Category: chores

Everything About You

Saturday morning. A good night’s sleep had me up earlier than I would have thought this morning, but I feel rested and good; I was exhausted last night for some reason; Friday, perhaps? I don’t know. But I feel good this morning, I only have one errand to run–which is the grocery store, and I’ll try to get that out of the way momentarily–and some cleaning and organizing needs to be done. I also need to do some writing and editing today; yesterday I was too tired to work on the Scotty revision when I got home, so I need to get caught up on that today.

GEAUX TIGERS!

LSU plays their fifth ranked opponent today, Mississippi State. The Bulldogs roll into Tiger Stadium tonight ranked 22nd in the country. They have some nice wins under their belt, and some losses to quality teams–last week they surprised Auburn–and so this is by no means going to be an easy game for LSU. There could be a let down after last week’s huge, physical win over Georgia; Mississippi State is going to come in hungry; and LSU has to be careful not to be over-confident, must stay focused, and try not to look ahead to the big Alabama game in two weeks–which won’t be as important should LSU lose to Mississippi State. I will undoubtedly be extremely tense during the game, but am going to try my best not to get overwrought and overly involved in the game. It’s supposed to be fun to watch for Christ’s sake.

I also have some reading to do, and some editing that needs to get done, and an author interview I need to get started. My intent is to clean out my email inbox before leaving for the grocery store, as well as get some morning cleaning done here in the kitchen/office. My day job is moving at the end of this month, and I will no longer, in the new building, have my own office; I shall be in a cubicle like everyone else–and so have had to empty the bookcases in my office as well as take down all the pictures from my walls. I do not have the wall-space here in the Lost Apartment to adorn my walls with these pictures–mostly of our trip to Italy–and I’ve been trying to squeeze the books in wherever I can, which for obvious reasons has not been easy to do.

I’m still reading Empire of Sin, and am hoping to get further along in that this weekend as well; it may be in my lap during the game tonight. My reading has slowed down dramatically; and I still haven’t done a blog entry about Alice Bolin’s Dead Girls. Maybe later today.

I finished watching season three of The Man in the High Castle last night, and by far and away, this third season is the best of the show so far. It is interesting to me how well they’ve done with the character of John Smith, an American who fought against the Axis during the lost war and has switched sides, climbing the ladder in the American nazi hierarchy and also being groomed for leadership by Himmler himself. Underplayed beautifully by Rufus Sewell, the personal journey of this monster has sort of humanized him–which is, in and of itself, terrifying; this man is a monster and the antithesis of a patriotic American; everything a true American patriot would despise–and yet, those personal problems and tragedies and little heartbreaks in his family life make him almost win the audience’s sympathies…then he does something monstrous and you remember, there are no good Nazis. This show, and its message, are particularly real and powerful and important, given these times in which we live.

In the early 1990’s, I has an idea for a dystopian series of novels, built around the collapse of the American republic and the rise of a totalitarian state in its place; which I was going to call There Comes a Tide. I have all my notes and ideas in a folder somewhere, which means I might take a look at them sometime soon and see if it’s something I want to write in the next year or so. I have a y/a on deck to write after I finish the Scotty revision, and I am also going to be working on the WIP in the meantime as well; I kind of wanted to try writing a cozy after the first of the year and I also have a noir I want to write, in addition to a paranormal suspense thriller I’ve been toying with the last few months. There’s simply never enough time to write everything I want to write, and all the procrastination doesn’t help.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I’ve also decided to pull a long story from my collection and replace it with two shorter stories; the longer story will probably go up as a Kindle single at some point, and I also am in the midst of another long story that will probably turn into a Kindle single as well: “Never Kiss a Stranger.” I’ve recognized that story needs to be longer but it’s not enough of a story to be a novel…and there’s always Kindle single.

And now, back to the spice mines. I need to wash the bed linens, put some dishes away, get these floors cleaned, organize and file….and stop procrastinating.

Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader!

