Blue Letter

Friday!

I’m not certain why waking up on Friday makes me happy–or as happy as one can be when going through the tedious process of waking up from slumber–but I am sure it has to do with a light day at the office and then two days at home that are free (well, free from the day job, at any rate; I work all weekends as it is), and of course I will have errands to run as always, writing to do, laundry and dishes to clean up, etc etc etc. I want to finish reading Gabino’s book this weekend, and of course I want to write and do some other things as well. It rained overnight–a quite marvelous thunderstorm–and it’s still rainy and damp this morning now that I have arisen. It felt rather marvelous to sleep last night. There’s really nothing like rain/thunderstorms to help one sleep when one is buried beneath a pile of comfortable and very warm blankets.

I did work on Mississippi River Mischief some last night–the first chapter wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was, but it needed some fixing and things and so I was more than happy to add about a thousand words to it as well as clean some of it up. I also recorded a video for an on-line conference for A Streetcar Named Murder. I had to clean off my desk and straighten up the kitchen in order to get it done, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be to do, and I didn’t even mind seeing myself on video or hearing the recording of my voice as much as I usually do. Which was nice, of course–the initial shock of seeing how much older I look than I think I look seems to not be as great as it used to be. Acceptance? A final loss of vanity? Who knows? But it wasn’t as big an ordeal or as terrible as I feared it would be (few things ever are as terrible as I worry they will be, thanks to my vivid imagination). It’s also interesting to start transitioning into promo mode for A Streetcar Named Murder, which should be kind of different and fun than what I am used to experiencing when it comes to book promo.

I’m feeling good this morning, and my coffee is hitting the spot, and everything feels right, which is always a little unsettling for me as I inevitably wait for the other shoe to drop that is going to fuck everything up. It has always been my experience in life that there’s always another shoe about to drop. We finished watching one of the Fyre Festival documentaries last night–the Netflix one rather than Hulu, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. As someone who has done event planning, and is married to someone who basically has been an event planner since 1998, oh my God, how we both were cringing. Sure, we had hindsight, but…as we watched as the disaster unfolded and the guests started arriving into the mess that had been created, one of the people involved with it kept talking about how, right up until the last minute, the guy in charge–Billy something, who actually turned out to be a sociopathic schemer–kept thinking and believing and convincing everyone that it would somehow all come together and work out at the last minute. I turned to Paul and said, “what’s really frightening about this is knowing I’ve been that person many many times, oh, it’ll all come together while not being entirely sure that it will but thinking that because it always has before. Have you ever felt like that?”

And he replied, “every weekend before the Festival starts I basically have a panic attack.”

No matter how many lists you make, no matter how much attention you pay, no matter how many reminder notes you scribble down somewhere, there’s always this fear that you forgot something important that’s going to rise up and bite you in the ass at the worst possible time. It always reminds me of that bit from The Shining about the boiler–“that what was forgotten” (although I knew in the beginning of the book, when the hotelier spent so much time explaining the boiler to Jack, that at some point it was going to blow the entire hotel to smithereens–SPOILER, sorry!).

In fact, I had completely forgotten that I had chaired World Horror Con in New Orleans whatever year that was; 2014? 2015? 2013? It really wasn’t terrible, but all those spinning plates…but I was cautious and careful and made sure nothing went awry, and overall it ran relatively smoothly. Funny that I had forgotten about that. Is it my age and getting older that has damaged my memory so badly? Or is it that the older you get the more you have to remember, so there’s limited room in my memory banks so things get stored deeper in my brain and aren’t as easily accessible? That’s better and easier to believe than my memory is faltering and synapses are no longer firing.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely and dry Friday, Constant Reader. I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.