Category: books i’ve read

Mysterious Ways

I hate being sick.

I noticed on Saturday something was off–I just assumed it was the disappointment of the LSU loss, but on Sunday I knew I was coming down with something; achy joints, burning eyes, fever that came and went, lack of energy, congested sinuses, etc. I took a Claritin-D, dosed myself occasionally as warranted with DayQuil, and slept decently that night. Monday I was still off–congested, achy, etc.–but it was bearable. Yesterday I was again low energy and achy, but was still hopeful I could ward it off.

Silly Gregalicious. When will you ever learn?

Yes, it hit with a vengeance this morning. All of my joints ache. I have a fever. I am constantly blowing my nose. I have a headache. Nausea. Draining sinuses and constant fits of wet, phlegmy coughing. Lovely.

So I regretfully called in sick. I will spend the day resting in my easy chair, reading, dosing myself with DayQuil and Vitamin C and juice and water. My throat is very scratchy and feels raw. There is so much pressure behind my eyes it feels like they’ll both pop out if I cough hard enough.

Yes, in case I haven’t made it clear, I am feeling absolutely miserable. Miserable.

Of course, it could be worse. It can always be worse. This is just some flu-ey thing that will go away. It’s not a chronic illness I have to live with the rest of my life, or something potentially fatal. New Orleans is being spared from the fury of Hurricane Michael (do stay safe, Floridians). So, yeah, all this whining for a minor inconvenience is pretty pathetic and sad, in the big picture.

Fuck the big picture. I feel sick.

I’ve been watching Season 3 of The Man in the High Castle, which is quite good. I am having trouble remembering Season 2–which I know I watched and enjoyed–but the show is very interesting…and somewhat troubling to watch. If you don’t know the premise, it’s based on a popular Philip K. Dick novel of the same title, which was an alternate history which imagined that the Nazis developed an atomic bomb, which they dropped on DC, ending World War II with an Axis victory. The United States has been divided up between Japan and Germany–the Germans have everything from the eastern seaboard to the Rockies; the Japanese everything on the other side to the Pacific coast (no mention of the Italians, which is interesting in and of itself), and the growing Resistance to the Fascist tyrants. After watching the first season I read the book, which is significantly different but equally compelling, but the show is really taking off. I do remember some terrific moral dilemmas for the characters–this is one of the show’s great strengths, frankly; when you are living under a fascistic regime, what is moral? It’s also an interesting look at collaborators, because of course there would be some–many, in fact.

I also read some more of Circe last night in my misery, and it is, as always, still compelling and beautifully written. Maybe between naps and misery i can actually finally finish reading it today.

And now to the easy chair with me.

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Good for Me

The LSU game on Saturday was not pleasant, alas; it’s never fun to lose, particularly when it’s to a hated rival. I was far too tense during the game, and realized that it was because of pent-up nervous energy. I correctly diagnosed that if I got out of my easy chair, turned both the upstairs and downstairs televisions to the game, and used the time to listen–occasionally watching–while cleaning and organizing, I could remain calm and cool and not get overwrought. I love football, but I don’t love the anxiety and stress that comes from total immersion in a game…so I think from now on I am primarily going to listen while cleaning the house.

And when the game was over and LSU had lost, I had a clean apartment and had done several loads of laundry and several loads of dishes. So that counts, at least for me, as a win. I also started another book purge; recognizing that some of my justification for hoarding some books (“someday I’ll write a non-fiction book about blah-blah-blah”) was just that: justification. Rather grimly, as I started pruning books off my shelves I told myself, you’d only ever have time to write that non-fiction book if you reached a place where you could support yourself solely by writing. And if that is the case, you can always buy another copy of the book.

The Saints didn’t play yesterday; rather they are on Monday Night Football playing the Washington Racist Stereotypes Redskins, which means getting home from the main office tonight will be a chore–which means I have to go the long way to avoid the Superdome and the Central Business District. Yay. It also means Paul will have to walk home from work, but I am sure he is already expecting that outcome.

