Category: childhood

I Am…I Said

Monday morning and I am working at home today; hurray! Data entry to be done, emails to check and answer, amongst various other things that must be done today. Later on, I am going to go over my manuscript one more time to make sure I caught everything and made every change that needed to be made, and then sending it off to my editor. Whew. I spent most of the weekend working on it, and I am pretty pleased with the work I’ve done. Is any of that work any good? Remains to be seen, but I think I managed to do what was asked of me. At least, I hope so.

I slept really well last night–I am definitely on a “good sleep” roll now–and actually woke up before six this morning, but stayed in bed until seven. I feel rested–this entire past week, once I got over the exhaustion from the trip, has been a miracle of feeling rested and good sleep–which is a lovely change from the norm around here. We watched the latest episode of Gaslit last night–I am not sure what the point of all the “Liddy being insane in prison” was about other than just filler; but the tragedy of Martha Mitchell is hard to watch play out fictionally, since I watched it play out in real life. I was an early teen at the time of Watergate; I turned thirteen in 1974, and even though I was apolitical at the time and paid very little attention to politics, just going along with what my parents believed until I got a little bit older and started paying more attention, Watergate was ubiquitous; it was everywhere. The hearings aired on every network every day, preempting everything I usually watched when I was home from school on vacation; it was on the news, in the was in the newspapers, Mad and Cracked magazines talked about it endlessly…I can only imagine how viral Watergate would be in today’s world, but on the other hand, it would have been a lot uglier in this current political climate.

And whatever else can be said about Nixon, when it was obvious how bad it was going to get for him, he did what was best for the country and stepped down–even if it was really what was best for him.

We also watched another episode of Merlí, but while it was very well done, it’s beginning to drag a little bit. The cast is very appealing, but there’s really no melodrama (or much of it, anyway); it’s really about a bunch of college kids learning about themselves and learning about the world, and there’s not even a lot of relationship drama. We’ll probably finish it off–they are all appealing, after all–but it’s not a must-watch must-finish kind of thing for us. We also started watching the new season of The Boys last night, which is interesting–I am really waiting for the arrival of Jensen Ackles, whose character has been teased since almost the opening of the season–and so we’ll probably stick with that. We also watched the first episode of Obi-wan Kenobi, which was better than I would have thought, and we’ll definitely go on watching that. I’m really in the mood for a good crime show, to be honest, and will probably go digging around on Acorn and Britbox to find something.

I was too burned out from the book yesterday to read anything last night, so The Mother Next Door continues to rest on my side table next to my easy chair. Maybe tonight, maybe tonight.

The kitchen is also in a bit of a mess this morning. I still have things that need to be filed and things that need to be put away–there’s also stuff in the refrigerator that needs to be tossed–but that’s cool. I can take care of that when my eyes get bleary from entering data and I need to take a break away from the computer. And my eyes will definitely get bleary; they always do when I’m doing this kind of work, which is why I am glad I don’t have to do it every day.

I also have to start preparing for my class this Saturday. I do have my notes I was going to use for the Saints and Sinners workshop (that I wound up not bringing with me when I went to the Monteleone to teach it, so had to wing it) but this is also going to be slightly longer than the S&S workshop, so I need to be better prepared, and I definitely don’t want to try to wing it at nine thirty in the morning. So, that’s the next big thing when I get this manuscript sent off later today. As I was also saying the other day, I am thinking it might be smart to go ahead and try to write a first draft of Mississippi River Mischief before trying to do anything else, so it can sit for awhile before I get back to it with fresh eyes–it really does help to divorce yourself from the work for a period of time. I think that really worked well with Royal Street Reveillon, and it’s probably the best and smartest way for me to get going on this new Scotty. I also am thinking I should go back and reread the entire series–not thoroughly, just a skimming–so I can get a handle on his voice again, maybe figure out some things, find some things from his past that might need to be circled around back to again. I’m thinking maybe a villain from the past might need to come back into his life at this time again…and of course, there’s the personal story that was left hanging at the end of RSR…I really need to stop doing that, don’t I?

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will chat at you again tomorrow.

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep

Friday morning and a working weekend looms on my horizon. I slept rather well again last night–I hope this is actually turning into a habit for me–so I feel pretty good again this morning. My muscles are still a bit creaky; they need to be stretched and they need to be worked, so hopefully after I spend this entire weekend with my nose to the grindstone I can start making the trip back over to the gym next week. Fingers crossed. I wasn’t too terribly tired when I got home from work yesterday, so I did some laundry, got the dishes under control, and did some filing and organizing, which is always lovely–the workspace is much more work-friendly this morning than it has been all week. I’ve not started reading my next book yet–Tara Laskowski’s The Mother Next Door–and I am putting that on hold until I have my work caught up.

We’re almost finished with The Little Drummer Girl, which has only one episode left to go, and it’s very interesting, if dated. At first, with its focus on the Israeli secret police hunting down terrorists, I thought it was going to be a very dated look at the Middle Eastern issue, especially given the time when the book was written (at that point almost the entire world, excepting Muslim countries, were pro-Israel)–but I should have known John LeCarré would never write anything one-sided, or pro one faction or the other. It’s actually quite nuanced, definitely more so than I would have thought for the time it was written and published; it shows both sides and how the irrational blood-for-blood eye-for-an-eye mentality of both deepened and made the hate more deeply ingrained to the point where there really is no possible solution, which is where we are now. I kind of want to read the book now–because, of course, my TBR pile isn’t deep enough as it is.

