Writers Tricks of the Trade VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 | Page 25

S POTLIGHT I NTERVIEW
J ON D’A MORE
While everybody has a story, author Jon
D’Amore’s has several, and he turned them
all into books! Having grown up as a 2 nd
generation Italian in Hudson County, New
Jersey, right on the river facing Manhattan,
Jon was a talented musician who played the
great club scenes of New York City, the
Jersey shore and every major club in the tri-
state area. His New Jersey “family
connections” took him on extended
excursions to Las Vegas in the mid-1970s
where he saw them pull off one of the
greatest gambling scams ever to hit Sin City.
It was so big that after a few years, and
after being discovered by the casinos, the
scam had changed gambling laws across America, and gave Jon unprecedented insight for his 2012 best-seller,
“The Boss Always Sits In The Back.” After that, writing and touring as an author became Jon’s life. From starting
as musician, to becoming a corporate executive and then a best-selling author, Jon is a shining example of
recreating life after 50 and living that life with a passion!
J
ON , YOUR STORY IS REALLY THE STUFF BOOKS ARE
MADE OF . W HEN DID YOU BEGIN WRITING ?
I actually began “writing” when I was
only 9 years old and had just begun 4 th
grade. It was one of those “What did you do
during summer vacation” reports the
teachers have students write. I was living in
New Jersey, right outside
of Manhattan. That summer
my parents took me to
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Instead of writing about
being a sightseer, I took the
story up a few levels and
hand-wrote a multi-page
story about a 9-year old boy who lived in
Gettysburg at the time and witnessed the
W INTER 2020
battles from various locations.
How ambitious for a child that age.
What happened with that story?
Well, my teacher showed it to the
principal, who had a secretary type it, then
had several hundred copies mimeographed
and stapled as if it were a real book…with
my name on the front cover. It was
distributed to the 4 th & 5 th grade classes
throughout the county and gave me my first
tastes of authorship and celebrity.
O KAY , I’ M HOOKED . W HAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT ?
I continued to write for the school
newspapers, but my real love was the
fantastic music of the mid-1960s. I’d been
taking guitar lessons every Saturday since I
was seven. By high school I was light years
ahead of the average strummer and those
P AGE 20
W RITERS ’ T RICKS OF THE T RADE