Old Hannibal says some strange things at times. As such this is the start of an irregular series of quotes form the Hannibal Smyth novels, because occasionally one should probably remember to do some promotion work for ones own novels for a change…

This quote comes from the first book I published which featured Hannibal Smyth, which was a little novella I wrote which crossed over my Passing Place multiverse with Hannibal own, because if you have a multidimensional time traveling piano bar which people drop into (often by mistake) have a drink and tell a story or two, why would you not have the protagonist of your other novels drop in…

At the time I wrote the novella the first Hannibal Novel, and a fair amount of the second were close to written in draft, though the end of book one and the start of book two was somewhat fluid at the time. In the midst of this were a couple of chapters which were a short story all their own, and one that I was considering editing out simply because while I loved the story itself it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the tale. So rather than cut it completely I took the story out of the Hannibal novels and had Hannibal tell it to Richard the Piano Player in The Passing Place one time when he dropped in.

So Hannibal’s little story is sandwiched between a couple of chapters of Passing Place story, which worked really well. The novella servers as an introduction for readers to both novels to some extent, and was frankly just fun to write. The quote above is one of my favorites form the novella and is very much a Hannibalisum…

Now the quandary mention in the page title. The Novella, which also had three unrelated short stories within it, has a few authors notes. Mainly because its fun to write them, and as a reader I love that kind of thing…

However the authors notes for the Hannibal story are wrong, they were correct when I wrote them, but they say that the central story ‘a Scar Of Avarice’ falls towards the end of book one of the Hannibal novels. But several drafts latter where it actual falls is about three quarters of the way into book two. While the events in the Passing place themselves ( Hannibal dropping in, literally) take place between book 2 and book 3…

I’ve know thus for a while, and while no one has pointed out this inconstancy, I am all too aware of it, so I need to go back and change the note at some point…