Welcome to my website!
I'm Martin L. Buxbaum, author of Negotiations with the Sniper: Book One: The Seas of Athanasia.

About the Author
Martin L. Buxbaum has a special gift; he’s totally insane, but he’s the good kind of insane: Irreverent, sarcastic, wet your pants funny and darkly cynical, ofttimes all at once. Author, poet, songwriter, underground cartoonist, non-practicing Druid, Martin long ago divorced himself from the hoi polloi and established his Cult of One. Being insane enough to question the accepted norms of the day, Martin spent the better part of his life pulled between what he was told to do and what he knew to be right. He was on the front lines of the anti-war protests and a Vietnam Era vet. He was a lay pastor in a full-gospel church and a born-again atheist. Twice married, twice divorced, father of five, he worked as an auto mechanic, a chef, a fireman and a host of other blue-collar professions until he finally amassed a wealth of vivid experiences and learned about life from the inside out—then he went to college.

Funny story, here’s this huge, scarred and mangled, old, redneck-looking guy sitting in a classroom full of young students and no one takes him seriously. His English professor gave out the first major writing assignment and told the class to write about whatever they feel and don’t worry about the content. In her thirty years of teaching she’s seen it all, and nothing will surprise her. When the papers were turned back to the class, she first retracted her statement and then read Martin’s essay out loud to a stunned and silent class. Fifteen years later, she still uses his essays as examples. His deep, powerful, no-holes barred style of writing hits the reader like a two by four between the eyes.Negotiations with the Sniper is the first book in a planned four-part series.

About my latest book, Negotiations with the Sniper: Book One: The Seas of Athanasia

Mason Allyon Dwennon is mad— both angry with the world mad and strapped in a rubber room while wearing a Napoleon hat mad. Diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic, Mason exists as a self-exiled pariah, skirting the fringes of humanity as the sole member of his Square Peg Society. Divorced, alone, bitter, depressed, haunted by voices and visions and on the verge of suicide, Mason experiences a major psychotic episode and is hospitalized. There he is finally diagnosed as having dissociative identity disorder and found to have at least eight different and distinct personalities.

Negotiations with the Sniper is a first person account of Mason’s ordeal. The story details a three-year free association session with his imaginary psychiatrist (A wise-cracking, life-size plastic Barbie head who speaks with a thick German accent and refers to himself as Dr. Carl). As the story progresses, each of Mason’s eight personalities reveals him or herself in their own voices as they search for the elusive something responsible for all of his suffering. To compound his problems, Mason continuously floats in and out of fugue states and has to reconcile missing periods of time. All too frequently, his habitués are less-than well behaved during his mental lapses. In Mason’s own words, “Many’s the time I’ve had to stand before a screaming, slavering, red-faced employer, manager, shop foreman, neighbor, police officer, parent, sibling, spouse, in-law, teacher, first sergeant, nun, etc. and bear the tirade meant for one of my compadres, while unable to offer any reasonable excuse for my actions.”

Despite the sinister allusion to a concealed killer, the title actually refers to the cruel, thoughtless and ofttimes well-intentioned actions of those persons most influential in young Mason’s life, responsible for triggering his psychotic responses.