Category: books i’ve read

Cico Buff

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and it’s a somber bit of a morning here. I’m still sad and a little in shock that Scooter declined so quickly, but in retrospect I am glad it was fast and he didn’t suffer for long. Skittle’s slow decline into death lasted months, which was terrible and heart-wrenching and soul-shattering. I decided that I am going to take the weekend off–no social media, no emails, no nothing. I am going to, of course, write blog posts–I will always try to write blog posts–but I am going to clean and organize and read and think and watch movies and television shows and so forth. This hasn’t exactly been my favorite year so far–how can a year in which you lose your mom and cat in less than half a year be a favorite of any kind–but it’s not been an entirely bad year, either. My life has always gifted me lovely wonderful things while at the same time gut-punching me with something awful; the other night when I realized i was caught up and/or ahead of most everything, I also thought which means something bad is going to happen–which is terrible, but I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially when good things happen to me.

I got some more Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies in the mail yesterday (Stories That Scared Even Me, Stories for Late at Night, and Stories Not for the Nervous), and I think it’s time to dial back on buying them, at least until I start getting most of them read. But to take my mind off my sadness I think I need to read a novel, so after I get the kitchen cleaned and organized a little better, I think I’ll probably curl up with Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott at long last, and spend the weekend with her. I think spending a nice, relaxing weekend is just what the doctor ordered, and you know, it’s long past time I did a really thorough clean of this place, and it shows. The condition of the apartment has deteriorated (primarily due to my laziness coupled with a general exhaustion I’ve felt the last few years) to the point that I hope there’s no afterlife; because if my mom can look down from heaven and see how slovenly I’ve kept house for so long…yeah, she’d be haunting me for sure. Several years ago I did finally realize that I am super-hard on my housekeeping skills because Mom was über clean; her house was always spotless and everything was where it went. Messes never lasted for more than five minutes in my mother’s house. She’d finish cooking and there wouldn’t be any mess left behind; something I’ve only managed a few times throughout my life…and yet it always felt marvelous when I was able to pull that off.

I also just realized/remembered that our anniversary is this coming week; the 20th, to be exact, will mark twenty-eight years of the Greg-Paul relationship. Twenty-eight years. I never dreamed that I’d ever find someone compatible to me, let alone have a relationship that would last almost three decades (if we can survive another two, we’ll make it to thirty), but I suppose I can do an “ode to Paul” on our anniversary, so I’ll table this talk for now. I do need to get him a gift; and I know exactly what to get him; I just have to remember to order it today so it may arrive in time…if it doesn’t, no big deal. We’ve both become rather lackadaisical about anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays at this point. They just are, and being together and still happy is the real gift.

Yesterday after I got home from the Cat Practice, I watched a true crime documentary that was interesting from a domestic suspense perspective; it was one of those “I didn’t know I was married to a predator” stories that I’ve always kind of wanted to do from a gay male perspective; lots of things to unpack, discuss, and talk about there. After the documentary, I put on the final game of the College World Series so I could watch LSU win it all yet again–mostly for background noise, really, while I waited for Paul to get home. After that, I was scrolling through Prime looking for something light and funny to take me out of myself, and wound up watching The Beverly Hillbillies, which is silly and fun and funny–still funny–but was so hated by critics and reviewers, despite resonating with viewers and being a Top Ten hit show its entire run. I never understood it myself, and remembered watching when I was a kid. My memories of the show airing weren’t strong, and so it was easy for me to go along with the mentality that it was low humor and tacky and clichéd and bad. I started watching reruns at some point as an adult, and was startled to see how misunderstood the show was; I may have to write about it sometime because it struck me as a particularly biting social satire on American culture and society. And it’s still funny; and the Clampetts are never the butt of the joke; the joke is always on the “city folk.” (Even while grieving, I still think about writing.)

I also listened to The Drowning Tree while doing my data entry; it’s really quite marvelous. But then Paul called with the news from the Cat Practice and that was that for the day. I’ll have to use some paid-time-off to make up for the afternoon hours I lost to handling the Scooter situation.

And on that note, I think I am going to go ahead and head into the relaxation zone rather than the usual spice-mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and if you have a pet, give them a big hug for me.

Highway to Hell

I realized the other night that, of all things, I take more pride in my short stories than I do in my novels. Isn’t that strange? Novels are, in theory, much more difficult to write than a short story–even at its barest minimum, a novel should be at least fifty thousand words while short stories generally cut off around a thousand. I think it’s because I still carry the scars from that asshole writing professor in college. I always struggle with short stories, and always have; I used to say that if I wrote a successful short story it was completely and entirely by accident. But writing erotica was an excellent tutorial in short story writing; in what other type of short story is “beginning, middle, end” so clearly delineated?

My first short story that got published outside of the realm of erotica was “Smalltown Boy,” which was published in 2003, I think. It’s still one of my favorite stories of my own; it’s an Alabama story and I am still very proud of it. I used to think I’d never get a short story published anywhere that wasn’t erotica, so when my stories started getting acceptances and published in non-erotica markets, it was very cool.

I like writing short stories because I can encapsulate an idea in that short form rather than writing an entire novel. I can also experiment with voice, style, theme, setting and story. I have any number of stories that don’t work but are completed; I have a lot more than were started and stalled because I didn’t know how to finish them. I think I have around a hundred short stories or so in progress; I actually counted a few years ago because someone asked and I didn’t know the answer.\

Several years ago, an Australian crime writer I’ve known for decades reached out and asked me if I would contribute a story to an anthology her publishing company was producing, The Only One in the World, which was a Sherlock Holmes collection–but the only rule was you couldn’t set the stories in London, period; I had never written anything close to a Holmes story and have never really been much of a Holmesian (I do love Laurie King’s Mary Russell series), but it was a challenge so I said yes–because for me, I love writing challenges because they push me out of my comfort zone and make me try things I might not ordinarily try. That story became “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy” (still one of my favorite titles of all time) and it was a lot of fun to write, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself writing it…to the point I’ve considered revisiting my Holmes and Watson in 1916 New Orleans, several times.

