Category: childhood

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.

Hawaiian Wedding Song

I am a bit tired this morning. All those errands I ran yesterday? Apparently I have not recovered my stamina yet, because I am feeling it this morning. My legs are very tired, and I did not want to get out of bed this morning…which was also partly because Sparky turned into a purring cuddlebug while trying to get me to get up–lying on me and rolling and purring and head butts and making biscuits. It was actually kind of lovely, really, but now I am up, a load of laundry is started, and I am drinking and loving my coffee. LSU is competing for the national championship in Gymnastics at 3, which is probably going to suck all the oxygen out of the day, so I’ll need to get a lot of things done today before three, won’t I? GEAUX TIGERS!

Yesterday was a rather interesting day, social media-wise. After I posted yesterday morning and as I was getting ready to dive into the day, I shared the post on my social media as I always do, and I had some extreme irritations, all related to my years in Kansas, of all things; like all this writing and thinking about Kansas and ideas for books/stories there manifested some people I went to high school with, as well as some other unpleasantness. For the record, straight white cisgender, this is the sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about microaggressions and safe spaces. The first thing that popped up at me on Facebook was some tired old bitch of a white woman’s post sharing an interview with Dawn French, in which she not only defended the Chatelaine of Castle TERF, but chastised everyone. After all, as a straight cisgender white woman, it’s our responsibility as queer people to explain it all to HER, and if we’re not willing to do so, their lack of understanding is on US.

Fuck off, Dawn French. Queer people don’t have to explain their humanity to you, you miserable fucking bigoted bitch. “Well, I don’t understand this, so please explain to me why you deserve to be treated like a human being.” That’s it right there. Doesn’t sound so nice when it’s put that way, does it? Is it really too much for you to treat other people with respect and kindness even if you “don’t get it”? And when exactly do I get my fucking paycheck for explaining our HUMANITY to someone with a blackened, dead soul and no empathy for anything outside their own experience? The arrogance!

Anyway, this former Facebook friend shared this and said, “I agree.” Someone else, another former Facebook friend, commented “Yes, absolutely.” I unfriended and blocked both, and then posted in my anger “If you are a defender of the Chatelaine of Castle TERF, just unfriend me now.” Another former Facebook friend then announced his departure. He only unfriended, so I blocked his homophobic ass, too.

As if that wasn’t enough, someone I went to high school posted a funny meme I was going to comment on, when a homophobic piece of trash from high school tried TAGGING me on it because I had unfriended her after getting sick and fucking tired of her MAGA posts and remembered the time I heard my “friend” mocking me with other people in the high school cafeteria for being gay. Again, I don’t owe anyone any explanations for cutting you out of my life because I fucking refuse to explain why I deserve to be treated like a human being and not as the butt of a joke or something to hate and despise because a verse in Leviticus says so.

Jesus, right? It’s so tiring.

And then, in the biggest irony of ironies, another person I went to high school with–who is always posted queer ally stuff, which I’ve always appreciated–did so again yesterday further down on my feed, and of course someone had to come in waving their cross and Bible, but what was truly nice was seeing how many people went after the Bible-thumper, quoting the Bible and the Sermon on the Mount back to her, and it was on that thread I discovered she had a younger sibling that is gay (I wasn’t the only one to graduate from that school, apparently) and then someone else from high school commented “My brother is gay, too”–and the irony of that was almost too delicious to savor. You see, the second “my brother is gay” poster? She and her troglodyte best friend loved called me a fag quite often and quite happily my senior year…and while that was satisfying enough, I then remembered that she and her bitch friend would say it and laugh…in front of her brother….so his situation was worse than mine, and I went from smug to sad. Her brother was also an asshole to me (which I understand; I avoided other kids who got slandered and mocked and called that), but knowing that he was gay and was listening to his sister and that other bitch call me that? How he must have hated himself every time she said it. I wonder how suicidal he was? And truly, how sad was it that we are so socialized to avoid other kids with that same stigma and shame we experience rather than supporting each other? I think that’s also one of the many reasons I have trouble trusting gay men as I do straight people–another kid who was gay-presenting at my high school in the suburbs and was friends with people who treated me like shit….out of curiosity I looked him up and he too is out and proud now. How sad he joined in so his friends wouldn’t think he was a fag, too.

