Category: crime fiction

I’m a Believer

Thursday and my last day in the office for the week, Huzzah! It’s been a pretty decent week, overall, which is pretty amazing and pleases me endlessly. Is it just me, or is this summer just swimming by? It’s almost mid-July already, holy crap. I’d fully intended to be further along in my book than I am, so I need to kick it up a notch. Now that I have most of the busy work done around the apartment, I don’t need to spend as much time on that on the weekends and can start focusing on getting back into a strong writing groove again. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the book and developing the characters out further–I need to do some more work on that as well before moving on–so I am working, just not in the way that gets me closer to a finished first draft. A chapter a day for the rest of the month should do the trick, really, but that’s also a lot of writing to cram into a short period of time and I don’t know if I have the mental stamina to do that without burning myself out a bit.

I guess I need to stop being afraid to find out, right? Fear is such a useless emotion when it comes to living your life, really. Sure, if a spree killer is coming for you, you should be afraid–but you need to stay calm so you can think your way out of the situation. (I’ve always wanted to write my own take on a slasher movie; I have a couple of ideas that could be a lot of fun to explore.)

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day at all. I managed to make it through the entire day without getting tired or worn out. I came straight home from work between the rain storms (Beryl’s remnants are still plaguing us in New Orleans, but there was no flood warning last night, either) and we watched Presumed Innocent and more of Outer Range, which is very strange. There’s only one more episode and there’s no way they could possibly get everything wrapped up and explained in one, so it’s either going to be continuing into a second season and a lot is going to be left unexplained at the end of the series. It’s entertaining enough, and the acting is pretty good, so it’s involving us, but part of that involvement is “what the hell is going on?”

Not a way to end a first season or a mini-series, I’m afraid.

I was a bit tired when I got home yesterday, not going to lie about that. Not worn out must lie in chair all night doomscrolling social media while the television plays as background noise, but still fatigued. Today is my last day in the office for the week, so here we are at the end of another week with the weekend looming. I really need to get a to-do list together, because I know I am forgetting things I need to be doing. I think I am going to try to use this weekend to do a few things on the apartment, but get everything looming finished and caught up. I also want to finish Hall of Mirrors this weekend, so I can select my next read, and I have a pretty good idea of what that is going to be–it’s either the new Lori Roy or the new Wanda Morris–and of course I have some other blog posts I need to get finished. Ironically, I was already writing one about “the art v. the artist” re: the recent publishing community scandals when another broke yesterday, involving someone I know slightly and have always liked…so now I can write it from a more personal headspace. All of the scandals were surprises, but once the surprise wore off, it really wasn’t as surprising as I’d initially thought.

I also discovered yesterday that a short story I need to write isn’t actually due until December, so that was very good news. One of the things I need to do is also keep working on short stories. Maybe I’ll work on editing some this weekend; there are quite a few in progress and I really would like to get the collection finished and turned in. It can be very daunting sometimes when I think about all the things I have in progress and the fact that I am probably going to work on two of the more recent ones before I go back to anything else. I also think I am going to start working on the next Scotty book, too. I mean, what’s another thing to have on my plate, really? But I’ve written two at the same time before–going back and forth; when I’d get stuck on one I’d go work on the other, and by the time I’d get back to the original I wouldn’t be stuck anymore. It IS a lot to be juggling two books and a short story collection at the same time, but I have a lot of free time now, which I am still trying to get used to and wrap my mind around and figure out how to manage that time the most effectively I can–it is very easy to get sucked into doing nothing, particularly since I am so damned lazy and “a Greg at rest tends to stay at rest,” which has been true most of my life.

Ironically, I was writing a post about the “art v. the artist” argument this week in the wake of the last two authors outed as shitty people from the outside perspective of someone with no skin in the game (I’ve admired Gaiman’s work, but was never really vested in it; was aware of Munro but hadn’t read her; I bought a collection when she won the Nobel Prize), as has been the case pretty much always; I’d read the Harry Potter books as an adult so wasn’t vested in them, so that author’s descent into homophobic TERFdom wasn’t hard for me…but yesterday news broke about someone I actually do know and have worked with before, which means scrapping that post and starting over again. But even that acquaintance wasn’t much, and while I admired his writing successes, as I do with everyone, but I’d only ever read some of his short stories…so it’s again not something emotionally wrenching for me. So this brings a whole new perspective to it, and so I need to roll it around in my head a bit more.

Jesus, the world in which we live.

And on that horrific note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back probably later.

Last Train to Clarksville

Well, we made it to Wednesday, didn’t we? This is my first full week of work in over three weeks, thanks to holidays and a canceled trip, and I am rather surprised at how well I am doing. Monday was a drag, but yesterday? I was wide awake and energized when I left the house yesterday morning, and listened to Berlin’s Pleasure Victim–which is still a bop, forty years (!) later–and got to work early. I also got to leave early, which was delightful, despite the remnants of Beryl dumping rain on us off and on all day.

