Category: diversity

Sing

Hello there, Saturday morning. I am on my second cup of coffee this morning, trying to finish two loads of laundry, and essentially wake myself up this morning. I slept rather well last night, which was lovely (as it always is) and now have to plan out my morning/rest of the day, and hope there won’t be distractions. Once I finish this and write some emails, I’ll probably adjourn to my easy chair to read S. A. Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer for a while before getting on with my day. I have errands to run, a grocery list to make before I do, and I’d like to get some work done on the Major Project this morning (actually, I’d like to finish it this morning and be done with it, but that might not happen). I’d like to write another chapter of the WIP today (if not two, but I am not pressing my luck) and get some other writing done that needs to be done. I’m feeling confident about my writing these days, which is extremely unusual and very much not like me–I’m not sure where that came from, frankly, but I need to harness it and ride it for as long as I can.

After I was finished with work for the day yesterday I thought some more about how I am going to wrap this entire book up in the next three chapters, and the knowledge there are only three left to do is astonishing, quite frankly, and rather lovely. I honestly never thought I was going to reach this point–this book seemed to take forever and a day to write, frankly–and of course it isn’t finished, not by a long shot; I have some extensive revising, editing and rewriting to do on it before it’s fit to be seen by any living, sentient human being, but I am very pleased with it, and I am looking forward to spending the ret of the month finishing the odds and ends that need to be finished with various other things by the end of the month, as well as making a plan for the revision of the other manuscript I  need to finish revising and editing. Then I have another major project to get done, and while i am doing that I am going to try to revise another manuscript that’s just lying around here, while doing the beginning research for Chlorine, which I hope to write next year.

We’ll see how it goes.

But being this close to done with this manuscript’s first draft is an absolutely lovely feeling, and one that is making me feel rather accomplished this morning. It probably goes along with being able to look around my desk and see that things are under control as far as filing and organizing are concerned; I need to wipe down surfaces and do the kitchen floor at some point this weekend, but overall this is the first Saturday in a long while where I am not feeling antsy because of the mess my workspace is in.

Which is also a lovely way to feel.

We’ve been watching the US Gymnastics championships over the last couple of nights, which is always delightful and fun. The dominance of the US women on the international stage in this century has been something to see…we could easily field three different teams at worlds, and win both gold and silver team medals, with our third tier women in strong contention for the bronze. Simone Biles is so dominant, and so far and away better than everyone else, that she made major errors on every apparatus in the first round of the all around competition and is still almost two points ahead of the second place athlete. As for the men, Sam Mikulak is the cutest gymnast I’ve ever seen–classically handsome, gorgeous eyes, and those muscles. Good Lord. He’s our best male gymnast, hungry for a world and Olympic medal, and finally got one last year–a silver on the high bar. And of course, the Olympics are next year, so this year’s worlds are a major stepping stone to Olympic glory.

I can’t wait for the Olympics.

Anyway.

I suppose I should get to work. The sooner I get all this stuff accomplished this morning, the sooner I can get on with the relaxation portion of my day. I still have a credit on iTunes, so maybe we’ll watch a movie later.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

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Live and Let Die

Friday afternoon, and I’m home already. The bed linens are in the process of being laundered, Scooter’s been fed, I’ve unpacked my backpack and have Blondie blaring on Spotify. (Blondie’s music is, if I do say so myself, way ahead of its time as well as timeless.) I’m in the midst of Chapter Twenty-two, which I’ve got queued up on my screen, and I am going to get another two thousand done on that bitch this afternoon if it kills me or someone else–preferably someone else, but your mileage might vary. My weekend is officially here, and I’m most happy about that. I need to unload the dishwasher and do the load that’s currently sitting in the sink, but that’s okay; no rush, I’ll get to it at some point today.

It’s just lovely to be home.

I cashed in some of my health care points today for an Amazon gift card–it’s a long story, but our health insurance at work allows you to earn points for doing healthy things, or taking care of yourself–and managed to use that gift card to order some books, including a preorder of Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, which I am looking forward to reading. It’s getting raves everywhere, and looks like it’s going to be one of the bigger books of the year, which is very exciting. I love seeing writers do well, you know? I also ordered the new Donna Andrews (Terns of Endearment),  Attica Locke’s Edgar winning Bluebird Bluebird (it deeply shames me that I don’t already have this, as well as not having read it yet), Craig Davidson’s short story collection The Saturday Night Ghost Club, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, and Joyce Carol Oates’ noir Triumph of the Spider Monkey. 

Some excellent reading to be had there, am I right?

