Category: college football

Let’s Wait Awhile

Thursday and I still have no voice–well, I do, but my throat is still sore and my voice is still raspy-ish. But it is getting better–I really need to treat it with honey and tea, I suppose–but it’s annoying that it has lasted this long. I’ve also had an earache for a lot longer than necessary, which is terribly irritating. I’ve not actually had an earache in a very long time, and of course, now that sixty is just over the horizon, everything new and different and unusual that happens to me physically automatically turns into something traumatic in my head: I wonder if I damaged my hearing at Tiger Stadium last Saturday?

It wouldn’t surprise me. There were times during the game when the crowd was so loud I could feel the noise vibrating against my ear drums. Heavy heaving sigh. Of course I suppose now I can feign deafness when someone I don’t want to listen to is talking to me…

Oh, I already do that. Never mind.

But it’s Thursday morning, and I slept later than I probably should have this morning. C’est la vie. I kind of feel like I need another weekend to regroup and recover from everything; and I also can’t seem to get overly focused to work this week on my writing–or to read anything. It’s rather disappointing, but the earache from hell–which is sticking around, apparently, for another day–is enormously distracting and does make it harder for me to focus. I’m going to take a Claritin in a moment–my sinuses appear to also be fucked up; and maybe opening up my sinuses will alleviate the earache; stranger things have happened, after all–and hope that makes things better for the day.

I’m not really sure why we continue to watch American Horror Story: 1984. Last night’s episode continued to go even further off the rails, and the previews for next week’s episode seemed also incredibly unappealing. I had wondered how they would manage to draw out a slasher film homage into ten or eleven episodes, particularly since it was all taking place over the course of one night; and now I apparently have my answer. And yet, much as I am hating it, we’ll probably keep watching to the bitter end…the only season we ever completely bailed on was Hotel.

I’m hopeful that this weekend will be a productive one, since last weekend was a complete wash. I am so behind on everything now! It sucks being tired, and slightly ill, this entire week. It really sucks that my throat is so sore–and that it’s still not better. Is it worn from all the yelling last Saturday night, or is this a holdover from being sick? It sucks when they both happen at the same time so i can’t figure it out, you know what I mean? Just horrible. Heavy heaving sigh.

But I did manage to get the bills paid, and updated my debt list. It’s disheartening to see how much debt I’ve managed to accrue over the last few years, but it’s also somewhat heartening to know that it’s all, primarily, because I bought a new car, and have been trying to pay it off early ever since. It’s also lovely, and most satisfying, to see the debt owed on the car slowly but steadily decreasing. I haven’t been able to pay more down than the regular payment for most of the year, but it’s finally down into four figures, and should go much faster now that it’s that low. God, what will I do with all that extra money once the car is paid off? And if I take care of this car, it should last me for a good long time…

And once the car is paid for, the rest of the debt can get paid off. Thank you, baby Jesus.

Anyway, I am hoping to start reading Certain Dark Things today; I opened it the other night and read the first paragraph, and loved the style and authorial voice. My reading has certainly been suffering lately, and while I am desperately trying to get organized and rested and all that nonsense, I really need to focus. Sigh, I’ve been saying that for a really long time, haven’t I?

I am still reading my New Orleans history, though–I am now up to “The Last of the Mafia” in Robert Tallant’s Ready to Hang, which is about the kidnapping of young Walter Lamana. I’ve already read about this case–it was talked about in Empire of Sin, I believe, although I could be wrong–but it’s always interesting to me to read about how the French Quarter, in the days before preservation began, had turned into a terrible slum (which is why, before the preservation movement took hold in the city, bulldozing the Quarter would come up every so often). Since I am going to be writing a short story or two during this period–did I mention I was asked to write a Sherlock Holmes pastiche? If not, I’ve been asked to write a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and I have a terrific idea for it–I need to get an idea of what the Quarter was actually like back then, especially if Sherlock Holmes is going to be living in the Quarter.

My ADHD-addled brain has certainly been jumping all over the place lately, and I’ve been trying to write ideas down in my journal as they come to me.

And on that note, perhaps I should put on my miner’s hat and head into the mines. I don’t get off work this evening until eight, so I know when I get home I’m not going to want to clean or do much of anything; I’ll probably try to get some writing done this evening but I am not holding out much hope. This entire week has been almost a complete loss.

Sigh. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

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The Next Time I Fall

Wednesday has rolled around again and it’s Pay-the-Bills Day. Huzzah.

That’s the worst part of being an adult, methinks–being responsible financially.

I hate it.

Ah, well, it’s an evil thing that must be done, alas, for there is no choice.

I was still extremely tired yesterday when I got home from work; it was a long day, of course, and I am probably still recovering from whatever that was I caught at Tiger Stadium Saturday night–my throat is still sore–and I slept like a stone last night. I was so relaxed and comfortable this morning I didn’t want to get out of bed, and in fact, stayed in bed much longer than I probably should have. What can I say? Sleep is essential, and necessary, and I clearly needed more. I probably should have stayed home again yesterday, to make sure I was completely rested and over everything, but…yeah. I felt well enough to go to work and so I did.

