Brandon Tietz is our own Chuck Palahniuk…whatever that means

“I missed a lot of my 20s sitting behind my computer,” says 28-year-old Kansas City novelist Brandon Tietz. “My friends got sick of me saying, ‘I can’t go out tonight, sorry. Gotta work on the book.'”

“The book” is Out of Touch, a dark novel whose main character is literally numb to bodily sensation. It took Tietz two years to write and would have taken two more to shop around to agents and publishing houses, but Tietz went another route. He paid to have the book published through a vanity press, otherwise known as the biggest no-no in the world of novel-pimping.

The crazy thing is, it worked.