There's this term people use today: meta. It's all over the place. Metagaming. Metaverse. Metadata. Metatags. These are in addition to the old words like metabolic, metastasize, metamorphosis. You can meta almost any damn thing. It's so easy, I just made this essay meta by addressing you.Yes, you. The reader, the one who's got eyes on this page. See, I'm the guy who's the main character in most of these crazy-ass Enchanted Forest State Forest stories, but right now I'm conversing with you directly. That's not supposed to happen.On TV, it's called breaking the fourth wall. When the characters yap out at the reader from the page, the word for it is metafiction.That's not just a snappy line, either. Stop and think for a sec: here you are, reading this book. The book is about me and my...experiences...here in the EFSF. It's told in a first-person point-of-view, which means you experience the story through my senses, thoughts, and perceptions. I'm the one relating all that, making it so you get to be me for a while. Sure, there's this Nik guy's name on the book, but anybody who writes stories in any format will tell you there are aspects of themselves in every character they make up.In that light, meta loses at lot of fancy status. If we keep putting the blowtorch to the word, we find it melts into slag, same as anything else. A part of me lives in Nik. A part of Nik lives in me. That's a fact, not a concept.It matters here, too. Visitors see me in action, the only question they have is, How'd you wind up doing this crazy job?The answer to that is a few hundred pages, minimum. The novel Trollbooth does an excellent job of hitting the main points. On the other hand, the way some folks mean the question is, How did I get here? How did I wind up leading an interspecies crew of rejects, fuckups, and out-of-the-box thinkers? How the hell, in other words, did I get myself installed as a sheriff with an actual posse?That's what these tales are for. They're short - shorter, at least. A couple are about me. The last one isn't, but it sets up a bunch of shit that gets tossed into my fan later.Maybe you're here for origins, or maybe you're here for depth. Could be, you're the one looking for clues to my whole body of work - that sleuthing shit some people love to do with books. All of that's here. It's the truth, too, even if around here, the truth is often as malleable as it is meta.