The road to publication for The Starry Rift was extraordinarily long and complicated. A book normally takes about two years from conception to publication: this one took four. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and it impacted on the final book in unexpected ways. One of them was that it changed the table of contents slightly.

Back in September 2004 I met Neil Gaiman at Noreascon. I think we had sushi with Jack Dann for lunch and, just before we headed out the door, I asked him if he’d write a story for a book I was doing with Sharyn November. Neil is a really nice guy, and he treated my request with far more kindness and graciousness than it deserved, and he said “Sure”. I was pretty happy.

A year or so passed and a story, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, dropped in through my email inbox. It was good. Very good. Good enough that I wanted to wait a couple days before responding to him - read it and read it and be sure. I told him I liked it, we did the contract thing, and we were all set. Time passed. Neil needed a story for his new collection, Fragile Things, and a lot of time had passed. The story needed to be in Fragile Things, and Neil would write me another story (which became “Orange”). The original story ended up on the Hugo ballot and was widely loved.

If you’ve not read the story, and want a taste of what The Starry Rift could have been like you can read the full text of it here.