The concept of the art vs the artist has reared its ugly head again this past week or so, and yeah, I don’t have any answers to this question. I’m not particularly vested in this most recent pair of artists being exposed as bad people outside of their craft; I don’t have a dog in either fight. I have enjoyed one’s work in the past, and admired their craft, but…but the other I’ve never read. It’s easy for me to say the credible accusations are enough for me and to never read them again, but it’s not painful. I think the message from all of this is to be very careful who you make into a hero? I myself have been disappointed by celebrities and authors who’ve turned out to be terrible people in the real world; but actors aren’t their roles and authors aren’t their books, either. Performances and writing are necessarily of the person, of course, but…just because you love a character doesn’t mean the creator or the actor is a good person; the character is. Someone I’ve been reading for years and was probably my biggest favorite writer of my life has been disappointing on social media lately, and yes, I’ve allowed my politics and values to impact how I feel about him as both a person and as a writer…and if I cut other people off for being TERFs or homophobes, it’s hypocrisy to not cut off someone I admire for the same things. It helped me clear out some room in my bookshelves, and relieved me of the need to catch up on his work, which I was years behind on anyway, and you know what? I’m not sad about it, either. The books I loved I still love, I just don’t need to spend any more of my money buying new ones. Does it make me sad? It’s more disappointing than sad. They don’t care if I don’t buy another one of their books; one amongst millions is beneath even being noticed. But I blocked them on social media, which I didn’t have on my 2024 bingo card (didn’t have the media trying to pick the Democratic presidential candidate this late in the game either–and I will never forgive legacy media for this 2016-like “but her emails” reaction to ONE bad debate after three years of extraordinary leadership, either. I also didn’t have “legacy media not learning anything after 2016 and 2020” on my bingo card, either. I will not watch anyone ever again on television who are doing Project 2025’s dirty work for them (bye bye Rachel, we had a very good long run) and I will certainly never subscribe to or click on a link from a newspaper whose editorial board has gone all-in on Fascism under the arrogant guise of “we know better than Democratic voters who turned out for President Biden and have never once questioned his ability to do the job so best do what WE say”….um, excuse me? Who fucking died and made the opinions of arrogant political writers and pundits who think they know better than the voters? I trust the people around the President to help him run the country the right way, as opposed to the other candidate’s people; we’ve already seen the grifters and criminals he’ll surround himself with so they can loot the country. He doesn’t even have to be impaired for this to happen.

I certainly never thought I’d see the day when a third of the country and the media would be all-in on Fascism. Do the people at CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times actually think they’d survive a Fascist government in this country? Or are they prepping for their collaborationism by collaborating now, so they can say see, we helped your rise to power?

And that cadaver James Carville, who’s been out of touch for at least twenty years, needs to crawl back into his coffin. Don’t forget what he married; the fact that he could happily marry a reich-winger, and stay married to her after 2016, tells me all I need to know about how craven and shallow his beliefs and values are.

God, the world has changed so much since I was a kid, hasn’t it? And I cannot say for certain it’s for the better in many instances. I do think trying to end bigotry of all kinds is an improvement, for sure, and while schools aren’t 100% safe for queer kids today, at least they may not feel as isolated as they did when I was a kid–even if they live in a red state.

Even in trying to look back to the world as it was in 1994 for my WIP shows such incredible changes in the country and the world in that thirty years (half my life at this point) that it almost seems like a different world, like that Earth was in a parallel dimension. But that’s the thing about the past–it was a different time and things that are problematic now were just normal and every-day things back then. And let’s not forget it wasn’t that long ago that marriages between tweens was an acceptable practice–and still is in some parts of the country.

Some deep thoughts on this damp Wednesday morning. We’re going to continue having thunderstorms on and off through the weekend–the tail end of Beryl moving through–which is fine with me; as long as I don’t caught in a flash flood or something. We were in a heat advisory all day yesterday, and then a flash flood warning from about seven p.m. on. Just another typical summer in New Orleans. We got caught up on House of the Dragon last night, and watched two more episodes of Outer Range, which is very bizarre but really interesting. It’s reminiscent of shows like Lost or Fringe, where there’s some kind of strangeness going on that no one is really sure what it is; it’s fascinating but I have literally no idea what is going on in the show. But it’s very well done, the acting is terrific, and visually it’s very stunning to watch. We’ll probably finish it this week and then will have to find something else.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, and I’ll probably be back later.

Sexy pro wrestler Finn Balor is a favorite of mine for obvious reasons–and he’s a great wrestler, too.

A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You

Well, yesterday was one of those days at the office–the kind when you’re really grateful that you get to go home at the end of and shut your mind off completely. It wasn’t a terrible day, by any means; my job is never like that, but it was one of a lot of frustrations and small problems that usually are nothing but…the day went off the rails early in the morning and everything seemed to pile up on top of that, so the solutions, usually so easy and effortless, required thought and a moment to think it through…so yeah, not really a lot of fun there for anyone. But I got some writing done last night, and that third chapter I was really struggling with has managed to work itself out. I also am going to try, really hard, not to make every chapter the same length; there’s something to be said about the erraticism of varying chapter lengths…and the real truth is the reason I’ve always gone by chapter word counts and kept them around the same is to easily figure out the word count and where it all stands without having to pull it all into one document. I can’t work from a master document until I am in the final editing stage, and always operate by chapters. It’s methodical, and I also wonder if that methodology might be stifling creativity?

You see, I can always turn anything into a version of Imposter Syndrome, no matter what it is.

I am awake and feeling okay, too, which is a pleasant surprise. I slept well last night. I stopped and made some groceries on the way home, and spent the evening reading Rival Queens, which is about Catherine de Medici and her daughter, Margot. We’re almost up to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre–a religious genocide–during which Margot saved her Huguenot husband from the bloodthirsty Catholic mob. It was, sadly, yet another failed attempt by the Queen Mother to end the religious strife in France by killing everyone who wasn’t Catholic. It sometimes feels like I’ve been reading this book forever, and that’s probably because I have been reading for well over a year now. I’m still having some trouble focussing on reading, and thus it’s taking me far longer than it should to get deeper into my TBR pile. I am hoping to finish Hall of Mirrors this week; I just need to manage my free/spare time better. I’m not used to having free time, or at least, not this much, and I am trying to adapt to that so I can still have relaxation time in addition to reading/writing.

