Author: gregh121

I am a writer and editor who lives in New Orleans.

Love Child

One more day till the three day weekend!

I realize it probably sounds like I hate my job, the way I crave days off, weekends, holidays and vacations–but I don’t. I actually like my day job, and it’s certainly one of the best–if not the best–day job I’ve ever had. My days off, on the other hand, are lovely because I don’t have any stress–I don’t have to rush about, be anywhere at a particular time, do anything at any particular time, and I don’t have to get up until I feel like it. That’s kind of nice. Even if I didn’t have a day job, and still worked from home the way I used to, I still looked forward to the weekends because Paul didn’t have to go to the office on the weekends. I am not working next Friday either, as that is the day I’ll be driving over to Montgomery for the Alabama Book Festival, where I am making my first ever appearance. (I’ve done more book events in Alabama this year than I’ve done anywhere else in years, which is more than slightly odd.)

Which, more than likely, is why Alabama is so much on my mind lately.

Since finishing “Quiet Desperation”, I’ve not really been writing anything other than this blog. (I have, however, been thinking about the second draft of that story, and already know how to make it much better the second time around; I do consider that to be writing, even though no words have gone on the page. SHUT UP THAT DOES TOO COUNT.) I am hoping, though, to get “The Terrortorium” finished this week, and maybe make some headway on “The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain.” I’ve also been brainstorming some on the new Scotty, and I need to get back to work on that as it’s just sitting there, glaring at me. And I have a shit load of editing to do of my own stuff; unfortunately, I loathe editing my own stuff and would rather drink bleach to do it, which means it piles up and it piles up and it piles up…I also get really stubborn and don’t want to throw things out, trying to fix things and make what was written work rather than removing it and writing something different.

I have so many bad writing habits. It’s almost sad.

I am getting back to reading The Nest this week, and am not sure what to read next, if I am being honest. It’ll probably go the way it usually does; I’ll go through the stacks and the book shelves and find something that strikes my fancy at the moment. I got another shipment of books yesterday, all of which look good, and of course, there’s all the stuff I had on hand already that I haven’t read and need to get to. Heavy heaving sigh. I am going to need to do a purge again soon, and what I really need to do is purge the storage spaces. But what a pain in the ass that would be. Maybe I should  take a couple of vacation days from work and do it….ugh, just the thought is too much for me, really. Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, I am heading back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Hump Day hunk to get you through the rest of this shortened week.

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Reach Out Of The Darkness

It’s quite bizarre. I no longer have to work early on Tuesday mornings–I now don’t have to go in until eleven-ish, at the earliest–and I was disoriented most of the day; mainly, I kept thinking it was Wednesday and getting terribly confused. I’ve been coming in at 8 on Tuesday mornings for so long that NOT having to get up at six seems, at the very least, strange. But I am certain I can adjust to not having to get up so damned early.

And there’s a three day weekend this weekend! Woo-hoo! Maybe I’ll go see Beauty and the Beast.

I am definitely going to go to the gym, that’s one thing I am going to accomplish this weekend. STOP LAUGHING I MEAN IT.

Bastards.

I finished reading Ben H. Winters’ controversial Underground Airlines yesterday morning before I went into the office, and it was quite exceptional. He was recently nominated for a Thriller Award for Best Novel from the International Thriller Writers, and I have to say, it’s a well-deserved honor. I met Winters several years ago, at the Edgar Award banquet when he won for Best Paperback Original for The Last Policeman, the first in a highly acclaimed trilogy that blended both the crime fiction and science fiction/alternate reality genres (the trilogy is in my TBR pile, which is, as I am sure you’ve assumed by now, pretty much is my entire living room), and so I was sorry to see the criticisms leveled at him for writing and publishing this book. The book is an alternate reality novel, based on the premise that the Civil War was never fought and slavery (or, as it is called in the book, Persons Bound to Labor) still exists in only four states, known collectively as The Four: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Carolina–the two states were combined into one. The main character is a man of color who works for the Federal Government as a slave chaser, and the book focuses on one particular case–which goes very deep, and is horrifying as you get more and more into the book and the true story of what’s going on starts to unfold.

underground airlines

“So,” said the young priest. “I think I’m the man you’re looking for.”

“Oh, I hope so,” I said to him. “Oh, Lord, I do hope you are.”