Last year, the Sherlock editor, Narrelle Harris, reached out to me to see if I’d write something for a new anthology, The Fresh Hell, and there was a list of horror tropes we were given to chose from. Being from Louisiana, how could I not pick “haunted bayou”?

And so I started writing a story that became “Solace in a Dying Hour.”

Madeleine Chaisson opened her eyes and knew that the next time she shut them would be the last.

She cocked her head to listen. Even amongst those few (some say blessed, others cursed) who could hear them, most would describe the strange sounds they made as they danced about the dark, still waters as whistling. But Madeleine was special, different, not like the others.

She heard them clearly. She knew they weren’t whistling. They were singing.

But the sound she heard now was just the gulls over Bayou St Ferdinand shrieking as they swooped and flapped their wings looking for morsels of food. 

Dirty scavengers, she thought with a scowl. She hated the gulls; had since she was a little girl growing up in this very house.

How much gull shit had she cleaned off the dock during her long lifetime? Papa would backhand her if he saw any of the dried white splotches with black pellets on the dock when he brought the boat back in from a day shrimping out in the Gulf.

‘It rots the wood, you lazy cochon,’ he’d say in his sing-song southeast Louisiana Cajun accent while she rubbed her stinging cheek. ‘And who will have to rebuild the damned thing when it collapses? Don’t I already work hard to keep you clothed and fed?’

Even with him years in his grave, after she began wondering if that was even true, she’d still take the bucket out and scrub the gull shit from the weathered old wood.

If I were a witch like they always said, I could have snapped my fingers and cleaned it, she thought with a snort.

The new anthology debuted today, and it is available on Amazon and other sellers here in the United States; here is the link to Bookshop.org : here. This link is to the trade paper; there’s also a much more expensive hardcover edition as well if you disdain paperbacks.

“Solace in a Dying Hour” is another one of my south Louisiana stories. It took me a long while to get to the point where I was comfortable writing about Louisiana outside of New Orleans (don’t ever ask me about the colossal error in geography I made in Bourbon Street Blues…I SAID DON’T ASK!); I think my first was “Rougarou.” I also wrote and published “A Whisper from the Graveyard” since that one, and this is my third. I’ve started building a fictional world of Louisiana outside of the city over the last seven or eight years or so; it could be longer since I no longer have any sense of time anymore. I have revisited rural Louisiana in books like Need, The Orion Mask, and A Streetcar Named Murder; I have more stories and books I am going to write about my fictional rural Louisiana; I’ve also fictionalized the north shore several times already.

“Solace” is an homage of sorts to two other stories I really loved, “Do the Dead Sing?” by Stephen King and “An Unremarkable Heart” by Karin Slaughter. Both involve someone lying in bed dying, and reliving some pretty horrible things that happened over the course of their lives. I had been studying Louisiana folklore and legends for quite some time, but it was around 2017 or 2018 that I started really doing a deep dive into Louisiana history and culture. A co-worker had moved to Houma, which is deep in the bayou country, and she was doing the same. She was who suggested I write about le feu follet, the swamp lights some see. There are numerous definitions and descriptions of who and what le feu follet actually are; I decided I wanted to use the lights and the whistling aspects of their legend, and I wanted the story to focus on a woman who’s lived a very hard life and been through some things…but who could not only see le feu follet for what they actually are and appear, but could tell that they weren’t whistling, but singing. I also kind of based her on my maternal grandmother, a very quiet woman who never showed emotion and never complained about anything; things were what they were and you just dealt with them, period. I wanted to get that sense of quiet strength that you can usually only find in rural Southern women, that practical pragmatism that has gotten them through hard lives and a lot of tragedy.

My maternal grandmother was pretty amazing, really.

I am very proud of the story and how it turned out; the anthology itself is amazing, and the cover is gorgeous. I hope you enjoy it should you choose to check it out.

Oil of Angels

Here we are on a lovely Thursday morning. I managed to survive a full week in the office for the first time in three weeks (I won’t be going in on next Wednesday, either, as I have doctors’ appointments all day that day, so yet another non-full week for me, oy). I wasn’t very tired yesterday; no more than just the normal wearing down of a work week. I had slept really well Tuesday night so I wasn’t very tired yesterday, and I was also trying to get some odds and ends finished. It’s very strange where I am right now; I have some commitments but not many; and I finally seem to have the email situation almost completely under control at long last. I do sometimes find myself at loose ends on occasion; no emails to answer, nothing urgent that needs to be done, finished or worked on. It kind of feels weird, but it’s also nice in some ways. Maybe that’s why I am sleeping better? Because I’ve managed to get the stress under control somehow?

Who knows?

Paul worked late the last two nights–he’s writing a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts, so glamorous–so I was kind of at loose ends. Last night I had a ZOOM thing at six; and I was already a little worn down from the day at the office (mostly from getting up at six, really). I was falling asleep in my chair by nine, so I went to bed; I tried reading a short story by H. G. Wells in that My Favorites in Suspense Hitchcock book, but I couldn’t get focused. But I also realized something when I got home from work yesterday: I am sort of caught up on everything? Oh, sure, I still have two novels in various stages of production–waiting for the edits on one while page proofing the other–but I am actually kind of caught up right now. I had no emails to answer in my inbox. The proofing is going decently, and isn’t due to be turned in for another couple of weeks, at any rate, so I am actually ahead on that one. For the first time in years, I had absolutely nothing to do and no excuses or justifications necessary to go sit in my chair and cuddle with the cat and just empty my brain and do nothing. I cannot remember the last time this has happened; it’s been at least since 2019, I think. It’s an odd feeling, but also one I could get sort of used to, if I let myself.

