Not much right now that I either want to talk about (really, let's just not go into Current World Events at all, shall we?) or that anyone wants to hear about (mostly I've been working on the Easter story), so let's lay a little ground for Dredging the Circular Cruises.

That, and the other quote at the end, are from Jean Kerr, who might as well be the patron saint of the Circular Cruises. I will never be able to write as amusingly as she does (I do wiseassery sometimes, but I'm very bad at humor) nor as concisely, but this has never stopped me from trying.

The Circular Cruises were where longer, allegedly coherent, single-topic non-fiction pieces went, back in the day. They were named that because often to me they felt like being on a cruise that never actually went anywhere. Rereading some of them, lo these decades later, has not lessened that sensation much.

There are thirty-six Cruises in my archives. Some of them actually have things to say. Some of them, not so much. Some of them started huge arguments when I first posted them, others more or less got ignored. A few of them are definitely experimental, and not all of those experiments were successes. (I still can't tell whether Dollar Draw would be interesting to actually play. I suspect it wouldn't be.)

So I might not Dredge them all out. But I'll definitely be pulling out some of them.

The Cruises are pretty much the oldest long prose I have in the files, apart from a few bits and fragments which end up reprinted in the journal later. The oldest Cruise is from May 1997 -- more than a year before Alewife Bayou began. In fact, by the time we get to June 1998, when we enter the bayou, there had already been nineteen Cruises -- including twice when I posted two on the same day!

1997 and 1998 saw most of the cruise traffic. I didn't pose a single Cruise in 1999. I did a few in 2000 and 2001, but I suspect that the futility of essays --- why take the time to put together several thousand words of non-fiction prose if no one is going to ever read it? -- was beginning to set in for me by then. In 2002 I posted the third and last of the March game essays, and Dollar Draw ... and that was it for the Circular Cruises forever.

When Dredging them, I'm not going to go chronologically. Instead, I'm going to repost them as they get mentioned while I'm going through journal entries. This seems like a good way to decide which ones feel most significant. If I constantly refer to, say, the religion essay, then that's a sign. If it's an essay I posted and then never mentioned anywhere, that's a sign pointing in the opposite direction.