There’s still work to be done around the house, of course; there always is, and it’s a nice way of waking up every morning over the weekend as I prepare to get ready for the day’s writing; I’ve tended to have it look like it’s under control on the surface while underneath it’s all just a huge mess. (The file cabinet drawers in particular are a mess; I need to spend a weekend cleaning out and emptying and reorganizing my file cabinet…although what I really need is a taller, four drawer cabinet, but I don’t have room for it where the current cabinet sits.) I also need to start preparing my class for next Saturday at the East Jefferson Parish Library; I have the notes for the Saints and Sinners workshop (that I forgot to take with me that morning) that I can build on, and one of the books I discussed in the class–The Rape of the A*P*E* (American Puritan Ethic) by Allan Sherman, happened to be one of the books my dad found while emptying out one of the areas in their basement and pressed on me while I was there last weekend. So I have that to consult and get notes and information from…or not, if I don’t need it. Inevitably I am always afraid I am going to run out of things to say in front of the class, and have to wing it and make myself look stupid, but more often than not I have too much material for the class.

And who knows? Maybe this time–unlike Saints and Sinners–no one will show up.

And on that cheery note, I am heading off to the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again

I didn’t start reading young adult fiction until I was an actual adult.

I didn’t read it when I was an actual young adult,, which I’ve tried to remedy in the years since I discovered that there is young adult fiction that is not “ABC Afterschool Special” style drama–these abounded to an extreme when I was a teen; everything was a cautionary tale. You want to have sex? Here, read Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones or My Darling My Hamburger. Drugs? You should read Go Ask Alice. And on and on it went…the 1970s were a very weird time to go through puberty and your teens, especially if you were beginning to realize your sexuality was all wrong and you needed to hide almost everything true and honest about yourself from everyone you know. There were actually good books for teens being written and published during that time, of course; I just never found them (some have been recommended to me by friends who are the same age and read them at the time; Trying Hard Not to Hear You by Sandra Scoppetone could have made a significant difference in my life had I read it back then).

But in the early 1990’s, I started reading horror/mystery novels by teens by Christopher Pike, which led me to R. L. Stine’s Fear Street books and my favorite mystery writer for teens–the forgotten and vastly under-appreciated Jay Bennett. Those books got me to start writing my own y/a horror/mystery/suspense novels for teens–which eventually became my novels Sara, Sleeping Angel, and Sorceress–and I continue to write them from time to time; my last two releases were actually young adult fiction (or marketed as such). I try to keep my hand in the field by reading horror/mystery/suspense novels for young adults that are more current; it’s hard to keep up with everything I want to read as it is, but I was really happy one of the books I took with me on my trip was Alan Orloff’s Agatha Award winning (and Anthony Award finalist) I Play One on TV.

He watched as a teen in a dark hoodie emerged from a storage closet and crept into the high school locker room. In the dum light, the shadowy figure advanced, slowly, methodically. In his left hand, a knife blade glinted.

The man’s insides constricted as he observed. He could almost smell the stale sweat left behind by the athletes after football practice, soon to be replaced by the stench of fear and the coppery odor of fresh blood.

The feelings he experienced now–rage, fear, excitement–mirrored those he had felt then, five years ago. When he had been the teen in the hoodie in that locker room. When he had been wielding the knife.

When he had been stalking his unsuspecting victim.

The premise of I Play One on TV is very original and clever: the main character is a teenager with ambitions of becoming an actor–he has an agent, goes out on auditions for commercials and local theatre productions, and works with his high school’s summer theater camp–and thus far his biggest break was starring as a teenaged killer in a true crime reenactment series. The killer he is playing, Homer Lee Varney, was a bullied outsider who murdered a jock, and has recently been released from prison due to a legal technicality. Dalton’s two best friends are also aspiring actors, and shortly after his episode of the show airs, someone starts stalking him–and he fears he is being stalked by the actual killer.

But was Homer guilty, or was he railroaded? Dalton has found some discrepancies in the police reports which indicate that the investigation might not have been as thorough or efficient as one might think…so maybe Homer isn’t a killer after all?

Dalton, despite his faults (and it’s to Orloff’s credit as a writer that he doesn’t make Dalton perfect–especially since this is a first person narrative), is easy to connect with, identify with, and root for to succeed–not just as an amateur private eye but as an actor and as a person. He’s a bit selfish and self-absorbed (as creative artists have a tendency to be), and he also has some serious professional jealousy for a schoolmate who often winds up going up for the same parts–but gets them instead of Dalton (which is a stage name). Dalton’s relationships with his parents and with his sister are also realistic and well drawn, and the story/mystery progresses at an excellent pace, and comes to a very satisfying, enjoyable conclusion.

I Play One on TV recently won the Agatha Award for Best Childrens/Young Adult Novel, and also received an Anthony nomination in the same category.

Definitely recommended!

I Woke Up In Love This Morning

Well, I kind of do every morning, really. It’s kind of hard sometimes to wrap my mind around the fact that next month is our twenty-seventh anniversary. Twenty-seven years. That’s a long time for someone like me, whose prior relationships never lasted much longer than a couple of weeks at best. I was thinking about my past last night, after I got home and collapsed into my easy chair, and thinking again how I could never write a memoir because I really don’t remember what actually happened, and over the years I’ve rewritten things to make me look better in my own mind and memory. We all have, I think, a tendency to see ourselves as always being in the right, and everyone else being wrong…and as more time passes we continue to color those memories and slant them in our minds until the truth, what really happened, what was actually said, have changed completely in our minds and these biased revisions become our truth; which is just one of many reasons I use my past–if and when I do write about my past–I only use it for fiction–because my past as I remember it now is probably mostly fiction.

