Category: college football

Shake You Down

And just like that, it becomes Tuesday.

Another restless night of sleep, yet I managed to get through yesterday after a similarly restless night, so I guess I’ll be okay today. Tomorrow is a short day for me (yay!) and so I just need to get through this really long day before the easy part of my week gets here.

And today is the official launch date for Royal Street Reveillon. I know some of you have already gotten and read it–thank you so very much!–and I hope my incessant reminders that the book is dropping today haven’t been overly annoying. I never know about that–it worries me somewhat to always been on self-promotion mode, and yet some authors seem to go there all the time without a problem, so maybe I’m doing this all wrong?

Then again, this is my blog, which is pretty much all about me to begin with, isn’t it? In a way, my blog is my own version of a reality TV show; a carefully curated but essentially honest version of my life. Something to ponder, at any rate.

I got another ask for a short story last evening after I got home from work–a solicitation to submit, not a guaranteed inclusion–and it’s something that immediately struck my fancy, so I said yes immediately. Without going into many details, it’s a pastiche; an assignment to write a story using another author’s incredibly famous characters to create something new, with a slight twist–the characters can be anything other than the famous nationality that is very much a part of them. Immediately, I came up with a great title (it’s one I’ve had in my back pocket for quite some time and thought I’d never get to use), which is always the first step of the process for me, and then jotted down some notes for it in my journal, which is usually the second step in the process for me, and then I realized I can probably start even writing the beginning, which also came to me last night. I have another story to finish by the end of the month and an essay I have to finish by the end of this week, so I need to stop procrastinating and get to work, don’t I? And the last round of the volunteer project is also on deck, so I suspect I am going to be very busy this week–which is also kind of nice.

This month is also flying by a lot faster than I would like, but that’s pretty much every month these days. So, for the record, this week I need to work on two short stories, finish an essay, and write a chapter of Chlorine, all while working on the volunteer project around the day job. Heavy heaving sigh. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.

But that’s my life, isn’t it? LSU doesn’t have another big game until next month, after they start SEC play–Vanderbilt, Florida, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas and then Texas A&M, with a week off between Auburn and Alabama–but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to watch their games against lesser-tier opponents in the meantime, but I find myself not all that interested in watching other college games this season. I really and truly only care about LSU (and Auburn, to a lesser extent) and I do have some affection for Alabama, residual leftover from growing up watching them during the Bear Bryant years, but not so much everyone else. Maybe that’ll change as the season progresses; I don’t know. But I am very excited for LSU, and excited to see how they turn out this season.

And maybe sometime I will have the time to actually sit down and lose myself in Rob Hart’s The Warehouse. My reading time lately has been greatly diminished, and I am not happy about that, either.

And now off to the spice mines for the day. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

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The Way It Is

Good morning, Sunday, hope everyone is well today. I’m a mixed bag; disappointed that Serena lost in the US Open final yesterday but quite happy that LSU managed to beat Texas last night, 45-38, with an insane second half that basically turned into a high-scoring shoot-out. And you know what’s weird? Every time Texas would pull themselves back into the game, I’d think, Okay, offense, get out there and score again. 

Even weirder? They would. LSU has never, in all the years I’ve watched them, had this kind of offense–at least since JaMarcus Russell went pro after the 2006 season. They scored a touchdown in the closing minutes of the first half to go up 20-7–they never fell behind again after retaking the lead 10-7 in the second quarter–and those two goal line stands in the first half? My God–how do you keep a team from scoring on two consecutive drives inside the five yard line? Eight plays inside the ten, and no points. That was really the turning point of the game for me–that, and that LSU came back and scored again immediately after the second goal line stand. I wondered how good LSU was after the Georgia Southern game–and yes, it’s still early in the season and there’s still a Murderer’s Row of a schedule to get through (including Auburn, Florida, Alabama, and Texas A&M), but wow. LSU is looking championship quality, at least early in the season–and that’s incredibly exciting…although teams we’ll be playing later in the season will be trying to come up with defenses to stop our offense. The defense bailed out the offense in the first half, and the offense bailed out the defense in the second half.

Nevertheless, there was a lot of tension in the Lost Apartment last night until we scored our final touchdown and made a two point conversion to go up 45-31 with less than two minutes to go in the game. Even then, I couldn’t relax until the on-side kick call went in our favor. But it was a big, landmark win for LSU–like Georgia last season–and suddenly, there we are, actually being considered amongst the national elite again.

Wow. GEAUX TIGERS.