I feel pretty good now; I didn’t this morning, honestly. I had to do a biometric screening at work this morning (more points!), and didn’t want to have anything to eat or drink beforehand. This mean getting up at eight and not having any coffee. I did have to take my morning pills, and as there wasn’t any cold filtered water in the Lost Apartment I thought the hell with it and washed them down with a swig of Gatorade….so of course, my blood sugar was slightly elevated, which was highly annoying. Blood pressure and everything else was fine, but didn’t really have high enough good cholesterol, so the fish oil is going to have to be added back to the morning pills. Which is fine, I’d rather take a natural supplement than another pill–I’m already on something for the high bad cholesterol, which wasn’t so bad today. I also got a flu shot, which I hate doing, but there you have it. I also have to see my doctor next week on Tuesday (I’m going to go to Five Guys first as a treat, the blood work was already done so no worries about the effects a delicious bacon mushroom roasted jalapeno cheeseburger with a side of Cajun fries will have on my visit), which is nice. I also need to have my regular doctor visit rescheduled; they called last week to reschedule my next appointment and I missed the call and haven’t bothered to call back yet. (Yes, I see two doctors. It’s complicated, has everything to do with my health insurance, and how stupid our health care system is, as a nation.)

And looking around, I am so glad I took the time last weekend to do all that filing and organizing. There’s still that needs to be done, of course–isn’t there always–but it’s not nearly as bad as it was, and it’s not to the point where it actually bothers me. There’s still more files I can store and/or get rid of–and at some point I am going to have to actually work on the file cabinet;  taking a look at what’s inside those two drawers absolutely terrifies me to even think about(maybe it would make a great project on my birthday staycation).

All right, I am off to the spice mines to finish Chapter Twenty-two. Have a lovely rest of your Friday, Constant Reader.

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Superfly

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Thursday.

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

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

Life rarely gets better than that, seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

I kind of doubt it.

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

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My Maria

Wednesday morning and I am slowing waking up. I slept well last night–didn’t want to get out of bed this morning (not that I ever do), but I did, and am on my second cup of coffee as the fog clears and my body starts to slowly become something slightly resembling human this morning. On my way to work this morning I have my usual Wednesday morning errands today, with an addition: I have to stop at Garden District Books to pick up my copy of the new, signed Laura Lippman (she signed there last night but I had to work), Lady in the Lake, and then resist the urge to start reading it immediately.

It’s also pay-the-bills day, an odious chore I just completed, and to be perfectly honest–I don’t feel good about it. I love being able to pay the bills, but seriously–budgeting is something I absolutely hate and despise. I do believe that no one ever thinks they ever have enough money–no matter how much they have; we are an acquisitive by nature culture, and there’s always something we just can’t afford that we long for–but I do miss the days when my income was higher and more plentiful and I never really had to plan or budget or worry about anything the way I do now–but back when I was making more money I don’t really remember feeling footloose and fancy-free, in all honesty. It’s an endless cycle, I think; one that our money-mad culture drives.

After the cut, there will some spoilers for Years and Years, so read ahead at your own peril.

Continue reading “My Maria” →

Here I Am (Come and Take Me)

Tuesday morning and all is quiet in the lower Garden District. I’m awake and well-rested; I had a very good night’s sleep last night, which is of course quite lovely. I have a lot to get done today–yesterday I was feeling very scattered, but did manage to get some things pulled together and finished. I started the next chapter of Bury Me in Shadows, which is off to a very rocky start, and worked some more on the massive project, which–God willing and the creek don’t rise–might actually be finished by tomorrow? Fingers crossed, at any rate.

I also started reading S. A. Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer. Laura Lippman is signing at Garden District Books tonight–I’ve preordered my copy of Lady in the Lake because I have to work and can’t be there–and I’ll be picking it up tomorrow morning before work as I run my errands. I was trying not to buy any more books for awhile, but I always make an exception for Lippman.

I also, of course (because I have nothing else to do) wrote the openings of some new stories yesterday; “Dead Man’s Shoes,” “The Dreadful Scott Decision,” “Flood Stage,” and “Festival of the Redeemer.”  Because I don’t have enough to write already, apparently. Heavy heaving sigh. But that’s just how my mind works, and just how things go around here. I do need to stay laser-focused on some things–the big project, for one–but my mind always scatters and strays; that’s part of the process and always has been, and some things will never change, I suppose.

I also suppose I will never finish writing all these partial stories, or turning the fragments into finished stories.

Heavy sigh.

Anyway, I was talking about the story I wrote for that Pink Triangle Rhapsody the other day, “A Whisper from the Graveyard,” so here’s a taste for you:

I was hired to find a zombie the same day I found out I was dying.