Yesterday I didn’t feel well; a fever that kept coming and going, runny nose, congestion…very unpleasant. I couldn’t focus because I had sick head; my mind couldn’t focus. I tried writing for a while and finally had to give up on it. Instead, I curled up in my easy chair and finished reading Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls.

 

 

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She’s Playing Hard to Get

GEAUX TIGERS!

LSU plays at Florida today at two-thirty central time. Paul is going to be out all day; he has to go work at the office and is attending an event tonight. I have to do some errands around noon–post office, bank, mail–and of course I want to get some writing done today. I didn’t write at all yesterday; I came home from work and started cleaning, then relaxed and watched some television until Paul came home. I’m trying to get as much of this book done as I possibly can today, around the LSU game.

I’m trying not to get worked up about football as much as I used to; it is, after all, just a game and the players are just young men, barely adults. This has worked for me since the Auburn game; during the first quarter I was very anxious, and found myself getting highly irritated in the second quarter. When LSU fell behind 14-10 just before half-time, I thought, let it go. Stop yelling at the television. They can’t hear you for one, and it doesn’t make you feel any better, and the players are just kids. This isn’t life or death. It makes ZERO difference in your life for the better or worse if LSU wins or loses. 

 It worked and I calmed down considerably, and was able to watch and enjoy the rest of the game. Of course, it didn’t hurt that LSU won the game, coming from behind to score nine points in the last five minutes or so of the game. I suppose the real test of this attempt to watch games calmly will be a game LSU loses.

It’s a lot of energy to expend on something over which I have no control. So now I try to watch the games with detachment rather than overhyped emotion. It also makes no difference also in that I am never going to stop rooting for LSU.

Maybe someday I’ll get more zen about the Saints’ games.

I woke up just before eight this morning, but stayed in bed for another forty-five minutes before finally getting up. I feel rested. My sleep has been better for the last week or so–the overnight rains have helped in that regard tremendously–plus getting up at seven three days a week now instead of just one has helped shift my sleep patterns to something more manageable. For years I woke up at seven every morning like clockwork; that changed when I started working late nights and my sleep has never been the same since that time. Now that I am back into a regular sleep pattern, I get up early every morning and get to do what I used to do in the mornings, before I faced the world; answer emails, write blog post, read my social media feeds, even do some writing, on the mornings when I don’t have to be at work by nine. On weekend mornings, like this one, I can relax with my coffee and get some things done around here. I like this new schedule I’ve been on for the last few weeks; I get to start cleaning the house and doing the laundry early Friday evenings, and then I can relax with television or a book (honestly, cracking open the wine usually results in me watching television instead of reading; and I still haven’t finished Circe; again this is a not a testament to the quality of the book. Thus far it is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.)

And so now, it’s back to the spice mines. I’ve got laundry going already, and the kitchen is fortunately already clean. I need to work on the living room some today as well; I can do that during the LSU game without disturbing Paul since he’ll be at the office. I’m going to spend the rest of this morning working on Scotty and maybe starting to pull apart the WIP. Ironically, I’d begun to think that a y/a novel about rape culture wasn’t timely anymore; these last few weeks have proven to me that it’s just as timely as ever. I have to put aside all of my doubts about being a gay man writing a novel about rape culture and just write the damned thing. As I said earlier this week, it needs to be pulled apart and it’s own stand on its own book, which means starting from scratch (which I had already kind of done) and then start piecing it back together again. The shell I’ve already written can certainly be recycled into another book, if need be, and I even already know what that book is going to be. So, this is a win-win, really.

Have a  great day, Constant Reader, and hang in there.

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Breakin’ My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)

WE MADE IT! Constant Reader, we have survived another week and it’s finally Friday! Huzzah!

Looking forward to the weekend always reminds me of my mom warning me, when I was an impatient teenager and counting the days till summer vacation, don’t you know you’re just wishing your life away?

But now, whenever I hear her voice in my head reminding me of that, I think, yeah, well, we’re all going to die someday anyway. Not looking ahead to the weekend isn’t going to make me live longer.