Yesterday was one of those days, really–tired, unmotivated, incredibly frustrated with electronics (and increasingly so as the day progressed). My back is getting better but it still tender and slightly sore; I don’t understand what’s going on with the muscles of my lower back, but it really needs to stop. I need to work on a short story and an essay today=–the essay is due this week–and I also agreed to write some website copy at the last minute for a friend’s business. That’s going to take up my morning, mostly, and then there’s some more volunteer work to be done–and my kitchen is a mess and I need to get the filing under control. I’m going to print out the first chapters of the final revision I started on the Kansas book that I wrote earlier this year before having to put them aside–so as to get an idea how to get it going again, and I think I’m simply going to have to figure out how to make the necessary changes it needs before I start trying to write any of it. I am excited about this book, frankly–I’m glad after all the work I’ve put into it I’ve finally figured out how to solve the problems with it and make the story click–but I still have to revise and rewrite it, to get it done and out of my hands.

I am also going to try–try is the operative word here–to write a chapter of Chlorine every week. Last night as I watched the LSU game I figured out how to write the second chapter–and the research I need to do in order to get it right–and I figure if I write a chapter a week, in five months the first draft will be finished, and if I can’t carve out enough time to write a chapter a week I should be ashamed of myself. Obviously, there are going to be weeks I’m not able to get to it–but even if I get a chapter started and not finished, that’s better than not writing anything.

As you will notice, there’s no blatant self-promotion about Royal Street Reveillon contained in this  post. Instead, I will leave you with the opening of Chapter One. Enjoy.

I fished the last olive out of my almost empty glass and popped it into my mouth. I glanced at my watch as I chewed it, and moaned after swallowing. “There’s nothing like a good martini,” I said, glancing around the bar and getting our server’s attention.

 “Do we have time for another?” My nephew Taylor finished the rest of his sazerac and looked at me hopefully.

“I take it you liked it.” I replied, not even trying to hide my smile. “But no time for another unless we want to be late.”

This was Taylor’s first time at the Sazerac Bar. He’d turned twenty-one just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, and since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater, I thought I’d treat him to a sazerac in the bar where they were invented. I personally don’t care for the drink—give me gin or vodka any day of the week—but everyone in New Orleans is required to try a sazerac at least once.

And now I could rest easy, having done not only my civic duty but treated Taylor to a New Orleans rite of passage.

I’d also wanted him to see the Roosevelt Hotel’s Christmas decorations. The Roosevelt was one of the grand old hotels of the city, and their lobby decorations are truly spectacular. Since we were going to a party at the Joy Theater—a mere block or so from the hotel, I thought, why not kill two birds with one stone? This was Taylor’s second Christmas with us, and I wanted to do it right. We’d already done Celebration in the Oaks at City Park, and I’d loved seeing the beautifully decorated ancient live oak trees through a newbie’s eyes.

I know it’s corny, but I love Christmas.

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader!

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Daisy a Day

Good morning, Sunday, how are you doing?

I slept late this morning; we got home rather late last night from the LSU game (GEAUX TIGERS!) and then I watched the first half of the game again, to catch things I missed in the live atmosphere of the stadium, as well as to see how the team looked on television. I am still kind of physically worn out this morning, despite the good long sleep, and as I slept later this morning I’m feeling like oh no you’re so behind already today you may never get everything done you need to–but I am fighting that feeling.

It’s always fun to be at a game in Tiger Stadium; it’s always fun to kick off the season by going to the home opener in Baton Rouge. It was, I have to say, the first and one of the only times I’ve ever been to, or watched, an LSU football game where I didn’t experience stress or anxiety of some kind at some point during the game. Sure, LSU was playing Georgia Southern, but in the past, whenever LSU has played a lower-tier team (UL-Lafayette, Southeastern Louisiana, Troy, Alabama-Birmingham–hell, they even LOST to Troy two years ago) they’ve always seemed to play down to their opponent, rather than operating the way a top-tier team should against a lesser foe. LSU scored last night on their first five possessions, and the score was 35-0 with ten minutes left in the first half.  Yes, you read that correctly: LSU was up 35-0 in with ten minutes left to play in the game. Georgia Southern didn’t even have a hundred yards of offense the entire game, and Joe Burrow threw more touchdown passes than he did incompletions. It was weird, it was exciting, and it was so wonderful to see LSU with a power offense churning up yards and scoring points for a change.

But the first real test is next week against Texas. They are also ranked in the top ten and the game is in Austin. How will the new offense and new attitude of the Tigers perform against a quality opponent? I feel confident I will feel stress during next weeks game. GEAUX TIGERS!

