Category: crime fiction

Got to Get You Into My Life

Wednesday, and my mind is all over the map this week. I kept thinking yesterday was Monday and had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t, that it was actually Tuesday, and the rest of my week is going to be relatively light, in terms of time spent in the actual office. I do have to drive out to Metairie after work on Thursday for my eye exam (new glasses! hurray!) which means driving back into the city during the worst of rush hour traffic (hurray!) but….I only have to work half-a-day on Friday, so there’s the trade off. And then it’s the weekend, again…

I am literally wishing my life away, aren’t I?

I managed another chapter and three thousand words, give or take, yesterday, and it felt good to be back on that horse. Note that I am not saying the chapter/3000 words are good, mind you–but I did get them done, and I am really pleased with myself, he typed smugly. I may not get this finished by the end of the month as I originally intended, but I will get it done sooner than I was estimating. I was actually worried I might have to put it to the side and get back to work on something else because I failed so miserably at getting it done in May, but if I keep up the pace I should be able to get this draft finished and still have time to get back to work on the other manuscript before I have to work on a different project entirely.

It never ends, really.

So here it is Wednesday, and I am still a little off. The shorter weeks, despite my love of them, are a bit disruptive to someone who enjoys routine, finding peace (in a recognizably and understandably bizarre way) in repetition and the sameness of following the same routine. It’s sort of like cleaning; I enjoy the mindlessness of cleaning and the feeling of satisfaction once it’s finished and everything is completely in order. Today is also payday, which means it’s time to start paying the end of the month/start of the month bills, which is always a completely odious chore. Ugh, how I hate paying the bills.

But it must be done, sadly, and the brief moment of satisfaction derived from seeing a momentarily swollen bank account will be fleeting, as always; fleeting and over and done with in a matter of moments. I try to derive satisfaction from paying the bills; getting a sense of completion from accomplishing a task, no matter how much I loathe said task, of course.

Tomorrow after work I have to head out to Metairie for an eye appointment; I am looking forward to getting new glasses and a new prescription for contact lenses, which I am determined to actually try again this year. My eyesight has gotten so bad that contact lenses aren’t necessarily the best option for me (I either need the progressive ones, which I don’t like that much, or to get regular ones and use reading glasses. The problem is I am so blind I’d have to wear the reading glasses all the time, which kind of negates the entire purpose of contact lenses), but I am going to give it the old college try once again. I am actually kind of excited, weirdly enough, about heading out there tomorrow; I generally detest going to Metairie, particularly if Veterans Boulevard is involved (which it will be, alas), and I’ll have to drive back into the city during the worst of the traffic–which I absolutely love the idea of, he typed sarcastically. But part of my goals for this year is to get everything taken care of that I should get taken care of, and take advantage of the various insurance plans to which I have access. After the eyes are taken care of, it’s the dentist…which is a terrifying thought.

I really hate the dentist.

But I feel rested and recharged this morning for the bill paying that must be done and the errands that must be run before work, which is a good thing and not how I usually feel on Wednesdays, so this is a lovely change.

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

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Thunder Island

As Constant Reader already is aware, I’ve been trying to diversify my reading this year. The Diversity Project, as I’ve been calling it, has been revelatory for me; I’ve been reading books and authors I should have been reading all along, but somehow, despite having bought the books, they’ve collected dust and cobwebs in my TBR pile as I somehow always manage to reach for something else when it’s time to read something new. But it has been, as I said, revelatory to me; and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the ride. My endgame, as it were, is that when I finish this “project”, any subconscious bias I might have in deciding on what to read will have been ripped out, root and stem, and it will simply fade away into something I won’t need to call attention to because I’ve bested the worst biases in my psyche–and aren’t the ones we aren’t aware of the worst?

Yes, they are.

So over the last week I read Rachel Howzell Hall’s wonderful They All Fall Down.

they all fall down

The Los Angeles International Airport was the worst place to lose your mind in post-9/11 America. Especially if you perspired like Kobe Bryant in Game 7 of the NBA finals. Especially if you popped Valium twice a day to combat anxiety. And there I was, standing in the TSA security clearance line at LAX, a sweaty, anxious black woman wearing sweaty green silk, sipping air and blinking away tears.

Miriam, keep it together. They’re gonna pull you out of line if you keep on. Calm down. But “calm” was slipping further away, an iceberg on a quick current being pushed by a pod of enthusiastic killer whales.

And so I closed my eyes and I prayed again. God, don’t let them kick me out of LAX today. Please help me stay calm.

“Next.”

In my mind, I said, “Amen,” then opened my eyes. I forced myself to smile at the gray-eyed TSA agent seated behind the little podium, and hoped that she thought I was a slow blinker and not a terrorist praying one last time before setting one off.

The agent flicked her hand at me and said, “ID and boarding pass, please.”

I’m not sure how I became aware of Rachel Howzell Hall, but I think it was while I was serving on the board of directors for Mystery Writers of America and I was chairing the committee to recruit new board members; we were determined to diversify the board and I think the wondrous Margery Flax suggested her to me as a possible, viable candidate. We had a lovely email exchange and I bought one of her books, Land of Shadows, which went into the TBR pile and never came out of it. I’d heard lots of good things about They All Fall Down, so I got a copy, and decided to read it next.

And am I glad I did!

