Category: editing

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Last night when I got home from work I was so tired I literally repaired to the easy chair almost immediately, while a purring cat in my lap. I kept dozing off while I waited for Paul to get home, and finally, once he did make it through the front door, I gave up any pretense of being awake still and went directly to bed. I didn’t want to get up this morning (no different than any morning, really, other than it’s dark and rudely early), and would be more than happy to go straight back to bed for another few hours.

I did manage to revise the first chapter of the WIP yesterday; first chapters are always the hardest to do, quite frankly, and so I always end up spending the most time on them. The trick is to introduce your main character without a lot of explanation and back story–the temptation to write an entire chapter of back story is always, always present, and must be resisted; there’s no easier way to lose a reader than explaining back story….but there has to be enough for the chapter to make logical sense to the reader as well. It’s a balancing act; one that I’m not quite sure I’ve managed, but at least today I get to move on to Chapter Two.

Tonight I have to not only pack for the weekend but also continue to move perishable things over to the carriage house. I think the last thing I’m going to do is move things to the back of the car–the cat food, etc.–and since I’m not taking the car to the Quarter for the weekend (the cost of parking down there is absolutely insane) that should work. It’s also going to be a struggle getting Scooter into his travel kennel to take him to the Kitty Spa Friday morning; it’s usually a two-person job, and since he’s a Daddy’s kitty, not having Daddy to help me is going to make it a battle royale, I fear. I also have a doctor’s appointment Friday afternoon that I couldn’t reschedule before July (!), so it looks like the most likely progression here will be drop off the cat, drive back over here, and call a Lyft to take me to the Quarter, then grab another Lyft to the doctor, and take the streetcar back from there.

Madness; a weekend’s worth of utter and complete madness.

But I am feeling better about things; the lovely comments from people about my story in Murder-a-Go-Go’s plus getting some good revision done yesterday has me feeling better about my career and my ability to write again; it’s been a hot minute since I felt good about anything having to do with my writing, so it’s kind of lovely to have some confidence again. Or rather, restore the low confidence I’ve had most of my career. Writing is insane in that way; maybe the big names like Harlan Coben and Jeff Abbott and Lisa Scottoline and Karin Slaughter don’t ever suffer from Imposter Syndrome, but it’s really an integral part of my personality. I’ve had it about everything–not just writing. I constantly question, and have my entire life, whether I am good at my job (whatever it may have been at the time) or whether I am a hard worker or how clean my house is or whether I actually can write or if I am just somehow managing to cost by somehow, being read by non-discerning readers who can’t tell that I’m not a good writer.

And around and around and around it goes.

I started reading Samantha Downing’s wonderful My Lovely Wife yesterday on my lunch break, and it’s really really good. I am looking forward to moderating our “whodunit” panel this Saturday; hope to see you there.

And now back to the spice mines–because if I know anything, it’s that spice won’t mine itself.

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Love Machine

Ah, Monday of the week that ends with the tenting and the Weekend o’Festivals. Just thinking about getting through this week and this weekend makes me tired. Very tired.

We started moving perishables and other things that could be poisoned by the termite gas over to the carriage house yesterday; even as we did so, I kept remembering and finding more things that need to go over there. I’ve never experienced termite genocide before, that oh-so-uniquely New Orleans experience that so many others have before multiple times. It’s got me thinking about the possibility of murder by termite tent, of course–although I am pretty certain I’ve read a book where that happened, I think it was by Elaine Viets.

Murder-a-Go-Go’s officially releases today as well, so those who preordered it should be getting it delivered to your electronic reading devices and those who ordered hard-copies should be getting them soon. Huzzah! I love book birthdays; my own for Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories is soon to come; April 10th, officially. Order, order, order! And don’t forget, the first ever Chanse MacLeod short story is in this book!

I reread my story for Murder-a-Go-Go’s again yesterday, primarily because another idea came to me yesterday, which I shared on social media: Someone really needs to write a spring break noir called WHERE THE BOYS DIE and I would read the hell out of that. I do think that’s a terrific idea; is there any better setting for a noir than a small beach town taken over by tens of thousands of partying college students? (I also had another idea for a book, based on an actual brutal murder that took place over spring break several decades ago; hat tip to Scott Heim for reminding me of that murder) I had always wanted to do one over the course of Southern Decadence weekend as well; I still might do that one. Anyway, I’m digressing. So, on my post about Where the Boys Die some suggested I write it, others that it sounded like an anthology, and then Jessica Laine said, you already wrote this story for MURDER-A-GO-GO’S, and I loved your story. 