But at the same time, it’s giving me an insight into Kansas that I didn’t have before. The state, which I should have known, isn’t full of homophobic MAGA trash, and neither is the area I lived and suffered through for five years. And that could make for an interesting approach to another book. I had thought Sara, with my out gay character in a rural Kansas high school, was a bit much–I didn’t think kids could be out there–and turns out that while it’s not appreciated, those brave kids are facing it all down and defiantly throwing it back in their tormenters’ faces. I actually even thought for a moment last night that it might be worth it to go back sometime, to just look around and see how different everything is from my old memories.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and going on my day. I may be back later, I really do want to get all of these draft posts finished and out of the drafts file at some point, but I also don’t know how the day will play out so we’ll just have to see, Constant Reader. Have a great Saturday regardless.

Poison Ivy

Work-at-home Friday! I got up early this morning for some reason, but it was an hour later than usual so I will count it as “sleeping in.” I have a lot of stuff to get done for work duties today, which I want to wrap up so I can get all the errands taken care of. I have prescriptions to pick up, groceries to make, a trip to Costco–I get exhausted just thinking about it. But yesterday was really a good day, wasn’t it? I’m not sure how it was for you, but I was productive and in a really good mood for most of the day. I was a bit tired at times during the day, but I made it through, picked up the mail (a package of new shirts arrived!), and then came home. Sparky was rambunctious and so had to cart him around on my shoulders while I did some things, and then he parked on the desk while I wrote for a while. I also talked to one of my co-workers who drives for Uber/Lyft, because I wanted to be sure I was getting how it all worked right in a short story I am working on and revising, “Passenger to Franklin.” I was also pleased that the story wasn’t the piece of trash I convinced myself it was when I was writing the first draft, and I was pretty happy to see that despite my usual self-deprecation mentality (which I am really working on, I promise) it wasn’t bad at all–and there are some really good images and sentences in it. After all my running around today, if I have time I am going to write some more tonight, and hopefully finish this second draft.

LSU Gymnastics was in the first session of the national championship meet, and they scored over 198 and qualified first overall into the finals Saturday afternoon. I would be excited regardless, but it’s even more exciting this year, because if they hit they could finally win it all this year. I was waiting for Paul to get home and had stopped writing to settle into my easy chair, and remembered, oh, I wonder if we can catch a replay of LSU on ESPN? So I turned on the television and navigated into the ESPN app, and thought, oh, I don’t care about the second session, but I can watch for a while until Paul gets home. So I did just that and turned it on just in time to see Oklahoma’s first vaulter sit down on the landing. Oklahoma was undefeated and ranked number 1; Ragan Smith, one of their stars, has spent a good potion of the year making TikToks claiming LSU’s routines were over-scored, which is not only unsportsmanlike but a total bitch move (I am not a fan of that kind of shit, especially since you’re daring karma,Alabama and hubris is not something the gods like). They sat down two more vaults, and two others weren’t great, pushing them so far down they couldn’t climb back, which was shocking. They had two more falls off the beam, so had to count a fall there. This is NOT what you expect watching Oklahoma, and Paul got home right after that first vault, and the evening session was like a trainwreck you couldn’t stop looking at. It rained Alabama gymnasts around the balance beam–I think four of them came off–and even other teams were having falls they didn’t have to count. When the bloodbath was over, Utah and Florida moved onto the finals to join LSU and California. I am very excited to watch Saturday afternoon!

Last night was also a lovely evening because Paul and I were both relaxed, rested, and in a pretty good mood, so we were laughing and joking and having a great time. It’s been way too long since we’ve had an evening like that, and I was actually reluctant to go to bed and end the evening (I still hate ending a good time, and I don’t think that will change until I am in the crematorium), but it held over until this morning, too, which was unexpected and a delight at the same time. I feel good this morning, despite only sleeping in for an extra hour, and confident and like myself again for the first time in a really long time (I know, I say that all the time, but having fun with Paul has been missing from my Bingo card for far too long), but I don’t really think I’ve been myself for almost ten years or so. Mom had her first stroke and we almost lost her the first time in 2016 around Christmas, and that’s been weighing on my mind subconsciously I think ever since until last year when we finally did lose her. The pandemic, volunteering, getting COVID myself, Mom dying, my surgeries–it’s been quite a ride and while I am not certain I am completely coming out from under it all, I am feeling somewhat better and I hope it lasts.

I also came across another interesting bit of Kansas corruption and crime yesterday, in which a corrupt district attorney (now a federal prosecutor), in tandem with a police chief and a judge, were closing cases by not sharing evidence, forcing people to testify against innocent people by threatening to send them to jail, and on and on it goes. You can read about this vile racist piece of shit here.

Seriously, so much crime in Kansas.