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Warm It Up

Well, the weekend turned out to be a total bust as far as getting anything writing-wise accomplished; this means I didn’t actually sit down at the desk and revise or write. I did scribble ideas in my journal, though, which while not counting as actual work, does count as something. I did manage to get the apartment cleaned during the LSU-Georgia game on Saturday (GEAUX TIGERS!) but on Sunday, I relapsed a bit into whatever-it-was I had last week; fevers came and went along with headaches and some nausea, some post-nasal drip. So, I curled up in the easy chair, covered myself with a blanket, and finished watching The Haunting of Hill House.

I will say that I thought the finale was a bit of a disappointment, but I thoroughly enjoyed this show. I knew going into the final episode that it would most likely be disappointing; the ending is not something Shirley Jackson would have written or done, and up until that moment, the show had done an excellent job of channeling Jackson. It was thoroughly involving from the very first moment, the writing was superb, the production values excellent, and the acting perfectly en pointe. It was chilling, eerie, creepy and terrifying; everything I would want from a Jackson adaptation. The show also had a lot of shout-outs to the original and to Jackson–I loved where in one scene one of the kids was reading The Lottery–and actually gives me hope that the film adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle might be good.

So much of Jackson’s brilliance was about the internal, not the external–which is what the people involved with the hideous 1999 remake of The Haunting got so completely wrong. And while in Jackson’s novel you never see and never know what is haunting Hill House, seeing some of it in this mini-series didn’t spoil it in the least; it was done minimally, and in such a way that added to the creepiness.

But this morning I feel better. My head feels clear, my sinuses aren’t full, there’s no drip going on in the back of my throat, and I don’t feel feverish. So I am hopeful that the whatever-that-was is over and done with, history, archived, collecting dust in the file rooms. And that I can focus this week on getting the things done that I need to get done.

Here’s hoping, anyway.

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People Everyday

Hulu is streaming a two-part true crime documentary about a string of unsolved murders of women in Jefferson Davis Parish, Murder in the Bayou. I have a copy of Ethan Brown’s book of the same title, released a few years ago, but haven’t read it yet (instead, it’s sits on a shelf in the mini-bookcase to the right of my desk, where I also keep other nonfiction–histories, true crime, cultural studies–about both New Orleans and Louisiana; books which I delve into periodically in order to come up with ideas for stories (novels and short stories and novellas, etc.), or background for the same. (One of the many reasons I laugh when people refer to me as ‘a New Orleans expert’ is because I am everything but an expert on the city; there are literally hundreds of volumes of reference books information about New Orleans I’ve not read and know nothing about)  Mr. Brown came to the Tennessee Williams Festival a few years ago, but I didn’t get to meet him or see any of his panels, but I did pick up his book that weekend.

So, you can imagine my surprise the other night when I opened the Hulu app on my television (ten years ago that sentence would have been as unintelligible to me as Latin) and I saw it listed as a show I might be interested in. “Huh,” I thought, clicking on it, “I wonder if this is the same story as the book I’ve not read?”

Sure enough, it was.

I finished watching the show yesterday afternoon, and then of course, got the book from the bookshelf and started reading it…and didn’t stop until I was finished. I hadn’t intended to do that; I actually started writing this post after I finished watching the documentary series and simply reached over to the bookcase and pulled it out–mainly to see if there were photographs in it–many true crime books do–and since it didn’t, I started reading…and then couldn’t stop. I’ll talk some more about both the documentary and the book in another entry; I want to think about it some more, and the issues that came to mind while watching/reading–but again, as I said earlier, it was yet another example of how little I know about not just New Orleans, but Louisiana in general. As I read more New Orleans history, and get to know my city better with each read, I find myself expanding my former-tunnel vision view focusing on New Orleans only to expand out into Louisiana as well. It’s a truly fascinating state, really–as someone said in the documentary, there are three Louisianas: New Orleans; north Louisiana; which is really part of the Protestant Bible Belt and could just as easily be part of Arkansas; and south Louisiana, which is overwhelmingly French and Catholic; heavily Cajun, in all honesty. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Atchafalaya basin, too; I sort of have an idea about writing about that area. Most of my Louisiana fiction has been confined to writing about New Orleans, or places on the I-10 corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and sometimes dabbling on the North Shore. I am sure every state has just as rich and diverse and colorful a history as Louisiana/New Orleans; but I also don’t live there, and Louisiana with its strange mix of Creoles, Cajuns, Spanish, and Americans, with the attendant cultures, brews up a strange and endlessly fascinating gumbo.