So, today is September 1st, and I am still not finished with Bury Me in Shadows. I did finish Chapter 24 yesterday, and I started Chapter 25 yesterday. Today I need to get that chapter and manuscript finished, and I also have to write that web copy and get it turned in. Fortunately, there’s no Saints game today, and Paul is going to a Southern Decadence party late this afternoon so I’ll be home alone and able to focus. Once I’m fully awake and completely caffeinated, I’m going to dig into Chapter 25 and be done, once and for all, with this draft of the book. Monday I have to work on the volunteer project, and then Tuesday is going to be a bit of a day for me, but I am hoping Tuesday night to be able to start revising the Kansas book for its final draft before submission. I also have to finish writing an essay that’s due on September 15th, and I have a short story due on October 1….so my September looks like it’s going to be really full. A lot of work for one Gregalicious, but I do enjoy me some challenges.

Although….it would be nice sometime to not always have a million things to do. And I really need some time to finish reading Rob Hart’s The Warehouse. Maybe sometime this week…I also really want to start reading Lisa Lutz’ The Swallows. I’m also (finally) reading Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Then again, I find almost anything and everything about New Orleans fascinating. I’m still kind of surprised with myself that I haven’t read this book before. I know I’m probably going to have to write another Mardi Gras book; it’s been thirteen years since Mardi Gras Mambo was published; maybe not the next Scotty book, but the one after; I don’t know. But I also found, in reading Lords of Misrule for a few moments this morning, a fabulous quote to start the book off with…and let’s be honest, up until I read the quote this morning I didn’t think I would ever write about Mardi Gras again. But…here we are, right?

I also didn’t think I’d ever write another Chanse book, and now there’s one in the hopper.

I have so many books to write, Constant Reader! So I suppose I should probably stop procrastinating and get on with today’s writing, right?

 

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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Break Up to Make Up

Friday morning of a Labor Day weekend, and I slept well last night. Yesterday was plenty bad; I felt sick most of the day. I did manage to eat some things, periodically; a grilled cheese here, a banana there, a protein shake…and my stomach began to settle and my blood sugar also stabilized. I was also really dehydrated, so I drank a lot of water and Gatorade. I still feel a little dehydrated this morning, but I am not exhausted, and feel pretty decent otherwise. I do feel a bit hungry–I’ve had some toast already, and will probably have a banana or something else snacky in a moment. I have to remember to hydrate, I need to remember to eat, and I have to try to keep my blood sugar stable.

The hardest thing, for me, about getting older is the changes to my body that require me to change my habits. My eating habits have always been bad, and I’ve never in my life drank enough water on a daily basis the way one should. I eat terrible food–and I also sometimes forget to eat. I rarely am hungry–and if I don’t eat when I get hungry it will pass and I will forget to eat, which didn’t used to be an issue but now? It really is. Part of yesterday’s problem began on Tuesday, when I had a small lunch and nothing else to eat the rest of that day. I slept poorly Tuesday night, and then on Wednesday again, didn’t eat until dinner–which didn’t help with low energy and feeling tired; my blood sugar dropped to dangerous levels and then that night I didn’t sleep either, so yesterday I woke up with blood sugar so low I had no energy and everything ached; I hadn’t slept so was completely exhausted; and I was dehydrated on top of everything else…a perfect storm of conditions I need to be wary of in the future.

And of course, I was reading Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, which opens with one of the characters talking about pancreatic cancer, which he has, and thinking, oh, maybe that’s what’s wrong with me.

Not. Helpful.

We also watched two more episodes of Thirteen Reasons Why last night; there are only two more left to go, and it does feel like they are stretching the story in order to stick to the “each season must be thirteen episodes” mandated by the first season. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still enjoying the story and how it’s playing out lazily, but in order to play things out the way they need them to, sometimes plot twists or character behavior feels contrived; the only reason the twist or the behavior makes sense is because it’s necessary for the plot. They are dealing with heavy issues for teenagers–rape (both girls and one boy), drug addiction, suicide, murder, voyeurism–and perhaps most interesting of all: the dangers of being a self-loathing closet case. In this last case, I am kind of torn. On the one hand, I like they are showing how horrific it can be to realize you’re gay when you have an alcoholic and abusive father and are part of the jock culture; Monty’s self-loathing is the key to his villainous behavior (and make no mistake, Monty is definitely the villain of season three), but it’s also not explored. Monty is just an asshole, and it never gets any deeper than that; maybe one of these last two episodes is devoted to him and we’ll see some understanding and be able to develop some sympathy for him. On the other hand, I am not sure I like having the closeted gay kid as the clear villain of the season. As I mentioned before, the openly gay character was clearly written out of this season, and the lesbian/bisexual Asian girl who was a main character in season one basically only makes cameo appearances this season…so the only representation of a queer character is this one, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Also, this rehabilitation of the rapist story arc this season also makes me uncomfortable; but on the other hand, Bryce was such a cartoonish villain in the first two seasons that he seemed unrealistic; as I said the other day, Hitler loved his dogs. And whenever I write about character development, or teach a workshop on character development, one of the things I always emphasize is that villains are also three-dimensional characters; very few people are all good or all bad, but most everyone is a combination of the two. Seeing another side to Bryce is an interesting twist to the story, but I’m also not sure how much this “nice side of Bryce” is actually earned. On the one hand I applaud them for showing that rehabilitation is a possibility for even the worst of the worst, but there’s also a sense of “both sides”-ism to this.

