Category: childhood

Bobby Sox to Stockings

Saturday morning and I am off to Alabama later this morning. I still have to make a packing list, finish some chores around here, and get gas on my way out of town, but there’s no rush and no need to stress about getting there. I’ll probably stop somewhere to eat lunch after I cross the Mississippi state line, and then will have dinner with Dad up there. I’m excited to see Dad again, but I am a little worried about the drive and my stamina. I am planning to drive back to New Orleans on Friday so I can have two days to recover from the lengthy drive, which will be exhausting. I am going to listen to Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree–which I started listening to on the drive back from Panama City Beach last October, but never finished; I need to start over but that’s perfectly fine; I love Carol’s work, and I am probably going to listen to Lisa Unger on the way home. I really wish I had started listening to audiobooks in the car years ago, you know?

Yesterday was nice and relaxing. I like working at home on paperwork and stuff because outside of an attention-needing kitten with BIG energy, I don’t have any distractions. I can focus in a way that I can’t when I’m in the office. But once my work was done I went out and ran my errands–picking up things for Paul while I’m gone, mail, prescriptions, etc.–and then came home and relaxed. We finished Dead Boy Detectives, which we both absolutely loved, and then caught up on Abbott Elementary before moving on to the new season of Hacks, which has not declined in quality at all. I did some cleaning around here yesterday, too–got the laundry finally caught up, and almost caught up with the dishes, too (last load needs to go in this morning before I leave), so I can leave with a clear conscience knowing I am only going to come home to Paul’s mess, and he really doesn’t make much of one in the kitchen anymore. He generally just uses the microwave or makes scrambled eggs for the most part while I’m gone.

I also signed and uploaded my tax returns yesterday–another refund, thank you, baby Jesus–and so that’s out of my hair. It’s always nice to not have to worry about things and go on a trip with a fairly clear conscience. I’ll probably take some stuff with me to read and work on, knowing I may not have time to do much of anything while I am there. Dad will have been gone for almost two weeks by the time we get up there on Monday, so he is going to have lots of chores to do–and he never allows me to help, which drove Mom crazy. This time it’s a stamina issue for me, which is truly sad given I’m sixty-two and he’ll be eighty-two later this year, but I also had two major surgeries since Labor Day and damn it, I am old. Twenty years ago I’d probably already be back to normal and going to the gym three times a week trying to burn off the fat I would think I had gained during my long inactivity. I put on a shirt the other day for work and wondered for the first time in years “does this make me look good or do I look fat?”–so maybe the vanity is coming back, which may not be an entirely bad thing.

I just checked the weather for both Alabama and Kentucky and looks like a lot of rain, warm during the day and cold at night. Well, we won’t be going anywhere at night but I’ll need to take a jacket of some sort with me just in case; a zip hoodie should do the trick.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely weekend, and I am not sure when I will be back. Possibly tomorrow, or who knows?

I Want to Walk You Home

Work at home Friday, and Trip Eve, since tomorrow I will be off to Alabama. I slept really well last night, and of course had to get up at six to feed His Royal Sparkiness. I went back to bed for another hour before His Highness decided I either needed to get up or he was going to cuddle with me. That was peaceful for about five minutes, before he decided he needed to either eat my watch or bite off my Breathe Right nose strip. Comfortable as the bed was, I was awake and finally decided to just get up. I have a nice day of work-at-home duties to do, a couple of errands to run later, and I also have to start packing and so forth for the trip. The house is also a mess I can’t leave in this condition, so I’ll need to get the place cleaned up at some point today as well.

After work yesterday I picked up the mail, where I got my copies of Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett and The Bootlegger’s Daughter by Nadine Nettman. Both women are amazing people and amazing writers I get to call friends, which is another reminder of how charmed my life actually is. It’s so easy to get morose about life and everything because so many little things are there to get you down all the time, and those minor issues and concerns and irritations gradually build until you’re just grumpy all the time. I keep being hard on myself, but 2023 was a lot; one thing after another and I am still not completely healed from everything, and it’s okay to still have bad days now and then. At least there are more good days than bad.

And with the world burning down all around us, who isn’t having bad days?

I’ve pretty much decided on my reads for the trip. The audiobooks are of course going to be from Carol Goodman or Lisa Unger, and I am looking forward to listening to them in the car. I don’t know how much time I will actually have to read while I am up there, but I know when Dad is doing chores he refuses to let me help with (“you’re on vacation and you don’t do chores on vacation”–despite the fact that he always has) I’ll have some time to read. I’ve certainly spent more time in Kentucky and Alabama this past year than I have in probably ten years (Alabama is more like forty years), but I don’t mind. It’s nice to reconnect with your roots and your history, even after forty years, and every time I go up there I get inspiration for more stories and books about the county. Whether I will ever actually write them remains to be seen, but I do like the inspiration.

