Author’s Note on Living in Sin

I fucked up.

When I wrote Chapter 1 of this tale, it was back when I was working through my prerequisites for nursing school. I had pretty much cut my writing down to almost nothing in order to focus on academics. But I am now convinced I was born to be a writer the same way Jake Kingsley in Intemperance was born to be a musician. Not writing during this period was painful, so in what little leisure time I had, I started Living in Sin. It was basically a reboot of my earlier short story The Mommies, but with all the things I’d learned about writing and plotting since then.

It was meant to be just a fun little thing—something I could pick at until I graduated nursing school at some point in the future. At the time, I was in one of my black periods. I was far from sure I would even get into nursing school once the prerequisites were done. The process was very competitive and, at that time, lottery based.

I’ve always had neutral luck in my life. No Teela Brown am I. I was never Caller 17 on the radio contests. I never won big at gambling. I don’t even play the lottery, because I could never win it with my luck. But I also never got on the plane that crashed, was never on the Bay Bridge during an earthquake, never got some rare form of cancer. I can live with neutral luck.

As it turned out, just as I was about to finish my prerequisites and start applying for schools, the community college system–based nursing programs in California switched over to an admission system that was merit-based instead of lottery. Students with the best grades were given priority status, but that was not all. Points were given for a variety of things, including affirmative action–type things that actually favored me, a forty-plus-year-old Caucasian, heterosexual male who was a licensed California paramedic.

This, as Chase Best would say, was real irony (which having it rain on your wedding day is not ironic, Alanis, you stupid bitch—it’s just a bummer). Suddenly, I got points galore on this system. I was everything that a traditional nursing school applicant was not: male, over forty, Caucasian. Good times.

In addition, I had excellent grades. 4.0 on my non-science classes and 3.8 on my sciences. There’s a ranking test called the TEAS test, which rewards good test takers like myself. I got a very high score on that. While I had friends who had applied to nursing schools a dozen or more times without being selected, I got in on my second application to one of the most respected and oldest community college–based schools—and it was within thirty minutes of driving time from my modest little house, where I live with Mrs. Steiner and, at the time, our three teenage Steiner offspring (they are now all grown up and out of the house and respectable members of society these days).

I put my nose to the grindstone for two years, working full time and going to school full time. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, hands down, but I made it through (and had a pretty good heart attack two years later, requiring a triple bypass, but that’s another story).

After graduation from school it took me about six months to get my first job: ER staff nurse at one of the local hospitals where I routinely delivered patients as a paramedic. I got to know the manager there and she was pretty much a benevolent dictator of not just her department but the entire hospital. Nothing happened there as far as hirings that she didn’t approve of. This included all ER staff, including the EVS department, security, techs, and registration personnel.