Born to the mean streets of Long Island’s Nassau County in the early 1970s, Richard Daub hustled his way out of the suburbs and, in 1996, inspired by Jack Kerouac, a love of rock & roll, and flannel shirts, landed in Seattle, Washington, where he towed rental cars for a living, then, when Jeff Bezos still had hair, went to work for Earth’s Biggest Bookstore for a couple of years, before splitting for the Lost Coast of far Northern California to write an epic novel that, thankfully, like his short stories of the period, would never see the light of day, allowing for a fresh start as a fiction writer later in life. From there he traveled back East to New York City, working in the glamorous world of glossy high-end lifestyle magazines, before splitting for Baltimore, getting married, and taking a job as a pork and beef buyer for a highly corrupt foodservice corporation.

After moving from Baltimore to a place they would later learn was called “the exurbs”, and, after reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”, a first-person gonzo piece in which the great fiction writer goes on a cruise ship and goofs on the whole experience, Daub, inspired that the guy who wrote Infinite Jest would put on a tuxedo t-shirt to meet the cruise’s dining room dress code, began a journalism career, writing a gonzo piece in which he wanders into the town of Emmitsburg in rural Maryland, on the doorstep of Appalachia, just south of the Mason-Dixon line, this being at a more naïve age before he’d read Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, a town, he would later learn after being called things like “ballsy”, “nuts”, and “crazy”, was a hotspot for KKK members, and wrote a piece titled “Finding Emmitsburg” that poked a little fun at the sleepy burg and was later published in Frederick County’s glossy lifestyle mag.

From there it was back to New York City and into the jet set world of animal pharmaceuticals, where, for two years, Daub served as the North American Correspondent for Animal Pharm, a journal owned by the major London publishing house, Informa. After burning out during a trip to Kansas City, being wined and dined by animal health executives who believed him to be a hotshot international reporter from New York City who was going to put them on the map—not unlike the plot of Waiting for Guffman—he left the madness behind and began selling real estate in Harlem. Too burned out for prose, he picked up his guitar and started writing songs at night, leaving behind a boxed set worth of material that has yet to see the light of day.

After the economy collapse of 2008, Daub, while taking a job at a factory to feed his family, began writing again, waking up at 4:00 am working on things that would never see the light of day, but the process got the writing machine going again. In 2014, he and his son, Emerson, wrote and published a children’s book about their cats titled Spaulding and Zoom. In 2016-17, the father and son team wrote and published a two-book YA series titled The Adventures of HyperKid about a hyperactive fifth-grader who develops superpowers.

Then the serious fiction writing began, leading to the publication of numerous short stories and several super-awesome, finished and polished projects that have yet to see the light of day and have the publishing industry abuzz like a backyard mosquito zapper. ▪