Category: diversity

Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)

New York!

It really is a wonderful place, and I love it here. The energy, the rapid pace, the mobs of people everywhere–comparatively speaking, of course–it is all quite exhilarating, frankly. It usually wears me out being here–the constant activity of rushing from one meeting to the next; walking around slow walkers, hearing all the different languages and accents and voices; clambering down the steps to the subway and remembering my age as I climb back up at my stop, the towering buildings, the light show that is Times Square…it’s really quite marvelous, all of it. This time, though, I am not worn to a nub the way I usually feel when I am in the city. My sleep–never great when I travel–has actually not been so bad this time around; I wake up periodically during the night but for the most part I am actually getting some decent sleep, so I feel rested. Last night I did kind of hit a wall, though; I was very exhausted when I managed to make it back to my room and collapse onto the bed, too tired to read or think or much of anything, so I turned on the massive television here (which has Netflix) and it suggested that I watch Glee–soon to be leaving the service–and I hesitated for a moment before starting. I remember loving Glee in the beginning, but it became so bad and off the rails in later seasons that it went from “love it” to “what the fuck” to “hate watching” to “life is too short to watch bad television.” And there’s some weird curse on the show, too–several stars have died, Lea Michele turned out to be a bigger monster in real life than Rachel Berry (which is saying something–although to be fair, I already knew she was awful because I knew someone who went to Yale with her), and of course, Glee is the show that truly launched Ryan Murphy as a television production conglomerate. (His previous shows, Nip/Tuck and Popular were cult favorites; Glee’s huge success is what made him golden). It was interesting to watch it again, and see how subversive the show was for its time: a closeted gay teenager slowly making his way out of the closet, although terrified to admit it because he was already being bullied for being different; the absolute mockery of Chastity Clubs for teenagers; and while the show would probably have difficulties were it a new show starting to air today–playing off bullying for laughs, for one thing–it was still groundbreaking for the time.

It’s so interesting how things change so quickly, isn’t it? Over the course of my lengthy lifetime there has been so much change that things that were groundbreaking and transgressive at the time are now problematic; I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly in the wake of rewatching both Pillow Talk and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which may be the first time those two films have ever been linked together in this manner–any manner, really; they are actually quite different films but…at their core they both challenged the status quo of their time), and especially now having rewatched the first few episodes of Glee.

And, as always, there’s probably an essay in there. I used to think about how much the world changed over the course of my grandmother’s life–she was born in 1910, during the Taft administration, and died during the Clinton–and all the changes she must have seen over the course of her lifetime, although in remote rural Alabama she might not have been terribly aware of those changes; she wasn’t able to get a telephone line until the early 1980’s–but now that I am past the sixty mark and no matter how much I want to believe otherwise, I cannot deny that I am on the downward side of the mountain of life I also marvel at how different the world is now than it was when I was a child. You never hear anything anymore about nuclear disarmament or the threat or potential of a full-blown nuclear war that could take civilization back into the dark ages again…but I also remember learning very young about atomic weapons and the damage they could do; I remember air raid drills when I was in elementary school and that there was a very large bomb shelter below the basement level of my school–you never forget seeing those triangular symbols on the wall over the staircase down. The right still drags out that cold-war era trope of communists! Communists! that they used to bleat about endlessly; I just saw it from moronic state legislator from Arizona on Twitter just the other day; and to this day they conflate socialism with communism as a scare tactic to drum up the base…who seem to think living as wage serfs from paycheck to paycheck, one medical bill or car accident away from bankruptcy and homelessness is better than any government assistance to ease their lives in any way–because there is nobility in suffering? But then, that also goes hand-in-hand with their embrace of a version of Christianity that tells them the more the suffer in this life the more wealth they will have in Heaven, which is weird. (I’ve never understood why they despise socialism and communism when in fact their ideation of heaven and the afterlife is…socialism.)

I’ve started reading Rachel Howzell Hall’s These Toxic Things, which is also quite marvelous. I am a bit behind on my reading of Hall’s canon; this is her release from last year and I also have her release from this year in the TBR pile as well; and I really want to go back and finish reading her Lou Norton series. The opening chapters of this are quite excellent, and I know what I’ll be reading on the train to Boston tomorrow. (One of the reasons I enjoy traveling as much as I do is because the uninterrupted reading time it gives me…I probably won’t finish all the books I brought with me on this trip–there are two others I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time; I love having time where I have nothing to do but read, although I suppose I could actually try to write on the train….nah. I may write in my journal instead if the mood hits me.)

I guess I should wrap this up so I can start getting ready to head out for my day. Don’t know if I will have time before my train to post in the morning tomorrow, but will definitely check in at some point–it’s weird to not being posting daily this week!

Happy Thursday, Constant Reader, and a shout out to all veterans on this Veterans’ Day as well!

Here I Go Impossible Again

Later today I am leaving on a jet plane. My bags aren’t packed and I’m not ready to go–but eventually this morning I will get to that place. I have already made my packing list, have checked in for the flight on-line, have ground transfers negotiated and hotels booked; appropriate credit cards are in my wallet and I will get cash at the airport ATM. I have some errands to run this morning as well–prescriptions to retrieve from the pharmacy, treating myself to Five Guys because it has been far far too long–and I don’t have to leave for the airport until the mid-afternoon. So I decided to let myself sleep a bit late, futz around the Lost Apartment for a bit, and try to get things together that need to be gotten together before I depart, abandoning Paul and Scooter for far longer than I would prefer.

But I am taking a trip!

It’s almost like the before times.

Almost.

But when I think about how marvelous it felt to be in Tiger Stadium earlier this year, how normal it all felt to be there on Game Day (despite seeing my Tigers lose in person for the very first time in eleven years, but it was going to happen sooner or later and hey, the streak lasted an entire decade), and how that “normal” experience actually translated into feeling better about this world in which we live in general. Airports (and airplanes) generally aren’t pleasant experiences for me in the best of times and circumstances; I have so many horrible memories of nightmarish experiences working for that airline that literally going through the automatic doors of an airport concourse makes my entire body seize up with tension–I can feel the knots forming in my neck, shoulders, and back. But…I am thinking today I may be too happy and excited to feel that tension–not to mention grateful to actually be able to travel again.