I had another good night’s sleep last night, which was marvelous and feels great this morning. My muscles feel rested and relaxed as opposed to tight and tired, and my mind feels a bit refreshed. I am not in world-conquering mode quite yet; but I am getting there slowly but surely. I have a lot of work to get done this week and over this weekend; I am going to have to buckle down and force myself to actually get the work done this weekend no matter how badly I want to goof off and relax and do little to nothing–it’s really not an option for me this time around. I have too much to do, and the trip to Kentucky, necessary as it was, really threw me off schedule (which I was already behind, to be fair; the trip made things worse). So I am hoping–with feeling rested and everything today–that I’ll be able to make some serious progress on things, and get to a place where I can unplug for the entire weekend (other than the blog, of course) and avoid everyone and everything until I am completely caught up the way I should be on everything. I doubt that will happen–if anything was proven to me this past weekend on the trip, it’s that I get way too much junk email every day, so not looking at it and not deleting things is really not an option for an entire weekend.

I am also the featured author at Three Rooms Press this month, which is very cool; many thanks to Peter Carlaftes (and Kat Georges) for always being incredibly supportive of me and my career over the years, ever since they published the Florida Happens anthology I edited for St. Petersburg Bouchercon. I was rereading it last night in my chair while I was waiting for Paul to come home (so we could watch another episode of The Little Drummer Girl), and I winced quite a bit, as I always do. The other morning, when I taped the segment for Great Day Louisiana (which, it occurred to me last night, might not air) I was having to talk about writing and again, I think back to the questions asked (Malik, the interviewer, was great–friendly and nice and very high energy) and my responses and wince a little bit. I always feel so pompous and pretentious when I talk about writing, but I try to be as honest as I can. I’m never sure how I come across (and let’s be honest, I am a huge critic of myself), and I want to be practical–I always roll my eyes when I read interviews about writers talking about writing and they turn into this mystical, mysterious thing with muses and Gods of Inspiration and “opening a vein and bleeding on the page” and all of that stuff. Yes, you want emotional honesty in your work, and yes, you want your characters to be realistic and fully developed and well rounded and to have interior lives, but ultimately, at least for me, writing is work. I think about it, I go over it in my head, I sit down and write it and print it and edit it and revise and rewrite it and maybe that can, I suppose, be seen as “bleeding on the page”…but then I remind myself I am not a literary writer and so therefore I don’t go through all the angst and agony they do–I don’t spend hours trying to structure and craft a sentence until it’s perfect and poetry, either.

Then again, I’ve never really fit the mold of what most people think authors are like and I’ve never written the way other people do. And that’s fine; there’s no “one way” to be an author. I always tell people the entire point of writing manuals is to show beginners there are any number of ways to write and be a writer; what works for someone else might not work for you, and the point of the manuals with helpful hints and techniques and methodologies for getting words on the page is for you to try things to see what works best for you, and it may wind up being a combination of Sue Grafton said this and this other writers does this and let me try this thing Michael Connelly does and so on…you have to come up with whatever works for you, and there’s nothing wrong with borrowing bits and pieces of other author’s techniques and honing them into something that works for you.

Which is also why I will never write a How to Be a Writer manual. I could, on the other hand, do something like Stephen King’s On Writing, which is a combination writing memoir/manual, and is the book I recommend to any and every person who wants to write. And then I think, like anyone wants to read your memoir about writing….and didn’t you just say you aren’t sure of your own memories of the past, what’s true and what’s been revised over the years by your ego?

Yes, that would be a problem.

At any rate, it’s time for me to head into the office for another exciting day of STI testing. You have a great day, Constant Reader, and think of me down here in the spice mines.

Lonely Days

The first “Gothic” novel I read was Victoria Holt’s The Secret Woman (technically, it was Mary Stewart’s The Ivy Tree, but I don’t really think of Stewart as a Gothic writer–which is a subject for another time), and I fell in love with them. These were the books, usually from Fawcett Crest in mass market paperback, that became famous for the “young woman running away from a spooky house with a light in the window while wearing a long nightgown and having really long hair” covers. Sometimes those covers didn’t belong on the books that had them (Charlotte Armstrong didn’t write Gothics, for one example), but inevitably, you really couldn’t go wrong picking up a book with that kind of cover. My favorites were of course Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, and Victoria Holt; I devoured their books, and also enjoyed Susan Howatch, Dorothy Eden, and any number of others. I miss those books, even if sometimes the heroines were incredibly passive to the point where I wanted to shake some self-esteem into them…and have often bemoaned their disappearance from the paperback shelves.

But there are modern Gothics being published–Carol Goodman is a QUEEN of the modern Gothic–and I’ve turned my hand to them from time to time myself (Timothy, The Orion Mask, Bury Me in Shadows) and would like to do more.

So, you can imagine how delighted I was to read (listen) to The Death of Mrs. Westaway.

The girl leaned, rather than walked, into the wind, clutching the damp package of fish and chips grimly under one arm even as the gale plucked at the paper, trying to unravel the parcel and send the contents skittering away down the seafront for the seagulls to claim.

As she crossed the road her hand closed over the crumpled note in her pocket, and she glanced over her shoulder, checking the long dark stretch of pavement behind her for a shadowy figure, but there was no one there. No one she could see, anyway.

