Category: editing

Shambala

Thursday afternoon, home from work and the grocery store. It’s overcast outside–there was a monsoon earlier, but no flooding–and I am really glad I made it home before it starts pouring again. I really should be putting the groceries away, but it’s so hot and muggy outside I wanted to just sit for a minute before I get up. I also have laundry to do, and might as well get started on the slog of cleaning the kitchen/office/living room. Heavy heaving sigh. I also want to do some writing or editing this evening before I give up for the day and start dinner and relax.

Storms clouds have rolled in since I got up and put away the groceries and put the laundry into the dryer. It’s weird because I can visually tell it’s darker outside–if I turned off the kitchen lights it would ridiculously dark–but when I look up out the windows through the crepe myrtles next door,  all I see is blue sky and white clouds.

Ah, New Orleans weather and its many peculiar vagaries.

Shit, I just remembered there are clean dishes in the dishwasher. Be right back.

Okay, that’s one, and I have Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys playing through the stereo unit in the Lost Apartment (those harmonies!) As I look around at the kingdom of my office, I spy things that need to be put away, things that need to be handled, things that need to be put away. I’m also kind of avoiding my email inbox, because I also don’t want to deal with any of that, either.

I’m still thinking about Laura Lippman’s lovely essay that I read the other day, as I continue to struggle to get a grip and handle on everything I’ve managed to again fall behind on.

One of the more interesting–perhaps curious is a better word–things I’ve noticed over the course of my lifetime is the change in what the cultural definition of what is (or isn’t) sexy when it comes to men and masculinity. I can remember when I was a kid that bodybuilding was primarily seen as the province of queers; I’m not sure how or where I became aware of that, but I know the eschewing of weight lifting for men (and younger men) was not something that was a cultural norm; health clubs didn’t really start proliferating until, best as I can recall, the late 1970’s/early 1980’s. Even then, the idea wasn’t to get ripped or cut or to have a six pack, it was just to have a bigger overall physique.  I don’t remember how old I was when I began having a love-hate relationship with my body; I joined my first gym in 1981. Over the course of the next ten years I joined several others; I never lasted more than a few weeks. I wasn’t particularly motivated–I wanted to look better and feel better about myself, but I found the weight room horrifyingly intimidating and gyms not particularly welcoming. I am sure some of that had to do with the PTSD acquired as a tween and teen with gym class, athletics, and everything to do with those things. I tried several times, and it never took.

I always blamed those failures on my own laziness. Now, though, I am beginning to wonder about that more; if there was more to it, on a psychological or subconscious level. I know when I joined a gym in January of 1995, I was determined to accomplish change, not only in my body but in my life. I also joined a gay owned and operated gym; which was not only welcoming and friendly, but kind of nice. Everyone who worked there was friendly and available to answer questions and help. That made a huge difference. I liked my gym, I liked going there, and the changes I was seeing in my body–I was also on a very strict eating plan–were enough reward to keep me going. And I also noticed that the way I was treated in general was better–bartenders, servers, sales clerks, even the passengers at the airport–were friendlier and nicer to me the more my body shape shifted and changed. I was very dedicated to this self-improvement kick; I also have a tendency to be obsessive when I become interested in something. When I lost my job at the airline, I decided the next step in my career would be to work in health and fitness, trying to help people who were like me and pay it all forward.

I fell off the fitness wagon about ten years or so ago; primarily because I injured my back and also started working full time outside of my home. The adjustment to finding time to work out around a forty-hour work week, a brutal editing schedule, and an insane writing treadmill (which led to the publication of a ridiculous amount of novels and short stories over a highly productive few years) made finding time to workout more and more difficult. The injury didn’t help…and I would always try to come back too soon and aggravate the obviously-not-completely healed injury. I even hired a trainer to make me go to the gym–I’d keep appointments, even if I couldn’t be bothered to go to the gym at other times. A few years ago the tightening of my finances and the need to buy a new car forced me to let Wacky Russian go as an expense, which sucked…because I’ve never really been able to find a rhythm for working out again since then. I keep meaning to go…but then I am so tired, and I can’t keep up with my writing and my emails and my cleaning, and then…

Yes, excuses. I can always find them. Never fear.

I’m also going to be fifty-eight next year. I am not as concerned as I was when I was in my thirties whether other people think I’m hot–or as Laura said in her seminal essay, “fuckable”–and ironically, doing it for my health, to improve my sleep and my energy, doesn’t seem to be motivation enough to get me to go. I am not, after all, going to hang out in the Quarter all weekend long with very little clothing on during Southern Decadence, nor am I going to pick out a slutty Halloween costume, or go out dressed nearly naked as a masked professional wrestler again. But feeling better–and I always do after I work out, after I stretch, etc.–should be enough of a motivator to get me to go. And yet, somehow I will always find some kind of excuse for it (I intended to go during my Staycation a few weeks ago; then I left my headphones for my phone at the office and since I couldn’t listen to music–I can always find an excuse) and wind up not going.

Repeat after me, Gregalicious: three times a week is optimal, two times is better than one, once is better than none.

So, my plan is to give it another shot this weekend. I do miss the gym, you know. I miss watching other people work out and making up stories about them in my head. I miss the smell of the weight room, the clanking sound the weights make, the friendly people who work at my gym, and even the water I drink–I hate water, don’t drink nearly enough, and working out forces me to drink it.

And on that note, I am going to try to get some of this mess cleaned up and maybe even do some writing.

Have a lovely rest of your day.