I am, as ever, behind on everything; I tried yesterday but just didn’t have the energy to focus and get things done. I’ll have to do better today, as the month of October is clearly slipping through my fingers. But I have to make groceries on the way home from work tonight, and I’m not sure how much energy I’ll have once I get home. I need to remember to conserve my energy, and not expend it all the time. This weekend I seriously need to get my shit together and get some work done on the Lost Apartment–it’s seriously filthy; the LSU-Mississippi State game is the marquee game on CBS Saturday, so it’ll be on smack dab in the middle of the day, at 2:30–which means I’ll be on the emotional rollercoaster until sometime after five. So, clearly Saturday is the day I need to run errands and focus on cleaning around here, so I can devote Sunday to writing.

I keep getting more ideas on how to make Bury Me in Shadows a better book than it currently is; so that’s going to be my primary focus for the rest of this month–getting that finished. I think part of the problem I’ve been having this month so far has been lack of focus; I’ve been far too scattered with my energies this month, which is always a problem with me–that and focus. Squirrel! See what I mean?

And let’s be serious, any ideas I get on how to make the current WIP better are welcomed. I groan and moan about the additional work its going to cause me, but I already knew the manuscript needed work, and there were holes and inconsistencies in the story–the ever popular oh why would they do this other than I need them to in order to advance the story keeps popping up, and that’s what, frankly, needs the work. There’s nothing worth than having contrivances in your story.

Last night the SEC Network rebroadcast the LSU-Florida game, and as I already mentioned, I was too tired to do much of anything last night–even read–so I just put the television on the game yet again–I rewatched it Sunday night, but was so ill and tired I kept falling asleep and it was primarily on for background noise, that’s how tired I was–and as I watched the  game again my mind started wandering again–back to the first LSU game Paul and I ever attended, back in 2010 against Ole Miss. That game was also a nail-biter, with LSU finally clinching the win with a touchdown in the final minute of the game. LSU has, as I’ve mentioned before, never lost when we are in the stadium. I then remembered that I promised to dedicate my next book to the Judge and his wife, Janet, if they gave us those tickets–which they did, and so I did, and that book was, I believe, Sleeping Angel. Janet and the Judge have gifted us with their game tickets at least once per season ever since–others have given us tickets over the years as well, and we’ve sometimes bought them on Stubhub–and as I was thinking about Sleeping Angel, I realized, wow, I haven’t thought about that book in YEARS.

I had written a foreword for the new edition of Jay B. Laws’ The Unfinished, which was brought back into print yesterday byReQueered Tales–this was the essay I was struggling with several months ago–and while I did get it finished (the publisher loved it, I might add, writing me back to tell me it was beautifully written), in the posts about the book’s release yesterday I was referred to as “legendary writer Greg Herren” and other such complimentary things. I am always, inevitably, taken aback by such pronouncements–I don’t see myself as legendary, or any of the other kind ways people refer to me these days; mainly because when I think of legendary queer crime writers I think about Michael Nava and John Morgan Wilson, among others. It isn’t fake humility, either–although I’ve been accused of that before. I generally don’t, as a rule, tend to think about myself in those kinds of terms; therein lies, I believe, the path to madness–which I really don’t need any help finding, thank you very much. Felice Picano told me once, a long time ago, that if you stick around long enough you’ll get respected for the longevity, if nothing else…and it’s also weird to me when I realized I’ve been doing this consistently for seventeen years.

I was also thinking, in my roundabout way last night, about the need to buckle down and focus. I was talking with another writer friend yesterday about short stories–we’d both written a story for the same anthology–and we exchanged our stories, which turned out to be vastly different. But I loved hers–it’s wickedly funny–and she loved mine, which was also very cool. I love writing short stories, even though I often struggle with them, and right now I have two out for submission, and about three that are pending publication. I have two collections I want to do–Monsters of New Orleans, which would be Gothic horror stories set here, and Once a Tiger and Other Stories, which would compile my crime short stories that have been written and/or published since Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories was published. I was also thinking I need to rename Once a Tiger and Other Stories; maybe This Town and Other Stories, since people really seemed to like my story in Murder-a-Go-Go’s a lot. I was also thinking about doing the four novellas into one book thing, like Stephen King has done–which would most likely have  Never Kiss a Stranger anchoring the collection. I’d of course have to get permission from Kensington to reprint “The Nightwatchers” in this collection, and if they don’t give it to me, I’d have to write another, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, either. I’d always wanted to turn “The Nightwatchers” into a series; it’s loosely connected to both the vampire novella and novel I later wrote as Todd Gregory–“Blood on the Moon” and Need–but have never gotten back to them. (The next book I’d planned would have been Desire.)

I was also thinking I should dedicate another book to the Judge and Janet; the game experience was so amazing on Saturday night I should do something incredibly nice for the two of them again.

