At 26 I was nearly two million dollars in debt; I had an IRS agent who knew me by name; I paid my rent with those blank checks the credit card people sent you; I even paid one credit card off with another; I foolishly drank and foolishly gambled and foolishly partied…. 1)

All over the world; I dreamed about being Michael Chrichton or Hunter S Thompson while living off credit cards and book advances for books that nobody read beyond my immediate family :) and yet I kept burning deeper and deeper into that hole…2)

How did I get so deep in debt you ask? I’d wake up on a Wednesday, head to Logan airport with no bags, fly to Paris one way and check into the Crillon and invite all my friends who could come and stay for weeks…3)

And then I’d head to New York and check into the Park Plaza and party and drink and then head to LA…4)

When the Standard in West Hollywood opened I stayed a month in the pool suite; then to Vegas to the Hard Rock or the Palms or hell, the Dirty Bird… blowing through every penny the publishers would send me before another book bombed….5)

And I got closer and closer to the edge and I knew there was no way back up except a lightning strike or the hand of god, the hole was so deep… at one point I found myself in some hotel in Amsterdam…6)

And I’d taken over the presidential suite and invited a bunch of degenerate friends, who in turn somehow invited half the Red Light District over for a New Years Eve party, and by 2 AM the entire staff of the hotel was up there with us… we racked up 50k in hotel bills…7)

And when I got back to Boston I got a stack of business school applications because I knew the only way I’d ever come close to digging my way out was to try to get some job in banking…and it was right then, that a girl I knew from college invited me to a local bar…8)

To meet a bunch of friends of hers from MIT who had too much money, and all of it in 100 dollar bills… they turned out to be the MIT Blackjack Team, and that turned into my book Bringing Down The House, which by way of Kevin Spacey (another story:)) turned into the movie 21…9)

And just like that, lightning struck, the hand of god came down and lifted my drunken gambling delusional ass toward my literary dreams…10)

Which is all to say, I know what it feels like to be in that desperate hole, and I know I was lucky as hell- but it really can all change in an instant. You never know when that lightning is going to strike, but be ready when it does…11)

And when lightning does strike, do your damndest to hold on tight and not make the same mistakes that led you down that hole in the first place. :) 12)