Sometimes, when I have those down days and I wonder why I ever thought I should write fiction–or anything, really–I think things like look at all the books you’ve written and published! Look at all these award nominations–you’ve even won a few! And still you have a day job. Why do you try? Why do you keep writing books? If you haven’t broken out and become successful (even by your own modest standard) by now, why do you think it still might happen?

And then I remember John D. MacDonald wrote a lot of books, but didn’t break out and hit bestseller lists until he was about forty or so books into his career, when he hit upon Travis McGee. He was certainly successful prior to McGee; but McGee was the big break that enabled him to stop writing two or three books a year and settle into just one. His pre-McGee pulps were also quite good; I certainly have enjoyed the ones I’ve read. But I hold on to that with both hands: John D. MacDonald didn’t hit the Times best seller list until he was over forty novels into his career.*

So, there’s still hope for me…if I can figure out how to write as well as John D. MacDonald.

So, this is something to keep in mind as I move into the weekend and try to decide what I’m going to write once the Scotty is finished. I think the WIP, which needs to be deconstructed and revised almost entirely from scratch, might have to take a backseat for a while to something else. I’d like to do Bury Me in Satin, but I am also interested in writing a short and nasty noir, which would inevitably be Muscles. 

Sigh.

Seriously.

AH, well, back to the spice mines.

*this may be incorrect; but I believe it’s true.

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2 Legit 2 Quit

The revision continues to proceed, slower than I would like it to–as always–but it’s getting there gradually, which is always a lovely thing. I am very pleased that thus far I’ve not needed to do anything truly major in terms of revision; just cleaning up some sloppy stuff, getting rid of some things that were eventually discarded from the narrative thread as well as adding some things to foreshadow what’s to come. It’s lovely to see that so much of this, written by the seat of my pants without much idea of where it was going or how it was going to end, is actually turning out to be usable.

I love when I am wrong. I was almost certain I’d have to basically start from scratch. Sure, there are grammatical errors and repetitions I am cleaning up (and some horrifyingly awkward sentences) as I go, but the final run through will do a nice job of cleaning all that up.

Or so I hope.

I also realized last night, as I finished off the revision of Chapter Five, that this is going slowly partly because there’s some serious shit going down in the first third of this book; and I don’t particularly enjoy writing about characters I love going through rough times. So, there’s that as well. But as Scotty always says, life doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. It’s how you handle it that matters.

As I was running my errands this morning, an idea came to me for a bit for an in-progress short story I’ve not worked on for a while, “The Brady Kid.” I don’t know whether or not I should take a momentary break to add it to the story, or if I should just make a note. (Note to self: I also need to go through my last two journals and mark pages that have notes for works in progress, etc. It really is handy to have the journals to write in and write free form with ideas as they come to me, but it’s not helpful if I don’t remember those notes and things are actually there. In fact, I may do that today between clients. Yes, that’s the ticket.)

And it’s Wednesday. The week is half over, and now it’s just the slide downhill into the weekend. The LSU-Florida game is this weekend, and the Saints don’t play until Monday night (which will, of course, make getting home from work that night ever-so-much more fun), and I of course will have errands to run. Perhaps wait till Sunday to do them, spend Saturday cleaning and writing around college football games, and then perhaps do the same on Sunday?

So many decisions to be made.

And I really need to get back to both Circe and the Short Story Project.

And so now I head back into the mines to extract more spice. Have a lovely day, all.

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Stay

We did finish watching Castle Rock last week. I’m not really sure what to think of it, but I probably should watch the finale one more time just to be sure. I was playing with my phone–getting text messages–and I may have missed something key.

Either that, or the finale simply made no sense.

Which is, I suppose, a possibility.

I did write yesterday, not nearly as much as I wanted to or would have liked to, but despite all of my best efforts the words simply weren’t coming as quickly or as easily as I would like. I can remember, years ago, putting Madonna or Stevie Nicks or Fleetwood Mac CD’s in the stereo and hitting shuffle, sitting down at the computer and then several hours and thousands of words later realizing there was no music playing anymore and the afternoon was gone. Now, I feel like I am always scrabbling to get some work done between interruptions and distractions. It’s okay–the work is getting done, if at a slower pace than I would prefer–but I do miss those blissful afternoons writing away like a madman.

