Category: college football

Go Your Own Way

Lovin’ you, isn’t the right thing to do…

Wednesday and pay-the-bills day. Yesterday–the return to the office–wasn’t terrific. My back hurt in the morning to the point where standing up and moving around was incredibly painful, even with the generic Ben-Gay slathered liberally over my lower back. I used my back massage-roller thing Monday night and it helped, but for whatever reason yesterday morning when I got to work I was in extreme pain. I hate this for me, frankly. One of my co-workers stopped by my desk and saw the tube of store-brand Ben-Gay sitting on my desk and said, “oh, I thought I smelled Ben-Gay” (technically incorrect) and I replied, “Yes, I now officially smell like old man. Yay for me.”

I also realized I didn’t pick up a copy of my own Bouchercon anthology while I was there. Seriously, how DO I still have a career?

My back is still achy this morning–I’ve used the back roller and did some stretches, and it feels somewhat better than it did yesterday–but I am going to bring the heating pad to work with me this morning and see how that goes. I hate this, seriously. But the improvement from yesterday is significant–I don’t wince when I move this morning, at least not yet–and so I will go on hoping that this will gradually clear up and not become a more permanent thing. I somehow managed to get through my work day yesterday despite the back pain and despite the extreme tiredness I was feeling, even managed to make groceries (insanely expensive, I might add) on my way home. Once I got home, I retired to my easy chair and the heating pad and just kind of vegetated while Scooter slept in my lap until Paul got home. (I did watch the first episode of The Serpent Queen while I waited for him; it’s really quite good, and of course, I’ve always been fascinated by Catherine de Medici–one of these days I am going to write a book about her ‘flying squadron’, beautiful young women she trained to seduce men and get secrets out of; how fun of a book would that be?) I was going to start reading the next Donna Andrews, or reread the Scotty work I’ve already done, but I suspect–not entirely incorrectly–that I am going to be very tired most of this week and as such probably won’t get around to doing a whole lot of writing or creating this week as I dig out from under with everything–I’m not even remotely finished with my emails, and may never be–and there are some odds and ends I need to get finished in the meantime.

I really need to make a to-do list this morning and get it all together. As always after a trip, I feel rather disconnected from my life again this morning (this week, really) and it inevitably takes me a couple of days to recalibrate back to my regular life (oh how I wish my mystery conference life was my regular life!) and start figuring out what needs to be done. Costco, of course, and a regular making groceries run (not just the scattershot drive-by I did yesterday on the way home from work); and of course, it IS Pay-the-Bills Day (hurray). Heavy heaving sigh. I also have short stories promised to people, methinks, that I need to get back to work on. There really is no end to being a Gregalicious, is there? Heavy HEAVING sigh.

The high from the weekend is also starting to wear off a little bit, but it was a very lovely reminder of why I love my genre community. I met some writers whom I really admire (Attica Locke, Karen Dionne, Eli Cranor, among many others) and got to hang out with dear friends and as I said, laughed and laughed until I actually ached from laughing, which is really quite marvelous. I think I am definitely going to go to Crime Bake in November up in Boston (suburbs); I won’t be traveling quite as often or as regularly next year, alas, but am hoping to make it to Malice in April and then of course, Bouchercon rolls around again in the fall in San Diego. I’ve not really looked into what games are this weekend–I know LSU plays Mississippi State at night in Death Valley, which gives me most of the day to errand and clean and all of that lovely stuff–and I am not sure when the Saints game is on Sunday (noon, probably, but who knows?) and so hopefully I won’t spend the weekend vegetating (all of the time at any rate), but you never know. I do need some down time to recuperate, so I may just have Costco delivered and order the groceries for pick-up (I may make a Mississippi roast this weekend, or whatever it is called; I can get a very lovely rump roast at the Fresh Market meat counter).

The weather has been beautiful, too, since we arrived back. This unusual cool September weather is very similar to what it was like up in Minneapolis, and the weather (with the exception of one day) during the weekend was stunningly beautiful; I spent as much time outside as I could do so logically.

And on that note, Constant Reader, I am going to head into the spice mines and get to work. Happy Wednesday, all, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Second Hand News

Labor Day Monday and I have a nice relaxing day ahead of me of writing and reading and who knows what else? We also leave for Minneapolis the day after tomorrow, which is also kind of exciting. I did make a small run to make groceries yesterday and had a small Costco order delivered. I also watched some tennis (Coco Grauff) and then we watched the LSU Game. Jury’s still out; they played very lackadaisically to me, it seemed; not quite gelled as a team yet, but lots of talented players with some kinks to work out yet. They ended up losing 24-23, could have tied and/or won the game at the end, and rallied from 24-10 down in the closing minutes, so that was promising. I am of course disappointed the comeback failed, but at one point it literally looked like we were going to lose 31-17, and that final drive went ninety-nine yards in sixty-five seconds. So, they could continue to improve and get better, which is a good sign. I impatiently was hoping this could be turned around in one year, but….it even took Saban an off-year before turning Alabama into what it is today. It was a fun weekend of football, to be sure, and I am always happier when it’s football season.

