COMMENTS about TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE
"Although I've published a bunch of humor in The Journal of Irreproducible Results and The Annals of Improbable Research, this is my first piece of published fiction. Whoopee! The ideas for this story nucleated around the Pete Townshend quotation, which I found in an old edition of David Marsh's Book of Rock Lists. Most of the ficitional songs mentioned were tunes I wrote when I was in a band called The Stoney Leaves with my friend, Tom Brennan, who plays drums.
"Some authors, like Harlan Ellison, can bang out a story in an evening or a sitting. (Since I read slowly, I suspect that it may take me longer to read some of his stories than it took Ellison to write them!) Turn and Face the Strange took an arduous six years (!) to write (off and on), during which time the story went through innumerable plot and character changes, while I was working on my Ph.D. and getting married.
"This story is the part of a projected series entitled The Encyclopedia Capricciosa, a science fiction history of rock and roll, from 1955 to the far future. Hopefully the next stories in the series will take less time to finish."
Frank Wu