Smoke And Mirrors

Snow, Glass, Apples

This is another story that began life in Neil Philip's The Penguin Book of English Folktales. I was reading it in the bath, and I read a story I must have read a thousand times before. (I still have the illustrated version of the story I owned when I was three.) But that thousand and first reading was the charm, and I started to think about the story all back to front and wrong way around. It sat in my head for a few weeks and then, on a plane, I began to write the story in longhand. When the plane landed, the story was three-quarters done, so I checked into my hotel and sat in a chair in a corner of my room and just kept writing until it was done.

It was published by DreamHaven Press in a limited-edition booklet that benefited the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (an organization that defends the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers and retailers). Poppy Z. Brite reprinted it in her anthology Love in Vein II.

I like to think of this story as a virus. Once you've read it, you may never be able to read the original story in the same way again.

I'd like to thank Greg Ketter, whose DreamHaven Press published several of these stories in Angels and Visitations, a small-press miscellany of fiction, book reviews, journalism, and stuff I'd written, and who published others as two chapbooks to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

I want to thank the multitude of editors who commissioned, accepted and reprinted the various stories in this book, and to all the beta-testers (you know who you are) who put up with my handing them, faxing them or e-mailing them stories, and who read what I sent them and told me, often in no uncertain terms, what needed fixing. To them all, my thanks. Jennifer Hershey shepherded this book from an idea to reality with patience, charm and editorial wisdom. I cannot thank her enough. My thanks also to Doug Young for his patience and help in preparing the Headline edition of this book.

Each of these stories is a reflection of or on something and is no more solid than a breath of smoke. They're messages from Looking-Glass Land and pictures in the shifting clouds: smoke, and mirrors, that's all they are. But I enjoyed writing them, and they, in their turn, I like to imagine, appreciate being read.

Welcome.

Neil Gaiman