, studious, responsible self who seems to come out only in times of great structure, like growing up in a rich household, or in one of my twelve stints in rehab, or sometimes as a kickback response to the consequences of my other self: the addict, the womanizer, the gambler, the live-and-let-live self, who arrives when that first self runs out of steam or has been given room to play.
What genre, or genres, of fiction would you consider Private Destiny to be?
This is a tough question to answer without sounding like I haven’t overthought this. I wrote the book I wanted to write and then when it came to marketing I feel like I might have shot myself in the foot.
I would consider Private Destiny to be semi-autobiographical paranoid transgressive memoir fiction, under a heading of literary fiction.
If that’s not enough to confuse you, I’d also say it carries genre trappings of neo-noir, crime fiction, mystery fiction, and conspiracy thrillers while subverting their tropes.
I’d also say parts of the book are within the realm of satire, dark humor, erotica, disturbing fiction, surrealism, and Roman à clef.
How did you come up with the main character Rick of Private Destiny? How do you come up with your characters in general? Which are you most comfortable working with, male or female?
Rick is a hyperbolized reflection of myself and my journey as an artist, a drug addict, and just another human trying to make it in this fucked-up world.
It’s a novel about real world events overlaid with the facade of fiction. I used a fictionalized world in order to reflect the truth of the world around us.
All my characters are people I’ve known throughout my life. I’d say Rick was the character I was most comfortable writing, although I’m not sure if comfortable is the right word, as writing your thoughts in the first person to the degree I do can be quite vulnerable, but it rolled off the typer much smoother than other characters.
Others I can know only from an outside perspective, and given I’ve written in the first person I have to display them only through Rick's filter. That might be a shortcoming as a writer, but I feel it worked for this book.
What does your writing process look like? Do you outline first, etc.?
I write mostly on my phone or in a notebook. I jot down anything from simple ideas to entire chapters whenever the idea hits. I feel it loses its juice otherwise. I then save all these and edit them later, sometimes adding, sometimes taking away. And then I write the in-between bits and look where these ideas might fit best.
It’s a very free-flowing process that allows ideas to give birth to further ideas, and it still amazes me at the end of the day how these through-lines and themes I never implicitly planned come to light.
When did you first decide you wanted to become a writer? What authors, if any, inspired you?
I hesitate to admit this, but the first book that got me into reading was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
I initially went to film school. I wanted to be an auteur, a writer/director, but I soon became fed up with the industry and the people in it. I was having some success writing screenplays for short films so I figured why not cut everyone out of the equation and just write for myself.
At this point I was big into other writers that wrote in the style I now write in. Books like Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, William S. Burroughs’s Junky and Naked Lunch, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing series, The Curse of Lono, and The Rum Diary, Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, and Charles Bukowski’s entire catalog.
Other notable mentions would be Herman Hesse’s Sidharttha and The Glass Bead Game, Brett Easton Ellis’s entire catalog, Gregory McDonald’s Fletch series, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk, Robert Anton Wilson, Don Delillo, Thomas Ligotti, Aldous Huxley, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves to name a few.
Private Destiny touches on many views of present-day society. Care to explain?
We have more nukes now than ever, we are past the point of fixing the climate, and fascism is once again on the rise in more countries than ever.
My book is in part about my personal journey through these realizations that the world and life isn’t what I was told it was by my parents, leaders, books and movies. From those small realizations to the large.
For me it boils down to grief, which is a big theme in my book. I grieve a world that was promised but ultimately never was and that facade falls away more every day.
I’ll leave it at that.
What made you decide to self-publish and not go the traditional publishing route?
I queried over a hundred agents and while I received praise for my work I was told that it wasn’t marketable.
A key moment was when I kept getting asked to name five books on the market like mine that were selling.
If there were five books on the market like mine I wouldn’t have written it.
I realized that I spent six years writing a book and I was pitching it to salesmen. I decided I’d much rather take my chances pitching it to readers.
Do you have any current work in progress? If you do, care to tell us what it’s about?
Just poetry and short stories. Other than that, I’m fully devoted to marketing Private Destiny, but I’m sure something else will bubble up shortly. It always does.
What authors would you compare Private Destiny to, and what readers do you think would most enjoy it?
I'd say fans of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Phillip K. Dick’s semi- autobiographical work would find Private Destiny to be the kind of book that they haven’t seen being pushed by the publishing houses since those authors' time.
Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
Thank you for your interest in my work and process. I hope my book finds the eyes it was intended for and I feel a deep gratitude that I have made it this far.
I hope your readers will give Private Destiny a chance.
Cheers!
Jonathan Gabel is a full-time writer and bartender. A past student of film and photography, he now focuses on prose and poetry work, trying daily to bring a humanism and street level realism to his fiction and poetry. Flaws and all. Jonathan battled heroin addiction throughout his twenties which has become a big source for his work. He currently resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife of three years.
You can contact him at [email protected]
Private Destiny is centered on the character of Rick Thompson, an ex-junkie investigative journalist who is struggling to find work and is tempted day in and day out to fall back into heroin addiction despite all the junkies around him falling prey to The Sickness. That is until the his ex shows back up to his apartment with something that gives him a bigger story than he could have ever wanted.
It’s a first person view of a man who has devolved to cynicism after realizing he has been fed lies his entire life, and while struggling to find meaning he clings to anything that might push his life forward.
The entire book is about how we embrace the delusion and comfort of fantasy in order to feel in control of, or even just ok with, our own lives and the world around us, and how over time if these fantasies are embraced they can rot into conspiracy and paranoia.
It’s a meditation on storytelling itself, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, from small lies about our adventures to big budget motion pictures and lifestyle fantasies, and how they shape our relationship with the truth of reality we can sit in, but still be blind to, daily.
