So with Strange Angel coming out soon I feel the desire to talk about the project. To look back and really get into what went on there, in my head. It will have very few spoilers, this isn’t about plot, but instead about where I was and what I was thinking, how it all came about. That sort of thing.

“Do you ever read the Olson twins’ books?” Vince asked me. We were outside during Balticon. It must have been late 2004. The sun was shining down and I stood there and gaped at the man like he had just ripped off his face and revealed himself to be an alien.

“What? No, huh? What? UNCLEAN!” was close to what I must have said, loudly, while taking a step back. Then I laughed. This was Vince. Sometimes Vince asks these questions.

It turned out that he was asking because he had seen a few and noticed they were bringing back a format he liked. A small package book, maybe 27 thousand words long, about 70 or 80 pages, but still cut to the 8.5×5.5 inch spec he used for books. Old novella style, really. We both had a fondness for them. I remember buying a Haldeman short novella as a solo thing once, back in the day, from Village Comics when it shared space with the Science Fiction Bookstore (yes that was its name). Anyway we both told stories about the format, things we loved and why we wanted it back. Yeah, we’re nerds. You see why I love having the guy publish my stuff, right?

After a while though Vince shrugged and told me that he wanted to do a new anthology and he needed an intro story. He loved doing intros that were short, like two thousand word long, stories. He asked me to do it. I was honored. I hadn’t sold that many stories by then and being asked to do the kick-off to an entire anthology was awesome.

There were, however, conditions.

* The main character had to be named some form of Susan Sparrow. Susan Sparrow was the name some author had used to co-write the Dawn of the Dead novelization with Romero. Vince had a thing.

* The story had to include this Sparrow woman in a school, somehow.

* It should be horror, really, like the anthology.

* The Sparrow woman should have powers.

* It had to end with the line “On with the show,” somehow, because Vince wanted that last line to be a theme for his anthology openings.

* I had 2,000 words max to get everything done.

* The story had to be titled Strange Angel.

Of course I said yes. I didn’t think on it, just took a few notes and gleefully went off to my doom. I got home and sat down to figure this out. I wasn’t sure how to achieve any of this, much less all of it at once. Some was easy. Susan Sparrow became Susie Sparrow in my head very quickly. Make her a teen, she’s in school, wham! easy. Powers? Strange Angel? I didn’t know how to tie it all together.

I remember I sat on the floor, playing with the cat, while thinking for about an hour. Just sitting there, grumbling to myself about how everything fit together. Until I found the answers and the story made perfect sense. It’s fun working under odd constraints. I find it freeing, actually. It lets my brain fill a shape instead of having to work out a shape and then fill it.

Well, I wrote it, Vince agreed it was what he wanted, and it shoed up as the intro to Dark Furies (and for the last time, that’s Furies as in Greek Fury, not furries) and that was, as they say, that.

I wrote a nice, clean, short short story with a character I came to enjoy. Susie Sparrow was … spunky. She had a sense of humor and a resignation to the idea that sometimes bad things have to happen. Not that those things didn’t touch her and she was made of stone, but rather simply that – like it or not – bad shit happened. I tried to give her weight with it, a touch of cynicism to go with her age (about 16) and anger, but mostly a child’s anger not an adults – for the most part because when you’re 16 anger is a bit of both depending – and a sense of strange humor. The powers I slid in with, what I thought, a nice twist and turned everything into a much less straight forward event while making it utterly straight forward. Just those little games you play as an author.

Still! The story was done. Strange Angel was written, edited, accepted and published and the journey was over…

Except I really liked Susie Sparrow, and we still had that format that we liked a lot, the one the Olson’s used. Obviously something had to be done … but that’s for another day’s thoughts.