But…it’s making me think, and isn’t that what these kinds of entertainments are supposed to do?

So, I am going to spend my day answering emails—I also have errands to run–and later on I’m going to try to get Chapter Twenty-four finished, before I take a streetcar named St. Charles to the Quarter so I can work condom patrol tonight for Southern Decadence. We definitely are getting the tickets for the LSU game, which is very cool (GEAUX TIGERS!), and so I also need to do some cleaning around the Lost Apartment so we can go to Baton Rouge tomorrow absolutely guilt-free.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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Papa Was a Rolling Stone

Wherever he laid his hat, was his home…and when he died…..all he left us was alone….

I do love that song. It’s always fun when a song title pops up for use that’s a song I really love.

I’m not feeling particularly well this morning. I’m not sure what it is. I had another not-good night’s sleep last night–two days in a row, actually–and this morning my stomach is really bothering me. I’m not sure what it is, but yesterday was terrible. I was so tired and blood sugar was ridiculously low most of the day, which also didn’t help very much. I did manage to get the major project done, and this morning I am glumly looking at about a gazillion emails in my inbox that must be dealt with. I’d hoped that tired as I was yesterday, I’d sleep well–and was very sleepy throughout most of the evening, until, of course, I went to bed.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I was so tired yesterday I forgot it was the anniversary of the evacuation in 2005, which makes today the Katrina anniversary. Lovely, particularly as there’s a storm in the Atlantic targeting Florida–just the same way Katrina did fourteen years ago, before crossing over into the Gulf, speeding up and heading for Louisiana. My thoughts are naturally with everyone in Florida; but I am also keeping a wary eye on this storm’s progress. We may have tickets for the LSU-Georgia Southern game on Saturday night (GEAUX TIGERS!), which is another reason I don’t want to be sick for the weekend. A conundrum, really, and a quandary; should I stay home and rest today, dose myself liberally with–I don’t actually know what, to be honest. It’s my stomach, combined with exhaustion; what do you take for that? I guess one could simply lie down and read, or something. I don’t know. I also hate to use up my sick-time this way; but I need to decide sooner rather than later, don’t I? But all I have to do tomorrow is pass out condoms for four hours tomorrow night, which means I have the whole day free to sleep in and rest and all of that; and then it’s a three day weekend.

Decisions, decisions.

Okay, well, now that I’ve eaten something we’ll see what happens next. I’m personally hoping my stomach settles down, because I would rather go to work than stay home, to be perfectly honest.

Since I finished the big project again yesterday–some more work from it will show up, in dribs and drabs over the next week, I suspect–I can now focus my energies on these last two chapters of Bury Me in Shadows’ first draft, which I would like to be done with by Sunday, which is September 1st. I also want to start reading Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, and Lisa Lutz’ The Swallows.

Well, I’m still feeling terrible and it’s about time to start getting ready, so I think I’m going to stay home. I hate skipping work for sickness; I also hate being sick in general. As I’m getting older that’s one thing I’ve noticed–I’m more susceptible to being sick than I was when I was younger, to go along with all the newfound aches and pains; it seems like every morning there’s a new one. I honestly don’t mind getting older–I certainly never thought I’d make it this far–other than being betrayed by my body and my health. About the only thing I’d want back from being younger is energy and the ability to sleep deeply and well every night. I know that my body is changing–and not for the better–but every time something happens–like when my back wrenches from picking up the laundry basket wrong, or I turn my head too quickly and my neck gets sore–I think to myself, yes, you really can’t fool yourself into thinking you’re still a young man anymore, can you?

Sigh.

Well, I’m going to go lay back down. Hope you have a better day than me, Constant Reader.

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Funny Face

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day, you know?

Saturday night I watched a documentary about college football on ESPN, Football is US: The College Game. It was interesting–I didn’t know who Walter Camp was, but I’d heard the name before. I also knew who Amos Alonzo Stagg was–there’s a high school in Chicago named for him, and I also knew that the University of Chicago was an early power in college football, until they disbanded their team and stopped playing. It lightly touched on how college football parity helped desegregate the Southern universities–their football teams were mediocre, once other schools started recruiting, and playing, black players–but there was one line, when talking about the civil rights struggles in the 1960’s, and how Southern people, especially those in Alabama, focused on football as a source of pride for their state, that was particularly true and honest, and I wished they would have followed up on it some more: they didn’t like the way their state was being portrayed on the news, and felt like these representations of Southern states as hotbeds of racism was unfair.

