Category: editing

Do They Know It’s Christmas

I have to write today.

The temperature dropped overnight, and so it’s a bit on the chilly side this morning in the Lost Apartment; it felt rather muggy and humid last night when I retired to bed, so this morning I put on a T-shirt and am now realizing I should head back up and get a sweatshirt. Hang on, I’ll be right back.

Thanks for waiting–that’s much better. The sun in also shining, and I do think I am going to take the day off from the gym again. The shoulder is still sore, and I am worried that–even though it didn’t really bother me on any exercise other than the triceps pushdowns Thursday–doing anything weight-bearing could keep aggravating it, even if I don’t feel it while I am doing the actual exercise, so yeah, probably best to wait and let the strain or whatever the hell it is go away. I may go and do some step exercising–all cardio machines suck balls for me, and while using the step and doing my own little step aerobics routine probably isn’t good for my leg joints, it’s not hurting my shoulder and let’s face it…I need to do some cardio in addition to the weights if I ever want any of this extra weight to go away; lifting weights at this point is clearly not going to be enough to trim off the middle fat this time around…especially if I keep straining or injuring muscles.

Heavy heaving sigh.

But that’s part of getting older, isn’t it? I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my body has managed to hold it together for so long, that it took until I was fifty to injure myself enough to stay out of the gym for a long long time, and that it’s still capable of going to the gym at all. Better my shoulder than my back, after all, and it’s not structural at all; it’s muscle, not joint or cartilage or bone.

Yesterday was kind of a nice, if low energy, day. I finished watching Chapelwaite–more on that later–and did some cleaning around the Lost Apartment as well as did some deep thinking about the book; mindless chores like vacuuming and doing the dishes are really good for that sort of thing– so that was helpful; I know now what changes I need to make to this draft to make it better and I am going to spend today going through those first chapters, which should be enough of a trigger for me to get the next chapters done this week–and I am also going to spend some more time on the chores today as well. So, so close to having everything cleaned up and organized…and I want to finish rereading A Caribbean Mystery today, so I can move on to something else. I have so much to do, and the clock is ticking on the deadlines for so many things….AIEEEEE. But I slept very well last night, and I feel very well rested this morning, and so am hopeful that I will be motivated to get the things done that I need to get done.

And the first thing I need to do is look at the to-do list I made last week at the office and see if any of it got done (doubtful). But I did find some interesting research details yesterday (I looked up Valerie’s house and floor plans; I love that you can find all that stuff on-line; my copy of Lloyd Vogt’s New Orleans Houses is also an incredibly valuable resource), and that’s one of the reasons I want to reconstruct these first seven chapters; I also feel that the heart of the story isn’t well expressed there in my desperation to get as much done as I possibly could as quickly as I could, and the book never really flows–I always get stuck–when the opening isn’t as good as I think it should be. So, that’s my task for today, once I get through my coffee and finish some other chores around here.

The excitement truly never stops.

But there’s a load of laundry tumbling in the dryer; the living room is a disaster area; and of course, the dishwasher needs to be unloaded so I can empty the damned sink. There are piles of papers and folders everywhere here in the kitchen office, and trash everywhere. I hate how I let things slide this way, but yesterday, as I said, was an incredibly low energy day for me; it’s a wonder I got as much done as I did.

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

Santa Baby

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, and I am a bit tired. I went to the retirement party last night (note: it was not in the Bywater, but actually in Holy Cross, on the other side of the Industrial Canal; a neighborhood I’ve not been to in years. But then again, I’ve really not spent much time in the Bywater in forever either), and it was absolutely lovely. I enjoyed spending time away from the office with my co-workers in a relaxed environment, it’s been a hot minute (and not just because of the pandemic, either) and it was nice spending time getting to know them outside of a professional environment. I laughed a lot more than I thought I would, and stayed much later than I had planned–it was almost one in the morning when I finally rolled into the Lost Apartment, but was very delighted. I had a glass or two of champagne spread out over five hours (and they were very small), so was okay to drive, but have a bit of a headache this morning.

It feels more sinus-y then anything else as well, so I think once I take a Claritin that problem will clear itself right up.

Today I have a lot to get done; I need to get back on track with the book, I need to go to the gym (but continue to baby the left shoulder, which is still a bit sore this morning; note to self: Icy Hot), I want to finish reading A Caribbean Mystery, and I also want to finish watching Chapelwaite. I only have two episodes left, and despite that really slow burn first episode, it really picks up steam and starts going full blast, the pace picking up with every episode without losing the integrity of the story or the characters. It also has inspired me to write a sort-of sequel to Bury Me in Shadows–well, that’s not quite true; I’d always intended to return to Corinth County with another book, and but watching this show gave me the inspirational story spark I needed to come up with the story. I scribbled down a lot of notes yesterday, and while I need to focus on the current book, I am itching to get to this one sooner rather than later (a constant problem with this my writing career, which never seems to change despite my advances in age) but I definitely need to get to Chlorine next.