It was rare for the seafront to be completely deserted. The bars and clubs were open long into the night, spilling drunk locals and tourists onto the pebbled beach right through until dawn. But tonight, even the most hardened partygoers had decided against venturing out, and now, at 9:55 p.m. on a wet Tuesday, Hal had the promenade to herself, the flashing lights of the pier the only sign of life, apart from the gulls wheeling and crying over the dark restless waters of the channel.

I had heard somewhere that this book had echoes of potentially being a Rebecca homage (hello, Timothy!) so of course I was interested. Ware first exploded on the mystery scene with her The Woman in Cabin 10, which I haven’t read (it’s buried in the TBR pile somewhere) and I had acquired some of her others titles in the years since her debut with In a Dark, Dark Wood (which I also have on hand) and I decided, when picking out audiobooks to listen to on the drive, thought, “Hey, isn’t it about time you checked out Ruth Ware? Overdue, in fact? So I downloaded The Death of Mrs. Westaway and started listening once I pulled away from the curb last Thursday.

Wow.

The main character is Harriet Westaway, who goes by Hal. Hal is poor–very poor. She makes a subsistence-level living by reading tarot cards in a booth on the pier in a seaside resort, and it’s the off-season, where her living is even lower. The book opens with her walking home from a night’s work, trying to figure out how she is going to pay her bills–and which ones can wait, which need immediate attention–and she also owes money to a loanshark, who is getting more threatening with every passing day. Out of the blue she receives a letter from an attorney letting her know she was named in her grandmother’s will, and an invitation to the funeral. Confused–Hal knows that wasn’t her grandmother’s name, and verifies the information by checking her mother’s birth certificate (her mother was killed in a hit-and-run accident when she was a senior in high school–the British equivalent, at any rate–and as such never finished school); it’s a mistake, but…maybe she can fake her way into a bit of an inheritance. She is desperate, after all, and what can it hurt to get away for a little while? And so Hal sets out for the Cornish estate Trepassen–the Westaway fortune has dwindled over the years, and the house is in ill repair, but Hal is very startled after the funeral to discover that her “grandmother” has left everything to her, which now has her on the horns of a dilemma. She knows a mistake has been made about her identity, but doesn’t know how to get out of the pickle she’s now in.

Trepassen reminded me in ways of Manderly, and the Rebecca parallels are there, but this is not a simple homage. Mrs. Warren, the housekeeper, was devoted to the late Mrs. Westaway (whose children despised her) and is perfectly awful to poor Hal. The Westaway family welcomes Hal as the long-last daughter of their long-lost sister Maud, which only adds to her guilt about the deception she is pulling on them. Hal is mousy, like the second Mrs. deWinter, and there were times I wanted to shake her into standing up for herself a bit more…but on the other hand, it kind of fits into the situation she’s in–how do you stand up for yourself when you are literally lying to everyone? There are a lot of family mysteries to explore and unravel. Hal’s arrival at Trepassen starts those threads unraveling, and like any true Gothic heroine, soon her life is in danger…

I enjoyed this book tremendously. It reminded me strongly of Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney, and I will certainly be reading more of Ruth Ware going forward.

Woodstock

June first, and the start of Pride Month. I should probably wax poetic about the long struggle for civil rights for queer people–one that I pretty much spent my entire life witnessing (I was eight at the time of Stonewall; I don’t remember seeing any news coverage of it, but it gradually seeped into my consciousness through osmosis or something) and a lot of years participating in at some level. I sometimes wonder if I could have done more, or fought harder, or been better about it in some ways; if I could have done something more that could have caused a greater impact or advanced the cause more quickly in some way. I imagine that’s probably my own issue more than anything else; I always feel like ai should do more.

I slept pretty well last night, and I think I am starting to get caught up on that. I felt better yesterday, but got tired relatively early in the day and of course, had errands to run after work (I cannot be the only person stunned at how much the cost of groceries has gone up, can I?), and then came home to make dinner (I was very hungry, which was unusual but cool as I am usually not hungry after work), and then Paul and I watched another episode of The Little Drummer Girl, a John LeCarré adaptation we’re enjoying, if not completely certain we are following the story completely. I’ve not read much LeCarré; only The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which was amazing and yes, I am well aware I need to read more. (I also would like to read more Eric Ambler, for that matter, and there’s some Robert Ludlum I’d like to revisit as well.) I’ve not decided what to read next, to be honest; probably something older is most likely; I have a couple of old suspense novels from the 1960’s I’d like to read, and they are short, which makes them even more appealing. I also downloaded another book to listen to on my phone; I am hoping that I can listen to it while doing chores around the house and/or walking to the gym (which I hope to start doing again). I have an eye appointment on Saturday in Metairie (yay) but maybe after I am finished with that and after running a couple of errands, can walk over to the gym Saturday afternoon and start working out and stretching again. I can feel that my muscles need to be stretched (badly) because it’s been so long…

But I do feel better today, like I am finally over the trip.

I am behind on everything, but that undertone of being tired never helps in that regard; when I am tired (exhausted) I always look at everything I have to do from a perspective of oh I will never be able to get caught up and feel defeated. The trip of course was a disruption, and now I have to piece together the many things I was doing and working on before I drove north. But with some clarity–sleeping well helps–I should be able to get that taken care of this morning as well as starting the incredible chore of clearing out my inbox, which has been out of control for quite some time. (Hell, everything has been out of control for quite some time.)