Yes, indeed. It was incredibly unfair how the national news depicted Southern racism as how it actually existed in the real world. This resentment of how they are viewed by outsiders is keenly felt down here, and that sense of resentment is very key to understanding their behavior.

I reread the final few chapters of Bury Me in Shadows yesterday, and then planned out the final three, so I have a good shot at making my deadline of finishing the first draft by September 1. I also revised both “Moist Money” and “This Thing of Darkness” yesterday, so it was a fairly productive day for me on the writing front. Both stories need to be gone over again before sending them out into the world–both are rather dark stories; I sometimes shock myself with how dark I can go if I set my mind to it. (Fully cognizant of the notion that other people’s opinion of what dark is can vary wildly.)

We are still watching the third season of Thirteen Reasons Why, and I have to say, the show is both ridiculous and over the top–last night I said to Paul, “you know, this high school is completely fucked up–I can’t imagine anyone I went to high school with being murdered, let alone that almost everyone I was friends with would have a motive for killing another classmate”–but the show’s true appeal lies in the cast, how good they are in their roles, and the chemistry they have with each other. And let’s be honest–it hasn’t come remotely  close to Riverdale when it comes to plots going over the top. While watching last night, it occurred to me that the show is really kind of an Edge of Night type serial, only set in high school; every season’s plot has had something to do with death and crime. There has been at least one suicide, one suicide attempt, an almost-school shooting, several rapes–one particularly brutal one involving a young man and a broom handle–and so I can see why teenagers who’ve been through a trauma of some sort would find the show hard to watch.

I also watched Roll Red Roll, a horrifying documentary of the Steubenville rape case–which also is an exploration of rape culture in small towns–and that case was what initially inspired my own in-progress manuscript about the same thing; rape culture in a small town. Watching the documentary, and remembering how awful the story was as it unfolded–several other cases broke around the same time; there was another in Marysville, Missouri, and another in southern California, which were the subjects of another documentary–also made me see, again, what are the many problems and holes in the plot of the book I wrote on the subject, and what needs to be fixed about it.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me.

Happy Monday, everyone.

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Funky Worm

Well, it’s Sunday morning and the windows are covered with condensation again, which means it’s hot and humid outside (with a chance of rain). I finished reading Laura Lippman’s brilliant Lady in the Lake yesterday, but after running my errands in the heavy heat and damp, I was pretty wiped out by the time I’d put everything away and found it incredibly difficult to focus on much of anything. I did some more cleaning, brainstormed a lot more in my journal (I’ve been having some great ideas for “Never Kiss a Stranger”) and then watched the first official game of the college football season–Miami vs. Florida on ESPN last night. I’m not much of a fan of either, to be honest, but it’s an in-state rivalry game and they don’t play each other very often. It was a great game, actually; I didn’t think Miami had much of a chance, but ended up only losing 24-20, and they had a chance to win the game in the closing seconds but couldn’t convert. LSU’s first game is next weekend–a non-conference snoozer; I don’t even remember who they are playing–and soon enough the Saints will be playing their regular season games too. I love college football, and the Saints–I only watch the Saints play in the NFL and pay little to no attention about other teams unless the Saints are playing them. (This goes all the way back to when I was a kid; I’ve never cared much for the NFL but have always loved college football…if I didn’t live in New Orleans I probably wouldn’t care about the Saints, either; but you can’t live here and not love the Saints. It’s practically a city ordinance, and I will say I’ve never seen or experienced anything like the way this city loves its football team.)

Today I have a lot to do. I am going to revise my short story that’s due next weekend, and work on a big project that needs to also be finished by next weekend, and I am probably going to mess around with “Never Kiss a Stranger” a little bit today. I am also going to reread the last few chapters of Bury Me in Shadows so I can finally get those last three chapters written, hopefully by getting a start on that today, and finishing by September 1 so I can do one last pass on the rape culture novel before sending it to my publisher. I also think I’m going to work a bit on my story for the MWA anthology. It’s already finished, and I’ve revised it already a couple of times, but I think I am going to revise it one more time, give it another going over, to make sure everything is fine and ready to go. I doubt it’ll get taken, but I like submitting stories to these anthologies, and one of these days I am going to actually make it into one of those anthologies if it kills me.

And it just might!

Oddly enough, these last week or so I’ve had a sense of general malaise–the notion that I have so much to do that I’ll never get it all done, which then creates inertia/paralysis: there’s no way I’m going to get this all finished so what’s the use in trying? This is incredibly self-defeating, and I know I have a tendency to often defeat myself, so these are alarms and triggers I know to watch out for, fight against, and not get too deeply imbedded in my brain. I don’t always succeed; sometimes the inertia/paralysis wins and I get nothing done, which only exacerbates the problem. But I somehow manage to always get everything done, which is very exciting.

