The book Dilemmahs 'n Dealin's my life and times is a 2013 autobiography and purported self-help book by musician and businessman Jeremiah Creosote, a reflective collection of personal stories and essays chronicling his rise to stardom and eventual troubles in music, business, the media and law.
It was largely written during Creosote's time in rehab in 2010, shortly after he'd filed for bankruptcy. Many of the books critics claimed the timing of the book's writing and release pointed to yet another money-making scheme by Creosote in an attempt to ease the ever greater financial woes. In late 2013 Creosote admitted that was 'undeniably a factor' and pointed out if people felt that way about it they 'shouldn't have bought the buggerin' thing'. It also drew on his journal entries from the late 1980s during Creosote's peak of international fame. These comprised almost 500 pages in doodles, song lyrics, bass tableture and political polemics. Originally he submitted a 'great tome' to the publishers which contained masses of such scribbles, directly scanned and copied from his journal, which were often illegible or simply banal. This was on top of the 350 pages of present day writing. The document was so long it became known in the publishing industries' inner circles as 'Creosote's Doomsday Book', during its time being sent to different publishers. Due to the amount of images included it regularly crashed file readers and was otherwise highly avoided by lower down employees who feared being delegated the task of actually sifting through its mass.
Creosote was finally persuaded in by his agent to create a more concise book drawing on the highlights, transcribing passages of his journals to print, while including pictures of the original pages where needs be. Most of the workload for the book was ultimately this stage of summary and ordering of the journal entries into some sort of chronology. This was accomplished with a team of writers between 2012 - 2013. Ultimately the book combined Creosote's modern day biography with his older writings seamlessly and was around 400 pages.
Mr Creosote also claimed the book could be used as a an 'extended self help pamphlet' by 'upcoming musicians and entrepreneurs - a guide on where not to go wrong!'. This led to a minor dispute with the publisher Hachette Livre, since Creosote made such claims after its release during a promotional tour, and it was not the basis they had agreed to promote the book on. They particularly feared public criticism and mockery for publishing a book which made claims for good business advice written by one of the most famously disastrous businessmen in modern times. Ultimately Hachette Livre could find no clear breach of contract over the matter and resentfully allowed Creosote to promote the book in this way, despite mounting jeers from the newspapers.