Derek Jayson Tribute

[PM2K]

One of my fav tales from Derek is The Truth about Quicksand, which told the tale of a lost lady sinking from the quicksand's point of view. When I first read it, I hadn't read a story quite like that before. and loved it.

Another fav who's title evades me was a first person account of a lady who breaks into a fenced off area, stripes naked, and sinks happily out of sight. Simple, yet incredibly effective.

[Boggy Man]

Here is another link to Derek Jayson's stories, with perhaps a couple not found on Black Squirrel's site, unless they were renamed:

http://web.archive.org/web/199911130030 ... torix.html

[Viridian]

I've read most of his stories and refer to him as a pioneer who was part of the "golden age", and Derek stands out because of his prolific style - he had both the quality and the quantity and knew how to target his stories to get to the point.

There are a couple more things to keep in mind. One is the time-gap between Derek's active period and now. It's been well over a decade, and most of the current writers and readers probably would not have been from that time period of Yahoo Groups and even DeepSinking. If we're comparing this to AcidTester's tribute, AT was active to only a couple of years ago, and AT is *still* floating around. The other thing to keep in mind is the relatively low profile that Derek kept. Over time his stories have become increasingly difficult to find and it wouldn't surprise me if the newer batch of community members haven't had the chance to view his work - something which will hopefully change with the archive work (and again in contrast to AT, who had more of his work up until recently, and his work was more widely collected).

Though there have been many writers, in my mind Derek represents "that" era, and his retirement from the QS scene, to me, was the end of that era. Though it may be surprising, I wasn't a huge fan of his work and wasn't inspired by his writing style (I was drawn more to the intensity of scenes depicted by Crypto and DerMudGecko). As a "post-Derek" writer, I personally consider my goal to advance the art of writing to a new level.

[quickbeard]

Derek was indeed from that early time period in which the quicksand was the star, so you "jumped" right into it. He is the the only writer immortalized in another story "at the boghole" as the guy that wants us to sink in panty hose.