This coming weekend is Southern Decadence, and this is going to be my first Southern Decadence when I am not working in the office on Frenchmen Street–I don’t even have to drive through the Quarter to get to work anymore, so I won’t be caught off-guard by seeing hordes of gay men walking around in the Quarter on my way to work. I am going to do condom duty on Friday night only, giving me a lovely three day holiday weekend to enjoy, watch LSU and get to work on the rape culture novel for its final draft before submission. I’ll be glad to have that book finished, and then I have another project to work on for both October and November, and then in December I can return to Bury Me in Shadows. If my plans hold up, I should be able to then finish revising another unfinished manuscript in January before starting to write the new Chanse, while doing the final research and prep work to get started on Chlorine. These plans are, of course, always subject to change; you never know when another project is going to drop into your lap and that could possibly change everything yet again.

I really need to make a to-do list, and do some other business-type stuff today. I’ve also started packing another box of books to go into the attic; I should probably finish that today as well. I think I’m going to read Rob Hart’s The Warehouse next, followed by Lisa Lutz’ The Swallows, and then I’ll come back to the Diversity Project, probably with Michael Nava’s Lay Your Sleeping Head.

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

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Jambalaya (On the Bayou)

Goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh.

Now I want jambalaya.

Yesterday kind of sucked over all. I wasn’t in the least bit sorry to go to bed last night and bid the shitty day adieu. The energy of the day was off from the moment I got up yesterday, and just never got any better than that, sadly. The drive from the office to the grocery store was an endless annoyance of stupid drivers and their senseless, dangerous behavior. The grocery store was full of thoughtless trash who seemed to think they were the only people in the store, and then I almost got hit by another idiot driver who wasn’t watching or paying attention as I took the turn off St. Charles to my street–had I not been paying attention or been five seconds later, I definitely would have been broad-sided. I got home and the house was a disaster area, so bad I couldn’t get organized enough to clean because somehow I’d allowed the kitchen to get so bad that I had both sinks full of dirty dishes, the stove and counter were filthy, and a dishwasher full of clean dishes that I had to put away before I could start doing the rest of the dishes–which turned out to be more than one load. The shrimp creole turned out delicious, though, and when it was finally time to relax and watch some television, when we opened the Netflix app on the television, the third season of Thirteen Reasons Why had dropped. The second season wasn’t very good–and the first had its moments of nonsense–but as we watched the preview, it looked interesting–and of course the cast is all very young and appealing, so we decided to give it a whirl. The third season is, so far, the best of the three, to be honest; I enjoyed the first season, was surprised by its twists and turns, but ultimately the gimmick that tied the first season together–the tapes Hannah left behind after her suicide–was a bit outdated. For one thing, can you even buy blank cassette tapes anymore? Even when the book was originally published, sometime during the second Bush administration, the cassettes were outdated–but it was important to the story that it had to be cassette tapes–digital recordings wouldn’t work for the necessity of the story–and the one big plot hole that was never resolved was how did all the kids have the means to listen to cassette tapes? Clay had to borrow Tony’s ancient Walkman–and let’s be serious, Walkmans didn’t last very long, even when babied. To use cassette tapes in this decade was absurd on its face; why not videotapes, if we’re using obsolete technology?

But the third season is off to a really good start, and it appears that the third season is going to follow the story-telling methodology of the earlier seasons: the present, the recent past, and the distant past as timelines. The first season’s question was why did Hannah kill herself? The second season concerned itself with will Hannah get justice?, and it appears that the third season is going to be a lengthy, lazily unfurling murder mystery, in which the show’s villain has been murdered and of course, everyone in the cast has a motive. It will be interesting to see how they proceed with this, and I’m actually hopeful it will be a better experience than the first two flawed seasons. And yes, I am very well aware that the entire notion that the group of friends are helping out the poor bullied kid who almost became a school shooter last season by taking care of him and watching out for him, while getting him psychiatric help, is a bit much…but then again, teenagers often think they can solve problems that are beyond their scope.

Juggling multiple time-lines is not something I’ve tried in any of my works; Alison Gaylin and Laura Lippman both are masters of the varied timelines–so if you’re looking for a tutorial on how to structure a novel this way I highly recommend Gaylin’s What Remains of Me and Lippman’s After I’m Gone–but it is something I’ve always wanted to try. My novels are always linear–A to B to C–and it might be a fun challenge sometime to do the multiple timeline thing.