I knitted my fingers together and leaned forward across the table. I was aware of how I looked: I looked pathetic. Eager, nervous, confessional. I could feel my thin, cheap spectacles slipping down my nose. I could feel my needfulness dripping from my brow. I took a breath, but before I could speak, the waitress came over to pour our coffee and hand out the menus, and Father Barton and I went silent, smiled stiff and polite at the girl and at each other.

Then, when she was gone, Father Barton talked before I could.

“Well, I must say, Mr. Dirkson–“

“Go on and call me Jim, Father. Jim’s just fine.”

“I must say you gave LuEllen quite a start.”

I looked down, embarrassed. LuEllen was the receptionist, church secretary, what have you. White-haired, apple-cheeked lady, sitting behind her desk at that big church up there on Meridian Street, Saint Catherine’s, and I suppose I behaved like a wild thing in her tidy little office that afternoon, gnashing my teeth and carrying on. Throwing myself on her mercy. Pleading for an appointment with the father. It worked, though. Here we were, breaking bread together, the gentle young priest and I. If there’s one thing they understood, these church folks, it’s wailing and lamentation.

I understand why this book set off warning bells for people, and as a white man, maybe I’m not the best judge as to whether it’s offensive or not; but I thought it was amazing. Well-written, completely believable yet horrifying at the same time because of that believability; a stinging indictment of the horrors of systemic racism by showing what kind of desperate measures desperate times can call for. I highly recommend it; I greatly enjoyed it even as it deeply unsettled me.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

 

Spooky

During the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invited to dinner at the White House. When she was introduced to President Lincoln, his eyes twinkled and he said, “So this is the little lady who made this great big war.” Stowe, of course, had authored Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published originally in 1852, and it was probably one of the most influential books ever published in the United States.

Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)

Monday morning in New Orleans.

I’ve been awake for an hour, yet don’t feel awake yet. Second cup of coffee is helping, though; I can almost feel the caffeine moving through my body inside my veins. I have a short day today; only five and a half hours, and am having dinner with my friend Stuart this evening. Tomorrow and Wednesday are both twelve hour days at the office, complicated still further by meeting with Wacky Russian early on Wednesday morning. I don’t have to go in until late on Thursday, which will also be rather lovely; I am sure I am going to need the extra sleep to get over the preceding days. And of course, Friday is Good Friday, so—three day weekend! I am hoping that if I spend about three hours on each day of that weekend cleaning I can get the Lost Apartment back under control. It’s a horrifying mess, quite frankly, and it’s more than a little appalling. The ceiling fans, for example, are disgusting.

I’ve gotten further along in Underground Airlines, and I am really enjoying it. With the three day weekend coming, I hope to get it finished this week, finish The Nest over the weekend, and maybe move on to something else. I didn’t get any writing done this weekend, but I did do some brainstorming–which, to me, counts, and if you don’t think it does FUCK YOU–and came up with some new characters. The problem I am having with Chapter One of Crescent City Charade (which I really want to finish this week) is that already the chapter is too long and it’s not even finished yet. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, and rather than resisting how long the chapter is I should just make it as long as it needs to be to get to the transition into Chapter 2 and worry about editing it down–or splitting it into two chapters, if necessary–later, rather than worrying so much about it now; similar to how I have almost five thousand words of “Quiet Desperation” already written and haven’t even gotten to the meat of the story yet. (That story, obviously, is going to require a ridiculous amount of editing.)

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate editing myself? The only thing worse is rewriting. Heavy heaving sigh.

Friday night I finished watching a television show on Hulu; Faking It, which originally aired on MTV. It only lasted three seasons, and it’s actually kind of clever (the second season was twenty episodes; the third and final was only ten, which makes me wonder how that played out). MTV has long been a progressive force, yet we really no longer hear about MTV being controversial. MTV ran the first HIV/AIDS PSA’s to air, and continued to do so for years before other networks caught up. MTV also originated reality television–The Real World model is still copied and imitated to this day; any reality show where everyone has to share a living environment is copying it–and also put a face on HIV/AIDS with Pedro Zamora back in the early 1990’s. I often have held that a lot of the shift in public/social perceptions of the LGBTQ community had a lot to do with MTV’s influence on youth; I also think MTV has shifted public perceptions on many social issues by exposing young people to them and helping them to see the systemic unfairness in so much of American society. But that’s an essay for another time.