The new client was waiting for me on my front porch when I got home from getting the news. I was still in shock. Even though I’d only had to walk a few blocks from the office on Decatur Street where a very nice blonde lady with reddish, watery eyes and a slight quiver in her voice delivered the bad news to me, I was drenched. It was a hot sticky July afternoon in the summer of 1995 and sweat had adhered my black T-shirt to my chest and back. As I trudged through the heat and humidity and vicious sunshine, I kept trying to convince myself it wasn’t true, there had been a mistake. Mistakes happen whenever there’s a human element involved. Yes, the number they’d given me matched the number on the printout from the lab, but numbers could get mixed up, couldn’t they?

But I’d been expecting this for years. And while a surprise, the real shock was that it had taken this long, really. I thought I’d been preparing myself for this for years, but I was wrong.

You’re never prepared to hear someone tell you that you’re dying.

Not bad, if I do say so myself. And now back to the spice mines.

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Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got)

Sunday morning. I slept late again–it took me a while to fall asleep last night, but I finally did and slept like the dead, which was lovely.

I finished reading Steph Cha’s exceptional Your House Will Pay yesterday; I reviewed it in a different entry, but will re-emphasize that you should preorder it right now again. I really loved it; I love the way Cha writes, and I also look forward to getting back to her Juniper Song series. There are some extraordinary novels being published in the crime fiction community this year; I myself have read some pretty amazing books this year, and can’t wait to dive into my next one, S. A. Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer.

I also woke to the news this morning that the anthology I was talking about yesterday, the one to which I’d contributed my original story “A Whisper from the Graveyard” to, will be released this October, which is kind of exciting. The cover was designed by Joe Phillips, one of my favorite gay artists (check out right here on his website; the art on my walls in my old office on Frenchmen Street were his calendar illustrations; gorgeous works of art). The title of the anthology is Pink Triangle Rhapsody, and it’s all genre work by gay writers. I’m kind of looking forward to reading the whole thing, to be honest.

I managed to get some things done yesterday, around reading the Cha novel. I cleaned, I ran errands, and I organized; I also made some notes for things I am writing, and then last evening–Paul went out with a friend–I fell into an Amazon Prime docu-series about The Romanovs, actually Russian produced with English subtitles. It was interesting, but now that we’ve reached Catherine the Great I no longer need to continue watching. I’ve read enough about Catherine that I don’t need to watch a documentary about her; and the Romanovs who came after her aren’t particularly interesting other than Alexander I, and he’s only interesting because of 1) Napoleon and 2) he never seemed to have any real interest in women. As this is a Russian production, I imagine the chapter on Alexander I will focus on Napoleon rather than his private life. So, no need for me to continue. The nineteenth century Romanovs aren’t that interesting, and I’ve read and watched enough about Nicholas and Alexandra to last me a lifetime; although I would be curious to see how they handle the last of the Romanovs, to get an idea of how Russians see them now. But again, their sad tale of hemophiliac son, deep abiding love and passion, and Rasputin that ends in a massacre in a basement in Ekaterinburg I know well enough already.

Today I plan on writing, believe it or not; I am going to dive into Chapter 21 headfirst and see what shakes out. I also am going to try to reread the first twenty chapters as well to update the detailed outline I am doing as I go, which will help me restructure the novel when it’s time to go over it a second time and revise the hell out of it. I also want to work on “Never Kiss a Stranger” a little bit, perhaps even as a warm-up; deciding that it’s going to be a novella rather than a short story was a good first start on getting it finished. (I am, in fact, still reeling from yesterday’s realization of just how many books, stories, and essays I am currently in the midst of writing) I also need to work on a project today, and there’s definitely some organizing (isn’t there always?) that needs doing. I also need to clean out my email inbox. Heavy heaving sigh, isn’t that always the way?

I’m also still thinking about Steph Cha’s novel, and how good it actually is. One of the things I meant to talk about in my entry about her novel is how it’s about every day people, rather than exceptional ones. Her characters aren’t cops, aren’t professional investigators; just people like you and me and your friends and neighbors, who sadly get wrapped up into a horrible crime and trauma, and how they deal with it. Such a good book, really.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines for the day, Constant Reader. Hope your Sunday is a lovely and peaceful and relaxing one; I hope mine will be as well as a productive one as well. We shall see, shall we not?

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Higher Ground

I surprised a younger co-worker a few years ago.

I don’t exactly remember what precisely we were talking about–it had to be a famous court case of some kind involving a teenager or someone in their early twenties, it may have been Brock Turner, the Stanford rapist–and I remarked that one of the things that always surprised me, and caught me off guard, about these kinds of cases was how the parents “will spend every cent they have defending that child, and will never consider, under any circumstance, that their child might actually be guilty.”