I’ve been mulling over my y/a about rape culture. As I said yesterday, I had thought (oh, innocence) that in the years that had passed since Steubenville that it wasn’t timely anymore. Yeah, that. It is amazing that at age fifty-seven I can still be so fucking naive about the world in which I live. I read a terrific essay the other day on Vox about how one of the greatest teen rom-coms of the 1980’s, Sixteen Candles, is actually deeply problematic (I’d already recognized its racism years ago), which also sent me into a deep think about other movies aimed at the youth market in the 1980’s and how problematic they are: Revenge of the Nerds, Risky Business, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (less so than the others), Valley Girl, and The Last American Virgin, among many others–and we can’t forget (no matter how hard we try) Porky’s and it slew of even worse sequels. I also started reading Dead Girls by Alice Bolan; which is well written and very interesting. (Every so often I think I would like to write creative non-fiction; I would love to write a critique of the bury your gays trope which would also deal with how gay men are depicted in crime fiction, as well as piece on Gothic romantic suspense novels from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, posited on the premise that these books were noir for women; but then I read something like this book and think, not educated or well read or smart enough.)  I also think there’s a book in a critical reexamination of teen films/books/television programs and how they handled gender roles and sexual assault in the 1980’s.

I am also seriously considering learning how to speak Italian…although French would probably be better for research purposes.

And the Saints won!

And now back to the spice mines.

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The Best Things In Life Are Free

Hello, Thursday! I am front-loaded on hours this pay week (our week runs from Friday thru Thursday) so I don’t have to go into the office until way later today; just for testing hours, and so I can run some errands today so I won’t have to do them this weekend.

Huzzah!

My kitchen is also a mess this morning, and I have a load of dishes to put away and a load of laundry to fold and put away. I would also like to get some work done on Scotty this morning; I made it through to Chapter Four or so last night, and I think I can get some more significant progress done on it today. What’s interesting is now that I am diving into the Scotty revision, my creative ADD has seemed to have significantly slowed down and I am not thinking of other things I want to write anymore. Which on the one hand is kind of cool, on the other interesting. When I was working on the WIP, for example, I was constantly distracted, just as I was as I suffered through writing the first draft of the Scotty. But this revision is going so smoothly–I haven’t reached the snags yet, I suspect, but I’ve made it much further without reaching a snag than I would have thought–that I am actually kind of enjoying this revision.

Which is really weird. I’ve always hated revisions and rewrites, but this is going very smoothly, as I said before, and the only reason it isn’t going faster is because I am a lot lazier than I should be. Last night, for example, I could have kept going but decided I’d worked long enough for the day and called it quits earlier than I could have.  Which is always par for the course. But even if I only manage to get through a chapter a day, I’ll be done in less than a month. This is my longest Scotty since Jackson Square Jazz–twenty-five chapters, a prologue and the postscript–and it’s probably the most ambitious one I’ve ever written. But I am also enjoying writing it…I am enjoying the challenge, and I am enjoying doing it the way that I used to write books–slowly and carefully, and spread out over a long period of time. There’s nothing wrong with writing fast, either–but it’s so lovely not having a deadline.

So fucking lovely.

If I’m lucky, I can get this draft and the final polish done by November 1, which is my plan for the moment. I am going to wind up missing the deadline for the anthology I started writing “The Blues Before Dawn” for–it’s mid-October–but other than that I don’t mind putting all my short stories on hold for the time being. I am really getting excited about starting to do some research for a novel set in New Orleans’ past, and even more excited about the research itself. There are so many archives in New Orleans, and the city’s past is so rich and full. (Just looking over at the little two shelf bookcase next to my desk where I keep research books, I see the following books: Gumbo Ya-Ya, Bourbon Street, The French Quarter, Empire of Sin, Plantation Parade, The Civil War in Louisiana, Mr. New Orleans, Lost Plantations, Inventing New Orleans, The Capture of New Orleans 1862, Louisiana in the Confederacy, The Thibodaux Massacre, The Ghosts of New Orleans, Frenchmen Desire Goodchildren, Getting Off at Elysian Fields, Legendary Louisiana Outlaws, and Dixie Bohemia, which barely scratch the surface! On my desk is Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans as well.)