I realized also yesterday while going through my blog drafts that I have never published my blog entry about reading Gary Krist’s Empire of Sin, which was what sent me down the Louisiana/New Orleans history rabbit hole in the first place.

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“The crime,” as detectives would later tell the newspapers, was “one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”

At five a.m. on the sultry morning of May 23, 1918, the bodies of Joseph and Catherine Maggio, Italian immigrants who ran a small grocery store in a remote section of the city, were found sprawled across the disordered bedroom of the living quarters behind their store. Both had been savagely attacked, apparently while they slept. Joseph Maggio lay face-up on the blood-sodden bed, his skull split by a deep, jagged gash several inches long; Catherine Maggio, her own skull nearly hewn in two, was stretched out on the floor beneath him. Each victim’s throat had been slashed with a sharp instrument.

A blood-smeared ax and shaving razor–obviously the murder weapons–had been found on the floor nearby.

The book opens with an examination of the strange case of New Orleans’ most famous serial killer: the Axeman. Julie Smith wrote an entire novel  based in the story called The Axeman’s Jazz; it might be the second or third Skip Langdon novel. Poppy Z. Brite wrote a short story with the same name, and of course, American Horror Story: Coven also included the Axeman in its litany of past New Orleans horrors–in the Ryan Murphy version, he stumbled into the Robicheaux School for Girls (read: witches) and they killed him; his ghost haunting the house ever since. The mystery of the Axeman’s identity, of course, has never been solved–as well as the why.

Empire of Sin, however, isn’t about the Axeman entirely; it’s really a history of the Storyville district (again, another notorious part of New Orleans history, probably best known for its appearance in the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby, which probably, with its creepy pedophilia, wouldn’t hold up too well today), and really focuses on the man known as the mayor of Storyville, Tom Anderson, who rose to great wealth, notoriety, and political power through his successful bordellos there–even going so far as to providing the district with its own police force. It’s a story of immorality, the struggle between reformers trying to turn New Orleans into a city free from sin (they won small victories but New Orleans remains New Orleans to this day) and Anderson’s struggle against those “virtuous reforms.” He eventually failed, and Storyville was shut down, but Krist tells a fascinating story, extrapolating his tale of Storyville’s struggle to stay open and functioning (the money being made there brought with it the ability to, of course, buy off the police and politicians), along with the stories of corruption, murder, prostitution, violence and racism extant in the city at the time. It’s also a story of how Storyville also, surprisingly enough, gave birth to jazz music, and provided a way for musicians of color to make a successful living playing music. Storyville was the incubator that provided sustenance to the musicians playing this new form of popular music, enabling them to make a living while developing a wholly American form of music.

Reading Empire of Sin is what sent me down the road to reading history, as I said before, and as I love history, it also made me aware of just how little about New Orleans I actually do know. Discovering little throwaway bits in the book–that there were male prostitutes who serviced men with “more exotic tastes”–reminded me of how frequently, and almost completely, queer history has been successfully erased, and that made me start thinking about, well, doing something more about it. Reading this book inspired two short stories I’ve not finished–“The Blues before Dawn” and “A Little More Jazz for the Axeman”–and also inspired a potential series set during the time. It’s also what gave me the idea for my collection of noir/crime/horror stories that I want to write, Monsters of New Orleans.

I cannot recommend Empire of Sin highly enough.

