Chemical

Sunday, and time for the final push on the book. I’m at the point in writing where I feel like my entire life has become subsumed by the book; that point where it has seized almost complete control of your brain and you are thinking in terms of when this is done I’ll have my life back. I am also at the point where I hate everything about it, am heartily sick of the story and the characters when I am not actually working on them, and also when I am questioning any and all of my life choices.

I had a socially distant drink (or two) with a friend in from out of town for the Easter holiday, and her mixology skills may have gotten me to switch my allegiance from vodka to gin when it comes to martinis. They are two very different drinks–I’d never particularly cared for gin when I’d tried it in the past, but the traditional martinis she made me yesterday were quite tasty. I did all the errands I had to do yesterday, including the laundromat trip I’d talked about–which was interesting, and I did get much further in The Russia House while I was waiting to switch clothes from washer to dryer and then to finish drying–and then I came home to work for a bit before the cocktail date. It has been quite a long while since I’ve had anything alcoholic to drink, and it was so nice and normal I wasn’t quite sure how to act. After I got home and made dinner, we watched the regional final (LSU qualified for the national semi-finals; they did better than they had the day before, but it was still a rather sloppy meet for them; they can do better and score higher than they have) and then it was on to watch another serial killer documentary series–The Clown and the Candyman (recommended by a friend on Facebook).

Gacy is the more famous of the two serial killers who targeted and tortured boys and young men; Gacy came after Dean Korll and is better remembered for some reason. I guess it’s the whole clown thing, but Korll was, I think, even more sadistic than Gacy and the whole candyman thing–he used to work in his mother’s candy store and gave candy away to kids. It’s kind of terrifying, really, to think about how things usually associated with children were twisted around by these horrible killers. It’s like if the ice cream truck driver turned out to be a serial rapist/killer (Stephen King kind of did this in Mr. Mercedes), or some other trusted person people felt safe having around their kids. This documentary touches on something the Gacy docuseries briefly touched on; that Gacy may have been involved with a nation-wide ring of pedophiles involved in sex trafficking boys. The similarities between the Korll and Gacy murders are eerie and creepy; the assumption has always been that Gacy kind of copied what Korll did, but what if they actually were connected in some way–which is even more terrifying to think about or consider. I’ve always wanted to write about Dean Korll; I heard about the mass killings in the Heights when I first moved to Houston back in 1989, and have been fascinated by the story ever since. I am really looking forward to watching the second half tonight….if I finish my book.

Speaking of which, I am so close to being finished!

So, when I finish this I am going to go back and read the previous drafts of these last two chapters–I don’t think there’s much to be saved from them, frankly, but hey, stranger things have happened–and get them reworked to fit the final narrative. It’s been quite a journey writing this book, frankly–going back all the way to the summer of 2015 when I wrote the first draft in a burst of energy and excitement that hot and fetid July in New Orleans. I’ve also been so horribly disorganized, computer wise, since the Great Data Disaster of 2018, when things started going haywire with my desktop computer and nothing has really been the same since (I’ve not really tried to organize my computer files since then, with so much to do and so much going on; one of the things I decided yesterday was to make sure that, with the manuscript finished and so forth, that I spend some time over the next month–when not revising Bury Me in Shadows one last time–getting all my files and so forth organized–it’s been an absolute bitch revising this manuscript because there are so many versions and so many drafts scattered throughout all my storage–iCloud, dropbox, back up hard drive–that I am never entirely sure I am using the most current version of any of it, to be honest; but it’s fine, really. I am pleased with this version of it, and if there exists better drafts of chapters I’ve been working on, oh well). It’s just so time consuming to go through everything, opening and reading files, determining where the right space for them is, and so forth.

Sigh. So much organizing to get done.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Happy Easter, and have a lovely day.