I mean, take away the two fumbled punts, the blocked extra point, and the blocked field goal, and LSU would be 1-0 right now.

I am curious to see how the rest of the season shakes out.

I skim-reread Jackson Square Jazz yesterday, and again, I was very pleasantly surprised at how well the book still reads, roughly nineteen years after release, and again–I really did do a great job with the characters. I am writing an entry about it, of course, and then started skim-rereading Mardi Gras Mambo, too. I really wish I could remember what the plot was in the first two failed attempts to write the book, but maybe it’ll come to me while I skim reread, but I rather doubt it; I forgot those original plots years ago. I am glad that reader asked me about the Scotty books, though. I had figured I’d talked about them often enough that Constant Reader didn’t really need me to write the backstories behind the books in this series, but I am having the most wonderful time revisiting the books and remembering the process that produced each one. And these first three are so far back in my distant past that it’s almost like reading new-to-me books; I always wondered if my own work would ever get to that point, and clearly, they have done so. I’m not sure how to feel about it, but I imagine Philip Roth didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his first couple of books, nor did Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, or Erle Stanley Gardner. (Not that I put myself up there with those greats of crime fiction, but you know what I mean.) We write books and we move on from them to write other books, and the farther in the past those old titles get, the more distance I feel from them and the less I remember about them, which makes them much easier to read (at least for me).

And it’s really helping me get back inside Scotty’s brain and his voice, too. Always a bonus, you know?

Today I am going to take it easy but still get things done. I need to write–which I’ve done woefully little of this weekend–and I also need to overhaul the first three chapters of this book before I can move on with it, which should be taken care of today. (I started to do it yesterday but…Coco Grauff was playing!) I also have some other things to get done today–maybe I should make a list of what all I want to get done today; can’t hurt–including making my packing list for the trip (I checked the weather; I think I can get away with taking a sweat jacket with me rather than a coat; every night it’s supposed to dip into the 60’s, which, as we all know, is the dead of winter to me) and some other loose odds and ends. And the skim-rereading of my books is at least getting me to read again–just wait till Wednesday afternoon at the airport though; I’ll be tearing through that Gabino Iglesias novel like it’s going out of style. I don’t think I’ll finish reading the Iglesias, the King, and the Andrews on the trip, but I am taking a book in reserve just in case–A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren. I also need to prep myself for reading only horror in October, the way I do every year; I know there are some Paul Tremblay and Stephen King and Christopher Golden and some other great horror novels sitting there waiting in my TBR Piles. There’s also some great short stories I should read, too. I am sitting on a Daphne du Maurier novella–“A Border-line Case”–and maybe I should spend some time today reading that?

I do love me some du Maurier (reminder to self: reread My Cousin Rachel).

So, we’re basically sitting on today and tomorrow as interim days. I think the house is in good enough shape as is for us to leave without doing some more cleaning, but I always do some cleaning while I am writing. There’s a load of dishes that need doing, and some other picking up and things needing to be put away, but that’s always the case, isn’t it?

And on that note, I am going to make a to-do list, finish those dishes, and head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Labor Day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

7

I’m So Afraid

Sunday morning and there’s an LSU game tonight (GEAUX TIGERS!). There’s no way of knowing how good LSU is going to be this year, so I guess tonight’s the night we find out. I watched some of the games yesterday–Georgia certainly looked impressive, and good for Florida and Ohio State winning their big games yesterday, but again, it’s also too early to know anything for sure. Were the two top-ranked teams from the PAC-12 (Oregon and Utah) overrated, or will they rebound (although that shellacking the Ducks got from Georgia had to sting) to make a play-off run after all? The only thing you can ever be sure of in college football is Alabama will be a contender.

Yesterday was a very good day. We had a downpour and flash flood warning for most of the afternoon, but fortunately I had already run the errand I had to run; this morning I have an errand to run as well, and then i am going to come home and order Costco for delivery (just a few things we need) and I intend to spend the day writing. I spent the day organizing and cleaning (which is always an incredibly pleasant way for me to spend the day) and cleaned out kitchen cabinets in order to throw away a lot of items that I had purchased for single, one-time use and had never used again. My cake carrier, for example; I bought that to carry birthday cakes I’d made to work. I used to make our nurse a red velvet cheesecake for his birthday every year–but he’s left the agency and it is highly unlikely I’ll ever make another cake that needs to be transported; if I do, I guess I can just get another one. I also was throwing away things I don’t use but take up space in the kitchen–the big metal salad mixing bowl, the big plastic salad container, muffin tins, etc.–and then reorganized the shelves and made more room for things. I also cleaned things off the tops of the cabinets. It now looks a lot less cluttered in the kitchen and when I open the cabinets.