Paul had a meeting on Sunday afternoon (!) and so I was left to my own devices after the Saints game ended; I caught up on The Lost Symbol (better than I remember the book) and Foundation, which really picked up steam (I also realized they aren’t following the exact timeline from the book series, either–for example, the existence of the second Foundation isn’t revealed until Book Three, not during the first Seldon Crisis–so much is coming back to me as I watch!) after a slow first two episodes–the Emperor thing is also different than in the books, but I am enjoying this entire idea of a clone threesome who run the empire, in fact embodying it to the point they are simply addressed as Empire, and also loving Lee Pace in the rule of Day, the adult yet not old Emperor (Dawn, Day, Dusk are the three cloned emperors; Dusk eventually dies and is replaced by Day, who is replaced by the no longer a child or teen Dawn, and a new cloned baby because the new Dawn. It’s interesting, and they’ve added a lot of creative flourishes filling in the missing brushstrokes; as though the Azimov novels were merely an outline needing to be expanded.

But when I was finished with Foundation, I still had some time left before Paul would get home and I didn’t really want to start something entirely new-to-me (having to stop when he got home) and my headspace after the Saints game wasn’t really in a place where it should be for reading, so one of the suggestions on my streaming app was The Rocky Horror Picture Show…and yes, I have literally seen it well over two, if not three, hundred times already. I’ve never watched it on television because talking back to the television by yourself is kind of…not sane? Certainly not as fun as being in a movie theater full of people with props and people in costume and so forth. It was interesting to watch it by myself and completely sober…it’s really a crazy movie that makes little to no sense, really, but it’s message resonates very strongly still with me today…I suspect there’s an essay there. I also think there’s a short story or a scene from a book I need to write about viewing The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time; I remember being quite taken aback–if completely enamored–by it. I do know that I bought the soundtrack album the day after and still know it all by heart even now, all these years later…

And yes, I did find myself answering the movie back. There are some problematic things in it, of course–what movie from that period doesn’t have something problematic in it?–but at the time…and for quite some time afterward, the movie meant a lot to all of us misfits out here, the square pegs that couldn’t be pounded into a round hole no matter how hard society–or we–tried. In that theater that first night–and all the other theaters on so many other nights–for about an hour and a half I was able to escape the strictures and stresses of a world in which I–and people like me–didn’t belong. As years passed props and toys were slowly but surely banned–who would want to clean up that mess, seriously?–but the loss of water pistols to simulate rain, flying rolls of toilet paper, etc. always seemed to lessen the experience.

Then again, I would have hated to have been the one cleaning the theater at two in the morning for minimum wage, too. Definitely an essay there, for sure–which would have to include the problematic parts that haven’t aged well. But man, did Tim Curry ever commit to that part, and he definitely understood what the movie was.

Last night we watched some more Big Mouth, which is hilarious, although I am never entirely sure if it is actually funny, or if the laughs come from wow I can’t believe they went there shocks. (I’m actually surprised there’s not more right-wing outrage at the show, honestly; maybe there is and I am unaware, but this is precisely the kind of show they would go for–a comedy about junior high students going through puberty that is completely frank about sex and sexuality and masturbation and so forth? You’d think the American Family Association would be eating the outrage with a fucking spoon in both hands.)

And on that note, I should probably start getting it together around here this morning. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you tomorrow morning from New York!

In My Arms

Thursday and working at home today. Data to enter and condoms to pack; but at least I don’t have to go out in public today, which is a blessing both for me and the public when it happens. I decided to stop and make groceries on the way home from work last night, to make this possible, and it’s an absolutely lovely thing to contemplate that I was smart enough to think ahead so I can just work from home and not go anywhere today, other than to the gym later on. My body isn’t happy that I’ve not been to the gym in weeks, and it is most definitely letting me know of its deep disapproval of this conduct. I may not even lift weights–but stretching is definitely on the agenda. I need to really stretch every day, to keep my muscles from tightening and knotting, and all the knots and tightness and tension I am feeling this morning is yet another example of why self-care, particularly in trying times, is so absolutely necessary.

I also really need to get back to writing more regularly. I always feel better when I’m working, writing, than when I am not. You’d think after over twenty years of writing, this would be firmly imprinted on my brain: writing and creating are imprinted into your DNA and when you aren’t doing it, you’re making yourself miserable. I’ve always believed the the so-called trope of “writer’s block” is actually a symptom of depression; there’s something else going on in your brain that is preventing you from creating. (I cannot, as always, speak for writers other than myself; this is my belief and my experience. I’ve also come to recognize that I don’t want to do it mentality when it comes to writing for me is my own personal version of writer’s block–the depression and the imposter syndrome insidiously doing its work on my brain: why do something you love to do when you can not do it and feel bad about yourself and question your ability to do it?) There have been a lot of distractions lately–really, since The Power Went Out–and I need to stop allowing shit to take me out of the mindset that the most important thing to do in my free time from now until January is to write the fucking book.

The book is the most important thing right now.

I did spend some time revising the first chapter last night, despite having the usual “third day in a row up at six” tiredness last night. It felt good, as I knew it would, and spending some doing something I truly love really gave me a rush of sorts; I was able to sleep deeply and well last night, I feel very even and stress-free this morning, and some of the knots in my shoulders, neck and back seem to have relaxed this morning, and I feel rested, more rested than I have felt in quite some time. Untangling the thorny knots of problems in a manuscript–while forcing me to think and use logic and reason while being creative–is perhaps the best cure for anything I have going on at the time. Escaping into writing has always been my solace, going back to the days when I was that lone queer kid in Kansas, and it still works to this day.

It’s actually an interesting challenge for me–writing a book set in New Orleans that doesn’t center a gay man or any gay issues. (There will be queer characters–I can’t write anything without including some; sue me.) The book is also centered in a neighborhood with which I have some familiarity, but I obviously don’t know it as well as the Lower Garden District (where Chanse lives, and where Paul and I have always lived) or the Quarter (where Scotty lives); it’s the same neighborhood where my main character in Never Kiss a Stranger also lives, so I need to get more familiar with how it is NOW…I tend to always think of neighborhoods as they were not as they currently are; which means I need to go walk around and take some pictures and get a sense/feel for who lives there, what it’s like now, etc. This neighborhood used to be considered sketchy when I first started coming here/when we first moved here; the price ranges for rentals and properties now (well, every-fucking-where in New Orleans now) are hard for me to wrap my mind around. (When I was writing my first book, Murder in the Rue Dauphine, I made a reference to “million dollar homes in the Garden District; this was in the late 1990’s. My first reader–beta reader, they’d call it now–highlighted the sentence with the note there are no million dollar homes in New Orleans. The Internet then was not what it is now, of course, so I was surprised to look in the real estate listings in the Times-Picayune to see she was correct. Now, homes in neighborhoods that used to be considered ‘dangerous’ go for over $400k; I just looked at “houses for sale” on Zillow in the neighborhood I am using and was not in the least bit surprised to see that a house like the one my character lives in is listed for 1.15 million…which is actually a plot point I am going to use in the book. And while verifying this just now didn’t surprise me, per se, it did make me shake my head and wonder, who is paying this for a house in New Orleans?)