Sometimes I talk about Agatha Christie, but it’s been years since I’ve read any of her books (I did reread a favorite, Endless Night, a few years back; it’s the most noir of Christie’s novels, which are all, frankly, much darker than she gets credit for) but one cannot deny Christie’s rightful place as the greatest mystery writer of all time; she did it all, and she did it first. One of my absolute favorites of hers is And Then There Were None, which was groundbreaking and highly original and has been copied numerous times: the set up of taking a group of people somewhere remote, stranding them without chance of rescue or escape, and setting a murderer loose amongst them. Margaret Millar, for example, used this set-up for Fire Will Freeze; and it’s been the basis for many slasher movies, etc. I thought about doing my own version of this a few years ago–because the set-up is so classic and enduring, I wanted to give it my own spin–but the problem was how to strand a group of people without cell phone service or the Internet or even satellite phones, without using Christie’s “send them to a remote island” trope.

Let’s face it, though–the remote island is the perfect set-up.

They All Fall Down has been compared to And Then There Were None, and it’s apparent, almost from the first: a group of people have been invited to Mictlan Island, a remote location somewhere in the Sea of Cortez; all with different understandings of why they’ve been invited. Miriam Macy, Hall’s main character, believes she’s been invited to join the cast of a Survivor type reality television show; she’s hoping to win and use the prize money to reboot her shattered life. Hall only doles out information about Miriam slowly, over the course of the novel, but it’s a testament to her skill as a writer that there are two mysteries going on at the same time–the mystery of Miriam’s past, and the mystery of who is killing people on the island. The book is full of surprises and twists, the cast of characters is diverse, and the themes Hall explores are original, or given enough of a new spin to make them seem fresh and new.

But the real revelation of the book is the character of Miriam Macy, and the way Hall breathes life into this complicated woman who has done something horrible and yet continues to justify what she did rather than accepting any culpability for it. You can’t help but root for Miriam, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and the brilliance of Hall’s talent is that you keep rooting for Miriam as the story goes on, even after you find out the full story and her history, because her experience on the island is helping her to grow and see the darkness she has denied for years.

This book is an extraordinary accomplishment, and I can’t wait to read more of Hall’s work. Buy it, read it, and love it.

Summer

Memorial Day, and I woke up early. Last night wasn’t a deep sleep, but rather a nice restful one that involved some occasional waking from time to time. My eyes are kind of blurry and burning this morning as well–probably not as well rested as the rest of my body feels.

Yesterday was a nice day. I chose to take the day off from writing yesterday and just read–although I have to admit it wasn’t really much of a choice: I decided to spend an hour reading Rachel Howzell Hall’s They All Fall Down, only to not be able to stop reading it until I was finished. It’s quite a book, frankly; I’ll talk more about it in its own blog entry, perhaps even later today. I then started reading Joseph Olshan’s Black Diamond Fall, which is also extremely well written; but the opening reminded me a lot of the opening of Sara J. Henry’s A Cold and Lonely Place, which is one of my favorite books of the decade, quite frankly–do yourself a favor and read it, if you haven’t already. I’m probably going to do some more reading this morning before I embark on the rest of my day–I still have cleaning and straightening up to do, and there’s always more writing that needs to be done–but this four-day weekend has been absolutely lovely. I only have a four day work week as a result–one long day, one normal day, then two short–and then it’s again the weekend, which will be rather lovely. I’ll probably turn the 4th of July into a long weekend as well, which will also be lovely.

We watched the Game of Thrones documentary last night, The Last Watch, and while it was interesting and informative, there were places where it dragged a bit; the problem was scope, at least for me; the show was simply too big to condense a “behind the scenes” documentary into slightly less than two hours. But it did fill the enormous hole in my Sunday evening that the ending of the show has left; I hate the idea there won’t be any more Game of Thrones. We came to the show late, of course; everyone was already talking about it and it was already winning Emmys when Paul and I started watching it all those years ago, with discs from Netflix delivered in the mail; I believe it was Season Three where I finally broke down and started paying for HBO so we could watch the show as it aired on Sunday evenings. I’m still processing this final season, and while I can understand the disappointment a lot of fans had with it, it also kind of worked for me–and I also would like to remind people, it could have been much, much worse. I was glad that the traditional story-telling tropes the show never followed it continued to deny right up to the very end; I mean, wasn’t the show building to Jon Snow killing the Night King and winding up seated on the Iron Throne as the last male Targaryen heir? It certainly looked that way, and I couldn’t really see any other ending. The show constantly surprised and angered us all over the years by consistently doing the unexpected, as the books do as well.

The enormous disappointment and hard feelings held by so many fans kind of tells me the show did its job properly; we were so vested in the characters that not having the expected endings for them embittered so many.

We’ve saved the second season of Killing Eve for a binge tonight; which is why I want to get all of the things done I want to get done today done early. So, once I have finished writing this and answering some emails, I am going to make myself another cup of coffee and adjourn to my easy chair and the Olshan novel, which I will read for a little while before getting up and cleaning the windows. After I clean the windows I am going to try to get some writing done; probably working on the outline for the rest of the WIP, some more work on another project, and I think I am going to dig out “Never Kiss a Stranger” and do some more work on it. I want to send some stories out for submission this week, so I’m going to need to spend some time reading and polishing those stories today as well. Yes, yes, so much to do, and sitting here isn’t getting it done, either.

So, it’s off to mine spice for me. Have a lovely day, everyone.

