“As noted in the entry for Bright Shadow, I am often asked “How long does it take you to write a book?” The answer is, about a year. But it can vary. A lot. S.O.R. Losers took me one day to write. It has never happened before, or since, and I don’t think it’s likely to happen again. How did it happen in this book? When I was in high school I played on our school soccer team. I was goalie. We were terrible. How terrible? We never won a game. My own kids—who had become good soccer players—loved to hear how bad their dad—me—was. So I told them many a story about how we always managed to lose. They thought it very funny.

“One day I decided to write it all up as a novel. Since I had—in a way—practiced telling the tale of our terrible team so often, it just flowed out, game by game—in one day.”

Is losing funny? Read the book and let me know.

My regular mode of thought is novels, so I usually don’t write short stories unless I’m asked to write one. Finding them a real challenge to write, I begin by reading many, so as to reset my narrative grooves. Curiously enough, my short stories are very much more auto-biographical than my novels—or at least they are most often based on something that really happened to me. Consider “Scout’s Honor,” which appears in the anthology, When I Was Your Age. Readers find it very funny, even absurd. Yet, much of it really happened to me, including the incident in which a can of beans is opened with a hatchet. I have no plans to write more, unless I’m asked. But then again . . .