Ancient History

One of the things I’ve been doing as part of the unpacking/moving-in process here is going through all of the boxes that were buried deep in the garage in Santa Clara, or in the storage pod we stuff things into. This is allowing me to see what’s been in storage and curating it, which implies sometimes moving stuff around into new boxes, and sometimes sending it to its next homes — but most importantly, labelling all of the boxes so I can actually find stuff next time I’m looking for things.

Literally the last box to be looked at of mine was my long-missing box of archives from my times as a professional writer, which ended sometime around 1990 when I chose to focus on my computer career. It includes copies of (and floppies for) all of my sold stories, a complete run of my book review columns I did for TSR’s Amazing Stories, the pieces I wrote when I was a contributing editor for Macintosh Horizons, and even some of the writing I did back when I was at Sun. It also contains a hard copy of the entire print run of OtherRealms (the online versions are here). I’ve been going through it a bit and plan on putting it in a more archival box, and then storing it away again, but it was fun to dig up some of those memories, and the notes for the two novels I never finished…

For your amusement, then, a couple of covers I unearthed in this search.

I’ll note that I have no intention of taking up these novels again, although one of them (my fantasy) would still be interesting and worth writing (the other, more techie, would have to be completely be rebuilt from scratch). I’ve always intended to get all of my sold fiction online, but I”m one or two stories short of finishing that project and it’s low priority. And the OtherRealms archives are functional but not pretty, and I have plans to improve that — someday. I know how to do it, but I haven’t put the effort into it (yet).

But, I can take a victory lap, because literally every box we brought north with us has been identified and opened and dealt with in some way, although we have about 20 more boxes of books to unpack and shelve, and most of that is sorting out the Hockey collection going into Laurie’s office. But give we moved north something like 250 BOXES of stuff,. we’re quite close to done dealing with it all.