IMG_1715

Stuck In the Middle With You

Hello Thursday! It’s been a bit of a week, quite frankly, with me all over the map and trying to get sorted out somehow. Not sleeping well most nights this week did have something to do with my zombie-like staring at the computer screen, watching my email inboxes continue to load up to the point where I felt paralyzed and unable to make any sort of progress on them, and as the hours passed and slipped into days going past, getting absolutely nowhere with anything and getting myself completely worked up and frustrated through the inability to get anywhere this week. I was so tired every night when I got home from work this week that I couldn’t even focus on reading anything.

And yet last night’s sleep was deep and restful and recharging and lovely. This morning I feel rested, my brain doesn’t feel fevered and despair has been shown the door, which is kind of lovely, actually. It’s unfortunate that it’s now Thursday, of course, and most of the week has passed me by already; but I can still try to focus today and tomorrow and get a lot of things done, maybe even this weekend can turn out to be epically productive.

One can certainly hope, at any rate.

Yesterday was a lovely mail day, in which I got an advance reader copy of Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, James Polchin’s Indecent Advances, Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings, and Eric Beetner’s Dark Duet, a pair of noir novellas that I am indeed looking forward to reading. I still need to finish reading this book I have to write the introduction to; which I want to get done this weekend, and I also need to start writing two short stories I’ve promised to write. I need to at least get them started, at any rate. I know how I want to do them, and I know what I want them to be, but I really need to start writing them so I can get them written and finished on time. And I need to get back to work on Bury Me in Shadows if I want go be finished with it by the end of the month–which I still believe is possible. I also want to revise this first chapter of Chlorine that I wrote last weekend, just to see how it works and looks and if it indeed looks like it could lead to a story of some sort, or if it’s merely another false start.

We’ll see how it all goes. I am not going to assume that I’ll feel as good as I do right now this weekend, either. The matter of sleep is always the most important component to everything. It’s unfortunate I have to go to work today, as I feel like I could be incredibly productive here at home today, but such is life. And at least it’s Thursday, which is one of my two half-days. Tomorrow I am not going to the office at all. I am testing in the Carevan, which will be parked by the New Orleans Athletic Club on Rampart Street from 11-3 to do testing for the Tales of the Cocktail event. My guess is that tomorrow will be a wash for me; I have to take the streetcar down and walk the rest of the way, and probably will end up walking home as well–in the hideous heat of mid-summer New Orleans–so I’ll be too exhausted and drained when I get home to do much of anything. It is my day to launder the bed linen, though, so maybe I can find the energy to do that and some straightening up around the house in the meantime.

We shall see. But it does feel absolutely lovely to be completely rested this morning. And I do get off relatively early today–I need to stop at the grocery on the way home–and should be able to get started on cleaning and straightening, as well as doing some writing, once I get home.

So, on that note, I shall bid you adieu for the day. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader.

IMG_1827

Love Train

Yesterday I had the privilege of reading a personal essay that did what all good personal essays do: it connected with me on a deeply personal level. That’s what the best kind of writing does; it connects with you. One of the myriad of reasons I love Stephen King’s work is because I can connect with the humanity of his characters–even the bad ones, and that’s truly skill.

If you would like to read Laura Lippman’s powerful essay on body image and getting older–something I myself have been wrestling with lately, as I get older and my body morphs into something I’m not sure I entirely recognize anymore–right here; trust me, you will NOT regret clicking here.

I’ve been wrestling this week with a lot of things: exhaustion from the pressures and anxieties of recent weather situations down here; concern about my inability to get work done on any of my writing; concern about money (always); and many of my volunteering responsibilities. A lot of it had to do with being tired and having low blood sugar-I don’t stress eat, whenever I’m under any kind of pressure it has the opposite effect: I don’t eat at all and lose my appetite completely. I rarely ever get hungry in the first place, and often have to ensure that I schedule myself time to eat so that I will actually remember to eat. (I know, it’s weird) But the older I get the more important it is for me to remember to eat because of the blood sugar thing. When my blood sugar drops, I have no energy or patience, and the lack of energy and patience often leads to a muddled mind which isn’t capable of writing or editing. The inability to write or edit (or even read) anything then creates more stress and anxiety, which means further loss of appetite. WHen Paul was out of town I found myself forgetting to eat almost constantly; the same situation developed over the weekend. It peaked finally yesterday, and having to run an errand to pick up a prescription in Mid-city afforded me the opportunity to pick up Five Guys for lunch–and eating a substantial meal made such an incredible difference in my day–once I’d eaten, I had energy and my sense of humor came back. I had been avoiding doing some things–like dealing with my email inbox–for days; not even wanting to read any of them because I simply couldn’t face dealing with them. But after I finish this I am going to start working my way through my emails with a goal to having the inbox officially cleared out by the end of today.

I know I can do it.

I’ve always had a tendency to put off dealing with unpleasant things because I simply didn’t want to face up to them; taking the Scarlett O’Hara “I don’t want to think about that now, I’ll think about that tomorrow” approach, and then continuing to push them away every day until,  of course, it was too late and the situation had become much worse. In my mid-thirties I finally recognized the reality that it’s always easier to deal with a shitty situation earlier rather than later and getting it over with–waiting never made anything better, nor did it resolve the problem, no matter how much I hoped the problem might somehow resolve itself over time. I have a shit ton of messages, for example, on various websites and even on Facebook messenger, that I’ve not answered. And while responses to messages and emails always beget more messages and emails, you can’t just keep letting them sit. I used to make myself crazy responding to everything; I used to have a very strict “everything must be answered within twenty-four hours” policy, which also sometimes provoked anxiety and also sometimes created more work for myself. I’ve taught myself to walk away from the email and the messages; no one needs to be on call 24/7, and I am, like anyone else, entitled to downtime and relaxation. I generally stop answering my emails after seven every day; the evenings are my writing and watching television and spending time with Paul time, and that’s kind of sacrosanct. There are very few things that actually demand, after all, immediate attention. I also restrict myself from dealing with emails on the weekend; that is my down time for cleaning around the house, running errands, and writing. That has really worked well for me, and I am going to stick to that going forward, with the occasional exception.

