About Cutty Braughn
Cutty Braughn started keeping notebooks as a teenager but wisely waited a few decades before letting anyone read a word of them. After a doomed stint on the edges of the film business — where he discovered that success required seventeen-hour days and a high tolerance for editors — he earned the rare distinction of being a failed screenwriter, an unpublished novelist (still), and a sellout entertainment-magazine editor, all before lunch.

At fifteen he tried to fly a small plane in Alaska and to befriend the people who actually lived there. Both ended badly. He washed up in Northern California, where he helped his sister raise a houseful of kids and treated the arrangement as a long-term social experiment. The results were mixed but respectable: they all survived, and most of them succeeded — some, he suspects, precisely by rejecting his example.

Later he attempted grown-up respectability as a cabinetmaker and shipwright, then drifted into life as a marine surveyor, a ship's agent (a trade he still hasn't managed to escape), and an innkeeper. Somewhere in there he took a 1977 BMW down through Mexico and Guatemala looking for his sister, and came back with more questions than he'd left with.

Through all of it he quietly kept writing about people who make questionable choices in interesting places — usually working from his own example — and finally stopped waiting for permission to let anyone read them.