1. Excuses & Apologies
Haunted by crush landings in however modest try at giving fantasy a free rein, aggravated, on top of that, by being all thumbs at spinning yarn, I am cornered and left out any other option but telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In other words, no merry sallies outside the straitjacket of my personal experience. Such, muchly rueful, limitations cancel any hope to ever reach the stardom of the literary conveyer-line celebrities bell-jingling as requested by the bestselling practices at the fantasy, science, thriller, mystery, action—each and every, you name it—twist of fiction in the field… Born to crawl, go and fly a kite.
Still—poor, yet proud—I hereby declare that not anything at all would fit under your skin glib and smoothly, neither would you offhand pull off any fancy whatsoever, like, walking thru the walls and/or over the waters, not to mention the shameful inclination for the unhealthy recreational addiction to sucking strangers’ blood in totally unsanitary environs. (A sigh.)
2. Structure & Texture & Content
Sprung from its lengthened title, the novel goes thru this here Foreword, sort of, to be followed by the epigraph—curt, but to the point—and then flows into the narration of not excessive terseness—4 books, all in all—where some passages might arise reasonable doubts whether my pledge of the forthcoming truth was made in good faith.
So again: my objective is keeping true to life as close as I can. But then, not every truth is met with a warm hug, there’s no guarantee from someone tossing up their back and yelling, “Bullshit! Not a chance of selling that to me!” My most amicable, immediate advice to hard-duty skeptics is to put The Rascally Romance off until they, hopefully, got it that even truth can have, now and then, surprises up its sleeve to make a Holy Cow or 2 moo and moo from envy. And if the truth of this here observation stays dim for some obtuse dunce, then it’s my turn to envy their blest innocence.