The thing about being a writer is that all-too-often you don’t remember things about your work once it’s finished. “This Town,” my story for Murder-a-Go-Go’s, is one of my favorite stories that I’ve ever written, to be honest; I think it’s also one of my best. But, when I read Kristopher Zgorski’s lovely review and he singled out my story as one of many for individual praise, and then seeing Jessica’s lovely comment, I decided I should probably reread the story since my recollection of what I actually wrote was so vague…and there it was. Constant Reader, it’s good. I then pulled up my story “Neighborhood Alert,” which is going to be published in Mystery Tribune, and it, too, is good. This was revelatory for me; as I may have mentioned, another story of mine was recently rejected by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and that had, of course, put me into a bit of a tailspin as far as my writing of short stories was concerned…astonishing at how easy it is to have one’s confidence in one’s own work shattered, isn’t it?

And that also got me to thinking about the second Chanse short story, “Once a Tiger,” that has tragically been stalled for so long. Short stories are actually more intimate than novels; in that you have much less space to develop a story and less room for characters so it has to be scaled back some. “Once a Tiger” is struggling because, quite simply, there are too many characters in it; how does one investigate a death at a fraternity house on a college campus when there would have to be well over a hundred brothers and pledges? That was where I struggled with the story; even the police would have trouble sorting all of this out, so imagine the trouble Chanse would have with it, working alone as he does. I still want to write a murder mystery set at Chanse’s LSU fraternity, where Chanse has to come back and solve the crime, but I just don’t–at the moment–see how that can be done as a short story. Maybe now that I’ve said that it will come to me–just like the other day, how to weave the two plots for the next Scotty book came to me from out of nowhere.

I love when that happens.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Jojo

Sunday morning and another lovely night’s sleep. It should surprise no one that I wound up getting very little done yesterday. Blame it on the World Figure Skating championships/SEC women’s gymnastics tournament one-two punch, if you will. After watching the LSU ladies win their third title in a row (GEAUX TIGERS!) Paul and I settled in to watch an episode of Shrill and a few episodes of The Order, which is just good campy, Teen Wolf-ish fun. And it doesn’t take itself seriously, which I love; it is funny, and it also takes time to laugh at itself.

But I did box up all of the open perishables in my kitchen cabinet, and now have just a few more boxes to load up–the bathroom stuff, etc.–and then we are as ready for the termite tenting as we can be. I still have to clean out the freezer–our friend Jean has graciously agreed to allow us to keep it in hers–and coordinate how all of this is going to go down–Scooter to the kitty spa; my suitcases and so forth to the hotel; the freezer stuff to Jean’s; how to coordinate getting everything back into the house on Monday–but it’s just too much and I don’t really want to think about it. This week is going to be completely insane, and I am not here for it.

I think that’s part of the reason I got so little done yesterday–in addition to the laziness default and the stuff on television–is that I am more than a little overwhelmed with everything I have to do–without taking the tenting into consideration. I literally am half-way through a first draft of a novel, have at least twenty to thirty short stories in some stage of writing, another manuscript that needs to be revised, am editing another novel as a paid gig, and that’s not even taking into consideration the volunteer work I am doing with Bouchercon and other organizations–and the Weekend o’Festivals is looming on the horizon. I still have to finish reading The Woman Who Fed the Dogs and My Lovely Wife, I have to get prepared for my panel and come up with some interesting questions for my panelists, and….seriously, all I want to do is sit in my easy chair and watch highlights of old LSU games on Youtube.

But I need to buckle up and get to work. There are things that need to be done, and they need to be done today. I need to get my email inbox cleaned out, as well as answer insane amounts of messages on Facebook and other places that I’ve simply allowed to pile up, and I still have a lot of filing and organizing to do. I’m not beating myself up over not getting all the things done yesterday that I had originally intended to get done yesterday; that’s just self-defeating, after all, and I am not a believer in wasting time on regrets. So, when I finish this, I am going to go fold the laundry, load up another box of stuff from the kitchen and perhaps from the bathroom, and organize/file the stuff that’s piled up on the kitchen counter. I am going to make a to-do list for the week, some playlists for the car on my phone because I am sick to death of the ones I already have and have listened to for quite some time now, and possibly finish revising the first chapter of the WIP. I am not going to push myself too hard about getting the WIP worked on this week; my original plan had been to finish it this month, but that’s not going to happen now so I am going to push it off until April. I also need to get my taxes sorted and to my accountant, and I also need to back up my desktop computer.