A nice problem to have in my sixties, methinks.

It also was raining when I went to bed last night, which certainly helped me to fall into a good, deep sleep. It’s been a very wet summer thus far–the humidity has been brutal on my sinuses, frankly–which isn’t a good thing for New Orleans; the more rain the more soaked the ground becomes and the less able to soak up water when it comes, which makes it easier to flood. They’re putting up a house on the one remaining vacant lot on the block; it started going up a couple of weeks ago (which reminded me of my unfinished short story “Condos for Sale or Rent”), so yet another place where water can go during a flooding rainstorm is now gone. We’ve still been fortunate that our block has only flooded once in all the years we’ve lived here (and it wasn’t after Katrina), and can only hope that our luck continues to hold. I think it’s going to rain again this evening as I run errands on my way home from work (mail, prescriptions), which will be annoying but livable, really. I don’t think we’re going to be busy in clinic this morning or this afternoon, which is very cool…I did manage to get caught up on things yesterday, and just have a few more things before I can wrap up the month of June completely.

I also have some chores to do tonight when I get home.

So here’s hoping for a good day, rather than a slightly irritating one. Every day is a new day, after all; and it is what you make of it, methinks. I am going to take my leave of you now and head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later, most likely.

I Want to Be Free

Monday morning and back to the office. I didn’t want to get up this morning–not really a surprise there, after a holiday weekend–and even now as I sit here with my coffee and can feel my mind and body coming back to life, my body really wants to go back to bed. This week will be my first regular work week in a while–four days in the office and one at home–so I imagine I will be dragging come Thursday morning. I did get some more work on the apartment done yesterday–the difference in the apartment is actually pretty amazing–but had some fatigue. I made groceries in the morning and came home to just kind of collapse and relax. I went down some research holes on Youtube (Louisiana bridges; the story of how New Orleans’ bridges were built and funded should also be a book; some of the nation’s longest bridges are in Louisiana; the top three, in fact–the Causeway, Atchafalaya swamp basin, and Manchac swamp bridge–all are in the New Orleans area) and then scribbled the rest of the evening in my journal. We started watching an odd show called Outer Range with Josh Brolin and Lili Taylor, which is different and interesting and very well filmed, and then I went to bed early.

Today is also usually my Admin day but I am in clinic this morning and afternoon, so I kind of had let some things slide to do today but I also found out late Thursday that I would be in clinic, so I am very behind and will be trying to get caught up around clients all morning. I am also trying very hard not to get stressed about it–it is what it is and it will get done at some point–and I also have some emails to answer. And it’s fine; I’ll get everything done like I always do, and not going to let anything get to me today. I slept really well last night, and now I am waking up completely. (I love when my body shifts from “want to go back to sleep” to “waking up and feeling rested”.) I’m also trying to spend less time on social media–primarily because it isn’t fun any more, and hasn’t been in a long time; it’s just another habit that needs to be broken. I need to resist the urge to waste time there “just to check in” and spend that time more productively. The precipitous decline in emails that need to be answered has been delightful, even if it still catches me off-guard, as does the amount of free time I now have.

It occurred to me last night that I dealt with my stress of the last decade or so in about the same way that I always did in the past–by taking on too much of a load so I don’t have time to focus on being sad or worried about things or concerned. The primary problem with that is I’ve slowed down some, and can’t keep up the way I used to be able to do. So, in order not to face unpleasant realities and keep myself occupied I replaced worry and sadness with stress and overwork. This time I finally burned myself out in a way I had never experienced before–the COVID in the summer of 2022 that basically wiped my short term memory and left it permanently on the blink also didn’t help matters any, either. The last two years or so have been so much stress and depression and sadness and fear (the surgery terrified me, as did the recovery process) that my memory and brain couldn’t really recover, and I went back into strictly survival mode–“just get through the day/week/month”–and I am now finally coming out of it at long last, and it’s been so long since I’ve not been buried in work and projects and things that I am having a difficult (but nice) time getting acclimated to my life again.

I also am resisting the urge to say yes to everything because I have free time, and if I have free time that means I’m wasting time….it isn’t the best way to have your brain wired, really. I would much rather waste time than spend the rest of my life worried about running out of it, to be honest. But like I said, I really went into a deep dive on the book last night in my journal, getting to the heart and core of my main character and why the experiences he is about to have are going to happen and how it changes him, who he is going to become. I think that’s important, and it’s something I always forget when I am writing a non-series book; I don’t have to really go into a lot of detail about who Scotty and the boys are; and with a non-series book I have to remember it must be written differently and the plan has to be completely different. (I do worry that this is more busy-work to do so I don’t have to write, but that’s always going to be something I wonder about, and no, this was incredibly productive because I am starting to get a grasp on who my character is and what he wants and why he is where he is in his life…)

And on that note, I’d better start getting ready for work and my not-Admin day. Have a great one, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; one never knows. It depends on how busy we are and if I can get caught up on my work or not. We shall see.

Oh Very Young

Friday morning and I slept late and I don’t care. I also did little to nothing yesterday and I don’t feel in the least bit guilty about it, either. Ordinarily, I’d be chastising myself and feeling like I wasted an entire day, but so what if I did? Am I never allowed to actually have a day off where I don’t do much of anything? I did get the laundry finally done, but I’m not going to kill myself this weekend, either. There are definitely things I need to do today–laundry, errands, gym, writing–but I am going to get to things when I get to them and if I don’t, there’s always another day.