It’s also an honest look into a man broken by this system, and a call for radical empathy for such characters. A call for a realization that we could all be the worst of us if given the same circumstances. I open with the quote by Terence “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”
And I feel that says it all. A call for mankind to take this silly idea of choice and control off the table.
It’s what’s dooming us all; it’s why the world is ending. Which is the last focus of my book. A grieving of that fantasy life promised to us in the last century and a realization that even when this life is gained it is ultimately funded by countless wars and the pillaging of third world countries. And now this philosophy of infinite growth is cracking away. You commented in your review that I was prone to ranting in my work, and yes, I'd say in parts that is true, because once you realize the ruse that’s being pulled, that anger needs to go somewhere, and it seems to me that anger is useless anywhere but in art.
Private Destiny is also a reflection on coping with dual identity. I know for sure within me there are two selves. There is the clean, studious, responsible self who seems to come out only in times of great structure, like growing up in a rich household, or in one of my twelve stints in rehab, or sometimes as a kickback response to the consequences of my other self: the addict, the womanizer, the gambler, the live-and-let-live self, who arrives when that first self runs out of steam or has been given room to play.
What genre, or genres, of fiction would you consider Private Destiny to be?
This is a tough question to answer without sounding like I haven’t overthought this. I wrote the book I wanted to write and then when it came to marketing I feel like I might have shot myself in the foot.
I would consider Private Destiny to be semi-autobiographical paranoid transgressive memoir fiction, under a heading of literary fiction.
If that’s not enough to confuse you, I’d also say it carries genre trappings of neo-noir, crime fiction, mystery fiction, and conspiracy thrillers while subverting their tropes.
I’d also say parts of the book are within the realm of satire, dark humor, erotica, disturbing fiction, surrealism, and Roman à clef.
How did you come up with the main character Rick of Private Destiny? How do you come up with your characters in general? Which are you most comfortable working with, male or female?
Rick is a hyperbolized reflection of myself and my journey as an artist, a drug addict, and just another human trying to make it in this fucked-up world.
It’s a novel about real world events overlaid with the facade of fiction. I used a fictionalized world in order to reflect the truth of the world around us.
All my characters are people I’ve known throughout my life. I’d say Rick was the character I was most comfortable writing, although I’m not sure if comfortable is the right word, as writing your thoughts in the first person to the degree I do can be quite vulnerable, but it rolled off the typer much smoother than other characters.
Others I can know only from an outside perspective, and given I’ve written in the first person I have to display them only through Rick's filter. That might be a shortcoming as a writer, but I feel it worked for this book.
What does your writing process look like? Do you outline first, etc.?
I write mostly on my phone or in a notebook. I jot down anything from simple ideas to entire chapters whenever the idea hits. I feel it loses its juice otherwise. I then save all these and edit them later, sometimes adding, sometimes taking away. And then I write the in-between bits and look where these ideas might fit best.
It’s a very free-flowing process that allows ideas to give birth to further ideas, and it still amazes me at the end of the day how these through-lines and themes I never implicitly planned come to light.
When did you first decide you wanted to become a writer? What authors, if any, inspired you?
I hesitate to admit this, but the first book that got me into reading was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
I initially went to film school. I wanted to be an auteur, a writer/director, but I soon became fed up with the industry and the people in it. I was having some success writing screenplays for short films so I figured why not cut everyone out of the equation and just write for myself.
At this point I was big into other writers that wrote in the style I now write in. Books like Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, William S. Burroughs’s Junky and Naked Lunch, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing series, The Curse of Lono, and The Rum Diary, Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, and Charles Bukowski’s entire catalog.
Other notable mentions would be Herman Hesse’s Sidharttha and The Glass Bead Game, Brett Easton Ellis’s entire catalog, Gregory McDonald’s Fletch series, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk, Robert Anton Wilson, Don Delillo, Thomas Ligotti, Aldous Huxley, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves to name a few.
Private Destiny touches on many views of present-day society. Care to explain?
We have more nukes now than ever, we are past the point of fixing the climate, and fascism is once again on the rise in more countries than ever.
My book is in part about my personal journey through these realizations that the world and life isn’t what I was told it was by my parents, leaders, books and movies. From those small realizations to the large.
For me it boils down to grief, which is a big theme in my book. I grieve a world that was promised but ultimately never was and that facade falls away more every day.
I’ll leave it at that.
What made you decide to self-publish and not go the traditional publishing route?
I queried over a hundred agents and while I received praise for my work I was told that it wasn’t marketable.
A key moment was when I kept getting asked to name five books on the market like mine that were selling.
If there were five books on the market like mine I wouldn’t have written it.
I realized that I spent six years writing a book and I was pitching it to salesmen. I decided I’d much rather take my chances pitching it to readers.
Do you have any current work in progress? If you do, care to tell us what it’s about?
Just poetry and short stories. Other than that, I’m fully devoted to marketing Private Destiny, but I’m sure something else will bubble up shortly. It always does.
What authors would you compare Private Destiny to, and what readers do you think would most enjoy it?
I'd say fans of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Phillip K. Dick’s semi- autobiographical work would find Private Destiny to be the kind of book that they haven’t seen being pushed by the publishing houses since those authors' time.
Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
Thank you for your interest in my work and process. I hope my book finds the eyes it was intended for and I feel a deep gratitude that I have made it this far.
I hope your readers will give Private Destiny a chance.
Cheers!
Jonathan Gabel is a full-time writer and bartender. A past student of film and photography, he now focuses on prose and poetry work, trying daily to bring a humanism and street level realism to his fiction and poetry. Flaws and all. Jonathan battled heroin addiction throughout his twenties which has become a big source for his work. He currently resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife of three years.
You can contact him at [email protected]
