"Weather" permitting, I write just about every day, and live for the "Aha!" moment that comes when I understand what a piece wants to be. I'm happy to say that in recent years I have gotten better and better at the art of distinguishing the true "Aha!" moment from the false. I have published personal and critical essays, but regard that as a run-up and sidelight the fiction that is my main passion. Crazily, I have five or six quite diverse book-projects in the works right now, all of which may be said (donning the critical hat here to characterize my own work) to trade in sly intellectual comedy informed by an extensive reading of the tradition. But then again my exertions might not be all that crazy: two of these works are close to completion, and that only a year after I first made the same declaration. One of them is a collection of absurdists stories or "fantasias" about the NFL; the other a novella that combines banana plantations, game shows, Botticelli, Frankenstein, and Book of Genesis. I am a member of Eugene's Prose and Cons circle of writers.