And if there isn’t, oh well, no need to worry about any of it, is there?

Yesterday was lovely, as non-active days inevitably are. I wrote some posts and worked on the laundry yesterday morning, but once Paul got up, I turned the television onto Wimbledon for him and I kept sitting here at my desk, finishing that blog post, which was very cool–the television usually is a distraction, and it wasn’t yesterday. I did eventually move into the living room to watch television with him, and we got caught up on The Boys (which is going so hard on the right this season that sometimes I laugh out loud; one of the most horrible supes this week quote that trash from Georgia MTG, and then I realized the entire character was her, and laughed and laughed and laughed), then watched the entire new season of That 90’s Show (the best character is Ozzie the young gay). We also finished the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on Netflix, which again was really just a better produced and edited together season of their old reality show, but a lot more serious and it also went in on some of the girls more. I said, while watching, “It really does take a certain kind of person to want to be one of these girls, doesn’t it? It’s like they create this big sorority.” That was what it reminded me the most of–a big sorority–with little to no drama between the girls…which I suspect would NOT be tolerated should it ever happen. Usually watching anything documentary style, or non-fictional, usually gives me several ideas of how this little “bubble” they live in could lead to crime; and I realized yesterday in all our years watching Making the Team and now this, that’s never happened once. Even sitting here this morning with my coffee and a cat in my inbox (Sparky is watching Cat TV out the window), I cannot think of why anyone would want to kill any of those girls or even their coaching staff. Kellie, the primary coach, reminds me a lot of that woman from Navarro from the Cheer series.

Besides, I was just thinking the other day that if and when I write another young adult novel, I am not going to write about cheerleaders and football players. That was my primary experience in high school, but there are so many other kids that are neither of those things and I kind of would like to write from a different perspective rather than the usual, high school stereotype kids. (Which, now that I’ve said that, is precisely who The Grimoire of Broken Dreams is about; so it will be the last of those…but The Summer of Lost Boys will be about a high school outsider; it’s the only way the story works in the first place.)

I do have some picking up to do today, and I certainly need to get the dishes done–which always makes such a difference when it comes to how the kitchen looks–and I’d like to get some more filing work done…at least alphabetizing so the files are easily found. I have one more file drawer to get through–there’s a lot of sorting that needs to be done on it–and then that is finished. I’d like to get started moving boxes off the tops of the cabinets this weekend, too. Some of it is just paper that can go in the trash; others are books that also need to be gone through. I hope the library sale is open tomorrow so I can drop these books off to them, which will also make the living room look less cluttered. I also have a long term scanning project to work on, too–all my old articles and reviews and so forth that I have stored neatly in a box; I’d like to get that all scanned so I can give these old queer magazines and newspapers to the local queer archive. I hate throwing it all in the trash; someone might someday want to see these old issues of Lambda Book Report that I edited, and I doubt they are electronically available; it wouldn’t surprise me if even Lambda didn’t have copies of its issues going back to the 1980s.

There’s a part of me–the packrat part–that wants to keep all of this and archive it and all my papers and put them somewhere, like at Tulane (who wanted them at one point) or the Historic New Orleans Collection; but that seems a lot like hubris to me, you know? “Oh I am so important my papers need to be collected for future scholars and historians” isn’t something that rolls easily off my keyboard, you know? After a lifetime of not being taken seriously to the point that I rarely take myself seriously, it’s hard for me to imagine that my writing and my life would be of interest to anyone in the future, you know? Someone told me that I was the only writer who documented what life was like here for a gay man before Katrina, and sadly, all I can do is think of all the things I haven’t documented here, like the wars over Southern Decadence against homophobic pedophile Grant Storms (it’s always projection with them, isn’t it?)–I wanted to write a book about that, and Storms himself along with psychotic Louisiana Republican politician Woody Jenkins1 inspired Bourbon Street Blues–and various other battles here in the state. Cancer Alley, the poisoning of poor black communities by petrochemical plants and oil refineries, the loss of the coastline and the wetlands are all things that should be written about, and I really wish there was some John D. Macdonald here in Louisiana who could write about the environmental disaster the state already is, and how we are making it worse by the day every day.

But I’ve decided2 to just throw it all away, really. I don’t have the time or the interest to catalogue and organize a lifetime of writing, let alone the logistics of getting it all somewhere, and every draft I’ve written is electronic, except for the files that are so old no program will recognize them anymore, and there’s also this blog. It’s never been the whole story, and it’s always been relatively carefully curated, but when I do write things here I don’t censor myself. The only blog topics that have always been off-limits are Paul, my family, and deeply personal stuff. I also try very hard not to invade the privacy of my friends, which I wasn’t so good about in the early days back at livejournal almost twenty years ago.

I also think that’s why I want to keep doing the Greg’s Gay Life or Pride Posts throughout the rest of the year. I’d like to document more of my past, the things that I clung to (like the tiny queer rep in film, movies and books when I was a gayby), and sharing what it was like to live through things. I have no desire to write a memoir of any kind, but I kind of do at the same time, but my fear is always the faulty memory and the memories of the other people who were there will inevitably be different. I’ve already noticed how the kids I went to high school with clearly had no idea how miserable I was; the mask I wore of the class clown who makes sure everyone is having fun was more successful than I ever thought it was…although I have become convinced everyone knew somehow I was gay. That delusion was hard to let go of, but it’s also true. No one I ever came out to was surprised, you know.

