When I wrote A Year with the Hoopers, my only goal was to be as funny as possible. Who needs plots, richly-developed characters, or the human condition? Not me! Before doing any other work on the book, I wrote more than 2,000 gags: one-liners, jokes, aphorisms, cartoons, and anything else I could think of. About 70 of those gags wound up in the book.

What was I to do with the remaining 1,930 gags? For almost all of them, the answer was painfully simple: hold my nose, erase them off my hard drive, and pretend they'd never existed. I put a few of them in short stories and some others in screenplays. Yet a stubborn contingent of 129 gags lingered.

Now, about five years later—as I was purging my files for an entirely unrelated reason—I stumbled upon the remaining gags again. I read them and liked them. And I thought, “Why don't I put them in a free ebook and share them with the world?” And I also thought, “Maybe publishing these gags will encourage a million people to buy A Year with the Hoopers! I'll be rich!”

Benevolence and greed are a powerful combination. Thus this book was born. It's short but it's free, and you may find a laugh or two in it.