I don’t see how any working class people can actually afford to live here anymore, really. Sure, there are still neighborhoods that “affordable” when compared to the neighborhoods adjacent to the levees, but the fact that our original apartment, that we paid $495 per month for, now goes for $2100. And that’s something I think I should address in an upcoming book–whether in this new series, or in a Scotty.

I’ve also found myself going down wormholes about Louisiana and New Orleans history a lot lately; I’ve never been conversant in either other than the basics–Bienville arrived and set up camp; why English Turn is called English Turn; Spain takes over from France, and so on. Both city and state have a deep, rich and sometimes horrifying history; it’s little wonder the city is so haunted. So much ugliness, so much violence, so much criminal activity! (Which kind of thematically what I was exploring in Bury Me in Shadows–how the history of violence and ugliness in a particular area can poison it) It’s why I am always amused that the white-supremacists-who-don’t-want-people-to-think-they-are will always cry and whine about crime in New Orleans–when they haven’t lived here in decades and were part of the white flight when the schools were desegregated–they left because of crime, not because they didn’t want their kids to go to school with black kids, oh no! It was the crime! (But if you give them enough rope, they will always bring race into it eventually). New Orleans has always had a dark past, has always had high crime rates, has always had corrupt politicians…but the crime here is why they left…even though the white politicians were also always criminals, and there has always been a lot of violent crime here.

Anyway, I went into a wormhole the other day about the possible murder of Louisiana’s first Black lieutenant governor, Oscar Dunn–who may or may not have been murdered in 1871. What a great historical true crime book that would make, wouldn’t it? Post war, the racial tensions in the city, Reconstruction going on…and on the other hand, it could also make a great historical mystery novel as well! Yet another idea, yet another folder, yet another possibility for the future.

It never ends.

And on that note, tis time for me to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me

Ah, Kansas.

Moving between your sophomore and junior years in high school isn’t easy on any teenager. I wasn’t quite as nervous about this move as I had been when we moved from Chicago out to the suburbs–which was a major shift in everything I was used to, moved me away from friends I’d been going to school with since first grade, and made me that thing no one wants to be: the new kid–primarily because I’d already experienced being the new kid once already, and had never really gotten over it. Suburban life wasn’t good for me, really–I got picked on and bullied alot, called gay slurs pretty regularly, kids didn’t want to be my friend because they’d open themselves up to the same bullying I was experiencing. So, while I was going to miss the people I did consider to be my friends–which was yet another eye-opening experience in and of itself, but more on that later–but I wasn’t going to miss the bullying, the being targeted, the snickers after I walked past people in the halls, and worrying about having a place to sit in the cafeteria every day (my sophomore year I joined Choir to get out of the lunch break–we were always dismissed fifteen minutes early so we could eat, so I would grab something quickly and eat it as fast as I could; I still eat fast to this day).

I even thought it could be a fresh start for me, and all of that could stay in the past.

While I sometimes will joke about how glad I was to get out of Kansas five years later, I appreciated my time there. My high school was actually–given its size–a much better school than the enormous one I attended in the suburbs; I actually learned there and participated in class. I was, of course, horribly lonely; it’s never been easy for me to talk to people I don’t know (painful shyness, to the point of anxiety), and as always, when nervous and uncomfortable I resort to humor and jokes and being a clown. I never felt like I fit in there, but it was so much better than my old school experience–and the slurs didn’t start there until the second semester of my senior year. That was fine; I just had to make it through a few more weeks by then and at that point I was ready to get out of there and move on with my life.

Kansas wasn’t a particularly welcoming place for a gay teenager in the mid-1970’s, but then most places weren’t at the time. I remember thinking I was the only gay kid in Kansas, the only one at either school I attended, and there was absolutely no one I could trust to talk to about it. I missed having real friends, ones like I read about in books or saw in movies and television shows; it wasn’t until much later in life that I realized I never had real friends because I never trusted anyone enough to actually be honest with them, tell them the truth about me–and the real basis of friendship is mutual trust. I obviously have always had serious trust issues–the whole no one can find out hell of my first few decades of life–but I never felt close to people because I didn’t trust them enough to not turn on me, walk out of my life, and/or mock me if I told them the truth.

So, for a long time I rather held it against Kansas and the area where we lived for not being more open and welcoming, and it was unfair. Would rural Alabama have been better? New Orleans? Nebraska or Texas or California? Even in the cities with a big queer population at the time–New York, Chicago, San Francisco–I wouldn’t say the life of queer kids going through the hell of being closeted in public school was better there. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; I don’t know. But when you live in Kansas and are a queer kid in the 1970’s…I felt like I was marooned on a distant planet.

Oddly enough, the little book store in the county seat, the News Depot–they had a massive newspaper/magazine section, and also carried comic books; it was there I started reading them again–that I found the books that were my foundational queer reading: Gordon Merrick’s The Quirk, Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap (and yes, I am aware of the allegations against her as well as her husband–and his, I believe, actual crimes; but I cannot deny the book was foundational reading for me, either). The clerk didn’t even give me a second glance whenever I bought one of these books; I also had to bury them in my room in stacks of other books so my mom wouldn’t find them (my biggest fear was always one day my mom would get bored, wander into my room to find something to read, and wonder, ‘The Quirk? What’s that about?”). There were sex scenes in them, too–sex scenes I read over and over again, memorizing the page numbers so I wouldn’t have to use a bookmark or turn down a page, which was far too risky. I already had a vague idea of what gay sex was like, gathered from insults and comments in other books; but these were pretty graphic and left no doubt in my mind whatsoever about what was involved.

And boy, I wanted to find out how it actually felt.