So, next year is going to be about Chlorine, another Scotty, and this second Corinth County book, which will start tying the threads of the county spread out over many different stories, both short, novella length, and novel, together. (Which was one of the primary reasons I was dreading writing such a book; tying these threads together was going to be difficult, but now i sort of know how to do it all; there’s one novella in particular that isn’t going to be easy to tie into the others, but I think I know how to do it now)…) And the novellas. And the short story collection. And the essays. And….yikes. Just typing all this out made me very tired.

I also had a rather scary moment this morning when I saw a headline about a fatal, catastrophic tornado (or rather, series of them) devastating Kentucky; I really wish the news would be less generic in headlines or click titles for articles about such things. The vast majority of states are actually rather large in size and scale, and while obviously I feel terrible for the residents of the state affected by this disaster, at the same time I was extremely relieved to go look at a map and see it was in western Kentucky, a significant distance from my family in eastern Kentucky. I understand the need for clicks and so forth is the on-line Internet business model, but still. Nevertheless, these tornadoes devastated a vast swath of that area, including Arkansas and Tennessee and I believe Missouri, and as someone who has lived through and dealt with natural disasters myself, I have nothing but the deepest sympathy for those who have lost loved ones as well as homes and property (the gulf parishes south of New Orleans are still struggling to recover from Ida, by the way). Please donate to the relief efforts if you can.

And on that note, I have an excess of emails to clean out, a kitchen office to organize and get ready, and a book to get back to writing, amongst many other things to do and they ain’t getting done the longer I sit here writing this. Have a happy healthy Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you tomorrow with a progress report.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Friday morning and I have a dear friend’s retirement party to attend in the Bywater this evening. I have to run some errands–including stopping by the office–at some point during the day, and it looks like I shall have to postpone working on the book until tomorrow as there isn’t any way to make time for it today. But these things happen; sometimes life doesn’t allow an author an opportunity to write. It’s not the best possible outcome of a day, of course, but there it is.

I also further aggravated a muscle strain in my left shoulder (usually it’s my right one that becomes an issue, from an old wrestling injury) at the gym last night. I noticed the ache the last time I went to the gym–and thought I could push through it at the gym again last night. I noticed it when I was doing the chest exercise–I had to significantly lower the weight in order to do the exercise–but ironically, the only other time it was an issue was doing tricep pushdowns, when the shoulder merely works as a stabilizer for the working of the triceps. I had to abandon that entirely, and it did make me wonder as I walked home how I strained the muscle in the first place? It’s also worrying, now that I am back into the swing of actually working out again, that I now have a ready-made excuse to talk myself out of going every other day. On the other hand, it’s just a strain of some sort–not even a pull–so it can undoubtedly be worked around. The gym was also very crowded last night, which was irritating; I really need to get used to going into businesses that are more full than I’ve gotten used to over the past year or two. And especially since it’s now Christmas time; everything and everywhere is going to be more crowded.

Sigh.

While I was making condom packs yesterday I started watching Chapelwaite on Epix. I originally started watching it with Paul, but he thought it was too slow and didn’t care to continue watching it. I knew almost from the get-go that it was most likely a slow-burn; it was very Gothic in feel, which inevitably means a slow-burn (a friend asked me if I was watching, and when I said we’d stopped, told me to go back and finish–and she was right). The show is exceptional–it did take me a while to get used to Emily Hampshire playing someone not Stevie on Schitt’s Creek–and if you’re into Gothic horror and suspense, it’s right up your alley. It also handles issues of class, race, prejudice and provincialism extremely well; and the steady sense of dread and building suspense is quite remarkably done. I am really looking forward to finishing watching, to be honest. The afternoon flew past as I watched. It’s based on the story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” by Stephen King, from his Night Shift collection, and yes, it does sort of fit into the mythology of his terrific novel ‘salem’s Lot. I’m not sure if that was his intent when he wrote the story–Chapelwaite, the house in the story, is in some ways similar to the Marsden House in ‘salem’s Lot–which is yet another reason I am looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

It also gave ma a good idea for another Alabama book, a sort of sequel to Bury Me in Shadows. So huzzah indeed!

But as Friday looms, there’s a lot I have to get done this weekend–I really need to get caught up on the book; I want to finish reading A Caribbean Mystery, and as always, there are endless chores to be done, and don’t even get me started on my email inbox–but I have faith that I shall persevere, and will come out on the other side of the weekend with much ado and accomplishment. (Yes, I do crack myself up from time to time, thanks for asking.) I slept really well last night–we got through the second season of OG Gossip Girl and are now into season three; it really is fun to watch, especially seeing bigger name stars of the present in early roles–Armie Hammer (although one can argue he no longer has a career of which to speak) was in the second season, for example, and yes, shame that he turned out to be what he turned out to be, as he was very good looking and reasonably talented–and our addiction to this show is allowing other shows we watch, or ones we want to watch, pile up so we’ll have plenty to watch in coming weeks and months, which is lovely.