And the books always need to be reorganized.

And then, of course, there’s the Scotty Bible, and I also need to make a list of things to do for the next Scotty, aka Hollywood South Hustle.

And on that note, those emails aren’t going to answer themselves now, are they?

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Off the Wall

It’s Saturday morning and the Lost Apartment is close to being clean; I have to work on the kitchen a bit more today and do the living room floors. I also have to start packing up/throwing away perishables for the looming tenting for next weekend. Heavy heaving sigh. But…it’s also going to make me clean out my cabinets, and since everything has to washed after the tenting is over, also make me reorganize them.

Crazy!

I have a couple of errands to run today; I need to get the mail and I also need to get my brake tag taken care of today–it was due in January and now it’s almost April. Not very adult or responsible, I’m afraid; I really need to stop procrastinating about things and just get them done. I am going to clean out my email inbox, respond to Facebook messenger, and I also have to mail some things today. I want to work on the WIP, and I want to clean, and I want to finish reading The Woman Who Fed The Dogs so I can move on to Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife, thus completing my Festival homework, and then I need to prepare some questions. Moderating isn’t something I particularly enjoy, in all honesty, but I generally do a fairly decent job at it–at least, no one has ever told me that I suck at it. I know Paul thinks I’m good at it, or he wouldn’t keep trying to make me do it–although I also suspect it’s simply easier for him if I agree to moderate a panel.

So, yes, my plate is rather full today, but that’s okay. Hopefully, tomorrow I can do some writing in the morning and spend the afternoon reading the Downing (which, of course, is completely predicated on finishing Fed the Dogs today). The world figure skating championships are also going on currently, and I’d like to see the men’s competition, which is airing this afternoon. Americans are sitting in first, second and fourth after the short program–which is unlikely to hold through the free skate, but stranger things have happened.

And while next weekend is going to be fun and lovely–the Weekend o’Festivals always is–it’s also going to be exhausting, especially when you add in the fun of having to put the house back together that Monday. And it’s almost April already! When did that happen? How did that happen? Where did the first third of this year go, and what do I have to show for it? Very, very little…although I suppose I did finish writing a book, so that’s something.

And this past week’s episode of Schitt’s Creek was another one of those “get me in my feelings” episodes. Seriously, y’all, if you aren’t watching this show, you really need to be. There was one scene last night that should win Daniel Levy an Emmy, just for that scene alone–and of course Catherine O’Hara is a comedic gift that never stops giving.

All right. This spice isn’t going to mine itself, now is it? Happy Saturday everyone!

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You Decorated My Life

Friday, and the weekend looms. Alas, but this weekend is deceptive; it is the last weekend before the Weekend o’Festivals which means I won’t see Paul very much and I probably won’t be able to get a whole lot of relaxing done as I will be stressing about numerous things. I need to finish reading two books by next weekend, I need to get some work done on the WIP, and I need to clean this filthy apartment. I am behind on everything (like always) and really need to step up my game. I’ve been feeling slightly overwhelmed this week, but feeling overwhelmed only leads to paralysis and inaction and chaos, so…when I get home from work this afternoon I need to get to work. I need to stay off social media, close my Internet browsers, and just get on it. I need to get chapters revised; I need to clean thoroughly; I need to do all sorts of things, and this is the last chance I have to get any of this done before the Weekend O’Festivals.

And the house is being tented that weekend for termites; effective Friday, the termite tent is going up. So we also have to prepare the house for that.

I’ve got to get my reading done as well, so I also need to focus and try not to goof off as much. Scooter, of course, won’t mind me sitting in the easy chair all weekend reading, either–which should minimize the kitty whining I have to put up with over the weekend. (there’s always kitty whining)

Heavy heaving sigh.

What I need is to have a Type-A weekend. I haven’t had one of those in a while; not sure what that’s about, but as I said, I’ve felt disconnected from everything since the Great Data Disaster of 2018. The return of my allergies hasn’t helped much in that regard, either–it’s spring in New Orleans again! I guess the first step in getting my shit together is to make a pretty solid to-do list, and stick to checking things off on it. That’s always been the most effective way for me to deal with these things, and something I’ve been rather slipshod about for quite some time.

