crowdog66

I got home VERY late from my afternoon shift at Quagga -- my second shift ever, and I think I'm going to like it there. It was the closing shift, so after the store was locked up I got the thrill of helping the senior volunteer to feed all the cats and medicate certain ones. My next shift will be a try at the kennel end of things, I think; I suspect that working WITH the cats themselves, rather than up front in the retail area, will be most rewarding for me. However, it was the exposure to the public/answering phones that was my original point in volunteering with them in the first place. Gahhhhh, dilemmas!

Did some Hardy Boys flatting, then on a whim I went on a tour of some of my old ZIP disc archives. Found a treasure trove of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence fics, including a perfectly luscious series (IMO, at least) involving Professor Hobby/Gigolo Joe. You can find the first, completed story in the series, "One Degree of Separation", in four parts starting here:

http://www.cybcity.com/gigolojoe/onedegreechapt1.html

(The feedback link won't work, just FYI. And I hope you'll forgive me any typos.)

At any rate, everything else I'd written for the series was on the discs, and I spent about an hour reading through the old material. God... did I ever write this well? 0_o... apparently so. It's all right there, and there's some stuff that leaves me dumbstruck with how good it actually is. There's also a whole bunch of Joe/Other fics, plus a story called "For Always" in which Monica Swinton and Gigolo Joe end up finding each other as ghosts, unable to leave David's side as he languishes beneath the sea in the amphibicopter, praying to the Blue Fairy to be made real.

Strangely, reading them also leaves me ineffably depressed.

Why? Perhaps because I DID write this well at one point, and something of that joy has been gone from my life recently. Perhaps I can get it back again...

I'll post some of the material here on my LJ, if anyone's interested.