revised 2 March 2017

Joy Beeson's Writing


Everything here is copyright Joy Beeson.
Please do not republish without permission.
You may download and print out these essays for your personal use,
and please do tell your friends about this page and the URLs linked to it.
 

Plain Text

Many of these files are plain text.   Your browser will probably display them in a font appropriate for short pieces of plain text on an HTML page, but hard to read in quantity.   If a file interests you, download it and read it with a word processor or text editor.

To make my plain-text files possible to read with a browser, I added extra line feeds to cut them into short lines.   Word for Windows does not deal gracefully with extra line feeds.   If you have trouble with a plain-text file, ask me to e-mail you a copy in which each paragraph is on a single line.
 

Needlework

Mending knits , an excerpt from Rough Sewing file ROUGH024.TXT
(Medici has been discontinued, but as of March, 2007, some sources still had a little Medici in stock. I have not revised Rough Sewing to reflect this change. Appleton Crewel is now the finest wool thread I know of, and it is fairly coarse. Sometimes silk thread can be substituted.)
 
Rough Sewing:  rough notes — An HTML guide to the back-up files of a work in progress.  They are in ASCII (plain text) with a few formatting commands. There are also a few HTML files in a somewhat more-finished condition.
 
Shuttle Solitaire:  Tatting as a Tranquilizer — a work not in progress
 
Heart Medallion:  a recipe for an edging that can be turned every which way
 
Crocheted baby booties: an old family pattern

Mailing-list etiquette

 "I Miss a Lot of Good Stuff":  (plain text)
I plugged an unfinished mailing-list post into an empty spot in
the Writer's Exchange Bulletin a few years back. Recently, I came
across it while looking for something else, and decided that in these
days of The Endless September, it deserved wider circulation even
in its still-unfinished state, so here it is.

(I prefixed a definition of "endless September" to the file.)

!!NEW!! with added essay on "How to Advertise on Mailing Lists and Usenet"
 

How to Edit Your Club's Newsletter

Sample chapter:  "Style, Spelling, and Grammar:  Nobody's Perfect"  (plain text)

Copyright Myths  (plain text)

How about sending me one of the myths I missed?
 

Poetry

Paging Dr. Roget  (plain text)

Shock Amnesia  (plain text)

A Golden Autumn Silence

Meta-poetry

I detest movies about show business, but I indulge myself in poems about poetry.

Light Armory  (plain text)

Prose  (plain text)
 

Fiction

Once upon a time I was reading a children's magazine -- one intended to be handed out in schools, if I recall correctly -- and came upon something that appeared to have been an incredibly-lame story set in the American West, but the next call was for SF, so someone changed "ranch" to "planet", and "jeep" to "rocket ship" all through the story.

I'm most definitely not a fiction writer, but this story made me angry, and I always write better when I'm angry.  Sometimes I regret that very much, but this time the result was
Manstealers  (html).

And then one day I was poking through my files and said, hey
The Dying Demon  (html).
isn't all that bad.  This, too, was written in response to an incredibly-lame published story, but in a fanzine, a publication that admits that it's the work of amateurs.  (Am I detecting a trend here?  Perhaps I should post "Angelan Spring", which is not a response to anything, and let you say whether it's worse.)

The fanzine, alas, died long before I finished the story I was writing for it.

Anjelan Spring  (html).
No sooner said than done. Well, it took a couple of months to get around to it, but only an hour or two to convert it to HTML. HTML is really easy, once I figure out what I'm doing, and once one has realized that one formats to a wide left margin first, and puts paragraph marks in said margins later.

There are two prequels to this story -- I take a long time to warm up, but this is the record, I think, for amount of stuff that had to be snipped off the beginning of a story. Given the teensiest bit of encouragement, I'll HTML those too.

If you squint a bit, "Anjelan Spring" is in the same universe as "Manstealers", but in a different part of the galaxy, and most likely a good bit earlier.

Widow Lady  I don't recall when I wrote this story or where it came from. 
<Olive Oyl>
It's short, and it's . . . short, and . . . it's short.
</Olive Oyl>

The First Arrangement  Plain-text file.

Inspired by Doc Savage even though I've still never seen a Doc Savage story. But I gather from secondary sources that I didn't get quite everything wrong.

This was written before I got my first computer, possibly in the late sixties. I finally got around to punching it in, but haven't shown it to a beta reader yet. Care to comment? My e-dress is my name at comcast dot net.

A blog of sorts

Rants

HTML and the World Wide Web -- a protoblog

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