The ISBN for the paper edition is 978-1-879211-01-8, and the Kindle edition is ASIN: B00522VEME. Other e-book formats are in progress, and Jay's considering an agent to market more works, television rights and whatever else.

Everyone who knows Jay knows he's been working, secretly some would say, on works of fiction since, like, forever. Jay's a graduate of the newspaper business, and novel writing in the newspaper business is a long standing tradition, especially among stereotypical mild-mannered (or othrwise) reporters.

Jay was hardly known for mild-manneredness, though he aspired otherwise, but he did honor the time-honored tradition of writing fiction in his spare time. He set out on his first novel in the late Sixties when a serious ankle injury left him laid up for a few weeks. With plenty of time to write, he did just that, passing the 200-page result around among friends at the newspaper in South Carolina for comment. After changing jobs and cities and a few other interruptions, he finished the book a couple of years later in Charlottesville, Virginia. That being before humanly ownable wordprocessors, the book was in tatters, with pink and yellow pasteups where changes had been inflicted and much scribbling between the lines for edits and amplifications. After another break of two decades with a bunch of life's vicissitudes sailing by, Jay dragged the manuscript, then around 300 pages, out of a trunk and set about typing it into his favorite wordprocessor. That was several computers ago. Most of that manuscript is still in a state of pink-paper paste-up, and that's not the one that is - brace yourself - now freshly published.

So it is that Jay's first-published novel is actually his second. He got it off to a good start in 1982, on paper with an actual typewriter, parked it several times over the years, and brought it to life and paper and electronic versions this month, May 2011. Here's the cover.

The action takes place in a fictional town near Atlanta. No, not in South Carolina, because the book's characters needed a larger city with room for high-rise condo complexes, traffic jams and other discomforts of urban living, since the characters go looking for an escape from all that, and find it haunted. Jay had a great deal of fun drawing the town's characters, especially the flirt Gertie, waitress at the local diner, and the mysterious, clairvoyant Isabel, proprietor of the local antiques emporium. A couple of herds of shrinks can spend decades trying to figure out which characters are influenced by real people from Jay's past, but really, they're all creations of Jay's imagination. The many years of development allowed Jay to hone the characters, slowly replacing all aspects of reality with entertaining lies. Namely, fiction.

Jay got interested in photography as art in the late Sixties (the nineteen sixties, thank you), and joined the actual fray as a photographic artist around 1970. That turned out to be a short-lived, ill fated venture, but he pleads youth and naïveté. Okay, youth and stupidity, but the multitudinous disasters had little to do with photographic or artistic considerations and a whole lot to do with crooked real estate agents, greedy banks, nincompoop insurance companies, and heavy handed Southern politics so crooked they call it "North Carolina" politics. Anyway, photography-as-art still beguiles, and Jay yields to the Muse's call whenever possible, reason and common sense and even old age notwithstanding. Jay's exhibited many of his photographs in the Midlands of South Carolina within smelling distance of the very seat of state government and within cannonball-shooting distance of the capitolith itself. The art shows provided opportunities to show off, even though Jay had to brave appearing in actual person at the openings. Now he maintains a continuous online art show, where sales of prints are enabled worldwide: RedBubble

Jay's not noted for conformity and doesn't fit well into any categories. "Mainly, I get bored easy." So, the body of his work cuts across a variety of styles, schools, techniques, subjects, and display media. Some are old and traditional, and some new and misunderstood. Some work, and some don't. The viewer decides which is which.

Often printing images in more than one way, Jay alters them as necessary to adjust to the medium. Other works are traditional photographs printed by technologically impressive means onto non-traditional (for photography) surfaces such as artists' canvas, watercolor paper, and metallic foil.

Jay especially likes images in plain ol' photographic gelatin-silver created in the dark. However, the allure of electronic output, with the color permanence of giglée prints, keeps his kitchen smelling more like food than fixer. Oh, and that's another thing. Jay's respiratory functions are extremely sensitive to photographic chemicals, owing to the years he spent in the color photo lab business.

People are usually Jay's favorite subjects, including nudes. He also likes the surreal, and creating abstractions that start as photographs of people, nude or otherwise, and metamorphize into something indistinct, but reminiscent of reality in some curious way.

Computer technologies have booted up an infinite palette of possibilities for manipulating the camera's imagery, and Jay delights in exploring those complexities with works that cut across both traditional and digital photographic technologies. Many of his favorite works are digital abstractions, which he greatly enjoys doing and looking at, ever since 'way back in the Seventies - the Nineteen Seventies.