(I never actually found a gay bookstore until I moved to Tampa in 1990. But I would spend hours in bookstores in the years prior looking for anything that might even be remotely gay or gay-friendly; and occasionally I would find something like Dancer from the Dance or The Swimming-Pool Library but what I really wanted was something fun to read with positive gay characters. characters who weren’t stereotypes or to be pitied or felt sorry for; gays who lived their lives openly and proudly, and maybe solved crimes, fell in and out of love, experienced life that wasn’t all solemn and dreary and sad. Don’t get me wrong–I am not dogging either of those books; they are wonderful novels and beautifully written, but…I am a genre guy, not a litfic guy, and I wanted to read some gay crime or horror or romance or something entertaining. Once I discovered the wealth of books and authors that actually existed in the genres? There was no turning back.)

I had always felt like I didn’t belong anywhere–my earliest childhood memories are of me being aware I wasn’t like the other kids, in many ways, and how odd and different I felt. That feeling never changed growing up–hell, there are still times when I feel like I am from another planet–and the moving around didn’t help, either…I do remember thinking, every time I moved to a new city and state as an adult, ah, here we go again–no friends, no life, and no idea how to find anyone who is like me–if there are any people like me.

It was often discouraging. I felt like I was going to always be alone.

By the time I was twenty it was time to go, to leave Kansas and never go back. I felt so stunted, and so unhappy, like my potential hadn’t been tapped and never would if I remained there. I knew if I stayed in Kansas I would wind up probably very unhappily married, with kids and a whole life I didn’t want, had never wanted, but was expected of me. I knew I would never be happy there, completely happy–and so when the chance presented itself to move to California (California! You can imagine how exciting that sounded to me), I took it and never looked back.

With the passing of time and more perspective, a lot of the bitterness I used to feel about my experience there has changed. I don’t know that the experience there now would be any different than it was in the 1970’s, but I suspect that even had we stayed in the suburbs of Chicago those last few years of high school and first years of college would have been equally scarring and stifling; that’s pretty much how it was for queer kids everywhere back then. Some of the kids I was friends with, or knew, from my old high school in Kansas have friended me on Facebook, and me being a big ole queer must not bother them too much; it’s not like I hide it anymore (those days are forever gone) and they don’t unfriend or block me (although my feed could be hidden from their walls; I’ve certainly done that). I’ve revisited Kansas some in my work already–some short stories, a novel here and there–but this latest visit there in the world I created for #shedeservedit might be a bit unfair; but in a town where toxic masculinity has been allowed to run unchecked, I can’t imagine it would be a comfortable place for a gay teen.

And that’s enough for today. Hope you have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Take a Chance on Me

I got my boosters shot yesterday; other than some arm soreness, I seem to be okay–no gills have developed, no wings, and no scales–but the day is young. The weather here turned very cool yesterday, which was incredibly lovely; fall and spring are so divine here, it makes us forget the swampy hell of the summer every year. Yesterday wasn’t a bad day; I managed to get a lot of work-at-home duties done, while watching Foundation (I am all in on the show now) and then started, of all things, Peacock’s original series adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (more on that later). I have quite the busy day ahead of me now; lots of work at home duties and as always, the Lost Apartment is a disaster area. I am actually up much earlier than I have been getting up on my non-going-into-the office mornings, and it kind of feels good. The light outside is different than it has been–another indication that the world’s turning has shifted and daylight savings is looming on the horizon (next weekend)–and it’s a nice morning here with my coffee here in my kitchen-office.

The house was power-washed this week, and despite the fact we’ve been living here on this property since 2003, I had always thought under all the accumulated grime from the air here (our air quality is something I try not to think about very often, but it’s hard when you see how much of it gets on your car and windshield) the house was painted a pale blue; turns out it is pale coral. Who knew? They also power-washed the concrete sidewalks around the house; the difference is very startling. I am taking the power-washing as a hint that the apartment needs an even deeper dive cleaning. There’s no LSU game tomorrow (thank God, really; I am dreading the Alabama game next week), so I have the entire day free. There are some good games airing, but there’s no need for me to sit in my chair and spend the entire day watching college football, either. There is a Saints game on Sunday–Tampa Bay and Tom Brady–but that’s late enough for me to watch so I can get things done during the day; and a 3:25 start time is also a nice time to call it a day on everything else I am doing around here.

I haven’t started Scott Carson’s The Chill yet, either; ironically I got a copy of his new release. Where They Wait, this week (as well as a copy of Lucy Foley’s The Guest List), so I should probably crack the spine of The Chill at some point today. Scott Carson is the name Michael Koryta (one of my favorite authors) uses now to write horror (he used to write it under his own name. Not sure why the switch/rebrand, but probably has something to do with Koryta being branded for top notch crime fiction; seriously, check out his work if you haven’t. I recommend starting with The Prophet, and if you’ve not read Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, they pair together very nicely).

I also really, really need to write this weekend. I need to write a lot. I also have to do the page proofs for #shedeservedit, but they aren’t due until a week from Monday, and I think the more time I take away from that manuscript the better job of proofing I will do on it. I am a shitty shitty shitty proofreader, which is probably why there are more mistakes in my finished books than there should be in anyone’s printed books. But at least there’s time for me to let them sit and percolate before I jump on them; I am usually so heartily sick of any book at the proofreading stage that I don’t pay as close attention as I might. On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that I am being too hard on myself, which is something of which I am frequently guilty. No one is as hard on me as I am on myself. At some point in my life I pretty much decided if I was super-critical of myself, other people’s criticisms wouldn’t hurt me as much as they had before–and it became deeply engrained into my psyche, and it’s actually more damaging to me than accepting criticisms from others.

Many years ago I decided to stop being unkind to writers and their books on my blog. If I read a book I didn’t care for, I wasn’t going to dis it on the Internet–because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, primarily, and I am not always highly receptive to negative nastiness about my own work. (I tend to say “I’m not the right audience for this book” now.) I didn’t want to be become like those professional reviewers who hate everything, and make their reviews about how smart the reviewer is and how bad of a book they are destroying in print. At the time I made that decision, I also decided there were two exceptions to my rule: Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. What was my small voice, after all, in the chorus of critics and readers worldwide who loathe their writing? It did strike me as hypocritical from time to time, and so I stopped even doing that. They are, no matter how much success and money they have, still human beings with feelings, and there’s a sense that mocking and insulting their work, no matter how small my platform or voice, is just piling on.