Maybe my memoir could be called Deluded.

And on that note, I am getting some more coffee and going to work on the sink. Have a lovely Friday, whether you are off like me or have to work. I’ll most likely be back later.

  1. Jenkins was too extreme for Louisiana back then, but he’s to the left of our current governor. Jenkins was also the first Republican that I can recall who claimed the election was stolen from him and wanted an FBI investigation. This behavior killed his career in state politics; he couldn’t even get elected to represent the racist part of Baton Rouge that recently seceded from the capital. And yes, Louisiana will go at least 60% for another crybaby sore loser this November. Funny how that works. ↩︎
  2. Don’t @ me about this; my mind is made up. ↩︎

Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing

And in one of those weird things, today is Wednesday but it’s also my Friday. What the hell, right? It’s also Pay the Bills Day, and tomorrow is a holiday and a four day weekend starts and I am feeling a bit groggy this morning. I slept well last night, and haven’t completely woken up yet.

I did manage to go to the gym on the way home from work; and all afternoon I was trying to talk myself out of going. I was tired, I wanted to just go home, and so on and on and on. Even after I picked up the mail in my workout attire, I was talking myself out of it all the way there, and finally just went and got it over with. It felt great, as exercise always does, and I was still energized when I got home (thank you, endorphins) so I got started on laundry and the dishes and made some progress on the book, too. But this morning I have muscle fatigue from the gym, which is what I was mistaking as not being completely awake yet. I am , but the muscles are tired and that’s what I am experiencing this morning. But I feel better physically this morning than I have in a long time. I am going to go tomorrow and do some other, non-rehab exercises for other body parts (although anything to do with the upper body involves the left biceps and shoulder), and then go back to rehab on Saturday. Also, the working out helps me sleep better, too. Now that my mind has been aroused by my morning coffee, I feel terrific–rested and alert and everything. Maybe today will be a really good day; one never knows, does one?

I am going to stop on the way home from work to get some things to cookout tomorrow–it is the 4th, after all; barbecuing is practically de rigeur at this point–and maybe pick up some cheesecake or some kind of “treat” for us this weekend. I do think tomorrow will be my “don’t write” day; in which I just read and clean all day and not worry about getting any writing done. I’ll do some planning, of course–I sort of finished Chapter Three yesterday, but I am going to go over it again because I was skipping things that need to be there because I actually wasn’t in the mood to write them (including a sex scene). The book will need a significant revision when this first draft is finished, but I am not going to worry about that now (although future Greg will be shaking his fist and threatening past Greg, I am sure). I also need to work on some short stories, too; I finally realized over this past weekend how to fix one that’s been turned down by everyone–the story I wrote for the Minneapolis Bouchercon anthology, “The Sound of Snow Falling”– because it doesn’t work; the trigger for the murder isn’t really there. So I need to do another revision of that and make it even nastier than it was; and then I can throw it into my short story collection. Sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Tree BASTARDS!

We’re watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on Netflix, and we really got sucked into it again. Years and years ago, somehow we discovered Making the Team, a reality series about going from try outs to the first performance of the year. It was so insane and crazy and wild, and we were just fascinated to see these beautiful young women with these extraordinary bodies getting body shamed or told they need a makeover and so on and so forth. The documentary is very similar to the old series (maybe this is Netflix’s way of relaunching the show, who knows?) but it’s a little more in-depth than the show was. The whole thing–being a part of the “team”–is very beauty pageant/sorority like; this is not a reality show where you’re going to see women fighting and arguing and throwing drinks at each other (that would be unseemly for a DCC team member) so if you’re looking for conflict, it’s going to come from watching these women not achieve their dream–which isn’t fun because you do feel sorry for them…while wondering “wow.” Some of them have been dreaming of this since they were little girls…I guess it’s the same as having a professional sports dream? It does make me think whenever I watch–the really interesting ones are the ones whose mothers were also DCC, so it’s a “family legacy.”

My friend Laura says there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure as one should never feel guilt about something you enjoy, but I do always feel a bit guilty watching these girls because they are really very sweet, and I think it’s great they are chasing their dreams. I guess the real guilt is that I feel like this is a very low bar as far as goals would go, but who am I to decide whose dreams are good and whose are bad? Just because I cannot imagine having that be my life goal doesn’t mean I should diminish or demean those who do.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and get this day a going. I may be back later–you never can be entirely sure what I am up to these days! Have a lovely 3rd, everyone!

I Remember Mama

A number of years ago a friend–another writer–emailed me to ask if I would write a noir short story for an anthology she was pulling together with a another author, with a focus on noir in hot climates (Scandinavian noir was the “hot” thing in crime publishing at the time) that would be called Sunshine Noir, and since I lived in New Orleans, she knew I could write something dark and nasty despite the sunshine and heat.

The result was a story named “Housecleaning,” and it was also included in my collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories. I was delighted to hear recently from wonderful Barb Goffman that she wanted to make it her “Selection” for Black Cat Weekly’s issue 148, and of course said BY ALL MEANS!!!!

And it just dropped this week.

The smell of bleach always reminded him of his mother.

It was probably one of the reasons he rarely used it, he thought, as he filled the blue plastic bucket with hot water from the kitchen tap. His mother had used it for practically everything. Everywhere she’d lived had always smelled slightly like bleach. She was always cleaning. He had so many memories of his mother cleaning something: steam rising from hot water pouring from the sink spigot; the sound of brush bristles as she scrubbed the floor (“Mops only move the dirt around. Good in a pinch but not for real cleaning.”); folding laundry scented by Downy; washing the dishes by hand before running them through the dishwasher (“It doesn’t wash the dishes clean enough. It’s only good for sterilization.”); running the vacuum cleaner over carpets and underneath the cushions on the couch.