Someone told me yesterday–during the ZOOM call–that I’m a workaholic, which kind of took me aback. (Kind of like being called prolific used to always make do a double take and say, what?) But as I sat there in my easy chair rewatching the LSU College World Series final game at last (GEAUX TIGERS! I also realized I never really posted about that world series and how fun it was to watch–the final game was pretty fun to watch; must have been amazing to watch as it happened), I started thinking about that some more and instead of the usual kneejerk no, I’m actually really lazy defensive reaction I always have (because, believe it or not, I really AM lazy) when someone says something like that to me, I decided to think about it and she wasn’t entirely wrong. I do have a full time job in an office. I do write full time. I edit part time. This is the first year since maybe 2009 where I am not doing any kind of official volunteer service in what little time I have left after everything else, and it’s kind of nice. It’s nice to have free time I don’t have to feel guilty about, where I don’t have to say to myself “no one else has to justify taking the weekend off from everything” when they are too tired to work on the weekends. I think she was probably right: I am a workaholic.

Oh, this is just a respite and things will start cranking up a bit again, I am well aware of that, but I want to enjoy this brief time of leisurely page proofing while I wait for my other edits with no sword of Damocles hanging over my head. I’m probably going to start writing something else relatively soon, maybe next week or the week after, depending on when the edits arrive. I want to finish strong first drafts for Muscles and Chlorine by September, when I am going to spend the rest of the year working on the requested follow up book to this other one I’m currently proofing. I also have to come up with a plot for that book, so there’s so mental gymnastics ahead of me, so letting my brain have a bit of a rest will be helpful as my batteries need to thoroughly recharge; I’ve run them down dramatically over the last few years. Mom’s decline and final illness, the pandemic, being EVP of MWA, trying to continue to write books and stories–and that’s not even taking into consideration the national political shit show this country has been for years now–it’s a wonder I managed to survive the last few years, you know? Let alone continued to write and be productive while doing my day job well, managing the household–the chores were definitely allowed to slide for a very long time, I’m afraid–no wonder I was exhausted and tired and drained all the time. No wonder writing my stories and books felt like misery and like I was doing it on autopilot.

And I need to take better care of myself, period.

Today is also the launch day (in Australia) for This Fresh Hell, edited by Katya de Becerra and Narrelle M. Harris; it features my story “Solace in a Dying Hour,” which is one that I am rather proud of, to be quite frankly. (While I was trying to read that H. G. Wells story–“The Inexperienced Ghost” was its title–it occurred to me that I am much prouder of my short stories than I am of my books, which is a weird thing I am going to have to unpack at some point) I’ll do another entry about the story, of course; maybe that will be the time and place for me to work through my weird neuroses about short stories and my writing.

Or I could see a therapist again. Which is probably the best thing, really.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Y’all have a great Thursday, okay?

The Itchy Glowbo Blow

Wednesday and we’ve made it halfway through the week, Constant Reader. Didn’t think it was quite possible, did you, when Monday dawned so early and ugly? We expecting thunderstorms today in New Orleans–it feels cooler and damp this morning, but I don’t know when we are supposed to have said storms; probably this afternoon. I slept really well again last night–it’s been lovely getting good sleep lately. I felt a bit tired yesterday when I got home from work, and so took it a little easier on myself when I got home. I managed to get caught up on my emails (such a weird feeling) and did some writing last night. I think I’m still a bit in the post-book malaise phase of things, so writing anything isn’t easy (not that it ever is) but Paul got home late so was left to my own devices once I finished writing for the evening. I did watch some documentaries on Youtube about the Hapsburgs last night (I also discovered an English-language biography about her–Margaret of Austria–which I added to the my list of books to buy…which is almost as out of control as my TBR stack, which is now essentially the entire living room), and I read a short story in Hitchcock’s My Favorites in Suspense anthology; a dark little Charlotte Armstrong story called “The Enemy.” Armstrong was a writer I discovered as a tween, when Mom let me join the Mystery Guild Book Club; I got an omnibus by her (The Witch’s House, Mischief, The Dream Walker) which I greatly enjoyed. I rediscovered Armstrong thanks to the work of both Sarah Weinman and Jeffrey Marks, which enabled me to continue reading in her canon.

Armstrong won an Edgar for Best Novel for A Dram of Poison, a charming if dark little story of suspense; maybe the rare Edgar winner where there’s no dead body but the plot has to do with preventing an accidental death? It’s very clever, and incredibly charming, but beneath that clever charming surface it says something dark and awful about human nature and character–people who are unhappy spreading their misery to others. Armstrong was also made a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. Her work may seem a bit dated in the modern day–technology and society have moved on from the times she lived and wrote in–but I think it’s well worth the read. “The Enemy” is that same style of writing as Dram, a serious subject presented charmingly, and the death of a child’s dog the catalyst for an exposé of something darker and nastier…and yes, the plot also hinges on the darkness a human being is capable of creating. It’s a really clever, if slightly dated, story–and you can’t help but smile or laugh at the last line of the story. I am really enjoying these time capsules into the past, to tell you the truth. I bought a few more of these anthologies on eBay yesterday, too. It’s nice to have short story collections around for those times when my brain can’t really focus on reading an entire novel.

I have been listening to Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree on Audible, but I may have to break down and finish actually reading a physical copy because I can’t keep listening every day and with my memory a literal thing of the past these days, I’m not sure I remember enough of the story to pick it up again this weekend. I also picked up copies of her new novel, The Bones of the Story, along with Paul Tremblay’s new short story collection, The Beast You Are. I do like Tremblay’s writing–A Head Full of Ghosts was one of the best horror novels of the last decade, and I’ve liked everything else of his that I’ve read–and I think this may even be his second collection. I am also hoping to pull together another collection myself this year–This Town and Other Macabre Stories–but I am not sure if I will have the time. I also got the copy edits for a short story I contributed to an anthology in my inbox last night, so that has to go onto the to-do list, and I still have page proofs to get through. But for the most part, it seems as though I have a guilt-free free weekend, which one can never truly go wrong with, either. I’ll have some errands to run, of course–I always have errands to run–but there’s no stress or pressure on me either, which is kind of nice. I think maybe that’s the reason I’ve been sleeping so well this week? No pressure and my schedule has kind of normalized, gotten back to normal, settled back into the routine my body is used to, perhaps?

