It started in 1980...
n 1980, when I was 23, I did not understand that there’d been a big surge in the novel-publishing business during the past three decades, and that meant that a book could be perfectly terrible and still come out in hardback. I’d bought a novel with a promising title in a second-hand shop, and one Sunday afternoon I tried the first chapter and kept reading, thinking I surely would get to the well-written, interesting part soon. I said out loud, in my empty apartment, “I coul d write a better book than this.” No planning, no fear, no experience. I wrote this novel, Olé, Baby (originally titled Tutti Frutti ) over one very hot summer when I lived in a small apartment without air conditioning in Bloomington, Indiana. For reasons too boring to explain here, the book came out many years later as a spiral-bound chapbook, and not many of those, either. Now here it is, in online form. I see that it lacks polish, but I like it anyway. The plot is simple: in the late 1950s, te...