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Baby Face

Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and I am feeling well rested and lively and energetic and all of that. I always forget how important it is for me to take these mini-breaks, to keep my sanity and recharge my batteries. I woke up just before eight this morning–I stayed up later than I’d planned, but the latest version of Halloween was available to stream on HBO and we didn’t discover it until after nine last night, so my plans of going to bed regularly between ten-thirty and eleven were all for naught. There’s condensation on my windows this morning, which means it’s humid as fuck outside; I’d planned on lugging the ladder outside and cleaning the windows this morning–which I still may do, mind you, I haven’t ruled it out–in addition to some other cleaning.

Yesterday was quite lovely, and I realized, yet again, how my ideal life would be that of a stay-at-home writer; it’s lovely to get up, check emails, bounce around social media a bit, then clean and organize around writing. I finished the laundry room yesterday, with the baseboards and everything in there, and progressed into the kitchen/office area. I did the lower windows on the inside, moved the file cabinet to clean behind it, and reorganized things around my desk. There’s still some debris piled up on the counter that needs to be sorted and filed away properly; that’s a chore for this morning with my coffee, methinks, along with the dirty dishes in the sink. I’m also taking the pictures down and wiping the dust off them; New Orleans is the dustiest place I’ve ever lived, and it’s a constant battle. I was going to be a feather-duster yesterday but they didn’t have any at Rouse’s, which was, as you can imagine, a horrible disappointment to me. I also couldn’t believe I didn’t have one to begin with; I searched high and low for it yesterday morning, certain there was one somewhere….and then I remembered…you have a cat. Skittle destroyed your feather duster years ago, and you saw no point in buying another as long as you still have a cat.

Fortunately, Scooter is not nearly as vicious a hunter/destroyer of worlds the way Satan’s Kitty was, so I think I might be able to get away with having one again.

It’s the little things, you know, that truly make me happy.

I also worked yesterday, shocking as it may seem; little as I wanted to, of course, I still managed to sit down and work. I read the rest of “The Snow Globe” all the way through, and realized I needed to add another scene to it–it ends too abruptly for the new end I have in mind, and so I have to reread the entire thing from beginning to end. I always aim for my short stories to come in around five thousand words as an ideal length (which I also realize is quite silly; it comes from editing anthologies and thinking “twenty stories of five thousand words each is a hundred thousand words and voila, anthology is finished!) and it’s subconscious. The story is now at about just over 4800 words, and there’s no way to add this sequence in only 200 or so words and so I pulled back from the story. This morning, in the cold harsh bright light of a new day, I realized so fucking what if it winds up over five thousand? You can actually make it SIX thousand if you fucking want to. So, I’ll probably be revisiting that as well.

I took a look at Chapter Eleven of the WIP as well; realizing that starting it one week and finishing it the next without rereading what was already done resulted in some repetition of things; yesterday I chose not to deal with it, and instead did some background work. I pulled up the outline, that only went through Chapter Five, and added the next six chapters to the outline, intending to outline the next five as well so as to have something to fall back on without having to create it out of thin air. But I sincerely (not lazily) couldn’t figure out what to do in the next five chapters and so I put it aside as well and worked on something else–something else that I’ve been asked to do and has been hovering in the back of my subconscious creative brain while I struggle to finish this first draft. I am not ready to talk about it completely and openly just yet–still far too nascent for any public commentary/discussion–but I started doing the background work necessary, and realized what I’d been thinking of doing was probably the wrong place to start, and I actually thought of the proper place to start, so I was busily making notes and writing things down and actually creating, which is always kind of fun. I’m probably–we’ll see–going to try to get Chapter Eleven straightened out today, and will work on this new thing for a bit, and I’d also like to work on another story I’ve got hanging around unfinished. If I can get all this writing–and cleaning–done today, tomorrow I may reward myself just a little bit by allowing myself some down time to read–in fact, this morning, I am going to read for a little while before tackling the dishes; I find reading is also a lovely way to wake up the mind, and I really do want to get deeper into Rachel Howzell Hall’s They All Fall Down, which is quite superbly written.

We did watch the newest Halloween last night, and it was quite enjoyable. I love the concept that Carpenter basically threw away everything already filmed as canonical sequels to the original, and simply pretended none of those films had ever happened; instead making a straight-up sequel/reboot of the series; I’m not really sure what you would call this film in terms of the rest of the Michael Myers canon. But it was clear Halloween H20 or whatever it was called never happened; in this world Laurie had a daughter, not a son, and we find Laurie Strode in straight-up Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 mode; someone who has spent her entire life preparing herself for when he comes back to  kill her–and there’s no doubt in her mind that he’s going to, eventually. The trauma of the murders when she was a teenager has damaged her, certainly, and has definitely affected the relationship with her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, and she lives in a secure fortress (think Sydney in Scream 3), which also makes sense. I couldn’t help but think as I watched how much better this all would work as a novel; as we could actually get inside the heads of certain point-of-view characters, and how Laurie’s residual trauma has affected/damaged them–wouldn’t that novel, from the point of view of all three women, each a different generation with a different outlook and experience with the trauma, be absolutely fascinating?

I’ve become a lot more interested, I think, as a reader and as a writer, in the aftermath of trauma–how precisely does one deal with that kind of trauma, and what does it do to you as a person, how does it affect the rest of your life and your relationships, etc.  As a writer, I’m becoming less interested in the solving of a crime rather than the actual aftershocks created by the crime; as well as the motivations behind the crime–what drives the criminal to commit the crime in the first place? I think the reason Murder in the Rue Chartres is often considered my best work is because it deals with trauma; the trauma of a  damaged and destroyed city after a major natural disaster, as well as the trauma of getting past the murder of someone you loved.