Yes, that makes total sense to me.

I also have ideas and thoughts pinging around in my head. I’m itching to get back to the works I have in progress; I want to get a strong first draft of two different novels finished before I leave for Bouchercon next (!!!) month. I actually, finally, made a to-do list yesterday; I am hoping that I can get my life back on track the way it was before the pandemic and the madness of the last few years. That doesn’t mean that my blood pressure won’t continue to go up predicated on the constant assaults on everyone who’s not a cisgender straight man from the demons on the right–which is part of the reason my interest in the Civil War and the 1850’s, that terrible lead-up to the split, has been heightened these last few months. I do see a lot of similarities in the split between conservative v. progressive today, which was predicated along the lines of abolitionist/pro-human trafficking back then. One of the books my father gave me to read was called Southerners in Blue, which was a novelization of the true story (albeit poorly written) of a Union sympathizer and others like him in Winston County, Alabama. (If you’re not familiar with Winston County, the easiest way to explain it is this county did not vote for secession and essentially stated that if Alabama had the right to secede from the Union, the county had the right to secede from Alabama. They did not secede from Alabama, just said they had the right to predicated on the secession arguments being presented, but have gone down in Alabama history and lore as having actually seceded even though they most certainly did not) Basically, in some of the northern counties of Alabama there was basically a second civil war, between the “secesh” and the “Unionist” supporters, and the mountains of north Alabama were filled with deserters from the Confederate Army, This was also novelized into a book called Tories of the Hills by Wesley Sylvester Thompson, which is incredibly rare (my uncle has a copy, which my aunt won’t let be removed from her house–wise, as I would totally steal it). I had read another book also while I was up there, about the Kansas-Missouri border war–which had a decided “secesh” slant to it, of course, while complaining that all previous histories were “unsympathetic to the Missouri slave-owner point of view”. I’m sure he had a point, but simply because there are two sides to every story doesn’t mean each side deserves to be heard, or that each side’s opinion has equal weight. It did spark my interest, though, and I really think there’s a book in this little-known history of north Alabama. Again, it would be difficult to write–lots of potential landmines there–but it’s also, as I said, not very well known and with today’s tribalism mentality–not to mention how loud the Lost Cause fanatics are–it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the notion that the South wasn’t monolithic in its thinking.

Because no group of people are, really, which is why I don’t like being asked for a gay perspective on anything; I can only speak for myself.

But while I continue to research this aspect of history and try to figure out a way to get a novel out of it, I am going to map out two others. One is already in progress, and the other is a New Orleans ghost story I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time now. The trick is to make it different from every other ghost story I’ve already written. Good luck with that, Mr. Repetitive!

Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

A Kissed Out Red Flatboat

I did read some short stories this weekend from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies I’ve gotten from eBay over the last month or so, and they’ve been wonderfully delightful and deliciously wicked. They also remind me of where I got the idea that short stories should always have a wry, slightly ironic but gasp-inducing twist at the end. I remember vaguely watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents (we were always a family who were fans of Hitchcock) and, while I was too young to remember The Twilight Zone, I do remember Night Gallery. I am also loving reading stories by masters of crime fiction that I’ve not read before; in one of the anthologies the next story up is by the delightful Charlotte Armstrong. I just read one by Anthony Boucher (for whom Bouchercon was named) called “They Bite” that was incredibly creepy; in another one of the anthologies the next story is by Roald Dahl. I would love for us to go back to the wonderful world that existed back in those days, when the short story was a much more valued art form than it is today and there were all kinds of markets for them. Heavy heaving sigh.

So, I did pull out that story the copy-editor said was “powerful,” and as I read it my horror grew, until by the time I finished it I had noted so many errors and transition problems that I thought that cannot be the version I turned in and was in thorough panic mode when I remembered to check the laptop and sure enough, there it was. I did reread the story, did spot some mistakes, but the revision I did before turning it in was clearly the right thing to do, as the story was significantly better and made more sense and was actually, pretty good. It touched on themes I seem to keep returning to, over and over again, but what can you do? I cannot control my creativity that strongly, you know; I write the stories as they come to me. I do worry that I am repeating myself though–how many hangover scenes have I written over the years (which is hilarious, because I never really had hangovers the way other people have always talked about them)?

We started watching a new crime show that seemed to have a lot of potential, but there were a couple of annoying characters in the forefront of the show that undermined it for me, so we gave up after a couple of episodes. We did watch the final episode of The Ashley Madison Affair, which was pretty interesting to me. First of all, if anything, it emphasized the fact that not everyone is content with monogamy–and since we idealize monogamy and the nuclear family in this present day society (unrealistically, I might add), the concept of open and honest conversations about sexuality and monogamy and so forth are made very difficult to have. Women are trained from childhood to see cheating as the worst possible sin of all time, as well as to try to inhibit and control their sexuality as much as possible, denying themselves the same freedom to explore what they like and enjoy while also determining what they don’t like and don’t enjoy the way single man are often allowed. Dorothy Allison wrote very strongly about how societal views and beliefs and mores about female sexuality prohibited women from becoming their full selves; there’s always someone just raring to slut-shame a woman, isn’t there? A former friend of mine who claimed herself to be an ardent feminist (she became a TERF, of course) and that women had every right to be as sexually liberated as men would then turn around and slut-shame every female celebrity that ever came up for discussion. All models were really “escorts,” and every successful woman in entertainment slept her way to the top.

That’s an interesting feminist take, isn’t it?

We also started watching a gay teen movie, and turned it off within five minutes. It was terrible. We watched something else after that, but i honestly don’t remember what it was, to tell you the horrible truth. I hate this memory nonsense, seriously.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow (or later, whatever the case may be).