Having said that, I will admit I greatly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code when it was released, enough so that I went back and read the first Robert Langdon novel, Angels and Demons (which I actually thought was better). It was a great ride, and I already had some familiarity with the idea of the Christ bloodline, having read Holy Blood Holy Grail at some point in the 1980’s, with its outlandish (if interesting) claims that were eventually turned out to have been based in a great fraud. It combined a lot of things that tick off boxes for me: treasure hunt based in history, actual historical events, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heresy, the Crusades, and of course, making the Catholic Church the great villain of the story (the only better villains are Nazis, really). Was it greatly written? I honestly can’t say now, it’s been so long since I read it. But I did read The Lost Symbol, his follow-up, when it was released and absolutely hated every word of it. I tried to read the next, Inferno, and gave up after the first chapter. I’ve never watched any of the films–although now I am thinking it might be interesting to do so. When I saw the Peacock was adapting The Lost Symbol, I actually (thank you, faulty memory) thought it was the Brown novel I hadn’t finished. After I got caught up on Foundation but still had at least another couple of hours’ worth of condom packing to do, I decided to try The Lost Symbol. Even as I watched the first episode, none of it seemed familiar to me, and it wasn’t until they mentioned the painting “The Apotheosis of George Washington” (that may not be the actual name; but it’s the painting in a government building ceiling where it looks like Washington is being greeted into heaven as a god) that I began to suspect that I had actually read the book; by the time they descended into the tunnels below the city and met the Architect of the Capital I thought, oh yes I did read this and didn’t much care for it. But the show itself held my attention–it’s an adventure story, after all, and Ashley Zukerman was very well cast as Langdon. I look forward to continuing watching it–at least while I wait for the new episodes of everything else we are currently watching to be loaded for streaming.

And on that note, it’s time for me to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader–I’ll come back tomorrow to check in.

Always

Wednesday, and somehow Pay the Bills Day kind of snuck up on me unawares. That’s probably not a bad thing; it certainly means I am not living paycheck-to-paycheck (at least for the moment), which means a lot less stress (there are few things more stressful than money problems) for the time being.

And yes, I am thoroughly enjoying being free of that stress for the time being. I am sure at some point it will return with a vengeance, hence my embrace of the current status.

I’ve recently been immersed in #shedeservedit this past week or so; the final round of edits came in from my editor, and no sooner had I gone over them, rereading the entire thing yet again, then the page proofs dropped into my inbox. I actually have more time than usual to get these done–which is quite lovely and marvelous–and this of course is only checking for typos and mistakes and missing words, etc. But it’s been weird spending so much time in Kansas again in my head lately.

Immersing myself into that world has also been an interesting experience; particularly when you take into consideration how much different the story is now than where it was at when I first wrote it. It was, sadly, inspired by the viral rape cases in Steubenville, Ohio and Marysville, Missouri; much as I hate to admit this, the sexual assault of teenaged girls by their classmates etc. wasn’t really on my radar until those stories went viral–and of course, the Stanford swimmer rapist. All three cases horrified me to the very core of my being; and given that the only recourse I had to effect change was to write about it, I decided to start writing what I obliquely referred to as “the Kansas book” for a very long time (despite the fact that I had always titled it #shedeservedit).

Ah, Kansas.

We moved to Kansas when I was fourteen (I turned fifteen later that summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school). To say it was a bit of a culture shock is putting it mildly. The entire state of Kansas is less populous than Chicago, and the biggest town (small city) in the county was smaller than the suburb where we had lived. I don’t know how many students my suburban high school had, but the building itself was enormous and we basically had a campus; the town library was on the property and we had a field house by the football field, with locker rooms for the home and away teams. My high school in Kansas had 180 students, and my class, the largest in school history, had 48 kids. The school was simply a lobby, a single hallway for the classrooms, and a gym, which had a stage for plays at one end of the basketball court. Our hall lockers didn’t even have locks–which was unimaginable at my former school. We actually lived in a very small town (population 942) about eight miles north of the county seat; that town was the second largest one in the county. My high school was consolidated; five small towns and all the farms in the community sent their kids there–it was sixteen miles from where we lived.

Kansas, and my high school there, had a profound influence on me in many ways. I had taken a creative writing class at my former school–got an A, and some praise from the teacher, but nothing overwhelming–but it was in Kansas where I really started writing. My English class required us to write papers my junior year; my teacher very generously allowed me to write fiction, and so I did. Everyone in my class loved the stories I wrote, and my teacher, the hallowed Mrs. Anderson, encouraged me to pursue writing as a vocation–which was the first time I ever had any kind of encouragement of any kind from anyone other than my grandmother to do so–and that was when I actually began to believe it was something that could happen for me; that I had the ability to tell stories and write and even possibly, at some point, get paid to do so and maybe even make a living doing it. (It only took more than twenty years after graduation, but I did eventually start getting paid to write; it was even my primary source of income for a very long time.)

The town in the book–Liberty Center (a nod to Philip Roth’s When She Was Good)–is obviously based very slightly on the county seat; mostly the geography more than anything else, as well as it also has a small college, a park on the way out of town just before a waterfall; and another park on the other side of town rumored to be a gay cruising spot. I’ve written about this town, and this county, a lot over the years, but the name of that town has changed numerous times–everything from Greenfield to Kahola to Carterville and finally, Liberty Center. (Sara, the first young adult novel I wrote chronologically, is also set in that same area; however the county seat in that book had a different name; Kahola, I think) I’ve not set foot in Kansas since we left for California in February 1981; so this is all from my memory, with an occasional glance at Google Earth or Google Maps. Obviously, everything there has changed dramatically in the forty years (!) since we got on Amtrak and headed west at two in the morning; I tended to stick to my actual memories than the reality of what has changed.

So, when these notorious sexual assault cases involving kids (sorry, I still, and will always, think of college students as kids too, YMMV) became so viral and so ever-present everywhere, I knew I finally had the story for the book I wanted to write in this fictional town–I’d made any number of false starts over the years; some of which may eventually became the seeds for other books–but I have always, always, wanted to write a book set there, and writing a toxic masculinity/rape culture book set there just seemed like the right way to go. I had everything in place that I wanted or needed to write the book; the only thing I didn’t know how to do was end it. So, as I mentioned the other day, I finished the last book I had under contract sometime in the spring of 2015, and took the month of July to write this first draft–96,000 words, nineteen chapters, and missing the concluding one. I didn’t get the story right in the first draft, but set it aside to do other things for awhile before coming back to it. I worked on it around other projects over the years since, and finally, last year, finally recognized the truth I’d been avoiding–it will never be finished unless you sign a contract for it with a deadline. And so I did, and now it will be released in January of this year.