I also typed up some notes for the new Kansas book (it feels weird to be saying that since it was what I called #shedeservedit for years), and I also started bringing together some things for the next Scotty book. See? I am being productive again. Maybe that’s why I am feeling so good? Probably. I always am in a better place when I’m writing, and without any other things weighing me down, I am really loving life lately, you know?

And on that note, I am going to start doing some day-job stuff by heading down into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later (have you noticed I’m posting a lot lately? Trying to clear out those unfinished drafts).

At the risk of sounding crude, this wrestler has an amazing ass, does he not?

Weird Science

I loved kids’ series when I was, well, a kid. I still have fond memories of reading and collecting as many of the books as I could–I still have all my copies–and while of course times have changed, I feel bad for kids today who don’t have the plethora of series to choose from that I did when I was a kid.

Of course, I chose all of them, pretty much.

And while the most popular kids’ series were Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, my favorites were the ones that weren’t as well known, didn’t last as long, and vanished from print during the late 1960’s and through the 1970’s. I always preferred Judy Bolton, Trixie Belden, and Vicki Barr to Nancy Drew; I enjoyed The Three Investigators, Ken Holt, and Rick Brant far more than I liked the Hardy Boys, but you could get Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books almost anywhere, whereas the others were incredibly hard to find. Our babysitter used to take us to the Goldblatt’s Department Store on 26th Street in Chicago when she went, pulling her buggy behind her (Dad says Mom used to pull me and my sister in hers to the grocery store, but I don’t remember that). Mom would always give my sister and I two dollars each to spend, and I loved going there because in the basement was the kids’ section, and while my sister was looking at dolls or single records (remember 45’s?) I discovered the remainder table, where Goldblatt’s marked down some of the lesser known Grosset & Dunlap/Stratemeyer Syndicate books on a big table, for like thirty-nine cents, which was a big deal because I could get a lot of books at that price. They were all series books I’d never heard of, but they sounded interesting. It was off that table that I got my first Ken Holt. Rick Brant, and Biff Brewster mysteries. The Biff Brewster books weren’t as good as the other two series, but today I want to talk about Rick Brant, and why I loved the series so much.

Rick Brant, being tall for his age, had no trouble making the final connections on his latest invention. He screwed the bell on solidly, then stepped back to view his handiwork.

The doorbell was now in an unusual position. Instead of being at waist level, it had been moved to the inside of the doorframe and placed up high.

It looked fine. A stranger might have to hunt a little before he saw the push button, but he’d find it all right. Rick went inside and threw the switch that would send electricity into the gadget and went to collect the family.

Mrs. Brant was in the kitchen, supervising the supper preparations for the family and the scientists who made their home on Spindrift Island.

Rick sampled the cake frosting in a nearby bowl and invited, “Can you come out on the porch for a minute, Mom? There’s something I want to show you.”

Mrs. Brant looked up from the roast she was seasoning, a twinkle in her eyes. “What is it now, Rick? Another invention?“

“Wait and see,” he said mysteriously. “I’ll go get Dad and Barby.”

And so opens the first Rick Brant Science Adventure. I bought four Rick Brant books that day (The Rocket’s Shadow, The Egyptian Cat Mystery, The Flying Stingaree, and The Flaming Mountain), all of which had some appeal to me. I wasn’t really that much into science or rocket ships, but I did buy the first because it was, well, the first in the series, and OCD Child Greg had to read the first book. I didn’t have to read the series in order–I did try that with the Hardy Boys, but gave up when it was time for Book 4 and the title, The Missing Chums, didn’t excite me so I got one of the later volumes, The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior instead. There was a pyramid on the cover. I’ve always been a sucker for pyramids–but I always felt obligated to eventually get to the first volume of every series. It wasn’t always necessary, but in some cases–The Three Investigators, Trixie Belden, Judy Bolton–they really did set the stage for the rest of the series and it helped to have read the first one.

I’ll be completely honest here, too: I was never good at science. I don’t know why that was, but I just was never good at any of it–biology, chemistry, physics; math and science were my two Achilles heels. I only read a couple of the Tom Swift books, and even those were because one was reissued in paperback and renamed In the Jungle of the Mayas (the Mayans built pyramids!) but I got the impression the Swift books were more about science than a case or a mystery or anything. The Rick Brant series, on the other hand, while having some insane titles (The Electronic Mind Reader, The Wailing Octopus) like all series did, there were also some that were called “mysteries.” So, yes, science, but also mystery.

