"Here a tower shining bright, once stood gleaming in the night, where now there's just the rubble."
There was more melt yesterday than expected, because it was warmer than expected yesterday, and the sun was out, when it was supposed to be cloudy, and the threatened snow flurries didn't arrive. There is honestly nothing less useful anywhere in the world than a weatherman in New England. Today, we have sun, but it's bitter cold, currently 27˚F, with the windchill at 13˚F. I'm exhausted by this lingering chill.
No writing yesterday, but something significant, nonetheless. For years, I've been trying to find old diskettes from Pandora, mt first Mac, diskettes I used to back up the stories written during the first few years of my career, those that would go to make up Tales of Pain and Wonder and From Weird and Distant Shores, my first two short fiction collections. What I think of as the Pre-Dreaming Era, roughly 1993-1995, when I live on 16th Avenue in Birmingham and then the Carriage House in Athens, while I was writing Silk. The diskettes could help me reconstruct when my early stories were written, as I certainly don't clearly remember those details, so many years later. Eventually, I took began carefully dating hard copies, but not back then. Anyway, yesterday, I found the diskettes. They'd been in my office for ages, and somehow I'd just overlooked them. By checking at the dates that files were created for stories, I can get a good idea when they were written. In most cases, these dates confirm my suspicions/spotty memories. So far, I've worked out this much of the chronology:
Birmingham, Ala.
01. "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea" ~ May 5, 1993
02. "Persephone" ~ August 20, 1993
03. "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent" (originally "Mina") ~ November 7, 1993
04. "Hoar Isis" ~ February 20, 1994
05. "Two Worlds and In Between" ~ February 28, 1994
Athens, Ga.
06. "Anamorphosis" ~ May 3, 1994
07. "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)" ~ June 7, 1994
08. "Escape Artist" ~ July 18, 1994
09. "Bela's Plot" ~ November 7, 1994
10. "Tears Seven Times Salt" ~ January 27, 1995
11. "The Comedy of St. Jehanne d'Arc" ~ February 14, 1995
Which is as far as I got with any degree of certainty. I currently have a gap between February and August 1995, and I know I wrote something during that time, but it may be I was mostly working on Silk, which I finished early in January 1996. At any rate, those dates record the day I created a file for a story in MS Word, which has pretty much always been the day I begin work on that story. The dates on which they were completed will likely always remain a mystery, as files were often modified years after completion, for one reason or another.*
Nothing very interesting to say about last night, so I won't bother to embellish.
Resistance, Peace, and Compassion,
Aunt Beast
* What a wonderful luxury it would be to have a year again when I only had to write three short stories, as in 1993, or even six, as in 1994. Last year, which I counted as an unproductive year, I did a dozen.
No writing yesterday, but something significant, nonetheless. For years, I've been trying to find old diskettes from Pandora, mt first Mac, diskettes I used to back up the stories written during the first few years of my career, those that would go to make up Tales of Pain and Wonder and From Weird and Distant Shores, my first two short fiction collections. What I think of as the Pre-Dreaming Era, roughly 1993-1995, when I live on 16th Avenue in Birmingham and then the Carriage House in Athens, while I was writing Silk. The diskettes could help me reconstruct when my early stories were written, as I certainly don't clearly remember those details, so many years later. Eventually, I took began carefully dating hard copies, but not back then. Anyway, yesterday, I found the diskettes. They'd been in my office for ages, and somehow I'd just overlooked them. By checking at the dates that files were created for stories, I can get a good idea when they were written. In most cases, these dates confirm my suspicions/spotty memories. So far, I've worked out this much of the chronology:
Birmingham, Ala.
01. "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea" ~ May 5, 1993
02. "Persephone" ~ August 20, 1993
03. "Emptiness Spoke Eloquent" (originally "Mina") ~ November 7, 1993
04. "Hoar Isis" ~ February 20, 1994
05. "Two Worlds and In Between" ~ February 28, 1994
Athens, Ga.
06. "Anamorphosis" ~ May 3, 1994
07. "To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)" ~ June 7, 1994
08. "Escape Artist" ~ July 18, 1994
09. "Bela's Plot" ~ November 7, 1994
10. "Tears Seven Times Salt" ~ January 27, 1995
11. "The Comedy of St. Jehanne d'Arc" ~ February 14, 1995
Which is as far as I got with any degree of certainty. I currently have a gap between February and August 1995, and I know I wrote something during that time, but it may be I was mostly working on Silk, which I finished early in January 1996. At any rate, those dates record the day I created a file for a story in MS Word, which has pretty much always been the day I begin work on that story. The dates on which they were completed will likely always remain a mystery, as files were often modified years after completion, for one reason or another.*
Nothing very interesting to say about last night, so I won't bother to embellish.
Resistance, Peace, and Compassion,
Aunt Beast
* What a wonderful luxury it would be to have a year again when I only had to write three short stories, as in 1993, or even six, as in 1994. Last year, which I counted as an unproductive year, I did a dozen.