And maybe I should revisit Sleeping Angel. It, along with Sorceress, was set in the mountains of California, in the small city of Woodbridge; I’d intended to write several novels set there, and connect all my y/a fiction together in some way. Laura, the main character in Sorceress, was from the small rural area of Kansas where I also set Sara; and I keep forgetting that Dark Tide is also kind of connected to Bury Me in Shadows, which is also kind of connected to Lake Thirteen and Sara. 

I also have an unfinished manuscript, tentatively titled Spellcaster, which is also set in Woodbridge with some character overlap.

I was trying to do an R. L. Stine thing.

And on that note, the bills aren’t going to pay themselves, so I best put on my mining cap and head back into the spice mines.

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I Knew You Were Waiting for Me

I am sick, and I hate being sick. I suppose after spending many hours in crowds, exposed to the germs of over a hundred thousand people, while also wearing myself screaming and cheering and jumping up and down, it’s to be expected, but it’s still incredibly irritating. You never think about getting germs when you’re at a football game, but if you think about it–what better way for a plague to spread than Patient Zero attending a packed college football game? One of the most chilling chapters of Stephen King’s The Stand was a chapter about how the superflu spread out from the east Texas town of Arnette–I will always remember about how one woman stopped at a bar for a sloe gin fizz and left a dollar tip “that was crawling with death.”

I don’t think I have some horribly mutated super-flu, but my eyes hurt and so do all of my joints…and my throat is even worse than it was yesterday. I’ve gone from Kathleen Turner to Brenda Vaccaro in just over twenty-four hours, and it’s weird. My ears and sinuses were also bad yesterday, but Claritin-D has seemed to clear that right up, thank you, baby Jesus–the sinus pain is the worst.

I think I’m probably going to make myself some chicken noodle soup for lunch today, and I’m also terribly dehydrated–so I clearly need fluids.

I did some thinking about my work yesterday as I sat in my easy chair, curled up under blankets and watching the Saints game before watching the replay of the LSU game on the SEC Network (we used to do this all the time; watch the LSU game on television on Saturday, and then a local network would rebroadcast it on Sunday, when we’d watch it again so we could enjoy it without all the tension and emotion of the live-watch; knowing how the game ended made it a lot easier to watch!) and I made some notes from time to time in my journal. I was paging through Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which I hadn’t put away after my annual re-read, and it occurred to me that there’s a terrific line that runs throughout the book, repeated over and over again, which would actually make an interesting title for a story: “Mrs. Dudley Clears at Ten.” I literally have no idea what the story would be, or who it would be about, or anything other than that title, which pleases me so much. I always start with titles, as Constant Reader should already be aware; it’s difficult for me to write anything unless I’ve given it a title already.–even if it’s one that I don’t care for or doesn’t really work. I also riffed on titles for Scotty books yesterday; as long as I can come up with a title I’ll probably be able to keep writing Scotty for as long as I want to, or as long as someone wants to publish them, and as long as people want to read them. Part of the fun of reading all this New Orleans history is that it’s giving me ideas for short stories and for novels, which is really a lot of fun. (Just as I will  never have time to read all the books I want to, I will never have the time to write every book or short story I have an idea for. Sad reality–and one that I try to deny all the time.)

So, while yesterday sucked eggs because I was feeling poorly, at least the creative side of my brain was able to function and come up with some ideas and thoughts. I also thought some more about Bury Me in Shadows, and whether I want to go ahead and try to get it finished by the end of the month. (Saturday afternoon I realized it’s not as close to being finished as I had hoped it might be….I’m going to go sit in my easy chair with the manuscript this afternoon, after I eat my soup, and see if I can figure out what needs to be added…there’s a scene that occurred to me sometime over this weekend that I think needs to be added into the first chapter…I was trying to be oblique in the writing, but I think there are some things that need to be clarified so the reader isn’t thinking, oh, it was necessary for the story for this to happen even though it really doesn’t make a lot of sense as they continue through the story–which is a horrible thought to have as an author; that you’ve contrived something because it needs to happen otherwise there’s no story.

Just thinking about it makes my stomach clench.

And I just got a wave of dizziness, so I am going to go lie back down for a while.

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Calling Baton Rouge

There is absolutely nothing like Saturday night in Death Valley. Nothing.

I’ve often talked about how much I loathe the drive to and from Baton Rouge; it’s tedious, and once you get past the second swamp bridge there really isn’t anything to see. Sure, the countryside of Louisiana is beautiful–as is the countryside of every Southern state, to be sure–but after awhile it become rather humdrum, and when you’ve made the drive as often as we have, yeah…it gets boring. It’s about eighty miles total, give or take, from the Lost Apartment to Tiger Stadium, and it really seems to take forever.

The only thing worse is the drive home after dark.

