Inauspicious

Edgar Allan Poe lived in Fordham, in the Bronx, just a dungeon wet and dangerously slippery stone’s throw from where spent my youth. I sheepishly count him among my early influences and freely admit to being a Poe substitute at best. I read my Poe from smelly library books and already crumbling, second-hand bookstore paperbacks, as seemed fitting.

Charles Adams was equally important to the early arrangement of my neurons, his cartoons enlivening the issues of The New Yorker, that in turn graced the magazine strewn end-table at our family physician’s office. I was exposed to them often as I visited often. Come for the chronic breathing diagnosis, stay, for the magazines.

Science fiction films filled my head with what, compared to let’s say the FATHER KNOWS BEST television show, sounded to me like possibilities. Life on a hostile planet, crawling with costumed iguanas seemed far more likely than one spent in a big house, in financial comfort and surrounded by a clearly well adjusted, loving family.

A lot happened since my childhood in the Bronx, but nothing to dissuade me from doing this thing, from eventually writing this book, so why go there?

You cannot imagine how long it took to craft the initial 1000 stories from which this collection derives. I can however. In time, I whittled that bulk down to 421 tales, ran away from the project for two years and then finally, edited the stories to the nearly 300 you will hopefully soon read. During this period I read selections at eateries, galleries and theatres and not one audience member every tried to escape, which I interpreted as encouragement. I might have spent the time it took to produce this book learning how to invest, or working a lucrative side-hustle, but no.

I hope to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of forty to 250,000 copies of HAVBD. If you put my feet to the fire and given the stories in question, why shouldn’t you want to, I would foresee selling forty eight in all. Yes, that sounds right, forty eight copies. 

So here we find ourselves. I have written a book and you may take the time to read it, so thank, avoid meteors and keep in touch.