For anyone who’d like a free taste of Stardust, PS Publishing have generously posted the first story in the collection, ‘B-Side’, as the latest in their regular ‘Something for the Weekend’ feature at their website. The story will be free to read online all this week.
‘B-Side’ had an interesting genesis. It started life as a much shorter story, and the ending was starkly eliptical, even for me. I was never entirely satisfied with it, and when I eventually showed it to Chris he said he felt the ending came out of nowhere and that I’d have to do something about it. I remember the discussion well (we were stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 at the time, so not the best venue for a reasoned exchange) – knowing there was more than a sackful of sense in what Chris was saying, yet at the same time feeling protective of my story and not wanting to lose the threatening sense of mystery I knew it should contain.
I did the best thing I could think of in the circumstances – I left the story entirely alone and did not return to it until I felt I could see it objectively, without any of the attendant baggage of who had been ‘right’ about that ending. Letting work ‘rest’ in this way always has the constructive advantage of dissociation – as if it’s someone else’s work you’re reading, and therefore much easier to criticise honestly – and when a few months later I did read ‘B-Side’ through again it seemed immediately obvious to me that what I had was the bones of a story, the beginnings of a longer piece awaiting completion. Once I had that clear in my mind it was a matter of great satisfaction to me to excavate the full story that lay waiting beneath the visible surface.
And what lay waiting was bigger even than I realised at first, because ‘B-Side’ turned out to be not just a longer story in its own right, but the beginning of my idea of Stardust as a whole. I knew right away that ‘B-Side’ and ‘The Lammas Worm’ were linked through the travelling players, and that the young chess player in ‘B-Side’ had a counterpoint in an unfinished but closely treasured fragment called ‘Stardust’ that I had written and then laid aside about a year before. As these things became apparent, I knew I had a book on my hands. I won’t say that the other stories wrote themselves – ‘Wreck of the Julia’ especially took a long time to get right – but I did at least know where they belonged, and that they belonged together.
Chris always refers to ‘B-Side’ as ‘the highwayman story’, in remembrance of that rather robust discussion we had about the ending. The highwayman he refers to appears in the story now but fleetingly, a mention only – but in a very real sense the collection would not exist without him.
Perhaps a second dedication is in order!