In her world, dirt and germs were everywhere, and constant vigilance was the only solution. She judged people by how slovenly they looked or how messy their yards were or how filthy their houses were. He remembered one time—when they were living in the apartment in Wichita—watching her struggle at a neighbor’s to not say anything as they sat in a living room that hadn’t been cleaned or straightened in a while, the way her fingers absently wiped away dust on the side table as she smiled and made conversation, the nerve in her cheek jumping, the veins and chords in her neck trying to burst through her olive skin, her voice strained but still polite.

When the tea was finished, and the cookies just crumbs on a dirty plate with what looked like egg yolk dried onto its side, she couldn’t get the two of them out of there fast enough. Once back in the sterile safety of their own apartment, she’d taken a long, hot shower—and made him do the same. They’d never gone back there, the neighbor woman’s future friendliness rebuffed politely yet firmly, until they’d finally moved away again.

“People who keep slovenly homes are lazy and cannot be trusted,” she’d told him after refusing the woman’s invitation a second time. “A sloppy house means a sloppy soul.”

I’d written the first line long before I had a need for a story; I wrote it down in my journal with the title HOUSECLEANING underlined twice for further emphasis. In one of those great moments of serendipity, I had just been paging through that journal earlier that same morning and after I finished reading the email, I thought, “I’ll write ‘Housecleaning’ for this.” I literally opened a new Word document, wrote the title in all caps, hit return and typed The scent of bleach always reminded him of his mother.

And surprisingly, I was able to just keep going.

The funny thing is now I remember what triggered the initial note in the journal–I actually had that very same thought as I was filling a bucket in the sink with hot water and bleach. I poured the bleach into the water, smelled it, and thought of my mom. I then laughed and scribbled the sentence–and title–down because I rightly thought it was a great title and a great opening line. I used to always joke about my mom that she made Joan Crawford look like a slob, and it was true. Her house was always spotless. Her kitchen floor was cleaner than most people’s dishes. Her refrigerator and cabinets were organized to within an inch of their lives and she could put her hand on anything in the house within two minutes without even having to stop to think. She cleaned the house every day. I think I’ve told the story of the coffee spoons before? If you know this story, feel free to skip ahead.

Mom and Dad always drank their coffee black (she used to put milk in hers when I was a kid, but she stopped at some point) and I’ve always sweetened mine and put creamer in it. So, I need a spoon to stir it. At home, I have a spoon rest where I keep my coffee spoon so I can keep reusing it. Mom didn’t need one, so no spoon rest. Every time I’d get a cup of coffee when I was visiting once, I had to get another spoon because the one I’d just used had disappeared out of the sink. It took me another cup to realize she was washing the spoon I just used and put it in the dishwasher. I had already gone through three spoons before I caught on and kept it with me.

No one was ever going to drop in on my mother and find a dirty house. She took that seriously.

Obviously, my mother was vastly and dramatically different from the mother in this story. (I’ve always been reluctant to say my mother inspired the story for obvious reasons, but she did.)

The odd thing about this story was that I wrote it almost all in free form, with no real certainty where it was going to go, so it kind of was written organically; I didn’t put any thought into it and just started typing from that opening line, and the story came to me as I wrote it. It was messy in its first draft, but I worked on it and cleaned it up and cut out some excess, and I ended up very pleased with the story. The premise–that the main character is remembering his past growing up with his mother while doing a chore–I think really worked; even though the story is almost entirely about the past, there’s some present-day involvement that become increasingly clear as the story goes on.

Thanks again to my original friend for getting me to write the story in the first place (thank you, Annamaria Alfieri!) and for Barb for bringing it to Black Cat Weekly. And if you want to read it–and the other good stuff in the issue–you can order it here.

The Show Must Go On

Ah, Monday the first of July, and a very short work week it is, too. Huzzah for my four-day weekend! It was very nice this morning to come downstairs to a clean workspace. It does make a difference. I feel like I slept very well last night and feel very awake and alive this morning, at least so far. I was tired all weekend, which was odd but probably had something to do with the daily pills issue I was talking about yesterday. My biggest wish is that the situation with that would work itself out within my body while I slept last night and I’d be back to (what passes for) normal this morning. So far, so good, and my coffee truly tastes amazing this morning, too–always a good sign.

I forgot to mention this weekend that the awesome Barb Goffman selected my story, “Housecleaning”, to spotlight this week at Black Cat Weekly. You can order it here! How cool is that? This is my second story to be picked and featured by Barb, and it’s such a thrill–particularly given how little confidence I have in short story writing.

I also submitted my story yesterday to that anthology; we’ll see how that turns out. It probably needed to wait another day and reread another time, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I didn’t do any actual writing of fiction this weekend, but I did make a lot of notes and think about what I am working on; hopefully tonight after work I’ll settle in and get back to work on the book. I have to write my entry on Horror Movie at some point, too; it was a really terrific read that I do recommend, and I started Hall of Mirrors yesterday, which I am also really enjoying, at least so far. While I was working on the files this weekend, I also started paging through my old journals–which will always survive purges–and it was very interesting. I don’t really go back and look through them as often as I should (I do when I’m looking for notes on something I am currently working on) and what was interesting was seeing, in some places, where books and short stories I’ve published actually began–a scribbled title, a theme, what I want to explore in it–and of course, other ideas that never progressed further than that page in the journal. I am still missing some of the ancient ones–going back to the 90s, when I started using bound blank bound journals–but I’d love to see those sometime, especially since I am now writing about that period. I imagine they somehow got put in a storage box….and since the goal of the summer is to get rid of as many of those as humanly possible from the Lost Apartment and the attic, I am sure to find them again this summer, which will be great. I also worked out yesterday how to rearrange the books in the living room. I decided I no longer need a “vanity bookcase”, overstuffed with copies of my own work, for one–properly labeled for ease of discovery, they can go in the storage boxes while I fill the bookcase with the books stacked on the floor and on top of the bookcases, making the whole place look a little less cluttered and opening up more space.

