I’m presently working on two books of stories. Had a Good Time is built around my extensive collection of picture postcards from the first two decades of the twentieth century. I’ve collected these cards not so much for the pictures on the front (although the images are quite interesting, too) but for the messages written on the backs. Before telephones were common, people would sometimes pour their hearts out on the postcards they wrote. I have a wonderful collection of these very brief but highly intense and suggestive messages from people long since dead. So I’ve chosen my favorite ones and I’m picking up the voices off the cards and writing the fully imagined stories.The other book began when I visited Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) a few years back. I went to the War Crimes Museum and saw a guillotine that the French used until their departure in 1954. I read about the guillotine and discovered that during its heyday at the end of the nineteenth century there was much speculation (and even experimentation) over the possibility of enough blood remaining in the brain to sustain consciousness for a time after decapitation. My book will have two epigraphs, one from a French doctor expressing his belief that consciousness actually persisted for one and one-half minutes, and the other from a hand-book of speech pointing out that in a heightened state of emotion people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. So I’m filling the book with very short first-person stories—each exactly 240 words (1.5 times 160)—that will represent the final outburst of internal monologue in a severed head. (I’m doing both famous and obscure—John the Baptist, Marie Antoinette, and Nicole Brown Simpson as well as, for example, Claude Messner, a homeless man who laid his neck on a train track.) For a time I was calling the book Talking Heads, but cooler heads prevailed and now it’s Severance.