I also think I am finished with Paul’s Christmas presents, but am not entirely sure. I’ll assess once they are in my hot little hands and wrapped (and hidden). And I do need to do my Christmas cards at some point–tick tock, said the clock.

And on that note, tis time to head back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will speak with you again tomorrow.

The Christmas Song

Wednesday and yet another Pay-the-Bills Day. Huzzah? HUZZAH.

Yesterday I was tired. I slept better on Monday night than I had on Sunday night, yet somehow by the afternoon I was far more tired than I had been the afternoon before. I really didn’t want to go to the gym after I got home from work, but I did, and I also wrote a (shitty) chapter of the book before Paul got home. I felt really great after the gym, and I slept amazingly well last night. (The first time I woke up in the night–I did so twice–was to find a purring Scooter curled up next to me, which he never does; he always sleeps on the other side of Paul rather than in between us…and never underestimate the power of a purring cat to help you sleep.) It’s taking me a hot minute to wake up completely this morning–it’s also raining, which also makes me feel drowsy and is not helpful to the waking up process–but I feel very well rested, which bodes well for the rest of the day. I do have some bills to pay today, and lots and lots of emails to answer.

Ah, the sisyphean task of answering all the emails.

It’s funny, but the other day I was cleaning out/organizing electronic files and came across an essay I started writing several years ago as the introduction to an essay collection I was thinking about putting together (which I promptly forgot about; and didn’t remember when the idea occurred again earlier this year–so this year’s idea of an essay collection wasn’t even original!) and I opened it and started reading…hilariously, as mentioned parenthetically above, it was a reflection on getting older. Apparently, there’s no such thing with me as an original idea during this pandemic, because I had these ideas already and before. I keep saying that aging has never really bothered me but sixty kind of shook me up to my core, but there it was, an essay at age fifty-seven, triggered by me noticing (for the first time) that the skin under my chin/jawline was loose. (Yes, yes, it’s probably been loose for years, but I really don’t spend much time looking in mirrors; usually when I am shaving and I have to take my glasses off and so can’t really see anything but blur.) But it was interesting to revisit how I felt about confronting my age (in my head I am forever stuck at 35–even though my eldest niece is now in her forties, which makes it harder to keep that delusion going. Although I think I have finally pushed that deception out of my subconscious and have embraced being sixty…at least can say it without shuddering.)

So tonight when I get off work I am going to head directly home, methinks; home to clean the kitchen/office, perhaps the living room; do some laundry; write another chapter of the book; and hopefully spend some more time with A Caribbean Mystery. I was reading an article about Christie’s enduring popularity last night, and this book was mentioned (along with two others) as one whose title had to be changed because of racist implications in the title; which I didn’t remember (And Then There Were None had the most notorious original title; which was corrected to something considered less offensive but then became offensive, and hopefully its latest title in the UK–Ten Little Soldiers–will stick for the rest of its history), and so I looked it up. It did always have the same title, although its entirely possible that the offensive content was inside the book–I’d already marked some questionable content regarding the locals on St. Honoré–and will have to do some more research into the book and its history to see if it was, indeed, the content and if the edition I am reading is one where the content had been cleaned up.

It was foggy last night when I walked to the gym, and since I now generally go after dark, I’ve been taking pictures of Christmas decorations. The foggy night gave some of the pictures a more eerie feel, which was pretty cool, and so I think tomorrow night after the gym I might detour through the Garden District on my walk home–fabulous decorations on the houses there, of course–and I would like to head down to the Quarter at some point to see how it’s decked out for the holidays; it’s really such a lovely time of the year to do this sort of thing. It’s also helping me feel reconnected to the city in a way I’ve not really felt since our office moved, since I no longer work one block outside the Quarter anymore. I do miss that, and now that I am writing another book about New Orleans I really need to feel more of a connection to the city than I have in a while. I’ve really felt disconnected from everything, really, since this pandemic began, but am starting to feel much better about everything the more time passes and the more things slowly start coming back to some sort of what passed as normal in the before time.

I guess we’ll see how everything goes, won’t we?

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

Winter Wonderland

And now it’s Tuesday! Hope your Monday was lovely.

Yesterday I was tired; I didn’t sleep well on Sunday night but managed to still get quite a bit finished over the course of the day. There were tornadoes (YIKES!) on the North Shore, but I ran some errands on the way home in the rain and then wrote another chapter of the book–another shitty-ass chapter, but a chapter nonetheless–and also caught up on logging entries for the Bouchercon anthology ( as well as sending acknowledgement emails), and made progress on the email inbox, which was delightful. It’s always nice to feel like you’re getting somewhere rather than just spinning your wheels, isn’t it?

I also spent some time thinking about my short story, “Solace in a Dying Hour,” which is what I’ve renamed “The Rites of False Spring” (which is a great title and I will recycle, it’s just not right for this particular story); I really like the new title, it’s from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Tamerlane”; I was paging through a collection of his poetry and that line jumped out at me, and I thought, you know what, that title fits the story you need to write better than the one it currently has and so decided to swap them out.