Faking It has a ridiculous premise, but it’s actually kind of clever at the same time: Hester High School, in Austin, Texas, is every conservative’s nightmare about political correctness raging out of control in public education. The show could have easily been called Politically Correct High; because Hester High School is just that: sensitivity to other races and cultures are foremost. The most popular kid at Hester is the openly gay kid, whose best friend is the high school lothario; but the primary focus of the show is the friendship of Karma and Amy, two best friends who accidentally get outed as a lesbian couple. Amy wants to correct the record, but Karma enjoys the corresponding rise in their popularity and she wants to ride that wave; plus, the school lothario–played by Gregg Sulkin–is now interested in her because he’s never had sex with a lesbian before. The show frankly and honestly takes on a lot of social issues–everything from intersex to transgender to sexual fluidity–and the catch to the ‘pretending to be lesbians’ schtick is that Amy actually is in love with her best friend Karma–who doesn’t return the feelings. The young cast is quite appealing, and while some of the adventures they have strain credulity, the show’s message of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding is handled very well.

Gregg  Sulkin also has achieved teen heartthrob status.

 

gregg sulkin

Not hard to see why.

But young, out actor Michael J. Willett as Shane Harvey pretty much steals the show. Shane is depicted as a scheming. snarky, but funny kid with a lot of insecurities who really just wants to find a boyfriend, and Willett plays the part to perfection. He also played gay in the movie GBF, which was actually a lot better than I thought it would be (think a John Hughes teen comedy with a gay main character instead of Molly Ringwald), and the two characters couldn’t be any more different–showing that there are a range of gay characters; we aren’t this monolithic ‘all the same’ that some people seem to think we are–which goes along with the concept of inclusion: we’re not all finger-snapping sidekicks with a great sense of snark, fashion sense, and with our fingers on the pulse of pop culture. Just as it would be cool for books, TV shows, and movies to include gay characters for the sake of diversity; within the gay community there’s a huge range of diverse characters. The key to writing gay characters is to make them human.

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Here’s hoping Willett can find more work as an out gay actor.

And now, back to the spice mines.

La La (Means I Love You)

Good morning. It’s a lovely Sunday morning in New Orleans, as I look at the start of a relatively easy and short week for me at work. Good Friday is a paid holiday for me, so I only have four days to get through, and I have short days on both Monday and Thursday (horrifying long days on Tuesday and Wednesday, of course), so it’s kind of a ‘win some lose some’ kind of week. I ended up not writing much yesterday; instead I read Underground Airlines (which I am enjoying) and when Paul got home from his errands, I made dinner and we watched Rogue One and then the first two episodes of Five Came Back, a wonderful documentary about five Hollywood film directors (Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, and George Stevens) who spent World War II making documentaries about the war rather than directing films in Hollywood. It’s narrated by Meryl Streep, and is based on the book of the same title by Mark Harris (who also wrote the documentary). It’s very well done; and it does a really good job of capturing the era it’s about, while at the same time not only exposing how easy it is for film to be used as propaganda, but raising questions about the ethics of making propaganda during a time of war. As we as Americans are currently wrestling with the notion of news as propaganda, and how to tell what is real and what is not–a horrifying place to be, quite frankly–and how the news was controlled for the American public during the Second World War to keep them behind the war effort (which was prodigious) as well as buying war bonds to finance it, it raises difficult questions about truth, ethics, and the media. I cannot recommend it enough; I’m really looking forward to viewing the final episode.

I will undoubtedly spend today in a mix of cleaning, writing, and reading. My friend Stuart is in town, and hopefully we’ll get to have lunch or an early dinner together today, if not, it will be tomorrow.

Underground Airlines, like The Underground Railroad, is not an easy book to read. I’ve never read much alternate history (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle being one of the few exceptions), and that’s what this book is; alternate history, and one that, as you learn more about the ‘history’ of the United States and its ‘peculiar institution’ the deeper you get into the book, is terribly disturbing because you can see how it might have gone this way.

American history, as it pertains to questions of race and equality, is difficult; and the truth of American history, as opposed to the deeply sanitized version we are taught in public school (or at least, the deeply ‘rah-rah-rah’ version I was taught in the 1960’s, predicated on the manifest destiny of white Europeans to take dominion over the Americas while eradicating the natives and enslaving Africans, required a lot of unlearning; I told one of my co-workers the other day that I’ve spent most of my adult life unlearning everything I was raised to believe while re-educating myself on the truth), is actually kind of ugly. I remember reading James Michener’s Centennial when I was in my teens, and realizing everything I’d been taught, read, or seen in movies about the native Americans, and their clash with white Europeans, was actually incredibly biased against the native ‘savages’. (If you’re interested in re-educating yourself on American history, please read Howard Zinn’s histories of the United States, starting with A People’s History of the United States.)