I also spent some more time down the Noah Presgrove wormhole. It’s just such a bizarre story, and that they still don’t know much despite the death occurring eight months ago. There were some more posts on the Facebook page yesterday, including one that triggered an outpouring from the page members about personal tragedies in their own lives–sons “murdered” by their wives; nieces and daughters and sisters whose murderers were never caught (I am really getting a bad opinion of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation–the OSBI), and more hard feelings. It’s a litany of tragedy and sadness and lack of closure, and you can’t help but feel bad for them all, even from a removed distance. I don’t know if I ever will base a book out of this story–trying to explain the injuries alone would be an exercise in madness–and obviously, it wouldn’t be based on the actual case but would arise from the same kind of situation. It feels morbid to talk about writing about other people’s tragedies, doesn’t it? But…I am a crime writer and it’s a very strange case. And it’ll eventually be a true crime documentary, I bet.

I also had my soul recharged by a phone call with a very dear friend who is also a writer yesterday, and it really did feed my soul. It’s very easy to feel depressed and discouraged and isolated when you’re a writer who doesn’t get the chance to talk, either face to face or on the phone, with my writer friends very often, and it’s always so enriching for my writerly soul. When I got off the phone I was in a very cheery mood and excited about writing again for the first time in a while. I’ve been dissecting my writing process a lot lately, and my process–easier to do when you actually aren’t doing anything, really–trying to remember the last time I actually enjoyed writing (it does seem like a long time, but…2023 seemed to last an eternity), and trying to figure out what I am not doing that I used to enjoy. I think it’s partly been depression and stress and anxiety, and now that the anxiety and stress are gone, it’s just a matter of getting back into the habit of doing it every day again. I am finally used to my work schedule and no longer mind getting up early in the morning, and I am only sometimes tired when I get home from work. What I think of usually as laziness was also do the recovery from everything and the surgery; my stamina is way down and hasn’t built back up again. This is my first trip of any kind since the surgery, so we’ll see how I do with the driving…

And on that note, I need to get ready for my ZOOM meeting at nine. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably check in again later.

So Fine

Well, I got all my tax stuff done yesterday and uploaded into my accountant’s portal and that’s the end of that shit for at least this year now. I don’t know why I always hate doing this; it’s not fun, to be sure, but it never takes super long and it’s such a relief when it’s done…praise Jesus. But that put me into a mood–not sure if it was depression or what, but I wasn’t exactly in the greatest mood after finishing. Not a bad mood, by any means, but just a kind of weird funky malaise of some sort. It didn’t help that it was raining and gloomy all day. I had to run errands after work (in the rain), made it home and just sat down for awhile and took a red pencil to “When I Die,” and there was a lot of deleted material. That also kind of made me feel not so great, either–even though a lot of the deletions had everything to do with switching the story from about two couples to three young men. Paul and I watched two more episodes of the Dead Boy Detectives, which is really quite good and we are enjoying it a lot. There’s some queer subtext going on with the show, but nothing truly overt other than the Cat King.

I woke up this morning to the news about Tulane calling out the cops and campus police to break-up a protest for Gaza on the campus last night…and they brought out horse cops. The irony that the cops only get called or try to break-up protests by progressives on college campuses doesn’t escape me, but no one ever cares about Nazi marches or things like what happened in Charlottesville not that long ago. I always hear people complaining about how college students and the young don’t vote, don’t get involved, etc etc etc. Well, now they are engaging in world affairs, and they really don’t like seeing genocide on their screens. So, I guess it’s about what they chose to be interested in? And I don’t think having them arrested or the police physically assaulting them is going to change their minds? It always bothers me whenever I see the police attacking protestors. It’s definitely a free speech issue, and of course with memories of Kent State lingering in my mind…I just don’t like it. If the protestors aren’t being violent or damaging property (remember, the police’s job is to protect property, not people), what’s the harm? Don’t come for me, either–I also feel Jewish students have the right to feel safe on campus and of course there’s no place for anti-Semitism anywhere in American society, but spare me the pearl-clutching from the right–you know, the people who believe there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville? I had read that the students had closed down St. Charles Avenue for a little while the other day–again, an annoyance to drivers, nothing terrible or serious or revolutionary in any way–and was kind of pleased. Apparently, Tulane’s president feels that the protestors aren’t students for the most part (the old “outside agitators” thing, thank you, George Wallace for that terminology), but again, I despair. I also despair at the people who think the protestors should be shot and killed, which…seems unconstitutional in ways you don’t have to be a lawyer or a legal scholar to recognize. The fear that the crowd might become uncontrollable or violent isn’t a justification for denying the students their First Amendment rights.

Again, property not people, and the sooner most white Americans wake up from their lifetime of brainwashing about what the role of cops actually is the better. And I say that as a crime writer. I don’t like the notion that the cops are above the law, can violate it with impunity as well as the legal rights we all share in theory. I was thinking about this lately, about how most crime writers never delve into police corruption or never really challenge the notion that the cops are the good guys when all too often their frail humanity gets in the way. I’ve thought about this a lot since the original police brutality protests about innocent Black people being murdered by the cops–at his point there are so many I can’t remember them all or what actually got the country riled up in the first place. I have taken to thinking that I write a lot of copaganda; my police officers–always supporting characters and never the lead–are honest, hard-working, not corrupt, and can be counted on.