I woke up before the alarm this morning, and I do feel rested–the upcoming shower will undoubtedly shake off the cobwebs, at least one would hope so–but once I had finished writing and cleaning the kitchen last evening, I was a little too tired to actually do any reading, so I just sat in my chair waiting for Paul to come home while watching Youtube videos about ancient Egypt; the 18th dynasty to be exact, and primarily about the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten, who is just absolutely fascinating to me, and someone I would love to write about sometime–alas, it would require ever so much more research than I have time to do while working, of course, but someday I will make the young adult book ideas I have based in Egyptian history to fruition. (I love when I think about the books I will someday write–the ones that require more research than I have the time to do while juggling everything I must juggle now; as though retirement will eventually provide me suddenly with a lot of free time…which I have already become aware is nonsensical dreaming, since even taking time off from work inevitably involves time being lost to unforeseeable yet easily predictable distractions. Hell, just trying to carve time out of the day to go to the gym is a process of if I go what will I not be able to get done?)

We continue to wind our way through the original Gossip Girl, which is quite fun. I cannot imagine why we never indulged in it the first time around–probably the same reason we never indulged in either The Vampire Diaries or The Originals, assuming we weren’t the right audience for them–but I have no desire to read the books at all, and we’ve also noted continuity errors that are just sloppy writing; “oh, we need to completely forget about this in order to make this episode happen”, which often is annoying–like how i never forgave the Dynasty writers for the massive cheat out of the Moldavian Massacre season finale. I am also highly amused by the Dan Humphrey talented writer who wants to be a writer story–why is it that movie and television writers never understand how writing actually works? I love how he can, in one night, write a brilliant short story–without revision or rewrite at all; no one ever gets anything right in the first fucking draft–as well as the fact that as a seventeen-year-old he got a story published in the New Yorker, yet is worried about getting into Yale and his future as a writer. Um, if a seventeen-year-old got a story into the New Yorker, agents would be lining up for him and he probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about getting into Yale; every university with a strong writing program would be lining up with scholarship offers–faculty wouldn’t have stories in the New Yorker. None of the writing classes I ever took in college ever emphasized the importance of revisions, editing, and rewrites; that’s the one thing I wish I would have learned myself while I was in college.

I am also at the stage in writing a book where I am absolutely certain it’s horrible and I’ve lost my ability to write and this is the book that will decimate my career once and for all, so I guess what I am saying is things are back to normal in the Lost Apartment.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Happy Tuesday, Constant Reader.

(She’s a) Very Lovely Woman

Saturday morning and it looks kind of gray outside the windows this morning as I look out at the world blearily and drink my first cup of coffee. I slept very well last night–which is always welcome–but woke up feeling a bit groggy this morning. I am sure the caffeine will work–it generally does–but as I glance around at the chaos of my office/kitchen my inclination is to pour the coffee out and go back to bed and sleep the rest of the day away, hoping magical elves or something else will show up whilst I sleep to finish organizing and arranging this mess into something resembling workable order. On the other hand, I don’t think that’s going to happen, so I am going to need to wake up, buckle up, and put my nose to the proverbial grindstone. I’ve got to contain this mess–and do it properly, no more sweeping things under proverbial rugs to get mess out of sight–and I’ve got to work on the book today and I need to run some errands. I also have to go to the gym today, so I will most likely follow football championship games today by periodically looking on-line to check scores only. Paul is going into his office this afternoon to do some work as well, and I need to update my to-do list and…yes, it’s a very busy day for a Gregalicious.

I finished reading Murder Most Fowl by Donna Andrews last night–charming, as always, delightful and witty and funny–and decided, since I was talking about how much I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot the other day, that I should revisit one of the Marple stories. I have a hardcover copy of A Caribbean Mystery–I don’t recall where it came from–but it has some sentimental value for me in that it was the first Marple novel of Christie’s I had read all those many moons ago when I was a child, holing up in my room on Saturdays with a book and a bag of Bar-B-Q Fritos. (My first Poirot was actually Halloween Party, which I also have a hardcover copy of and again, do not recall where I got it or how long I have had it; I read most Christies in paperbacks purchased at the Bolingbrook Zayre’s off their wire paperback racks) In those first few pages of the book, it spelled out exactly what I loved about the Marple stories–about how living in a small village actually exposes one to almost every kind of human behavior there is in a smaller ecosystem, and the great irony that the smallness and rural aspects of the small community are all too frequently seen as provincial and inexperienced in the world (why Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place was so shocking when it was originally published some seventy years ago; that placid, idyllic on the surface looking village/small town/rural community has a lot more going on than one would think at first glance). This is an excellent set-up, really, for the story Christie is writing about this fictional resort on a fictional West Indies island; her nephew, the successful novelist Raymond West, has paid for this trip for her to get some sun and recover from an illness…and when she originally protested about the expense and “who will watch out for my home in St. Mary Mead”–this response (which I hadn’t remembered) hit me right between the eyes:

Raymond had dealt with everything. A friend who was writing a book wanted a quiet place in the country. “He’ll look after the house all right. He’s very house proud. He’s a queer. I mean–“

He had paused, slightly embarrassed–but surely even dear old Aunt Jane had must have heard of queers.