I’ve also not been as organized as I would like, going back to the Great Data Disaster of 2018. I’ve felt kind of at sea since then; that horrible weekend stalled the great momentum I was building and I’ve never really regained it since then. I’ve felt lost, like I’m treading water but barely keeping my head above the surface. That needs to stop, and I guess recognizing that there’s a problem is the first step in taking corrective action on it. I haven’t really felt like myself pretty much this entire year, like I’m one step behind my life. Other times it feels like I’m simply observing my life as it passes me by, which isn’t a particularly good feeling.

So, in the spirit of Laura’s essay, I am going to stop beating myself up over things, and try to focus on the positive, rather than the negative.

And on that note, I have some emails to answer. Happy Wednesday, Constant Reader.

IMG_1725

I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby

I wrote twenty-three hundred and sixty-six words yesterday; a rather precise amount, I admit, but I am rather proud of them, as I’ve not written anything new in nearly two weeks, I think.

It was also new, nothing do with any of the many works in progress I am in the midst of; it was one of those things where the idea came to me, and I knew how to write the chapter, so I sat down and I did lest I forget it. I also wanted to see if I could get the voice right, the tone, and all of that. I think it kind of works, but I am going to let it sit for a moment or two (or weeks) and see what I think of it then.

It’s the first chapter of Chlorine, which is a start. Probably not what I needed to be writing or working on, but

I do want to get back to the WIP–and I’m not really sure why I keep calling it that. Why am I superstitious about sharing the title of this book? I like the title, and I believe I have even mentioned it before. I originally had the idea a million years ago, when I was a little boy. My grandmother–the not sane one–used to love to tell me stories about the past; she always swore on the Bible the stories were true, but I’ve long suspected that most of them were invented or stories she read somewhere–she did like to read, and encouraged both my sister and I to also read. I never wrote the stories she told me down, but I do remember bits and pieces of them, and one of those bits and pieces became a short story I wrote in college called “Ruins.” I wrote it as a ghost story, weaving what I remembered from my grandmother’s story into a modern-day story in a fictional county based on the one my family is from (I also planned to do a lot of writing about this fictional county when I was in college…I have published some work about the county; it’s where Scotty’s sorta-nephew Taylor is from and where Frank’s sister lives. It’s where my main character from Dark Tide  was from, and also where “Smalltown Boy” was set, along with various other short stories, like “Son of a Preacher Man”…so I’m using some of those old ideas today. There are also any number of short stories in some form of completion set there, and the current WIP is, of course, set there). I always thought “Ruins” (still unpublished) could be expanded into a pretty decent novel, and that’s what I am currently working on, have been for the last few months. I no longer call it “Ruins”–that title has already been used multiple times for a novel, and why invite comparison–but when I needed a new title, I wanted something more poetic. I started looking through poems (can you imagine? I know so little about poetry it’s staggering) and wanted something Barbara Michaels-ish. I decided to riff on her title Be Buried in the Rain, which is from a poem, and then a lyric from The Band Perry’s song “If I Die Young” stuck in my head, and I started using that as the title, Bury Me in Satin. But that didn’t really work or fit, and it evolved into Bury Me in Shadows, which had the right creepy, spooky, Gothic feel to it that I wanted, that I am trying to get in the book. It’s a ghost story of sorts, it’s set in the woods of rural central-western Alabama, and there’s a ruin of a plantation back in the woods, which an archaeological team from the University of Alabama has started excavating. There’s a legend about the “lost boys” around the ruins; two boys who disappeared during the Civil War. I’m also working rural drug addiction into it, as well as the Klan, and racism and homophobia. It’s a lot, and it has to been done correctly, in order to get the points across that I want to make in the book. This is why it’s been such a slog, really. I am trying to make points about important topics without sounding too preachy-teachy, while trying to weave in an interesting story, all told from the point of view of a rather intelligent gay teenager from Chicago, who has to spend the summer in Alabama being the point person for the family while his grandmother, who has had several strokes, dies in her own crumbling Victorian style home from the late nineteenth century, and then the archaeologists discover the skeleton of a young man. Is he one of the lost boys from the Civil War, or is there something more sinister going on back in the woods?

I’m trying to write about race sensitively, without giving offense. I am trying to be conscious of my own internalized prejudices and bigotries, which is sadly a life-long process of deprogramming. (But that’s a subject for another time.) But I am hopeful that my own keen editorial eye will catch things in the editing process, and there’s also going to be my editor’s eyes on it. So, hopefully it won’t turn out to be yet another sad white person’s attempt to deal with race that turns out to be problematic.

I am also writing it in a style different than what I usually use–first person present tense, and it’s obvious when I reread chapters I’ve written that it’s not my default; I slip into the past tense very easily and naturally and because I’m so used to writing that way it’s easy for me to miss things in the wrong tense.

