While I’ve been finishing up the current revision of The Persistence of Memories, I started looking at the list of what I call the Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtracks. Out of the thousands of albums I’d listened to over the years I wrote what would become the Bridgetown Trilogy, these are the titles I equate to my writing sessions, whether they were in the family basement, the Shoebox apartment in Back Bay, or the sweltering summer in Allston. It’s been a fun reminiscence looking at this list and revisiting some of my favorites over the years.
And while I was at it, I pulled out a spreadsheet I’d made some time ago of a writing chronology. I’d gone through my poetry chapbooks, personal journals, trunked ideas and outtakes, pretty much every creative thing I knew I still had on hand. I entered it all in and sorted it by date just to see what I was working on when. It’s an interesting read on a personal level, as it reminds me when certain life events happened, what moods I was in, when I came up with certain ideas, and so on.
What I found while going through all this is how much my life changed in September of 1996.
I’d had a handful of ‘here until further notice so I can save up/pay bills/get out of debt’ jobs since moving home a year earlier. I left the radio station that June and started a temp job at my mom’s place of work soon after. I’m pretty sure it was late August when she pointed out the ad for HMV, and by mid-September I had the job, starting on the 23rd.
Two things happened that month, one right after the other. One, I really needed to get my own car at that point. I couldn’t continue to borrow someone else’s, so I managed to score a 1992 sky-blue Chevy Cavalier for two grand and only a few thousand miles on it. It pretty much looked like the one below, and I’d drive it into the ground over the next four years on all those commutes and road trips around New England. I called it the Mach 5, of course. I knew that any job I tried out for would not be in the immediate area, and this gave me so much more freedom. I’d buy a few local road atlases to stuff behind the front seats to get me where I needed to go. I used to park it in the grove out front, back when we had multiple cars in the driveway.
And two, I’d finally decided that it was time for me to move my PC down to the basement. I knew it was sometime in late summer that I’d decided on it, and I’d chosen to do it for a few reasons. The thing was a good few years old and had a rather loud fan, and given my penchant for staying up later than the others in the house, I didn’t want to keep them awake. I also wanted what would essentially be a work area with minimal distraction, and a place I could specifically label as my own personal space.
And we certainly had the room down there, the spot in the top picture formerly only housing a few chairs among other things near the wall phone. I utilized a desk (and a boombox, the one you see there) that had been my uncle’s, a director’s chair I’d had during my Boston years, and my dad provided the short filing cabinet. Made a few trips over to Walmart to pick up various desk organizers, 3″ disks and other stationery. My trusty milk crates from my college years got a new life underneath in the footwell area where I stashed three-ring binders of printouts. Snacks were hidden away in those open shelves, and 12-can boxes of Mountain Dew would soon make an appearance as well.
Mind you, I wasn’t down there with any sense of frequency, at least not yet. I think that wouldn’t happen until summer of 1997 when I chose to start transcribing the longhand work I’d started with The Phoenix Effect. That novel project had started in March of that year and by the summer I’d realized that it would make a lot more sense if I revised as I transcribed in order to make it better instead of completing each draft one after the other. And it probably wasn’t until summer 1998 that I finally did start going down there on a frequent basis, once I finished TPE and started in on the major revision work, multiple trunked attempts at sequels and related stories, and eventually what would become A Division of Souls.
But it all started there, thirty years ago in September of 1996, when I made those two life changing decisions.
[Side note: It wasn’t always called the Belfry, even though I refer to it as such these days. I don’t recall the exact date at the moment (surprisingly, it’s not on that chronology spreadsheet), but I’m pretty sure it was the summer of either 2000 or 2001 when two bats entered the basement through an open door and hilarity ensued. Thus the reason why my writing nook in the cellar of my family’s house was nicknamed The Belfry thereafter.]
