Meredith Mansfield, Author

In real life, one of my current projects is to organize that room. Just about every house has one. The room that doesn’t get used very often (maybe it’s a guest room) and so ends up being the place where you put anything you can’t find another place for–or things you just don’t want to week out, yet. In my case, it’s variously referred to as the back bedroom or the closet room. Somehow, no matter how many times I’ve tried to organize it, it always ends up looking like some giant has stirred it with a stick. I think there’s a poltergeist at work.

There are literally corners in that room I haven’t been able to get to for years. Not without a lot of work, anyway. I pulled a lot of stuff out of that room when I designated a portion of my new office space for crafts. Made sense to organize and store most of the craft supplies in one of the closets. That should make it easier to organize what’s left. Somehow, it seems to have had the opposite effect.

The thing is, you never quite know what you’re going to turn up when you start poking into corners like that. Among the things that have turned up are  very early versions of some stories that I later rewrote. (Must remember to shred those at some point. The writing is truly dreadful.) And an abandoned writing journal.

I knew that the characters and at least some of the events of the Dual Magics series had been kicking around in my head for a while. Now I know just how long a while. 1987. Yikes. Back then, I used to write long hand in spiral notebooks.

Of course, it’s not quite the same story now that it was then. It’s much better and richer than that early version.

After I abandoned the book as a writing journal, I apparently used it to write down impressions on at least one vacation. The last entry is:

Long way home. Fog, rain, pelicans.

Well, at least it’s not verbose. I must have been tired.