So, that’s the plan for today, at any rate. Tomorrow I hope to spend the day doing a deep clean of the living room and the staircase, done around the writing and reading I need to get done, and then hopefully we’ll start getting caught up on Killing Eve.

And now back to the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

08

Let Her In

Yesterday was simply lovely.

I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, but I also suspected as much would occur–I know myself all too well–but I got the laundry room cleaned, even the baseboards–and all the bed linens done, vast arrays of dishes, and filing and organizing and other general duties that probably don’t get done as often as they should. I am really the most horrible housekeeper; my apartment would never pass muster, and the way my mother would react to it sends chills down my spine. I don’t like have a slovenly home, but there simply isn’t enough time for me to keep up with it all, let alone do the deep dive it really needs.

You learn to live with the dust.

I shudder to think what the tops of the cabinets look like, or what’s under the refrigerator.

But it was lovely, I enjoyed doing what I was doing and I listened to music and I made progress on answering my emails and I even looked over the revision of “The Snow Globe” I had begun. I also discovered that–utter Luddite that I am–that I can broadcast the screen of my computer onto the living room television. The mouse also works in there, but not the keyboard; I am not sure what the problem is there, but it’s probably solvable. Imagine, me being able to write on my computer while seeing it on the television screen while I recline in my easy chair with a lap desk.

How much fun would that be?

Pretty darned fun, methinks.

We started watching the new Renee Zellweger show on Netflix, What If, but lost interest in it about halfway through. Paul fell asleep and I was scrolling through my phone, and when he did wake up I really couldn’t explain what was going on because I hadn’t been paying attention–so off it went. We may try it again later, but we’ve never been big fans of hers, and while I hesitate to comment on the way people look, particularly people in the entertainment business, she’s had some work done and she doesn’t look quite right, if that makes sense. She looks pretty, but now there’s a kind of artificiality about her face which wasn’t there before, if that makes sense? Maybe not. Maybe I am being too hard on her and too hard on the show, but I was hoping for something good, particularly since one of the male actors was stunningly good looking and had a nude scene in the first few minutes, appearing again later in just some boxer briefs.

We may try again later.

I also watched another episode of The Spanish Princess, which is entertaining enough, if not as well done as other similar type series about royalty. I never did finish The White Princess, but I rather enjoyed The White Queen, and am really looking forward to HBO’s Catherine the Great with Helen Mirren–although that may be just a film. But watching The Spanish Princess, I was struck by how very different this take on Katherine of Aragon is then anything I’ve ever seen (or read) before. Katherine is primarily of interest to filmmakers/playwrights as an old woman, past menopause and having lost the love of Henry VIII, while desperately resisting his attempt to divorce her to marry Anne Boleyn. She is always portrayed sympathetically–the tragic devoted wife, deserted and abandoned for a younger model (the age-old story), proudly holding on to her dignity and fighting for the inheritance of her daughter. I’ve always kind of been more #teamAnneBoleyn, to be honest, and the older I get and the more I read the more suspicious I am of the kind of person Katherine was–and she doesn’t really have my sympathy. Don’t get me wrong, neither does Henry; he was an idiot and a fool and he didn’t understand his first wife at all. They were both willful and arrogant and too proud. Katherine should have understood her duty better; Henry should have known better than to ask his wife to say she’d lied to the entire world in order to invalidate their marriage.

Simply stated, there wasn’t any way Katherine was ever going to do that, and that he even asked guaranteed she would fight him to the end.

But it’s amazing how well she has done in the court of public opinion over the centuries; the “wronged woman” getting all the sympathy. One of the things I loved about Carrolly Erickson’s biography of Katherine’s daughter, Bloody Mary, is that she wrote about the influences constantly at war within Mary’s nature; her role in the world as a woman, and how that came into conflict with her role as princess and later Queen. (Her sister Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a master of playing both conflicting roles to her advantage, based on the situation at hand; Mary could have learned a lot from her much younger sister.)

But the interesting thing about The Spanish Princess is that we are, just as we can never be certain about the truth in history, not certain whether or not Katherine’s first marriage, to Henry’s sickly older brother Arthur, was actually consummated. The way the show was filmed (and I could be wrong), it implies that they did consummate the marriage–and she changed her story later to fulfill what she believed was her destiny: to marry a prince of England and bring the two countries into alliance against their common enemy, France. This is a very different take on Katherine’s story; usually it is pretty much taken for granted that she was telling the truth and she and Arthur never had sex.

I like this entire concept of telling the story from the perspective that she actually lied in order to become Queen of England; and I’ve always believed, from the very first time I read the highly sympathetic biography of her by Mary M. Luke when I was eleven (Catherine the Queen), that she may have lied because it was in her best interest to do so.

And having lied, she could hardly admit, thirty years later, that she had.

Such a fascinating woman, really. I still am not certain any biography has truly done her justice.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines. There’s cleaning and reading and writing to do; and I need to run some errands later.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

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One of These Nights

I have been saying for quite some time that some of the best crime fiction in print is being written by women. This is not to say that there isn’t great crime fiction being written by men these days–there are a lot of amazing male crime writers–but the women don’t ever seem to get the attention–or rapturous praise–that men do. Sistersn in Crime has dedicated itself for over thirty years to put women on the same playing field–recognition, reviews, awards–as the guys, and their hard work is starting to pay dividends.

