sovay | Half the days are mine remembering friends from the earth

From the front lines of the lurgi: I woke up coughing in the middle of the night, have a spiking headache, have appointments I can't miss this afternoon [edit: THE MBTA DECREED OTHERWISE]. I had to check when I got up that there was not really a Cambridge-area writer named Sandrine Aday who had written an unfinished sequence of intense, dreamlike, anthropomorphic animal fantasies from the early '80's through the early '90's before dying under still-mysterious circumstances having to do with a holdup and her daughter being in jail. In the dream I had grown up reading her, as had several but not all of my friends; she had the kind of not quite cult fandom of Meredith Ann Pierce, pre-Baen P.C. Hodgell, pre-Firebird Clare Bell. "Like Redwall, but earlier, and only the weird bits," I remember describing her work to someone who had never heard of her. She had never been reprinted. That was changing, I really want to say because Small Beer Press had waded through the rights hell that was the remains of her estate; a previously unpublished story of hers was the centerpiece of one of their upcoming anthologies. I had work in it; so did Greer Gilman; so did Ruthanna Emyrs. The Aday story had herons and a sacrifice headland, which ties it to one of the oldest dreams I can remember. I was reading the galleys in a boathouse. I really resent this anthology not existing.

P.S. I rated an end-of-year recommendation in the same company as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Audre Lorde, and Dorothy B. Hughes. I'll take it!

P.P.S. And TCM is running Van Heflin movies for his birthday. I have already reviewed Act of Violence (1948) and The Prowler (1951); I have never seen Patterns (1956); I made it halfway through Tennessee Johnson (1942) once. I guess I have a plan? I've been so sick, I haven't even been watching movies.

Half the days are mine remembering friends from the earth

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