The 1990s ranged far and wide, both in terms of writing and location. I started the decade in Berlin and ended it in Mexico City, in between tackling a difficult University of London Masters’ degree, acquiring TEFL and NUJ accreditation, and doing a lot of international freelance and some staff journalism. And I wrote four novels, plus a load of short stories.
Only three of the novels, and a selection of the stories will appear here, bit by bit as I reformat, copy-edit and upload. The second novel written ca. 1992 is now elsewhere, serving as first-draft to a section of the eighth, which is still in progress.
I notice that incidents from my life recur all the time, popping up redrafted to feature again in a new context. That’s been another striking feature of all this back-reading – how much redrafting of my life, starting from my earliest teenage diaries, I have actually already done and mostly long forgotten.
Almost everything here was inspired by memory, which is absolutely not to deny that many things are also made up. The settings and a fair few of the people are mostly real, at least at the outset. What happens to them and between them is generally a question of what-if.
October 2021
Earlier uploads:
https://marytuda.wordpress.com/
http://ateenagediary.home.blog/
https://astudentdiary1978to1981.wordpress.com/
https://storiesfromthe1980s.wordpress.com/
Also ePub version of Cynthia’s American Year: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dLMb3ZcWslob7c-XLanNqidf70XG7zXJ/view?usp=sharing
And subsequent ‘Tales from the 2000s’:
Tales from the 1990s 