I also had no idea it was going to become one of my favorite series.

When I first read The Rocket’s Shadow in the late 1960s/early 1970s, it was already significantly dated. Originally published in either 1946 or 1947, the background to the story was that the scientists on Spindrift Island, off the coast of New Jersey, were trying to build a rocket to send to the moon. Several different groups were trying to accomplish this, and whoever succeeds first was going to get a very lucrative government contract…and their efforts are being sabotaged. Rick’s father, Dr. Hartson Brant, is world-renowned, and of course Rick is very interested in science and is always inventing things to either save time or effort, and they aren’t usually very practical, even though they do work. Rick and his younger sister Barby go to school on the mainland–Spindrift is separated from the coast by tidal flats that are underwater during high tide–but everyone on the island is determined that their rocket will succeed and they’ll catch the saboteurs.

Rick soon figures out a clue and gives chase to some of the saboteurs, who turn on him and attack him–only he is rescued by a blond hitchhiker carrying a military duffle. He and Rick run the attackers off, and then Rick brings his new friend, Don Scott–“Scotty”–home with him because he has no place to go. He’s out of the military and has no family, was just wandering the roads to see where he wound up. The close bond between Rick and Scotty1 resonated with me, especially their sense of camaraderie and affection for each other. They had no girlfriends or even any girls who might be potential dates at first (some were introduced in the series later, Barby growing up for Scotty and a new scientist comes to the island and has a teenaged daughter Jan who is sort of an interest for Rick–but the girls are never more important to them than they are to each other.2

Obviously, by the time I got and read the book we were already into the Apollo space programs from NASA, and we landed on the moon in 1969–so all the science in The Rocket’s Shadow was off and wrong–also the rocket got there in like twenty minutes, not possible even now–and as such, the series could never really be updated and revised like the Hardys and Nancy Drew. The Rocket’s Shadow would have had to have been completely rewritten, and I’m not sure how you could introduce Scotty as a hitchhiker/war vet (he lied about his age) today.

I enjoyed all the books in the series. I did eventually get them all over the years and read them, and many of them are dated. High tech walkie-talkies don’t seem so impressive in a cell phone world, and of course, there are some trips to foreign lands (Asia and Pacific Islands) that are probably more than a little racist and dated now. But I loved The Lost City, where they are off to Tibet to set up a radio receiver on the opposite side of the world from Spindrift to triangulate with the rocket on the moon, and they discover a lost city of Mongols and the tomb of Genghis Khan. They also meet, in that book, an Indian youth named Chahda who helps them out and becomes basically a member of the family, and they take him off the streets of Delhi and pay for him to go to school. Chahda was incredible smart and adventurous too–but not sure how he’d hold up under modern scrutiny in these more evolved times.

And maybe when I’m retired I’ll reread the series critically. The books can be found on ebay and second-hand sites; some are available as ebooks, either on Amazon or Project Gutenberg.

  1. I am even now wondering if this character is why I’ve always liked the name Scotty, and have used it repeatedly for characters of my own creation. ↩︎
  2. I do find in also amusing that my parents–so worried about me reading books about girls instead of boys; did they not understand just how homoerotic the relationships between boys in these books were. This amuses me greatly now. ↩︎

Regret

I rebooted my life when I was thirty-three years old.

I had already started the process of merging my two lives into one, but I had thought that process would make me happier than I had been since I wasn’t pretending to be someone I wasn’t anymore, and badly, for that matter. I thought all of my problems, you see, had to do with being closeted and living two separate lives, and merging them and being myself for the first time would make me happy and once unleashed from my prison, all of my dreams would come true. That didn’t happen, and I was just as at sea in the queer world as I had been in the straight one. I didn’t really know how to be out. Part of the hard reboot was the decision to never look back at my past, to stay in the present and look to the future. The past was painful, I wasn’t proud of it, and I wasn’t that person anymore.

And truth be told, I didn’t like that person very much.

But since Mom died last year, I’ve been on a voyage of self-discovery and reflection which also entailed looking back at my life and its various stages. Looking back and relitigating my childhood and my early adulthood is a waster of energy, but I’ve found that the passage of time has softened the edges some and put a cheesecloth over the lens in my brain.