And yes, the deadline was precisely the panicking terrified motivation I needed to make the changes to the story that made it gel and possible for me to write an ending.

And of course, as always, I have been plagued with doubts every step of the way while writing this: am I the right person to write this book? Is a white male the right person to do a book built around toxic masculinity and rape culture? Am I taking a spot in publishing away from someone who might be better qualified and better experienced to write such a novel?

But writing is about taking risks, and trying to push yourself. One of the reasons I started doing the stand-alone books all those years ago was because I worried about getting stale and bored writing my two series; originally, switching back and forth between them helped keep them fresh and new to me…but around 2009 I was starting to feel like those books were becoming repetitive (how many car accidents has Scotty been in?) and stale; that I didn’t have anything new or interesting to say about them. (I kind of am feeling that way with Scotty right now–Chanse has ended, although I may do some novellas with him; but am hopeful once I get everything done that I am working on currently that I can sit down and gather my thoughts on the next Scotty book into something interesting and cohesive and frankly, worthy of the character) I use the stand-alone books to push myself further as a writer, into exploring other things and voices and tenses, which I hope makes the series books better.

I guess we’ll have to see how that goes, won’t we?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, everyone, and will check in with you again tomorrow.

Who Needs Love Like That

Tuesday morning and I feel like I had a good night’s sleep; I certainly am not feeling groggy or tired this morning; at least not yet anyway. I was very tired yesterday, though–I started the day out pretty well but around ten in the morning started to drag, and then just managed to hang on by my fingernails for the rest of the day. I ran some errands on my way home from the office, made dinner for Paul, and then watched a bit of the Saints game for a bit before we watched two episodes of Dopesick, which is really quite good. (It also makes me angry.) We switched back over to the Saints game for a bit before I went to bed; I am very glad to see they did go on to beat the Seahawks 13-10 in what may be the lowest scoring Saints game that I can remember.

I still have a lot to do this week, and so I really need to be certain I am getting the rest I need so I can get the work done I need to get done.

I finished going over the final third of #shedeservedit last night, and it’s better than I remembered it being; it’s hard, really, for me to tell because the manuscript has gone through so many iterations on its path to being published. I started writing this book way back in the summer of 2015, when I was feeling incredibly burned out and was trying to take a break from the non-stop grind of deadlines. 2010-2015 was probably the period when I published the most work, from novels to short stories to anthologies, and I was exhausted, frankly. That was also the time when I did my first service on the Mystery Writers of America board, and with all that writing and all that volunteering on top of my day job I was worn down, exhausted, drained. I’d been wanting to write this book for a while, but at the same time wasn’t terribly confident that I would be able to write it properly, so I decided to take that summer and work on it; I literally wrote the ninety-six thousand word first draft that July. I wasn’t certain how to end it, so I never wrote the last chapter, figuring I would figure out the right way to end it when I was revising it. It went through any number of revisions and redrafts over the years that followed; more drafts than anything I’ve published since Murder in the Rue Dauphine, actually–and that didn’t exactly make me feel any more confident. I tried to get an agent with this manuscript; only one agent I queried actually bothered to reply with a ‘not interested but it sounds good’ brush-off email. This was obviously disappointing (every time I’ve looked for an agent has been disappointing; I try not to let it effect my confidence anymore, and evolved to the point where generally I make a joke out of the fact that I’ve never had representation. I’ve not done badly for myself, really, without one; I probably wouldn’t have the career I do now had I had an agent, but conversely it’s also possible I would have a much better one.

You never know.

I’d intended to start reading Scott Carson’s The Chill last night, which has, at its core, a concept that’s always interested me and one I’ve always wanted to write about: a town submerged by the rising waters of a dammed river. Alas, I had to read those last chapters of my own book to sign off on the edits, and alas, by the time I was done with that I was too fatigued mentally to really focus on reading anything. I am hoping to be able to either make it to the gym for a quick and easy workout this evening or to read the book some before Paul and I settle in for more episodes of Dopesick.

One more day of getting up before dawn this week. When does the time change again this fall? Ah, not this weekend but next, the seventh of November; that’s the night we get an extra hour to sleep in. I suppose it is an improvement having it start getting darker an hour later than it does already, or is it the other way around? My mind has gotten so mushy these days I have trouble remember time zone differences if I don’t sit down and think about it really hard–which is truly tragic for a former airline employee who used to have to not only know the time differences but which zone what cities were in, and to know it so well I didn’t even have to think about it. Heavy heaving sigh.

But I am hoping to get back on track with everything today. I do feel more rested and awake than I did yesterday, and am equally hopeful that the energy won’t flag in mid-morning today, either. I managed to sleepwalk my way through a pretty good level of productivity yesterday, all things considered–I did get some things done that needed to be done–and my fingers and toes are crossed that today will follow suit that way as well. And there’s the sun, too; so perhaps it is time for me to head into the spice mines this morning. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again before dawn tomorrow.

Stop!

It’s Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment and slept relatively well again, if a bit late; my body clock is now all messed up and tomorrow morning’s waking up at the crack of dawn is going to be harder than usual.

Not that it’s ever easy, frankly.

LSU played terribly yesterday and lost, as expected, to Mississippi 31-17 (first loss to them after five straight wins) but I managed to finish reading Not All Diamonds and Rosé while it was on, and also read some more in Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, which is, as all books by Paul Tremblay, very well done–but I am not deep enough into it to have an idea of what’s going on. It focuses on the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old from a state park outside of Boston; it opens with his family–along with everyone else in the community–finding out he is missing and dealing with the emotions and fears that come along with a kid gone missing; but something out of the ordinary has already happened (no spoilers, sorry) which means there’s more to this than just your average child gone missing story.

Which, given it’s written by Paul Tremblay, was always going to be the case in the first place.