Anyway, when Underground Airlines was released, there was some controversy, given the subject matter and that author Ben H. Winters was white and writing from the perspective of an African-American who worked as a runaway slave catcher. Questions of cultural appropriation often dog the work of white people who write from outside their own experience; yet at the same time there is also a clamor for diversity within fiction and there has long been a Twitter hashtag #weneeddiversebooks. I don ‘t think–and I could be wrong–that the problem is so much cultural appropriation as it is that authors of color do not have the same easy access to publishing that white people do; it’s easier for a white author to get a book published with a person of color as the main character than it is for an author of color to do so. I’ve personally enjoyed seeing the progress made by film and television to cast people of color; when I was a kid I would have loved to find books or television shows or films where gay men weren’t tragic figures doomed to die, or the butt of the joke, or figures of contempt; I can only imagine the positive impact this is having on young minority children to be able to see characters like themselves on films and television shows, or finding them in books.

This is not a bad thing.

The book is very well-written, and I am enjoying it tremendously, but it’s not an easy read, as I said earlier. I had always, as I’ve said before, intended to read it and The Underground Railroad back-to-back, to get a sense of comparison and to see how the differences between how an author of color deals with the issues of race and white supremacy vs how a white author does. Both books have made me think about these issues–the racial divide/conflict that is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society and culture, and how it always has been there from the very beginning.

That’s not a bad thing. Being made to think, to reexamine your values and beliefs, to unlearn things you were taught that are wrong and to reeducate yourself is never a bad thing. I think we, as a country and a society and a culture, can do with some reexamination.

Heavy thoughts for a Sunday morning before I head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a happy Sunday morning hunk for you, Constant Reader.

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I Wish It Would Rain

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and it looks lovely outside. I may clean the windows today. I have to get the mail, pick up some prescriptions, make a grocery run, and I also want to get the car washed, and of course, as always, there is laundry to do. I also want to spend some time reading today, and cleaning the kitchen and living room. Yes, I am feeling rather ambitious today; we shall see how it turns out.

I forgot my book (The Nest) at the office on Thursday night; I worked at the other office yesterday and it’s French Quarter Fest, so getting down to Frenchmen Street would be a nightmare and would make me tired and cranky, so I decided to just start reading another book–Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines, recently named a Thriller Award nominee for Best Novel. I’d always intended to read The Underground Railroad and Underground Airlines back-to-back for comparison sake; I forgot and started reading something else when I finished reading the Whitehead. The Winters book was controversial when it was released; it, like the Whitehead, is sort of magical realism/alternate history; Winters’ premise is that the Civil War was never fought as yet another slave-owner appeasement compromise was reached in 1860 that prevented secession and the war; and other compromises were reached over the years since. It’s an interesting concept, and at the time the book was released there was some controversy; the main character is a free man of color who works as a slave-catcher. I’m not very far into it, but it’s well-written and I’m enjoying it thus far.

I also got a lot of work done on “Quiet Desperation” this week; the story is now well over four thousand words. I stopped working on it the other day (Thursday, to be exact) because I felt that I was getting impatient and rushing the ending, so I decided to pull back from it for a few days and then get back to it over this weekend. I also think the story may have meandered a bit. The goal is to finish it and the chapter of the new Scotty I’ve been working on, so I can really get going on both the Scotty book and another short story next week. Ambitious goals, yes, but do-able.

And I want to get to the gym tomorrow morning.

A truly ambitious plan for the weekend, no?

We’ll see how it all works out, won’t we?

Here’s a hunk to see you through your Saturday.

The Horse

A cold front blew in last night, dropping the temperature here in New Orleans to the low sixties/high fifties; it’s only 65 right now, in fact. I have some errands to run today, and it’s a late night of bar testing ahead for me, so I am going to try to get some chores done around the house, maybe do some reading, write a little bit, etc. (My inbox definitely needs to be emptied…) Maybe vacuum, etc. I want to get as much done today as possible so I won’t have to leave the house over the weekend; a strategy I’ve been enjoying. I do want to make it to the gym this weekend, though–which will be a start. I’ve lost almost ten pounds since Fat Tuesday, which is great, and I want to drop at least another fifteen. Another trip to the gym or two per week in addition to the slight tweaks in diet should do the trick, methinks.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the notion of 200 pounds as a goal weight, honestly, but there you have it. ‘Tis what it is, you know?