As I said the other day, being an LSU fan is a lot of fun–if sometimes not necessarily good for your blood pressure or your heart. The Tigers have almost always been a strong defensive team with an okay offense–conservative and methodical, rarely passing, always trying to grind out yards in the run game. The dull offense has resulted in LSU’s inability to recruit outstanding quarterbacks–if you’re never going to get to pass much, pretty much anyone can take a snap and give the ball off to a running back. LSU occasionally has had outstanding quarterbacks–JaMarcus Russell and Zack Mettenberger come to mind–but the offense never really changed very much; they might have gotten to pass more regularly than the usual stand-in quarterback, but not enough to have made a difference. LSU has always had an elite level defense that kept us in games and made up competitive…and then Joe Burrow transferred in from Ohio State last year. Joe’s arm and competitive spirit raised what many experts thought would be an average LSU team to a higher level; losing only three games (two of which were close and could have, should have, gone out way; only Alabama really put a beating on the Tigers–and frankly, losing to Alabama might be frustrating, but they are the program of the decade and the standard to which all other SEC teams must be held) and giving us some hopes for this season.

No matter what we might have been hoping for, this team and the new offense was something we never could have expected, nor dreamed.

Tiger Stadium was rocking last night, and I can honestly say once the game started I maybe sat down no more than two or three minutes of the game. It was so loud my ears were ringing and I couldn’t hear myself think most of the time. This morning, I have no voice and every muscle and joint in my body is aching, as is my lower back. (I’d hoped to get things done today, but I suspect I’m going to by lying in my easy chair most of the day recovering) What a game.

What a game.

LSU and Florida has turned into a major rivalry. Back in the aughts, LSU and Florida were consistently the two best teams in the conference (until the resurgence of Alabama in the latter part of the decade); the winner of the LSU-Florida game won the national championship three years in a row (2006-2008).  This year, both teams were again undefeated and ranked in the Top Ten: LSU at number five, Florida at number seven. A night game in Tiger Stadium. LSU took the opening kick-off and marched down the field until the drive stalled, and a field goal attempt was wide right. The defense forced a three-and-out, and on the very next drive LSU took a 7-0 lead. The rest of the first half was a seesaw, with LSU going ahead and Florida coming back. At half-time the score was 21-21; Florida got the second half kick-off and had what looked like an easy drive to take their first (and as it turned out, only) lead of the game 28-21. They also made it look so damned easy…the stadium quieted and I thought to myself, oh no. But the Tigers counterpunched and tied the score 28-28…and that was it. The defense bent but never broke again–including an amazing interception in the end zone, and a goal line stand in the closing minutes of the game in which Florida failed to score despite running eight plays, starting at the LSU nine yard line (a bogus pass interference call in the end zone on fourth down–the officiating was a disgrace and an embarrassment to the SEC and the NCAA–gave Florida first-and-goal from the four and they didn’t get it) and the stadium was rocking the entire time.

When Derek Stingly made that interception in the end zone I jumped up into the air screaming–and when I came back down, I swear I could feel the stadium shaking under my feet as everyone just was going absolutely nuts.

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God, how I love Saturday nights in Tiger Stadium.

Afterward, as we drove home in the pitch black of a Louisiana country night, exhausted and happy and drained of energy, I remarked to Paul, “And our unbeaten streak continues.” LSU has never lost a game when we are in the stadium; we often joke we should get complimentary season tickets just for that reason alone.

And again, there is absolutely no reason why our final record for the season shouldn’t be, at worst, 10-1.

GEAUX TIGERS!

Lean on Me

GEAUX TIGERS!

I still can’t believe we have tickets for tonight’s game. We try to make it to at least one game every season, if we can; we’ve managed to go to at least one game per season since our first trip to Tiger Stadium, when we went to the Ole Miss game in 2010. We’ve seen some exciting games there; we’ve seen some blowouts, and we’ve seen some games that were closer than they should have been. One of the things I love about being an LSU fan is that they are never boring to watch. That 2007 national championship year was probably, overall, the most interesting and fun season of college football that I can remember. It’s also LSU’s Homecoming, and of course, we’re playing hated rival Florida; both teams undefeated, both ranked in the Top Ten. And while a loss for either team doesn’t necessarily mean being taken out of the conference championship race, or out of national hopes, it would mean an uphill battle the rest of the season–and another loss will spell the end of all hopes for the season.

Not looking forward to driving to and from Baton Rouge, though.

But Death Valley is going to be rocking–after all, it’s Saturday night in Death Valley!

It’a also going to be in the 60’s–perfect stadium weather tonight.

Very exciting.

I’m going to try to get some writing done, as well as some cleaning around the Lost Apartment, before we head out this afternoon. I also have to walk over to the International School to vote in the Louisiana primaries.

I’m not really sure what to do with Bury Me in Shadows. On the one hand, I’d really love to get it finished and turned in soon; on the other, I’m worried that I’m rushing to get it out of my hair. Of course, I can always turn it in and do a final revision before the official deadline it will be given, but…I don’t really like doing that. I did it with Royal Street Reveillon, though, and that seemed to work really well. So, maybe? I don’t know; I am very torn. I do think this might be one of the better books I’ve written, and more attention to it could make it my best. But again, I am terribly worried about turning it in, getting it on the schedule and then trying to get another finished draft finished before it’s due for production–because I absolutely have no idea what my life will be like at that time.

