Yeah, I Know What I Said
The week before last I was talking about posting a chapter a day for AOMR, but I wanted to have a day off.
It’s been a week and half of a week and I need some time off, so I’m going to post story entries on weekdays only.
Plus, fewer people visit this site at weekends, so it’s better to post when you’re actually here to read something. If I’ve learned anything over my blogging life, it’s that it’s more chicken than egg. Or egg. I think.
What I have done is put links to all the chapters together on a page here which you can find in the navigation sidebar. Please feel free to add it to your favourites or send it around. I’ll update that page every weekend with the latest updates from throughout the week.
Anyway, what AOMR fans might not know is that it was written seventeen years ago. I was eighteen in 1990, and vanity publishing wasn’t something technology would stretch to. Or my budget. Or my vanity.
But after blogging a while, I thought I would dust it off. It was originally stored on 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, then 3 1/2 inch floppies, then on every hard drive of every PC I’ve had since. It was printed out and the pages were stored away in a folder, then for the last two years it has dangled from my keys on a USB storage thing.
It has travelled further than the journey I took when I started writing it and it is nearly as old as I was when I took the trip, so I though why not put it online, where at least someone can read it.
I’ll go now because I’m concentrating on about about a million other things.
And I’m not writing that well.
Short, stacatto sentences.
On the page. That you read.
January 27th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
DAmn, CLiff. WRiting like that at 18 ? I’m fooked.
January 27th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Rubbish. Give it a go.
I did add some bits for the online draft, but only the odd sentence in each chapter such as “I was dumb and thoughtless and the priviledges of youth included letting others live however and say whatever they wanted.” from in Chapter 5.
Other than that it’s word for word from the manuscript written a month after I got back, and most of that was from notes written on trains at the time.
January 28th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
See, it reads like you’re looking back through the mists of time at sepia-toned images and long-thought-out descriptions of the essences of the people you were with, not ‘Oh, well, I guess I better write that down before I forget it’. You saw things so clearly at 18 , so much more clearer than I do even now.