There’s still some work to be done on the cabinets, but I feel very good about the progress made yesterday. I also did the floors.

I also spent some time revisiting Bourbon Street Blues yesterday. I didn’t give it a thorough read, more of a skim, but it had been a hot minute since I last read the book and…Constant Reader, it wasn’t bad. The book came out nineteen years ago, and I of course wrote it twenty years ago. It’s had to believe it’s been that long, isn’t it? I wrote it when we lived in the apartment on Sophie Wright Place after we moved back to New Orleans in 2001; it’s the only book I wrote there, because I wrote the next two after we moved onto this property and were living in the carriage house. I also realized that the reason I am so hard on myself when I read my own work is primarily because I have trained my mind over the years to read my stuff critically and editorially, with an eye to revision–and that doesn’t change once the book is actually in print. Bourbon Street Blues is not a bad book at all–there’s even some really clever lines in it. Someone had actually responded to one of my blog posts about the stand alone books that they’d like to see me do the same for the series book; I feel like I may have done that already, but it’s not a bad idea. I need to revisit the Scotty series anyway in order to write the new one (which was part of the reason I picked up Bourbon Street Blues yesterday) and since I have trouble focusing enough to read other people’s work at the moment, why not reread the entire series from start to finish? It certainly can’t hurt.

I have been bemoaning how bad the writing is for this new Scotty book I am writing and yesterday, as I cleaned and organized and reread Bourbon Street Blues, I began to see why precisely the work I’ve already done isn’t good and what precisely was/is wrong with what I’ve already done. The bones are there, of course, and it can be saved, which is what I am going to do today. I know precisely know how to make this book work, how to structure it, how to introduce the new characters and the plots for the book, and it’s a marvelous feeling. After I finish this–and then write my entry on Bourbon Street Blues–I am going to go run that errand, come home and get cleaned up, place the Costco order for delivery, and then dig into redoing the initial three chapters of the book and maybe even dive into another. I also am going to spend some time today with Jackson Square Jazz; I may bring the iPad with me so I can keep reading the Scotty series during Bouchercon–but then again, I have other things I am taking with me to read, too. But those are for the airport and the flights primarily; I can lug my iPad around in my backpack and then between panels or when I am sitting alone in the lobby I can pull it out and scan through another Scotty book quickly. It’s also not a bad idea for me to start working on (at last) pulling together the Scotty Bible I’ve always said I needed to pull together. (I also kind of need to pull together all the information on the Gregiverse; the world in which all of my books are actually set, from Alabama to New Orleans to California to Kansas to Chicago’s suburbs…)

I also have a short story submission I need to look over before sending it in for the blind read–next year’s Bouchercon anthology is the market–but I am not sure I’ll have the time or if I know precisely how to fix it.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. I’d like to have another productive day today, so…lots to do before the LSU game tonight.

And one last time, GEAUX TIGERS!!!

Warm Ways

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment and all is well in the world. Southern Decadence is raging in the French Quarter–if someone would have told me as recently as ten years ago I would have ever reached the point where I didn’t care about going down there and diving into the sea of mostly undressed gay men from all over the country I would have laughed at the absurdity, but one gets older and things and priorities change. Do I have fond memories of years of going and having an amazing time? Absolutely. Do I miss those times? Somewhat, but I am also aware that I am older and that kind of wild-ass partying is too much for my old body to handle anymore.

I slept really well last night, which was a delightful and pleasant surprise. When I got home from the office yesterday–running errands on the way home–I was tired, of course, but still managed to do all the bed linens, get the rest of the laundry done, and did two loads of dishes in the dishwasher. There are still some odds and ends around here that need to be taken care of, but other than that, the Lost Apartment is sort of under control. For now, at any rate.

College football is also back this weekend (GEAUX TIGERS!) with LSU playing tomorrow night in the Super Dome. Monday of course is Labor Day, Tuesday I have to go into the office, and then Wednesday it’s off to Minneapolis. Huzzah! As such I will probably get no writing done at all while I am gone–I’ll be too busy running around everywhere–so it would be nice to make some good progress on everything I am working on this weekend. Of course, the temptation to be lazy and simply spend the weekend relaxing is, of course, always going to be there–will probably win out more often than not–but that’s okay. I am done beating myself up for not working every minute of every day every week of every month of every year. Everyone needs down time, and it’s absurd to think otherwise.