Now, what is one to make of that? It was a jolt, certainly. It put me in mind of something I came across on Twitter the other day, written by Wil Wheaton, in which he had answered at a con somewhere a question regarding the current debate of “can you separate the art from the artist?” This is something I’ve pondered about quite a bit–most recently, the feeling of guilt I experienced in rewatching Chinatown, knowing now what I–we all–know about Roman Polanski. I enjoyed Chinatown every time I’ve seen it, and I was now watching–rewatching–through a different lens than I had before; I was watching in terms of my own Cynical 70’s Film Festival, to see how a 70’s film that actually harkened back to old-style crime/hard-boiled/noir styles, but with a more modern (at the time) sensibility fit into that 70’s cynicism and darkness about humanity and human behavior. But the discomfort kept popping up, particularly because Polanski himself appears in the film…and I eventually decided not to rewatch another favorite, Rosemary’s Baby, because of it.

I am not going to consign Agatha Christie to the trash heap of history; she was an extraordinary writer, and one of the most influential in the field in which I myself write. Nor do I think a simple throwaway line or two in a book originally published in 1964 is enough to dismiss Christie and her canon as homophobic and never revisit her work. In fact, given the time period in which the book was written, I am surprised the two sentences weren’t, frankly, much worse. Reading the sentences didn’t offend or outrage me; it was just a surprise, primarily because I didn’t remember them at all in a book I’ve read multiple times over the years–and I think when this hardcover came into my possession (I won’t swear to it, but I think I got it during one of my many eBay buying frenzies after Hurricane Katrina, when I felt it necessary to get copies of books with some sentimental value to me) I did actually read it again because I didn’t remember the plot–and this either went right past me or I noticed and didn’t think much of it.

Revisiting this book and viewing it through a modern lens is going to be interesting. And like I said, the reference could easily have been worse–but seeing queer used in this way reminds me of how it used to be used. The younger generations are reclaiming the word, and I myself have been advocating for it as a generic term for the non-straight community for eons…but I also can see why there are people of my generation/the one before me/the one after me who object to its use and why.

But I would a thousand times rather see the word queer used in an Agatha Christie novel than faggot. And I also remember the sympathetic depiction of a lesbian couple in my favorite Marple, A Murder is Announced.

Interesting thoughts on a Saturday morning. The sun has come out now and it’s not quite so gray outside; the second cup of coffee is certainly hitting the spot right now and the grogginess is beginning to leave from not only my head but from my body. I still don’t want to straighten up this mess, but there’s no choice, really, and I want to get some good work on the book done today and tomorrow. I need to go to the gym either today or tomorrow as well; perhaps later this afternoon once I get some writing/cleaning/organizing completed. I cannot be completely lazy this weekend, much as I would like to be; I have to get things done, and the more things I get done now the fewer things I will have to do later this month (I am not, for example, going to want to write on Christmas). But once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator.

And now it occurs to me that perhaps I am procrastinating here, so I am going to bring this to a close. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and will talk to you soon.

One for One

FRIDAY!!!!

Yesterday was a good day. I slept extremely well, got up, answered some emails and printed some things out that I needed to sign and scan and send back, data entered, and then made condom packs. Once I was finished with my work-at-home duties for the day, I went to the gym. Yes, that’s right–one more time for those in the back: I went to the gym again. It was a lovely late afternoon–early December is so lovely here, Constant Reader, you have no idea–and so the walk was nice. People out walking their dogs, dogs running around having a good time in Coliseum Square, a nice coolness…it’s so lovely here once the blast furnace of the summer is over.

I also wrote for a bit–not one of my better writing days, alas–and so took a break and read Donna Andrews’ Murder Most Fowl for a while until it was time for us to watch last night’s batch of episodes of Gossip Girl. The last three episodes of the reboot–although I suppose it’s really more of a sequel series than a reboot–have dropped, but last night’s was rather lame; the season is sputtering its way to the finish line, which is a shame, since it started so well with guns blazing–and we’ve come to the conclusion that we much prefer the OG. We saw the first two episodes of Season 2, and are all in once again; despite the fact that the season one finale was such a disappointment. New characters, new romances for the characters, and lots of new drama, which is wonderful. I still can’t believe we didn’t ever tune in when it was originally airing.