After the LSU game, we spent the rest of the evening watching Skate America; we used to be (still are) big figure skating fans, but the Internet and so forth has kind of ruined figure skating, really–when you know what the results are before the competition airs, it’s not nearly as exciting or suspenseful; so the only way to recapture the way it used to feel to watch something pre-recorded is now to watch live, which Peacock (NBC’s streaming service) does now provide. (I also think the new scoring system has a lot to do with it as well. Sure, the old 6.0 system had serious flaws and corruption in its judging, but I am not convinced that corruption still isn’t there and now the scoring system is so mysterious and complicated that it’s almost impossible to tell anymore if anything untoward is going on. The great irony is the scoring change, claiming to be more fair and to rule out bias, simply made it harder for viewers to see it for themselves.) There’s also tension brewing in the ISU this year as well, as a Russian judge and coach has made horrifically homophobic comments about French ice dancer Guillaume Cizeron (who came out last year) and his partner Gabrielle Papadakis. They have a silver Olympic medal (it would have been gold had Papadakis not suffered a costume malfunction in the original dance) and are three time world champions. It was an obvious attempt to smear them in an Olympic year and potentially influence future judging pools at upcoming events, only making it all the more disgusting….particularly since Russia couldn’t even officially compete at the last summer Olympics because of widespread doping and cheating. This piece of shit Russian essentially said that since Cizeron is gay they cannot “convincingly portray romance” the way the top Russian team can; to that I say, “hey, you homophobic needle-dicked piece of shit, if you want to see a gay man convincingly play a romantic lead, watch Pillow Talk some time and tell me Rock Hudson didn’t deserve an Oscar. And by the way, go fuck yourself and drink bleach.”

I am so fucking sick of this shit. Seriously.

I did manage to get some things done yesterday, but I am still looking for my old journals. I cannot for the life of me remember where I stored them; I know sometime over the past few years I found them in a box, but now I don’t remember what I did with them. It seems unlikely I would have simply shoved them into another box and stored them somewhere; but I can’t seem to locate them anywhere inside the apartment, which makes it appear that must be what I did with them. Generally I don’t go back and read my old journals very often–I don’t really like to see how much of a mess I used to be, written down plainly in ink on paper–but I kind of need to because I am writing a novella set in the summer of 1994 and I kind of need to go back and see what I recorded back then about music and pop culture and so forth. One of the hardest things about doing research on gay life in the past is so much of it is hidden, or wasn’t recorded anywhere, really–like there’s no listings anywhere on the Internet of “what dance songs were popular in gay dance clubs in 1994?” and my memory banks simply are not substantial enough anymore for me to summon those answers up out of the muck and mush my brain is slowly turning into as I age. That summer I went out dancing a lot, but I honestly don’t remember anything much about the music other than there were a couple of Pet Shop Boys songs that were really popular that summer–“Go West” and “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”, and Erasure had a great remix of their song “Always”, but beyond that I have no memory of much.

Today I am debating as to whether I actually want to go run errands; making groceries is kind of necessary but I really have no desire to leave the house and go out in public. There’s not a Saints game today–they’re on Monday Night Football this week–and next weekend is LSU’s bye week, so I don’t really need to spend Saturday watching football (despite it being the weekend of Georgia-Florida and Auburn-Mississippi), so here’s hoping I can get some serious writing done today and this coming weekend. Stranger things have happened..and I am definitely running out of time to get this book written, which is incredibly stressful for me, as always. Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

A Little Respect

Well, hello, Wednesday morning, how are you doing? I am at home today because I am doing the prep work necessary for tomorrow morning’s procedure (it’s a colonoscopy; I am not sure why I am being so coy about it. I am over sixty now and this is long overdue; the hurdles I had to clear and hoops I had to jump through to get this thing scheduled….oy. I don’t understand the mentality of the people who defend our health care/insurance system…and sadly, it’s better now than it was when I first got health insurance back in 2006), and the doctor recommended being in close reach of a bathroom for most of the day. I have to get up at midnight to begin Stage II, then I have to get up and be at Touro for the procedure by seven tomorrow morning. I also have to go to Touro later today to get a rapid COVID test to get clearance.

Seriously, with my luck I’ll test positive and then not only have to reschedule the entire thing but have to quarantine for fourteen more days.

That sure took a turn, didn’t it?That should give an indication of my late October mood, though, shouldn’t it? I don’t know, maybe it’s the procedure and having to go underneath anesthetic for the first time in a really long time; or perhaps it’s the whole Halloween thing? Who knows? Halloween is certainly a time for darkness and the macabre; which is interesting, since the name is a contraction of all hallows eve, which means, really, the eve of All Saints Day, which you’d think would be more celebratory? It also occurs to me that I’ve never actually written about Halloween, and given what a popular holiday it is in New Orleans, that’s kind of odd. Jackson Square Jazz is set just before Halloween; I think in the afterward Scotty mentions the costumes he and the boys were to the Halloween Ball? It’s been a hot minute, so I can’t remember…but I know there’s not a Scotty Halloween book, and I know I never did one with Chanse–who couldn’t be bothered to wear a costume; he’d find the whole thing tiresome. But not even a short story! (“The Snow Globe,” in fairness, began as a Halloween story and was originally titled “All Hallows Eve”; obviously I changed that.)

Unfortunately, given the timeline I’ve got going with the Scotty books now, I don’t know that the next one can be a Halloween book. Although I could play with the timeline a little more, I suppose. Royal Street Reveillon was set during the Christmas season, and I’ve always thought of it as Christmas 2019 (which means it became cemented into my brain as set in that year; and my stubborn subconscious never lets it go until my conscious mind realizes how stupid I am actually being)….with a pandemic just around the corner. But the book itself came out in October 2019, so I finished writing it earlier that year so there’s no reason it can’t be 2018…or 2017 for that matter, and I can also go back and put books in between the ones I’ve already published, if I so desire…ah, the Godlike power of being an author! What, though, would be a good Scotty Halloween title? Hmmmm…Halloween Season Hijinks? Halloween Party Horror?

Sigh. This will be in the back of my head now for awhile, which is how this always goes, doesn’t it?

I did sleep very well last night, which was lovely. (I set the alarm of course, reflexively, as I slipped into bed last night) We finished the first season of Only Murders in the Building, which resolved the first season but ended with a cliffhanger setting up Season 2–something I was wondering about–and thoroughly enjoyed it. We also started watching Dopesick, a fictionalized version of how the Sackler family single-handedly created the opioid crisis in this country so they can make billions. It’s very well done–I’d watched the documentary version of this already, whose name I cannot recall–and the acting is stellar. It’s powerful, too; I love that they are showing how this all happened through the eyes of a doctor in Appalachia (played by Michael Keaton), as well as showing the lives of some of his patients and how they got sucked into oxycontin addiction. I don’t know how anyone can watch this (or the original documentary) without burning with rage at the Sackler family and the politicians they fucking bought off so they could exploit the pain of the working class for profit, and what a classic example this is of how an unmonitored and unregulated capitalism–the ideal of the conservatives (let the market decide!)–can not only be damaging but lethal. We are still cleaning up the mess this created, while they sip expensive wine and eat caviar and fly to glamorous places on private jets. (I think the next time someone pulls some of that Ayn Rand libertarian “no regulation” bullshit on me I’m just going to smile and say “Oxycontin and the Sackler family disprove her theories on everything.”)