I do not feel that way in real life. I have had an idea for a book about police corruption in New Orleans for a really long time now; the problem (for me) is that it’s a Venus story, and I don’t think I necessarily have the chops to write from the perspective of an older Black woman cop nearing retirement. I’ve wondered how I could turn it into a Chanse or a Scotty book, where Venus hires them to look into a case that’s been written off; I had wanted to call it Just Another Random Shooting, but if it’s a Chanse or a Scotty I have to stick to the title scheme I started with. Or I could spin off Jerry Channing, my true crime writer, who has appeared in several of my books already and who I’ve wanted to write about for quite some time.

Interestingly enough, my hearing aids haven’t been working that great lately and I was beginning to think I’d have to take them in again for repair…but last night after I got home from work, both ears popped (a pressure thing) and this morning my hearing aids feel like they are turned up way too loud! I had to turn them down. Today I can hear my fingers clicking on the keys, I could hear Sparky whining for treats upstairs, and so on. I feel pretty good this morning and it looks like it’s going to be another beautiful (borderline too hot) day today after the gloom and rain of yesterday. Huzzah!

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I may be back later, stranger things have happened!

A Lover’s Question

Monday and back to work in the office day. I slept like the dead last night, which felt rather nice, so I am feeling pretty rested and good this morning. My coffee is good, Sparky’s been fed, and I am going to get cleaned up and head in to the office relatively soon. This Monday feels much better than last Monday did, to be sure. Yay!

Yesterday was nice and relaxed for Paul’s birthday. We watched a couple of things, and then started watching Dead Boy Detectives on Netflix, which we are really enjoying. You can’t go wrong with a property from Neil Gaiman; I could be wrong, but I think they originally appeared in the original run of The Sandman comic. I am really looking forward to the return of that show, too; watching convinced me to reread some of the anthology collections of the original run of the comic book, which was a lot of fun and reminded me of how much I used to love comic books. I’m hardly an expert on comic books and the super-hero lore from either DC or Marvel; I started reading comics when I was very little with Richie Rich and Little Lotta and Sugar and Spice before moving onto the Archie books, which eventually led to Superman and the rest. But The Sandman, reading the Gaiman run on that comic let me see, for the first time, that comics–and their stories–could be art.

We spent the afternoon watching the second season of CNN’s The History of Comedy, which was interesting. It’s really funny to remember all the censorship stupidity of television when I was a child–when you couldn’t even say damn on television, let alone other curse words1. Sexual content or references? Not so much. Even as a kid I thought it was weird. My dad swore, my mother rarely (when she did it was serious) but I always have. I added swearing to my vocabulary repertoire in junior high, even though I really didn’t know what I was saying…years later I would realize a lot of so-called bad language was really dumb and not at all what the words meant. (Is “bastard” really a modern day insult? It really means the child of unmarried parents, no more no less; this used to be a horrible insult but really? It’s not the bastard’s fault they are a bastard, and there are a hell of a lot more of them around now than when I was a kid. As an insult, it’s archaic since there’s no shame or embarrassment around being one today, so kind of pointless.)

I didn’t get much done this weekend, between recovering from being exhausted from last week and Paul’s birthday yesterday (which was kind of nice). Being a bad boyfriend, I didn’t get him anything other than a pizza for dinner, but he truly doesn’t care (nor do I). I mean, we’ve been together for thirty years next summer (!!!), which seems astonishing to me. Thirty years. I would have never believed in a million years had someone told me in my early thirties that I would find the perfect person for me. And yet, here we are. Kind of pleasant surprise how my life turned out in the end, wasn’t it?

The Kristi Noem “dog killer” memes continue to flood social media and she, like so many others of her ilk, refuses to admit doing anything wrong. Sorry, Governor, you’re never going to get everyone in the country to agree that “living on a farm means tough decisions”-2-I recognize the attitude about animals, my parents and their siblings pretty much all had the same mentality but never had pets. She’s another one of those pretty Republican women with the dead eyes–nothing behind them at all–like the Republican women who came before her. Remember Michelle Bachman? Empty, dead eyes–although Bachmann’s also had that crazy look to them, too. At any rate, Noem may survive politically in South Dakota, but she’s done nationally. She might wind up as a senator from there, God help us all, but any further national ambitions are pretty much dead…no one is ever going to forget she shot a puppy in the face because she hated it.

I also read a bit more of Michael Thomas Ford’s Suicide Notes, but not much. My mind was too scattered to settle down to focus on reading, so I gave up. Not an indictment of the book, mind, but more a critique of my fevered brain.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.