This morning’s hurricane check shows that Beryl is a massive monster already but it looks like her course hasn’t changed, and Chris went ahead and developed into a tropical storm and came ashore in southern Mexico. There’s a D storm in the Atlantic heading towards the Gulf, too. Hurray! When we watched the weather report last night, Paul said, “A category 4 in June already?” and I seriously asked in reply, “Gosh, where do you want to live after New Orleans is wiped off the map this year?” And y’all ain’t seen a recession like the one we’ll have this time if New Orleans ceases operating as a port and oil hub. It’s also supposed to rain today, and we’re in a heat advisory where it will “feel like” 114. Yay. It’s going to be a brutal summer by all accounts here. Guess I better start saving to pay the power bills. But Beryl doesn’t appear to be a threat to us here, although she will impact our weather, so the second named storm of the year–and a big one–is a bullet dodged for New Orleans.

Unfortunately, that means the bullet hits someone else, which always makes me uncomfortable. I never want it to seem like I’m hoping other people’s lives get disrupted and/or destroyed, because I would never wish that on anyone else, under any circumstance.

And on that rather dreary note, I am heading into the spice mines. Should you have a moment today that is upsetting or depressing or knocks you down–remember, Steve Bannon is now behind bars and it’s just one step in the right direction.

(I’ve Been) Searching So Long

Sunday morning and I slept late. I’ve been off both days this weekend, not really sure what that’s about…but this morning when I saw the clock and the time, I remembered that either yesterday or Friday, I was confused about taking my daily pills and I may have taken them twice…and a double dose for one day of my daytime anti-anxiety medication definitely would have led to exhaustion. Lesson learned. I am usually a lot more careful about these things, and so I need to better about paying attention.

I was sleepy for most of the day yesterday. I ran errands and came home, and then started working on things again, which was terrific. I had low energy, obviously, but I cleaned out the two remaining file boxes in the living room, thus clearing out the corner where the boxes stood, and which will now be taken up by the vacuum cleaner and the crate of Sparky toys, which opens up the living room still further. I started clearing books out of the laundry room and am on pace to get that shelf emptied and used for pantry items. This overhaul of the downstairs will obviously continue Thursday as I begin my four day weekend. I also managed to finish reading Horror Movie yesterday, which was sublime and wonderful, and started John Copenhaver’s Hall of Mirrors, between breaks so I could rest. I took a lot of those breaks, I might add–and during several of them I started to fall asleep. I did nap for about half an hour in the late afternoon, which is weird–and today I still feel a bit sleepy. All I need to do outside today is go to the gym and make a very quick grocery run, and then I get to come home and hopefully shower and get some writing done. Stranger things have happened, you know.

But the house is a mess and I am working very hard not to chastise myself for the way I left the apartment looking when i went to bed last night, barely able to stagger up the stairs. It won’t take long, really–the majority of the mess in the living room is the donation pile, which simply needs to be stacked properly and loaded into boxes. Likewise the kitchen won’t take long to look orderly again, either. There’s a lot of stuff to be put away for sure in the kitchen, and I’m not done with the laundry room, either–but it’s not a priority and can wait until the holiday weekend if necessary.

Sigh. I’m also very behind on my Pride Posts, which will defiantly continue to run through the Independence Day holiday weekend as I celebrate queer independence, and pray for our gains not to be lost to the current joke of a Supreme Court. I will never forgive anyone involved in “but her emails” or “benghazi” or anything else that smeared and slandered the most qualified candidate for president in decades so we could get fascism instead. Thanks, privileged white liberals for thinking she was corrupt or too shrill or not charismatic enough. And don’t think I won’t keep bringing that up until we’ve survived (if we survive) this election. We lost Roe v. Wade in no small part because that arrogant, narcissistic Hollywood she-bitch sneered on national television that she “don’t vote with (my) vagina.”

I hope to either spit in her skank face or piss on her grave before I die, and thank you again for making any number of films I enjoy unwatchable again because all I think about when I see her face or hear her voice is “we lost our rights because you’re an arrogant bitch who thinks she is a political expert when the truth is you don’t know jackshit and learned NOTHING from the 2000 election when you helped elected Bush.”

There’s a direct line from her performative progressivism to every justice who overturned Roe. I wish someone would bring up Nader to her in an interview. 2016 was a repeat performance of 2000. And for the record, she is not an ally. AOC is, and understands how to get things done and has evolved and learned how to work for progressive causes in Congress. She is an actual hero.

And my inability to write my Pride Post about The Rocky Horror Picture Show is because I don’t want to mention her or use any of her images, which is difficult.

