That’s Alright

Sunday morning and I slept really well last night, so am feeling rested. I believe the Saints game is tonight, if I am not mistaken, which gives me most of the day to get things done. I did manage to get some things done yesterday in the wake of the LSU debacle; my kitchen is all straightened and cleaned up (I also watched the Auburn debacle against Georgia before giving up on football entirely for the day, as it was clearly not meant to be my day at all) and I finished reading my Donna Andrews book (Round Up the Usual Peacocks, more on that later) while getting started on my revisitation of Interview with the Vampire (which I realized, once again, upon starting that it’s really not a horror story of the kind one usually associates with vampires) and I also got some other things done yesterday as well. Today I have even more things to do, including picking up the groceries I ordered yesterday, and am hoping that I’ll be able to get a lot of things powered through. My coffee tastes great, I feel rested–if a little loopy from sleep, and that should wear off rather soon. A new episode of Interview with the Vampire should drop today as well–it’s fun to reread the book while watching the new adaptation–and of course, tomorrow I have to return to the office to see how much, if any, of a difference returning to the office for Mondays will make in how my work week goes every week.

We watched Sins of Our Mother last night on Netflix, a documentary about the so-called “Doomsday Mom,” who began to believe we were living in the end times and that she and her lover were modern-day prophets, which led to the murders of their spouses, one of her brothers, and two of her children. She hasn’t been tried yet–which of course led to my “why would you make the documentary before the trial?” question–but it was interesting. I feel incredibly sorry for her son Colby, her only surviving child–how do you go on with your life after something like this happens to you?– which is why the impact of crime on people is becoming more and more interesting to me than actually writing whodunnit murder mysteries. How do you go back to your normal life? How do you carry on, go on, get past the horror of your brother and sister being murdered by your mother and her lover? That she has become almost completely insane with religious fervor? I shudder at the thought.

We also started watching the Netflix adaptation of Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club into a series. I loved Christopher Pike back in the day, once I discovered him; I made a point of going back and reading everything he wrote, and it was reading Pike (and from him, discovering other y/a horror/suspense writers in his wake like R. L. Stine, Jay Bennett, and Lois Duncan) that led me into writing my original three young adult novels (Sara, Sorceress, Sleeping Angel). I liked the Pike novels because they were so damned dark, and happy endings were never guaranteed in a Pike book (I always liked Pike more than Stine, even though I liked the way Stine linked his books together under the Fear Street series header), which I also liked. The Midnight Club is totally dark; the premise is that the book is set in a hospice for terminally ill teenagers, and they gather every night at midnight to tell each other stories–scary stories for the most part, but stories–and they also swear that the first one to die will try to come back and tell the others what death is like…while strange things are going on in the hospice itself, in which you can never be sure if those things are really happening or if the kids themselves are hallucinating from their drug protocols, which as I recall kept me off-balance as I read the book. Such a great premise, really; I don’t really remember much of the book other than the setting and the dying teenagers–which is pretty fucking grim, if you don’t mind me pointing that out–so there’s this almost-casual acceptance of their impending deaths as well as their curiosity about the supernatural and the world beyond–or if there even is one. I remember reading The Midnight Club and thinking “this is really heavy shit for teenagers to digest” but then…I was reading Stephen King when I was a teenager, so there’s that…but Pike was the one who made me realize my perceptions of what you could and couldn’t do in young adult fiction were heavily skewed and incredibly incorrect in almost every way. I’m not sure I am going to write any more of them, to be honest–I do have ideas for any number of others, but I think I’m going to pause my young adult writing for a while and maybe, perhaps, do some stand alones that are for adults rather than a young adult audience…(although I think mine do qualify as readable by adults, too, but I am not the best judge of any of that, really)

I really need to work on my book this morning once I finish this and get cleaned up. I want to do a little more reading on Interview today, and I have some other things that need to get done, too. The key is to not allow myself to get derailed or distracted, which is never an easy thing for me to have not happen, you know? I sometimes wonder how much I could get done if I weren’t so easily distracted from everything, but there you are; we’ll never know because I will always be distracted. Heavy sigh.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines this morning. Y’all have a lovely Sunday and if you have an NFL team you root for, I hope they do well today.