  1. Curse words, and swearing, are a subject for another time but an interesting one. ↩︎
  2. Especially since farm people are weighing in against her. ↩︎

I Only Have Eyes For You

Sunday morning and I slept pretty well. Sparky of course annoyed me out of bed to feed him around six, and then I did go back to bed for two more hours. Our big day of errands wore us both out yesterday, and I also just realized the primary thing I went to Costco for? I didn’t get. AUGH. Oh, well, it’s just sweet-and-low packets; I can get some anywhere and then go for the three year supply the next time we head out there. Still irritating, though. After we got home and put everything away, we settled in to finish Vigil, which I greatly enjoyed, and then we moved on to a rather clever slasher flick called Bodies Bodies Bodies, and then we tried Baby Reindeer, which was very strange and really just kind of sad. I don’t think we’re going to continue with it, but it was something different, to be sure.

Yesterday wasn’t a total wash, just as today won’t be. It may be Paul’s birthday–I’m going to get us a pizza for dinner, and maybe rent something to watch, lie Dune Part II–but I can get some things done this morning before he gets up. I’m also not going to wake him up until he wants to get up, and I also promised to make him waffles, which I’ve not done in so long it’s almost shameful, frankly. Paul is 61 today, and I will be sixty-three in a mere four months. I did make some writing notes yesterday, and of course I was also thinking a lot most of the day about the things I’m working on. I also recognize my incredible skill at rationalization here as well…no one can rationalize or justify the way I can when it comes to excuses for not writing. I also downloaded some biographies of King James I–the influence of Mary and George, no doubt–but I am not entirely sure why I’ve avoided biographies of King James before. I have a lifelong interest in both his mother (Mary Queen of Scots) and his predecessor (Elizabeth I), as well as his Stuart descendants; yet have always avoided King James. I’m not sure why that is; but other queer kings and royals have often been of interest to me, but James didn’t come to a bad end the way most of the others did and so can be considered a successful queer King. (Frederick the Great is another.) It also seems like this Elizabethan/Jacobean era was rife with sodomy all the way through to the eighteenth centiury, both in England and France. The last son of Catherine de Medici, and the last Valois king of France, was gay (Henri III); so was the brother of Louis XIV and one of his illegitimate sons, the Duc de Valentinois; and of course James I’s great-granddaughter Queen Anne was a big ole lesbian. The queers disappear from European royal history for a while, certainly in England and France in the eighteenth century. I’ve always wanted to write about Louis XIV’s brother, and it may be interesting to write about Henri III from the point of view of one of his mignons. The French court in the 1580’s was a hotbed of intrigue, conspiracy, and murder; a very turbulent period I’ve always wanted to write about.

I’ve also come to realize that I need to be more ambitious with my writing rather than saying oh that’s too complicated or too hard or too difficult for me to write. I’ve been putting off my historical interest writing for quite some time, always thinking that someday I’ll feel competent in my skills to try it. It’s actually a cop-out; I should have written some of these years ago, or at least got started. My Sherlock story (still so incredibly proud of it) was my first real historical story (one written in a period of time I was not alive and cannot remember), and all of my fears about it were so clearly misplaced. You don’t have to know a period so intimately that you might as well have lived then in order to write about it. How much research is too much research? The difference between a short story and a novel, of course, are significant–clearly, you don’t need to know as much with a short story as you would with a novel–but again, how much is not enough and how much is too much? The problem (for me, at any rate) is research is like planting seeds–more ideas grow the more research I do, it’s an ADHD thing, I’m pretty sure. But I am definitely going to start the research for my seventeenth century novel, methinks; I love history, so why not? I can scratch two interests at the same time.

Saturday morning I will leave for Alabama for Decoration Day, or what I always thought it was called, The First Sunday in May. That’s what it’s always been called, it’s definitely what my grandmothers and mother called it, and that’s how it’s lodged in my memory banks. I’m going to help my dad put out the flowers and clean the graves, and then on Monday morning I’ll follow him north to Kentucky. It’ll be a nice week away, and I am going to try to get some work done and a lot of reading done while I am there. (Dad called it Decoration Day in an email the other day, and I thought, well, that makes a better name for it but for me, it will always be called The First Sunday in May.) I did notice last year that the only people out doing it were my age or older, so it’s probably one of those county customs that is dying out in these modern days of the Internet, cell phones, and streaming. A pity, to be sure, but sometimes traditions do die out. “The old ways”, as they say in creepy tones in Gothic novels that I love so much. I also imagine my creativity is going to explode while in Alabama as it always does.

And on that note, I am going to eat breakfast, get cleaned up, and head into the spice mines for the day. I may be back later, one never can be certain–but if not, have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Screenshot

Frankie

Saturday and a big day of being out of the house. I had planned on not doing much outside the apartment vis-a-vis errands, but Paul’s state ID expires today (and he only realized it last night) so somehow only getting the mail today has morphed into the DMV, Costco, lunch out, and the mail. Ah, well, I can come home and write in my easy chair. I finally figured out why my Macbook Air doesn’t sync with my Microsoft accounts; it needed to have Word updated and the passwords reset…so now I can access everything from the laptop, which makes life ever so much easier for me. I was actually working on the revision of “When I Die” yesterday when Paul decided he was done for the day and came downstairs so we could watch Mary and George (still superb) and more of the second season of Vigil, which is absolutely fantastic.