Last night I watched, of all things, the E! True Hollywood Story: Dynasty on Youtube. It occurred to me, really, how correct they were when they said Dynasty encapsulated the 1980’s more than any other television show; Dallas might have averaged higher ratings throughout its lengthy run, and there were certainly other successful night time soaps in the 1980’s, but Dynasty really captured the era more so than anything else–and let’s not forget, Dynasty had the first openly gay character in a television drama series (Jody on SOAP was probably the first; but it was a comedy), and then of course, Rock Hudson’s appearance on the show when he was dying from HIV/AIDS–not revealed until after he’d left the show–made the epidemic world-wide news and shone a bright light on an epidemic that was actually being largely ignored by the world at the time and when it was talked about, well–as said by a horrific bigot on Designing Women a few years later, “it’s killing all the right people.”

I also watched the final episode of Showtime’s Murder in the Bayou last night, and cannot help but feel sorry for the families of the victims. The mystery of who murdered the Jeff Davis 8 will most likely never be solved, which is an absolute shame, but it is such amazing fodder for a novel. Every time I watch an episode, I think to myself how to structure such a book, and start populating it with characters. It’s definitely a Chanse novel more so than a Scotty; obviously I could do it as a stand alone–which is still a possibility–but almost from the very beginning I’ve seen it as a Chanse novel; primarily because Chanse is from a small town in east Texas, which would give him good insight into the class differentials in a small town, as well as some insight into police corruption. I’ve never done a Louisiana corruption novel yet; this is almost too perfect a case to hang such a story upon.

I know I said Murder in the Arts District was probably going to be the last Chanse novel, but I always add the caveat “unless I get a good idea.” I was burned out on writing Chanse when I finished that book, and I felt like it was probably past time to retire the character from my canon. I’ve written one short story with him as the main character, “My Brother’s Keeper,” which was included in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, and I’ve started writing another one, “Once a Tiger,” which started off strong but then petered out as I wrote it. It’s still unfinished, and I think it’s going to have to be overhauled completely. It’s a great idea–Chanse comes back to LSU to solve a murder at his old fraternity–but it doesn’t really get traction in the way I started writing it. As I was thinking about the story for the new Chanse novel last night, I also recognized that some things that I was thinking about, as far as Chanse was concerned, would have to change; I really do need to go back and read the last few books in the series again. I am probably going to cross over a character from the Scotty series into this Chanse, should I write it–Jerry Channing, the true crime writer. I may not, it just seemed like he would be the perfect person to bring the murders in a western Louisiana parish to Chanse’s attention.

Anyway, we’ll see. I need to finish Bury Me in Shadows, the Kansas book, write some more short stories, finish “Never Kiss a Stranger,” and, of course, Chlorine.

I also found myself thinking about some other stories I have in progress, in particular “Please Die Soon,” which I think is going to be pretty good–if I ever finish it.

And on that note, I’m going to get cleaned up and go vote. Happy Saturday, Constant Reader!

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Control

So, we’ve got tickets to the LSU-Florida game for tomorrow night! Saturday night in Death Valley! Number 5 LSU taking on Number 7 Florida in a battle of the unbeatens! SEC and national implications! Woo-hoo! I mean, Tiger Stadium is always fun–but it is going to be rocking Saturday night.

Needless to say, it was quite a pleasant surprise when Paul got home last night and proceeded to tell me that we were being gifted with tickets to perhaps the biggest game played this season in Baton Rouge. I am, as I am sure you can tell, incredibly excited about this.

HUZZAH!

I came to a realization last night also, as I was pulling Bury Me in Shadows together–that maybe, just maybe, I am rushing to get the book turned in and maybe I should relax, take some of the pressure off myself, and do a more thorough job of revising/editing/pulling it together. Sigh. I’ll think about it tonight–Paul is going to the Mortuary haunted house with some friends, and so I’ll be home this evening all alone; so I might just take the laptop and the manuscript and sit in my easy chair while streaming a football game or a movie or something for background noise and read through the last fifteen chapters a little bit more, see if there’s more that needs to be added. I’m going to have most of the day tomorrow before we leave for the game as well to work on revisions and additions and so forth, too, so there is that.

I have to say, writing and editing and revising is something I truly enjoy; and maybe that’s why I’ve been sleeping so well lately–I did wake up a few times throughout the night last night, but I was able to get back to sleep without much trouble; I feel terrifically rested this morning too, which of course is absolutely lovely. I think a lot of my sleep issues stem from the inability to turn off my brain–and if I’m writing or revising or editing, that exhausts my brain’s creativity synapses so I am able to shut down completely when I go to bed. It certainly has worked that way this week, and for about the last two weeks, all told, really, and it’s quite lovely. If this means I have to write or do something creative every day so I can sleep well every night, so be it. The worst thing that can happen is I’ll get a lot of work done.

Yeah, there are definitely worse things than that, right?

