Blog

It appears that my cur­rent work-in-progress (title pend­ing; cur­rent work­ing title is “How Quick­ly We For­get”) came to me in a dream just over a year ago. Just for fun I took a snap­shot of the git com­mits^[1]nerds gonna nerd,^[2]speak­ing of nerds gonna nerd: appar­ent­ly tac in Lin­ux will spit out a text file in reverse order, the oppo­site of cat on the project, and here’s what I’ve done so far (no spoil­ers that I know of):

• Ini­tial commit
• First few ¶s — 2024-11-17
• 2024-11-23 morn­ing
• 2024-11-23 evening
• Updates pri­or to 02-Sep-2025
• Added a few notes for lat­er inclu­sion (or at least consideration)
• A quick snip­pet for the moment right before the Time Jump
• Intro: the diaries arrive; some notes
• Start­ing to get into the whole swing of the narration
• Added .git­ig­nore
• Con­vert­ed all the sec­tion breaks to #, which is my pre­ferred notation
• Tonight’s writ­ing
• a cou­ple pos­si­ble titles
• OK now it’s a roman à clef
• Can’t find my face in the yearbook
• Minor changes to the ‘I can’t find my face’ section
• Diary entries and notes; pub­lic domain image of the tarot’s Tower
• Added more to the first diary entry
• Diary entry about the dis­ap­pear­ance of Hen­ry Lepin
• lam­bent
• First close encounter with the tower
• More diary entries: Rhéal ascends and descends the tower
• Added Olympics bit
• Added Unsplash pho­to; added snip­pet about the door’s sud­den appearance
• Quick note so I don’t for­get it
• After Rheal came back down…
• Added note about Oppo­si­tion­al Defi­ance Disorder
• Added some notes; edit­ed the open­ing; intro­duced the tow­er a bit earlier
• Light edits
• Added text about why Mark kept a diary
• Most­ly edit­ing the first bits
• Start­ed on the next diary entry
• Some minor edits
• Some edits, a new diary entry, a few updates to the notes
• Update: no explic­it men­tions of the tow­er in the diary entries proper
• Some notes for the edit­ing phase
• Start­ed on the climb of the tower
• Added a note (‘Coda’) about how the whole thing ends
• He’s climb­ing the stairs now
• Removed extra ‘chap­ter’ titles, minor edits, tongue-in-cheek title suggestion

Update, Dec. 19^th: a month lat­er, here’s the next batch of com­mit messages:

• He’s still climb­ing the stairs
• A bit more climbing
• idea for a web­site (lat­er)
• Reach­ing the top
• Left a note about the mas­sive storm — make sure it’s in the diary
• small edits, the view from the top
• A bit more at the top
• About to start the descent
• Jot­ted down a cou­ple notes about ideas I had while wash­ing dishes
• Run­ning into Rhéal on the way down; [dates]
• Added TK to the date notes, for more easy regex search-and-replace later
• Typo fix­es, added TK about an upcom­ing entry
• A ‘manse’ is for cler­gy; also added the year to the ‘mod­ern’ date TKs
• Added red-brick tex­ture; pos­si­ble cov­er image
• More diary entries
• Pos­si­ble title image
• Moved the giant images to an ignored fold­er, made a small­er JPG cov­er concept
• Fiz­zgig real­ly does­n’t like the ele­men­tary school playground
• Very minor changes
• Cleared off a TK (what a love­ly feeling)
• Rhéal stays over
• Punc­tu­a­tion changes
• Minor edits
• Notes on the coda; the new tow­er appears
• Ignore the word­count file
• Christ­mas diary entry
• Start­ed the Thanks­giv­ing scene
• Renamed the school after Mme. Chirac
• Added a cou­ple notes; linked to the post about The Dream
• The rest of the Thanks­giv­ing visit
• [redacted]‘s fate
• The next morning
• Guilt over [redacted]‘s fate
• Cor­rect­ed the spelling of L’Évêque