A Blink of the Screen

a Skryling encampment showed through the freezing trees’. Skrylings were okay, they considered that crazy people were great shamans, Kevin should be all right there.
    Nicky stood up. ‘Well, I’d better be going,’ she said. The tone and pitch of her voice turned tumblers in his head.
    ‘You needn’t,’ he said. ‘It’s entirely up to you, of course.’
    There was a long pause. She walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder, her manner a little awkward.
    ‘What’s this?’ she said, in an attempt to turn the conversation away from its logical conclusion.
    ‘Just a story of his. I’d better mail it in the morning.’
    ‘Oh. Are you a writer, too?’
    Erdan glanced at the word processor. Compared to the Bronze Hordes of Merkle it didn’t look too fearsome. A whole new life was waiting for him, he could feel it, he could flow out into it. And change to suit.
    ‘Just breaking into it,’ he said.
    ‘I mean, I quite like Kevin,’ she said quickly. ‘He just never seemed to relate to the real world.’ She turned away to hide her embarrassment, and peered out of the window.
    ‘There’s a lot of blue lights down on the railway line,’ she said.
    Erdan made a few more alterations. ‘Are there?’ he said.
    ‘And there’s people milling about.’
    ‘Oh.’ Erdan changed the title to
The Traveller of the Falconsong
. What was needed was more development, he could see that. He’d write about what he knew.
    After a bit of thought he added Book One in the Chronicles of Kevin the Bardsinger.
    It was the least he could do.
    1 Like Zen Buddhists, only bigger begging bowls.

TURNTABLES OF THE NIGHT

    H IDDEN T URNINGS
, ED . D IANA W YNNE J ONES , M ETHUEN , L ONDON, 1989
    Sometimes you just get an idea for a story title and you have to write it. And Diana Wynne Jones wanted a story for the Young Adult anthology
Hidden Turnings,
published in 1989 … I quite like it, but short stories always seem to cost me blood, and I envy the people who do them for fun
.
    Look, constable, what I don’t understand is, surely he wouldn’t be into blues? Because that was Wayne’s life for you. A blues single. I mean, if people were music, Wayne would be like one of those scratchy old numbers, you know, re-recorded about a hundred times from the original phonograph cylinder or whatever, with some old guy with a name like Deaf Orange Robinson standing knee-deep in the Mississippi and moaning through his nose.
    You’d think he’d be more into Heavy Metal or Meatloaf or someone. But I suppose he’s into everyone. Eventually.
    What? Yeah. That’s my van, with Hellfire Disco painted on it. Wayne can’t drive, you see. He’s just not interested in anything like that. I remember when I got my first car and we went on holiday, and I did the driving and, okay, also the repairing, and Wayne worked the radio, trying to keep the pirate stations tuned in. He didn’t really care where we went as long as it was on high ground and he could get Caroline or London or whatever. I didn’t care where we went so long as we went.
    I was always more into cars than music. Until now, I think. I don’t think I want to drive a car again. I’d keep wondering who’d suddenly turn up in the passenger seat …
    Sorry. So. Yeah. The disco. Well, the deal was that I supplied the van, we split the cost of the gear, and Wayne supplied the records. It was really my idea. I mean, it seemed a pretty good bet. Wayne lives with his mum but they’re down to two rooms now because of his record collection. Lots of people collect records, but I reckon Wayne really wants – wanted – to own every one that was ever made. His idea of a fun outing was going to some old store in some old town and rummaging through the stock and coming out with something by someone with a name like Sid Sputnik and the Spacemen, but the thing was, the funny thing was, you’d get back to his room and he’d go to a shelf and push all the records aside and there’d be this neat brown envelope with the name and date on it and everything – waiting.
    Or he’d get me to drive him all the way to Preston or somewhere to find some guy who’s a self-employed plumber now but maybe back in 1961 called himself Ronnie Sequin and made it to number 152 in the charts, just to see if he’d got a spare copy of his one record which was really so naff you couldn’t even find it in the specialist stores.
    Wayne was the kind of collector who couldn’t bear a hole in his collection