Private Eyes

I loved the Three Investigators.

When I was writing about rereading “The Birds” the other day, it brought Alfred Hitchcock to mind again. I have been revisiting the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies lately, and slowly (finally) realizing what an enormous influence on my writing Mr. Hitchcock was. Obviously, there’s the films, and the television series, of course, but even more so in books–books he had little to do with other than licensing his name–because hands down, no questions asked, my favorite juvenile series was The Three Investigators. I loved those books, and still do. The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the other series–they don’t really hold up well for me now, but I can still enjoy the The Three Investigators as much today as when I first read them. The books are incredibly well written, and the three boys themselves are very distinct from each other yet not one-dimensional, and that holds true for all the members of their supporting cast–Uncle Titus, Aunt Mathilda, Hans and Konrad, Hitchcock himself, Worthington the chauffeur–as well as the primary settings, the Jones Salvage Yard and Headquarters, a wrecked mobile home hidden in plain sight, beneath and behind piles of junk, with secret tunnels leading to it.

What I liked the most, though, was that the plots of the mysteries themselves were very intricately plotted, and the criminals were actually pretty smart, so it took a lot of good detective work, thinking, and intelligence to outwit them. Many of the books were treasure hunts, which of course I love love love, and often required the solving of a puzzle, which I also loved. The three boys who formed the investigation were Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews. Jupiter (First Investigator)had been a child star on a Little Rascals type television show as “Baby Fatso”, which he doesn’t like being reminded of, or being called fat (this was actually one of the few kids’ series that dealt with fatphobia and flat out said making fun of people for being overweight was cruel; think about how much Chet Morton gets teased for being fat in The Hardy Boys and the same with Bess Marvin in Nancy Drew); he is also the brains of the outfit. He has a quick deductive mind, pays attention to details, and has read a lot so he’s got a lot of arcane knowledge in his mind that comes in handy quite often. Pete (Second Investigator) is strong and athletic and not nearly as bright as Jupiter. Pete also gets scared easily, but an ongoing theme in the books is how Pete always overcomes his fears to come to the aid of his friends. Bob Andrews is Records and Research; he works at the local library so can do research for them, and he also is the one who writes up all their cases to present to Mr. Hitchcock, to see if it’s worthy of his introduction. When the series begins, he has a brace on one leg from a bad fall down a nearby mountain–so he doesn’t get to get involved in any legwork or in-person investigations for several volumes until the brace comes off.

And of course I loved learning from Jupiter’s vast stores of knowledge.

“Help!” The voice that called out was strangely shrill and muffled. “Help! Help!”

Each time a cry from within the mouldering old house pierced the silence, a new chill crawled down Pete Crenshaw’s spine. Then the cries for help ended in a strange, dying gurgle and that was even worse.

The tall, brown-haired boy knelt behind the thick trunk of a barrel palm and peered up the winding gravel path at the house. He and his partner, Jupiter Jones, had been approaching it when the first cry had sent them diving into the shrubbery for cover.

Across the path, Jupiter, stocky and sturdily built, crouched behind a bush, also peering toward the house. They waited for further sounds. But now the old Spanish-style house, set back in the neglected garden that had grown up like a small jungle, was silent.

“Jupe!” Pete whispered. “Was that a man or a woman?”

Jupiter shook his head. “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Maybe it was neither.“

Jupe and Pete are on their way to call on a prospective new client, referred to them by none other than Alfred Hitchcock himself. Professor Fentriss had bought a parrot from a peddler, primarily because he stuttered and was named Billy Shakespeare (Fentriss is an English professor). The parrot says “to-to-to be or not to-to-to be, that is the question.” But this is in and of itself mysterious, as Jupe points out, because parrots don’t stutter; they have to be taught to stutter. Why would anyone teach a parrot to stutter? But the stuttering parrot is just the start of a bizarre and unusual case, with twists and turns and surprises everywhere the boys turn. Their detecting soon leads them to the revelation that there were six parrots and a mynah bird the peddler was selling, and they were all taught specifically to say one phrase. The phrases are clues to a treasure trail, and the prize is a magnificent and incredibly valuable painting by a master.

This book is an excellent example of precisely why I loved this series so much. The pacing is always excellent, the characterizations are three-dimensional, the mystery is intricate and puzzling and hard to figure out, and the conclusion of the book, where the boys have to beat several bad guys to actually find the painting, which takes place in a spooky abandoned cemetery on a foggy night, is some of the best atmospheric writing I’ve ever encountered. You really feel like you’re lost in the fog with bad guys you can’t see out there somewhere.

I’ve never understood why these books never achieved the popularity of the Hardy Boys and other series like them. They were better written, better stories, and just over all vastly superior to the Hardy Boys in every way. The first book in the series, The Secret of Terror Castle, remains one of my favorite kids’ books to this day (several books from this series make that same list). The problem with the series was time, really. Alfred Hitchcock eventually died, and they had to get someone else to fill in for him. Eventually, recognizing that Hitchcock’s name alone dated the books, they removed the references. The books themselves were never updated, which is also a shame because it dates the books but at the same time gives them a kind of nostalgic charm, as well. The Secret of Terror Castle was about the home of a silent film star whose career was ended by talkies, who turns out to be still alive. That was a stretch for me even when I first read it in the early 1970’s, let alone today. Whenever I think about writing my own kids’ series, I always think of it in terms of being Hardy Boys-like, but really what I would want to do is emulate the Three Investigators, whose books were well-written and a lot of fun to read.

Be sure I will talk about them again another time.

Spooning Good Singing Gum

Saturday morning, and at some point I need to walk to Office Depot and get ink for my printer. I suppose I should really let go of this obsessive need to have everything printed on paper just in case. It’s terrible for the planet, for one, and I am sick of spending the money on ink. Who will win here, the neuroses or the economist?