As an artist and a photographer, Jay's completely self-taught. "Outsider," is the current term. He learns best by doing, anyway, and Jay's always felt that doing something - even doing it wrong - was a better way of figuring out how to do it than being told. Besides, there have always been plenty of books on the subjects, and Jay definitely relates to books. In fact, he'll miss them when they're replaced by electronic versions. But moving to his present apartment was complicated by the fact that his books filled up more than half of the rent-a-truck and consumed immense amounts of time to pack and unpack. A few dozen CD-Roms would have held them all.

Jay's favorite vocation and avocation is photography. Photos gratia artis. He started young, encouraged by his father who at family events proudly took the current-model Kodak box camera off its high shelf in the closet. The old man set everybody blinking with the flash from huge bulbs, even in outdoor sunlight, and after weeks of waiting gleefully showed off curly edged glossy prints, square and sharp, many of them color. Yet, Jay's family album contains very little that survived the internal combustion of his dysfunctional family, so most of what's extant is stuff Jay shot in recent times.

Photographically, Jay started by recording his grandmother's flower beds with his father's Kodak. When the prints came back, an interminable wait later, the flowers were all black and white. Not beautiful, hand printed black and white, but bleached out "drugstore" prints - which is of course what they were.

Jay gave up in despair, unaware that changing the film would have brought color prints. Several years later, Jay received a new Polaroid Land Camera - freshly invented - with a kit of accessories. It was a gift from his father. The camera required some finagling with exposures, but Jay managed to figure out the EV system and went about recording absolutely everything for posterity - the cat, the house, and any relatives who'd put up with the hassle. None of these great images survives, so posterity, the Smithsonian (and the dumpster) are out of luck. After the new wore off, and the cute little Wink Light died for the second time and couldn't be repaired, Jay moved on to other enthusiasms, not to say obsessions, and parked the Polaroid.

Years passed, as years are wont to do. While at the university of South Carolina in Aiken, studying journalism, Jay snagged part time employment as a newspaper correspondent. His Sainted Grandmother bought him a 35mm camera, and a new interest was re-born. Again with the black and white. Only this time the prints got individualized attention from the newspaper's photo lab and even appeared in print.

Jay's a writer by trade. By choice, too, by gum. Four books on the shelves, all non-fiction, and several more still captive in the wordprocessor. Some fiction, some not - and sometimes hard to tell which is which. Former newspaper editor, reporter, commercial photographer, former store clerk, former printer's devil, former sweeper of hallways, former homeless person (twice!), former garbage removal engineer. Stand-up cynic. Proud of it, too. We cover this "hats" ground nearabouts the beginning of this work, to satisfy the human tendency to categorize people by what they "do." People aren't happy talking to someone unless we find out up front what he "does," so we can inflict on him whatever stereotype applies to his trade or profession and deprive his utterances of respect accordingly. In social situations Jay has often withheld information on hat(s) he wears or not, to rebel against this human tendency, for all the good it does him. Might as well fess up here, though. The power of the Internet makes it difficult to hide for long.

Lover of cats, of classical music, ballet, typography, and photography, of theatre, humor, and art. Graphic artist, videographer, web programmer - slash - designer, electronic publisher, magazine editor, multimedia designer, author and editor, publisher of books and magazines. Takes out the trash when the can gets full.

Much of what Jay knows how to do - for a living or whatever else - is now obsolete. He can, for example, set letterpress type with a composing stick, use quoins, and print stuff with a Kelsey, Kluge, Chandler & Price or similar printing presses. Useless skills completely, but once quite valuable. Benjamin Franklin could, too, and did, and got famous. And rich. Jay can do skilful cold-type pasteup, too, and once did for money. Then there are the skills of the photographic darkroom, including color C-22, C-41, E-4, E-6 and Cibachrome processes. All by hand, all pretty much last century.

To say the least, it's been a festive life, perhaps even worth some of the digital ink it'll take to record it here. On the other hand, it's taken a long time to live enough to make it worth this rime, and some of the living can hardly be called living at all. Even so, from here sometimes it looks like much of this had, or perhaps has, some purpose - like all this so far was a peculiar set of experiences building up to who knows what that either hasn't happened yet, or didn't happen and was supposed to, or might not happen, but ought to have.