Once More With Footnotes

Remarkable Traits and Humours (and so on, for 64 words). There are obvious nuggets on almost every page: Preserved Fish was a famous New York financier. Then there is what I might call secondary discovery, as in, for example, the dark delight of the Victorian author, when writing about a famous German family of financiers, in coming up with sentences like "soon there were rich Fuggers throughout Lower Saxony." And finally there was the building up of some insight int o the minds of the people for whom money was not the means to an end, or even the means to more money, but what the sea is for little fishes.
     
                  I've learned one or two things over the years. One is that the best time to work out a book is in bed, just after you've woken up. I think my brain is on time-share to a better author overnight. A notebook is vital at this point. So is actually being fully awake. If I had been fully awake I probably would have written a fuller note than "MegaPED:" on the back of a c a rd by my bed the other day. It's probably the key to a plot idea, but don't ask me, I only wrote it down.
     
                  And if you think you have a book evolving, now is the time to write the flap copy. The blurb, in fact. An author should never be too proud to write their own flap copy. Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
     

This appeared in 1988 in the first of what turned out to be thr ee books in the Drabble Project, produced by Birmingham fans to raise money for charity and add to the gaiety of nations.
     
    A drabble is that once popular SF formal, the short, short, short — one hundred words, not a word more or less. Every word counts. Oddl y enough, I really enjoyed doing it, and even managed to fit in a footnote.
     
     
     
     
     
Incubust
     
                  The physics of magic is this: no magician, disguise it as he might, can achieve a result beyond his own physical powers.* ( *See the Necrotelecomnicon, p. 38. )
     
                  And, spurned, he performed the Rite of Tumescence and called up a fiend from the depths of the Pit to teach her a lesson she wouldn't forget, the witch.
     
                  The phone rang.
     
                  "Nice try," she said. "It's sitting on the bedhead now."
     
                  His breath quickened. " And?"
     
                  "Listen," she said.
     
                  And he heard the voice of the fiend, distant and wretched:
     
                  "... frightfully sorry ... normally, no problem ... oh god, this has never happened to me before ..."
     

First published in G.M. The Independent Fantasy Roleplaying Magazine, October 1988.
     
    I've tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I've thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I've always had a soft spot for this story.
     
     
     
     
     
F inal R eward
     
                  Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.
     
                  "There's a simple explanation," thought Dogger. "I've gone mad."
     
                  This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalisation at seven o'clock in the mo rning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren't mad, despite appearances.
     
                  There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* ( *Like Zen Buddhists only bigger begging bowls. ) call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realise that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn't.
     
                  He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn't quite sure how it h ad started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he'd