I’m up early because today returns normality to my life; this is my first work week that won’t be disrupted this month. First it was a brief vacation, and of course last week was disrupted by Barry. I got very little accomplished over the last few days–storm disruptions make it very hard to focus or get anything done, frankly; as you wait for the storm you don’t want to start anything in case you lose power suddenly, plus there’s the weird tension of waiting for the unexpected. When I walked to Touro to get my car yesterday and run by the grocery store, it was strange; the city was still deserted and lifeless. There were a few cars out driving but not the usual amount of people out and about on a Sunday, even in the rain. I actually think we got more rain yesterday than we did from the storm on Saturday, frankly. I was soaked by the time I got to the car–$21 is a very low price to pay to keep your car safe, to be honest–and of course, everything at the grocery store was on sale because it was old and ripe; I got a great deal on two enormous smooth avocados, and there were still some Creole tomatoes out, but the grocery store was still depleted from people stocking up for the storm. I came home, we got caught up on Animal Kingdom, and last night we watched The Spy Who Dumped Me, a cute comedy starring Mila Kunis and Kate MacKinnon. I love both women, and they worked very well together, and the plot was clever and funny enough to hold my attention, but it could have been better–but it was mostly the charisma of the two women, and their chemistry together, that made the film enjoyable.

So, wish me well on my first full week of work this month. It’s gray and drizzly outside my windows this fair morning; I’m hoping my shoes have dried out from yesterday as well. (note to self: order new shoes, you’re due.)

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

IMG_1739

Say Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose

Paul and I both stayed up way past our bedtimes last night, finishing the third season of Stranger Things. I had spent the afternoon finishing The Pacific on HBO streaming service (it’s really quite brilliant and moving and heartbreaking and horrifying; probably one of the best things about the horror of war I’ve ever seen, and how it wrecks the young men who fight them–if not physically, than psychologically). As such I slept later than I usually do this morning–much later than usual, which is obviously a problem as I have to go back to work tomorrow morning which means getting up extremely early. I’m not terribly concerned, however; it is what it is.

We never lost cable or power yesterday; and it didn’t even rain in our neighborhood until later in the evening; I think it was around eight-thirty that I got a tornado warning alert on my phone. I checked it out on my computer–it wasn’t for our area, but further downtown and in the lower river parishes, who also had overtopped levees and flooding. That was when I noticed it was raining outside. There wasn’t thunder or lightning, just rain. We’re still in a flash flood alert, but I think I’m going to go take a long walk in the rain and retrieve my car from the Touro parking lot, where I took it Friday afternoon just to be on the safe side. I need to stop at the grocery store, but I suppose it will also depend on if one’s open. I suspect the city is fairly operating normally again today, but I’ve also just woken up and am still on my first cup of coffee, so I could be wrong.

I managed to get absolutely nothing done over the course of the last four or five days; the city flooding and that aftermath, while trying to prepare for the arrival of a tropical storm/hurricane kind of drains you of most energy and your ability to focus. The waiting is also horrible, I might add, the wondering endlessly if you made the right decision or not, whether you should have fled when you had the chance, and so on. This is how it ever was, and how it ever will be. Paul and I were talking about this very thing on Friday, as we adopted our usual wait-and-see mentality. We have actually only evacuated twice; once for Katrina, and for Isaac (or was it called Ike?) in 2008. The other I storm left us without power for the week leading up to Labor Day in 2013, I think it was–I just remember we had tickets for the LSU game that Saturday, and the irony of sitting in the heat all day that Saturday after complaining all week that we didn’t have a/c or power, only to have it come on the night before was kind of the most Louisianan thing we’ve ever done.

I also feel that all of my friends and family deserve an apology for the horror that was the storm coverage all week, culminating in emails, texts, and posts/PM on social media. And admittedly, the arrival of hurricane sex symbol Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel here on Friday was not a good sign. New Orleans and tropical weather has been major news, alas, ever since the levees failed, and nothing gets clicks and views like apocalyptic headlines and news coverage. I’m sorry all the 24 hour channels and even some reputable news organizations decided to go down the terror route for everyone; I’m sorry you all had to be put through that kind of stress and worry on our behalf.  Don’t get me wrong, it makes my heart feel full that so many people nationwide care, not only about New Orleans, but about Paul and me and our friends and our lives here. Thank you for that. I just wish the media wouldn’t put you all through it…as we always say down here, this kind of coverage is what makes the really dangerous storms get not taken as seriously as they should be.

Paul and I are also very prudent, and cautious. In our twenty-odd years here, we’ve learned what to listen for and who to listen to; which local stations are dependable, which models of storm tracking to pay attention to, and we also aren’t ever locked into a decision–we make a decision based on the information available at the time, continue to check, and adjust decisions accordingly based on new information. We’re not meteorologists by any means, of course, and there’s always the possibility we’ll make a wrong decision–and your concerns and worries mean so much to us. Don’t ever think that’s not the case.

And once New Orleans is out of danger, it’s truly awful and sad to see how quickly the story dies…despite the damage that actually was wrought, and continues to be, from this storm system. New Orleans isn’t the only part of Louisiana that is below sea level, and protected from flooding by an at best iffy levee structure system. This system is going to continue to dump lots of water everywhere on its path, and it has the upper Mississippi valley, already in flood stage, square in its sights. Even as I type, the north shore is in tornado warnings, and there are also flood warnings for rivers on the north shore. The North Shore and the I-10 corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge were horribly, unexpectedly flooded several years ago–places that generally never flood, or at least, not often–and they are still recovering from that horror. (I think that was August 2016?) So, do keep those areas in your thoughts.