She looked at me in horror. “Why is that a surprise? My parents would.”

“Mine,” I replied, “wouldn’t. They also wouldn’t, under any circumstance, believe that I was innocent of any crime of which I might be falsely accused of committing. They would always, always, believe the police before they would believe me. They’d get me a lawyer but they would expect me to plead guilty.”

“Even if you were innocent?” The horrified look on her face was something I’ll probably never forget.

“They’d never believe I was innocent unless someone else confessed.”

I wrote about that in my journal at the time; I came across my documentation of the conversation recently when I was looking through my journals for something else (they really do come in handy; I am so fucking glad I started carrying them around and using them again, you really have no idea, Constant Reader!) and it made me smile. My parents have always believed in law and order, you see–despite almost regular evidence to the contrary, my parents believe all police officers are honest, upright, and do their jobs properly–and should always be believed. Certainly, they believed this when I was a child and it was something I was taught; it’s so ingrained into my psyche that the police are always in the right that evidence they aren’t quite so honest, to this day, is jarring; belief that the police protect and serve the public interest, and their commitment to justice is pure, is the foundational bedrock our entire civilization and country was built upon.

The truth is that reality is a lot more complicated than that.

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“Well, this is it,” said Ava. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to find these fools.

Shawn gaped at the crowd gathered across the street. The movie wasn’t supposed to start for another hour and a half, but there had to be hundreds of people waiting outside the theater. It was dark already, too, hard to make out faces even with the neat row of lamps lining the sidewalk. Ava said Westwood was white people territory, but almost everyone here was black, a lot of them high school kids. They’d have to get closer to pick out Ray and his friends.

Ava grabbed Shawn’s hand as they crossed the street. He pulled back, thinking of all those older kids seeing him get dragged along by his sister. “Aw, Ave, I’m not a baby,” he said.

“Who said you were a baby? I just don’t want to lose you.”

They walked slowly down the sidewalk, starting from the box office, where the marquee overhead announced the showtimes for New Jack City. Shawn smiled. He’d been looking forward to this night all week. Everyone at school was talking about this movie, and he was going on opening night. It didn’t matter that Aunt Sheila had made Ray and Ava take him when they said they’d be watching White Fang. He was here now, sneaking into an R-rated movie, just like them.

Steph Cha’s latest novel, Your House Will Pay, drops this October, and if you’re smart, Constant Reader, you will preorder this book from your nearest retailer or wherever you get your books from immediately.

It is, simply put, quite extraordinary.

There are two central characters to the book, Grace Park, the daughter of Korean immigrants who works as a pharmacist in the family pharmacy, and Shawn Matthews, a middle-aged man of color who works as a mover, is married, and has a young daughter he adores. The two have no idea that they are connected in any way, but as the book progresses we find out that not only are they connected, they are connected in the most terrible of ways; connected through a horrific crime of violence from decades ago, in the early 1990’s, and the fallout from that terrible tragedy nearly thirty years ago is continuing to wreak havoc in the present day for these two characters, and their families.

The beauty of the book lies in how it’s told. Both point of view characters seem absolutely real and are completely distinct from each other; it’s not just a story about racial conflict and racial divides, but a melancholic examination of grief and trauma. By not choosing sides, Cha exposes both sides to her audience, and leaves the complicated nuances to her readers to sort. There are no easy answers in reality, and there are no easy answers in Cha’s novel, which makes it all the more heartbreakingly real, honest, and raw.

It’s also a searing picture of Los Angeles, a city riven by racial divides and strife, that has never worked out any of its own problems or made any effort to bring communities together. It’s also about grief, about dealing with your parents and your family as flawed adults–as well as loss; lost lives, lost potential, and the damage violence can do to its survivors, and how denial can also lead to not healing.

This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I’ve read some extraordinary work this year. I urge you to preorder it, Constant Reader–you won’t regret spending time with it.

I Believe in You (You Believe in Me)

I really need to focus and stop being distracted by shiny objects.

Stupid fucking shiny objects, anyway.

But there are so many, and they’re all so glittery and pretty and interesting.

It’s a wonder I get anything done.

Every once in a while, like now, I allow myself to get completely scattered and my inability to say no to people gets me into trouble; I then get overwhelmed and paralyzed with fear that I’ll never get everything done…thereby ensuring I won’t get everything done–or if I do, I’ll basically have to kill myself to get it all done on time. Heavy heaving sigh.

But at least now I’m aware I’m doing it again, which should count for something.