I’ve also fallen behind on my reading–it’s not easy for me to both read and write a lot at the same time, and I do want to get Deliverance finished at some point this weekend, so I can move on to one of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s terrific novels, either Certain Dark Things or Gods of Jade and Shadow; I’ll decide when I get to it, I suppose. I try to read horror during the month of October–I am also way behind on my Stephen King reading–and have been enjoying going back through The Haunting of Hill House this month (which is also part of the reason I’ve not been able to finish Deliverance), and there’s no reason I can’t combine October horror with the Diversity Project, either. There are so many good books in my TBR pile–I really don’t need to buy anything new for quite some time, and really shouldn’t, not with all these books on hand that I have yet to get to. I am also way behind on reading some of my other favorite authors as well–Michael Koryta, for example, and Donna Andrews for another–so there’s really not much reason for me to buy any more books, quite frankly, for quite some time. Heavy heaving sigh.

But I love buying books!

I’m also still reading Ready to Hang as part of my New Orleans history reading. I am now reading about the murder of district attorney J. Ward Gurley, in the chapter titled “A Problem in Good and Evil” (which is an amazing title which I might have to purloin), and this morning I came across this sentence:

There was a murder in New Orleans nearly every day, but seldom was the district attorney the victim.

This was in 1903! And people talk about the murder rate in New Orleans now, like the city is sliding into lawlessness and danger–when the city averaged almost a murder a day one hundred and sixteen years ago…which proves the point I’m slowly starting to understand more and more, the more history of the city I read: New Orleans has always been a dark city with a crime problem, almost from the very beginning.

That isn’t to say that the city shouldn’t work on lowering our crime rate by any means; but the fact that the city has historically been a hotbed of crime puts the hand-wringing over our current crime situation into a rather different light, doesn’t it?

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines.

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Somewhere Out There

And Thursday rolls around, which means the weekend looms on the horizon.

Yay, weekend!

It’ll be tense, though, with the LSU-Florida game looming on the horizon (GEAUX TIGERS!) and there’s also a road game for the Saints, I believe. But the LSU game is a night game (it’s Saturday night in Death Valley!) so I have all day to get things done. There are other games on, of course, but none of terrific interest. I find myself becoming less interested in spending the day parked in my easy chair watching college football games, and if I want to turn Bury Me in Shadows in on Monday, I’ll need to buckle down and get some things worked on this weekend as I rather doubt I’ll have the time to get the whole thing finished before the weekend….

I managed to make Swedish meatballs for dinner last night–they turned out the best they ever have, which was nice, especially since I made them without consulting a recipe. That means I’ll probably never make them exactly the same way ever again, as well–but I think that’s part of the joy of cooking, at least for me; I love always trying to improve on recipes I’ve made before with little tweaks here and there. I wish I had more time to cook, to be honest; it is something I rather enjoy doing.

I also slept incredibly deeply and well last night. I’m not really sure what’s going on or what’s different; but I’ve stopped taking my prescription for sleeping–I always worry about addiction issues. Obviously, the last thing in the world I would need would be to get addicted to something, so I’m trying to take the sleeping pills less frequently. Over the last two weeks I only took one on last Saturday evening, and now my sleep seems to be more natural and more restful and longer lasting. I don’t even think I woke up even once during the course of last night, which is a first.

I wonder if it’s because the humidity seems to have finally broken?

Maybe.

But it’s very weird to wake up on a Thursday and not feel exhausted. I’m not sure if how that bodes for the rest of the day, but it would be awesome to come home tonight and be able to bang out some more chapters of Bury Me in Shadows. I’d love to get that finished by the end of the weekend so I can turn it in on Monday; that would be lovely. Finishing it means I could get back to work on the Kansas book with an eye to getting it turned in by the end of the month as well. That would open me up to writing solely Chlorine and short stories through the rest of the year; which would be kind of awesome. Ideally, it would be amazing to get a strong draft of Chlorine finished by the end of the year, so I could start writing this new Chanse novel in January, or perhaps another Scotty; I’m not sure which should come next. The Chanse novel, which would be drawn from–ripped from the headlines, if you will–the Jeff Davis 8 case, would probably be an easier thing to write–the brilliance of using a real life case as the jumping off point for a fictionalization is that a lot of your story is already in place; the only thing I’d need to do is, of course, come up with a fictional solution to the mystery. The next Scotty,  on the other hand, is a lot more amorphous, as Scotty books always tend to be; the story kind of comes to me as I write it, rather than planning it out ahead of time. This frequently causes me headaches, of course, but Scotty simply can’t be written any other way. I am torn between writing Hollywood South Hustle, which would be really fun; French Quarter Flambeaux, which is really just a kernel of an idea, as is the other potential Scotty, Lake Shore Limbo. I also have another Scotty title in the hopper, St. Claude Second-Line, which is what the original title, Bywater Bohemia Bougie, evolved into.

Hollywood South Hustle is a summer novel, though, I think; whereas FQF could easily be a March novel, and I think March is the right timing for the next Scotty, since Royal Street Reveillon was a Christmas novel.

