Liner Notes for Billie Reynolds And The Magic Hat Stall

The liner notes for my story Billie Reynolds And The Magic Hat Stall.

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Billie Reynolds came about as part of me thinking about carnivals. The first draft of the story pre-dates Strandbridge as an idea, just a free-floating English small town where weirdness and excitement arrives from outside. It’s indistinctness and the fact that it was quite derivative (see later) was part of why I later designed Strandbridge with it’s own personality and eccentricities.

Neighbourhood Watch, where we first encountered Billie Reynolds is a much later written story. I already knew she would get into trouble again after I wrote Magic Hat. She’s a cypher in that story, because I knew she gets a little bit of character here.

The Magic Hat Stall was a direct rip-off of the Magic Pencil in John Allison’s comic Bad Machinery, in The Case Of The Good Boy. When I went back to look I was surprised how much I stole from that and left it in there. Well, sincerest form of flattery, a different medium, and so on.

The pigs are ambiguous here, in earlier versions someone calls Billie a pig. In fact we focussed entirely on her. I preferred this version though, with a whole bunch of slightly insecure teens and tweens passing by the stall on their evening at the fair. The magic hat helping some of the kids, causing trouble for the bullies. Maybe a bit too neat, but then again if my folk fantasy can’t punish the wicked and aid the good, what’s it for?

There’s an age where you’re too young to go to the fair on your own, and it’s cool but your parents or whoever is looking after you are distracted and don’t see the magic. And a few years later you can see the cheapness of the toys and the fix of the games, and how quickly the pound coins run through your fingers and so you’re more interested in your mates and a burger and maybe some booze or someone you like.

In between, well it’s not magic.

But it could be.