Because writing Dear Babalu was easy, and because one of my most thoughtful readers said it was truer to the real me than was Lucifer’s Revenge, I began to wonder if I were a short story writer, not a novelist. So I wrote a couple of short stories and submitted them to magazines. (Already have one rejection.) Then I started another short story and got stuck. Today, after a walk along the waterfront trail, I realized that I wanted to write a novel, a literary novel, the only provisos being that it was readable and that it was funny. So after I got home from my walk, I renewed writing The Aliens of Prickly Pear, the novel I had put aside. I am posting chapter 1, under Folder.