Yesterday wasn’t a good day. I didn’t feel good still throughout most of the day, and I even took the horrifying step of getting Pepto Bismal at the grocery store. Shudder, wretched stuff. But it also occurred to me that maybe I was just hungry–another neuroses there–because I keep forgetting to eat or don’t eat enough when I am not in the office. So I ate something and did feel significantly better. And whenever that feeling started up again, I had something else. It worked. (Part of my food/eating thing is that I don’t ever get hungry and will forget to eat until I feel sick. That, sadly, is nothing new that can be blamed on the long COVID or anything.) But I was also very tired and feeling a bit burnt out from not sleeping well. Paul and I watched the first two episodes of the Ashley Madison documentary series–there will definitely be more about THAT later–and then I went to bed for the night. I did get some things done yesterday but the primary problem for the day really was not feeling good. Today I feel rested, hydrated, and not hungry, so we’re off to a very good start. I want to catch up on some correspondence this morning, and I need to write a first chapter of a book that I was asked to write this week. I intend to relax for the most part today; I have some cleaning up to do around here, which is fine–I am going to start listening to Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree while I clean and organize the kitchen–and I think I’m going to barbecue burgers for dinner later. Can you stand the excitement? I barely can.

I just got the official notice in the mail yesterday that our health insurance provider at work is no longer going to be our health care provider come January 1. I have literally no idea what that means for the future–will I have to buy my own and be reimbursed by the agency? Will we have to take on worse insurance than we already have out of desperation? I’ll be sixty two next month, do I really need to have this kind of stress and aggravation now that I’m getting older and am more in need of medical attention? Thank God I’m getting my teeth fixed in September because who knows what January will bring? Yay. I suppose I should start looking into Medicare and how that all works so I am not blind-sided in a couple of years. Who knows, maybe Medicare is the solution to this pending issue and then I just need supplemental insurance. It makes me head ache just to think about it all, truly. This is the part of being an adult that I really do not like.

But yes, the kitchen is a mess and I need to reorganize myself, which is the goal for today once I get this chapter written. I also will have the cover of the first book I did for this new publisher today soon, and when I share that cover is when I’ll talk more about the book, Constant Reader. I know this vagueness is troublesome, and it may read as coy (I hate coy), but it just makes sense to me to not talk about the book until I have a cover to share. I also think I am going to try to finish some of the entries I have in draft form, or delete them. (Some are over three years old and let’s face it, I’m probably never going to finish those. I can cut and paste what was written and save them as potential personal essays, which is probably the best way to do it.) I do want to go back to doing entries about my own books and why I wrote them–as best as I can remember; the two post drafts I have on here are Need and Timothy–which was kind of fun. I don’t obviously remember everything about those books, the ideas for them and how they came to be, but it’s always fun to try to remember these things.

I am also going to try to get started on Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman once I’ve finished everything today that I need to get done around here (I suppose I should make a list, shouldn’t I?). I have too many great books on top of the TBR pile–books by Eli Cranor, Kelly J. Ford, Megan, Alison Gaylin, Jordan Harper, Christopher Bollen, and S. A. Cosby, a new true crime anthology by Sarah Weinman, and I’ll be getting the new Laura Lippman once it drops–that not reading every day is truly criminal. I also want to read more of these classic short stories from the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies I’ve been getting from eBay. It’s funny, so many retired people tell me how much I am going to miss going to work and how bored I’m going to be once I retire, which is endlessly amusing to me. I will never be bored, as long as there are books to read and books to write. As long as I can function and think and type and read…I’ll never get bored and miss my job. I suspect I will find that time management will be the big problem for me once I retire–allowing time to slip through my fingers since I no longer have to be focused because I don’t have to plan my life and writing around my job anymore–which means I’ll need to make a to-do list for every week as well as one for every day. This is what I did when I used to have to do before I went back to work full-time, and I did still waste a lot of time. The key is structure; I need structure to be productive. And I think–between the tiredness, the hunger, and not feeling well–this last week wasn’t meant to be anything other than a slow and painful transition back to reality. It wasn’t really a work week, since the holiday fell on Tuesday…this coming week is my first full week back to work in three weeks. Next week I have to take a day off for a doctor’s appointment, so there’s that, too. And then it will be August, my power bill will peak for the year and start going back down again, and at the end of the month I will be flying all the way across country to San Diego for Bouchercon.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. That chapter won’t write itself, and the apartment won’t clean and organize itself, either. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow or later. It’ll be a SURPRISE.

Fly Like an Eagle

One of the first Alfred Hitchcock movies I ever saw was The Birds. We watched it on our big black-and-white television, and it was absolutely terrifying. What made it even more terrifying was that we as viewers–along with the characters in the film–had no idea what had turned the birds into vicious flocks of attacking predators. The movie was absolutely terrifying to a very young Gregalicious, who ever after always gave whatever birds he saw a wary look. That innocuous scene where the birds start gathering on the jungle gym? First a few that you notice, then you look again and there’s more… you look back another time and there are even more….more and more with every look until you have a sick feeling and think maybe I better get out of here–yes, I related absolutely to that scene in the movie and whenever I see a flock of birds gathered anywhere I have a bit of an uneasy feeling. You never really think about how vicious and terrifying birds–descended from the dinosaurs, after all–can be. Sure, we all know about the birds of prey, with their sharp claws and razor-like beaks; but sparrows? Blackbirds? Crows? How do you defend yourself if a flock comes for you? God, even now, just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

I recently rewatched the movie (during the Rewatch Project during the pandemic) and it’s not as good a film as I remembered, but it’s still terrifying. I was curious to see how I would react to the movie, because in the intervening years I had read the short story it was based on, and the story is much, much better than the movie.

The fact it was written by Daphne du Maurier didn’t hurt.

On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter. Until then the autumn had been mellow, soft. The earth was rich where the plough turned it.

