Who is Venicedude?
Venicedude is author, accountant and avatar of the curious Eric James Miller.
As a resident of Venice Beach, California for many years he remains inspired and hopelessly in love with the many different moods of Abbot Kinney’s famous city by the sea. However, a conflux of eolian circumstances forced him to move away from Venice in 2005 and though he will always consider himself a “venicedude” at heart, he now makes his new happy home in Henderson, Nevada.
Born in the 20th century in Washington, D.C., Mr.Miller escaped from inside the beltway and went to Macalester College in St.Paul, MN. Double majoring in English and Accounting, immediately after college he had the good sense to begin supporting his writing career by accepting a position with Price Waterhouse. After several years doing an excellent job counting other people’s money (and writing the first of many comprehensive procedure manuals for clients), he moved to Europe, living primarily in Greece, Switzerland and Berlin while working odd jobs more for the experience than the colorful local currencies.
Returning to the U.S., he found a studio in Manhattan and split his time working as a systems administrator for a large Ikea-like retailer and as a business manager for Deerfoot Yachts. But even when the business manager position became full-time and required frequent travel, he still found time to keep working on a novel he had started writing in Europe (a dreadful piece of sci-fi schlok based on a series of dreams he had while in a volunteer dream research project. yikes!).
When it looked like the Deerfoot offices were going to leave their cozy Greenwich Village space and move to Florida, friends and business contacts in the television & film industry beckoned and he landed on the Left Coast working in the finance department for New World Entertainment (”Wonder Years“, “Tour of Duty“, “The Chris Elliot Show” and “The Bold and Beautiful” among others.)
The finance, licensing, distribution and royalty accounting side of the entertainment business more than paid the bills and L.A. was a fun city to explore. But he still made time to write despite all the glitz, glam and distractions Hollywood had to offer. In 1996 he even got his first novel “The Metaphysics of Nudity” published through a local small press.
A long and productive association with contract management leader Saturn Software started not long after that. Product installations, system conversions, on-call product support and sales presentations were both challenging and gratifying. But after many years working on both the business and the creative side of numerous short films, commercials and b-movies, the creative side of the television & film industry eventually broke his heart.
Fortunately, near the end of his soured love affair with Holly-weird, he met his beautiful (in more ways than one!) wife Laura. They enjoyed the sanity of working together at tax software giant CCH for several years until, through her wisdom, they eventually escaped the pervasive snarl of L.A. and made a new home for themselves (and their then one year old golden retriever) just outside Las Vegas.
Now they happily reside in Henderson, Nevada where Mr. Miller writes part-time for e-zine Living-Las-Vegas and continues to work as a financial consultant specializing in Quickbooks, MAS90 and MS Dynamics. What he hopes will be his second novel and the beginning of a sleuth mystery series, “For Rent: Dangerous Paradise” begins with a missing person’s case set inside a fictionalized version of his old apartment building in Venice. It has already attracted some interest from several agents and publishers and is nearing the final, agonizing throes of completion.
Poke him on Facebook to see what he’s doing today.
