The tide flows in and the tide flows out
My short story "Twice Every Day Returning" has been accepted by Uncanny Magazine.
It was written in September, for which I credit the heat wave with making me want to think about ice; it was my first original fiction since the beginning of 2020 and arrived as a pendant to the title novelette of As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022), which may mean that I should now consider these stories a cycle, especially in light of the unfinished, pre-pandemic one. The title comes from the ballad "Just as the Tide Was Flowing," but the story itself was written primarily to Gordon Bok and Cesária Évora, plus assorted compilations of sea-songs, chanteys, and morna. It is queer and maritime and has a lot of diaspora in it, slantwise from my own. I had a bad jolt of feeling completely, professionally pointless last night and it is useful to be reminded it is not reality-based.
For the first time since returning from D.C., I slept until I woke of my own accord, which was sufficiently late in the afternoon that I got out for a walk in a kind of faded gold-flushed denim dusk. I had dreamed in extensive, semi-patched shifts of which the most last and most vivid embroidered unnecessarily on holiday planning. Van Heflin would have been a hundred and fifteen today. Yesterday morning, the Fort Point Channel was particularly brilliant in its winter-edged way.

It was written in September, for which I credit the heat wave with making me want to think about ice; it was my first original fiction since the beginning of 2020 and arrived as a pendant to the title novelette of As the Tide Came Flowing In (2022), which may mean that I should now consider these stories a cycle, especially in light of the unfinished, pre-pandemic one. The title comes from the ballad "Just as the Tide Was Flowing," but the story itself was written primarily to Gordon Bok and Cesária Évora, plus assorted compilations of sea-songs, chanteys, and morna. It is queer and maritime and has a lot of diaspora in it, slantwise from my own. I had a bad jolt of feeling completely, professionally pointless last night and it is useful to be reminded it is not reality-based.
For the first time since returning from D.C., I slept until I woke of my own accord, which was sufficiently late in the afternoon that I got out for a walk in a kind of faded gold-flushed denim dusk. I had dreamed in extensive, semi-patched shifts of which the most last and most vivid embroidered unnecessarily on holiday planning. Van Heflin would have been a hundred and fifteen today. Yesterday morning, the Fort Point Channel was particularly brilliant in its winter-edged way.


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Thank you!
Also while you were travelling, or preparing to, I wound up accidentally exploring context of the BBC 1991 radio A Woman of No Importance, but I am v tired (been out) so I will just link back to what I typed before in case it is of interest and not to worry if it is not.
I was very little on the internet in the run-up to the trip, during it, and then afterward while recovering from it, so I appreciate the pointer! I hope the version of A Woman of No Importance with Michael Hordern's framing still exists. It isn't the version I heard, either.
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♥