It took author, journalist and punk rock music enthusiast Jim Ruland years to flesh out the idea for his latest novel, “Make It Stop.”
The writing process included plenty of starts and stops as he was distracted by other projects, like co-writing “Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion.” That biography, written over two and a half years and with dozens of interviews with current and former members of the iconic Woodland Hills-based band, was published in 2020. He was also working on adapting his 2016 Keith Morris (Circle Jerks and Black Flag) biography, “My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor” into a screenplay.
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But he wanted to get back to this novel.
“I had to pay the bills doing other things and working on other books,” Ruland said during a phone interview from his home in San Diego, just before “Make It Stop” was published by Los Angeles publisher Rare Bird Books last month.
“One thing I didn’t see coming in my life was to be able to make a living off of writing punk rock books,” Ruland, who previously served in the U.S. Navy, continued. “Who knew punk rock would pay better than writing fiction? For me, that’s certainly been the case. But I felt like I had this good idea of these dysfunctional vigilantes and this large cast of characters that are going up against society. I just didn’t feel like the drafts of the novel I was coming up with were living up to the promise of the original idea.”
In his story, these “dysfunctional vigilantes,” known as Make It Stop — a brood of recovering drug, alcohol and sex addicts — work together to break patients out of corrupt Southern California detox and rehab centers that won’t release them until their bills are fully paid. Though a work of imagination, Ruland has some real-life experience to fuel the fiction. He’s been sober for 14 years and there are components in the book, he…
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