With the river so high and all the midwest flooding, I’ve also been thinking about, of course, Katrina and the flood that followed. It doesn’t help that the lead off and title story in my soon to be released collection, Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, is an aftermath story, with the character on his roof in the heat waiting rescue. It’s a morbid, creepy story; one that I was reluctant to tell, if I’m going to be honest about it. I evacuated; Paul and I packed up as much as could fit in the car, put Skittle in his carrier and fled north. We left the Lost Apartment shortly after eleven a.m. that morning; we didn’t get to Slidell until nearly seven, and the outer bands of the storm were already coming in as we crossed the Twin Spans across the lake. It does now seem like that was an incredibly long time ago, and yet the memories, while faded with time, are still relatively vivid–even though the distance makes it seem as though it happened to someone else. There’s an unreality about the entire thing, looking back over the years. It’s hard to believe something like that could happen, yet it did, and it does, every year, to somewhere. Puerto Rico is still recovering, and suffering, from Maria.

The other day on Facebook there was a post from the New Orleans Tourism Board about signs they’ve created that businesses here can hang in their windows, to show queer tourists that they are welcome in the business and in the city. Quite naturally, some homophobic trash (from Oklahoma) had to show up on the thread and say shit like well, looks like I need to cancel my reservations for New Orleans this May–guess it’s time for another hurricane! 

You really can’t fix trash. Particularly from some asshole who smugly thinks Oklahoma is immune from natural disasters. This reminded me, of course, of the congressional trash serving at the time who didn’t think New Orleans (the fifth largest port in the United States) didn’t need to either rebuild or recover from this disaster; they were willing to just let the city sink in the swamp and disappear. Steve King, the Klansman without a mask, was one of them; yesterday he said something similar again about how everyone affected by Katrina sat around waiting for help while “in Iowa we help each other.”

Really? Fuck you, you racist faux Christian piece of shit, and I do hope you have a lovely time in hell when you get there.

And despite the fact that Iowans clearly continue to reelect this excrement to Congress because he is a racist bottom-feeding monster, they still deserve our sympathy and our support and our help in this time of disaster for them.

Sorry you don’t have a soul, Mr. Congressman.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Tusk

As Constant Reader is aware, I’ve always had issues with my weight and, by extension, my body. I am trying–the goal is, anyway–to get down to 200 pounds. I am currently hovering at a plateau of 212, with fluctuations running from 210-215. Tuesday I tried on a pair of pants I’ve not been able to wear for several years and they fit comfortably; yesterday was the true acid test of my black Levi’s–which I haven’t gotten on in almost four years.

Not only did they fit, they fit fairly comfortably…and as the day progressed so began the ever-green struggle to keep pulling them up constantly as they slid down. I don’t know what that means–other than the reality that jeans do stretch when you wear them–but I’d like to think my body shape has changed. That fifteen or so pounds I lost has made a difference.

Huzzah! Now, of course, I should use that as motivation to improve my bad eating habits and start going to the gym with some degree of frequency…and also need to keep reminding myself that no matter how sore I may get, or how tired, or how little I want to lift the weights–I always feel better afterwards.

I worked a little on the WIP yesterday–not as much as I would have like or preferred, but so it goes, you know? I am still reconstructing that first chapter, which, now that I’ve started pulling it apart and trying to put it back together to try to make it more compulsively readable, isn’t quite as good as I may have thought it was when I originally conceptualized, and wrote, it. A lot of that probably has to do with originally conceiving the book as first person/past tense; and now I am shifting it to first person-present tense, so the reflective tone of the opening paragraphs no longer works.