I took stock yesterday of everything I am doing, everything I’ve promised, and everything I’m in the middle of–and it was quite staggering. I have, as I said before, promised three short stories, only one of which has a completed draft (the others are still just ideas, waiting to be born on the page); I am working on a massive short-term project; a massive long term all year one; I am five chapters shy of finishing a first draft of a novel; have another novel manuscript that will need at least another two drafts; have written the first drafts of two first chapters of new novels; have a lengthy novella whose publication fell through that can be revised and rewritten and turned into a novel; and have about thirty or forty short stories and essays in some form of being written….and I keep having ideas, new ones for stories or novels, every day. Just this week I came up with another book idea called Another Random Shooting, which I quite like, and three short stories–“Festival of the Redeemer,” “Hot, Humid, Chance of Rain,” and “Flood Stage.” Yikes. I also have to run errands today–mail, bank, groceries–and am hopeful I will get some things done today and tomorrow. I slept really well last night–am still a bit groggy this morning, while i wait for the coffee to kick in. I think, probably, when I finish this I am going to go sit in my easy chair and read the Steph Cha novel. It’s really quite good, and I like the idea of spending my Saturday mornings reading a good book.

Yesterday when I got home from the office, I finished doing the laundry (bed linens every Friday), cleaned the kitchen and did the dishes, cleaned the Lost Apartment (still need to do the floors), and did some filing. My office space is always, it seems, a mess; something I’m never sure how to resolve. The truth is my office space is too small, always has been; but the primary problem that goes along with that is there isn’t any other place for my office to be located here in the Lost Apartment. Our apartment is, especially by New York/DC standards enormous, especially given what we pay for it–we’ll never be able to move because we will never find anything comparable at the same price; I’m not even certain one can get a studio for what we pay in rent. And, if I’m being completely honest, having a room dedicated to being my office would eventually not be big enough, either, as I tend to expand to fill space. But I still dream of the day when I’ll have an entire room for my office space. Anyway, when Paul got home I made Swedish meatballs (I do love cooking, I just rarely get the chance to do it anymore), and we got caught up on Animal Kingdom, and then finished The Boys, which is fucking fantastic. It occurred to me last night as I watched those final two episodes, that a world with super-heroes would probably be more akin to Greek mythology than the comic book worlds we see in most super-hero stories; capricious, mercurial beings with amazing, seemingly limitless powers, and all humankind would be at their mercy. I also liked that the human male lead, Hughie, is played by Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan’s son Jack–and he’s quite good, and looks nothing like either of his parents–although sometimes you get a glimpse of one or the other. I have to say I liked this show a lot more than I thought I would, and we’re both looking forward to Season 2.

I think tonight we might dip into Years and Years on HBO. One can never go wrong with Emma Thompson.

Yesterday I reread my short story “Fireflies” in order to make some notes on it. I originally wrote “Fireflies” in long hand in a notebook back in the 1980’s–it’s another one of those “from the vault” stories–and I’ve worked on it, off and on, since the original draft was written. It was always slightly off, and the original ending was terrible. Fast forward, and last year I was looking at it again, and thinking about revising it, when I was invited to submit a short story to a horror anthology. I decided to use “Fireflies,” and I revised it and rewrote it a bit, smoothed over the rough transitions, made it flow better, and changed the ending along with some additions to the narrative to make it not only tighter but stronger. After submitting the story, I was contacted by the publisher and officially commissioned to write a story for the book. The anthology had a broad submissions call, anything from noir to pulp to outright horror, but every story had to have a paranormal element to it. They commissioned a pulpy noir story, and when I mentioned I’d submitted something already, they were very nice about specifically wanting the new story and would still consider the other; I wound up writing “A Whisper from the Graveyard” for it, and a few months ago they finally decided not to use “Fireflies”–but were interested in it as a novella; the true problem with “Fireflies” was its length. I immediately saw the value of the critique; I never think of writing in terms of novellas or novelettes (primarily because there really isn’t a market for these longer stories that are too short to be novels), and so made a note to reread the story and see what possibilities there were for it. So, I did that yesterday, and I was correct–the story would work better as a longer novella. I’ve written novellas before–“The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon” for those Kensington omnibus books, and I self-published “Quiet Desperation”” myself on Amazon. One of the projects I am in the midst of, “Never Kiss a Stranger,” is also going to be a longer, possibly novella length, story; I’d always thought of it from the beginning that way, and will probably self-publish it at some point on Amazon once I finish it.