Queer kids don’t get to have the same kind of childhood, puberty and high school experience the majority of kids do, and as such our development of our sense of self often gets stunted. (I think this is still true, even though more people are coming out earlier and earlier every year.) We don’t learn how to date and fall in love and all the practice kids get with relationships in high school. I did date, but as The Only Gay Boy in Kansas (which is what I believed) I dated girls, which was unfair to both them and me; something I’ve been a bit ashamed of all these years–the girls deserved better than that, but not dating, not going steady with a girl, would have marked me as an even bigger outcast and weirdo…and all I wanted in high school was to be “normal”… or like everyone else. I realized that my normal was different than most people’s, and now…now I am not as bitter or get as angry about how I was treated, shamed, humiliated, and embarrassed by ignorant kids who clued into my difference and used it as a weapon against me. Sure, they were monsters, and learning that there were literally no straight people I could ever trust is something that I have carried for the rest of my life: straight people can’t be entirely trusted, even the ones who say they like you–and most of them will always let you down eventually.

Not all of them, of course, but I am never surprised when it happens. I never let people completely in, to this day. Paul was the first, and there have been some others over the years, too. The teen years, and my twenties, were very scarring. I turned 21 in 1982, and was trying to figure out how I was going to live the rest of my life. I think had it not been for HIV/AIDS, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to reconcile my warring selves. HIV/AIDS made it even harder for me to come out. I heard all my straight friends making gay jokes and hateful AIDS jokes and knew I couldn’t trust them; being myself would have meant losing my life as I knew it then–and for some reason, despite being miserable in trying to fit again into a square hole as a round peg, I thought I would be even more miserable if I came out. My “secret” friends were all dying, and I would go from a hospital ward back to the fraternity house where I got to listen to my “brothers” make AIDS jokes, and make jokes about my own sexuality, which drove me even deeper into the closet.

Language matters. And crude, coarse jokes based in identities are damaging to the people who hear them, especially when it comes from people you thought were your friends. But by all mean, yes, I get how using slurs and other language to convey contempt of other people is something you should be able to use and not made to feel about it (eye roll to infinity). I mean, free speech, amirite? It’s always funny how people think that means freedom from consequence.

How do I feel about it? Let’s just say almost everyone who was a shit to me back then has died horribly in one of my books or in a short story…and I definitely smiled while writing their death scene. I used to obsess over my past, reliving the slights, hurts, and other indignities inflicted upon me over the course of my life by homophobic garbage. But looing back was always painful, with so much regret…and then I decided I was going to live the rest of my life without regret, and I would no longer regret anything about my past. My new rational was, everything that happened to me my entire life shaped me into the person I am, so if I am pleased with my life I shouldn’t have regrets about anything, right?

This was the hard reboot at thirty-three, when I decided I wasn’t happy with how my life was going and so I wanted to change things, shake it up a bit. I no longer wanted my life to be something that happened to me, but rather something I made happen. I essentially let go of all the pain and regret and misery that came before and closed it all off in my mind, only reaching back in there for memories to use in my writing. Writing about some of these situations also gave me a better understanding and more perspective on what happened and why, and also opened my eyes a little bit to the people who inflicted damage on me. I didn’t grow up overnight, of course, but these realizations about my past, my life and my identity rebooted my life from the slow-moving train-wreck it seemed to be for so long, one where I felt I was just a sideline observer to my life, letting it happen rather than trying to make things happen for myself, I was waiting for life to simply drop opportunity into my life for no other reason than I was me and deserved it. I used to think that good fortune and good luck didn’t come my way because I didn’t deserve it, while having all of my dreams mocked and belittled or told they were unrealistic or unattainable for someone like me, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. I grew up thinking I was a weirdo, an outsider, and destined for failure–and you hear things like that enough, you start believing them, you know?

I decided to prove everyone wrong and close the door, once and for all, on my past; that Greg no longer existed and there was a new Greg in town. Part of that included refusing to look back and feel regret; my thought was that having regrets negated your current happiness, or your opportunity to actually be happy and feel settled; because had you not had the experiences, or responded to them the way you had, your life would be on a different path and while it could certainly have turned out better than it had, it also could have turned out worse. There’s nothing wrong, I believed (still do), in being content with your lot while still striving and feeling ambition for more, nor did I believe that either invalidated the other. I’ve been pretty happy for quite some time, overall; so how can I wish something hadn’t happened the way it had, or something turned out differently? That would change the course of my life, and not necessarily for the better.

And I am learning more about myself, and I think I see myself more clearly now than I ever have before. I love my life. I love Paul, New Orleans, my day job and my writing career (not necessarily in that order, but Paul is always first). I’m finding that there’s a lot of things in my past that I can also mine for my work, which is very cool; certainly a lot more than I thought. I am feeling ambitious about my writing again, which is something I’ve not felt in a very long time, so I am actually excited about writing for the rest of the year and all the things I should be able to get done.

