"Dot" letter: "The stories are always theirs..."

Saturday 10/11/25

As the title of this entry says.

It's about twenty past six on Saturday morning here on 10/11, and I wanted to send you something. I've been meaning to print this out and mail it to you. Due to its length, I figured it'd be easier for you to read that way, but perhaps you have a printer handy. I also have a few others I've wanted to send you as well, and this morning I figured I'd just go ahead with this one here, and send what I send in the mail later on, and perhaps I'll include this again. 

This is a story. It's fiction. I want to be very clear about that. It's the second story--in terms of the running order--of a book I'm doing called There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. All of the stories in this book are about women or girls or both. Quite a few are told by women or girls. 

The story attached is called "Dot." This isn't the Dot that we knew. Dot's sister isn't your mother and my grandmother. The narrator isn't me. The narrator's mother isn't my mother. 

But what you could say is that I was inspired by people we both have known. After that, it's a separate journey, a separate thing. It's not memoir or autobiography or biography. "I" and "me" isn't Colin. The characters are their own people. They tell me their stories. The stories are always theirs and never mine. 

I don't normally work this way, though, insofar as an overlapping name from "real" life and some overlapping circumstances. I guess I don't have a way I normally work. Each work is different, and how it comes about is different. This actually began as something else, and a former professor of mine, having seen that something else, referenced the Willie Winkle part, and said that should be a story. He was on to something. I re-angled myself, and set off down a different path. 

That was a few years ago. I wrote that story, considered it done. Then a few more years passed, and I looked at it again and saw it needed much more work, as if I was beginning again...a third time, in essence. It got longer, more developed. I knew I had something special. I just had to see it out, and I did.

Writing doesn't get better than this. Art doesn't get better than this. I don't believe anything does. 

It takes as long as it takes. Or as long as it doesn't take. But that was a lot of effort and energy. As per our conversation the other day, this is what these people won't let the world see. This is what they don't want anyone else to know that I can do. Among many other things. Which I do every single day of my life, but with different works. All of them different from each other, save in how good they are. 

So with my prefatory remarks concluded, have a read of "Dot." I think you'll really like it.