I really hate working on my MacBook Air. I mean, I guess it’s okay but it’s really difficult for me to get used to, you know? I really love the bigger screen of my desktop computer–but then, maybe that will change when my new glasses come in–if they ever come in; they were due to come in this week, in fact. Heavy heaving sigh. I’ll end up having to go out to Metairie to pick them up next Saturday, most likely. Yay. It’s always such a joy for me to head to Metairie for any reason.
Heavy heaving sigh.
Well, it’s Friday and I’m in Florida (not as lyrically magical as “Friday I’m in Love,” but this is why I am not a songwriter). I did my reading at Noir at the Bar last night, and yes, I did read from Chlorine, and it went over very well, I think. People seemed to be appreciative of it, or at least very kind, at any rate. The other readers were all fantastic–JD Allen, Tracy Clark, John Copenhaver, Jeffrey Deaver (!!!!), Tori Eldridge, and Alan Orloff. I was quite intimidated when. I got up there as everyone was killing it, but I surprisingly didn’t have my usual stage fright and nerves beforehand, and much to my surprise as I was reading, my hands weren’t shaking and I couldn’t hear my voice shaking either. I did have the big adrenaline crash afterwards, of course–that will never change, methinks–but it was kind of lovely not having my usual stage fright jitters before hand; I think that may have been because I was sitting and chatting with friends before hand? Anyway, it turned out to be a much more pleasant experience than usual, and I can check “Noir at the Bar” off my bucket list.
I have a panel later on today, which should be fun, about point of view; and then I have two back to back tomorrow afternoon. I slept okay last night–more restful physically than actual deep rest, which was odd, given how long I had been up but then again, strange bed and a lot of stimulation during the day. It happens, I suppose. I just figured I would zonk out after getting up so damned early yesterday and flying and everything. Ah, well. Maybe tonight? One can hope.
So I am going to just take it easy this morning, methinks. I will have to go foraging for coffee at some point–they have some in the room, but…yeah, not the greatest and only one cup so a-foraging I will go. I know they had free coffee in the bookshop this morning but I missed that by lounging in bed much too long and now writing this, but I want to be able to be chill and witty on my panel later this afternoon. It’s really nice to come to these kinds of things; it’s always lovely being around people who love books as well as people who also write; we all have that struggle in common–that weird love/hate thing, not to mention the total insanity of publishing and how the business works which we are all trying to figure out somehow even though there really is no way to figure it all out. It’s also nice being inside a conference bubble for a weekend, where I can pretend that nothing is going on in the world outside and everything else is great and hunky dory and I can put off dealing with reality until I go home Sunday.
Ugh, reality. Not my favorite.
Okay, Constant Reader, it’s time for me to go forage for coffee. I’ll probably come back up here and write for a while before it’s time for my panel. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader–I’ll be back to annoy you again tomorrow.
Ye Gods, why am I awake this early? A six AM alarm is enough of a hate crime, but one at five should be prohibited by the Geneva Protocols. And yes, I know people get up this early every day for work, if not earlier–but I am not one of those people. I was talking about this with a co-worker yesterday–how that even on the days when I don’t have to come in so early now I wake up at six, and if I don’t stay in bed and just get up, I am not as tired as I am on the mornings when the alarm goes off at six (and on those mornings when I have to come in early, I actually start waking up around five. I stay in bed until the alarm goes off). I think it’s Pavlovian response, in all honesty, and has more to do with the alarm more than the getting up.
I really do miss the days when the earliest I had to be at work was eleven.
The trip was actually uneventful, honestly (I have since arrived; I didn’t have time to finish this before it was time to head to the airport this morning); I couldn’t have asked for a smoother trip. Getting to the airport was easy, I parked, got to the terminal, checked my bag, and then made it to Security without any issue or hassle or aggravation. The flight was on time, and was smooth and incredibly pleasant–I also got one of those exit row seats without a seat in front of it so I could stree-e-e-e-e-etch my legs all the way out. I got my bag without any incident, and then a friend picked me up and whisked me off to the Yacht Club for lunch, which was also lovely (yet I also can’t help but feel that yachts are incredible waste of money. I guess it’s a status thing for the ridiculously rich who, you know, don’t want to feed the hungry or educate the poor or heal the sick or anything). I also used technology to my advantage; I checked in early yesterday on the Hilton Honors app, my room was ready by one, and I can use my phone as my key, which is incredibly cool (although it will definitely increase my stress about making sure my phone is charged all the time). I’m going to head down in a moment to check into the conference (woo-hoo, Sleuthfest!) and get a Coke before coming back up here, finishing this, and rehearsing for my reading before tonight.
All right, I am all registered. I am starting to get cooled off here in my room–it’s quite lovely–and at some point I am going to have to rehearse for tonight’s Noir at the Bar reading (a rather impressive line-up of talent; not sure what I am doing in there but in these situations I have found that it is often best to never ask questions and just roll with it–I will no doubt geek out at some point about being in a reading with Jeffrey Deaver–closeted gay teenager in Kansas with big dreams has come a long way, has he not, from the little ranch house in a small town with a population of less than a thousand? It still trips me out from time to time when it kind of hits me.
