I never intended for these to be novelettes. I don't know about you, if you happen to be a writer, but I write a short story with a guideline of intended length. Sometimes they end up longer, a lot longer, than I planned. A novel is 40,000 words or more. A novella is 17,500-40,000. A novelette is 7500-17,500. The Prostitute, the Crazy Pimp, and the Counterfeiter, The Deconstruction of Love, and Rooming House Purgatory all happen to fall within the length category of novelette. I thought it was a good idea to compile them into one volume. It wasn't initially planned to compile them, as I was writing them, but in my mind they fit together. Probably because they're based on me at various periods of my life. In the book they aren't in chronological order. The chronological order is The Deconstruction of Love, Rooming House Purgatory, and then The Prostitute, the Crazy Pimp, and the Counterfeiter if you wanted to read them that way, but I don't really think it matters. I don't think it's necessary to read any one story to understand the others. Actually, writing myself as the protagonist in each one, I looked at myself as a completely different character in each one just like I look at myself as a different person now than say twenty, or even ten years ago. The question is: how close am I to the protagonist? If someone, who happens to know me, reads this book and thinks I'm not or they're not as I've described, and the story is a fabrication of my imagination, I don't care. Because, as Charles Bukowski said, "I'm the hero of my shit, baby."