That isn’t to say we don’t have a long way to go, however; but I do believe in recognizing progress once it’s been made.

I met Jamie Mason I don’t know how many years ago; I do remember it was at Sleuthfest in Orlando (thanks for the invite and another shout-out to MWA-Florida!), and we were on a panel together about place/setting. I think Laura Lippman, who was a keynote speaker/special guest, was also on the panel, and maybe one more person? My memories are hazy these days, my apologies. But I liked Jamie immediately, she was smart and had really insightful things to say. After the panel, Laura and I repaired to the poolside bar for a cocktail and lunch (it was afternoon and no one was out there), and Jamie tentatively asked if she could join us.

From such humble beginnings are friendships born.

I bought Jamie’s first novel that weekend, Three Graves Full, and read it several months later and LOVED it. (It’s still one of my favorite crime novels of this decade, for the record.) She handed me a copy of the ARCs for his second, Monday’s Lie, at Bouchercon in Long Beach either later that year or the next; I treasure that ARC, but as is my wont, didn’t want to read it until there was another Jamie Mason book in print.

That time is now. This summer sees the release of Jamie’s third novel, The Hidden Things, and she very generously send me an ARC of it.

the hidden things

The video had been watched only forty-four times before Carly Liddell’s attacker was identified to the police. Viewer number forty-four was the prize tipster, and it was a good thing it was all resolved quickly. The young man in the video had killed a turtle over a span of hours one dull Saturday a decade earlier, at the age of nine, in the early weeks of the same summer he’d set his first fire. Since then, matches, rocks, the heel of his shoe, the long drop over the railing of a bridge, and other weapons of juvenile destruction had been urgently fascinating to him in ways that got him into trouble when he was a boy, in ways he’d learned to hide over the years.

He’d been stealing things, lately. And watching women.

He always would have made the news.

The video, a sloppy edit of footage from a home-security system, went on to become something of a phenomenon. It had been cut together in a hurry by a tech-savvy officer in the cybercrimes unit who was good with that sort of thing. It went up on the police website less than twenty minutes after the flash drive, loaded with the raw recordings from the home’s monitoring surveillance, had been plugged into his computer. Backslaps and high fives all around for that one.

I love the way Jamie writes.

She has a very distinct and different style from others writing today, which is, in and of itself, an achievement. She builds her stories from a small kernel, a small thing that might happen at any time any day to anyone, and it builds from there. In Three Graves Full that small thing was the main character’s decision to hire landscapers to redo the flower beds around his nondescript home; in The Hidden Things it’s a little more unique: a high school girl coming from school to an empty house is followed by an assailant who gets into the house behind her. She manages to fight him off and go for help; all of this is captured by security cameras inside the house. The local cops post the video on-line on their Facebook page in order to help identify the assailant, with the unexpected result that the video goes viral.

Videos go viral, after all, every day. So what makes this viral video memorable, different, from other viral videos?

Well, for one thing, neither the girl (Carly Liddell) nor her mother had known there were security cameras in the foyer of their home; so her stepfather has some explaining to do.

Secondly, something caught on video–the corner of a painting hanging in the foyer–catches the attention of some very dangerous people.

You see, Carly’s stepfather of four years has been keeping some seriously dark secrets from both her and her mother…secrets that start coming out now with serious consequences.

I absolutely loved this book. The characters are beautifully sculpted; Mason knows what makes people tick and also understands that small, barely noticeable touches are what make characters come to life as well as making relationships ring with honesty and truth and reality. The book is so good I deeply resented everything else that was keeping me from reading it–being tired, errands, cleaning, doing my own writing, my day job–and I literally had to finally push everything aside one day to read the second half in one sitting. Her style reminds me of a combination of Margaret Millar and Patricia Highsmith; literary but accessible at the same time.

It is officially being released in August; do yourself a favor and preorder it right now. And if you’ve not read her before, do yourself an even bigger favor and go read her back list. You won’t regret it.

This Masquerade

 Yes, I am now beginning a glorious four-day weekend, during which I plan to read and clean and write and rest and watch movies and just have a glorious time relaxing and trying to catch up on things. I started cleaning, for example, out my jump drive yesterday–there’s an absolutely absurd amount of duplicates, old pictures from a million years ago, old files, etc on it–and I am probably going to try to spend some time trying to do that; get better organized with my computer files and so forth. I also intend to spend some time on a deep clean of the apartment–we’ll see how that goes, but my windows are filthy and I really do need to move things and clean beneath them; and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to clean and organize all the cabinets and drawers, either.

Ambition. We’ll see how that works out, won’t we?

But I slept fantastically last night, waking up this morning feeling wonderfully rested. My burnt lips are healing (you have no idea how fun it is to test people for syphilis while warning them of the dangers of the disease while your lips have enormous looking blister/wounds on them) and hopefully by the time I return to work on Tuesday morning, they will have healed completely and I will no longer have to worry about their syphilitic appearance any more. *whew*

So, here I am, just before nine in the morning with four glorious days off stretching out in front of me. I am going to write a little this morning–probably finishing the revision of “The Snow Globe,” and then hopefully revising the latest chapter of the WIP–while cleaning. I am going to try to do a deep dive clean, one that is sorely overdue here in the Lost Apartment–baseboards, floors, windows, window sills and frames, etc–which can, of course, be incredibly tedious, but it also needs to be done. It’s also launder the bed linen day, and so I have that to do as well. I also want to curl up with Rachel Howzell Hall’s They All Fall Down, which I’ve not had the chance to get back to this week, and after that, I’d like to read either John Copenhaver’s Dodging and Burning or Joseph Olshan’s Black Diamond Fall, which are both Lambda finalists (John is also a Strand and Anthony Award finalist). And then I am not sure what I’ll read after that; I got a stack of fabulous books this week to add to the TBR pile, including Owen Laukkanen’s Deception Cove and the new Michael Koryta…and there’s already so many wonderful treasures waiting for me in the the pile already.