I have decided to read tonight from the first chapter of Chlorine. Yes, just another example of how bad I am at this–I should read from Bury Me in Shadows or #shedeservedit, since I should be trying to sell more copies of them, but why should I start doing the smart thing twenty years into my career? And why not test run something new that I am working on?
I should write a piece called “Flop Sweat” to use for readings.
All right, I am going to lie down for a moment before it’s time to get ready. Have a lovely evening, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.
And now it’s Wednesday. I have to go to bed super-early tonight so I can get up for my flight tomorrow morning at the obscene departure time of 7:50. I need to rehearse my reading tonight, make sure that I have everything packed that needs to be packed, and perhaps even put everything in the car tonight–the suitcase in the hatch, at any rate; I don’t think I want my laptop in the car overnight in this heat and humidity. Probably not the wisest course to chart, no doubt. Yesterday was a weird one; the strangeness of the three day weekend morphing into a Tuesday that felt like a Monday (since Monday is usually my work-at-home day of the week, I felt like a holiday Monday shouldn’t have affected my perception of the start of the week, but nevertheless it did and there we were). The weather was also bad–gloomy and gray and thunderstorms all morning–it would have been an absolutely lovely day to stay in bed under the blankets with a good book, but alas, that was not to be.
Why couldn’t the thunderstorm have been MONDAY morning? When I could stay in bed all morning if I so chose? Heavy heaving sigh. Mother Nature clearly has it in for me, and I don’t like it one bit. DO BETTER.
Ugh, so much to do before I leave tomorrow morning. Heavy heaving sigh.
It doesn’t look like we’re going to get much rain today; if any at all. I have to run errands after work today, then come home and pack before going to bed early; I don’t feel as groggy this morning as I usually do on these mornings, which means maybe I slept well last night; I do feel like I did–I feel much more rested this morning than I did yesterday morning (low bar, to be fair) and that’s good. I was feeling tired most of yesterday, which is a feeling I really do not like much; it impairs my ability to get things done and I also feel like I don’t work as well with my clients when I am tired. That’s probably just me being hard on myself, but who would i be if I wasn’t hard on myself? Certainly not one Gregalicious, that’s for sure.
I sold my story “Solace in a Dying Hour” to that anthology that asked me to submit, which is, of course, absolutely a lovely thing. The story needs some more revision, which I am fine with–I trust editors, and I’ve always been lucky for the most part with the ones I’ve dealt with (I have had some horror stories, of course–who hasn’t?–but overall I cannot complain for the most part); I know this editor’s input made the last story I sold to her far better than what I originally sent in for the anthology. And this is a story of which I am inordinately proud; I really liked the idea behind it and what I did with it once I started writing it. (I am particularly pleased with the ending, he typed modestly.)
And it’s also Pay-the-Bills Day. But as I always rationalize to myself, at least I can pay the bills and buy groceries without worry, no matter how painful it is to pay the fucking bills. So, tonight when I get off work I get to run errands, do some laundry, clean up the kitchen, and pack so I am ready for the five AM alarm to go off in the morning so I can head to the airport. Heavy heaving sigh. I always have this dread of traveling before the whole thing gets underway. Here’s hoping that I will be able to sleep once I get there.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will talk to you again tomorrow–possibly from the airport itself.
I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked this past weekend, which is really not much of a surprise; I always go into weekends thinking I have lots of time to do things and so forth and wind up getting caught up in other things and well, then I don’t get things done that I need to get done and now I am all panicking because I leave for Florida really early Thursday morning and I then get worked up into a state and then…well, I find myself on Tuesday morning without as much done as I needed to get done and trying to keep the panic under control.
I did, however, to read the first chapter of Chlorine at Noir at the Bar Thursday night, so that’s one thing checked off the list. It’ll be nice, I think. It’s uploaded on the iPad and thus ready to go. I have so much to do…I am being interviewed for a podcast when I get home from work tonight, so I hope my client is on time so I can get home in time for it at five.
I slept very well last night–we’re still watching Condor on Epix, and are enjoying it; not sure why it hasn’t gotten more attention; but probably has to do with the plot and timing of the show’s release–hard for a show about the potential weaponizing of a lethal disease during a pandemic to really get a lot of attention or viewers; I would imagine this isn’t the kind of plot your average thriller-viewer would be interested in watching about during an actual global pandemic which had all kinds of horrific conspiracy theories swirling around it during the first few panicky weeks and months after it all started. It’s also kind of interesting how everything about it has just disappeared from the news almost completely, like it’s all over and no one is catching it anymore and the hospitals are doing fine now. No one seems to care about mask mandates or proof of vaccination anymore, either. I didn’t hear a lot of fireworks last night–although at one point I did wryly joke to Paul after a series of them went off, “Fireworks or gunshots?”