I need to get a library card. I can’t believe I’ve never had one in New Orleans.

All right, back to the spice mines.

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Tennessee

Wednesday and halfway through another week. I am almost finished with the revision of Chapter Three, and am hoping to power through it and Chapter Four today, with a side helping of Chapter Five and Six tomorrow; at this rate–should it persist–I will finish the revision in about three weeks.

I suspect, however, that will not turn out to be the case.

Look!  A squirrel!

Not having to be at the office early today feels really strange; like I should be there already and I am somehow loafing around this morning. I only have a partial day tomorrow, so I am going to try to get the weekend errands done before heading into the office tomorrow so this weekend I can simply focusing on writing and editing and revising.

It sounds good in theory, at any rate. In a worst case scenario, I am hoping to finish reading Circe this weekend at the very least. And maybe even work a little bit on “Never Kiss a Stranger,” which is turning into a novella. Which is fine; it’s too much story for a short story and not enough story for a novel; so I guess I am going to just somehow manage to turn it into a novella and sell it myself on Amazon, which I of course did with “Quiet Desperation.” I got rejected from a major market yesterday, which I was expecting, and I have to say–some of the major markets have the most kind form rejection letters.  I like to think that the kinder rejection form letter means my story was actually seriously read and considered before they decided against it; that helps lessen the sting. Since it was done through Submittable, they easily could have simply let the rejected label let me know, but they had the decency to email me as well; which I greatly appreciated.

A rejection used to always send me into a tizzy or downward spiral; but I also am very well aware that I am not the greatest short story writer out there–and there are a lot of terrific short story writers out there–and I am not really sure what I need to learn/experience/know to take me to a higher level as a short story writer. I am pretty much flying blind with them, to be honest; and sometimes I do manage to get it right. I know my subject matter can be a bit disconcerting; the story that was rejected was about someone raised in a cult who escaped from it and has built a life for himself outside of it…only to have paranoia set in when he thinks he recognizes someone from the cult at the grocery store. I think it’s a good story and I did a good job with it; but trying to find a market for it with a gay main character…well, you never can be completely sure that didn’t play a part in it being rejected, to be honest.

You see, there’s the thing when you’re a writer from a marginalized group, the thing the straight cisgender white writers never quite get when we talk about own voices and diversity; we never are sure if our work just wasn’t good enough for the particular market (or publisher) and we need to work harder, or if the marginalized voice/character automatically disqualifies the work. And for the record, that doesn’t even mean bigotry on the part of anyone reading the work to decide whether to publish it or not. Inherent bias can be so systemic and subconscious that perfectly lovely people who don’t think they have a bias at all actually do but are completely unaware of it; which is why the conversation always makes them uncomfortable.

All marginalized voices are asking is that our work be judged on its merits and values. This business is hard and crazy enough without having to always have that awful voice whispering in the back of your mind it’s because you wrote about a gay man/Latina woman/black man/transwoman.

All due respect, straight white cisgender writers don’t have those concerns. (Although it can be very strongly argued that straight white cisgender women also are in that same boat.)

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Bohemian Rhapsody

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Tuesday and my second long day of the week; just like last week, Mondays and Tuesdays coming in as long days. When we move into our new building in October (I am still in denial about that) my schedule will probably be long days on Monday and Tuesday every week, so I am trying to get used to it ahead of time. I wasn’t tired at all yesterday; but remember, Sunday I was drained and worn out from the game Saturday night and went to bed relatively early that night. I’m not necessarily tired today, but more a little on the drained side. Hopefully, I won’t be too tired to finish editing/revising two Scotty chapters tonight when I get home from work.