Storm days, as we call them down here–the free days off from work because of weather, the tropical version of Snow Days–aren’t conducive for getting anything done, at least not for me. Even though I ignore the doom-and-gloom news, and pay attention to the reports I’ve found reliable over the years (I still miss Nash Roberts!), there’s always that nagging sense in the back of your head, that horrible little voice whispering are you so sure? Are you so sure that not leaving is the right thing to do? That is, as you can imagine, emotionally draining and exhausting, and also makes it hard to focus on anything. I can never write or edit during these times; reading is often difficult as well. So I wind up watching a lot of television: this time, Band of Brothers (still unfinished), The Pacific, and Stranger Things. I did enjoy this third season of Stranger Things, even if there are enormous holes in the plot and things that didn’t make a lot of sense; but as entertainment it really did a great job–and it also introduced new characters to the cast seamlessly; not an easy task.

But I do think this enforced period of inactivity–in addition to my vacation the week prior–may have done some wonders are far as kicking my creativity back into gear, which is lovely. I think today–after getting the car and doing a minor grocery gathering–I may sit down with the first seventeen chapters of the WIP and reread them, making notes and figuring out the final act of the book so maybe, just maybe, I can get a strong, workable first draft finished by the end of this month. That puts me behind schedule, of course, but I think I should be able to work on my next project alongside a revision of the Kansas book for the next two months. Maybe that’s an overestimation of what I can do, and get done–it is, after all, going to be the dog days here–but we’ll see.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines and getting back on track. The house is a mess and needs straightening–and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that we could still lose power.

Thanks for all the good thoughts, y’all. Greatly appreciated.

IMG_1821

Keep on Truckin’

Sitting here in the Lost Apartment waiting for Barry’s rain to arrive. It’s eerily quiet outside right now–very little wind, and that weird pre-storm light that indicates something big is coming; I don’t think what’s going to happen here is nearly as bad as anyone predicted or warned about. Even as I type these words I just got the notification that Barry had reached the coastline of central Louisiana; it’s still calm and peaceful here.

Here’s hoping it stays that way.

Thursday night Paul didn’t get home until late; he was working on a grant due Friday–which they proceeded to extend the deadline because of the storm for a week, but didn’t send the email out until almost nine pm, but as I said, hey, at least it’s done and you don’t have to worry about it anymore–so I found myself watching things Paul won’t watch, to pass the time. I watched another episode of The Last Czars, which only served to lessen my sympathy for the last Romanovs even further (I also hate the third part of the story, which is the whole Anna Anderson/Anastasia nonsense, discredited at long last when DNA proved she wasn’t a Romanov), and then I started watching HBO’s Band of Brothers, which I’ve always wanted to watch on some levels–World War II has always been an interesting, if heavily mythologized, time in American history to me–and I really enjoyed it. It’s hard for me, even now, to imagine what that must have been like for the rank-and-file soldiery: the farm boys and the accountants, the garage mechanics and the shepherds, the fishermen and factory workers, many of whom had never traveled far from where they grew up, being sent to faraway and exotic (to them) locales, and having to go through the horror of full scale war. World War II was many things, but the world completely changed through the course of the war, and it was, indeed, the war that also exposed the inequities and inequalities of our own country and its systems. The military was segregated; any question of equality for people of color were shunted to the side or ignored for the “common good”, this despite the fact that they were all working just as hard for an American victory as the white people.

I’ve always felt the experience of the war was what eventually led to the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation/feminism movement, and the slow rise of the gay rights movement; which all came to a head in the 1960’s. Band of Brothers, well written, well cast, and well acted, depicts the segregation of the military in a way that is kind of sly–the entire cast is white people. That, of course, wasn’t the intent of the show in any way, shape or form; it was made at a time when all-white casts were pretty much the norm–and it’s sad how recent that time still is. But it is historically accurate; the military was segregated, and the perpetuation of this systemic racism came from high up in the command because there was a fear of how racist white people would react.

As always, the feelings of white people were paramount. I mean, how very dare the Pentagon force white people to serve with non-white people? 

Ugh.

I watched another episode yesterday, and then switched to another Hanks-Spielberg HBO series, The Pacific, which, obviously, is about the Pacific theater of the war, focusing on the Marine Corp First Division, which won the Battle of Guadalcanal against overwhelming odds. The Pacific is better, I think, than Band of Brothers, but there’s also a weirdly compelling plot line about two best friends from Alabama that I am reading as gay but probably isn’t. One of the best takeaways I am getting from both these series is, interestingly enough, again about the toxic American ideology of masculinity; seeing these men bonding through hellish circumstances and what they go through, and then being completely unable to express their love for one another–even if its just the love from friendship, not romantic–physically or verbally is heartbreaking.

There are times whenI just want them to embrace and hold each other…or to allow themselves to cry…but they always catch themselves and just give each other a firm handshake. This makes me think more about writing some essays about the American masculine ideal…but then think, Oh I am sure other people, more qualified than me, surely, have already explored all of this.

I’ve been having a lovely time on Twitter lately. Twitter is so associated in my mind with toxicity and trolling that it always comes as a pleasant surprise when I actually enjoy myself on there. But it’s a pleasant reminder of the social part of social media; remember when it used to be fun to go on social media? When the biggest complaints were joking about cat videos or dog memes or people’s meal pictures? So, going forward, I am going to try to make my Twitter feed as fun as possible, and encourage fun interactions.