I did get some chores done around here yesterday–I laundered all the bed linens and another load of laundry, and worked on the dishes, which need to be finished this morning, and did some picking up and organizing–and while I am relatively certain these errands are going to wear me out today, at least I feel rested this morning. I was still a big tired yesterday from the week, and when I woke up was a little groggy. This morning I feel ever so much better, frankly, and so I hope I can go ahead and make it through the day.

I have been watching with macabre enjoyment this bizarre civil war within the Republican party, and am not entirely sure how this is all going to end up. Yesterday the news broke and went viral about South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, one of the potential VP candidates for the right, who wrote in her self-promoting-I-am-to-be-taken-seriously-on-the-national-stage-book-about-me-in-an-election-year that she hated a fourteen month old puppy who “couldn’t” be trained (that’s a you failure, Madam Adulteress) so she decided to shoot him in a gravel pit–and then shot a goat she didn’t like on top of it when that didn’t sate her bloodlust. I immediately knew when I saw the Guardian article about it that she was 1) pretty much finished and 2) not really aware about the divide between urban and rural when she wrote that in her book. I know exactly the kind of mindset she has about animals–she’s rural–because it’s the same mentality my parents had about animals because they grew up on farms and you don’t have animals in the house as pets, for one thing, and for another, when you grow up on a farm and are used to killing animals for food–cows, pigs, chickens, etc.–you don’t get really sentimental about them because they die. I also knew it wasn’t going to play well with voters and most Americans, because most of us love animals and try to do whatever we can to save them, not shoot them. She also doesn’t get it, still; she defended herself with a post or statement of some sort where she talked about that very thing–and how many animals on her ranch/farm/whatever she’s had to put down recently. Way to throw gasoline on the fire, Madam Adulteress!

And way to not understand the American electorate. And if you don’t know that the vast majority of Americans love animals and especially dogs–you’re probably too ignorant and out-of-touch with most Americans to lead anywhere other than an extremely rural state, and most definitely not the entire country.

Interesting how many Republicans have been horrific dog owners–Noem, the Romneys, and the Huckabees of Arkansas.

My parents may not have had any sentimentality about pets, but they also didn’t have any.

Ah, Mary and George. I hope you are watching, Constant Reader–even if you aren’t into history, the show is the kind of bitchy back-stabbing plots and subplots and twisty/turny show that reminds me, with its wit and bitchiness, of some of the greater nighttime soaps and even of Real Housewives shows. I also like how fluid everyone’s sexuality is at the Jacobean court. I really need to read a bio of King James; I’ve certainly read enough about his mother Mary Queen of Scots and his son, Charles I, who lost his head during the second English civil war. I know Antonia Fraser, whose superb Mary Queen of Scots I read when I was eleven, wrote a bio of James that I always wanted to read but never did. Perhaps this is the proper time? I also should read bios of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu to get a stronger sense of the time period…and I really am beginning to think I might be able to start writing Milady, my long-dreamed-of novel, later in this year.

And on that note, Constant Reader, I am heading into the spice mines to load the dishwasher and get the day’s business started. Have a fabulous day, and who knows? I may be back later.

When Will I Be Loved

I have always been a huge fan of Linda Ronstadt’s. That voice.

My God, that voice.

So, a couple of weekends ago I was looking for documentaries to put on while Paul went in and out of sleep on the couch, I was stunned to realize I’d never seen the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, as a life-long fan–I’d always intended to, but had just never gotten around to it, plus the loss of her voice to Parkinson’s was an enormous tragedy I didn’t want to revisit (just as Julie Andrews losing her instrument was also a tragedy). But Ronstadt is indelibly a part of my adolescence in the 1970s. The first time I became aware of her was “You’re No Good,” which blew my socks off. I couldn’t get over the nasty blues guitar and that voice! So effortless, so powerful, so beautiful. This was also around the time I started appreciating vocal talents, and women in particular who could sing beautifully. Women were also slowly starting to make their presence felt in a field (rock) that was traditionally male dominated, and Ronstadt was a leader in that way; filling stadiums and arenas all over the country.

Ronstadt’s voice was incredible. Over the course of her lengthy career she basically proved she could sing anything; from country to pop to rock to Spanish language traditional Mexican music to operettas to big band music. She didn’t write her own music but was what was considered a “stylist”; she would take someone else’s song, and sing it her way, which was almost always better than the original. Not many people can cover Smokey Robinson, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello, and the Eagles (she also was inadvertently responsible for the formation of the Eagles). She was a huge star, and once she was filling stadiums and filthy rich, she wanted to try other things as a singer despite everyone thinking it would be a career-ending disaster only to continue racking up awards, critical raves, and big big sales. Her album with Aaron Neville, Howl Like a Rainstorm Cry Like the Wind is one of my favorites of all time; the way those two beautiful voices harmonize and wrap around each other is exceptional.