If so, I’ll try to read some more of Circe. I hate that it’s taking me this long to read it! Not an indication of its quality, people! Buy it! Read it! Savor it!

I’ve always loved Greek mythology, ever since I was a kid and I read a library book, when I was about eight or nine, called The Windy Walls of Troy. I’ve also always wanted to write about the Trojan War; it’s a tale I’ve always loved, and one I have always wanted to try my hand at telling. (Which is why the Troy: Fall of a City series on Netflix was so disappointing; as was the Brad Pitt film Troy.)  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a y/a set during the last year of the war; the part that the Iliad primarily focuses on, from the point of view of one of Priam’s bastard sons, promised to the priesthood of Apollo and raised in the temple, but still a part of the royal family. (I’ve also tried tracking down a copy of The Windy Walls of Troy, to no avail.) Madeline Miller also covered the Trojan War with The Song of Achilles, one of my favorite novels of this century; it made me weep, and I kind of want to read it again, now that I am enjoying her Circe. She did a really interesting job of weaving the gods and demigods into her narrative; how does one write about the Trojan War without including the gods? My thought, of course, was to try to do it as real, without the gods actually appearing in the story, but rather things that happen being seen as their work. But how do you do the Judgment of Paris without the golden apple and the three vindictive, spiteful, jealous goddesses?

Something to think about, at any rate.

I’m also having a lot of fun doing some slight research into the history of both New Orleans and Louisiana; I had another book idea the other night as a result of a Twitter conversation with Clair Lamb and Rebecca Chance (so it’s THEIR fault), but I think it actually applies and will fit into a paranormal series I want to write set in rural Louisiana in the parish I invented, Redemption Parish–doesn’t that just sound like a perfect name for a parish where supernatural stuff happens? It’s a matter of tying in all the stories and things I’ve already written set there…it also occurred to me the other night that even the novels and stories I write that aren’t connected to others actually are–I realized that my character Jerry Channing, who appears in the Scotty series AND appeared in The Orion Mask, also writes for Street Talk magazine and that awful editor who Mouse worked for originally in Timothy, which ties Timothy to the Scotty series as well. I always thought Timothy was the one book that stood on its own…not so much, as it turns out.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT IN DEATH VALLEY! CHANCE OF RAIN? NEVER!

Later today Paul and I will head up to Baton Rouge for the LSU game! HUZZAH! There’s nothing like a game in Tiger Stadium, and this marks the ninth straight season Paul and I have attended at least one game up there. Both campus and stadium are beautiful, and it’s always interesting to see the changes to the area and neighborhood since the catastrophic floods a few years ago. The Tigers are 3-0, but have a tough row to hoe yet–three future opponents are ranked in the Top 10 currently–and at least one more is ranked in the Top 25. This might be the last game we attend this season–if the Tigers continue to win, those late season games become more and more important, and I seriously doubt any of our friends with season tickets are going to surrender tickets to the games against Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, or Mississippi State.

And while it would be exciting as all hell to see LSU run the table…the schedule is just too difficult and honestly, after watching Alabama dismantle Ole Miss last weekend I don’t think the New England Patriots would be able to beat them. Even two or three losses on this schedule, though, can’t be disappointing.

We finished watching Ozark last night and now can’t wait for Season Three. The show is so dark, the writing so crisp and tight, the acting so understated yet real–it’s one of the best shows available to watch; Southern Gothic with a strong strain of noir running through it. I’m definitely sorry to have finished the season, and now am champing at the bit for the next one.

But despite the desert television became in the late summer, now shows are returning that we watch and entire seasons dropping on Hulu and Netflix to sink our teeth back into, which is lovely; now we don’t have the time to watch everything we want to see, which is a terrific problem to have.

I am going to spend the rest of this morning cleaning and getting organized; I left work early yesterday to get started on the weekend chores (knowing that today would be pretty much shot because of THE TRIP TO TIGER STADIUM) and then hopefully I’ll be able to get some reading done (Circe is calling my name) and some writing (I hope to get through at least three chapters of the Scotty revision this weekend).

Hope springs eternal.

And now back to the spice mines.

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