I also got Dr. Alecia P. Long’s latest book yesterday, Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime, which I am really looking forward to reading. This is, of course, about the Clay Shaw trials here in New Orleans, and how Jim Garrison abused his power as district attorney; Oliver Stone based JFK on this, treating Garrison as an unsung American hero when he was anything but that–I’ve not seen the film, nor any other Oliver Stone film since this piece of propaganda and packet of lies was filmed. I also don’t trust anything Stone did, or does, anymore to be honest and truthful and factual. He basically ignored all the evidence–and there was plenty of it–and turned Garrison into some kind of folk-hero when he truly was a corrupt monster who tainted everything he touched and made the Puritans look like sex maniacs. And this country being what it is, the completely fictional film JFK and its conclusions and accusations are now seen by people as being factual. I’ve always been interested in writing about this case fictionally–seriously, the history of New Orleans and Louisiana is so rich and deep and rife with potential for writing, I could never run out of material here–and have done some loose reading up on it…and I’ve never come across anything backing up Garrison or his claims that didn’t originate in some insane right-wing crackpot conspiracy generator. I could be wrong, but I feel Dr. Long–whose The Great Southern Babylon is also a must-read for people interested in New Orleans and her history–is not a Garrison sympathizer; certainly the book’s title implies that; but I also trust Dr. Long, her scholarship, and her dedication to research. This will inevitably prove to be the definitive book on the subject.

I’m also still reading Robert A. Caro’s massive The Power Broker: Bob Moses and the Fall of New York, which, like all of Caro’s work, is exceptional. I’m perhaps about a quarter of the way through the book, but it’s also fascinating; a history of the New York parks and recreational facilities and the building of highways and parkways and roads so that New Yorkers could escape the city and enjoy the outside recreationally on the weekends. The power struggle over making Long Island more accessible to the city dwellers is deeply fascinating, as is watching how another idealistic young man slowly realizes that politics is more about reality and power than ideals, and learns to use politics and power to get what he wants–even if doing so might not be exactly legal. (This was my primary takeaway from Huey Long by Harry Williams.) I hope to read more of Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock with an eye to finishing it, over the course of the next few days and the weekend. Tremblay is becoming one of my favorite horror writers; I’ve certainly loved everything he’s written thus far, and would like to get some more horror read this month before Halloween and we move into the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s holiday cycle.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, everyone, and I will check in with you again tomorrow after the procedure. (Depending on how it goes and how drugged I am and how quickly the drugs wear off.)

Blue Savannah

Tuesday morning, with the dark pressed against my windows and the overhead light necessary in order to see; it’s also very chilly this morning and I didn’t want to get out of the bed. I slept extremely well last night–much deeper than Sunday night (without checking the Fitbit to see)–but it was a very deep restful sleep the alarm jarred me out of this morning; the bed and blankets were marvelously comfortable and welcoming, and I deeply resented the alarm going off. I think today will be a better day than yesterday–the sleep alone is a vast improvement over yesterday already–and I also don’t have an event tonight after work. Last night I did an event on diversity via ZOOM for the Chessies chapter of Sisters in Crime; I believe it was for a library in Alexandria, Virginia. These things always cause me stress, and I think with it hanging over me all day yesterday that put me into a stressful mood; like the sword of Damocles was hanging over my head all day. But it was lovely–and informative. Moderated by Cathy Wiley, my co-panelists included the wonderful Sherry Harris, Kristopher Zgorski, and Smita Harish Jain (I hope I spelled that correctly), and it was a very pleasant hour talking about writers and diversity and how to increase diversity in your work.

And yes, sure, it gets old sometimes always being asked to diversity stuff, but it needs to be done. Maybe in my lifetime we’ll reach the point where diversity conversations and panels will be no longer necessary; wouldn’t that be lovely? A lot has changed in our country and society during the course of my many years on this planet; that one would be more than welcome, certainly.

Paul was working last night as I finished the ZOOM panel, and I was literally exhausted. I sat in my easy chair and watched some videos on Youtube. I tried to read for a bit to see if I wasn’t too tired to focus–I was–and wound up going to bed very early. On the way home from work tonight I need to stop and get the mail as well as make groceries; tomorrow is procedure prep day, so I am working at home as my system cleans itself out (such a revolting thought, really) and I can stay close enough to a bathroom so it’s not going to be an issue. That means I can sleep a little later than usual tomorrow (although I need to stay up late that night and get up ridiculously early the morning of the procedure) and relax around the house, making condom packs and doing data entry.

I am also starting to feel like I am caught up a bit, and this is always a dangerous thing. Getting caught up inevitably winds up with me thinking about other things oh now I have plenty of time so it can wait which inevitably leads to me getting behind again. I will never, I think, learn the lesson to stop taking down time until everything is finished so I can do it relatively guilt-free, and when other things need my attention again I don’t have to worry about feeling overwhelmed or buried…however, this is how I’ve been my entire life, and I don’t think sixty is when I am going to effect sincere and successful behavior change.

Stranger things, however, have happened.

And always seem to, for one reason or another.

I did manage to spend some time revising the first chapter of A Streetcar Named Murder, the latest thing I am terribly behind on. I was trying to do this while I waited for the ZOOM panel time; while also moving everything off my kitchen counters and hiding them so no one can see the condition the Lost Apartment is in during the early part of the week. (For the record, my washer and dryer currently have a shit ton of stuff sitting on top of them; I’ll have to do something about that tonight) I am hoping to work on the book some more tonight after work–before or around watching the season (series?) finale of Only Murders in the Building, which we are enjoying tremendously. I’d like to get the first four chapters revised by the weekend, so I can focus on writing the next two or three this weekend. (Note to self: check what time the LSU game is on Saturday; the Saints play Monday night) Ah–the game is at 2:30; so I have the morning to go run errands, go to the gym, and write. That will make for a busy morning, methinks. Maybe if I run the errands on Friday after work I won’t have to go out on Saturday other than the gym?

We’ll see how it all goes.

And on that note, it’s time for me to get ready for work. Check in with you again tomorrow morning, Constant Reader. Have a lovely Tuesday!