Today is another work-at-home day, mostly data entry but with some condom-packing perhaps later. Yesterday’s condom-packing movie was another entry in the Cynical 70’s Film Festival, and I decided to check out Shaft, the original from 1971 starring Richard Roundtree–who was sexy as fuck. I’ve never seen the original Shaft movies; there were three of them in total (Shaft’s Big Score, Shaft in Africa) released in the 1970’s, and while it’s terribly dated now, it still holds up as entertainment. And one cannot really dismiss its importance as a film, given the time in which it was produced. Here we have, in 1971, six years after the Voting Rights Act and other important civil rights legislation, a complex Black private eye as the hero of a crime film; it is a mere four years after the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier as a Philadelphia police detective solving a strange murder in rural Mississippi and having to deal with the horrific racism of the region. The film was a huge hit at the time, and it’s famous “Theme from Shaft” by Isaac Hayes won the Oscar and was a huge hit record; I believe the entire soundtrack also sold extremely well. The character of John Shaft was created by a white writer named Ernest Tidyman–no #ownvoices there–who also co-wrote the screenplay (he also wrote the screenplay for that same year’s The French Connection–he was definitely having a good year); and published a number of novels featuring the character. Just as Virgil Tibbs and In the Heat of the Night were created by a white writer named John Ball–the novel the film was based on in that particular case was problematic–so was John Shaft; but in looking up Tidyman, I also saw that he received an Image Award from the NAACP. The plot of the movie is pretty straightforward; the Mafia is trying to muscle in on a Black mobster in Harlem, so they kidnap his daughter, so he hires Shaft to find and rescue her. The NYPD is concerned about a possible mob war between to the two rival syndicates, and also is pressuring Shaft to give up what he knows and get involved. It was very much a film of its time; I always love seeing movies film on location in New York during that time, when the city was much grimier than it is now, and its success may have been integral in the development of what came to be known as the “Blaxploitation” film in the 1970’s–when studios realized there was a big audience for films about the Black experience in America, with strong Black lead characters, giving rise to the careers of Black stars like Pam Grier, for one–and some of Chester Himes’ novels were given the Hollywood treatment. Are there any books, I wonder, about this period? Why did they stop making these movies? (They must have stopped making money, which is usually the reason Hollywood stops making any kind of film) I must make a note to do some research.

I also worked on cleaning and organizing last night, so there’s some finishing up to do here in the kitchen/office. I also had to answer some questions regarding the proofs of my story “The Snow Globe” (which will be in the upcoming anthology Murder is Magic, co-edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley), which was nice; I was very glad that story finally found a home somewhere. It was originally, of all things, a Halloween story that morphed into a Christmas story–I’ll write more about it when the book comes out–but the opening line came to me one Halloween night as I stood on the balcony of the Parade watching all the costumes down below on Bourbon Street, when someone dressed as Satan came out of Oz. The costume was totally slutty-gay; a guy with a phenomenal body wearing red boots, a red bikini covered in sequins, horns, and red body paint. Wow, I thought, Satan has a great six-pack, and laughed, because I realized it was a terrific opening line for something–short story or a book or something–and pulled out my phone and texted it to myself so I wouldn’t forget. It sat in a folder called Satan costume for many years…until I realized I could turn it into “Santa” and turn it into a Christmas horror story. And the rest, as they say, is history.

All right, it’s time for me to get back to data entry. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and will check in with you again tomorrow.

Some of Shelly’s Blues

Thursday, and Gregalicious is working at home today. Huzzah? Huzzah! I do like working at home; it always has been best for me to work in isolation; my attention span is such that being around co-workers inevitably means distraction and lower productivity than I would prefer. This is especially true when I am doing data entry; it’s much easier to make mistakes and get distracted when others are around and talking, even if they aren’t talking to me. The printer/copier/scanner (business sized) is right behind where I sit at my cubicle, so every time someone prints something or needs to copy something I see them approaching out of the corner of my eye and they are right behind me as they go about their business. It’s a bit awkward to not acknowledge them or for them not to say anything to me, so when we used to operate at full capacity with everyone in the office I generally had a short conversation with everyone who was printing or scanning or copying…which, as I mentioned, is distracting when you are doing data entry and trying not to lose your place and be accurate. I’ve also gotten really used to there not being anyone else in the office since I myself went back to working a few days in the office every week in July 2020. Even now, we are still not at full capacity and not everyone has returned to the office yet–certainly not all at the same time, the way it used to be–and it’s going to be incredibly weird when we get to the point where we are all back in the office again.

Incredibly weird.

So for now I will continue to enjoy my working at home days, doing data entry and then when my eyes get bleary or start crossing, moving back to my easy chair so I can watch a movie or a television show Paul doesn’t watch while I make condom packs (seriously, if I got paid by the pack I’d probably make a lot more money than I actually do).