An embarrassment of riches, as it were.

We also watched the new Wanda Sykes comedy special on Netflix last night, and she’s just as funny and pointed as ever, which is lovely as I am a big fan.

I’m probably going to watch the finale of Game of Thrones again at some point over this weekend, as well–I have found, this season particularly, that it helps to rewatch the episodes after having some time to digest them; I find that it helps me appreciate the show more; the first time I watch I am so busy watching to see what happens that I miss subtleties I am able to catch on a reviewing. I know a lot of fans hated this final season of the show–some going as far as to hate the last two seasons–but I enjoyed it; I enjoyed it as spectacle, and I enjoyed it even despite holes in the plot and subplots that went nowhere and so on and so forth; primarily because it did the unexpected, and it did from the very beginning. Game of Thrones never gave us what we were expecting because it didn’t follow traditional story-telling arcs–for example, once Jon Snow was identified as the true Targaryen heir to the Iron Throne, I was a little disappointed (despite the thrill); because I thought, ho-hum, here we go, it’s just another telling of the King Arthur legend–but as it turned out, it wasn’t that at all.

And I think that may be why so many fans were so disappointed–they were expecting the traditional story arcs, and Game of Thrones went the other way and rejected those.

Then again, what do I know? The Last Jedi is one of my favorite Star Wars movies, which also apparently renders me suspect as a forty-year Star Wars fan.

And on that note, it’s time to start cleaning and writing which means closing the web browsers.

Hello, spice mines!

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Wham Bam

So, I burned my upper lip over the weekend (my lower lip also, but not as bad as the upper) and this is something I’ve never done before, so am not really sure how to deal with it. My lips hurt, of course, and it’s not like you can bandage your lip. I just kept putting Blistex on them the last few days whenever it felt like they were cracking (yes, that’s a thing) but I ate pizza for dinner last night and must have burned the upper lip even more because this morning I woke up with it covered in dried blood and kind of scabby. I carefully washed it, clearing off the dried blood, and then of course it started bleeding again. It has since stopped, thanks to regular blotting with tissue, but nonetheless, it was a rather traumatic way to start the day, but there we are.

I set my alarm to get up at seven, allowing myself an extra hour’s sleep than Monday and Tuesday, but naturally hit snooze and wound up getting up at eight thirty. Not disgraceful, mind you, but not pleasing in my eyes.

I wound up not working on the book yesterday, after all; a review of Chapter Eleven showed me that writing it disjointedly the way I had meant that there are things in the first part of the chapter that I repeat in the second half, which means I need to revise it before moving on. This was actually fine with me; I used the day to start rewriting “The Snow Globe” based on the lovely notes I’d received from the editor who’d rejected it (thank you again and a big shout out to Sandra Kasturi!) and the story is better and more cohesive now; it actually makes sense, and again, returning to a story months after the last time I’d looked at it–yeah, clunky sentences and paragraphs that don’t flow into each other, etc., to the point that I was actually embarrassed I’d let Sandra read it in the first place as she is an editor I admire. Oh, well, I’m sure it was neither the first nor the last time an editor read something of mine and thought, how in the hell did he get published, and how the hell did he win those awards?

Sigh.

I decided to take Friday off so I have a four-day weekend to look forward to, which is, naturally, quite lovely. I hope to get a lot done–don’t I always–but if I don’t, I am fine with just getting rested and doing some writing and some cleaning. I will, of course, come up with an enormously lengthy list of the things I want to get done, but we’ll see how it goes. I made a to-do list for the week yesterday, which is a lovely and nice change–I really need to get back into the habit of doing that–and I also made an eye appointment so I can get new glasses/contact lenses. Look at me, getting things done!

We also watched the most recent episode of Fosse/Verdon last night. The show is amazing on every level, and not just for the stunning performances of Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams in the leads. Williams deserves an Emmy, but the Actress in a Limited Series or Movie category is going to be a tough one, I suspect, this coming year. But as I watched the original production of Chicago coming together, and Gwen baring her teeth–especially when she had to have surgery on her vocal chords and walk away from the show for six weeks, being replaced by Liza Minelli, who then turned the show into a huge hit–I couldn’t help thinking of Valley of the Dolls and Helen Lawson, which then led me down a primrose path in my head of imagine if this story was being told by Jacqueline Susann, a thought that’s still, obviously, lingering in my head this morning.

The other interesting thing I am taking away from watching the show is astonishment at realizing just how HUGE a star on Broadway Gwen Verdon actually was; I’d heard of her before, of course–who doesn’t know Damn Yankees, and we actually did it in high school–and Sweet Charity, but I’d literally no idea precisely how big a star she actually was. She was considered the best singer/dancer on Broadway in the 50’s/60’s–and you have to remember who the other women appearing on Broadway during that time were to realize how important she must have been: Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews, and Chita Rivera, to name a few–and she won four Tonys. FOUR.

Damn it, now I am going to have to read the book the series is based on, Fosse.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Happy Wednesday, Constant Reader!