Nat Hocken, because of a wartime disability, had a pension and did not work full time at the farm. He worked three days a week, and they gave him the lighter jobs. Although he was married, with children, his was a solitary disposition; he liked best to work alone, too.

It pleased him when he was given a bank to build up, or a gate to mend, at the far end of the peninsular, where the sea surrounded the farmland on either side. Then, at midday, he would pause and eat the meat pie his wife had baked for him and, sitting on the cliff’s edge, watch the birds.

In autumn great flocks of them came to the peninsula, restless, uneasy, spending afternoons in motion; now wheeling, circling in the sky; now settling to feed on the rich, just turned soil; but even when they fed, it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire.

Restlessness drove them to the skies again. Crying, whistling, caslling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore.

Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell on them, and they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.

I love Daphne du Maurier.

The story was originally published in her collection The Apple Tree and Other Stories; when the film was released in 1963 it was rereleased as The Birds and Other Stories. (One of the problems with trying to read all of du Maurier’s short stories is because her collections inevitably have at least half the stories that have appeared in other collections; so you can wind up buying a collection for the two or three stories in it you’ve not read; for example, my first du Maurier collection was Echoes from the Macabre, which included “The Apple Tree” (title story of another collection) AND “Don’t Look Now” (also the title story of another collection) AND “Not After Midnight” (which, as you probably already guessed, is the title story of another collection). I have yet to find a definitive list of du Maurier’s short stories anywhere, and it certainly is long past time that all of her stories are collected into a single collection (are you listening to me, du Maurier estate?).

The reason I love the story so much is because it really is a master class in tension and suspense. It’s also a much more intimate, small story than the film. Nat is a simple worker, loves his wife and kids, and wakes up one morning to winter and bizarre behavior from the birds. The way du Maurier describes the sight of the seagulls all gathered out on the sea, rising the waves in silence, is creepier than any shot of Suzanne Pleshette sprawled out on the walk with her eyes pecked out. The radio–there only method of communication and getting news from the rest of the world–is reporting on the strange behavior of the birds, and that they are attacking people. Most of the action–the truly terrifying action–takes place inside Nat’s cottage while they are under siege; the attacks have something to do with the tides. During the lulls he boards up the windows and tries to lay in supplies, as he slowly begins to realize that the birds are winning. They wait out the attack one night and in the morning turn on the radio…only to get static. It soon begins to feel like they are, or may be, the only humans left alive. And Nat also realized that it’s just the smaller birds–sparrows, wrens, seagulls–and worries about what will happen when the birds of prey join in….and of course, they do…the story closes with the hawks attacking the front door while Nat resignedly waits for them to get through.

If I were teaching a suspense writing class, I would definitely teach this story. It’s simply brilliant.

Cool Change

On my way home from Kentucky over the weekend, I started listening to Carol Goodman’s marvelous The Seduction of Water. The book was too long, however, for me to finish before I pulled up in front of the Lost Apartment Saturday night; I have been known to stay in the car for another fifteen to twenty minutes to finish an audiobook, but when I checked with this one, I still have over an hour left to go. There was no way I was going to sit in the car for another hour with the apartment merely a dozen or so yards away from me, so I unplugged the phone and started unloading the car, figuring I could listen to it on Sunday while doing things. I was exhausted and had too many other things to do that day, so I put it off until the morning of the 4th, when I finished listening while doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen.

And what a marvelous tale it is, indeed.

My favorite story when I was small, the one I begged for night after night, was “The Selkie.”

“That old story,: my mother would say. She’d say it in the exact tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress, Oh, this old thing, she’d say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. “Wouldn’t you rather something new?” And she’d hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my father’s sister, had bought for me. The Bobbsey Twins or, when I was older, Nancy Drew. American stories with an improving message and plucky, intrepid heroines.

“No, I want your story,” I would say. It was her story because she knew it by heart, had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from hers…a line of mothers and daughters that I imagined like the images I had seen when I stood by her side in front of the mirrors in the lobby.

“Well, if it will help you sleep…”

And I would nod, burrowing deeper into the blankets. It was one of the few requests I stuck to, perhaps because my mother’s initial hesitation came to be part of the ritual–part of the telling. A game we played because I knew she liked that I wanted her story, not some store-bought one. Even when she was dressed to go out and she had only come up to say a quick good night she would sit down on the edge of my bed and shrug her coat off her shoulders so that its black fur collar settled down around her waist and I would nestle into its dark, perfumed plush, and she, getting reading to tell her story, would touch the long strands of pearls at her neck, the beads making a soft clicking sound, and close her eyes. I imagined that she closed her eyes because the story was somewhere inside her, on an invisible scroll unfurling behind her eyelids from which she read night after night, every word the same as the night before.

“In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon…”

I’ve always loved the selkie story, myself, and what a marvelous opening this was for the novel!

Our main heroine, Iris Greenfeder, is an ABD (all but dissertation) trying to patch together a living from being an adjunct writing teacher at several different schools. This particular semester, as the book opens, she is also teaching a writing class at Rip Van Winkle Prison. Iris’ mother was a sort of successful fantasy writer who was killed in a fire before she could either write or complete writing the final volume of her trilogy. Iris’ father manages the Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, a luxury resort hotel with stunning views of the Hudson River Valley. Her mother was killed when she was about eleven, and was checked into the dive hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. John McGlynn”–but only her body was found. Was it an affair? Was it something else? This mystery hangs over Iris’ life when the book opens, and her own writing career gets a boost when she sells a story to Caffeine magazine, whose editor kind of pulls Iris back into the orbit of the Equinox Hotel. She lands a top agent who also has more than a passing interest in Iris’ history, and her mother.