“Fireflies” is another Alabama story, which means another “Corinth County” story. It was inspired by the Fleetwood Mac song, “Fireflies”, even though they have nothing to do with each other as far as content. The only connection other than the title is mood; I wanted to get the mood of the song into the story, and I think I succeeded. The song is one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac recordings, and only appears on the Fleetwood Mac Live double album. Ironically, it’s a studio recording they mixed crowd noises into, so it wouldn’t seem out of place on the live album; the original version is on Youtube without the crowd noises. I’d say the story is also strongly influenced by Thomas Tryon’s The Other, which is one of my favorite novels of all time (and overdue for a reread, as are The Haunting of Hill House and Rebecca), and I still think someone should do a biography of Tryon. I’d do it, but my research skills are subpar and non-fiction is also not my strength. But Tryon is fascinating to me–a relatively successful actor who was closeted and never quite attained stardom; then gave up on acting and turned to writing. He was also the longtime lover of the first gay porn star, Casey Donovan, of Boys in the Sand fame. Anyway, I digress (damned shiny objects, anyway). The point is there are so many Alabama stories in my files that have never been published; I think the only Alabama/Corinth County stories that have been published are “Small-town Boy” and “Son of a Preacher Man,” as well as the novel Dark Tide, which may not be actually set there but the main character is from there. Bury Me in Shadows is the first full-length thing set in Alabama for me to get this far with, and it–and “Fireflies”–are reconnecting me to everything.

I also keep thinking I need to go back there, just to drive through and take pictures, get a feel for the place again, refresh my memories.

This is how the story opens:

Jem slapped at a horsefly buzzing around his ear. He hated horseflies. They bit and left welts that hurt.

“God commands us to HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER!” Brother Killingsworth thundered from his pulpit to a chorus of scattered amens inside the little chapel. Jem could hear the sermon clearly because the screened windows were open to catch whatever cooling breeze there might be on this hot July Sunday. He could hear the fluttering of paper fans, the creak from the turning of the blades of the ceiling fans.

The Church of Christ Our Lord and Savior didn’t believe in air conditioning because the faithful suffered in the heat to listen to the Lord preach back in the Holy Land, wiping the sweat from their brows and letting the cloth stick to their wet bodies. And if that was good enough for the ones who gathered to hear the word of Jesus, it was the least the flock of the Church of Christ Our Lord and Savior could do, am I right and can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?

“Little better than snake handlers,” Jem’s mama would sniff with that mean look on her face, shaking her finger in his face, even though it wasn’t polite to point, “and you’d better stay away from there. You hear me, boy?”

Not bad at all.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Dueling Banjos

Writing about the rural Deep South is difficult.

I’m from the deep south, yes, but I didn’t grow up there. I spent a lot of time there, my parents were Southern, and so a lot of my values and mind-view for a number of years were patterned in the Southern mindset. I draw from my memories of summers in the rural backwoods of the mid-central-western part of the state, about seventy miles from the Mississippi state line or so, but there are also so many attitudes and mentalities and stereotypes and tropes about the rural Deep South that it is easy to become lazy and fall into those. I am trying very hard not to do that, but as I said, it’s hard. Stereotypes and tropes exist for a reason, after all–they weren’t created from nothing; there’s always a core kernel of truth in them, whatever they’ve become once the seeds were planted–but the key is to burrow into them to dig out the core kernel of truth to build upon, so you’re telling the truth. But I worry, as I continue to excavate into this book, that I am relying on negative tropes and stereotypes.

I think I was thirteen when Deliverance was released; we saw it at the drive-in, which was something my parents loved to do with us when we were kids. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on in the movie–it was the kind of macho bullshit I loathed as a child, a loathing that has only somewhat lessened as an adult, so I stopped paying attention to it and I think I may have even dozed off. But I did see the scene early in the movie which has forever cemented into people’s minds a link between the backwoods South and redneck morons–“Dueling Banjos.” The open notes of the song are all that is needed to reference a joke about passing from civilization into the land of the uneducated, probably inbred, backwoods hillbillies; it has come to symbolize moonshine-makin’, overalls-wearin’, cousin-marryin’, dangerous rural Southern people. I’ve made the joke myself from time to time–driving through the Southern countryside at night, “You can almost hear the banjo notes, can’t you?”