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Fox on the Run

It is Sunday morning. I slept like the dead last night, which was quite marvelous, and now am awake and feeling rested (if slightly groggy; not mentally but I feel like my body hasn’t woken up completely yet, which is weird, I know) and sitting here at my desk swilling coffee. The day looks kind of dark outside–I just got a weather alert that Orleans Parish is in a tornado watch (along with about nine other parishes in the area) until eleven; which explains the gloom. I am going to do some things this morning–like write this blog, try to answer emails to send tomorrow morning, straighten up the kitchen a bit–and then I am going to get cleaned up and write for a while. I have a board call this afternoon as well; I assume after that is over I’ll get some reading done and start preparing for the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones tonight.

I figured out, as I mentioned yesterday, the perfect way to finally make my story “And The Walls Came Down” work, which is rather exciting, and something I definitely want to get to work on; I also figured out how to make “The Snow Globe” work; and I’d like to add some words to “Never Kiss a Stranger,” which is turning into a novella, but that’s fine; I don’t mind overwriting the story in order to trim it down to size at some point later. I also want to get Chapter Eleven finished; a rather ambitious morning I have planned here, but it should still work. I was also thinking about stopping at the grocery today to get some more Creole tomatoes, but that can really wait until tomorrow; if the weather is going to be shitty today I certainly don’t want to go out into it under any circumstances. I also need to make chicken salad for Paul’s lunches this week at some point, and I am going to make meatballs in the crockpot today for dinner, in order to have some things for lunch for the week myself (and making a crockpot meal makes it so much easier to clean up; I can get everything clean other than the crockpot itself long before the meal is done).

And of course this week ends in a three-day weekend, which is beyond lovely. I love me some three-day weekends, particularly since I will be sliding into it with two half-days before hand. Huzzah!

It’s going to be bittersweet seeing Game of Thrones come to a conclusion tonight. I’ve actually rewatched last weeks episode, “The Bells”, a couple of times–skipping over the parts I don’t care about (the so-called Clegane Bowl and the Euron-Jaime duel don’t need to be seen more than once, quite frankly) and I have to say, the more I watch the more impressed with the episode I am. I’ve also seen a lot of the fan reactions and read a lot of think-pieces about the episode–more so than I have about anything I watch on television or in a movie, other than my favorite Real Housewives franchises; and I do this a lot with Game of Thrones–and I’ve not really understood so much of the criticism. Game of Thrones has always been a show about the shades of gray rather than black-and-white; no one is truly good, no one is all bad. Good people can do bad things; bad people can do heroic things. Episode 4  (“The Last of the Starks”) is the episode everyone should have been angry with; that was the episode that ended with me shaking my head and thinking what the fuck just happened? People are disappointed that Jaime went back to Cersei, because that essentially ruined his redemption arc; but Martin has given us few redemption arcs that were seen all the way through. Maybe it’s because the redemption stories that actually were fulfilled were so powerful (Theon redeeming himself for his betrayal of the Starks and later his sister; Ser Jorah redeeming himself for the sin of slaving in his youth; etc) that we were bound to be disappointed with the ones that didn’t finish. But Jaime realizing that a happy ending with Brienne or whomever wasn’t simply in the cards for him and that he had to go back to Cersei in the end because they were bound together made total sense to me–and the payoff scene of their mutual deaths was powerful enough for me.

Did I want to see Cersei suffer more? Sure I did–I’ve been wanting to see her suffer since she demanded Jaime shove Bran out the window and Sansa’s direwolf killed–but there were also moments when I was rooting for her–the shame walk through the streets of King’s Landing, her victory over her enemies by destroying the Sept of Baelor, for two examples–and her death resulted in what I call “Darth Vader syndrome”; no villain ever dies in a way I find satisfactorily awful enough. (I waited three movies, six years, and almost seven hours to see Darth Vader finally get his; only to see him redeem himself before dying so I was cheated out of the grisly, painful death I’d been wanting to see for him for all that time.)

As for Daenarys turning Drogon loose on the city and destroying it while Cersei watched it all unfold in front of her (which was brilliant, and some brilliant, non-vocal acting by Lena Headey), I thought that was a brilliant way to torture Cersei and get some payback, and for the record, Dany has always been a bit of a ruthless tyrant. Her story has also been about her suffering and growing into the Queen she was mean to be; it is always her friends and advisors who held her back from unleashing the dragons of war on her foes. The show also did an excellent job of making us think that anything could happen with the siege/sack of King’s Landing; but the very points I made about the episode two weeks ago–why doesn’t she fly up high and come in behind the Iron Fleet–was the actual strategy she used last week to destroy the Iron Fleet and the defenses of King’s Landing–with the end result she and Drogon basically defeated Cersei and conquered the city almost entirely on their own.

As Paul said as Arya rode the horse through the ruins and the credits rolled, “Now imagine if she had all three dragons and her entire army.” She certainly wouldn’t have needed the Northern Army.

And as the bells rang and she sat on Drogon, both Paul and I were rooting for her to burn it all to the ground, frankly.

And really, the sleight-of-hand the writers have played with the viewers over the years has been quite expertly done: if Dany is indeed the villain, we have seen her go from a wide-eyed, meek and innocent girl who was merely a pawn in the great game to a great conquerer; we have seen the creation of a tyrannical Queen from the very beginning while we have also seen the development of Sansa into the smartest woman in the Seven Kingdoms playing the game better than anyone, the development of Arya from a young tomboy into the best assassin in the realm, and the growth of Jon Snow from belittled bastard of Winterfell into the true heir to the Iron Throne.