Always a valid question in New Orleans.
I did do some writing yesterday–not a lot, a small bit; a revision of a story I had already written several drafts of and yesterday I changed it from present to past tense, and the main character from a young college girl to a young college gay; I think it does work better in this form. I am going to submit it to a an anthology about the South; I doubt they will take it, but hey–it’s the first place I’ve come across where I could actually send it in to try for publication. I wasn’t super high energy at all over the long weekend; I’m not sure what that was about, but it’s definitely a fact–and of course, the trip this weekend is going to exhaust me completely. I have several things to do over the course of the weekend–panels and so forth–and I absolutely must read my essay in How to Write a Mystery again before my panel about it. I really need to make a thorough and exact to-do list so I can start working my way through it. Heavy heaving sigh. I guess I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, on the other hand, were I not always behind on everything.
I have decided to only take two books with me on the trip, since I have to read a friend’s in-progress manuscript while I am there. It’s also on my iPad, but since I have to read off the iPad Thursday night, I need to be careful to make sure it’s charged, so I don’t know if I should read the manuscript while traveling on Thursday or wait and read while resting in my room. Decisions, decisions.
I think after my podcast tonight I will probably go ahead and pack for the trip and get it out of the way. I have to get up at five (!!!) on Thursday for the flight, and I have errands to run and things to do on the way home tomorrow, and then I will get stressed about trying to get ready and GAH. It just makes more sense to get it done tonight.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely post 4th Tuesday, Constant Reader!
It’s always been a strange holiday for me, having grown up as an outsider drenched in Americana and taught American mythology rather than US history. (The more I use the word American to describe things that really only involve the US the less comfortable I am with it, particularly as I grow older. It’s simply a shorthand, obviously, for the much more awkward “US citizens,” but its use erases the fact that Canadians, Mexicans, and those from Central and South America are also Americans, and others them to US citizens. USAmericans also is an awkward construction. And can people of non-indigenous descent have a right to call themselves Americans in the first place? Once you start parsing, it’s a bottomless well.) It isn’t really our nation’s birthday, either–it’s Independence Day; the anniversary of the day the Declaration of Independence was ratified. Our actual national birthday is the date the Constitution was ratified and we actually became the United States from the thirteen colonies–and after the British defeat at Yorktown and the Peace of Paris, we actually were thirteen independent states in a loose alliance with each other for self-protection, and it was entirely possible those states might not have ever unified into a single nation. That was the real miracle of our nation’s founding–that, and the fact that thirteen disunited colonies who agreed on very little somehow took on the largest and most powerful global empire the world have ever seen and managed to defeat them–without checking I cannot be entirely sure, but it might be the only war the British Empire lost before it’s post-World War II collapse.
So, this year’s celebration is a bit muted. We are losing our freedoms and our rights–losing them to a bizarre political coalition that claims they are the real Americans, what they believe is the only way to believe and/or think about politics and the country, who scream and whine and protest about their freedoms and their liberties as cover for the fact they want to steal the freedoms and liberties–and citizenship–of people who do not agree with them. We have a “supreme court” that uses the Constitution, and almost 250 years of precedent and decided law, to wipe their asses with because it doesn’t really fit their vision of a theocratic nation ruled by a minority that forces the majority to put up with their bullshit because they have gerrymandered, legislated, and ruled in such a way as to entrench their power. This has happened before, of course–it always has happened before (which is why our lack of interest and education about our short national history is so deliberately encouraged; so we won’t learn from the mistakes of the past)–and I feel like we are living in a situation very similar to that in which the country was in between 1850 and 1861: an extremely loud and belligerent minority had been controlling and running the country since almost the beginning, in defense of a completely indefensible belief that it was okay for white Americans to either own people with differently hued skin, or to kill them with impunity. The slavery supporters had packed the Supreme Court with their supporters, and the compromises over the admissions of MIssouri and Kansas to the union were fraught because the slave states saw they were in danger of being outnumberedand thus losing their hold on the government.
And now this illegitimate body currently sitting on our highest court–deciding law for a majority even though most of them were appointed by presidents who didn’t win the popular vote–has started legislating from the bench under the guiding conservative principle that “it’s for each state to decide”–abortion rights, same sex marriage, racial equality, etc.
Because that worked so well with slavery?
The entire point of a federal, centralized government is to have the final say on law and rights; the Constitution also makes it very clear that the laws of one state should be honored by the others. But the framers of the Constitution also knew that there would be times when one state’s laws would come into conflict with another’s, and the federal government would have to decide which law was Constitutional–as they both might or might not be; but the idea was the law that restricted or prohibited rights more would be the one thrown out. This balancing act, naturally, was already in trouble because of slavery; a free state could not be forced to recognize the property rights laws of a slave state, and a slave state would never recognize the laws of a free state that outlawed slavery outright. The conflict and battle between states’ rights and the Federal government was baked into the document from the beginning, because the Southern states refused to give up their right to own people in a nation that was predicated on freedom and equality of all men.