I also am thinking that my Chanse short story, “Once a Tiger,” might actually work better as a novella. (As you can see, I have novellas on the brain.) I had originally wanted to call my second short story collection Once a Tiger and Other Stories, but if it’s going to be a novella, it would fit better into the four novella thing I am planning to possibly do. Ah, plans, plans, plans; it really helps if you actually work on the damned things, though!

And on that note, tis time to return to the spice mines for this morning. I don’t have to get ready for work and leave for another two hours, and I might as well put that time to use.

Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader!

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Open Your Heart

Well, the Saints managed to win again yesterday. I had the game on while I went through the Bury Me in Shadows manuscript, making notes; I have to concur with the assessment I made of the manuscript initially Saturday–it’s not going to require a lot of work before I turn it in. It might even be ready to go as early as next weekend, if I stay focused, pay no attention to shiny objects, and stay on course. During the Saints game, I went over the manuscript more carefully; making notes on what to add and what to take away, and the whole thing is actually more cohesive than I originally thought. It’s not going to be easy–it never is–but getting this manuscript ready for my publisher isn’t going to be as rough a slog as it could have been.

I was very proud of myself this weekend as I got a lot done. I cleaned and organized and got so much done that was on my list of things to do–and I even got a great night’s sleep and so felt pretty rested…until the alarm went off at six this morning. I’d actually woken up at 5:52, and just stayed in bed until the alarm went off, hitting snooze twice because the bed felt nice and comfortable and warm. I’d rather not venture out into the world today–I’d much rather stay here in the comfort of my own home, and definitely would have preferred to stay in the warmth of my comfortable bed, but I have to get up and go to work and prepare myself for my two long days.

Heavy heaving sigh.

We watched more episodes of Bigmouth last night, and I can’t decide if the show is actually really uproariously funny, or if the shock of the things the show covers–all the joys of junior high school puberty, with all that entails–is what makes it funny; the whole oh my God are they really talking about that? thing that I also always wondered about South Park.

I finished my reread of The Haunting of Hill House also yesterday–it’s a very short book–and am still in awe of the genius of Shirley Jackson. The way she created a mood, and tension, with beautifully crafted sentences and paragraphs is simply amazing. I couldn’t help but think how much stronger her book is than the nearest thing to it that I can think of–Richard Matheson’s Hell House, which was excellent and used the same basic structure–a notorious haunted house, and some ghost hunters arrive to see if they can figure out what is going on there–in a completely different way. The books’ titles are even similar. But I love both books, enjoy them both tremendously, but one always makes me think of the other. Again, I’m not really sure Jackson should be classified as a horror writer–her work kind of defies classification–but she was definitely one of the best American writers of the twentieth century.

I was trying to remember how I first came across the Jackson novel; I knew of her through her short story “The Lottery,” which I read in high school. I’d seen the 1963 film version, The Haunting, which was one of the most terrifying movies I’d ever seen at that point in my life–I’ll never forget Julie Harris as Nell–but at that time I didn’t know it was a novel. I think I first became aware of the novel because Stephen King used that famous opening paragraph as an epigram for ‘salem’s Lot; and shortly thereafter came across a copy in a used book store–so naturally I had to buy it, and read it in one afternoon, completely enthralled…and I’ve never been without a copy of the book since. I started rereading it every year about ten years or so ago–the other book I reread every year is Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca–and I think both books have influenced me as a writer, even if that isn’t apparent in my actual work. (I’ve never finished reading the entire canon of either Jackson or du Maurier; they are both dead and therefore the established canon is all there is…and I never want to be finished with either author. I know, it’s crazy, but it’s also just the way I am.)

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

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You Keep Me Hanging On

LSU won big yesterday, beating Utah State 42-6 with their lowest point total of the year thus far–and it’s probably an indication of how quickly Joe Burrow and this offense is spoiling LSU fans this year that at one point in the game, I said aloud, they are really playing sloppy this game. The score was 28-6 in the third quarter–and even as the words came out of my mouth I thought, wow, Greg–they have a 22 point lead in the third quarter and you’re complaining that they are playing sloppy. Next week is the first big SEC test of many–Florida, fresh off a 24-13 win at home over Auburn (another future opponent)–and that will probably be a good read on how the rest of the season is going to go.

I was tired yesterday, very tired. I stayed in bed longer than I usually do and my sleep wasn’t that much more restless than usual, but by ten o’clock last night I was dragging. I finally went to be around ten thirty, and got up this morning just before nine. I feel very rested and refreshed this morning, which is lovely–because there’s a lot for me to do today on the agenda. It wasn’t that bad, all told–rather than writing as much as I wanted to do, I instead made some serious progress on cleaning around the Lost Apartment–reorganizing books and so forth. I also started rereading Bury Me in Shadows, which is actually a lot more complete than I thought it was; it’s also a lot more creepy than I thought–see what a different putting something away for a while can make? It still needs revising, though, and there’s more things that need to be added to it along the way, but I am overall pretty pleased with what I’ve gotten down on the page so far. I also did a little bit of work on “Never Kiss a Stranger”–now that I’ve decided it’s a novella more than a short story, it works a lot better because I’m not worried about keeping it to less than six thousand words. I was also thinking yesterday that maybe I could do a collection of novellas. Novellas are hard to place anywhere, after all, and while it’s not a bad idea to self-publish them on Amazon, maybe it does make more sense to put them together into a collection of four, like Stephen King does periodically.

