I suppose I should elaborate on Beer Run, since I am trying to sell it. Maybe I should say what Beer Run is “about” rather than what it’s about. I’ve already summarized the first part of the plot. Now I’d like to answer why I wrote it.

I’ve had some bad work experiences. My first job was at a newspaper. The editor there was abusive, and my co-workers refused to show me how basic office equipment worked. Working there, I would have problems with people refusing to recognize me when I introduced myself to them, and then they would be mad that I didn’t know their name. It’s tough to talk about. Things didn’t get better as my career in journalism, then in law, went on.

The workplace seems to be this uniquely cruel place where hierarchy matters more than morality, X means Y if the boss says so, and the least important person in the room is always you. You go from college, a place where there is a real sense of shared values and where you have a sense of self-worth, to the workplace, where you represent a drain on revenue the management is trying to find a way to cut. I’ve been to places with turnover rates so high, at some point they stopped putting new associates on their website because it was simply too embarrassing. One place hired me, making me move halfway across the country and forcing me to take another bar exam, and then closed the office I was at seven months after I arrived. I once got laid off five months after buying a house and two months before getting married. My last job before this made its associates work twelve hours a day during the week and Saturday mornings. I genuinely considered it the best job that I ever had. They at least showed me how the copy machine worked.

Then, I got my current job. The management is diffuse. There are actually more partners than associates, so the power isn’t concentrated in one person. The CEO, despite being one of the busiest people I’ve ever met, is a genuinely nice guy. I normally get home at 5:30, after picking up my son. It’s given me time to have children, take up writing books, and even get published, all while giving me a very decent income. I have been there for three and a half years and barring a writing career that makes me somehow rich, I’m planning on staying.

Still, the bad memories I have from past employers still haunt me. I’ll get angry at random times. I keep flashing back to ass chewings from years past. I’ve gone to therapy over this, but nothing seems to completely put those scars behind me.

Suffice to say, my main character, Bill, has the same problems. Based on the character Acting-Ensign Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: TNG, Bill Stiltson worked as an “Acting-Ensign,” (more like an intern) on a Starship call the Starstorm when he was a teenager under Commander Michael Krieger. I imagine Krieger being based on Will Riker, only more like what someone like Riker was really like. He’s a tyrannical monster who bullies Bill mercilessly, and even years later, in an entirely different life, those memories haunt Bill.

Bill now runs his own brewery, with his own employees, and his own intern. He buys an illegal android from a bankruptcy trustee, who has both prodigious talents far beyond the average barmaid and the mind of a child. Bill, after receiving abuse at the hands of his “superiors,” is now in the position of being an authority figure himself. The story is about Bill trying to be better than the abuse passed down to him.

Does he succeed? You will have to read to find out! But, yes, he does better. You should still read to find out how.