My reading is all picked out for the flights/airport time: Laurie R. King’s Back to the Garden, Donna Andrews’ Round Up The Usual Peacocks, and Gabino Iglesias’ The Devil Takes You Home, if I don’t finish it this weekend, with Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side on deck. I’ll probably get some books while I’m at Bouchercon, too–the book room is always too big of a temptation for me to avoid completely–and I am pretty overall excited about the trip, and neither flight requires getting up at the break of dawn, either, which is lovely. We also got caught up on Bad Sisters last night, a fun show on Apple Plus–but the one I am really looking forward to is The Serpent Queen, as I love me some Catherine de Medici, and I have long wondered why this fascinating, complex and extremely intelligent woman has never been deemed worthy of a film or a television series (it would have been a great role for Bette Davis back in the 1940s; she would have chewed the scenery like nobody’s business and gotten another Oscar nomination).

This morning’s coffee, by the way, is da bomb. Delicious and hitting the spot, which tells me yet again that I slept incredibly well.

I am feeling particularly good this morning, which is also nice. It’s always nice when you feel rested. Oh! I’ve also been invited to speak on a podcast about Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which gives me an excellent excuse to reread it!

Alert Constant Readers will have noticed by now that I’ve been making posts about my stand alone novels over the last month or so (maybe just the last couple of weeks? I am not sure of anything anymore and I certainly don’t trust my memories); I am currently working on Timothy and The Orion Mask, after which I will most likely move on to some of the pseudonymous work I’ve done–the Todd Gregory novels, for example–but I should also, in honor of Southern Decadence, talk about Bourbon Street Blues this weekend; but I’ve already done plenty of writing and talking about Scotty and how he came to be, and how I came to write the book and where the idea for it came from, so I’m not entirely sure there’s anything left to say about Scotty and Bourbon Street Blues that I haven’t already said; I’m sure I just don’t remember everything I’ve written on my blog about that book. But it won’t hurt to revisit the book; I know there are some things about the books I’ve never talked about before. but we shall have to see.

And then should I do the short stories? The novellas? Why not? It is my blog, after all, and I can do whatever I please with it, can’t I?

And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee before heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in again later.

My Heart

Ah, the Thursday before Labor Day weekend and all is quiet in the Lost Apartment…at least until Scooter realizes I’ve gotten out of bed and comes galloping down the steps to demand, rather loudly, that I fetch his breakfast.

Wow, one week from today I’ll be waking up at Bouchercon and getting ready for my first panel. I’m not getting excited about the trip just yet, but I suspect that will get started over this weekend. I was realizing yesterday that I have Labor Day off, work Tuesday, and then am off the rest of next week…why didn’t I take Tuesday off as well? Seems kind of silly to work one day, but I was trying to conserve my vacation time, I think, because I didn’t know if I would have enough earned by the time of my November trips. And of course now it’s too late. Ah, well, there are worse things than having to work on that Tuesday, really, and it won’t kill me, and why not save the vacation time for use at another time?

I see that WordPress has yet again changed the way it looks when you’re drafting an entry, and I don’t like it. I will never understand the need to continually change things that are simply cosmetic for no other reason than to make a change, you know? It’s already irritating enough they don’t have a font that I like–would it really kill them to have Times New Roman? I know my personal favorite Janson is too much to ever hope for, really–that’s never standard anywhere. Ah, well, this is what happens when you get older and get sick and tired of things changing. Excuse me while I go outside at scream at the clouds.

I worked on the book some when I got home from work last night, and it’s astonishing how bad my first drafts can be. I think this is where some of the Imposter Syndrome comes from–writing such phenomenally shitty first drafts–and to be completely honest about it, it’s always, for some reason, the series books that turn out so bad for me every time in the first draft. The stand alone books, for some reason, have much better first drafts than the Scotty books. But it’s getting there, and eventually I’ll have a first draft done that I can agonize over and change and revise and fix and make stronger.

I also watched the incredibly exciting second round match of Serena Williams at the US Open last night, in which she took out the Number 2 player in the world in three sets. She played fantastic–and so did her opponent, for whom I felt a bit sorry, given the way she completely collapsed in her final service game of the match, in which she didn’t win a single point (I think). Serena looked like the Serena of old; the level of play was astonishing. I don’t know how far into the draw she is going to make it on this last US Open of her storied and legendary career, but as I said to Paul, “this kind of reminds me of that final run Jimmy Connors made at the Open, which got the whole country excited and watching. I think the entire world is going to pay attention if she gets further into this, but winning the whole thing is probably too Disney-ending to happen, although it would be incredibly satisfying.”