She was also the original woman rock star who never married, either–she chose career and music over marriage and children (Stevie Nicks did, too). The film, which traces her career and features clips of her singing live or recording in the studio makes you realize just how potent and powerful her instrument was. SHe never listened to her own recordings because she was hyper-critical of herself; when she said “when I listen to my own singing I just hear the things I could have done better”–which is also what I used to say about rereading my own work. I still tend to see the things I could have done better when I reread my own work but it doesn’t shame me the way it used to. I eventually had to realize that if I am indeed continuing to grow as a writer, obviously my old work would be written differently today because I am a different writer.

But I do strongly recommend this documentary if you haven’t seen it. If you’re a fan, it’s amazing; if you’re not, you’ll probably become one after watching–her catalogue is truly astonishing.

I used to have this poster of her hanging in my bedroom when I was in high school.

I’ve Had It

Yesterday wasn’t the best. Oh, nothing bad happened, it was a kind of meh day. I felt mentally refreshed but physically tired when I got up, and as the day went on the tiredness of my body seeped into my brain and my creativity. By the time I got home from work, I was too tired to do much of anything creative. I put away dishes and did another load as well as finished a load of laundry, and dozed off in my easy chair for about an hour before Paul got home. The nap didn’t really help, but I did sleep super well last night and feel rested all over this morning. This is a good thing, as it’s Pay-the-Bills Wednesday again, and today I am going to try to finish my taxes and get them off to my accountant.

So, yesterday was kind of a wash for me. I didn’t try to force anything, mainly because I didn’t have the will or the need. This morning I am feeling good and awake and my mind is already bouncing all over the place. Since getting up this morning I’ve come across an interesting news story that could tie into a fun Scotty book, have had some thoughts about my next book to write, and more ideas about how to make “When I Die” better. See, this sort of thing can’t be forced; I can make myself write but if my mind isn’t feeling creative and bouncing all over the place, it’s absolute torture that needs to be completely revised from the first word to the last. The rewrite of “When I Die,” for example, is going to be an almost totally word for word revision; the concept and setting are there, but the characters need to be changed and more depth added to the new ones that wasn’t there in the first draft, and that pleases me. I am also extremely pleased with “Passenger to Franklin.” I do need to polish it some more, of course, and make it prettier and tighten up the ending a bit–it seems abrupt to me, but I could be wrong. But I feel pretty good this morning, so here’s hoping for a nice, successful day without stress and/or irritations or aggravation. I will make groceries on the way home and swing by the mail, and hopefully Paul will be home early enough for us to watch another episode of Vigil.

I was talking to another writer friend last night about the business and it provided me with some definite food for thought about my future. I was already thinking about trying something different–I feel like I’ve gotten a bit stagnant with my work, and so I need to start pushing boundaries and trying some different things. I think I definitely want to try writing a gay romance novel, something I’ve thought about for quite some time, and I may try to branch out in other ways. I still definitely want to get these books on my list to get out of the way done, but I like the idea of writing a romance and stretching that way. I was even pondering the possibility of rebooting the Chanse series, but not using the same pattern of titles. I like the idea of revisiting him and seeing where he is now–is he any wiser or happier? But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like going backwards–always a concern–and I also think it would be far more of a challenge to write a Chanse book now than it was ten years ago when I ended the series originally.

The release of the French Quarter Stabber on parole also had me going down some wormholes yesterday between clients. The French Quarter Stabber was a teenager who murdered three or four gay men in the 1970s; there was some serious homophobia and undoubtedly some self-loathing involved there. I think it would make for an interesting exploration of who he was in fiction, but it might also make an interesting true crime novel–something I’ve never really considered doing, but it could be a fun project to research and work on between other projects–particularly how these murders were handled by the local press and police in the same decade that saw the Upstairs Lounge fire/mass murder, and how that did or did not change in the few intervening years.

And again, suburbanites and North Shore racists: remind me of precisely when New Orleans was the idyllic crime free city? Because my brief researches into the past show a city that was always a hotbed of crime.

Anyway, the Stabber’s story will easily fit into a project I already have in progress that just needs a lot of revision and rework, but I love being able to pull this new research into a project where it will fit snugly and perfectly. Yay! Obviously, I am feeling a lot better about things this morning than I did yesterday. I wasn’t down or depressed or anything yesterday, but it was a low energy day which had a lot to do with my blood sugar, something I’ve been trying to be better about. When I don’t eat, my blood sugar drops and I don’t have any energy. I don’t think this means that I am pre-diabetic or anything, but just another thing about getting older I need to pay more attention to than I have before. Sigh. It never ends.

