Well I've gone and started a new short story - my fourth this year. It's at about five thousand words, and the more I get into it, the more I find myself enjoying the little things like characterization and description. I'm also finding some truth to that cliche "Write what you know", as the sum total of my experiences up here in Boston for the past fourteen years come tumbling out. Maybe that's another reason I was unable to write a damned thing for all of these years. I was too busy taking mental notes of what I would be writing about later!

This story utilizes some of the settings and characters that I used in a previous story, "Bambino". At this point I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to put together a collection of these (maybe something between five and nine stories, all told) to tell a larger tale in an indirect, interwoven fashion, although I'd really like each story to able to stand on its own, outside of the whole. I guess maybe I'll find the proper balance as I go.

In the meantime, I think my new job has put my imagination into overdrive. I've been at Widener Library for just about a month, and the "gee whiz" of working in such a place still hasn't even come close to wearing off yet. The physical structure of the library itself is an adventure to explore, with ten floors of stacks, hidden reading rooms flooded with blue sky and sunshine streaming through modern skylights, and secret doors that only staff are able to access which criss-cross the building in ways that I'm only starting to figure out. It's a lot like the library in Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", only this is the real thing. I don't know how many times in the past few weeks I've gotten completely and totally lost. It's quite easy, owing to the fact that each floor's stacks is shaped more or less like a horseshoe. This doesn't seem too difficult to figure out how to navigate until you realize that you're following the outline of the horseshoe, which means lots of twisting and turning with few if any reference points, save for an occasional sign telling you whether you're in the East or West wing of the stacks. And then there are the staff doors. Yes, they're shortcuts, but at the same time they're mostly unmarked, and after a little bit every alarmed door and white corridor beyond starts looking like every other alarmed door with a white corridor beyond. I wonder what people must think of me when they see me pop into a hallway with this sometimes confused, sometimes delightfully surprised look on my face...

Today's big revelation was my visit to the sub-sub basement of the stacks, which is actually located in a building adjacent to the main library, accessible via a steam tunnel in Widener's very bowels. My quarry was a wayward religious periodical whose enumeration was suspect. This happens a lot with Greek publications, unfortunately, though it's not entirely the Greeks' fault. Long before the advent of Arabic numbers, the Ancient Greek employed two systems of numerical notation - one was similar to the Roman version of I's, V's, and X's; the other was a simple alphabetic substitution. Α was equal to one, Β was two, Γ three, and so on and so forth, until you got to Ι, which was ten. After that you used a combination of the Ι and the first nine numbers to form eleven through nineteen, in a decimal form of notation, until you got to twenty, when you'd use the letter after Ι, which was Κ. It's a clever enough way to represent numbers, but a real pain in the ass when you're running into them when reading a text. Well, long story short, this system of enumeration survived the Romans, survived Arabic numbers, and even made a brief comeback in the Greek school system during the country's more conservative political eras, and lives on proudly today on countless Greek periodicals published today. The only problem with this is that even the Greeks themselves are forgetting how to count this way, and therefore are more likely to goof up than they would be if they were using Arabic numerals to mark their tomous (volumes), teuchous (issues), and arithmous (numbers).

I was in the process of trying to verify that the publisher of this particular journal about the Greek Orthodox Church had indeed goofed when I discovered the steam tunnel and the stacks of the sub-sub basement, which were unlike any library stacks I'd ever seen before. For the sake of space, these shelves were collapsible in an accordion-like fashion, fitting to a track and sliding to the right or to the left to open up the aisle you needed to get at. Apparently this is nothing new in the world of libraries, although most people who have seen such stacks before remember them opening or closing by a crank that you turn by hand. These stacks, however, were electronic! Every collapsed aisle had a series of buttons on it that could slide the entire set of stacks, which moved automatically once properly cajoled. So I fiddled with the keypads until the section I needed was revealed, and found my journal halfway down the newly-opened aisle. That's when it hit me - what's keeping this thing from closing back up with me inside? The rational part of me reasoned that there must be a failsafe (and indeed there was, something to do with my weight on the aisle floor), while the more imaginative quarters of my brain started thinking of the Trash Compactor scene in the original Star Wars movie.

Needless to say, I didn't tarry. But how can you not love working at a place like this?