And on that note, I think I best finish this off and do some chores around here while we still have power. I hope hope hope we don’t lose power…but it’s also rather lovely that losing power is right now the worst thing that I think may happen to us here in the Lost Apartment. I moved my car yesterday to an elevated parking garage to get it off the street in case of a repeat of Wednesday; will definitely check in later.

Happy Saturday, all.

IMG_1754

Dancing in the Moonlight

Friday morning, Barry eve. Paul and I, for those who are curious, are electing to stay rather than go. We may end up regretting that decision, but it’s not like it would be the first time we made a decision we wound up regretting deeply (hello, year in Washington).

It’s sunny yet cloudy outside this morning, giving the morning a weird, yellow-grayish tint to everything (sepia!). I am most likely going to venture out this morning at some point; I still need to fill the car with gasoline, and later I am also going to decide whether to take the precaution of parking in a garage somewhere in the CBD, to get the car above whatever possible floodwaters might be coming. There’s also some things I should pick up at the grocery store–although I imagine the candle and bread aisles have already been decimated. Paul and I both don’t have to go to work today, so we will undoubtedly end up watching a lot of television and getting caught up on our shows–we fell behind while he was at his mother’s. Moving the car to a garage might not be necessary, but I’d rather pay a daily parking rate somewhere than over a thousand dollars making my car operational again–or losing it entirely to water. If experience has taught me anything, getting a car operational after it gets flooded also means it never quite runs right again, and why risk it as I am getting so close to owning it outright?

It’s supposed to rain off and on all day today as Barry gets closer to shore. It’s getting darker even as I type this right now, and so I guess that means it’s getting ready to rain at any moment.

Yesterday was probably the most beautiful day of the summer; low eighties with little to no humidity, and a cool breeze. Wednesday I was pretty tired all day, and that kind of carried over into yesterday. I got nothing done–this entire week has been a bust for the most part, other than reading to edit some things I’ve already written–but maybe I can correct that a bit today. I don’t know, we shall see, won’t we? Right now I am feeling pretty good and well-rested and like I can get some stuff done–but where that will wind up, nobody knows.

Yesterday was also a lovely day for me on Twitter; that’s twice in the last week or so I’ve had an absolutely lovely day on social media. Twitter, and social media, can be lovely places to connect and reconnect and speak (albeit electronically) with friends; I’ve tried for a very long time to keep my social media upbeat and positive, rather than allowing myself to get sucked into the toxicity rampant on all social media sites. I have no desire to argue with anyone, about anything; no one has ever been convinced to change their minds by a social media argument. If anything, it seems to harden people against opposing views, so why even bother? My time and my patience and my emotional investments are limited, as is my energy, and I’d rather use all of them productively and positively, rather than trying to score points on people with opposing views that I find repugnant.

Yesterday, though, was lovely; what social media can be if we avoid toxicity. Alex Segura had been doing some gratitude posts there, thanking people who have helped, encouraged, and supported him on his journey as a crime writer (if you haven’t checked out his Pete Fernandez series, you simply MUST); I thought to myself, self, you really need to do the same thing, and so I started a tweet-thread in which I did the same; thanked people for their support and help and encouragement over the now near-twenty years of my writing career. I naturally forgot some people–there have been so many–and I was trying to do it as I went, but the responses turned out to be a lot of fun and people are still responding to that thread this morning. But the tweets and responses were a lot of fun, and almost every new notification brought yet another smile to my face, and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside (as opposed to the usual, in which I’m dead inside…KIDDING), and made me feel quite grateful; grateful for my career, grateful for the terrific people I’ve met along the way, grateful for all the help and encouragement and support. Writing can often feel like an incredibly lonely business; most of the time it’s just you and your computer screen and your imagination, typing away while going deep inside your own head. Social media has made it much easier for us to connect outside of the conferences, your Bouchercons and Malice Domestics and Left Coast Crimes and Tennessee Williams Festivals–and helps deepen the bonds formed at those events, and makes you look forward to seeing everyone at the next one. I am already looking forward to seeing everyone in Dallas at this year’s Bouchercon…which will be here sooner than I expect and will also wind up being over much sooner than it should be.

So, I am going to spend this morning trying to sort my kitchen again–it’s astonishing how quickly it gets out of order–and probably reading this book I need to write an introduction for soon. I also have some terrific new books: Clandestine by James Ellroy (which I want to read again); Paper Son by S. J. Rozan; Life After Life by Kate Atkinson; and The Ceremonies by T. E. D. Klein. I may also reread some short stories that need to be edited; I may even try to write on the WIP–but let’s not get too crazy or ahead of ourselves here.

So, I guess it’s time to start getting my act together this morning. Have a great day, Constant Reader; hopefully we’ll still have power at this time tomorrow.

IMG_1755

We’re An American Band

Wednesday, Hump Day, and the slow slide into another weekend. It’s also pay day, which is really Pay the Bills Day–never a pleasant task, no matter how much I try to make it into one (“Oh, isn’t it satisfying to get this done?” Um, no, not really.)

I woke up after a lovely night’s sleep to a horrendous thunderstorm; we are now in a tornado warning, which I think means one has been spotted; I’m not really sure where precisely–I can never remember the difference between watch and warning. 

Okay, I looked it up and I was right: warning means one has been spotted. Looking at the radar map, it’s not in our area, but it’s rather close to where the office is.

Which should make for an exciting day at work, no?

