"BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical" . . "New York (N.Y.)" . . "HISTORY / United States / State & Local / General" . . "HISTORY / United States / State & Local / New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)" . . "HUMOR / General" . . . "David Goodwillie recounts the experiences he had after moving to New York in the hopes of launching his writing career, and falling into one implausible job after another." . . . . . . . . . "Electronic books" . "Seemed like a good idea at the time" . . . . . "Electronic books"@en . . . . . "Seemed like a good idea at the time a memoir"@en . . . . . . "Biography" . . . . . . . . . . "Fresh out of college and following a brief and disastrous stint playing minor league baseball, David Goodwillie moves to New York intent on making his mark as a writer. Arriving in Manhattan in the mid-nineties, Goodwillie quickly falls into one implausible job after another. He becomes a private investigator, imagining himself as a gumshoe, a hired gun-only to realize that he's more adept at bungling cases than at solving them. When, in his stint as a freelance journalist, he unveils the Mafia in a magazine expos & eacute;, he succeeds only in becoming a target of their wrath. As a copywriter for a sports auction house, he imagines documenting the great histories hidden in priceless artifacts but finds himself forced to write about a lock of Mickey Mantle's hair. Even when he seems to break through, somehow becoming the sports expert at Sotheby's auction house-appearing on major news networks, raking in a hefty salary-he's lured away by the promise of Internet millions ... just in time for the dot-com crash. Teeming with the vibrancy of a city in hyperdrive, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time recounts a dizzying and enthralling search for authenticity in a cynical, superficial-and suddenly dangerous-age. In his heartbreaking and hilarious struggle to become a big-city writer, Goodwillie becomes something more: an important voice of the lost generation he so elegantly describes."@en . "2000 - 2099" . . "BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs." . . . . "HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA)" . .