Jay Hampton

I suppose my life has been somewhat unorthodox. I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up, so even though I have a degree in civil engineering, by the time I was thirty-six I had had nearly three-hundred jobs. Obviously none of them lasted long. As a teenager still in high school I applied for and received a mineral concession from the government of Venezuela to search for gold in the jungles near Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall. My parents wouldn't sign to let me get a passport, so instead of the grand adventure, I graduated high school and then college. Following a brief stint as an engineer, I decided to be a writer and make life a grand adventure. Thus began a nearly four-year sojourn that began in Mexico, where my bus once came under automatic weapons fire, to its end in London where I flipped a coin to decide whether I should get married or go to Tangier. I didn't go to Tangier.

I spent months hitching around the continent while sending back stories to my hometown newspaper. I wrote stories ranging from the hardships of a struggling young writer who covered himself with newspapers to keep warm while sleeping in the weeds, to a once-in-a-lifetime experience of fighting a bull in Spain. While living in London I worked security at Sotheby's , the world famous auction house, and once served as a security guard for former British Prime Minister Ted Heath. At Sotheby's, I came into contact with numerous celebrities including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. In London I also came to know some of the world's most infamous mercenary soldiers, the African mercenaries that best-selling author Fredrick Forsyth dubbed "the Dogs of War". Through my friendship with the mercenaries, I became involved in a plot to work with rebel Southern Sudanese villagers in an effort to ignite a civil war in Sudan to free the southern black villagers from the Arab north. We failed.

My first literary success came in London, where I was once featured in an article in LORDS, an early spin-off of PENTHOUSE magazine. At the time, I was a professional gambler, and LORDS featured an article about a horse race betting system I had developed. However, one day at the track I lost all my money and had to peel potatoes for two months. When I returned to the U.S. I worked as an investigative newspaper reporter for a regional newspaper, and a regular contributor to several national men's magazines, with short stories and articles about my Europea