I’ve been reflecting about my gay life a lot lately–primarily because one of my many many projects are set in the past, which requires me to remember things from my life from way back when (“Never Kiss a Stranger” is set in 1994 New Orleans; another project is set in the mid 1970’s in the Chicago suburbs) and while I certainly wouldn’t ever want to go back in time–no matter how awful things seem to be in the present day, they were definitely worse in the past–it’s kind of nice to think back to what many people consider to be “simpler” times. The fact is the times weren’t actually simpler, we were just simpler and certainly more naïve. Maybe that’s just me projecting–always a possibility–and the cynic in me, when people talk about “simpler times”, always wants to say, “what you really mean is you want to go back to a time when you didn’t have to think about social issues because they didn’t really intrude into your life.” It’s very easy to not care about, or notice, things that don’t affect you–which is where the term “woke” came from, if you were wondering or have complained about it before–but (at the risk of making you think of campfires and “Kum-Ba-Ya”) we kind of are all in this together, and is it really so terrible to care about other people and how they are treated?

Apparently, a lot of people think the answer to that question is yes.

Anyway. I don’t think people will ever stop disappointing me. (For that matter, I don’t think I will ever stop disappointing myself.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely June 1st, Constant Reader.

Liar

Look at me, up and awake before seven in the morning on a Sunday! Who would have ever thought that would happen? I feel surprisingly awake and alert and rested this morning, given the early hour and all, but that’s okay. When you’re awake, you’re awake–so I figured I might as well get up and get a jump on the day. I will be going deep into the edits of A Streetcar Named Murder today. I ran the errands I needed to run yesterday, got some organizing and cleaning done around the house, and started the deep dive into the edits yesterday–most of the day was spent planning and figuring out things in the book that I didn’t have time to figure out when I was actually writing it (mistake mistake mistake; how do pantsers do this all the time?) and with my lesson firmly learned, am ready to get cracking on fixing the errors here and clearing up and tightening up the story. I want to be finished with it all before I leave on Thursday, because it will be very hard for me to finish it while I am in Kentucky. (And I’d rather spend whatever time I have free while I’m up there reading, frankly.) I’m getting a bit excited about the trip, if I may be so bold as to say so, which is a good thing; right now I am not even dreading all those hours in the car–I have Carol Goodman and Ruth Ware novels to listen to in the car–and while I do have to go into the office tomorrow, I work at home on Tuesday this week and can packed and ready to go that day so Thursday morning I can get up, have some coffee, and head out on the highway early.

There’s also some straightening and organizing I need to get done this morning–looking around the workspace is making me shudder right now–but it’s nice to feel rested and ready to go, honestly. I wonder what was so different about last night that I slept so much better? I’m not even going to check the Fitbit because I don’t necessarily trust its judgement and evaluation of my sleep, to be honest. I mean, it’s interesting to see how I feel vs. how it thinks I slept–but there are times when I wake up and feel rested and great but I supposedly slept poorly; and then mornings when I get up and feel groggy and tired and exhausted, it claims that I slept very well. I don’t know if I can trust it, and frankly, if it wasn’t part of the complicated system of trying to get cheaper health insurance through my job, I sure as hell wouldn’t wear it. Paul often buys me really nice watches as gifts and I never wear them–mainly because I am clumsy as fuck and inevitably break things that are nice–but the Fitbit…like I said, there’s this really complicated system of scoring points through a program that helps reduce the cost of my health insurance. I’m not entirely sure I understand it–I never really grasped it when it was explained eight or nine years ago–but I know I score points, earn a medal status (bronze, silver, gold) and if I get to silver, I don’t have any “out of paycheck” contributions to my health insurance, and registering my daily steps and how well I slept through the Fitbit scores fifty points per day. (The points also can be cashed in for gift cards; I always get Amazon to buy books, of course. Don’t @ me; the other options don’t really work for me.)

It looks to be a nice day outside my windows this morning, although it’s undoubtedly already incredibly hot outside. I’m hoping to manage to not go out into it much today–maybe taking out the trash or something–and I may be meeting a friend who’s in town for drinks later this evening (not too late, since I have to get up early in the morning), but other than that, I mostly plan to sit here at this desk and edit and revise and rewrite today. I also don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get this finished; I am hoping by focusing and working really hard and not allowing myself to get distracted I can power through and get this back to my publisher before I leave on Thursday.

One can always hope and dream at any rate.

We watched Hacks last night, and the most recent episode of The Offer, although I’m not really sure why we continue to watch the latter. I noticed last night that there are any number of shows we’re in the middle of (Severance, Pieces of Her, Slow Horses) that we forgot we were watching and thus will need to pick up again–it wasn’t that we weren’t enjoying them, but rather that we inevitably ended up having our viewing disrupted by something for several days and when we had time to go back and get caught up on things, we forgot we were watching them (we also never finished Physical either). It is interesting–I thought about this while watching The Offer last night–how many shows we’ve seen lately that were set in the 1970’s (Minx, Candy, The Offer) as well as what a great job they are doing depicting the era. I remember saying during one episode of Candy, “living this kind of life was my biggest nightmare when I was a kid, and they are doing a great job of showing how bleak and ugly and dull suburban life was back then.”