But today I feel like my life is very much the art of the possible this morning, and I am going to ride that wave like a surfer on Oahu’s north shore. So…I should probably head into the spice mines and start paying some bills. Have a lovely Wednesday, and I will most likely be back later.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Lonesome is a great word that doesn’t get as much use as it used to; it was a very popular emotion/feeling for songwriters (especially those in the genre then known as “country and western”) to write about back in the 50’s and 60’s. It’s a very evocative word, and I am not sure why I don’t hear it as often as I used to. I love the word, and one of my ideas is to write a book called Kansas Lonesome at some point. The premise would be that there’s a podcast called that, which covers Kansas true crime stories throughout the state’s history; I am not sure how that podcast will play into the story I want to write, but that’s the foundation of that book, whatever it turns out to be. I am currently in the process of writing a short story (one of many, by the way) with a college student investigating a crime site out in the countryside to sus out background information for a podcast episode for the producer/star of the podcast. I do think the book may be inspired (Kansas Lonesome) on a homophobic incident that occurred in my old school district in Kansas; a young lesbian was put off the bus and banned from riding for saying she was a lesbian. The school district tried to cover up everything, but it turned out the girl was the only one telling the truth, the bus driver was fired, and the superintendent lost out on a big career move…and a few months later, she disappeared. Her name was Izzy Dieker, and as best as I can tell, she’s not turned up yet and it’s been over two years since she went missing. There are just some articles noting her disappearance, and then….nothing.

That is a great premise for a crime novel, isn’t it? Kansas Lonesome is becoming what I will soon probably be referring to now as “the Kansas book,” now that the other one was finally finished and published. But I think I will probably write The Crooked Y first; there is so much material in Kansas for prairie noir, isn’t there?

It really is amazing how much crime–specifically brutal murders–have happened in such a sparsely populated, deeply Christian red state. (“But crime only happens in those scary big cities!” Fuck off, trash. And by the way, immigrants aren’t coming for your women or your jobs.) The Benders are another grisly story from Kansas’ blood-drenched past, and I’ve always wanted to write about them, too; and hope to do so before I run out of time on this mortal coil.

And last week I stumbled across another fascinating tale of corruption and illegality involving a district attorney, a judge, and a police chief…a truly horrifying tale about how justice can be (and is all too frequently) twisted to fit the agendas of people who are evil but so convinced of their own righteousness that bending rules and not turning over evidence to defense attorneys, suborning perjury and coercing confessions from people?

Sidebar: Yes, Sarah Palin, that’s the real America, you charlatan snake-oil salesperson. Hope you’re enjoying being completely forgotten, grifter and Grandmother of Bastards.

Anyway, that’s a lot of words to talk about how Kansas is actually a horrific true crime state, with lots of examples of horrible murders and desperate people. I sometimes wonder if has anything to do with how flat the state is, and how sparsely populated. I know sometimes those winter winds off the prairies are brutal, whistling around the house and rattling the windows, trying to find a way into the warm cozy inside. Sometimes that wind can whistle, too–and I can imagine in a time without electricity or much entertainment, listening to that wind and being so lonesome out on the prairie could easily drive you mad1. I could write a book of short stories and simply call it Kansas Lonesome, with the premise that the podcast host and researchers are doing the background research into these old crimes or something. That could be an interesting way of bringing those stories together…but I also think Kansas Lonesome is too good of a book title to not use it for the novel I was thinking about earlier in this entry–the one about Izzy Dieker.

Loneliness, though, while sad and depressing, is a writer’s friend. When you’re lonely, you have to entertain yourself, and I always drag out the journal at those times, or warm up my computer and start writing away. I think a lot of my creativity came from being lonely as a child, the recognition I clocked early that I wasn’t like other kids in many ways so I stayed away from them because I didn’t know if they were going to make fun of me or bully me. and so I retreated very often into my own mind. I read a lot, obviously, and watched a lot of television and movies (while reading), and I just kind of lived in my imagination for lengthy periods of time. I preferred my own world, frankly, and still do; I hate leaving my own world for the real one.

I do wonder sometimes if I would have still wanted to be a writer if I had felt like I belonged, if I was like every other little boy. But even when I was a kid, I looked at the future that was expected of me and found it wanting. A Lot. I hated the very idea of fitting into one of the ticky-tacky houses in the suburbs and the day job that was all-consuming and the wife and the kids and the lawn work and upkeep on the house and…yeah, that sounded always terrible to me, and the older I got the more I resisted that future. Had I followed the path laid out for me by society and family I would have been absolutely miserable by now. Would I have been so attached to books if I had friends, kids in the neighborhood and the comfort of knowing people did actually like me? It was the love of books and wanting to give other people the feeling I got when I read one I enjoyed that made me want to be a writer in the first place, and the more I read the more I wanted to write. I used to write all the time when I was a kid–things I didn’t take seriously at the time, and would completely dismiss…but I was always writing. I made up a world once, with its own countries and lineages and so forth, kind of a fantasy alternate kind of history. I wrote my own versions of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I wrote short stories in high school. I started writing a novel when I was seventeen, and while I might have gone months without writing at times, I always was writing, always coming up with titles and ideas, and I was always happiest when I was creating.