The opening sentence, which I’d loved, has to go: My mother ruined my life the summer before my senior year of high school.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good opening sentence, but it doesn’t really work anymore. Choosing to write in the present tense–which most y/a fiction I’ve read recently seems to be in–changes that dynamic; plus I always seem, at least in the early draft stages, to have a tendency to create a reflective, looking-back framing device for the story, like my character is remembering how it all happened from the vantage point of the adult he now is–and that’s just reflexive and lazy writing on my part. (It’s not a bad device, I’m not saying that by any means; but I use it too frequently, or try to, at any rate. I blame reading Herman Raucher’s Summer of ’42, which used this device beautifully; as did Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. Perhaps someday I will use it when it is appropriate and will work. I need to reread the Raucher; I bet it doesn’t hold up–primarily since it’s theme is about a teenaged boy who has sex with a woman in her twenties and he basically stalks her; hmmm, there could be a really interesting essay in there…)

I hope to get that first chapter revised, restructured, and rewritten this evening, since it’s one of my two short days this week; and tomorrow I can move on to the next chapters. I  started reading The Woman Who Fed The Dogs, part of my TWFest homework, and I also need to get that finished so I can read the last bit of my homework, Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife. 

Always, always, always so much to do!

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me!

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Refugee

Tuesday was yet another night of non-deep sleep; in which again I spent most of the night asleep than half-asleep then awake: lather, rinse, repeat.

I’m holding Daylight Saving Time solely responsible for this horror, I might add, because I was sleeping beautifully before this.

But last night was good; I slept through the night and feel very rested and very much better this morning. I made it through the rough part of my week and now have the easy, downhill path to my weekend. Being tired, I’ve accomplished little of note this week; I am not even keeping up with my emails…but now that I am past those two days and I’ve slept well, maybe now I can get caught up on everything I’ve tragically fallen behind on.

I do so hate when that happens.

But if I put my head down and just start ploughing through, I should tear through it all in no time. (Famous last works, no?)

But I sent the finished manuscript for Royal Street Reveillon in on Sunday, and I think part of the exhaustion (and not sleeping) comes from the inevitable relaxation and sudden drop of stress resultant from finishing a book. I always forget, from book to book, that there’s always about a week’s worth of resetting my brain that is required, and I rather stumble through that week, zombie-like, as my burnt out mind slowly resets and recovers. Bearing this in mind, I decided that it’s silly to beat myself up over not getting back into the current WIP immediately; I stopped that nonsense yesterday morning when the realization dawned, through my foggy, tired brain, that this is normal. So I’m going to instead spend this week getting focused on resetting everything, reevaluating where I’m at on things, and reading. The festivals are in two weeks, and I’ve got to finish my homework before the panel I’m moderating.

I’ve also got a diversity column to write for the next issue of the Sisters in Crime quarterly newsletter.

So, today I am going to focus simply on reading Alafair Burke’s fabulous The Better Sister, making a to-do list, organizing my bills, and figuring out what I need to get done by the end of the year; I also need to probably go back and figure out what projects I was planning on doing/working on this year.

It’s all about resetting.

And now back to the spice mines.

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I Pledge My Love

Good morning, Saturday, how are you doing? I’ve been up for over an hour and am just now finishing my second cup of coffee. I slept really well last night, and feel incredibly rested this morning. This is a good thing; I have a few errands to run later this morning (including getting my filthy filthy car washed) and therefore I need a lot of energy. I am also dropping off several bags worth of beads and throws at the Latter Library drop-off for the ARC of Greater New Orleans (attention locals: if you’re looking to get rid of excess beads and throws, here is a list of the drop-off points.). There are also a few odds and ends I need to get at the grocery store, and of course I always need to get the mail.

Yesterday was a bit of an adventure.

So, Thursday afternoon my MacBook Air started…well, acting a little funky. It was working just fine, no worries on that score, but on the left part of the screen, a series of vertical black lines suddenly appeared. I could still see what was behind them, but there was some flickering and the wall paper just turned into flickering blotches of color. Uh oh, I said to myself, that can’t be good. I spoke to Apple Support on-line, and we determined that yes, it wasn’t software but a hardware issue, which is what I suspected all along. We made an appointment for me to take it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Metairie, the earliest available appointment being for 3:15. Terrific, I thought. I get off work at one, can drive out to Metairie and go shopping at Target–which I need to do anyway–and then head to the mall.

So, I did precisely that; I got off work at one, headed over to 610, and took it to where it merges with I-10 just over the parish line and drove out to Clearview Parkway. I spent far too much money at Target (it’s just like Costco in that way; even with a list I buy more than I intended to–oh, look, I need toothpaste but this deal for two is a dollar cheaper than buying two separately at separate times; oh, coffee is on sale? This is too good a deal to pass up…and so it goes) and loaded everything in the hatch of the car (where there were already all the bags of beads and throws to be donated) and headed to Lakeview Mall. I checked in–an hour early–at the Apple Store, then went to eat at the Smashburger in the food court (good, but a little too expensive; I should have stopped at Atomic Burger, which is also expensive but worth it). I returned to the Apple Store and started checking out the MacBook Airs, just in case the old one wasn’t reparable. I really can’t afford to buy a new one at this time, but was prepared to because I can’t do without a laptop.

