Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

Happy holidays, y'all!

What?  You think it's a little late for that?  Give me a break: it's a holiday tomorrow, here in the USA.

Anyway, this will be [part of] my version of a "holiday newsletter."

Since I'm posting it here in my Dreamwidth journal, rather than distributing it via email, it is potentially visible to the whole Internet.  That constrains the scope some: I'll be very hesitant to post any personal information about anyone but myself.

I see this thing as having three sections, each representing a category of my activities: computer programming, writing, and social interaction.

Computer programming: I do a fair bit of it, though I'm thoroughly retired from doing it for money.  I do it for fun, and hoping that it will be useful—to me, at least.

For a while now, I've been doing most of this in a programming language called Clojure.  Best guess: most of the people reading this won't have heard of it; if you have, give me a shout!

I've written a program that calculates my income tax, and currently I am finishing the updating and testing for the 2022 tax year.

Writing: my scribbles on various topics may mostly be found at my personal home page at The Well.  The newest items, at present, are linked from the Fiction and Poetry page.

That's two of the three sections that I promised you.  The last one, "social interaction," will be left for another journal entry (or, who knows, maybe more than one!).

So here I am again, to tell you about something that's been added to my "site" at The Well.  This time it's a story called "Missing Katie."

The story isn't brand-new: in fact, it was last revised in 2015.  If you've known me for a goodly while, you may already have read it.  But it hasn't been "publicly" available before.  That is, now, at long last, anyone can download a copy …

… provided, of course, that one knows that it's there.  But you do know that, don't you?

The title of the story has a double meaning: "A little girl is missing.  And her parents are missing her terribly."  That's from the "index page" which links to the story: https://people.well.com/user/edelsont/fiction-and-poetry/fiction/fic-index.html.

Katie's sudden absence gives her parents a shock, and also a puzzle.  But is the story a "mystery," in the genre-label sense?  The observable facts are strange, so much so that their first thought is that one or both of them must be crazy.

In time, an alternative hypothesis presents itself, one that seems to put them in "speculative fiction" territory.  It takes most of the story for them to flesh this theory out into something coherent, and to begin to experience it as real.

And as they do, you may continue to suspect that the parents were right the first time: they've gone crazy.  The reader isn't given any information that definitively answers this question.

Or at least, not until the last chapter.

Technical bits: the story is on the site in the form of a PDF file.  If you want to print it out, you'll need thirty-two sheets of paper.  If you'd like to jump straight to the story itself, the URL for that is https://people.well.com/user/edelsont/fiction-and-poetry/fiction/Missing-Katie.pdf.

I'd be most delighted if you read it.  But I won't be able actually to feel that delight unless I find out that you've read it.  A great way of letting me know would be to come back here afterwards, and post a comment to this journal entry.