The notion that a state like Texas could criminalize abortion (or anything) to the extent they have, and that they expect pro-choice states to not only comply with their laws but turn over documents and accused violators of said law is just the Fugitive Slave Act all over again: conservative states are all about federalism when it comes to enforcing their own laws…but will scream “States’ rights!” to protect their own.
The cognitive dissonance it must require to be a conservative astounds me sometimes.
I’ve spent most of my life with my sex life making me a criminal in almost every state in which I lived. Lawrence v. Texas guaranteed that the government had no right to tell me who I could sleep with and what I could do in my bedroom with that consenting adult. I remember the day that decision came down; it was something I never thought I would see in my own lifetime. One of the things I was trying to recapture (am trying to recapture, really) in “Never Kiss a Stranger” is that sense of criminality; of how it felt to be a sexual outlaw; how every time you went into a gay bar you knew there was a chance the place would be raided by the police–or that every time you left a gay bar you were in danger from the police until you made it safely home. It wasn’t something conscious you’d think about back in those days, but it was always there in the back of your mind. Gay bars inevitably (with the exception of the French Quarter in New Orleans, the Castro on San Francisco, West Hollywood, and the village, among others) were in a sketchy part of town, and often they were own by the Mob for money-laundering purposes. The marriage between the gay bars and the Mob was an uneasy one, of course–a marriage of convenience. The Mob needed to launder their money, bars are an excellent way to do so, and the Mob could also pay off the cops to prevent raids–a corruption-go-round, if you will. (Gay bar raids inevitably wound up being extortion for corrupt cops to get more bribe money from the mob…this weird marriage between criminals–gay men and the Mob–is something I want to explore in fiction more. And the police, for the record, have never been friends or allies to my community; quite the obverse, in fact.)
I should make a note to reread this next year on the 4th of July. Will things be better or worse? My money’s on worse.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines.
I absolutely loved the tag line for the marvelous television adaptation of Megan Abbott’s equally brilliant novel Dare Me: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenaged girls.” It’s also incredibly accurate; our teen years often impact and influence who we become and can color the rest of our lives. I loved Dare Me; it was lyrically, hauntingly written, and the story it told, while actually pretty simple, showed how the intricacies of relationships between young girls and authority figures who aren’t much older than they are, can become so complicated and complex; layers of love intermingling with hate and jealousy, the power dynamic shifting and changing as the characters themselves shift, change, and grow from their experiences.
I write, sometimes, books where the main characters are young–teenagers, either in high school or college or having just completed college–and those books are often labeled and marketed as “young adult” fiction, even though I generally just consider them novels about young people. I mean, technically novels about young people are young adult novels, and yet while I am resigned to this marketing label I am never certain if my books truly qualify or not. Perhaps that’s some kind of internalized arrogance and a sense of subconscious superiority to what I consider something lesser; it’s definitely something I should unpack at some point. But I think it is also an interesting starting point for one of my endless essay ideas, and perhaps someday–when I am less scattered, less all-over-the-place mentally and creatively–I’ll be able to sit down and write all those essays I want to write.
Which brings me to John Copenhaver’s second novel, The Savage Kind, which I just finished reading yesterday.
If I tell you the truth about Judy and Philippa, I’m going to lie. Not because I want to, but because to tell the story right, I have to. As girls, they were avid documentarians, each armed with journals and buckets ofpens, convinced that future generations would pour over their words. Everything they did was a performance. Everything they wrote assumed an audience. After all, autobiographers are self-serving, aggrandizing. Memoirists embellish. It’s unavoidable. To write down your memories is an act of invention, to arrange them in the best, most compelling order, a bold gesture. Some of the diary entries that follow are verbatim, lifted directly from the source, but others are enhanced and reshaped. I reserve my right to shade in the empty spaces, to color between the lines, to lie.
You may balk, dear reader, but I don’t care. I need to get this right.
I could take different approaches. I could contrast the teenage girls: the black hat and the white, the harpy and the angel, the cunning vamp and the doe-eyed boob. Or I could draw them together, a single unit: Lucy and Ethel, Antony and Cleopatra, Gertrude and Alice, Holmes and Watson, or even, I dare say, Leopold and Loeb. But neither of those angles would work. The complicated facts are inescapable. These girls are both separate and together, but many times, they followed their own paths and even crossed one another. Things are never that simple, never that black and white, that good or evil, or that true or false. I’m not writing this to assign blame, or to ask forgiveness, or to tie it up in a bow for posterity. It’s not that kind of book.After all, an act of violence committed by one may have originated in the heart of the other. That’s to say, this is a story about sisters, and like many of those dusty and gruesome stories from ancient literature, here sisterhood is sealed in blood.
I should know. I was one of them.
Great opening, right?
John’s debut Dodging and Burning won the Macavity Award*, and was quite the impressive debut. II was completely blown away by the book myself–it showed a maturity and sophistication in theme, writing, and characters that one rarely sees in a debut novel. One of the things I thought was very interesting about the book was that while it did focus on a gay story, the main voices in the book were young straight women; I thought that was a risky thing to try to pull off, but he did a really excellent job.