I was tired yesterday–Wacky Russian did a number on me during our session yesterday–so I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked, but I did make progress on my short story, “Quiet Desperation,” despite getting a case of the self-doubts. I am hoping that was just because I was tired, you know? One would think, after all this time, that self-doubt would have been banished from the dark, cobwebby corners of my mind, but no. I suppose they will never, ever go away completely, no matter what happens with my writing and my career.

I’m always a little suspicious of self-confident writers, frankly; although I suppose suspicious is a rather strong word. I don’t get it, really. My mind is constantly at war with itself. You can’t become a writer without believing in your own ability to tell a story and to write; you certainly can’t submit work to be considered for publication without having the confidence that your work is worthy of being read, and liked, by others. Yet we–at least I was, at any rate–are trained almost from birth to not be humble; pride in one’s self is okay, but only to a point. It was so ingrained into my psyche from earliest childhood to always be gracious and self-deprecating; to accept compliments graciously but never, ever do so without shrugging off the accomplishment. It has, over the years, become so reflexive and automatic for me to be dismissive of any talents, abilities, or accomplishments I have that I sometimes wince when I hear the words coming out of my mouth.

And when you’re in the lifelong habit of dismissing your achievements, it also has an effect on the subconscious: I’ve pretty much convinced myself over the years that I am not special, not particularly talented, and that if I can do something–well, anyone can, really.

This, I have come to realize, isn’t healthy. It also keeps me from being ambitious, or talking about any deep ambitions that I might have–this sense that well, of course you don’t have an agent and of course they rejected your work, there are so many others who are more talented than you are…but at the same time this defeatist mentality doesn’t remove the sting of the rejection, either. I fear rejection of my work.

I am working on getting out of this mindset; but it is work. I’m always afraid of seeming arrogant; that’s a trait I despise in others, so it’s not something I want as part of my personality.

Self-confidence. Someday I might get there.

Here’s a hunk for you for your Thursday.

Turn Around, Look At Me

Well, in perhaps the most exciting news (at least for me) of the week thus far, I actually wrote fiction yesterday.

Hurray!

I think writing that essay finally on Monday flexed the atrophying writing muscles, because yesterday I opened my document of “Quiet Desperation” and wrote well over fifteen hundred words in a very short period of time, until I was interrupted. Of course, once interrupted the flow stopped–which is why interruptions annoy me so very much. I might have even finished the story had I not gotten interrupted…but the great thing is that in writing so much on it today, I also was able to figure out how to finish it and what the core of the story is; what I am trying to say. Whether I will succeed or not remains to be seen–but it’s yet another one of those stories about a writer. I’m not sure why I keep writing these stories about writers, but it’s also what I suppose I know the best. But I like the direction “Quiet Desperation” is taking, and I’m also enjoying working on Scotty again–I also managed over a thousand words on the new book yesterday, which made me feel terrific. Even after all the writing I’ve done over the years, when you hit a fallow stretch or period, when you don’t feel like writing, or you do and you can’t, there’s always this terror that the well has, indeed, finally run dry; followed by constant self-reassurances that always ring hollow–because the only thing that can make that terror go away is actually writing something.

So, thank you, Sisters in Crime, for kicking me in the ass and getting me to write that overdue essay. I think I’m over the hump now–and I am really looking forward to writing today.

I am tired, though. Wacky Russian basically made me do legs today, the bitch, and so even though my legs are usually fried from the small leg workout I get every time, today they are particularly tired and sore, the bastard. That’s okay, though. I think I am going to go in on Saturday and do legs on my own, some cardio and maybe some stretching. I need to get in better physical condition.

And since it’s Wednesday, here’s a Hump Day Hunk for you as I head back into the spice mines.

Cry Like a Baby

Well, I finished my essay for Sisters in Crime finally yesterday and got it all turned in. Woo-hoo! That’s something–the first thing I’ve really finished this year since turning in the last manuscript, and I am going to ride that particular triumph all week, and hopefully get the other things I want to get written finished this week as well.

I can hope, at any rate.