I also have started up again with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I’d stopped watching last season because I quickly grew tired of the Erika Jayne/Erica Girardi mess–I’d never particularly liked her very much, but at least she was somewhat entertaining–but given that the great wealth she has flaunted ever since she joined the cast was essentially stolen from settlements for victims of great and horrific tragedies and she was completely unrepentant and tried to play like she was the real victim, I no longer felt any desire to watch a sociopathic narcissist who has knowingly or unknowingly participated in embezzlement, fraud and God knows what else. I’d reached a point where I kept thinking someone just needs to slap the shit out of that fucking crooked bitch and felt that giving them eyeballs and a rating point on Hulu was endorsing the fact that Bravo was enabling her and giving her a platform to try to redeem herself in the public eye, which was shitty. Sure, innocent before proven guilty and all that–but The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills isn’t a court of law; and the fact they milked her potential criminality for ratings was disgusting and craven. I don’t love to hate her, I just fucking hate her. And the rest of the cast–outside the newer ones–are equally garbage. I stopped watching The Real Housewives of New York during its most recent season because I couldn’t watch the blatant racism being offered up as “entertainment.” Fuck you, Bravo, and fuck you, Andy Cohen. The Real Housewives shows have become a microcosm of everything that is wrong with American society and culture: there’s no accountability for anything. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: people are rewarded for being horrible.

It also makes me feel like I’ve always been incredibly naïve about the world, believing that being a good person means you’ll be rewarded and bad people will be punished for their wrong-doing, when the harsh reality is quite the opposite. I feel like I’ve been gaslit most of my life, frankly.

Which, of course, always comes back to me being a crime writer. I want to see justice being done. I want to see evil-doers punished and good people rewarded for their goodness. I want to write about a world where murderers and criminals are caught and punished, their victims avenged; not the real world where the wealthy can hire great lawyers and outspend the prosecution to get off, while so many innocent people who cannot afford great lawyers are convicted or talked into taking plea bargains every day and doing time while having committed no crime other than not being able to afford a great lawyer. (I’ve always wanted to write about a public defender–but who wants to read a book where the public defender loses every case?)

Heavy heaving sigh. And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader–I’ll check in with you again tomorrow morning.

I Just Want to Celebrate

…because it’s finally fucking Friday!

Yesterday was…not a great day, really. I was physically tired, but not mentally tired, if that makes sense? The problem is that the physical tired makes it hard for the not-tired brain to focus on anything, and I get kind of punchy, which isn’t really the face I like to show to the world. But my day was okay for the most part. I think the tired primarily came about because of the early return of summer weather to New Orleans. Yes, I know to those of you who do not live here New Orleans always seems brutally hot all of the time, but there are degrees to New Orleans heat, and yes, it usually starts getting hotter in May and yes, the humidity usually is back in May. But it was ninety-five degrees on Wednesday; and even at the hottest part of the dog days of August it rarely gets to that. Usually it hovers somewhere between 88 and 93, but it’s the humidity that makes it so awful. Also, I’ve been more active this week than usual. I did Ellen’s book launch on Sunday evening, I had that ZOOM meeting on Wednesday night, and I had drinks with a friend in from out of town before the ZOOM meeting. So, that was a lot more of social interaction than I am accustomed to, and instead of going home from work Wednesday night (the way I usually do) and collapsing into my chair while going into a Youtube wormhole of some sort, I didn’t get to relax until after nine pm.

That is not my norm.

I stopped on the way home last night to get some things at the grocery store, and then spent some time doing some kitchen chores (since I had drinks with a friend before the ZOOM meeting, I had to move everything off the kitchen counters, shove it all in the laundry room, and then closed the doors so no one could see it; and the dishes in the sink had to be organized so nothing could be seen from the camera on the computer; I never realized having my work station in the kitchen would turn out to be so problematic, but I couldn’t have foreseen ZOOM in the summer of 2005 when we moved into the Lost Apartment, either) before collapsing into my easy chair to wait for Paul to get home.

So, there I was, minding my own business, watching first Superman and Lois before The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (I have tuned back in for this season, I have thoughts) and occasionally checking social media and my emails when…I got a notification on Twitter. I clicked to see this tweet from Katrina Niidas Holm:

GREG HERREN!!! You wrote a book so damn good, it got nominated twice! Congratulations, @scottynola! Hope you’ll remember us Pogues when…

(‘Pogues’ being an Outer Banks reference, a show she and her husband Chris–buy his Child Zero, available now and amazing–convinced me to watch with the result Paul and I fell in love with the show, too)

I literally had no idea what she was talking about and gave my usual intelligent response of wait what? at which point she linked to this year’s Anthony Award nominees. Bury Me in Shadows was nominated not only for Best Paperback/Ebook/Audio Original, but also for Best Children’s/Young Adult.

TWO NOMINATIONS FOR THE SAME BOOK IN DIFFERENT CATEGORIES.

I am still in shock this morning–a delighted shock, to be sure, but it’s still shock. It still hasn’t completely sunken in yet, either. It’s going to take me a hot minute to thank everyone who has tweeted or posted on Facebook their congratulations, as well as to congratulate the ridiculously amazing amount of friends that are also nominated in one of the categories–it really is, overall, a remarkable list with a lot of books nominated that I read and loved loved loved–but what a lovely chore to have, you know? And talk about turning your mood and your day around! So, this morning–needless to say I slept very well last night–I am sipping my coffee and riding the high a bit still. At some point I’ll need to make sure I thank everyone and congratulate everyone else nominated and get through my social media, but right now I am just sitting here at my desk feeling very proud and happy and content while I sip my coffee. Wow. I mean, wow.