I’ve certainly come a long way since I was that kid in Kansas with big dreams.

Broken Hearted Melody

Ah, Wednesday and the midpoint of the week has arrived. It’s been a good week so far; I’ve not been super-tired at all this week and I think the shifting of my arrival at work from 7:30 to 8 was a smart decision. I imagine, though, it’ll eventually start getting difficult for me to get up later as it has getting up earlier, once I am used to the change. In other words, it won’t feel like I am getting to sleep late eventually.

I saw something interesting yesterday on social media that really resonated with me: Your life should not be a museum, and that’s kind of what my mentality has been. I tend to get stuck in ruts so easily, and I like to accumulate things that have meaning to me (have I introduced you to my library yet?), but do I really need to keep these “artifacts” of my past? I never look at these things, rarely have anyone over to see them, so therefore what is the point? Everyone at the day job laughs about how, at a co-worker’s wedding last fall, someone made a joke about how I always wear Crescent Care T-shirts to work and were surprised to see me outside of the office and wearing something else–and since the joke was made, I’ve not worn one. Not once. I had started wearing them every day during the pandemic when I came to work and it was a further simplification of my life: I didn’t have to pick out something to wear to work, But when he made the joke, I wasn’t offended, but it did kind of snap me out of a rut. You have plenty of other clothes you never wear, and they aren’t doing any good hanging in the closet, I realized finally, so I started wearing my clothes instead of the work T-shirt. I generally don’t care about clothes most of the time but I eventually get to the point, periodically, where I’ll get interested in clothes again and will buy some–I had a shoe experience earlier this year, and now have two gorgeous new pairs of shoes to show for it.

So, why not buy some more Polo style shirts in colors I generally don’t wear or don’t have in the closet? Yes, that’s my way of saying that I did order some new shirts for work yesterday.

Yesterday was also the fifty-year anniversary of women being able to get their own credit cards without their husband or any kind of male co-signer. I remember when this happened, by the way, and I also remember when my mother got her very first credit card; it didn’t have her name but rather Mrs. My Dad. I remember thinking, “yeah, but it’s STILL technically his name.” People also don’t remember that about fifty years ago was when women/wives stopped being subsumed into their husband’s identity at the expense of their own: I am constantly amazed by plaques commemorating civic leaders and donors that list women as Mrs. Chanse MacLeod or Mrs. Scotty Bradley. Women had no identity beyond their husband once they were married. They couldn’t get bank loans, and I am not sure about bank accounts, either, for that matter; women were basically chained to their husband for life and if she got a divorce, she was basically screwed. Once women had financial freedom and no longer needed a husband…well, the divorce rate rose significantly, which is why men were so opposed to treating women like equals.

“What, you mean I have to convince her to marry me? Spinsterhood and divorce aren’t unpleasant fates anymore? That’s it–women need to be controlled.“

Sigh.

We also finished The Gentlemen last night, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it did have a most excellent finale. I don’t know if there will be more seasons, or if it was merely a mini-series, but I really enjoyed it and kind of am in the place where I worry about the continuation; so many shows go on long past their expiration date (looking at you, Friends and Thirteen Reasons Why) and lose me in a later season. (I really worried about it with Ted Lasso.) But we’ve got some other shows lined up to watch, I think the national finals for college gymnastics is on this weekend, and I also would like to get some more writing done this weekend. I did write last night on revising a short story, but today I am going to get back to work on the book (and hopefully finish the short story). It’s been a good and productive week thus far, and I really like this “go in later” thing I accidentally stumbled over on Monday morning. I made it through the day yesterday without getting tired, and I felt good when I came home to His Majesty Sparky, who is now addicted to the squeeze treats I bought for him. But I only have one more day in the office this week, and suddenly it’s the weekend again. I also worked on my taxes a bit more yesterday. Sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines again. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will be back probably a little later.

Drop Me Off In New Orleans

Ah, some more blatant self-promotion! I’ve done some on-line panels so far this year, which has been terrific. Here are the questions from one I did, turned into an interview so I can promote myself! I believe these questions were for a queer crime panel, and the credit for the questions goes to the one and only J. M. (Jean) Redmann; you can order her books here.

Why did you choose your characters and their professions? What drew you to them?