It’s truly been an enjoyable ride.

I’m going to miss Game of Thrones. I am going to miss the pop culture the show has spawned, and I am going to miss the shared experience. I don’t know that I could handle watching the show from beginning to end ever again, as I did with The West Wing a few years ago–part of the fun of Game of Thrones was the constant surprises the writers kept throwing at us. Love it, hate it, be indifferent to it–but there’s no question Game of Thrones was event television in a way few other shows have ever been, and I don’t know what will replace the hole it’s going to leave in the Zeitgeist.

Will I be disappointed with the finale? I don’t know, but I am going into it expecting nothing and with absolutely NO fucking idea what’s going to happen–and that was always the appeal of the show for me; nothing was too extreme or brutal for the show, and it always, always surprised me….and there were so many great moments over the years–the Red Wedding; the Purple Wedding; the battles of Meereen, Blackwater Bay, Winterfell, Hardhome, the Loot Train, the Bastards; the horrible but well-deserved death of Ramsey Bolton; the eradication of House Frey; Lady Olenna’s last moments (“Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me” may well be the best final words ever); the execution of Ned Stark; the execution of Littlefinger; the death of the Khals; Dany emerging from the funeral pyre with her baby dragons–the list goes on and on and on.

It is incredible how much time I’ve spent thinking about this show–which says something about it, doesn’t it? I do look forward to finishing my read of the books, as well.

So, I should bring this to a close and get started on my own day; there is a lot of spice to mine, and I actually feel as though I have the energy to actually get it done today.

Happy Sunday, Constant Reader!

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Saturday Night

Well, it’s certainly Saturday morning. I woke up around eight, yet remained a lag-a-bed until around nine-ish, and you know what? Not sorry, not sorry in the least. I clearly needed to rest more–the work week seems to take more out of me these days than it used to, thank you, aging process–and now that I’m awake and swilling coffee, I feel more rested and relaxed than I did for most of the week. I still intend to write a lot this weekend, as well as get some serious cleaning done around here, and perhaps this is the time for me to finish reading Jamie Mason’s superb The Hidden Things, which is really fucking fantastic. She reminds me, in voice, style, and plotting, a lot of the great Patricia Highsmith. As I get deeper into the book and the stylish complexity of the plot becomes deeper and more tangled than I could have ever imagined when I read page one, I despair of the things that keep me from having more time to read so I can finish this exquisite gem of a novel. I am perhaps just over half-finished–which should give you an indication of how tired I’ve been lately; it’s taking me a really long time to finish this book–certainly longer than it should, given it’s consistent high quality.

The Anthony nomination this week (I still can’t believe it, to be honest) effectively derailed my entire week–but only because I allowed myself to bask in the glow of the enormous pat in the back from my colleagues, as well as the flood of congratulatory messages, posts, comments, and tweets. But now we’re in the afterglow stage of having to come back to earth and reality and get my life back together and on track yet again, particularly when it comes to writing. I really couldn’t afford to lose the days of writing I lost this week through my self-indulgence, and yet I did lose them. Chapter Eleven of the WIP has been a bitch to write; I started this past week and got about halfway through, and now have to go back to finish it and see if I can get on some kind of roll with writing it. I am going to try something; I am going to try finishing that chapter today and then move on to some short stories that have been languishing in my files for a while. Last night–or more properly, sometime yesterday–I finally figured out how to fix my story “And The Walls Came Down”; it’s a shift in the plot which will require some extreme changing. I also want to revise “This Thing of Darkness” one more time, and I’d like to get some done on my lengthy short story that is turning into a novella, “Never Kiss a Stranger.”

We watched Widows last night, which was good, but could have been better. The acting was topnotch, as were the relationships between the women–but the plot was so complicated and twisted I wasn’t sure I was actually following it and knew what was going on for most of the movie; that could also be entirely my fault. But Viola Davis is one of the finest actresses of our time, and I would watch her in anything, to be honest; her performances are always complex, nuanced, and brilliant.

We also need to catch up on Fosse/Verdon, which I can’t recommend highly enough, and we have yet to start season two of Killing Eve, which I am also excited about watching; although I am very worried about sophomore slump; season one was so brilliant and fantastic that I have concerns that the second season won’t pass muster.

Today I have to go by the Cat Practice to get another bag of Scooter’s expensive food (no, his Majesty is NOT spoiled, thank you very much), and then have to swing uptown to get the mail and make some groceries (not many, thank you Baby Jesus) before returning home, where I plan to spend the rest of the afternoon writing and cleaning (and probably doing some preparatory cooking for next week, as well). I may get the car washed as well; it’s looking pretty dirty, and the Uptown Car Wash does a lovely job; or perhaps I can put it off until next week, what with the three day weekend and all.

Yes, there’s a three day weekend lurking on the horizon, which is exciting. Huzzah! I am obviously thinking I’ll be able to either get a lot done over its course, or get a lot of rest, or some combination of the two, which would also be incredibly lovely.

I also have to start pulling together an article for Sisters in Crime for my diversity column. I have some ideas for it,  and I know who I want to speak to for it, but at the same time I’ve not been able to come up with an over-all hook for it. Maybe some brainstorming over the course of this particular weekend will do the trick for me.

And on that note, Constant Reader, it’s back to the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday!

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