Archive for November, 2010
I came across two reviews by Don D’Ammassa of my Dark Regions Press collections today, Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret. If interested, they can be found in Horror Reviews, August through December 2010, at www.dondammassa.com/R3C2010.htm When you get to the site, press Index, then scroll down to my name.
Also, I received the December issue of Niteblade today with a short seasonal poem by me, “Winter Wonder (2).” If you’ve ever wondered why lethal snowmen feel compelled to kill in cold blood, perhaps here’s one answer….
I started as a technical writer in the dinosaur days of computers. Great hulking beasts that took up most of the room, with card punches, line printers, consoles, tape decks …
Those were ugly times.
But then we went to terminals, keyboards — still hooked up to the Beast in the Basement, but small enough themselves to fit on an office desk.
Now we have whole computers that small and smaller. hooked up to others at will on the internet (back in the day, we discussed the potential of the then-new Arpanet for academic research — one prescient fellow concluded that it would come, but would be powered by sites for gambling and pornography). My first was a KayPro 1, still stand-alone back then, with a CP/M operating system.
I’ve since gone through DOS and am now in Windows. The current Cave Computer is actually three machines, only one of which is on-line. I do most of my writing off-line with WordStar 6.0, a wonderful still text-based word processor, on 3 1/2″ disks, converting that to .rtf (preferably) when it’s time to send work out. The third computer’s a backup computer. used mostly at one time for translating work to and from 4 1/4″ disks — from back in the mastodon days of computing.
The world has changed much, but here in the cave the old caveman virtues of thrift and simplicity — and continuing to put the bulk of one’s effort into the writing itself — still have their place. Thus this cave site, as no -frills as still can be decently possible, some might say to the point of ugliness, but nevertheless, I hope, with its rewards. A story or a poem, perhaps, every month or so just to keep folks coming back. A bit on my own doings once in a while. I am a professional short story writer and poet, working mostly on the darker sides of fantasy and science fiction, occasionally mystery, with two collections as of this writing, STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE and DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, published by Dark Regions Press, a chapbook novella called THE GARDEN from Damnation Books, and three or four hundred stories and poems in various magazines and anthologies. Book covers — once I can figure out how — will probably be displayed somewhere on this page.
Probably.
But above all I will try to keep these simple, because no one said that caveman computing was going to be pretty.
jamesdorrwriter 