She isn’t there long when she realizes that many mysteries shroud not only her own past, but the hotel as well. As she starts trying to figure out her mother–no one believes she was having an affair, despite the police conclusion–and what happened all those years ago, she finds that her mother was also involved in a crime involving some of her friend–the McGlynn, one of whom went to prison and her friend, his sister, threw herself in front of a train after visiting her brother. He was in jail for robbing a hotel, but did he actually do it, or was he framed? Did Iris’ mother know the truth? Slowly but surely Iris starts following the clues and trying to figure out what the truth about her mother was–and there are also people who are looking for that final manuscript of her trilogy. Why? Who cares about an old unpublished manuscript? Iris also is in a long term relationship with an artist that isn’t really giving her what she needs, either–but can she trust the younger, sexy ex-con from her class at the jail that she hires at the Equinox?

This book is classic Goodman; erudite and literary, with ties to writers and the publishing world and legends and fairy tales, all woven together in an enthralling mystery that is very hard to put down.

Definitely another five-star for Carol Goodman!

Throughout the Dark Months of April and May

Well, yesterday felt normal–as opposed to all the energy and the fabulous mood I was in on Monday, yesterday I felt more like the way I usually do on a midweek morning coming into the office. It was busy and we did have some odd and unusual issues, like we did on Monday, but it all worked out and I managed to get everything done and get out on time. I wasn’ tired when I got home, but there were men working on the house on our side of the building until about eight o’clock, playing (bizarre) music (choices) really loudly and of course, hammering and drilling and all those other power tool-esque things construction workers use. I’d intended to get some things done, but this successfully irritated me enough to make me lethargic. Then Scooter climbed into my lap and started purring and head-butting me and that was all it took; I was down for the evening. I did manage, however, to do a load of dishes so the evening wasn’t a complete waste. I feel more awake and alert and energetic this morning than I did yesterday, so that’s a step in the right direction, I think. Tomorrow I’ll be working from home, and trying to get caught up on the data entry and quality assurance stuff, as well as doing some yearly, on-line trainings about safety that are due (biohazard, fire prevention, HIPAA, etc.) so I’ll have a pretty full plate tomorrow, which is cool. I hope to spend some time with Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman this weekend, and I also would like to get some more entries finished–I have a review of Carol Goodman’s marvelous The Seduction of Water to post, and I have more entries about my own books to write. and on and on and on.

We watched more of Red Rose on Netflix last night, and we’re really enjoying it. It’s a horror series about a deadly app teens have on their phones; it’s an interesting modern take on the horror trope of the haunted device, and a very clever use of cell phone technology to base a horror series on. We’ll probably finish it over the course of the weekend, we’re about halfway through with four more episodes to go.

I’m also getting better at figuring out where I am at in my life and getting a grasp on everything I am doing and what needs to be done going forward. I want to spend the rest of this month trying to get one of my in-progress manuscripts finished, or at the very least, a first draft finished. I also am going to start trying to pull together another short story collection, and I want to get these novellas finished and out of the way, too. I am also aware that is a far too ambitious plan for me; there’s no way I’d be able to get all that writing done in twenty-five days. I also have another Alabama book swirling around inside of my head; I keep thinking Beau Hackworth, Jake’s boyfriend in Bury Me in Shadows, deserves his own story and would be the best place for me to continue on with Corinth County tales; I have others in progress (two novellas, in fact, “Fireflies” and “A Holler Full of Kudzu”) and numerous short stories. I have one actually coming out in an anthology this fall, predicated around breaking the Father Brown rules for a mystery story–mine was “include a supernatural element,” natch–called “The Ditch” that I’m rather pleased with. I want to revise my old story “Whim of the Wind” again, too, because I think I’ve finally unlocked the key to solving the problem in the story (with a grateful not to Art Taylor, whose story “The Boy Detective and the Summer of 74”) but have never gotten around to actually, you know, making the changes to the story.

That story, “Whim of the Wind,” is uniquely special to me. After being told by my first creative writing professor that I would never be a published author and to “find another dream” sent me into a tailspin that resulted in my flunking out of college and putting off seriously pursuing writing as a vocation for over a decade (there were flashes of time when I’d put some effort into it, writing stories and so forth before giving it all up as pointless and impossible for me) I took creative writing again when I went to a junior college in California in an attempt to get my GPA up enough to allow me to re-enroll in the California State University system. We were allowed to take that class twice, so I took it in both fall and spring semesters. The first semester my stories were derivative and trying too hard, but the teacher was very encouraging, which I wasn’t used to, so I decided to take it again in the spring–he urged me to do so. One day in class we were talking about stories and structures and writing, and I just had this idea pop into my head and I started writing in my notebook. All throughout the rest of the class I kept writing, and I finished it when I got home that night. That story was “Whim of the Wind,” and not only did the teacher love it (he wrote on the first page, excellent, you should send this out which was a huge thrill for me. The class also loved it and didn’t critique it very much–there wasn’t anything negative anyone had to say about it. But the story was flawed; there was a strong flaw in its premise which inevitably always got the story kicked back from anywhere I may have submitted it; editors would even admit they loved the story but it was missing something–but no one has ever been able to tell me what the story needed…and please remember, what I turned in was a first draft, I’ve never rewritten the story because I didn’t know how–and it’s really one of those “kill your darlings” examples; I can’t change the opening paragraph because it’s poetic and beautifully written and…I can’t bring myself to make any changes to that, and I suspect that’s really what it needs. Maybe I’ll take another look at it this weekend.

I’ve also been going through my journals looking for things–ideas, story fragments, etc.–that I’ve forgotten about, and I must say there’s quite a lot of that. I’ve even started writing short stories in my journal that I never finished and they are just sitting there, minding their own business and waiting for me to remember them so I can finish them. It’s also interesting seeing what I write in those things, too–sometimes I just free-write, which is open it, take a pen and just start scribbling whatever pops into my head, which makes for a kind of interesting (to me) look at how my brain operates when free associating…I am sure some future psychoanalyst (or even current, for that matter) would look and see a need for medication if not multiple psychoses. I also free associate write when I am playing with ideas for stories or novels in progress, so that’s always interesting to see again later.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will be back with you later.