"'You're going to have to do something, Max. I can't handle it by myself anymore, ' she said one morning over breakfast. 'Some of the bills are going unpaid. I didn't want to tell you last month, but....' "I knew what it meant -- I was going to have to come up with a job. A real job. To hell with writing, to hell with acting, to hell with my rich fantasy life of fat, regular royalty checks and reliable agents and all the other pleasant hallucinations of the artist manque in America. "A simmering rage ate at me. Years of unrelenting work and I was back at square one. It was always the same old story. I was doomed. And I wasn't getting any younger." --- Max Zajack is in trouble. His writing career isn't taking off, and now he has a wife and a child to feed. To what extent can an artist survive the needs of a day-to-day existence? And to what excesses can frustrated ambition ultimately drive Max Zajack towards the abyss?