Since adolescence, I’ve been crazy about reading and writing very short stories, but I only tried practicing the one-sentence form after reading a great collection of these in the 2004 book BLOOD AND SOAP by the author Linh Dinh. I especially liked his brief tale about a condemned man who wakes up on the morning of his execution to watch the sun rising “for the last, and the first, time.” Kind of says it all, huh?

“Get in fast, get out faster, and make every word pop”—that’s my credo for this one-sentence story business. I love that there’s no room for anything but the essentials of each tale, which gives readers a lot of space to fill in the proverbial blanks as they see fit. The challenges were 1: knowing what sentence structure would best serve each story, and 2: avoiding any digressions which, no matter how compelling to me, would rob the tale of its forward thrust.

Once I decided on having things recur in order to tie the book together (the way that that rug in The Big Lebowski “really ties the room together,”) all the familiar settings, characters, and themes started percolating on their own, as if my subconscious mind agreed with the program and ran with it. Of my two main characters, Map and Pryna, I’m much fonder of Pryna. But of course I made her easier for myself to be fond of.

There was no specific research process for my stories. I’ve always enjoyed reading many kinds of non-fiction, and whenever a fun fact would show up and fire my imagination, I would wonder if I could conjure from it a one-sentence story. The resulting such story was my for-better- or-worse answer.

Because I love music, all kinds of music—including the occasional (well, very occasional) polka number—it was inevitable that music and musicians found their way into my tales. I’m especially glad that I make reference in one of them to my friend Bob Neuwirth, who was a wonderful painter as well as a great songwriter—and a top-notch storyteller in his own right. I enjoyed writing about Jim Morrison, too. Not only am I a longtime Doors fan, but Morrison is also a favorite artist of one of my favorite writers, Tom Robbins.

When I was eight or nine years old, I met and and spoke with and got the autograph of the cowboy movie icon John Wayne, an encounter which remained a thrilling memory—I felt as though I’d gotten to hang out with Zeus or Odin or some other benevolent god. Then I grew up (to the extent that I have—let readers judge the truth of that statement) and I learned what toxically bigoted and obnoxious opinions the Duke had harbored and spread around. My angry feelings toward John Wayne (so Zeus is evil) have since grown more complicated (Zeus, like most human beings, is really just a greater-or-lesser mix of good and evil). So fame, I’ve come to realize, is an especially rich subject to write about in this celebrity-mad world we’ve made for ourselves.

While editing my book, I noticed that about one-third of the stories are autobiographical, one-third are entirely invented, and one-third are a blend of the two. (Of course, I’ll never tell which are which! Only my Hungarian wife Vera knows the truth…) The blended kind, where I tossed certain true-life experiences into the Cuisinart of my imagination and hit the power button, was by far my favorite kind to write, mainly because the results usually surprised me. And if I was surprised, I figured that readers might be surprised, pleasantly surprised, as well.

Being Jewish-American, I couldn’t help but be influenced by my background. And for decades I have been wanting to pastiche the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina by writing “All happy Bar Mitzvahs are alike, but each unhappy Bar Mitzvah is unhappy in its own way.”

Actually, the title “Goodbye, My Book!” comes from a line in Nabokov’s early novel The Gift, but “Chaucerian” sounds sweet to my ears. One never knows how people will respond to one’s work—now, later, or very later. I’d love for some citizen of the 23rd Century to come across my book and take a break from whatever hellscape is in motion then to chill out and read my so-called stories for people with a limited attention span. (What might attention spans be like in the 23rd Century? Yikes!) One hopes, always, to please. And no matter who reads my book, and why, and how, I’m simply pleased that it exists. As the terrific novelist Harry Crews (another departed friend of mine) said about a book of his own, “Before me, this was not. Because of me, this is.”