I’ve not been in a very good place about my career lately, honestly–any number of things; the problems with getting myself to actually write, not feeling great about what I write when I do write, all the little doubts and insecurities that have built up over a lifetime of wanting to be a writer but getting little to no encouragement from anyone, really. It all kinds of builds up sometimes, and anything–no matter how small or inconsequential–will trigger it and send me spiraling down into the Pit of Despair. As I struggle with my schedule and all the things I need and want to get done, with a to-do list that seems to grow like the Hydra, with two new things to do replacing every single task that gets scratched off the list, this was precisely the right time to get this kind of reassurance from my community, my wonderful crime fiction world, and I’ll always be grateful for this. Bury Me in Shadows was a very hard book for me to write, emotionally; but digging deep into the issues I dealt with in the book–and that emotional difficulty–made it a better book, I think.

Wow. I mean, wow.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful Friday, Constant Reader.

Ruby Tuesday

Tuesday and back into the office, which means I am awake waaaaaaay too early for my liking.

Sleep wasn’t great last night–yesterday was a very trying day, to say the least–and so I didn’t expect to sleep particularly well to begin with, and well, I was correct. I don’t feel groggy or tired right now, but I am sure will hit a wall big time later this afternoon. I’m not entirely sure it was that bad of a night’s sleep; I just know I woke up several times during the night and each time had trouble falling back asleep. But the coffee this morning is going down well, and I feel awake in a way, if a little physically tired still. But I shall make it through this day, I am going to power through and get things done. Yesterday I did manage to get work done–even if it wasn’t the greatest–but it was something.

I also got some bad news that I had to process–still processing, really–but life goes on, you know? The world doesn’t stop turning and you still have to go to work, pay your bills, and so forth. Scooter needs to be fed, and his litter box needs to be cleaned, and wallowing in bad news doesn’t get the dishes cleaned or the mail picked up or my clients seen. Or my stories written and edited and so on and so forth. The news did kind of derail me from finishing that short story that was due yesterday, but that’s life and it’s not the first deadline I’ve missed for an anthology or short story call. And at least I got more of the story written–and it could, if I can figure out the middle, be a really good one should I ever finish it.

So that’s something, at any rate.

Last night we caught up on Gaslit (Julia Roberts is really killing the role of Martha Mitchell, and I’m not a big fan of hers, either) and The Baby (a truly bizarre show) and started watching another show whose name I cannot recall right now–which is probably an indication of my brain fog from lack of sleep last night. (Although according to my fitbit I had a much better than average sleep last night, go figure.) Oh, yes, Tokyo Vice, starring Ansel Elgort. The first episode didn’t do much for me, but the story began picking up in the second episode and so we’re probably going to continue watching. The thing about Gaslit –asides from being yet another 1970s set television program–is that as we watched Paul kept saying, “were they really this stupid?” and I had to keep replying, “yes, they actually were this stupid, which is why they got caught. And it was all completely unnecessary–if I’m not mistaken, he won at least 48 states.” Idiot. And really, the country has never completely recovered from Watergate, either; the damage to public trust in our institutions has never been restored, which is part of the reason the country is in the shape it’s in now. Ironically, it was the Republican party responsible for Watergate–and then later they became the “you can’t trust the government” party. Coincidence? Or a pattern?

Definitely pattern.

I’ve not decided what I am going to read next, either. I am having to head up to Kentucky for Memorial Day weekend, so I will be trying to decide what to listen to on the drive up and back, and I also should be able to get some reading in while I am up there. I have a lot of great books on deck–my TBR stack(s) are literally to die for, seriously–which makes the deciding that much harder for me to deal with and make final decisions. But I need to start clearing books out again–an endless struggle–and—and—and–yeah, I have a lot to do. Tonight I am going to turn in the Bouchercon anthology and start diving into my edits on my book, which is going to make it a lot stronger than it currently is; obviously my preference would be to have that finished before I drive up there a week from Thursday (it’s incredibly difficult for me to get much writing work done while I am on a trip) but we’ll see. (Ironically, I still had the submission call for that short story open on my browser tabs and they’ve pushed it back a week so in theory at least I could get that story done as there is more time now…we’ll see how it goes. I am in such a dark space this morning I can’t really picture getting anything done here or in time. Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that cheery note, I am heading into the spice mines. Talk to you tomorrow, Constant Reader, and I hope your Tuesday is as lovely as you are.

Easy Loving

Monday morning and I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. I have so much to get done this week it’s kind of overwhelming, to be honest; and the temptation to just stay in bed for the rest of my life and avoid the world was kind of really powerful this morning. Yet the world stops turning for no man, let alone a Gregalicious, so there was naught for me to do other than arise, do my morning ablutions, and start drinking coffee. I did sleep fairly well, despite the enormous stress of a to-do list with incredibly lengthy chores and projects to work on, and feel pretty well rested this morning–if not quite up to dealing with the world at large.

Ellen Byron’s book launch last night was marvelous. I was delighted to see she had a very good turnout and sold a lot of books–and she is the QUEEN of swag. I for once didn’t have stage fright–I knew Ellen would be warm and witty and wise and funny; all I had to do was lob some questions at her and she was off and running (she did try to deflect attention back to me a couple of times, but I was ready to turn the spotlight right back on her after a brief answer and succeeded each time). The book itself is lovely, too; you want to get a copy of Bayou Book Thief, especially if you’re a fan of traditional mysteries. The cover is gorgeous, and it’s a fun story with a likable main character and a likable supporting cast, and Ellen’s adoration of New Orleans spills over on every page–and what more can a New Orleanophile ask for? I also picked up a copy of The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (I saw it and remembered someone recommending it to me a while back, so I grabbed it immediately) and a copy of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, which I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time now (since Camus was inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice for his own novel, I thought it only made sense for me to finally read the Camus)–I can never walk into a bookstore and not walk out with more than I intended to buy when I walked in (I had only intended to get a copy of Ellen’s finished book; I read a pdf) but that was fine–I wanted both books and let’s face it, I am always going to buy books at every opportunity, but it is time for me to start donating books to the library again.