And long story short, no they couldn’t repair it because it was too old. I bought the Air in 2011–eight years old, and eight years of it working brilliantly whenever I needed it to.

So, I decided to go ahead and get the least expensive one, which was actually very similar to mine. Except…

..they had none in stock, it had to be ordered, and the earliest I could get it would be April 1st.

Um, no. They did have the more expensive models in stock, of course.

But there was no way I was taking that financial hit and then having to wait four weeks to actually get the damned thing, all the while hoping that the current one would continue to work.

But this happened before, I remembered, with my current iPad–the store told me it would take five weeks to get it on back order, then I came home, went on-line, ordered it from Apple.com and had it within a week. So, I decided to come home and do the same thing–order it on-line and see what happened.

But as I was leaving the mall and turning around to head back to New Orleans, I saw there was a Best Buy on my right. What the hell, I thought, and pulled into their parking lot. Long story short, I bought a HP Stream for $251 total and it didn’t cost me any cash out of pocket; the cashier signed me up for Best Buy credit and if I pay it off in six months there’s no interest…which means even if it is a cheap piece of shit and breaks down or turns out to be useless, it should give me at least another year of use while I save up to buy a proper Apple laptop. And I may not even go with the Air next time and might get a MacBook Pro.

This HP Stream also looks just like my old iBook, which I loved and used for six years or so before its motherboard went out. It’ll take some getting used to, of course, but this all kind of worked out really well for me and I am most pleased.

And when I got home, there were no places to park on my street–remember, hatch was full of bags from shopping at Target–but as I drove down the street, resigned to having to lug everything two blocks in the heavy humidity we get before a rain, someone pulled out of a spot right in front of my house.

Seriously.

So, today I am going to run my errands and come back home to clean. I also plan on doing one last copy edit of Scotty before I send it in to my editor, and also get back to work on the WIP. I also need to read some more of Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, in preparation for our panel later this month at the Tennessee Williams Festival.

And I hope you have a lovely, lovely day, Constant Reader.

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Stand by Me

Friday; the last day of my work week and it’s a half-day, at that. How lovely.

Or it would be, but I have to go to Metairie to the Apple Store this afternoon. My laptop is acting funny, and I really really don’t want to replace it. Granted, it is eight years old, and it may not even be fixable, but it doesn’t hurt to find out one way or the other. Yesterday morning some long black lines showed up on the left of the screen, and the images beneath the lines were flickering. Heavy heaving sigh.

It never fails, does it? I was just starting to feel a little bit more comfortable. That’ll teach me, right? Plus this is throwing a monkey wrench into my plans for the weekend. Oh, okay, yes, I had only a two and half day work week, sure. But still. I was really looking forward to not leaving the house this weekend. Heavy heaving sigh.

Ah, well. It is what it is. The worst part of the trip to Metairie is going to be returning to the city during rush hour. Just thinking about it turns my stomach…heavy heaving sigh. Now i am also thinking I should have made the appointment for Saturday and kept my Friday as originally planned.

Paul and I started watching You on Netflix this week, and I have to say I was most impressed with it. At first I was like, oh, okay, a stalker story where the girl falls in love, unknowingly, with her stalker. I’ve seen this before, thank you very much and thought I’d give it an episode or two…but then the first episode took a much darker turn that I didn’t see coming and that woke me the fuck up. I am looking forward to watching the rest of the show now…alas, with the festivals looming on the horizon, Paul is terribly busy so leisure watching isn’t really a priority for him these days.

I am still feeling a little bit out of it this morning; like my life is something I’m watching on television and not actually participating in. Needless to say this is a bit disorienting. I’ve not been doing as much creative thinking this week as I would have preferred, but this entire week has been an exercise in “just make it through till the weekend”; I’m not sure why that is, but it has been. I also feel very disconnected from the world at large; Carnival always has this weird tendency to separate us here from the rest of the country and the rest of the world and what’s going on out there, and these days the news moves so quickly that it’s impossible to get caught up on what’s happened during the parades.