And now, here I am hurtling toward my sixty-third birthday with a lot of publishing credits to my name and boxes and boxes of ideas…that I want to digitize and throw away the paper files in an attempt to cut back on clutter. I have my next two years’ writing schedule pretty much figured out already. I’m happy. That’s the bottom line of everything, isn’t it? Being happy? I love my life. I love writing. I love connecting with readers and other writers. And I think I am continuing to grow and develop as a writer. I don’t ever want my best work to be behind me, and I don’t think it is. I’m feeling good and optimistic again, and that’s always a good thing.

  1. There was a really great chapter in James Michener’s Centennial that talked about this very thing; how on the prairies in the winter the wind could drive one mad. After I read that book I could never listen to the wind again without remembering that. ↩︎

Your Cheatin’ Heart

The other night I picked up an old favorite book I read originally when I was a teenager and realized, as I paged through it, that The Other by Thomas Tryon was probably one of the most influential books I’ve read, as far as my own writing style is concerned. Obviously the series books are different, but the stand-alones owe a lot to The Other, and probably one of the books I will write later this year will owe even more to it. I always forget it when someone tags me on social media to list books that made me who I am or influenced me or something like that, and I never remember The Other.

But looking through those pages, I remembered another book I read around the same time that also had a lot of influence on me as a writer, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t thet that made him feel so strange and alone. It was the look of the town.

There was only one car parked on the courthouse square–the night watchman’s old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the plains, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main Street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sonny’s pickup was a ’41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show it coughed out an had to be choked for a while, but then it started again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spumes of white exhaust that the wind whipped away.

At the red light he starts to turn south toward the all-night café, but when he looked north to see if anyone was coming he turned that way instead. No one at all was coming but he saw his young friend Billy, headed out. He had his broom and was sweeping right down the idle of the highway into the gusting wind. Billy lived at the poolhall with Sam the Lion, and sweeping was all he really knew how to do. The only trouble was he overdid it. He swept the poolhall in the mornings, the café in the afternoons, and the picture show at night, and always, unless someone specifically told him to stop, he just kept sweeping, down the sidewalk, on through the town sometimes one way nd sometimes another, sweeping happily until someone noticed him and brought him back to the pool hall.

Sonny drove up beside him and honked. Billy quit sweeping at once and got in the pickup. He was a stocky boy, not very smart, but perfectly friendly; picking him up made Sonny feel less lonesome. If Billy was out the poolhall must be open, and when the poolhall was open he was never lonesome. One of the nice things about living in Thalia was that the poolhall often opened by 6:30 or 7 a.m., the reason being that Sam the Lion, who owned it, was a very bad sleeper.

I think it was seventh or eighth grade when I first read The Last Picture Show. I had a battered copy that I got at a flea market (my grandmother’s second husband loved a flea market, and I always went with him whenever possible to look for books), and I hadn’t known the Oscar winning film (which I wouldn’t see uncut for over a decade until VCR’s became a thing and video rentals) was based on a book. There were some differences between the book and the movie–I never understood why they changed the name of the town from Thalia to Anarene–but for the most part, the movie was pretty faithful to the book.

I had meant to reread the book a few years ago–it had been years–but quit when I got to the part where the town’s older teenage boys decided to fuck a calf; I didn’t remember that from early reads and…it yucked me out. Interestingly enough, it never used to bother me, and I am not sure how I feel about that…or if I just went yuck and kept reading, or skimmed and moved on, but as an adult, I appreciate the book all the more, especially since I wound up living in a small rural town and going to a small rural high school several years after that first read. I never asked any of the kids I went to school with if they ever fucked animals–definitely didn’t want to know for sure–but I always did wonder, and there were definitely some kids I thought oh yeah.

But the book, about these kids learning about love and life and sex and growing up in a dying dusty small town whose best days are already past, has always resonated with me. My parents grew up in that same kind of environment in Alabama during the same time period, and there was so much…I don’t know, boredom and poverty in those small rural towns? The book and movie both were billed as the story of the explosive boredom in a small town. And that’s the part that people generally forget when thinking about the past and rural living–how boring it was. You had to find things to entertain yourself as a teenager, and that can lead to all kinds of trouble. McMurtry gave all of his characters humanity, and they were completely believable. There was the preacher’s kid, so uptight with his Christianity and strict life that he eventually takes a little girl with what is generally assumed as molestation in mind, and yet you can’t feel a little bit of sympathy for this poor kid with his horrific cruel parents (spare the rod and all that nonsense) who finally snaps. Everyone thinks he’s a “homo” anyway–which is really funny, because the person who really torments poor Joe Bob Blanton is the football coach, Coach Popper–who, despite being the embodiment of the town’s thoughts on masculinity (toxic, of course) is the town’s real homosexual–and he also accuses the English teacher of it, because he’s kind and gentle, and ruins him.

Very 1950s there, actually, and only emphasized to me how dangerous letting anyone know I was gay could be, and why I was so scared of my true self.

Great book, great movie–but please don’t mention Texasville to me. I hated that book.