May I ask what year? I was going to go out on a limb and say 1928, but I decided to give a range instead.
1922.
The writing style does feel older than that, but reading things from that year, and that period generally, I was struck by how many things felt completely modern in style (Fitzgerald, Mary Roberts Rinehart, etc) and how many seemed, by the style, to have actually been written in the previous century. (Lovecraft is the obvious example, but not the only one.)
I have a vague and possibly incorrect memory of talking to you about this at Clarion West, while sitting on the living room couch closest to the solarium, possibly just after a session of Robot Chicken. I feel like you'd stalled in the draft because you didn't know what year it was
The draft at CW was set in the present day. But we probably did have the conversation, since I do work that way generally. It's not that I'm opposed to square brackets--on the contrary, square brackets are my friend!--but it's hard for me to see things without details, and often the right setting or historical information will tell me what the characters are doing, or what's going on. When that information is missing, nothing quite feels right.
and there was illustrated the difference between our writing styles.
Indeed!
Although I also remember that the draft you turned in for CW (Swanwick's week, right?) had a note in it that said something like [stuff about aqueducts] in the middle of a paragraph. I was proud of you. ;-)
Note that once I knew the setting exactly, and knew what I needed to know about aqueducts, the story improved markedly.
And yeah, that was Swanwick's week. And he's responsible for it being set in the past. He read the draft set in the present and took it for a Mars nostalgia story, one of the many that centers around that traumatic moment when we discovered that no, really, there wasn't anything on Mars even remotely like the stories people had been writing and reading. Since that wasn't my intention at all, I spent the rest of the summer trying to figure out how to not trigger that response. And once I moved it back in time, not only was that problem solved, but several others were as well. So I figure I owe Swanwick for that.