One

GEAUX TIGERS!

Yes, second ranked Georgia rolls into Tiger Stadium today to take on the twelfth-ranked Tigers, reeling from the first loss last week at Florida. I’m trying not to get to invested in the stakes of the game; I just want the Tigers to play better than they did last week and be competitive. I want them to win, I will be rooting them on–but I will also likely be cleaning and keeping myself occupied to handle the nerves.

Sigh.

I slept in this morning–I did wake up around seven, but chose to stay in bed for another hour, before finally getting up and getting a load of laundry started. I feel extremely well-rested this morning; which is absolutely lovely. I have a lot of cleaning and organizing to do today in order to clear my plate so tomorrow can be all about writing and editing and reading. I am greatly enjoying Empire of Sin; it’s giving me all kinds of ideas about stories to write and maybe even a novel or two…I’ll probably read Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter next.

Lisa Morton once suggested that I do a New Orleans version of her book Monsters of LA. I am thinking that might just be something I can do, now that I’m reading all this New Orleans history.

I also started streaming the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House last night; I got through the first two episodes, which I greatly enjoyed. I was tempted to watch  yet a third but stopped myself as it was getting late. There’s been, since the trailers for the show dropped, a lot of anger and disgust from Shirley Jackson fans as well as horror fans, since obviously the show was going to be different from the novel, and why does this even need to be? Well, I am a huge fan of both Jackson AND this particular novel; one of my proudest moments was when Night Shadows was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. (I love the rock I got for being a finalist.) The show is good. It didn’t have to be Hill House; it didn’t have to be The Haunting of Hill House, but that’s what it is, and it is inevitable, as such, that it’s going to be compared to the original. Jackson’s structure is there; Hill House, the Crain family, the Dudleys; even some of the things that happen in the book happen in the show. It’s being told in a parallel structure; when the Crains moved into Hill House, a young couple with five children, ostensibly to renovate the house and flip it. Something horrible happened while they lived there, and the parallel story being told in modern times is about the Crains today; all five of the kids grown up into severely damaged adults. The children are Steve, Shirley, Theo, Nell, and Luke–the names of the characters from the novels plus the novelist’s name–and the parallel story structure works. The performances are good, and I also like the concept–it’s very Stephen King’s It, because clearly they are all going to have to return to Hill House and face not only the house but their own demons. As I watched and began to understand the story structure, I also thought to myself, ah, this is a great direction modern horror is going in; not only dealing with the paranormal elements but the also dealing with the psychological aspects of having dealt with something so traumatic as a child. It reminded me somewhat of Paul Tremblay’s novel A Head Full of Ghosts in that way. I am really looking forward to continuing to watch and see how it plays out. I don’t see how this can become a regular series…but then again Netflix turned Thirteen Reasons Why into a multi-season show and the second season just wasn’t very good.

I’m also still watching season three of The Man in the High Castle, which is sooooo good. The first season was terrific, the second kind of mess, but they’ve really hit their stride in Season 3.

And now, I have laundry to fold, dishes to put away, spice to mine.

Have a lovely lovely Saturday, everyone.

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All I Want

Today is the first time I’ve felt human all week.

I don’t know if I am completely over being sick yet, but I don’t feel bad and I don’t feel faverish and nothing aches, so I am considering this a win and that I’ve weathered whatever flu-ey type thing this was that descended, unwanted and uninvited, on me last Sunday. I am also hoping that I can make it through this day without getting sick again, and of course, now it’s the weekend and I can recover over the next two days and catch up on everything that’s lingered and slid this week.

Here’s hoping, at any rate.