Hmmm. This is tough, because I have so many books and so many different main characters…I think I’ll stick to my two primary series to answer the question. I wanted to write about a gay private detective in New Orleans, and I wanted him to be a big man, a former college football player who may have been able to be a journeyman NFL player had he not been injured in his final college game. I wanted him to be uncomfortable in his gay skin, and the point of his journey throughout the series was to grow and learn until he was finally comfortable in that skin, and able to be loved and give it.

Scotty, on the other hand, was created as a stand-alone character and I wanted him to basically be the antithesis of Chanse; in which he had few if not hang-ups, was completely comfortable being a sexually active gay man with a snarky sense of humor covering an incredibly big and kind heart. He didn’t really need to grow much–he usually is the catalyst for other characters’ growth–but as he’s aged, I’ve really enjoyed his journey.

What attracted you to writing mysteries?

I always liked them. As long as I can remember, my two biggest reading passions were history and mystery, with horror/Gothics close behind. I would check anything out of the library with mystery, haunted, ghost, phantom, secret, or clue in the title. Then I discovered the series books–The Three Investigators, Trixie Belden, et al–and after that there was no turning back.

What does being queer/gay/lesbian bring to your story?

I think queer people have the outsider point of view down to an art form because that’s how we see the world–from the margins. The easiest way to critique society, the culture, and how people interact with each other is from a remove–and queer people see all of those things from a remove through no fault of their own. I didn’t have role models when I was growing up, at least to teach me how to be a decent adult gay human being, so I had to learn it all on my own for the most part. I’ve also been confused and mystified by American culture, philosophy, and society, because it wasn’t designed for people like me. When I came out, I was just at sea in the queer world as I always had been in the straight one, and I’ve never forgotten those experiences, either, and they also inform my work.

How do we deal with how the wider world deals with queer characters? Especially in these times?

It can be depressing, which is emotionally and psychologically dangerous. It’s bad enough experiencing homophobia, but then to immerse yourself in it in order to write about it? Even more horrific. Watching Pray Away this weekend made me furious with the ex-gay movement all over again; listening to queer people hating themselves and their desires in order to be at peace with God in some twisted way? But if God is infallible…this is the doctrine Christianity gets hung up on. They think we’re mistakes, but if their God is infallible, He had to have made us perfect and its willful sin or the devil whispering in our ears. This is their incredibly harmful and dangerous rhetoric. If God tests humans, perhaps he made queer people to test the faithful–and they are failing.

But they can never admit to that.

How do you deal with diversity? No author can be everything their characters need to be, how do you handle reflecting the wider world?

I write mostly about New Orleans, and beyond that, mostly the south with occasional forays into other areas of the country–upstate New York, Kansas, California–and you cannot write about a city like New Orleans realistically without having Black characters, period. New Orleans is a majority Black city. You also can’t write about the South without touching on the issues of race and a problematic history. I’ve always included diverse characters in my books. I don’t like to describe skin color, frankly, and most white writers do it in the form of food, which I find unsettling–do you want to eat them? Cinnamon skin, cocoa, cafe au lait, eggplant, dark chocolate, etc.–I’ve seen all of those used to describe skin color and it always makes me recoil because it’s so damned lazy. I don’t think I would ever write from the perspective of a Black character–there are plenty of Black authors who can do that more authentically, and given how most diversity pledges by major publishers also inevitably end up in quotas, I don’t want to take a spot from a Black creator. I do love reading work by racialized authors, but I would never try to write from that perspective.

How do you use setting? What does it bring to the story?

Setting is one of my strengths, I think, so I always use it to enhance my story. I am also very lucky in that I live in New Orleans, where anything can happen on any given day and you can never go too far over the top about anything–if anything, you have to tone things down to be believable. I think setting is important because it tells you so much about the characters–why do they live there, how has it shaped them, did they live somewhere else, how do they deal with the challenges, what annoys them, what do they love–and is an important foundation for your story.

How do your books start—not the book beginning, but the start of the process of writing the book. Where do the ideas come from and how does that coalesce into a book?

It usually is something I find interesting and I think I should write about that. Sometimes the ideas take years to coalesce and come together, sometimes they are immediate. The Scotty books inevitably begin with three disparate things I want to address in one book, and then I have to figure out how to combine them all into a story. The next Scotty’s prompts are evacuation, statute of limitations, and obsession. It’s coming together in my head enough that I think I’ll be able to write it this fall.

Once you’re writing, what’s your process? Outline? Write from start to finish?

I used to outline, but now I kind of have it in my head and then will only go back and outline when I am stuck, so I can see where I went wrong in the manuscript. I always write from beginning to end. I don’t know how people can write backwards! I’ve thought about trying it sometime, though.