As good as Dodging and Burning was, I wasn’t prepared for how good The Savage Kind would be.
The heart of the book is the friendship/relationship between two damaged young women in the post-war afterglow of the late 1940’s in Washington DC. (Both of John’s novels are set in the post-war period, when the world was trying to go ‘back to normal’ after the massive paradigm alteration of a global war that left most of Europe and significant parts of Asia in ruins; tens of millions dead, billions in property damage, and the world needed to rebuild from the rubble–and normal was also being redefined; the paradigm shift caused by the war made going back to “the way things used to be” practically impossible–which makes it a very interesting time to write about.) Philippa’s mother died giving birth to her and she has a slightly adversarial relationship with her stepmother, Bonnie. Judy was raised in an orphanage and adopted by a wealthy couple who had lost a daughter in a particularly brutal way–Judy was adopted to replaced their raped and murdered daughter, but her adoptive parents are still too scarred and damaged from the lost of their own child to raise and love another, and this history also colors Judy’s personality and who she is. The two girls find each other and become very close friends; so close that their love for each other might go even deeper than the Platonic ideal of friendship–their teenaged hormones raging out of control, are romantic/sexual feelings also developing between the two of them?
They are also playing girl detectives, trying to get to the bottom of a mystery that they don’t know has anything to do with them beyond the idle curiosity (and their dangerous boredom) but as they look further into the mystery revolving around a classmate, a favorite teacher, and that classmate’s family–as well as their own–they become more and more deeply enmeshed in danger and cling even tighter to each other.
As if that juggling act isn’t tough enough, Copenhaver makes all of these characters realized, fully developed and realistic in their emotions, their feelings, and their reactions. He also tells the story in alternating points of view between the two girls while they are experiencing the events, as well as a narrator voice from the future, telling the story in retrospect as well as talking directly to the reader. This is hard to pull off, particularly the omniscient future narrator–the last time I saw this used so effectvely and memorably was in Thomas Tryon’s The Other (at least, this is the book that popped into my head as I was reading, and it’s a favorite of mine).
The Savage Kind was nominated for a Lefty Award, and it very deservedly won the Lambda for Best Mystery recently. I highly recommend it!
*I may be wrong here, but I think he might be the first openly gay author of a book with gay characters and themes to win the Macavity Award; I know I was nominated once for a short story–but my characters and themes weren’t queer.
Sunday morning and I slept late again, and again, it felt marvelous. I feel much more rested than I did yesterday morning–and I also don’t have to make an errands run today, either; lugging groceries from the car to the Lost Apartment on top of dealing with a grocery store on a Saturday of a holiday weekend wasn’t exactly an energy-enhancing experience either (my God, it was so humid yesterday; little wonder it rained off and on all day). But I did get things done–sort of. I finished reading The Savage Kind by John Copenhaver, which I really enjoyed from start to finish (more on that later); I got some chores done around the Lost Apartment, and I worked on getting better organized (always an in-process on-going thing). We binged a show on Amazon Prime last night–The Lake–which we both really enjoyed (and stayed up too late to finish watching) before retiring to bed for the evening, and now here I am this morning with a cup of coffee and slightly bleary, unfocused eyes as I write this. It’s a little cloudy and dim outside–not the blinding brightness of a cloudless morning, for sure. I don’t have to go outside for anything the next few days other than taking out the trash and using the grill–I’m probably going to cook out burgers either today or tomorrow, I can’t decide which–and then I am going to write and edit for most of the day, always a pleasure and joy. The next thing I am going to read isn’t something I can talk about, as it’s a manuscript in progress for a friend (who is also a really great writer), but I think the next book I read is indeed going to be Rob Osler’s The Devil’s Chewtoy, which is a great title and I’ve heard any number of good things about the author, who earlier this year won the Robert Fish Award from Mystery Writers of America for best debut short story–an impressive achievement, to be sure.
The Lake has an interesting premise, and it was much funnier than I thought it would be. Sixteen years ago, the main character–a gay male, Justin–had sex with his best friend (Teesa) on prom night (they were both drunk, and the only time he’s ever slept with a woman) and she became pregnant. They gave the child up for adoption–one of those “open” adoptions, so the child always knows who their adoptive and birth parents are, and has a relationship with their birth parents–which caused an even deeper rift between the main character and his father (already there because of his sexuality). After the adoption, Justin left Canada with his partner for Australia. That relationship has ended (the partner was “fucking half of Bondi Beach”), and he has returned to Canada. He brings his daughter Billie to the lake where he spent all of his summers as a child, and8 his family used to have a cottage to try to develop a relationship with her; only to discover that their old lake house was never sold–instead, his father left it to his stepsister and nemesis, Maisy, played brilliantly by Julia Stiles in an epic villain turn. The rest of the series details his schemes for getting back his lake house and feuding with Maisy; while developing a relationship with a local handyman named Riley, while his daughter ironically finds herself falling for Maisy’s son. Justin is played by Jordan Gavaris, who is terrific in the part; Constant Reader may remember Gavaris for his star turn in Orphan Black as Felix, the openly gay artist who is a foster brother to Sarah and her grounding point–seeing him in this reminded me of how terrific he was in Orphan Black, and how disappointing it is that he hasn’t broken out into a bigger star. But The Lake is terrific and funny and surprisingly twisted; I highly recommend it, and can we please have more good parts for Jordan Gavaris, please?