And we get our first look at the 2022 LSU football team this Sunday night, when they take on Florida State. I don’t know what to expect from LSU this year–new coach, almost a complete rebuilding of the coaching staff and the team–so while of course I always want them to win everything, I won’t get down on them this year because of that, but Brian Kelly is a decent coach (I know people say he “can’t win the big game” but he DID win some big games at Notre Dame, and he was enormously successful at Cincinnati before that and at Grand Valley State before that, so who knows?) and LSU always gets top talent when it comes to players, so you never know. I don’t know if we’ll get to go to any games this season–since we finally saw them lose for the first time in person at Tiger Stadium last year, now I no longer have that same confidence that LSU will somehow find a way to win because we’re there, which of course is completely absurd. (And let’s be honest–they should not have lost that Auburn game last year.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow, as usual.

Monday Morning

And here we are on another work-at-home Monday.

It has been quite a while since I managed the kind of word count that I did yesterday. I got up at seven yesterday morning, wrote my morning blog entry and then finished writing about how my novel Sorceress came to be (I am gradually working my way through all of my books), started another entry on Lake Thirteen (still to come), and then went to work on my Scotty book. I banged out Chapter Three, and then moved on to another project I am working on for a friend; I was writing a chapter of that book per week to send on to him but it went off-track and I knew it. So, I had to go back and reread those first four chapters that are already completed to see–and the fix was so much easier than I had been fearing, with the result that rather than actually fixing the problem, I simply made notes on how to fix it for the binder where I keep the printed pages (I do this with every book the last few years or so; it’s just easier to print it out, three-hole punch it and put it in a binder where I can access it easily and make notes whenever necessary). So I wrote Chapter Five of that project, bringing today’s word count to six thousand, not counting the blog entries. Whew, did my shoulder hurt once I was done for the day, but I actually felt like I earned the rest of the day off.

So, overall it was a pretty good weekend. I am working at home today with lots of data to get entered before I can take off my spice-mining helmet and head to the easy chair to relax. Labor Day is this weekend, which means it’s also Southern Decadence in New Orleans, and I haven’t really checked the schedule to see what I am going to have to do–if anything–for the day job this weekend. Next week we’re off to Bouchercon, which I am looking forward to; it’ll be lovely, even if smaller than it usually is. It’s the first in-person one since Dallas in 2019 (I still swear sometimes that LSU had the best football season of all time in 2019 and that broke the world) and there will be people I’ll get to see that I haven’t seen since St. Petersburg in 2018. My schedule is already filling up; I had to create a day by day schedule of where I have to be and what I have to do and dates I’ve made with people already (to avoid double booking as well as to keep track); it’s going to be hectic, and I also bet I am not going to get to sleep a lot because of my hotel room insomnia issues, which makes the trip even more tiring and draining. And then I get to come back and go to work at the office all week. Yay.

I’ve done a lot of thinking this summer in those rare moments when I have some time to sit and think about things–I really don’t get to do this as often as I should; I am thinking that maybe once every three months I just need to take a three day weekend and go stay in a hotel by myself somewhere–maybe do some exploring of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, I don’t know–to take stock of my life, evaluate where I am at and where I want to go, and what do I need to do to make the things I want to happen for me actually, you know, happen. The nine-day bout of COVID, with its exhaustion, fatigue and continual brain fog, forced me to not work, to not do much of anything other than trying to just stay on top of my emails. The forced rest actually gave me time to deconstruct my life and everything I do and all of my commitments, and recognize some things about my life and what I want out of it. One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result; I’ve been doing just that for quite some time now. I’ve missed a lot of opportunities over the years with my writing career–and while I am certainly of the mindset that everything happens for a reason and grabbing on to one of those opportunities might have changed my life in ways I cannot conceive, making it entirely possible that my life could be worse than it is now–one of the primary reasons I adopted the old “no regrets about the past” mantra–but I am getting old and many of those opportunities may never present themselves again. Now, I am at the point where my energies and abilities are growing more limited, yet the demands on my time, energy and ability don’t ever seem to ease up or abate in any meaningful way. I’ve made some decisions about my life and my future going forward; I also feel like they are the right ones to make and my mind is made up. (There are few things I find more annoying than making a decision and having that decision questioned, or having people try to talk you out of it. I rarely, if ever, change my mind once it’s definitively made up.)

I need to make writing a major priority again in my life. Yesterday it felt marvelous to get up in the morning, drink some coffee, and then sit down at the computer and start writing. I don’t know if my Scotty book is coming along well or not–it could be shit; and first drafts are usually pretty awful anyway–or if the other project is working or not, but it literally was so satisfying to sit at the computer and just create for hours. When I was finished for the day, too, I felt like I’d actually accomplished something and I liked the feeling. If I write a chapter of the other project every week while still managing to get two or three chapters of Scotty done every week, the Scotty will be finished on deadline and the other will have a completed first draft in another fifteen weeks. Juggling two completely different books and two entirely different styles is going to be a challenge, but I’ve always been about challenging myself when I write. (Even if it doesn’t seem like it.) I’ve also really been enjoying revisiting my books and remembering where the ideas came from, what I was trying to do with the book and story and characters; I hope those blog entries are entertaining. But…if they aren’t, you can always skip them, Constant Reader. I won’t mind. I’m also trying to write the book entries slowly, take my time with them, not write them all in one burst in one sitting the way I do the daily “this is what I am doing” entries.

