Chapter 1 – ‘Round Midnight | Chapter 2 – Ornithology | Chapter 3 – I’ll Be Seeing You | Chapter 4 – My Melancholy Baby | Chapter 5  – Broadway |Chapter 6 – My Funny Valentine |
Chapter 7 – Some Other Blues | Chapter 8 – Maiden Voyage | Chapter 9 – The Feeling of Jazz |
Chapter 10 – Lover Man | Chapter 11 – Just Friends | Chapter 12 – Someone to Watch Over Me |
Chapter 13 – All The Things You Are |Chapter 14 – There Will Never Be Another You
Chapter 15 – Karma | Chapter 16 – Alone Together

The point of Imaginary Bebop was to take a character from my first novel, The Host, center the action around his first year of college, and infuse it with a lot of my own struggles with alcohol.

Because there are many times in my past I am not proud of, many, many drunken disasters that not only ate holes in my character, but ruined my reputation at the same time. It took a lot of work to build myself back up, to beat my drinking problem, and I’ve successfully done all of that. But the stories, my stories remain.

A lot of them ended up in Imaginary Bebop, filtered through fiction, often warped to advance plot and character, and even amplified to make a better story, but under all of those shrouds hides an outpouring of honesty, which is why I was able to write the short novel so quickly.

The character is Irwin Jones,  a young saxophone prodigy, and the story takes place during his first year of college at an esteemed music conservatory in New York City. Irwin had just come from an upstate town, where he’d witnessed a murder only a few months before he left for school. Before that, he’d never touched a drink.

I actually wrote Imaginary Bebop as part of the 2005 National Novel Writing Month, in which you sign up to write a 50,000-word novel in one month for no prize at all other then the journey and a sense of accomplishment. At the time, I thought it would be a great way to force this story, which had been floating in my head for years, out of hiding. It did, the plan worked. Once I got started I couldn’t stop, and 13 days later I had 53,000 words and a brand new book.

My favorite part of the story is the point of view I used to tell it. Imaginary Bebop is told by Irwin’s conscience, a narrator that allowed the storytelling to have a 3rd-person distance from the character while also having a 1st-person prejudice. The narrator is Irwin, a distant one, the voice in his head that he has chosen to ignore.