I still haven’t figured out what I am going to read on Thursday, either. Heavy heaving sigh. I seriously need to put some thought into that either today or tomorrow or both; I go back and forth during those brief moments when I do think about it. Should I read from Bury Me in Shadows, #shedeservedit, or one of my short stories? It would probably make more sense to read from something that might intrigue listeners to go buy the book, and even more sense to read a novel than a story, since I won’t earn anything from a sale of a copy of the anthology, really, if my reading was to move people into parting with hard-earned money to buy something of mine. Yes, the more I think about it, the more likely I am to read from #shedeservedit…or maybe “This Town.” I’ve always wanted to read that story aloud…hmmm. I just wish I had started thinking about this sooner–this is why I always end up doing things at the last minute, which always makes me feel like I’ve not prepared adequately.
But I do feel very good this morning, which is always lovely. I get paid on Wednesday this week, so I can go ahead and get the bills paid before I leave for the weekend (I cannot believe I have to get up at five a.m. for my flight; what the actual fuck was I thinking? Clearly I wasn’t. Of course, it was the only non-stop, which is what I actually was thinking. But…I’ll be tired. Very tired that evening. And probably hungry and crabby and tired and…oy. No sense freaking out about any of that right now. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
And on that note, I am going to shave my head and jump in the shower and get my day’s work started. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader–I will check in with you again later.
Saturday morning and I slept late, and it was indeed marvelous. I have to make groceries and gas up the car (will probably need a bank loan for that), but my primary focus today is going to be reading and writing. I will also probably start going over the edits for one of the two manuscripts sitting in my inbox right now, but that’s also going to depend pretty heavily on how nasty it is outside. It rained off and on most of yesterday–I do love the New Orleans rain, especially if I don’t have to go out into it, of course–but it’s very bright and sunny outside my windows this morning. My morning coffee feels marvelous and tastes even better, and as I glance around the workspace and the rest of the kitchen I see some odds and ends that need straightening and putting away. There’s also some dirty dishes in the sink that need being taken care of at some point. The rugs needs to be straightened, and the entire downstairs needs vacuuming. I would also like to get a box of books down from the attic and start cleaning that out a little bit this weekend as well. An ambitious program to be sure, but one that isn’t impossible…if i stay focused.
Which is always the big if, isn’t it?
We did get caught up on The Boys last night–this third season is the best so far, and there was a great twist in last night’s episode, which doesn’t bode well for the future but I also can’t wait to see how it plays out (although that will probably come in season four). I wasn’t tired when I got home from the office yesterday the way I usually and ordinarily am, but there were things to do, and I immediately set out to get them done once I had reached the safety and respite of the Lost Apartment. But it all got done for the most part, and Scooter got his lap for a goodly portion of the evening while I doom-scrolled social media waiting for Paul to get finished with his work (he worked at home yesterday) so we could watch The Boys. I even fell asleep in my chair a few times while waiting–Scooter’s super-power is the ability to get both of us to fall asleep when he cuddles with us. I did spend a lot of the evening thinking about writing and things I want to write–there’s never enough time for me to write as much as I want to, really, even though I have to force myself to do it.
I also realized last night that I need to get ready for Sleuthfest. I am doing a reading on THursday night and haven’t picked out something to actually, um, you know, read, let alone rehearse. It’s my first-ever Noir at the Bar, and will be in the hotel bar. I’ve published so much stuff that I’ve never gotten the chance to read from, you know? Should I read from one of my recent books? Should I read a short story? Should I perhaps read something in progress–Chlorine, for example? I also am on a panel about MWA’s How to Write a Mystery, in which the other panelists and I are going to talk about our essays…and I really don’t remember much about mine other than it’s about dialogue, so perhaps I should go ahead and reread it at some point before the panel so I don’t sound like an utter blithering idiot.
Then again, maybe people enjoy me being a blithering idiot. I don’t know.
I can’t help but think that is not the case, though. I prefer to believe audiences laugh with me and not at me, but one can never be entirely sure.
Ah, well, there’s plenty of time to get petrified with fear about standing up in front of an audience. But I do have to decide what I am going to read on Thursday. Heavy heaving sigh. I was thinking “Moist Money,” from the Down Yonder anthology–mainly because it’s shorter, but it’s also one of the nastier things I’ve ever written; my short stories tend to be nastier than my actual books (by “nastier” I mean darker, not pornographic, FYI) but there are so many choices…and I need to make up my mind because I am going to need to rehearse before I get there…I can’t just get up and read the way I used to, completely unprepared and stumbling over words and…heavy sigh. There I go again, working myself up into a lather of anxiety about something happening in five days, which will end up being fine in the long run.