I suppose I’ve always used this blog incorrectly. I probably should use it to do giveaways of copies of my books or engage with readers more, or turn it into a writing advice blog or something like that; develop a plan for it and stick to it rather than just pantsing it every morning. But that’s how I’ve always done it, and maybe when I’ve retired and don’t have to get ready for work every morning (the blog is part of my waking up to go to work process) I can take it another direction. Ah well, that’s about four years into the future, so I can worry about it then–if I even live that long.

We also binged Bad Vegan last night, which was insane but interesting, and of course episode 2 of House of the Dragon, which was markedly better than the first episode. (I did laugh at the opening credits of Episode 2, which weren’t included in episode one…reusing the Game of Thrones theme and using the same kind of “model” assembling itself was an interesting choice.)

And on THAT cheery note, I am heading into the spice mines.

24 Karat Gold

Sixty-one and a day. It feels no different that sixty-one, of sixty and three hundred sixty-four days, or that matter. I had a lovely day yesterday–I must carve out some time today to thank people for all the lovely birthday wishes all over social media yesterday, which is always nice. I spent most of the day off-line, as I intended; I wanted to actually have a complete day off from everything, and it was lovely. I finished (finally) my book yesterday morning, and started Gabino Iglesias’ latest The Devil Takes You Home, which is superb. Gabino manages, somehow, to find terrible beauty in despair, and the first chapter is like a sucker-punch to the soul. I finished watching a documentary about post-war British cinema, Reel Brittania (it’s really good) and then we watched a whole lot of other things the rest of the day–the eleventh episode of The Sandman, which adapted two stand-alone stories from the comics run (“Dream of a Thousand Cats” was my favorite of the two, but “Calliope” was also incredible; seriously, The Sandman comic was one of a kind)–and watched some other things, gradually making our way to season two of Outlaws, which I don’t think is as good as the first season but it’s still fun to watch.

I am, however, looking forward to House of the Dragon dropping tonight, though.

It rained yesterday most of the day-some lovely thunderstorms added into the all-day rain for variety–which made it even more lovelier to stay home in my easy chair with a blanket tucked carefully in around me while I read my books and watched the television. It was really relaxing, which is what I wanted more than anything else in all honesty–a day where I could simply just completely unplug and let every part of me rest. It’s generally not a bad idea for me to do this with one day of every weekend–inevitably it falls on Saturday so I can spend the entire day watching college football (GEAUX TIGERS!)–but I am also going to need to take some time to go exploring around the outer edges of New Orleans; I was thinking the other day that I’d like to drive up the River Road, along the levee–the map can’t really give me the answer I need–and I also need to go explore the river and bayou parishes, to get a better idea of what they are like and what they look like and so on and so forth for this Scotty book.

I am probably going to spend today cleaning, revising and reading. I had thought I couldn’t actually spend the entire day sedentary yesterday and would inevitably get up to do some cleaning–because it bugs me, for one thing, when the house isn’t as tidy as it could and should be–but surprise! I guess having COVID did teach me one thing: that I don’t always have to be doing something and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing nothing, if that’s what I want to do. Usually, when I spend an entire day doing as little as I did yesterday I inevitably feel guilty the following day about the loss of time (that whole you’re not getting any younger, Greg thing that constantly runs through my head) but maybe I am starting to mature enough as I realize gradually that I will never be able to write everything that I want to write, or read everything that I want to read. I don’t always have to be working, and relaxation and rest is essential for my mental health, particularly as I get older (the inside of my head is a very intense and scary place, trust me on this, Constant Reader).

But…I am now sixty-one, and that much closer to retiring from the day job. I am trying not to think about retirement with a lot of hope and longing; sixty-five will get here soon enough, and I would like to make some good use of the four years between now and then. So, I am going to bring this to a close, Constant Reader, and start the process of cleaning and organizing so I can start the editing/writing process for the day.

And I will talk to you soon, Constant Reader. May you have a lovely Sunday.

If You Were My Love

Wednesday, and Pay the Bills Day has rolled around yet again. Huzzah?

