A Week in the Wayback Machine

Over the last week, I’ve been involved in an odd little project.  I suppose all authors, at some time or another, have the strange (oddly surreal, if I’m honest) experience of encountering their own early work face to face.  None of us writes the way we did when we started out; if we did it would certainly be a boring enterprise to become an author.

What brought me to this topic was the decision to turn my first collection of short stories, “The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusions,” into an e-book.  Normally this wouldn’t have required any heavy lifting, or actual interaction with the text, beyond a quick proof-reading.  Conversion tools and familiarity have quickened the pace of going digital for me, so though I’ve turned some of my earlier work into digital products, I was able to keep it at arm’s length.

Not so when confronted with the files, lack of files, and technology of 1995.  I discovered that I didn’t even have files for three of the stories.  These had to be scanned from print pages and carefully re-edited to get them formatted and ready to match up with the rest of the book.  Then there was the unique quality of older Word Perfect formatting when converted to Word 2007 documents.

Before all was said and done, I’d read each of these old tales, and found myself getting lost in the experience.  For one thing, and our own Brian Hodge attested to this fact when he wrote the introduction to my most recent collection, “Ennui & Other States of Madness,” I have always written a very wide variety of fiction.  This early collection was no exception.  There are three religious, spiritual dark fantasy pieces, a romance – oddly first published by ANOTHER Storytellers contributor, John B. Rosenman, in his college periodical “The Rhetorician,” an Earth Goddess story, a Lovecraftian piece, and a very short first person vampire story.

I felt very distanced from these works, and at the same time, felt them tugging at things inside me that have been buried a long time.  For one thing, I wrote with a passion back that was raw and fairly uncontrolled.  I wrote all of the time, churned out words like a factory worker on Crystal Meth…and they weren’t badly done.  I can see in those words the writer I’ve become, and several others I might have become had things shifted one way or another over the years.

Also, it’s strange how the stories stick with you.  Two of the tales in that collection have been transformed into novels, one into a screenplay as well.  They grew and morphed over the years, and while they are more fully fleshed now – I can’t say that the longer versions are in any way superior to the short stories – they are just different.  I was different when I wrote them.  I’m different now.

Anyway…the book has been completed.  It is available in a multitude of e-book formats from my digital publishing site : Macabre Ink Digital

You can also download the original stories individually:

The Fall of the House of Escher
A Candle Lit in Sunlight
Miracles in the Night
On the Third Day
Yours, the Vengeance
On the Road to Damascus
Sparkling Eyes

If you do…don’t judge young David too harshly.  He had passion, and he had energy, and a he had a vision.  Some of that vision lives on in this website, and through my novels and the hundreds of stories that followed these…

Sherman, of the Bullwinkle Show’s “Mr. Peabody” sketches, put a writer’s life in perspective very simply… “Where we gonna go today, Mr. Peabody?”

-DNW

PS – This collection was part of a series that was never completed, including collections by our own Mark Rainey and John B. Rosenman.  I may try to get them to let me digitize the whole shooting match and offer them as a set.