I felt great all day yesterday; a holdover from going to the gym Tuesday night, no doubt, and I was in a really good mood as well. I got a lot done yesterday–I realized, yesterday when writing my blog (and discussed it here) that I hadn’t really gotten a feel yet for my main character’s voice, and that was part of the reason why I’ve been struggling with the manuscript. So last night I started writing a biography of her, trying to get inside her head, to understand her point of view and how she feels about the world and how she sees it; I was making her a little more namby-pamby, I think, than I wanted her to be. I want her to be strong and capable, but also a bit unsure of herself; I want her to be feeling a bit of dissatisfaction with her life, not so much because she’s made bad choices but because in a lot of cases in her life she didn’t really get to choose her own path. She fell in love and married very young, had twin sons, and then she was raising her sons while working on renovating the old house she and her husband had bought, so the house was her job outside of wife and mother; her husband died suddenly and she went on raising the twins by herself. Now they are off at college and she has reached a point in her life where she isn’t quite forty yet, but doesn’t know what she wants to do with the rest of her life; she kind of thinks she made the easiest choices along the way. It probably also doesn’t help that her two best friends are successful professional women. I want this to be a good mystery series, of course, but I also want to show her journey from a place of what do I do with the rest of my life to having a clear purpose with goals and ambitions and dreams.

And writing her biography helped me with developing the character, so here’s hoping writing the book will become a bit easier now? One can always dream…

And you know what? After I finished the biography, and sat down to revise Chapter 4–I started to feel like I knew her, and what she would say, and how she would react. I feel like she really came to life, both on the page and in my head, in this chapter, and I powered all the way through it, which felt really great. Maybe it was a holdover of the endorphins from going to the gym Tuesday night; I don’t know. But I feel much better about the book and everything else this morning–tonight I will get going on Chapter 5–and I think I can make a very strong push now to get it finished on time.

I also finished reading Donna Andrews’ The Gift of the Magpie last night, which was terrific and fun and the perfect thing to read during Christmas season; she really is masterful at writing about Christmas, and her community of Caerphilly, Virginia, is always delightful to revisit. I enjoyed the visit so much that I started reading the next in the series, Murder Most Fowl, within minutes of finishing the earlier volume–I have others to read, of course, but this wonderful binge-read of Andrews in an attempt to get caught up on the series (only two left, inclusive of Murder Most Fowl), and the next one is another Christmas one…so, yeah. I’ll probably keep going with Andrews until I am all caught up.

We also finished the first season of the original Gossip Girl last night, staying up later than we’d intended to once we realized how close we were to the end of that first season–and the season finale was interesting; they pretty much had gotten everyone to a happy place, so naturally they had to dynamite everything to set up the next season, but I was more than a little disappointed with how they did it. I am not as intrigued to continue watching as I might have been–but it has been a really fun ride, and even the “villain” characters have wound up being a lot of fun to watch–with the exception of psycho Georgina, and Paul and I kept saying (spoiler) “oh for fuck’s sake, Serena, sic Blair on her. What’s the point of having an evil bitch best friend if you don’t take advantage of her skills?”–which she finally did, and it was ever so satisfying.

I just felt like they could have done a better job with the season one cliffhanger situation.

I guess the Saints are playing again tonight–they also played last Thursday–which means this weekend is another major-Louisiana-football-team-free weekend, which should amp up my own productivity. Today I am going to be working here at home, obviously, and then I am going to the gym, and then I want to get some more work on the book done. I made a new to-do list yesterday, and have to say I am very pleased with how well I’ve been doing lately, getting things done; one can never underestimate the motivating power of a to-do list.

And on that note, it’s time to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll talk to you later.

I Fall to Pieces

Wednesday morning, and the last day I have to get up at six this week. Huzzah! I also paid the bills yesterday–that onerous task I despise–but at least it’s done. And today is the first of December; hurricane season is now theoretically over, and it’s officially (to me at any rate) Christmas season–even though retailers have been pushing it on us since before Halloween. I even made it to the gym last night for a light workout–the old “one set full body workout” starter program, since it’s been over a month since I last went and my body is older and sadly, more brittle than it used to be–and it felt great. It’s weird to go after dark and walk home in the dark, yet it’s also now cool enough in the evenings that I wasn’t drenched in sweat and completely dehydrated by the time I got back home. It felt amazing; I stretched and exercised my muscles and as always, I forgot how great the endorphin rush after working out feels. I slept deeply and well last night–am a little groggy this morning, but that’s fine–because I feel rested. (reminder: you love the endorphin rush and you sleep better when you’ve worked out, so fucking stick to a work out schedule already, dumbass.)

I also worked on the book last night; it’s not coming as easily as I would want, as always, but I also realized, before I dropped off to sleep last night that it’s partly because I’ve not really found my character’s voice yet. That’s something I can write my way into, and then go back and fix in earlier chapters, so I need to keep moving forward while figuring out who she is. I think between clients and during my lunch break today I am going to work on getting to her core as a character; defining what kind of person she is, what she likes and dislikes, and so forth; she’s just kind of bland right now, and she definitely needs a stronger sense of humor. I kind of have an idea of who I want her to be, but I still haven’t found the voice, and that’s why I am struggling. I need to stop worrying and the voice will come to me organically, and I need to just let that happen.