And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee and head to my easy chair to read some more of The Savage Kind, which I hope to finish today. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.
It rained again yesterday, so it wasn’t terribly awful while running my errands after work last night. I came home, put away dishes and did some laundry, provided a lap for Scooter–who stayed there all night, and even when I would get up he would just jump back into my chair and go back to sleep (Paul didn’t get home from work until after I’d gone to bed, so he was feeling abandoned the way he always does when there’s only one of us at home), and did some more brainstorming and plotting for the stuff I am working on. I feel good and rested again this morning (I did get a bit tired yesterday afternoon), and hope springs eternal for another productive long weekend at home. The theme for the weekend is clearly editing, since i have copy edits for two manuscripts to start working through, and two short stories to edit–I also need to go through my “call for submissions” folder and see what is possible and what is not ( as well as tossing the ones that have already passed).
It seems weird to be celebrating Independence Day this year, since the radical, highly politicized “supreme” court continues to demolish every right and protection anyone non-white and not male have fought for and earned since the second World War–even going back as far as JOHN FUCKING MARSHALL to overturn decisions–as they work to establish a Fascist state once and for all. I was thinking about this last night while watching Real Housewives Ultimate Girls’ Trip 2 and remembering why I didn’t miss seeing Jill Zarin on my television, and I was also thinking about memoirs and memories and writing about my life. One of the primary reasons I’ve always backed away from it (and yes, I am aware that I am talking about being reluctant to write personal essays about my past and life in MY FUCKING BLOG) is not only because I know my memory to be faulty, but also because I know that–like most other people–I also have a tendency to rewrite my memories to make me look better or to justify bad behavior on my own part, and that isn’t fair to the other people in said memories who don’t have a platform (no matter how small) to tell their side of the story (which has also been undoubtedly rewritten in their own minds to make themselves look better). No two people ever see the same situation exactly the same; our interpretations and reactions to things are often predicated and formed by our life experience, our education, our opinions, and our beliefs and values that have also developed over a lifetime. An event that may have seemed completely throwaway and inconsequential to one person can be life-changing to another.
I’ve also begun recognizing and finding holes in my memory. For some reason I had always believed we’d moved, for example, from the south side of Chicago to the suburbs in the winter of 1969. That was firmly cemented in my brain as fact…until a year or so ago when I realized I was ten when we moved to the suburbs, which means we didn’t move out there until the winter of 1971. That’s a significant difference, which has skewed the order of memories in my head.
Some friends have been encouraging me to write personal essays, but I’m not really sure I should or not. For a long time I shut the door on my past as much as I could; it was painful to remember and it was simply easier for me to shove everything into a corner of my brain and lock the door behind them. When I started rebooting my life at age thirty-three, I still looked back a lot with sadness and heartbreak and bitterness–but I also began trying to put it all behind me at the same time because it was sad and heartbreaking and I didn’t want to be trapped into that quagmire of negativity. After Paul and I had met and we’d moved to New Orleans and my new life was beginning to take shape–the life I’d always wanted and had dreamed of for years; those dreams sustaining me through even the darkest of times–I decided to put it all behind me once and for all, deciding that I loved my life and was very happy with it, which meant that everything that had happened–no matter how terrible–was necessary to put my feet firmly on the path that led to my happiness and so therefore I should have no regrets about anything. It was helpful to distance myself from my past and never look back, so I tried never to do so. But now that I’ve reached sixty–I’ve started reflecting about the past a lot more over these past few years, plus writing my last two books (Bury Me in Shadows and #shedeservedit, respectively) required me to start digging around in those inner rings of the giant redwood of my life, as did watching It’s a Sin, which, despite being set in London, took me back to the 1980’s and brought a lot of painful memories back. It made me realize that while that coping mechanism of “no regret, not looking back” was necessary for my growth into who I am now, and for me to build a writing career, it wasn’t long-term healthy because a lot of unprocessed pain, anger and grief (and joy and laugher, as well) had never been recognized, processed, dealt with, and moved on from. I think part of the reason I decided to finish those two in-progress-for-years books was precisely so i could start processing and dealing with my past…and sometimes that means revisiting painful memories. It’s also part of the reason I moved “Never Kiss a Stranger” up on the lengthy list of things I want to write and finish and get out there; I want to remember the mentality of what it was like to be a gay man in New Orleans in 1994, just really coming to terms with your sexuality after being closeted at least most of the time for most of your life, and beginning to explore what it means to be gay while the specter of AIDS hung over your head like a death sentence just waiting to be pronounced. As prevention and treatment options continue to lower the risk of infection as well as the threat of death over the last decade or so, people are slowly beginning to forget what it was like back then–and the literature of the period is going out of print and disappearing. I now have clients who don’t remember what it was like because they weren’t alive then, and while it is so wonderful and lovely that they didn’t come out and experience life with that shadow hanging over their heads, periodically I feel a bit of pang remembering all those wonderful bright lights that were extinguished so cruelly, and the old embers of white-hot anger at the societal and governmental neglect, often deliberate and intentionally cruel, that allowed them all to die returns.