While I was cleaning yesterday some ideas for “Never Kiss a Stranger” popped into my head, and I’m hoping I’ll remember them today so i can add them in. I have some errands to run today, and definitely to spend some time with the new Lippman novel–which I may just finish today–and have some other work to do in addition to cleaning and doing some writing. I feel good this morning; awake and lively and functional, so here’s hoping it will last through the day–and going out into the heat and humidity, which I am rather dreading as it is so draining. But I have prescriptions and mail to pick up, groceries to make, and  I’m hoping I’ll be able to make some serious progress on projects. There’s college football games today–of all things, they are calling it “Week Zero”, which is insane–so I may watch the Miami-Florida game tonight before queueing up Thirteen Reasons Why.

I’m not really sure what I’m going to do about dinner today–and I’ll need to make up my mind before heading out to make groceries, you know? I’m also considering going back to taking salads to work for lunch every day–one of the reasons I stopped was because salads would turn brown if I made a big bowl, and it was too much trouble every morning to make a salad, plus it wasn’t helping me lose weight or anything–but now I’m thinking it’s probably not a bad idea to go back to salads again. Of course, I also have the shrimp creole. Maybe I’ll wait and get the salad fixings on my way home from work on Wednesday, which is my new short day.

Decisions, decisions. Maybe I’ll just wait till Labor Day weekend, and start then.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader! See you tomorrow.

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Reelin’ in the Years

Sunday morning, and times keeps on slippin’, slippin’, into the future.

I slept in this morning–this life of “sorta leisure” is one that I could easily adapt to–and now sit, inside my condensation-covered windows, sipping my morning coffee and reflecting on what the day ahead has in store for me. I finished both interviews yesterday–despite the best attempts of my computer to thwart me, with freezing programs and even an operating system that locked up at one point, requiring me to force-restart the thing–but this morning, it appears to have updated its operating system overnight and is running quite smoothly this morning. I am not, of course, taking this as a sign that this latest update may have removed the bugs from the operating system–this has been a consistent problem since the Mojave update back in December, which created the Great Data Disaster of 2018, from which I still seem to not be completely recovered from–because it’s still early in the day and there’s plenty of time for this thing to malfunction all over the place yet. It did make doing the second interview difficult, but I finally managed to get it saved and emailed off yesterday. I have to do that group thing yet today–I was going to do it  yesterday but after all the functionality problems I was facing, thought it probably best to not try to do the round table and push it off until today. I also need to work on some fiction writing today as well, and of course, I have a toothache again, one of the few molars I have left, and it’s making chewing a bit of a challenge.

Yay, vacation.

I also want to start reading Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake today; alas, while I was watching things on the television yesterday I got sucked into City of Nets–and there’s nothing more distracting for me than Hollywood history. I read about half the book yesterday–sometimes making notes, other times just getting enthralled in the story–and around nine last night I thought, oh, I should be reading Laura’s book but instead couldn’t stop reading about Hollywood corruption and morality. I’ve always been interested in Hollywood history but have never really thought about writing it–I’ve always been reluctant to write much of anything not set in the present day–but I’m slowly coming around to writing recent history. As I said in one of my interviews, I am working on something set in 1994–“Never Kiss a Stranger”–and immersing myself in that period whenever I can, and originally went there for my story “A Whisper from the Graveyard.” As a result I am finding myself vastly interested in writing about the recent past–so much has changed in so quickly a time that it’s really amazing; the 1950’s, for example, might as well have been 1776. (Which, of course, reminds me that my story “The Weight of a Feather” is set in the early 1950’s/late 1940’s; not specifically in any year, but it’s definitely that post-war time.)

But I hope to get my round-table participation finished this morning, and then I am going to work on “Moist Money” for a little while, and then perhaps start Chapter 23 of Bury Me in Shadows. I’d like to get the first draft finished before September 1; and I’d also like to get to work on some other things that are just hanging around. I’ve already been much more productive than I’ve been on any of my previous long weekend vacations, which is a lovely sign, and I absolutely must get moving.

The end of the year will be upon us before we even know it.

I mean, LSU’s first football game is merely a couple of weeks away; and the Saints are already going through their preseason games. Football season is nigh; and shortly behind it will come the cooler weather. This summer hasn’t been that bad–despite the series of heat-advisory days we’ve been dealing with this month–and the river is finally no longer in flood stage, which is lovely and a bit of a relief; when the river is in flood stage there’s always this sense of impending doom hanging over our heads.  I would like it to get cooler, because I do want to spend some time exploring the Quarter–it’s been a hot minute–just to see what down there is different and what has changed; I used to work a block away, for example, from where Scotty lived and I could walk down there and check out his home and the rest of his block from time to time. It’s going to be awhile before I start writing another Scotty novel, and one of the things I do want to address/tackle in the new Scotty is the gentrification/short term rental issue; which will also require bringing back one of the characters from Royal Street Reveillon. (I do this often; bring characters back from previous books to impact the current one. Life kind of does that, too, so it only makes sense from a realistic standpoint to do this periodically.) But I’ll probably write the Chanse before the next Scotty; once I get all these partial novel manuscripts out of the way and submitted I am going to focus on writing Chlorine, then the Chanse, and then the Scotty. So, really, I need to be reading Hollywood history this fall, so I can be prepared to write Chlorine. 

