Well, here it is. It begins like this:
The stories in this collection were not written in the order in which they appear here; they certainly were not conceived as part of a continuous narrative. However, I have decided to bring them together because of the chronology and themes which, it turns out, run through them. Please bear in mind that this is in no way a novella or novelette. It is a collection of short stories, and each story stands or falls on its own, as short stories must.
I find that the more I write, the more personal the writing becomes. I am putting more of myself into the work. This is not to say that my stories are autobiographical (although, admittedly, one of the stories in this collection is based entirely on something that happened, more than twenty years ago). There are moments of personal experience in the book, but I have used those moments, those brief scenes from memory, as the basis for something else. Exactly which elements from my life are contained in these stories is of no consequence. Readers may wonder, 'Did that really happen?', but in the final analysis it doesn't matter. They are Wee Fictions. They mean what they mean. And they will mean something different for each person who stumbles across them.
I suspect non-writers worry more about stuff like that. I don’t know you well and so I’m not going to know what’s based on fact or what’s completely fictitious and I prefer it that way. I’m reading a book just now where I do know quite a bit about the author and I can just feel the autobiographical elements seeping out of the page and I’m finding it very hard to connect to the book as a work of fiction in its own right. She’s just done what we all do, used settings and happenings familiar to herself to improve the book’s sense of reality but I feel like I’m reading the novel wearing x-ray vision specs.
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