I did do some creative thinking yesterday, about the long-abandoned and pushed to the side used-to-be-WIP. I had already decided to do one last revision of it and turn it in to my publisher; it’s what I am going to do once I finish the first draft of the current WIP. I also am going to start doing my research on the next Scotty; I suppose that makes it kind of official that I am going to do a ninth one. But don’t get too excited, Scotty fans; I am going to have to finish these other two first and there’s another first draft I want to write before I get to the Scotty; a gay noir I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time. That would be Muscles, and over this weekend one of the things I want to get done is pulling all of the material I want together (that I already have on hand) for the next three manuscripts. I am also going to go over Royal Street Reveillon one more time; one final read and copy edit before it finally is turned in for good.

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

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Drivin’ My Life Away

We left the Orpheus parade last night when it started raining and the wind picked up. It was already cold out there, but that weather shift was going to take it from merely unpleasant to intolerable pretty fast, so we skedaddled back to the Lost Apartment and called it a night.

But Orpheus is a beautiful parade, and the floats simply breathtaking.

And there’s nothing like Carnival to make me remember why I love this city so much. Carnival is pretty much unavoidable , no matter how hard you try, and there’s no point in resisting it because it isn’t going away. Even those who hate Carnival (which I don’t understand, unless they are also the people who kick puppies and so forth) have to ride the wave until it’s over. Today is the last day of my Carnival related vacation, and it’s been absolutely lovely. Did I get everything done that I wanted to get done? Of course not. I never do. But I did do some thinking, and thinking time is often in short supply. I’m looking forward to getting back to work on the WIP–I may go back and revise the first ten chapters to weave in the threads that are missing before writing the second half of the book–and with any luck, I can have a decent draft of it finished by the end of March.

Fingers crossed.

It’s very cold this morning for a Mardi Gras Day, and I kind of am glad Paul and I don’t do Fat Tuesday anymore. Not that it wouldn’t be fun, but all the costume planning and so forth, and I doubt seriously I could drink all day anymore and still make it to work on Ash Wednesday and be functional. Sigh, the pleasures of getting old. But I always feel like my time is borrowed, and the life I have is a gift I never thought I would see. So there’s that, you know?

I do have some cooking to do today; I need to make bacon for lunch sandwiches and I am going to make the chili today–thank goodness it’s cold, right? I am also going to go ahead and make chicken salad for Paul’s lunches this week.

I am trying to decide what I want to write next, if I do another Scotty. There’s an amorphous idea boiling in the back of my head that’s been back there for quite some time–Hollywood South Hustle–which would combine two stories I’ve been pondering for a while (I am leaning toward this one as the next Scotty because the other two–Bywater Bohemia Bougie and Redneck Riviera Rhumba–don’t have even an amorphous story dancing in my head other than the titles. I think Redneck Riviera will have to have something to do with Frank’s wrestling career and the other has to do with gentrification, but that’s all I’ve got. Hollywood South on the other hand has two different plots I want to write–one about a film industry scam that actually happened here in New Orleans, and the other about the victim of a vicious assault, twenty years later. It’s just about trying to figure out, really, how those two plots roll into each other and can run parallel to each other in order to make a cohesive story. Plus there’s another plot element that needs to be wrapped up, carried over from the current, and I think this plot can accommodate that story pretty well. This is kind of the Scotty book I originally intended to write as the fourth book in the series, but Katrina pretty much buried that, at least for a while. (I’ve already spun part of that original plot into Murder in the Rue Ursulines; but since it was a Chanse book it changed a lot; enough so that using the original idea as a Scotty would absolutely work.)

But…it’s nice to have another idea for Scotty lingering in my head, on the back-burner. Maybe I’ll even get to it later this year.

Stranger things have happened.

I also want to work on Monsters of New Orleans. I’ve not done any short story work in a while, and I kind of miss it. I had another story turned down by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but that’s only whetted my appetite to try to get something else published in there. There’s a long story, novella-length, called “Never Kiss a Stranger” that I’d also like to get back to work on, but on the other hand, I’m wondering if the story might make for a better novel than long-form story. I suppose I should finish a draft before making a decision, one way or the other.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines for me. I was thinking about working on some stuff today, since I’m not leaving the house, but I think I’ll just read instead.

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone.

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