Yesterday actually turned out to be rather pleasant, or at least not terrible, you know? The workday went well; some things are changing around at the day job–to be expected, as we’ve transitioned to a new department director and some other management staffing changes have occurred–but it’s not nearly as intrusive or annoying as I had feared it could be (the curse of a highly overactive imagination strikes again) and while that’s not to say there haven’t been some bumps, it hasn’t been as rough as I had worried it would be. I think I am starting to adjust at long last to this sleep schedule–I actually forgot to set the alarm last night but woke up at the right time–which is good, I suppose; I still don’t like going to bed early or getting up this early, but it’s become less and less painful the longer it goes on.

I was also highly productive when I got home from the office. I did the dishes and got laundry started (I’ll have to finish it tonight), and then I sat down and wrote around two thousand (incredibly shitty but nonetheless actual) words on the new Scotty. I am really enjoying writing this new book, even if the writing is thus far pretty horrible; the first drafts of Scottys are usually pretty fucking horrendous (I suspect I’ve never really made any moves about storing my papers anywhere is because I don’t want anyone to ever see how shitty my first drafts actually are, or to put my incredibly self-absorbed journals into circulation of any kind, even if it is ‘by request.’) but it feels good to be working on him again. Even as bad as the draft is, for some reason I never experience Imposter Syndrome when I work on the Scotty books, and maybe that’s yet another reason why I never let him go….writing him feels so natural, and there’s an easy comfort to entrenching myself in his world again.

It’s also lovely to get up to a relatively clean kitchen, too. There’s still some more cleaning to do in here–I’d like to spend some time every evening getting the apartment under control so I don’t have to spend much time on my weekends doing that sort of thing. As always, I am going to be trying to write a book during football season, which is always a nightmare for me. But let’s face the facts, shall we? There’s always something else going on that will distract me from the book–in the spring it’s the festivals and the Edgars, in the summer it’s the heat, in the fall it’s football season, and in the winter it’s Christmas and Carnival, so when IS a good time for me to write a book?

I’d also like to get some reading done this weekend. I am behind as always on my reading, but the focus reading properly requires hasn’t been there for a few weeks; I suspect it’s because my head is filled with Scotty–it really is–and so I can’t really make room for anything else at the moment. I am hoping once I get a few more chapters into the story I’ll be able to get back to my reading, as the great reads continue to pile up all around my TBR stacks in the living room. Heavy heaving sigh. But while I may have had a bit of mental fatigue around reading lately, it was really nice to not be super tired when I got home from the office for a change. I have to stop at the store on the way home tonight, so here’s hoping I’ll still have the same kind of “off-work now I’m home” energy I had yesterday so I can finish the cleaning–my birthday is Saturday, so I’d kind of like to not have to do much of anything that day other than relax and chill…and maybe spend the day reading.

Once Paul came home, we watched Only Murders in the Building and a new documentary series on Netflix; a true crime in Baton Rouge! And a recent one at that, 2019–and this is the first I’m hearing of it. It’s not too surprising, I guess–I really don’t pay much attention to the Baton Rouge news a whole lot, other than when they had that serial killer a couple of decades ago–but if it’s a weird enough case to get a documentary series, you’d think I would have heard of it, wouldn’t you? Called I Just Killed My Dad, it’s about a seventeen-year-old who shoots and kills his father, calls 9-1-1, admits it…and then it starts getting more complicated. It’s a very interesting case, and I am kind of looking forward to watching the rest of it.

And on that note, I have some bills to pay before I head into the spice mines for today. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Secret Love

Tuesday morning and it’s back to the office with me today. Hurray!

I really didn’t want to get up this morning–what else is new–but I could easily crawl back underneath the covers and go right back to sleep. But that isn’t possible, so I sit here and swill my coffee and try to wake up completely so I can get ready for work. Yesterday was a decent day of working at home duties and feeling rested; when I was finished for the day I did work on the new Scotty a little bit, and also did a little more research about Julia Brown, the witch of Manchac Swamp whose entire town was wiped out by the hurricane of 1915 (which has caused a bit of an issue for my Sherlock Holmes story, which was set in 1916 and never mentions the hurricane of the previous year; one would assume the city was still rebuilding at the time of that story, but I guess the lack of mention can be explained away easily enough if i put my mind to it–not that anyone will ever notice or say anything, naturally). After finishing work for the day entirely and moving to my easy chair, we watched the new episodes of The Anarchist and Loot, before starting season three of Who Killed Sara? I have a lot of errands to run after work tonight–prescriptions, the mail, and picking up library books–which is fine; there’s an easy pattern of driving I can follow to get it all done relatively easily and quickly, but the primary issue is that I probably won’t want to do any of those errands once I get off from work today.

Most likely not. But they need to be run, and I might as well get it all over with at once, don’t you think?

I concur.

