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.
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!