THE ORIGINS of DANNY

THE MINOR WORKS

The Minor Works is my nickname for all the bits and bobs that went to make up DANNY, but that, for one reason or another, didn't make it into the final mix.

They consist primarily of the original short story, Nothing But a Negro, written in the eighties, followed by the novella, The Boy With the Red Hair, which I wrote when I had just moved to Cumbria. And then, of course, there was DANNY itself.

However, DANNY was written with some breaks between (you can see full details of its chronology under DANNY's History).

In the course of writing Volume 4 I stopped when I seem to have veered off-course, taking DANNY into a slightly different territory by adding a character referred to only in 'flashback' in Volume 2. This was one Alun Waits, a wealthy fourteen year old boy that Danny had known while he had been living in the US with the Henderson siblings.

In Death in Venice, as the section was nicknamed and never lost, Alun is grown-up and on his honeymoon. He bumps into Danny and complications ensue.

Although I loved Alun I think I had been seduced into wanting to see more of him. (He is always a very real and interesting character to me, and I am always shocked to discover how little of him there actually is in Volume 2.) I must have felt this was not where I wanted to go because it was excised and the novel started again, assumably from another point. Some day I must find out the exact history of this detour, and what was going on in my head at the time.

I was obviously quite well adrift because instead of returning to the novel I started a fresh novel entirely, called Delaney, about a boxer who becomes a (very straight) ballet dancer.

It covered a lot of the same 'male object of fascination and desire' territory, albeit in a different way, and showed quite clearly that DANNY and I were not done yet. Subsequently this, in turn, was abandoned to return to DANNY Volume 4.

Both the 'asides' run to approximately 150 or so pages each.

I am currently having all these Minor Works typed up with a view to seeing if they are publishable as curiosities and, of course, hopefully they will provide some entertainment value of their own.

Well, that's the history. Now read on...

Chancery Stone

CLICK HERE to READ or DOWNLOAD Nothing But A Negro

or

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