LSU plays second-ranked Georgia this weekend in Death Valley; I imagine I am going to get a lot of cleaning done Saturday afternoon. Ceiling fans, windows, baseboards…maybe even sweeping dust off the walls.  There is no Saints game on Sunday–this is the bye week–so I should be able to spend the day writing, reading, editing and perhaps doing some cleaning; and maybe even make an appearance at the gym. Now that my sleep has returned to what I used to consider normal–waking up every morning just before seven–there’s no reason I can’t go back to what I used to do; answer email, write blog entries, do some writing, go to the gym–on the days when I don’t come to the office until later in the day; and on the days when I get off work early I can also go to the gym in the evening. The key is to not give in to the laziness and the inertia of doing nothing and once I get things moving, and get into a more regular routine, I can make a habit of it. I also need to focus on eating better; I think I lost a few pounds while I was sick.

I’ve also not worked on anything the last few days while sick, so I also need to start getting caught back up on everything again, since I am now behind. Heavy heaving sigh.

But I started reading Gary Krist’s wonderful Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle of Modern New Orleans. I just finished reading about the murder of Police Chief Hennessy and the lynching of the accused Italians–horrific, and horrifying–and have just gotten to the part where, in an effort to clean up New Orleans, the city decided to restrict prostitution to a small area–Storyville.

Seriously. I could get lost in New Orleans history research for the rest of my life and die there, happy.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Good for Me

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

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

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

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

 

 

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She’s Playing Hard to Get

GEAUX TIGERS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2 Legit 2 Quit

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

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

Or so I hope.

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

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

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

So many decisions to be made.

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

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

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Stay

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

Either that, or the finale simply made no sense.

Which is, I suppose, a possibility.

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

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

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

And the Saints won!

And now back to the spice mines.

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The One

Saturday! GEAUX TIGERS!

The Tigers are playing Ole Miss tonight in Tiger Stadium; this is a rivalry game (like so many of LSU’s games; how in the hell did that ever happen?) of which, of course, the most famous is the Halloween Night game when both were undefeated, LSU ranked Number One and Ole Miss number three–that fabled night when Billy Cannon ran a punt back and won the game for LSU, 7-3 (often forgotten is the goal line stand made by the LSU defense as time ran out). A few years back, during one of the down years for LSU, Ole Miss rolled into Tiger Stadium undefeated and ranked Number 3 in the country, and looked like they had the West division of the SEC wrapped up, having already beaten Alabama…and lost, 10-7. They lost again after that, to Auburn, but even with the Auburn loss a win over LSU would have tied them with Alabama in the West and they would have gone to Atlanta for the championship, and maybe even had a shot at the national title.

Okay, I guess I can understand why they hate us…GEAUX TIGERS!

Paul’s and my first game at Death Valley was the Ole Miss game in 2010; we were also there for the game in 2012. Both were thrillers and came down to the last minute; but of course, you know how they turned out as Paul and I have never seen the Tigers lose in person.

So, I decided to make today my day off from doing any writing. I have a business call tomorrow regarding the Bouchercon board and my duties there, so I’ve decided to clean and write and do everything that I need to get worked on tomorrow. (I may do some writing today too; I work up early and feel really rested, so there’s that–but I think I’d rather focus on cleaning and reading Circe today around football game watching.)  I also have a big announcement coming up sometime next week–nothing to do with writing or books, but still pretty cool, I think–so keep an eye out for that, won’t you?

I need to make a to-do list for this weekend. The kitchen is a mess, and I’m going to use my new vacuum cleaner on the downstairs–I also want to see if I can fix the old one, so we can have one upstairs and down. I need to wash the bed linens today, and I also want to reread the chapters I’ve revised on the Scotty book so far. It would be lovely to revise another three chapters this weekend, or even push myself to get all the way to Chapter Ten. There’s lots of filing and organizing to do; a load of dishes in the dishwasher that need to be put away,  a load in the dryer that needs to be sorted and folded, and all sorts of odds and ends need doing. Sigh.

It would be so nice to have a weekend where I could just curl up in my easy chair with book after book after book.

But alas, it is not to be, and I just need to buckle down and get things done. Make a list and start marking things off as I go, which is ever so satisfying.

So, on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Saturday all, and GEAUX TIGERS!

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