Deliverance and “Dueling Banjos” are such a part of our zeitgeist and popular culture that the book and film have become kind of shorthand Southern references–even for people who don’t know the origins of the references. I’ve never read the book, but I bought a copy a few years ago because I heard one of the references in something–a talk show, a book, a film, a television show; I don’t remember which–but I thought it was time for me to read the book and possibly watch the film in its entirety; that there was a possibly an essay in both about masculinity, rape culture, and the American male. (For those of you who don’t know, many male-on-male rape jokes were born directly of Deliverance.) I never did get around to reading the book or watching the movie; to be honest, I’d completely forgotten about them and the essay idea until recently. I also never got around to reading the book because I’d heard bad things about James Dickey, who wrote the novel. Dickey was primarily a poet, and considered one of the better American ones of the second half of the twentieth century by the Academy, and Deliverance was his only novel. I knew people who knew Dickey, and the reports back on him were terribly unpleasant, if not surprisingly so. (American letters has produced some horrific examples of toxic masculinity with its iconic, deified authors.)

Southern people are masters at grievance; they’ve been aggrieved for quite some time now–probably as far back as when the rumblings in the northern states began against slavery.  Everything is always someone else’s fault; even that language from the 1960’s came back to haunt Alabama during the special election to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate: “outside agitators.” That was always a favorite fallback of Southern white supremacy; people of color in the South were perfectly happy with the way things were set up, with not voting or having opportunities, and being segregated away from white people, until “outside agitators” stirred them up against their kind, genial white overlords. Outside agitation goes all the way back to slavery; Southern politicians and leaders railed against “Yankee agitation on the slavery issue.” It’s all there, in black and white, in the history books–if you know what to look for.

The politics of race in the South have always been problematic, but nothing is more irritating to me than white apologia fiction set in the South; in which the white people aren’t racists; those nasty lower class white trash people are the real racists, not the educated whites. I’ve seen this in any number of books and it never ceases to irritate me when I come across it; this historical revision that relieves the guilt of Southern white people is kind of like, as my friend Victoria says, how after the Second World War  no Germans had really been Nazis and everyone in France was a resistance fighter.

Bitch, please.

I guess all those southern white civil rights activists were working undercover, because they sure weren’t public in their opposition. (And yes, I know–not all Southern white people; but I sure don’t see any white faces in any of the footage from the civil rights marches and school integrations that weren’t in military uniform…or certainly not as many as novels and fictions would have us believe.) To Kill a Mockingbird is problematic to me in that I don’t believe for a minute that the sheriff and the cops in Maycomb, Alabama, were worried about the rednecks from the county lynching Tom Robinson and gathering up some of the good white people from town to defend the jail; history shows that the police were often Klansmen, or at least more sympathetic to the cause of white supremacy than they were to civil rights. That scene, while powerful, doesn’t ring true to me–it again divides Southern whites into the educated professionals and the uneducated racist rednecks, and I am not certain of the accuracy. The publication of Go Set a Watchman upset a lot of fans of the original work with its depiction of Atticus as a segregationist; they felt betrayed that the heroic white champion of racial tolerance and justice from Mockingbird was turned into a segregationist…but it was honest and real and rang true to me.

And seriously, I highly recommend anyone interested in looking at how Southern white people viewed civil rights during the 1960’s dig up The Klansman by William Bradford Huie.

This is, of course, part of the problem I am having with writing this first draft of a book set in the rural South that deals, in part, with issues of race in the modern rural South. I don’t want to be heavy-handed, nor do I want this to be another oh look another white person discovers how terrible racism is book, nor do I want it to be another “white savior” book; there are plenty of those already. But I also want to be honest; and how does one do that? There are always going to be those who criticize such a book for failing, or trying too hard, or some such. Southern racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny do exist, and having an openly gay teenager with roots in Alabama spend the summer there helping take care of his dying grandmother, while dealing with some other issues that arise during his visit, seems like a good lens to view all of these things through.

Or at least, seems to be one, at any rate.

I think this is one of the reasons I am having so much trouble writing this book and getting this draft done; I am so worried about being offensive or crossing some line as well as wanting to do it well and do it right that I am overthinking everything, and it’s like I have this incredible overwhelming sense of confidence about my abilities as a writer. But I am going to press on, all the while worrying…but I must needs remember: I can always fix everything in future drafts.

Part of my goals for the weekend are to finish writing a promised essay, to get three chapters of the book written, and to finish reading Steph Cha’s amazing Your House Will Pay. I also need to reread everything I’ve written for Bury Me in Shadows, and make notes as I go.

Heavy thoughts for a Friday morning, Constant Reader.

And now back to the spice mines.

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The Cover of the Rolling Stone

Wednesday! Huzzah!

Another lovely night of sleep last night; I was really tired. The two back-to-back twelve hours days have been wearing me out lately; combination of stress with all I  need to get done no doubt, and of course the heat of a New Orleans summer. The kitchen this morning is a bit of a mess, and I hope I have time this morning to get it straightened up a bit. The two short days begin tomorrow–huzzah!–and I need to get so much done it’s not even funny.

