The stories in The Jump all stand alone. No linking characters or settings at all - each is its own weird ride.

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Similarly, my novel, The Contract, is completely different from any of my stories.

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Humor (often very dark), irony, and self-delusion are frequent guests, but if I had to point to an overarching vision, it would be the existential backdrop against which all the action occurs. Characters constantly define themselves by their actions - and by their conviction or lack of conviction in those decisions.

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To quote from Ernst, in "The Jump":

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​“On The Jump, you have four seconds to decide. There is no compromise, only decision. You are the only one with the power. What anyone else thinks doesn’t matter. What everyone else thinks doesn’t matter. For those four seconds, you hold the universe in your hands. That is the lesson of The Jump.”

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In The Contract (“Jean Paul Sartre, meet Erica Jong”), the quest for meaning and identity is central. Sue, a young teacher who, prior to the story, had been a model of success, finds everything she had counted on falling apart when her kidneys begin to fail.

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Her physical life has been saved by Josh donating a kidney to her. And for a while, her contract to provide a year of “hot sex” to him in exchange helps distract her from her personal existential dilemma. But in the end, she is haunted by the need to understand who she is.

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“After everything I’ve been through, all the things I used to believe, well they just, I don’t know, just vanished, just disappeared. I felt guilty, but I did it anyway, because I had to, because there was nothing else left….

 

“I needed my own life. My old life was gone, my old self was gone, and now I needed to see who I was and what I was all over again….

 

“I’ve been through a lot. Not just the surgery. I had to confront my own mortality. In a lot of ways, I shouldn’t even be alive right now. And once you’ve been there, you can’t undo it. I almost wish I could, but I can’t. And I still really don’t know what to do with that. I feel like I have to learn everything all over again.”

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