I also started my annual Halloween reread of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson yesterday, and even as I marveled at her wonderful grasp of word usage, sentence structure, mood, and character, I couldn’t help but wonder, really, how one would classify Shirley Jackson’s work? It’s not really horror,  although the book is absolutely terrifying; and she didn’t really do much other work that could fall into the horror category. Her short stories are quite marvelous; and while We Have Always Lived in the Castle is also terrific, I don’t know that it could be called horror, either. Eleanor, our main character in The Haunting of Hill House, is probably one of the most fascinating and complex characters I’ve ever encountered in horror; the book is also an amazing character study. I would kill to be able to create the kind of mood Jackson created in this book…I am trying to create a mood in Bury Me in Shadows, and am not entirely certain I’ve succeeded. But just glancing through the pages yesterday, I definitely got the sense that the book is, as I said earlier, in much better shape than I originally thought; there’s definitely some revisions that need to be made and changes, but I am very pleased with it so far.

I am also glad I decided to try to get the revision of this squeezed into October rather than trying the Kansas book, which needs a lot more structured revision and needs to have a new ending. One of the things I’ve realized about the Kansas book is that I have crammed every conceivable stereotype into the book about high school you can imagine. Football players and cheerleaders? Check. Homecoming? Check. Mean girls and jock assholes? Check. Poor kids who see sports as their only way out of the stifling, dying small town they live in? Check. The primary problem with the book is that in trying to upend and subvert those stereotypes I unfortunately played into them, which is lazy writing. There were so many other things I wanted to examine in this book and somehow didn’t manage to do; class and poverty, the haves and the have nots, and so forth. I’ve also worked harder and longer on this fucking book than I have any other that was published, so there’s also that. But it’s that kind of authorial myopia that made me unable to see, all along, what I was doing, and of course there’s the innate stubbornness I always have about trying to make it work when it would be ever so much easier to scrap the shit and start over. There’s a short story I’ve been working on for a while–I’ve sent it out for submission and it’s been rejected every time. It’s called “The Problem with Autofill,” which I think is a genius title, but it’s also the problem with the story. I’ve been trying to make that story fit the title, and the only way to do so is to create a situation that literally makes no logical sense–even I have thought to myself why would anyone do anything so fucking stupid? The answer is obviously to change the title, eliminate the need to make it fit said title, and then turn it into something more creepy and dark and wicked….and yet why am I only now deciding/accepting/realizing this?

Heavy heaving sigh.

Ah, well. And on that note, back to the spice mines.

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I Just Died in Your Arms

GEAUX TIGERS!

I worked on “Never Kiss a Stranger” yesterday, and started feeling the main character more than I did. Before when I worked on the story I could picture him perfectly in my mind, but I didn’t know who he was as a person; I didn’t feel him yet as I worked on the story. Yesterday I tapped into his mind finally, which is always a relief when you’re working on a story. Characters are one of my favorite parts of writing, if not the favorite; I love discovering who these people are, figuring them out, and getting to know them in ways I’ll never really know a real human being.

One of the things I always stress when I teach workshops on character is how we all create characters every day–everyone we know basically is a character we’ve created in our heads, because we can never really know everything there is to know about someone else. When we meet someone, get to know them, we are basically creating a character in our heads; a persona based on the things they say, the things they do, the way they react, and what they tell us about themselves and their lives and their pasts. This is why people’s behavior will always surprise us, why people act in ways we never imagined they would, because we don’t really know them as well as we imagine or believe we do; we can’t, because everything that happens to someone, every experience of every day, in some way influences and affects who they are as a person, and we’re never ever going to know all those little details.

I slept long last night, almost ten hours, although I wasn’t asleep the entire night. I woke up at three, five and seven, remaining in bed and somehow managing to fall back asleep again every time. I probably should have gone ahead and gotten up at seven, but the bed was comfortable and it’s Saturday, so I thought why? Why not stay in bed as long as you want to? So I did. I’m a bit lethargic and slow to come fully awake as a result, but there it is, you know.

Last night we watched this last week’s episode of American Horror Story: 1984, and it kind of went off the rails a little bit (oh, who am I kidding? It went off the rails a lot). The idea was to have all these surprise twists, I’m sure, but the result kind of turned the plot into a mess, which means of course there’s probably a big change coming for the entire season. Great.

Also, Big Mouth, the hilarious Netflix animated show about junior high school kids going through puberty, is back. We binged four episodes last night, howling all the way through. I also like that Big Mouth isn’t afraid to have a gay tween character, Andrew, who is probably one of my favorite characters on the show–he and the sex-obsessed Jay, who is hilarious.

I have a few hours to get some things done this morning before the LSU game starts at eleven, so I guess I should head back to the spice mines. Happy Saturday, Constant Reader!

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