I finished Chapter Twenty last night; another 1400 words or so. I am hopeful to get back to my old 3000 per day total soon, but even if they are coming slower than I would like, I am getting them done–slowly but surely. I started to say that the words are terrible but I’ll take them; and then I remembered–Gregalicious, that is self-deprecation and haven’t we decided we aren’t doing that anymore? So, while Chapter Twenty is certainly not ready for the printers, it does what it’s supposed to do–move the story along, show us more about our main character and his burgeoning relationship with his love interest–and therefore, it needs some work but I am quite pleased with how it’s all turned out thus far. The next chapter is going to be trickier still than twenty was; there’s still a lot I need to have happen and revelations to come. But the end zone is in sight; if this were a college football game I’d be in the red zone, which is joyous.

Seriously, there were times when I thought I was never going to finish this draft.

As always, I am behind on everything; I am beginning to think that this is something I do to myself subconsciously to create the pressure which some part of my being thinks is necessary to get things done. I used to think I had a tendency to be self-defeating; that I was so afraid of succeeding that I deliberately set up road blocks to keep myself in a constant state of failure. I no longer think that I am self-defeating, although I do think I have a fear of success somewhat; why else do I keep doing things that apparently, according to all conventional wisdom, are the exact opposite of the things I am traditionally supposed to do in order to succeed?

We watched another episode of The Boys last night, and I have to say we are really enjoying this show. It’s getting progressively darker, and there’s also some scathing political commentary on the modern world as well. The parallels between the show’s United States and our current country’s recent history that are undeniably there, and frankly, we don’t come out of it looking too good–nor should we.

I’m hoping to read more of Steph Cha’s book today, and maybe even later when I get home tonight, if I don’t write for a while when I get off work this evening. There’s a new episode of Animal Kingdom available as well.

And football season is drawing ever closer. Tomorrow is August 1!

Where has this year gone already?

My toothache has almost completely gone away now; the tooth is still a little tender so I am aware of it, but as far soul-destroying pain, that’s no longer an issue. Huzzah indeed! I do need to go see the dentist though. Heavy sigh. I really loathe going to the dentist, but I suppose that’s fairly obvious given my teeth situation.

I am excited for football season; for the cooler weather and for both LSU and the Saints this year. LSU recently unveiled their new football training center, which is absolutely insane, and not without controversy; the battle between athletics and education is never-ending. Frankly, I’m deeply sympathetic to those on the side of education; LSU’s academic budget has been cut to the bone, majors have been decimated, and the campus library is in terrible condition. A brand new, $28 million state-of-the-art training facility for the football team at this time is kind of slap in the face to those worried about the state of higher education in this state. But the money wasn’t taken away from academics; the $28 million raised for this wasn’t taken away from academics but raised from donors who probably wouldn’t have given the money–or as much money–for a new library or to save a major that was being cut. LSU football, whether people like it or not, is big business now; and in fact some of the profits from the football team have been fed back into the University general funds since about 2012. Now, arguing about whether college football has become too big, too big time, and too much like professional sports–yep, college football has seen some enormous changes since I was a kid; it’s certainly not the same sport in 2019 that is was back in 1979, and those questions are valid and perhaps a debate we should be having.

But college football in 1979 was also vastly different from college football in 1959, or even 1969–when it was populated by mostly white players. I also agree that LSU desperately needs more money than the legislature is providing for it; maybe less tax cuts for the rich and for oil companies in Louisiana? Investments, not just in LSU but also in the University of Louisiana system, will pay off in the future for the state, and I’ve never understood why education has never been a priority for any politicians in Louisiana since Huey Long.

Of course, the argument could also be made that the political class isn’t interested in an educated populace; the more critically a person can think, the less likely they are to be swayed by emotional appeals based in nothing when they vote. One could also make this argument a national issue instead of just a state one; the decline of funding for education across the board on a national level over the last few decades is frankly scandalous.

But college sports didn’t create the education crisis, but it’s an incredibly easy target.

Or maybe as a lifelong college football fan (I only care about the Saints in the NFL) I am too hopelessly biased to opine on the matter.

But I will, nevertheless, continue to look forward to football season.

I also watched the third part of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion, which wasn’t particularly interesting. The reunions aren’t my favorites, although if you don’t want to waste your time watching an entire season, you can pretty much catch up on everything by watching the reunions (I used to do this with the ones I didn’t watch much, like New Jersey and Orange County.) But once you’ve watched an entire season, the reunions aren’t as “explosive” as the promos promise.

And now back to the spice mines.

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