I am not familiar with the part of New Orleans where the bookstore is located; Blue Cypress Books is on Oak Street past Carrollton, not far from where Carrollton and Claiborne intersect (and yes, the two streets actually run parallel to each other in my neighborhood; welcome to the wonderful and terribly confusing world of New Orleans’ bizarre geography). I would have, as per my usual, simply driven all the way to Riverbend on St. Charles then turned left on Carrollton…but I decided not to do my usual “this is how I know to get there” thing and used Google maps. Interestingly enough, Google maps took me on to Highway 90 then I-10 before getting off at the Carrollton exit in front of Costco and going that way…and it was faster–a lot faster, which I still kind of can’t wrap my mind around, but then again that’s New Orleans geography for you; my mind always thinks in terms of grids where everything runs north and south or east and west, and that isn’t New Orleans. The only actual grid design to anywhere in this city is the French Quarter–and only the French Quarter, at that. I have lived here twenty-six years and still get confused and mystified by how geography works here…which is one of the reasons I think people believe New Orleans is magical and mystical. Where else does geography make no sense other than here?

After I got home, we finished watching The Outlaws, which we really enjoyed, and started watching Gaslit. Julia Roberts is killing it as Martha Mitchell–I’d really forgotten a lot about her, but she was kind of a celebrity at the time, more so than the wife of Attorney General could ever hope to be, frankly–and she was enormously popular; everyone liked Martha Mitchell, because you never really knew what she was going to say next, which naturally didn’t sit well with the president of the time, Richard Nixon. (And again with a show set in the 1970s; sensing a theme–Minx, Candy, Gaslit–all set in the 1970s as a reminder to us all just how awful the 1970s actually were…pay attention, everyone. There’s a reason you never want to turn the clock back, or bring an era back.) I’d actually forgotten about Martha Mitchell–she’s often left out of books I’ve read about Watergate–and she was actually kind of an important cultural figure of the time. If the Nixon idea was to erase her from history, it kind of worked. The 1970s was definitely an odd decade.

As I was lying in bed dreading getting up and facing the world today, I thought, I would really love to have a vacation, you know. A week where I didn’t have a deadline to meet, or go into the office, or really do anything at all other than relax and read and watch movies or television shows I’ve not had a chance to see. It’s been a hot minute, and most of the traveling I actually do tends to be writing related in some way, which means it’s not really a vacation but a work trip. I don’t think I’ve actually had a vacation-vacation since we went to Italy, and that was eight long years ago. We’re talking about possibly going to Puerto Rico or some place in Central America (Costa Rica, if anywhere), but I think it’s past time…although I could also use some time off to stay home and get the Lost Apartment into some semblance of order, a Sisyphean task if there ever was one.

I didn’t finish my short story–the deadline was today and I know there’s no way I can get it finished in time to email off by midnight tonight, particularly since there would be little to no time to revise and/or edit it. It’s a shame, but at least the story is further along at about just over a thousand words than it was at less than two hundred; it’s a great idea but I’m basically stuck in the middle. I know how it ends, I just don’t know how to get it there, so letting it sit for a while is definitely in order. I did start writing the new Scotty yesterday–don’t get excited, I literally wrote maybe 175 words of the prologue; I found the book opening I wanted to spoof (Pride and Prejudice) and since I didn’t want to forget, I started writing it and it flowed along for another hundred words or so before I ran out of steam. The Scotty prologues are always the hardest part of the book for me to write; they are basically a recap of Scotty’s life thus far to get a new reader caught up without having to go back and read the first eight (!) books in the series as well as not spoiling the first eight books in the series should the reader decide to go back and actually read the first eight books in the series. (Something I actually need to do before I really dig in and start writing this thing…I really need to do the Scotty Series Bible and get that done so I have an easy reference without having to page through the books or do a search in the ebooks) I also did some research over the weekend for the book, which entailed rereading two Nancy Drew mysteries, The Ghost of Blackwood Hall and The Haunted Showboat (both books bring Nancy and her friends to New Orleans/Louisiana) and oh, yes, that bit of research definitely triggered a blog post which I started writing yesterday after I got ready for the event and was waiting for it to be the right time to leave. I kind of slam Nancy Drew in the post–but the truth is, despite my obsessive collecting of Nancy Drew books (trying to get the entire original series, with the yellow spines) I never actually liked the books all that much. (Same with the Hardy Boys.) While I appreciate the two series for their popularity and for getting kids to read (and to read mysteries) neither series was ever my favorite–but once I started reading and collecting, I had to keep reading and collecting because I am obsessive–and that obsession with collecting the books, while slightly tempered as I’ve gotten much older (and don’t have a place to display the collection), still exists. (Periodically I do think about emptying a bookcase and refilling it with my kids’ series books; it’s always satisfying for me to see them on the shelves. And yes, I know how weird that sounds.)

And now back into the spice mines with me. Y’all have a lovely Monday, okay?