I’m not really sure why I struggled so much with that essay; I’m not really sure why I am struggling so much to write in general since I turned in my last manuscript. Even this blog sometimes seems like a slog; although I do suspect in some ways it has everything to do with my usual inability to focus on what I am working on; deadlines can certainly make focus much much easier to deal with. But I really want to get these stories finished this week, and I am also wanting to get some editing done and some work on the book as well. Maybe I am overestimating what I can get done reasonably in a week, I don’t know. But it will be enormously satisfying, for example, just to get one of these stories finished. I actually was rereading one yesterday, also incomplete (“The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain”, for the record) and it’s actually quite good. It’ll probably need to be edited down some, but not bad–there’s about three thousand words or so already, and that’ll probably need to be sliced in half at the very least since there are at least several thousand new words needed to finish. I also have no idea where I would publish the story–I don’t know where I would publish any of the stories I’ve written/am writing. But I am enjoying working on them, so there’s that.

One of the things I am trying very hard to do is remember that I actually do ENJOY writing. It’s so easy to hate doing it, really–and that often has to do with the pressure of deadlines, or the frustration of it not going well, or it not going at all. I don’t miss the pressure of deadlines, in all honesty, but I am starting to get concerned about not getting enough done.

Heavy heaving sigh.

But we finished watching Big Little Lies last night, and got deeper into this final season of Bates Motel–which is so deranged it’s amazing! I am going to miss this show, and seriously, if Freddy Highmore is NOT recognized by the Emmys this year…I don’t know what is wrong with the Emmy voters. PAY ATTENTION.

I am still digesting The Underground Railroad (and the show Big Little Lies), but I hope to blog about both relatively soon.

And on that note, back to the spice mines!

Here’s a Twofer Tuesday hunk fest!


A Beautiful Morning

Well, I finished reading The Underground Railroad yesterday, and will most definitely be blogging about it, once I’ve digested it some and thought about it some more. It was, to say the least, very powerful, and not only did it made me think about the subject matter–it also made me think about a lot of other things, which I will be more than happy to discuss once I’ve digested them. I also started reading The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, which I am enjoying as well.

We were supposed to get heavy weather yesterday, but it arrived over night instead–everything out there is wet and dripping, which is always a joy. Ah, well.

I didn’t write yesterday, or at all over the weekend, which is, of course, terrible. I did get some cleaning done and some organizing–not as much as I would have liked–but we’re also working on getting caught up on our shows and I did want to power through and finally finish the Colson novel, which I did manage to do, and then we got caught up on The Walking Dead, watched last night’s Feud, and then it was bedtime.

I am greatly enjoying Feud, and am very impressed with how it’s taking on the issue of how Hollywood/entertainment treats women; which also, in some ways, goes along with another show I am looking to finishing watching–the season finale of Big Little Lies was also last night; which we will undoubtedly watch tonight as well as continuing to get caught up on Bates Motel (a show that is KILLING it now in it’s final season). The way two of my favorite old Hollywood actresses–Bette Davis and Joan Crawford–are being depicted is brilliant, and the two women playing them, Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon, are turning in stunning, award-worthy performances. Last week’s episode, in which both Davis and Crawford are still not fielding any offers before the movie opens–and then it becomes a huge hit–was particularly brilliant; the moment when Joan Crawford, leaving the theater after the preview of the film that ended with a standing ovation, is recognized in the lobby and then mobbed with fans–when this happens, the look on her face–surprise evolving into pure joy at being treated like a star again, is so poignant it’s heartbreaking.

Last night’s, Oscar night when Crawford was snubbed in favor of Davis, was also almost painful to watch; the naked need Davis had for that third Oscar, the pain and anguish Crawford felt about being overshadowed once again by her rival (the scenes where Crawford talks to Geraldine Page and Anne Bancroft, asking them if she can accept for them, and the pity and sympathy Page and Bancroft feel for her, agreeing to let her do it because she needs to…wow)–and Judy Davis is also killing it as Hedda Hopper.

And last night, for the first time, Catherine Zeta-Jones actually delivered as Olivia de Havilland.

I got the idea for an essay yesterday about women’s fiction–using three novels to not only compare and contrast to each other but also to talk about how fiction by, for, and about women is so regularly disdained and dismissed as somehow lesser–the three being The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, and Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I’ve been toying with the idea for quite some time, and I thought about it again yesterday, partly because of Feud, but also partly because of Big Little Lies. Of course, I have no idea where to publish the thing…and it’s not like I don’t have a million other things to write as well.

Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, back to editing.