Whilst I was fossicking around in the dusty basement of my website on Friday, I came across a page of links to guest posts and other pieces I’d written for a variety of websites, way back when. Sadly, a couple of them had been lost to time, and even the Wayback Machine couldn’t help me find them. Sic transit gloria mundi, and all that.
Title page of The Second City, reproduced by kind permission of the University of Yelda
But I tracked down the others, and I thought I’d bring them all back under my roof, as it were, before they suffered the same fate. I wasn’t that careful about archiving these pieces back then, for which I am kicking myself now. You would think that with a career in IT behind me I would understand the value of backups.
Anyway. The question now, of course, is what do I do with them. Some relate to craft, or my road to being published, and at least one of them has aged like milk. Oh dear. I think I’ll find a home for the craft-y pieces here, because someone might be interested in a peek behind the scenes, but the piece I’m most proud of rescuing is the one I should be shot for not having archived way back in 2013 when I wrote it.
The Second City is a little bit of Wild Hunt universe metafiction, an extract from an in-world book. The website I wrote it for is long gone, but I think the text itself stands up. It deserves another airing, so I’ve added it to The World of the Wild Hunt section of my site.
I originally set out to write this piece in the style of a Victorian travel memoir but couldn’t sustain the tone, so it ended up more a love letter to the White Havens from a lady “d’un certain âge”. As for the traveller herself . . . I can’t help but imagine the stories she could tell!
