A long time back I got the idea to pen a collection of (mostly) standalone stories centering around the Egyptian gods. The first three would deal with the Name of Ra/Destruction of Mankind cycle; another three would deal with Anubis; and the rest would be about various other gods. I believe it totaled ten stories: the six already mentioned, as well as "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air...," "Sobek & Hathor," "Sovereignty," and "The Price Of Forgetfulness." I eventually completed all these stories sometime in high school and I seem to remember letting a teacher read them; I was quite proud of them. Those stories were printed out from our old Tandy computer; this set is the ORIGINAL set, which I wrote in a small five-subject notebook. It looks like I got through six stories, then started on "7: Anubis 2: Kebehut"...and got partway through before abandoning the notebook in favor of the computer. I did a great deal of by-hand writing before giving up on this notebook, so I'm rather impressed.
City Of The Sun, or COTS as I've taken to calling it, stood for quite a long time. Then after going online for the first time in 2000, and sharing my rewrite of Horus with the world (such as it is), I decided to take a fresh look at the shorter stories. Ick. To say the least. I had NO comprehension of point of view, for one thing--my POV is all over the frigging place, a writing flaw which I can't STAND in others' work! And some of my plot elements are just plain ludicrous. Now ashamed of my former pride and joy, I decided to...rewrite! But this presented a challenge, as, now that my Anubis storyline had been altered by the writing of the novel Horus, COTS's contents could no longer stand "as is."
I finally settled on this plan: I would take the first three tales, the entire Name of Ra/Destruction of Mankind cycle, and convert them into a novel of their own, and THAT would be the new City Of The Sun. The Anubis cycle, meanwhile, would have to be completely revamped. The first story, featuring his birth, would be included in my novel Osiris (currently on hiatus, but the birth of Anubis has already been written); and the third story (not included here), featuring his "coming out" as the son of Nephthys rather than Isis (and including a big argument scene with Horus), had already been redone in much shorter, modified format in Horus. That left only one of Anubis's former three stories ("Kebehut," in partial format here), and the four other stories. I put COTS itself on hiatus as well (only the prologue and part of Chapter 1 have been written, to date), and set to work rewriting these remaining five stories. With "The Price Of Forgetfulness," I completed these rewrites, and by then, these five stories had been posted to the Web alongside various other novellas/short stories I had written about the gods in the interim. And so there you have it...the fate of the original City Of The Sun. I tore it apart, tossed hunks of it away, and cannibalized the rest! And I STILL haven't used up all the material from it! (Have yet to ever get around to writing the NEW City Of The Sun.)
This was probably my first major effort at rewriting; I won't include the earlier effort Horus (1997), as the rewrite of that was SO drastically changed from the original, childish version (also hopefully to be included on this site), that I didn't even have to LOOK at the original story to rewrite it. The rewrites of these stories were another matter. While they did change, a lot, you can still probably see a lot of similarities if you're willing to compare them to the current versions (themselves several years old and probably in need of rewrites by now!). Feel free to do so as all of the stories told here, save the three Ra myths, are now in rewritten format online. (You'll have to dig "Anubis 1: The Beginning" out of Osiris and "Anubis 3: Brothers" out of Horus, though.) Take note of ONE thing which has completely vanished from the stories due to necessity: The fact that, as a narrative device, I used the wolf god Khenti Amenti, telling these tales to the sons of Horus, as a sort of "frame story" around all the others. Of course this would never work in standalone story format...so out went Khenti and the sons of Horus! Sorry, guys. But maybe you'll get a kick out of reading the Ra myths which haven't been redone yet, as a taste of things to come in the potential COTS rewrite. SOMEDAY!
This set of stories marks a transitional period between my early, completely stupid Egyptian writings (including the first versions of Osiris and Horus), and the rewrite of Horus and the stories that I have posted online today. This is the first time I've really looked at these versions since rewriting. Cringemania. I BELIEVE, but am not certain, that these versions are word-for-word the same as the slightly later, computer versions which include ALL ten stories in their entirety; this set has only the first six and part of the seventh. (There may be SLIGHT differences, as I'm noticing vague little notes scribbled in the margins, such as "change unboard to disembark" and "space in pawprints," etc., but nothing major.) I'll type up the second version when I have time, if I can find all of it (some pages are still missing), but it's a LOT of typing. I can date these to high school (1991-95), probably earlier rather than later, because I think it was my freshman writing teacher who I subjected to these tales. (UPDATE! I only just noticed that the notebook itself has the date "1992-" in the front, indicating that that's when I started it, and never finished it...duh!)
Front, Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Back
by Rachel L. H. [last name omitted]
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