I had planned on running some errands this morning before heading in, and now I am not so sure I want to do that, understandably, unless this all lightens up before it’s time to go in. We’re also in a flash flood warning (through Sunday on one, JULY 23RD on another, because the river is already high and this tropical thing out in the gulf could send a storm surge up the river. (Aside: it is raining so hard I keep thinking the sink is running and start to get up to go turn off the spigot before catching myself.)

I haven’t written much this week so far; I’ve primarily focused on rereading things I’ve already read and editing them and making notes for revisions as I go. I know I should reread everything I’ve written for the WIP–in order to possibly trigger where to go with the next chapter, which I’ve been stuck on for quite some time–but I am feeling particularly writing-lazy, and I also know I am going to regret that should we have to evacuate in the face of the coming storm this weekend. But an evacuation would sort of change everything anyway–all bets are off!–so there’s also that.

I watched the season finale of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last night when I got home from work–I wasn’t so tired Monday night after work, but for some reason last night I was exhausted–and it entertained. It’s very strange, and more than a little unsettling, to see it without Lisa Vanderpump; if any of the original cast still left was going to go, my money and preferences would have been Kyle Richards, whom I have never been able to stand or bear for very long. This season was really not very good, and there were more than a few times when I considered, seriously, stopping watching. The only thing I liked about this season was the addition of Denise Richards.  I didn’t have high hopes for her as an addition–Paul and I actually tried to watch her reality show years ago, Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, and didn’t last beyond the premiere episode. (We usually will give any new show we try a couple of episodes, unless it is so beyond redemption in the premiere we assume it isn’t going to get better; alas, Denise’s original foray into reality television fell into that category–and we wanted to like it. We loved her in Drop Dead Gorgeous, which is a vastly under-appreciated comic classic.) Paul came home in the middle of the episode–he doesn’t really watch my reality shows with me, he has more discerning tastes–and as I explained things to him, I stopped at one point and said, “And it is truly frightening that I know this much, not only about the show, but about their lives outside of the show.“

But as Laura Lippman says, one should never apologize for anything in this world that one enjoys, as there are so many things and experiences we don’t enjoy–we should definitely allow ourselves to enjoy things that might earn us scorn from others. She’s right, of course; I don’t give a shit if someone looks down on me for enjoying reality television; hell, I’ve written a book around reality television (Royal Street Reveillon, coming this September, from Bold Strokes Books! Preorder now!). I’ve watched reality television going back to the very first season of The Real World on MTV, which, while not the first reality show, was certainly the precursor to the reality show boom of this century.

It’s also payday, and I have to pay the bills this morning. My favorite chore, but it must be done.

Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader. I look forward to giving you another Gregalicious update tomorrow.

IMG_1644

Right Place Wrong Time

Well, I survived Monday’s return to the office–and there wasn’t a body count.

It is, however, still early in the week.

Yesterday’s heat was simply insane. The heat index was about 115, I think, and it felt every one of those degrees every time I had to go outside. It was 95 last night when I drove home from work at eight o’clock, which is also just completely insane.

I did a little bit of writing yesterday, not much, trying to get going on the WIP again. I’m a little bit at sea with the WIP right now; not touching it over the course of my vacation wasn’t exactly much of a help, and the heat and everything  yesterday, as well as adjusting to getting back to the office, kind of made that a bit on the difficult side. I will, of course, try again tonight.

Paul also got home really late last night, so Scooter and I are no longer on our own here in the Lost Apartment anymore. I’m glad he’s home–he’s always gone just long enough for me to get over the “home alone” thing; I enjoy the solitude at first, and then it gets a bit lonely by the end of his trip. And now we can get caught up on everything we’re watching, which is also another one of those win-win things. Huzzah!

I’ve been watching Netflix’ The Last Czars, which I am enjoying–it’s very well done, and the actors cast playing Nicholas and Alexandra are perfectly cast; but it’s a little bit different watching a show about doomed royalty than it used to be. There’s been a kind of tectonic shift in my mind and my way of thinking, and while the story of the last Romanovs is certainly tragic on a human scale, on a national scale I don’t really have that much sympathy for them as I might have in the past. He was an ineffectual ruler, and they were both religious bigots; they actually believed they had a divine mission from God to be autocrats and sole authority in Russia; and therefore they were always in the right–as their people starved and his bad decisions and policies brought the country to the brink of ruin, while they lived and dined in luxury and spent, spent, spent. It’s really not hard to think they sort of deserved the basement in Ekaterinburg–and the way history is taught, I’ve come to realize, with its emphasis on royalty and nobility with no interest on the lives of the people whose bodies, taxes, and lives were exploited by the ruling class–all with the blessings of their religion–isn’t necessarily the right way to teach history. I’m not saying the lives of the rulers aren’t important to the histories, just that the emphasis on them is misplaced. History should be taught as the history of the people, and the development of law and modern government–which the people have had to fight for, every step of the way…one thing I’m enjoying about this show–an odd combination of documentary, reenactment, and actual footage from the time–is that it doesn’t shy away from the crimes or the arrogance of the Romanovs, especially when it comes to their people. There’s one particularly brilliant scene where Alexandra scolds Nicholas for even considering giving in and creating a duma (the Russian version of parliament), while the nation is on the brink of revolution. “They’ll want more,” she scoffs, convinced of their divine right to power, “they’ll always want more, and then what?” She wasn’t wrong about that, but she was most definitely wrong about their divine right, and she was almost always wrong about the people.