Which is why unveiling a commemorative stamp honoring Grendel’s mother, aka Nancy Reagan, during Pride Month was tone-deaf as well as a slap in the face to those of us who survived in spite of that miserable bitch and the raw sewage she married.
I also think this most recent pandemic and the memories it stirred up, timed with watching It’s a Sin and some other things, is why I am so exhausted all the time (well, that plus being sixty); it’s a sign of depression from all of the unprocessed emotions and feelings from locking away my past and turning away from it. It may have been necessary in 1995 to move forward, but it wasn’t healthy, and the longer I kept those memories locked away without dealing with them the worse it became. So I am going to set a goal of trying to write an essay every two weeks about something from my past, unlocking a memory and trying to find the meaning in it, how it impacted and affected my life–and not with regret, but with the cold, unflinching eye of the non-fiction writer. I also feel like something snapped inside my head this past week–I know how weird that sounds–but Wednesday I was really down. Memories flashing through my head, triggered by the reversal of Roe (I remember a pre-Roe United States, and also remember when the decision came down) and what that meant for other decisions revolving around personal privacy/freedom and government overreach. The four or five days following the Dobbs decision were dark ones for me (I cannot imagine what they were like for women), and yet, somehow, in writing something Wednesday afternoon something snapped in my head and I got past it all–and I realized I’d been dealing with a lot more anxiety and depression than I thought I was (and I thought I was dealing with a lot as it was). I have felt much better since getting over that hump on Wednesday, but I am also not foolish enough to think I am past it all, either–it will come back.
If I learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it’s that trauma and depression come in waves. There will be good days, and there will be bad days. I usually deal with darkness by writing–not writing makes the darkness even darker–which is something I also need to remember: writing always makes things better for me.
And on that introspective note, I am heading into the spice mines.
Thursday morning and i had insomnia last night. I am not going to complain about it–it’s been a while since that’s happened, so I should just kind of suck it up and go from there. I was tired when I got home from work yesterday–it was a bit of a draining day; we were busy at the clinic and I was dealing with some things in between that essentially took up the rest of whatever little free time I had yesterday, so by the time I got home I was exhausted, so no reading again last night. I did have something to do when I got home–of course–that was due yesterday, so I did sit down and spend about an hour and a half getting that finished and sent off, before giving into Scooter’s demands that I provide a comfy lap for him to sleep in. I watched this week’s Superman and Lois season finale–most excellent–and then The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which has me entertained enough to keep watching, despite the potential criminality of one of the cast members, and then Paul came home and it was time for bed. I didn’t sleep well–I woke up numerous times during the night and don’t think I ever went into a fully deep sleep at any time during the night, which means I will undoubtedly be very tired this evening when I get home also–yay? Maybe it will help me sleep.
But I have even more work to do now on this coming holiday weekend–yes, that’s right, copy edits have landed in my inbox for both A Streetcar Named Murder and Land of 10000 Crimes, so there’s my holiday weekend taken up–and I hope to finish reading my book this weekend as well. I am writing again, albeit slowly; I’ve got two chapters of a project I am working on just for fun and to see where it goes done, and I’ve started the new Scotty (cover art coming soon!), and of course, I’d like to do some work on “Never Kiss a Stranger.” Yes, I am juggling probably too many things at the same time, but you know, it happens. (I also peeked inside and the copy editor’s first note was to let me know how much she enjoyed reading it, which is also very cool!)
So yes, I will be spending most of my weekend going over copy edits, which is actually kind of a nice way to pass time on a long, lazy holiday weekend. I would like to get some more cleaning done–specifically, getting things down from the storage attic and start emptying it out–I can rebox copies of my own books that I have stored in a kitchen cabinet and move those up there, which frees up more space for me to use in the kitchen (having my work station in the kitchen’s bay window–while a lovely idea and I do love my windows–does cut back on available kitchen space and sometimes makes it seem cluttered in the kitchen, which drives me insane because I run out of counter space). I also need to edit a couple of short stories–one may need a significant rewrite, but I think I can handle it and can get it done this weekend–and I also need to sort through other submission calls. Despite the insomnia last night, I feel very energetic today so I am hoping I can ride this wave through the rest of the day. One can hope, at any rate.
And of course there are errands to be run on the way home tonight–there are always errands to be run on the way home–but despite my exhaustion every night when I get home from work I have managed to sort of keep up with the laundry and the kitchen stuff so I don’t have to spend an entire weekend day getting that shit caught up, thank you baby Jesus, so that’s a plus. Which kind of gives me hope for making progress of a sort.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Queer and Loathing in America 