Hurricane Beryl apparently is now a Category 3, with the potential for becoming a 4 once it enters the Caribbean, which is rather early maybe for a storm this size, which doesn’t bode well when we’re kicking off the season and the B storm will come ashore as a 4. It looks like the most likely path means a Yucatan landfall before crossing the Gulf again to come ashore close to the Mexico/Texas border. There are also two other potential storms out there, one in the Gulf (what if Beryl consumes this one? YIKES) and one out in the Atlantic. I guess I need to start looking into hurricane supplies and get the house stocked up again.

Okay, that’s NOT helping, so I think I should head into the spice mines for now. I am going to eat something and start working on this mess while writing another entry. I may also be back later, since one never knows what I will be doing at any given time.

Daydream Believer

Ah, Saturday morning. I have to make a brief errand run today, nothing major or horribly annoying, but it still means going outside. Tomorrow….tomorrow I am not leaving the house. We did all our errands last night, including a Costco run (we made it out for less than $300! It’s been years), and then we just hung out and watched television–the gymnastics Olympic team trials–and called it a night relatively early. I also managed to get some things done around the house, too–the bed linens laundered, the dishes put away and another load washed, cleaning up the kitchen–and was in a pretty good mood almost the entire day. I realized something else, too; I also bought the new car and took on all that additional monthly expense right around when Mom had her first stroke, too–so there was the Mom subconscious worry on top of monetary stress; something I hadn’t experienced in a very long time and I. Did. Not. Like. That. One. Bit. I am finally beginning to see a distant light at the end of a very long dark tunnel in that regard, but still. I don’t regret the car purchase; I am very pleased with the car and intend to hopefully keep it until I die. It’s hard to believe that I’ve had it now for almost eight years. That’s INSANE.

It was strangely cool and beautiful yesterday–granted, it was 86 degrees, but after the last few weeks it felt heavenly, and the damp in the air was cool not hot. I imagine that was the aftermath of Thursday night’s downpour, but regardless the reason it was lovely. The sun wasn’t out as much, either–there were a lot of clouds, so no endless punishing direct sunlight was also a pleasure to experience this close to the 4th. I am also going to have to keep watching Tropical Storm Beryl. Ah, hurricane season is already revving up for a long and busy summer.

I was also exhausted after we did the errands. I fell asleep in my chair for over an hour after getting back home, and the place is a mess. I was too tired when I got home from Costco (the last errand) to put everything away properly, and I’d also intended to do some work on the workspace, but…tired. I slept later this morning and feel better now that I am up and swilling coffee, but whew, it was hard to get up this morning and my joints all ached. The joys of being an elder, I suppose, but sheesh. I literally thought when I woke up (when Sparky woke me up) that I was too tired physically to get out of bed, but I got there eventually. I do have some errands to run today, but it shouldn’t take very long and then I can come back home and work on the house more. I also want to write this morning (and maybe this afternoon) and hopefully today I won’t get sidetracked or distracted.

The gymnastic trials were fun to watch; I always forget how fun it is to watch athletes trying to reach their dream goal of the Olympics–but of course the thrill of victory also carries with it the agony of defeat or worse, injury. It’s also hard for me to conceive that it’s an Olympic year and I’ve heard so very little about the Olympics (other than Parisians treating it all as a horror and inconvenience; I do sometimes think the Olympics will eventually die because they are too expensive to host) because naturally the election and the horrors that the Christofascists’ puppet SCOTUS are inflicting on our country are sucking all the energy and air out of the room.

I was too tired to make a Pride post yesterday, so I will definitely have to make up for it today by doing perhaps two? I am going to continue Pride through Independence Day, haters be damned, because Pride is about freedom and so is the 4th and therefore Pride should lead into a celebration of everyone’s freedom. And if straight people don’t like it, they can literally just fuck right off. I am so tired of being told how to behave and how to be an adult and how to “not upset the heteros” and you know what? Fuck the heteros and their delicate sensibilities. They’ve been tiptoed around and catered to more than enough, thank you very much. You know what offends me? Abused children, adultery, deadbeat dads, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Clean up your own fucking house before you come for queers, thank you very much. But it’s easier to blame us than take any responsibility for the messy world you’ve created, isn’t it?

And may no one else ever have to fear about their rights every election cycle–although SCOTUS has already delegitimized itself and we know they are coming for marriage equality at some point, too–and sooner than we think. And just remember–there is no divine right of Republicans to rule. How are they any different from the Jacobean Stuart kings of England? Claiming a God-given right, or a “divine mandate”, to be in power is hardly a Christian thought; Jesus said very clearly (if you believe the Bible) that his kingdom was not of this world, and coerced religious conversion isn’t what the Jesus I read about and studied would have wanted for anyone. (I still don’t believe that, if Jesus were real, that he was sent here to start a new religion, but rather to teach by example what a life devoted to good works and godliness looked like.

Funny how all they care about is the Word and not the Deeds.

Well, that got feisty for a bit, didn’t it? I guess I am more awake than I gave myself credit for! I also managed to finish reading Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay, which I really enjoyed (he is a masterful writer, and the language is superb). I am still digesting that book today, because it was a lot of ideas and intense creativity, which is why he’s one of my favorite writers and I am saddened to realize I am running out of his backlist to read, which means postponing reading more of him because I never want to be out of things to read by authors I really enjoy. I am planning on starting the new John Copenhaver today as well, which is exciting. I have quite a recent-release TBR pile–Kellye Garrett, Amina Akhtar, Angela Crook, Angie Kim, and Scott Carson, to name a few glittering names from the stack–and more just keep getting released every month. Sigh. I also need to do a book purge this weekend, too. Heavy heaving sigh. It never ends, does it?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday wherever you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll definitely be checking back in with you later.