Behind the scenes of Concrete Jungle, harm-reduction work, and the messy business of writing about things most people pretend not to see.
Everyone expects addiction narratives to end in either a funeral or a redemption arc. Concrete Jungle isn’t interested in either. It’s about what happens when survival itself becomes the addiction.
I teach harm reduction in the real world, then write characters who do everything wrong. That tension is intentional. Fiction lets us sit inside the bad decisions long enough to understand why they’re so compelling.
New York in 2020 wasn’t just a setting—it was an accomplice. The empty streets, the sirens, the isolation, the stimulus checks, the hotel loopholes… all of it became part of Jay’s personality.