I also don’t really care that much about the football games this weekend, so I think I’ll have lots of free time to not only read and clean and organize but to actually get some writing done this weekend. The house, as always, is a disaster area; I definitely need to work on that this weekend (I got started last weekend, and what little I did was a massive improvement already, so here’s to this coming weekend and making the Lost Apartment a little less lost). I also have to start getting ready to promote the upcoming January release of #shedeservedit, and I also have a short story that needs revising that is due on or around the same time as this current manuscript I am working on. I did tear through my to-do list; there are still some things on it that need doing, but I can go ahead and make a new one today and keep going. Huzzah? Huzzah indeed.

And while I am hesitant to say I am starting to feel like the old me again–every time I say that it’s kind of a jinx and everything kind of goes to hell again–I am feeling a lot better about everything. I know I can make these deadlines I am on; I am excited about getting deeper into my book; and I love the concepts I will be exploring in the short stories I have committed to writing for upcoming deadlines. I am not certain what’s going to happen with my new book’s release; I am a little concerned about the subject and how I’ve handled it, but I did the best I could and think I made some very strong and valid points about the controversial subject matter of the book. So, we’ll see. It may just come and go with a whimper, not even noticed. Which won’t be the first or the last time this has happened with one of my books, you know?

And I am excited to be getting to the end of this year and starting a new one.

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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When Will I Be Loved

Good morning, Tuesday.

I slept very well last night–but at the same time, wasn’t terribly tired yesterday nor did I ever run out of steam. When I got home I worked on the book for a while, then gave in to Scooter’s whining demands that I sit in my easy chair and read so he could sleep in my lap. I started reading Donna Andrews’ The Gift of the Magpie–it’s marvelous, as I expected, and before I knew it I was halfway through by the time Paul got home and we settled in for a few episodes of the original Gossip GIrl–it’s weird how vested we’ve become in this show, but it’s quite fun. I also managed to get a lot done yesterday–the Sisyphean task of email turning out to be quite Sisyphean–I managed to get a lot of it cleaned out only to have more come in once I sent out mine, but I think I simply need to accept the fact that it’s an on-going process and stop punishing myself for not ever getting the inbox emptied out.

I am, after all, trying to be less hard on myself these days.

And it looks as though the coaching carousel at LSU is finally over; it looks like they will be hiring Brian Kelly away from Notre Dame. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it at first–he has been successful everywhere he’s coached, going back to his days at Grand Valley State in Michigan–but he’s a completely different style of coach than what we are used to down here, as they endlessly say on television, “on the bayou.” (For the record, the entire state isn’t a bayou, and while there are a lot of them, most of the population doesn’t actually live on one.) But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made; he’s an odd fit, to be sure, but he’s always been a good coach and we really need that here. Our last three coaches have all won national titles, and in every instance the hire was questionable–none of them (Nick Saban, Les Miles, Ed Orgeron) had really made names for themselves before coming here, but all three were able to succeed (at varying levels) in Baton Rouge. In fact, when Nick Saban was originally hired, LSU was coming off a losing season, hadn’t won the SEC title in over a decade, and hadn’t won a national title in over forty years. (LSU has won three in the twenty-one years since he was hired; not quite Alabama level success, but I don’t think any other team has won more than two in that same time period.) So, I am willing to give him my support (for what it’s worth, and that’s practically nothing) and see how it all plays out.

I am going to try to make it to the gym again tonight. It’s been over a month since the my last time there, so I am going to have to start with the one set this week, two next, and so forth again. I’ll have another trip next month, but as long as I am consistently going before and after I won’t have to restart the training program again–and the hotel in New York has a lovely fitness facility I can use (although I tend to never work out when I travel, which is part of my problem, and working out would undoubtedly help with the sleep issue as well when I travel). I know there’s a new variant floating around out there that will eventually make it’s way over to the United States (omicron) but I am hopeful it’s not going to cause another shutdown or highly restrict gatherings in public and so forth.

And today is the last day of hurricane season, thank you baby Jesus. It’s actually been quite a year, really, now that we are about to enter the final month of it and I look back. January seems like a million years ago, doesn’t it? We had a category 5 hurricane here, a rough summer, no Carnival, a freeze on Fat Tuesday (when we didn’t have heat; I don’t ever want to be that cold again) and I actually made it up to Kentucky twice this past year. I also read a shit ton, watched a lot of movies, and finished writing two books–my short story output wasn’t what I would have liked it to have been, and I never finished the first draft of Chlorine either, but I did make some progress on the novellas I’d been developing, and once this book I am currently writing is finished I am going to go full steam on several of the projects-in-progress I have in the works; and I really do want to write a Scotty book this year. I know the plot, I know the story, and I know what I want to do with it, it’s just a matter of sitting down over the course of a weekend or something and pulling the varied thoughts and plots together into a coherent whole I can sit down and write.

I also rediscovered my love of writing this year–I mean, at least I started remembering how much I love doing it rather than viewing it as “just one more thing I have to do”, which was kind of the mentality I’d been facing it with over the last few years, which wasn’t particularly bright and definitely the wrong way to look at it.

So, as shitty as a year it may have been overall in the macro sense of life and the world in general, it wasn’t a completely bad year for me. And isn’t it better to always look at the positives?

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