For a moment, no one moved or spoke. Then the phouka sat down hard in the middle of the path and sank his face into both hands.

"That," he said at last, "was what is called an unneccessary risk. If you continue like this I shall be the first immortal to die of heart failure."

From the introduction to War for the Oaks by Emma Bull:

Ideally, works of fiction don't need to be explained. When I see one of those scholarly and well-crafted essays that always seem to precede a volume of Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker, I skip it. Yes, I do. If it looks promising, I come back and read it when I'm done with the fiction. But I'd rather not know beforehand that a character is based on the author's brother, or that the author had just been cruelly rejected by his childhood sweetheart when he began chapter 10. I like biography; but Charlotte Bronte isn't Jane Eyre, and Louisa Alcott isn't Jo March, and I don't want to be lured into thinking otherwise if the author doesn't want me to.

I wonder sometimes how authors would feel if they read the introductions that spring up in front of their works after they're too dead to say anything about them. What if that character had nothing to do with the author's brother but was actually based on the writer's dad's stories about what it was like to grow up with Uncle Oscar? What if the author was rejected by his childhood sweetheart, but it was secretly something of a relief to him by that point, though he never said so to anyone? And does chapter 10 read differently if the reader knows that?

It's all just too darn risky, this business of introductions. If I weren't me, I'm sure I'd be working up to declaring here that "Bull's experience as a professional musician clearly informed War for the Oaks." But since I am me, I get to dodge that bullet. I'd had very little experience as a professional musician when I wrote this book. I was extrapolating from things I'd seen other people do, things I'd read and heard. War for the Oaks was written from the backside of the monitor speakers, as it were, and it wasn't until after the book was published and Cats Laughing came together (Adam Stemple, Lojo Russo, Bill Colsher, Steve Brust, and me, playing original electric folk/jazz/space music) that the novel became at all autobiographical. (By the time I became half of the goth-folk due the Flash Girls, I was pretty used to the involvment of supernatural forces in one's band. Half kidding.)

But just knowing a few facts about the chronology of the author's life doesn't make introduction-writing safe. Writing a novel may be much like childbirth: once the end product's age is measured in double digits, the painful and messy details of its origin are a little fuzzy. My firstborn book is a teenager, and its very existence makes it hard for me to remember what life was like before it existed.

And as with teenagers, there's a point at which your book leaves the nest. What War for the Oaks means to me matters less, now that it's done and out of my hands, than what it means to whoever's reading it. A book makes intimate friends with people its author will never meet. I'm not part of those people's lives; Eddi McCandry is, and the Phouka, and Willy Silver, and the Queen of Air and Darkness. How can I describe or explain that relationship, when I'm not here to see it?

Here's what I can safely, honestly tell you about the story that follows this introduction:

I still love this book. I still believe in the things it says. When someone tells me, "War for the Oaks is one of my favorite books," it still makes me happy and proud.

Those are things only I could tell you; no writer of introductions, no matter how insightful, could deduce them from the text of the novel or the details of my life. But for everything else, the novel can, and should, speak for itself, and you relationship with it is as true as anyone else's, including mine. All I can do now is step aside and say, "I'd like you to meet my story."

I hope the two of you hit it off.

Emma's own website. Also has information about her husband Will Shetterly, another fabulous author. I'd put up an excerpt from his stuff except right now I'm typing with part of a fingernail ripped off, and it hurts very, very much.

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