As I love Hollywood history, this is not going to be a horrific chore. I also think I can justify reading James Ellroy’s L. A. Confidential as well for research.

It will also give me an excuse to reread In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, which will always be a pleasure to read. (I also have some other Hughes novels on hand, and the entire canon of Margaret Millar, which I would also like to  finish working my way through)

And on that note, I should probably get back to the spice mines. If I work on the round table for a bit, I can justify spending some time with the new Lippman novel.

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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Superfly

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Thursday.

I slept rather well last night, which was lovely, and today is one of my short days, which is equally lovely. I made some terrific progress yesterday on Major Project, not so much on the WIP but it’s okay. I’ve made peace with the fact I can’t work as hard in as short a period of time as I used to, and I feel confident that once Major Project is out of the way, I can make some more progress on everything else I need to get done.

I still have short stories I need to write, as well as an essay, and am hopeful that between today and tomorrow and this weekend–plus the long birthday weekend i am treating myself to next week–will give me the time to get all the things done that I want to get done. I haven’t had time to do much reading this week, but I need to get moving on S. A. Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer so I can dive into Laura Lippman’s new Lady in the Lake, which is getting raves everywhere. Again, hopefully, that will come to pass this weekend, and what a lovely birthday gift for myself to spend my birthday long weekend curled up with the new Lippman?

Life rarely gets better than that, seriously.

We finished watching Years and Years last night, and it remained interesting all the way until the end–even if the death of my favorite character kind of cost me some of my emotional investment in the show. I was quite critical of this character death yesterday, yet still held out some hope that the death wasn’t really exploitative and would make sense in the over-all story, once it was finished; you know, the sense that it wasn’t done simply to advance the story and motivate characters to the actions that would move the story to its inevitable end. I think it could have gotten to that inevitable end without this character’s death, frankly, and so it remains another sad example of show business’ favorite gay trope, bury your gays.

Overall, despite this disappointment, I did enjoy the show…although not as much as I did before bury your gays reared its ugly head.

But I am now in the short part of my work week, the two half-days that help me ease my way into my weekend. When I get home from the office late this afternoon, I can do some straightening and cleaning and I can also get back to work on Major Project, or the WIP. Tomorrow I also get off relatively early–one in the afternoon–and it has occurred to me that I could just run to make groceries then and get the mail, negating the need to leave the house over the weekend (running those errands always seems to throw me off every weekend but I need to be more disciplined anyway; soon enough Saturdays will be all about college football and Sunday will be Saints games, so my weekend productivity is about to go into a severe decline (I often read and/or edit while I am watching football games that are neither LSU nor the Saints, so there’s that), so it’s crucial that I start getting things done throughout the rest of this month. I’d like to get all these little things done this month so I can focus in September more clearly on JUST ONE THING for a change.

I’ve slowly been coming to a conclusion about my career, and I actually said it out loud to my friend Laura at lunch on Tuesday, which made it more real, and having said it out loud, it resonated inside my head and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Simply put, I don’t think I’m going to write much more young adult fiction, or novels that could be classified that way. Watching y/a Twitter has been horrifying, and that entire world just–yeah, no thank you. I had always wanted to write books for teenagers, going back to discovering Christopher Pike and R. L. Stine and Jay Bennett back in the early 1990’s (Jay Bennett was amazing, absolutely amazing), and it was never about trying to make a lot of money or anything (despite being accused of that any number of times), but simply stories about teens that I wanted to tell. Currently, I have three novels in some sort of progress centering teenagers; I am going to get them finished and then I am going to leave y/a behind (I still have two good ideas for y/a books; I may eventually write them, or I may not).

I’ve been reassessing my career a lot lately–I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me I should write something more mainstream, so I could make more money….because I would then have so much money I wouldn’t need to write anything at all. There are stories I want to tell–I have ideas coming to me all the time–but I am never going to stop writing stories centering gay men. I’m just not wired that way. I may write things that are more mainstream–a lot of my short fiction isn’t about gay men–but i am never going to stop writing gay stories. I’m just not going to, nor should I have to, and while I understand the good intentions behind people telling me to write something more commercial, I can’t help but wonder if people say that to other minority writers?

I kind of doubt it.

But now I need to get ready to face my day, so it’s off to the spice mines with me. Have an absolutely lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll chat with you again tomorrow.

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