My birthday is coming up, sooner than I would like–this month is just flying past, which is partly due to me trying to get through the work week as quickly as possible every week; as I’ve said before, doing this is wishing my life away, but what can I say? I vastly prefer the days when I don’t have to come to work than the ones where I do, sue me. Retirement–a mere four years in my future–looks to be more and more enticing all the time; however, I also don’t want the next four years to just blow by, either, so no more of this wishing my life away stuff; I need to focus on each day and squeezing as much worth and value out of every day that I can. I am very excited about working on the new Scotty book and whipping it into shape; making a story come together out of the amorphous nether regions is always kind of fun for me (no matter how much I bitch and/or complain about it) and of course, I find myself once again writing a book during football season–heavy heaving sigh, one day you’d think I would learn–but there’s also no telling what this season will be like for us LSU/Saints fans; both have new coaches and it’s kind of a new era for both teams; I find it highly unlikely, however, that LSU will have another season as bad as the last two, and of course last year’s Saints season was a total disaster. Can’t really complain though; Louisiana football fans have been terribly spoiled this entire century–LSU won three national titles, the Saints won the Super Bowl–so it was probably one of the best runs for Louisiana football in history, really.

The problem with this, of course, is that I really need to be doing some day trip exploring around the state for things I am writing. I really need to go into the river and bayou parishes and scope it out, get a sense of what it’s like there–the sights, sounds, smells, etc.–and if I am going to write about Julia Brown and the Manchac swamp, I kind of need to go have a look around there. I’ve written scenes in the Manchac Swamp before, but it’s been a hot minute since I explored around out there and I don’t trust my memory (which lies to me on a daily basis, the bastard)…and I also should drive around in the East a bit as well–taking pictures and so forth. But….if I can find the Saints on the radio, I can always listen to the game in the car as I drive around.

(I don’t care about missing the Saints games as much as I do the LSU games, honestly; I often will make groceries during the first half of a Saints game because the city turns into a ghost town.)

I also am really starting to like the Fresh Market on St. Charles. The fruit and vegetables are fresher than those at other markets; my blackberries, for example, don’t get moldy and fuzzy within two days when I get them from there. I also like the butcher counter–and in futzing around on their website yesterday I discovered that yes, I can indeed order for pick-up there as well. If I get this all under control relatively soon, I can get to the point where I never have to set foot inside a grocery store again…and I kind of like that idea.

And on that note I am going to head into the spice mines. It’s going to be a lengthy and hopefully productive day down here in the mines, and I will chat with you again tomorrow, Constant Reader.

Twisted

Ah, Tuesday morning and back to the office. I slept decently last night–woke up a couple of times, always able to go back to sleep–so I feel somewhat better this morning than I usually do on Tuesday mornings, but then again, we’ll just have to see how the rest of the day/week goes. I did my work at home duties yesterday, some chores and errands, and last night we started watching the new season of Stranger Things, which I think is the final season. The first episode was a bit off to me, but it certainly started picking up speed in the second and now we are all in after the third. I didn’t write or read much last night after work, but I do have some things i need to get finished today–quite a few things, actually–but I feel rested and maybe when I feel more awake than I do now, it might not be a problem getting everything done today that needs to get done. Stranger things, indeed.

I do have things I need to get ordered on-line today, too–and we need to go to Costco again at some point, perhaps this weekend. It’s always something.

I’m still, to be honest, coasting a little on the high from this past weekend in Florida, if I am being completely honest. I’m still feeling connected to my writing, which is lovely, even if I have to figure out a few things and get a few things pulled together. I also can’t believe it’s July already–and we’re almost halfway through the month, at that. Crazy, you know. But this year is already have over as well–what the hell? And then the next thing you know it’s football season. The twitter accounts for both LSU and the Saints are counting down the days until the season starts. It’s a new era for both–new coaches, essentially new teams, for that matter–so it will be interesting to see how the season goes for both. I also have a book to write during football season (as ever yet again), which will be challenging of course, as it is always is, and then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and BOOM. Carnival time again! #madness

Oh, and I have a book coming out in December right around the time my next Scotty manuscript is due, so as always, the promotion of a new book will have to occur (or start occurring) around the same time as I have to finish another. Now, there’s the workshop I would like to attend: how do you stay focused when you are finishing a book at the same time you are promoting a new release without going completely insane? That’s the part they never tell you about in creative writing classes and workshops–although I suppose those who have agents probably have the agent to walk them through that part (although sometimes I do wonder if I over-romanticize what it’s like to have an agent, since I’ve never had one? Oh if I had an agent they’d take care of this for me–I suspect that’s all too often not accurate. I also suppose that if and when I do ever land one, I will inevitably be disappointed with what they don’t do for me). Someday, I suppose, I’ll find out one way or the other.

And on that note I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.