I have agreed to write a forward to a new edition of an almost forgotten gay classic back from the plague years; the book was published posthumously after the author died from AIDS in the early 1990’s. The author, Jay B. Laws, had only managed to write two gay horror novels before died; the first, Steam, is better known than the second, and is one of my favorite horror novels as well as one of my favorite gay novels. I had read the second, The Unfinished, years ago but it’s quite odd; I don’t remember anything about it, so rereading it is like reading it for the first time. It’s quite good, and I don’t think I’ll have any trouble writing the forward–and I am also glad this has kind of forced me into rereading the book, which is practically like a new book to me. And, as a gay novel, it fits into the Diversity Project quite nicely.

There’s a low-pressure zone drifting from mid-Georgia into the Gulf, which will most likely turn into either a tropical depression or a tropical storm; forecast to dump a shit ton of rain on wherever it comes to shore, either Thursday or Friday, possibly this entire weekend. Hurray. The water in the Gulf is also ridiculously warm–89 degrees off the coast of Louisiana, near the mouth of the river and New Orleans–which isn’t really going to help matters much. (This heat wave has me already dreading my next power bill.)

Oh, yes, I also spent some time rereading the opening chapters of the Kansas book, which I’d started revising one last time last summer before being pulled away into other projects, and it’s in much better shape than I had remembered–I was still marking up the pages with a highlighter and my pen–but it also has me thinking that perhaps this final rewrite isn’t going to be nearly as painful as I first thought, or had been thinking since I got pulled away from it to work on something else. Huzzah!

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

IMG_1672

Wildflower

Back to reality.

I feel rested, relaxed, and ready to get back to the office and to writing. This is a really lovely feeling, Constant Reader, and one I’d love to feel more often, you know? But the truth is as I get older, I need to take these breaks from everything every few months, in order to keep on a-keepin’ on, as it were. I’d hoped to do some writing–didn’t happen, but I managed to get the proofs for Royal Street Reveillon finished, which was something, and I also made a to-do list, and tried to schedule out the books I need to write next, which is also an accomplishment. I have twelve–yes, you read that right, twelve–books in some form of completion; whether there’s a draft finished, a partial draft, an outline, or just a fleshed out idea. Twelve. 

And yes, I am completely and totally aware how utterly insane that is.

That doesn’t count the short story collections (two or three), or the essay collection, or the copy editing for Jackson Square Jazz so the ebook can finally go live.

So I guess it’s more like seventeen.

I also have agreed to write two short stories for anthologies, and I also want to write something to submit to the new MWA one whose deadline is coming up this fall. (Fortunately, I already have one written that fits the MWA criteria, so it just needs to be tweaked and cleaned up and polished and made pretty; I have to write the others from scratch, and I worry that won’t end well.) I am in the process of making a list, so that I can try to make sure I can get everything logged and written and therefore stay on top of things.

There’s a heat advisory today, from noon till about seven this evening, where it’s going to feel like 106-111 degrees outside, which should, of course, do wonders for my power bill for next month. Hurray. I’ll be curious to see how our new building handles this onslaught of heat; the side of the building we’re on is in direct sunlight after about one in the afternoon, so that should be lovely. It already gets hot over there in the afternoons as it is; I’m curious to see how that turns out. There’s also a low out in the Gulf, close to shore and in that corner of Florida where the peninsula descends from the mainland, that might turn into a tropical depression this week. Not likely to do anything to us other than outer bands, but not good for the Florida coastline.

I am reading Jay B, Laws’ second, and posthumous, novel The Unfinished. It’s being rereleased in a new edition by ReQueered Tales, and they’ve asked me to write the introduction for it, which is a lovely, nice thing to do. I read the book a long time ago, and barely remember any of it, but the opening sequence, in which our deaf main character (so far) has corrective eye surgery is not for the squeamish–I count myself amongst the squeamish when it comes to eyes–and I am really enjoying the ride again nevertheless. It’s amazing to me that I can’t remember anything about the story–I didn’t remember that the main point-of-view character was deaf, for that matter–because I used to be able to remember plot points and details of every book I’ve read; another by-product of age, I suppose, was the loss of many of those memories and details. I do remember, however, the enormous sadness I felt that Laws died so young of HIV/AIDS, back in the plague years, and was only able to produce two high quality gay-themed horror novels, this one and Steam.  HIV/AIDS did so much damage, not just to our community but also to our creative community that even now, so many years later, that we are struggling to recover from the losses.

I would imagine there’s an amazing academic study to be done on the impact of HIV/AIDS to the queer writing community, and how it shifted and changed our work, the direction of it, and how younger queer writers also lost the mentoring possibilities of the older, more established writers who were dying off, one by one. I myself have never once addressed the plague in my own work. It was a conscious choice back when I first started; the cocktail had already been discovered and lives being extended. The plague was no longer a death sentence for those diagnosed, and the advances that have been made in the years since I first started writing and getting published are the things we could only dream of during the 80’s and 90’s. Ironically, I wrote a short story for a horror anthology (more details on that to come) called “A Whisper from the Graveyard” which is the first time I’ve addressed the plague in fiction (the story was set in the early 1990’s), and I am writing about it in my so-far unfinished novella “Never Kiss a Stranger.”

God, so much writing to do and always, always, new ideas arrive. Even as I listed the books I plan to write yesterday, afterwards I remembered there were at least two more that I’d forgotten about.

Heavy heaving sigh.

And now, back to the spice mines, as I must prepare for my return to the office this morning.

Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader.

IMG_1677