Coming soon
Fate’s Janitors is a serialized web novel about the mental health and addiction industry and the people who clean up after fate.
A perennial student must complete a counseling internship at an outpatient mental health clinic. His supervisor, a recovering addict, and former outlaw biker, is less than thrilled about having an intern tagging along. The clinic is treated like an ignored appendage to the medical center, which in turn has been taken over by a giant corporation. The renowned psychologist, Dr Ahern, is appointed director, but when the great man at last makes an appearance, he delivers outlandish orders to the staff and bribes them to lie to insurance companies, deceive regulators, and bamboozle auditors.
The book takes the reader behind the pretenses of psychotherapy to show what happens when talk, noisy breath exhaled, is marketed as a precious healing salve.
A new chapter will be posted weekly, starting in January.
How do I read a serialized web novel?
Fate’s janitors will not be published in full, but chapter by chapter over a period of time. Click on the subscribe button to the right so that you get new chapters as they are published.
As is the case with any serial, it is best to start from the beginning to understand the context of the plot and characters. However, if you are coming upon Fate’s Janitors late, many chapters might be enjoyed independently if you click on the hyperlinks to get some of the backstory. I’ve also used hyperlinks to provide the reader with more information about a number of terms used and to reveal literary allusions that may not be apparent to some.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my wife, Karen Rosenbloom, for putting up with both my need for privacy and feedback as I wrote Fate’s Janitors. Thank you, too, my other beta readers, the Night Writers: Carlos Bahr, Barb Grosh, Bob Hesselberth, David Jolkovski, Dolly Malik, Martha Price, Eric Scoles, Sally Steinmiller, Henry Williams, and Byron Wilmot.
I also want to thank all those who lent me their stories over the years in my psychotherapy practice. You will find none of them in Fate’s Janitors because the book is a work of fiction. I am also grateful to my employer for giving me a place to work, but the dysfunctional medical center of Fate’s Janitors is a fictional setting. To my colleagues in the psychotherapy field, thanks for your support, but you are also not in this book, for the characters come out of my own twisted imagination. That is not to say that they are not real.