What are the hard parts of writing for you? The parts you enjoy?

Definitely the middle. The middle is soul-destroying, and always triggers Imposter Syndrome. I also hate copy edits, but recognize them as a necessary evil.

I love the actual writing and revising and all of that. There’s nothing like putting down a good word count for the day, regardless of how bad those words might be. I think revising is magic: you take garbage and turn it into something terrific.

Which writers influenced you?

All of them, in one way or another. I especially love Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier, and John D. MacDonald. Currently? Alison Gaylin, Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Michael Koryta, Alex Segura, Michael Thomas Ford, S. A. Cosby, Kellye Garrett, and Alafair Burke–there really are so many. I always take something away from everything I read, whether good or bad.

What are you working on now?

Right now I am writing a sequel to Death Drop, in the Killer Queen series. I also have a ton of short stories and novellas in progress, and I already have ideas for the next three or four (or more) books.

Any advice for newer writers?

Keep writing and keep believing in yourself, and keep reading.

Last words of wisdom?

If you want to be a writer, read Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English and Stephen King’s On Writing.

Gotta Travel On

The Ides of April and Tax Day, huzzah. I’ve filed for an extension for mine because I just couldn’t deal with it before, which is kind of childish and more than a little immature; the key word here is avoidance. But I plan to get it all finished this week, God willing and the creek don’t rise. I am going into the office a little later than I usually do, because I have to swing by the Cat Practice to get Sparky’s food on the way to the office. It’s an Admin Day, so not a big deal for me to not be there as early as usual.

I feel rested and good this morning, which is a very pleasant change and surprise. I did go to bed a little early last night, but I spent most of the day writing in my journal, watching documentaries, and later on in the evening we watched more episodes of The Gentlemen. I also finally looked up the name of the star, Theo James, because it was bothering me that I recognized him and couldn’t place him. I am liking it a lot more than I would have thought, frankly; not being a big fan of producer/showrunner Guy Ritchie, but it’s actually quite fun. I also went down some rabbit holes of research yesterday, which is always a lot of fun for me. I also started reading Paul Tremblay’s The Pallbearer’s Club, which I had a little trouble getting into at first, but I remembered having this issue with A Head Full of Ghosts, too–like the latter, he’s playing with form and style and point of view in the former, which is a bit hard to get used to it, so it’s slow going (for me) at first, but as always, there’s such depth and compassion in his writing it’s easy to see why his career has taken off. I’ll try to read some more of it when I get home from work tonight, after I do the day’s writing. I am definitely planning on writing every day now, even if it’s just a little something. I made lots of notes yesterday in my journal, too, which was very cool.

I decided yesterday, when watching a lengthy documentary of LSU football highlights (I was doing this around chores, listening to the documentary while Sparky and Paul slept on the couch) that one of the problems I’ve been facing with writing lately, something I’ve talked about on here a lot, is how I’ve not really been able to focus all of my creative energies on anything that I am writing, but have any number of things in-progress that my mind keeps attention-deficiting between, skittering around between projects and ideas without really landing effectively on anything for long enough to get very far. Yesterday I decided, as I grabbed the journal and hit play on the documentary that I was going to free-form take notes and scribble out ideas as they came to me, regardless of what they were about or for, even if they were entirely new project notes. I did a lot of scribbling, and most of it focused on one project, which really needs to get done by the end of the year, as well as some others I was a bit surprised still were there and fresh in my mind. I also know now that if I rewrite at least three of these short stories drafts that I have on hand, that collection will be complete.

I also found the voice for a new project idea I’ve had in the front of my mind for a while, primarily because we watched those ‘troubled teen cure’ documentaries at the end of the previous week. I had an idea for one set in Kansas, based on a foster home where the kids went to my high school. I didn’t think much of it when I was in high school–other than how much harder those kids had it than the rest of us–and sometime in the years since high school I thought, I could write a crime novel around that story even though it would entirely be fictional and the real place was simply a starting point for my fictionalization. The title came to me this weekend–The Crooked Y–and so that’s definitely moving up the list of “what to write next.”

As you can tell, writing is becoming more important to me and it feels good for my mind to be creating again, even in this current ADHD way, which is so much better than the dry well experience I’ve been having since…well, since Mom died, really. 2023 was a lot of personal trauma; and relentless from January on, which makes it not surprising, I suppose, that my brain has been fallow for so long.

And on that note, I am going to start getting ready to head into the spice mines for the day. Have a great Monday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.