Category: editing

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad

Ah, Third Chanse.

If you will recall from my last entry about the Chanse series, I had a new editor for the second book in the series. I had also written a proposal for the follow-up, Murder in the Rue St. Claude, which was going to be about a nursing home and an angel of death. The second book ended with a tragedy for Chanse, and the last scene of the book was Chanse saying goodbye to someone before their life-support was turned off. I did a trickery and was going to have the person be in the nursing home, still living, only a suspicious death happens there and one of the workers talks to Chanse about her fears. The editor wasn’t the most professional or organized person, and I had to send the proposal to her three times on request with no contract offer. I was very irritated by this, but there were also a lot of changes going on there–including moving the offices from LA to New York, which I thought was an incredibly stupid business decision…and I wound up with yet another new editor right before Katrina hit. I honestly wasn’t sure if I would go back to writing ever again–one of the lulls in my career–but things eventually settled down and I started house sitting for a friend in Hammond over on the north shore while I waited for the city to reopen so I could drive into the city and get some more things from the house. I did, my friends’ trip was cut short, and I was going to return to Kentucky to my parents’ after one more swing by the apartment to pick up things. Imagine my surprise that my mail service was open, my grocery store and bank were open, and so was my gym. We’d moved into the main house from the carriage house, which hadn’t been rented yet as it needed some work before the hurricane, and so….I just moved back into the carriage house and cleaned up around the property and kept an eye on the main house, as well as emptying out the water from the machines that were trying to keep the insides of the apartments dry (the roof was gone).

While I was in Hammond, my new editor got me to reluctantly co-edit an anthology about New Orleans called Love, Bourbon Street (a title I hate to this day), and he was trying to talk me into writing a Chanse book about Katrina. I didn’t really want to, but he kept insisting and finally, I gave in and agreed to write it. However, the nursing home I was researching was a place they left people to die in–wasn’t touching that with a ten foot pole–and it occurred to me that I could wrap the case around Hurricane Katrina. He was hired by the client the Friday before Katrina, and obviously he couldn’t do the job now.

And that was the seed from which Murder in the Rue Chartres (no title at the time of contract) grew.1

This is the original cover from Alyson Books.
This is the new cover for the Bold Strokes ebook

It was six weeks before I returned to my broken city.

Usually when I drove home from the west, as soon as I crossed onto dry land again in Kenner, excitement would bubble up inside and I’d start to smile. Almost home, I’d think, and let out a sigh of relief. New Orleans was home for me, and I hated leaving for any reason. I’d never regretted moving there after graduating from LSU. It was the first place I’d ever felt at home, like I belonged. I’d hated the little town in east Texas where I’d grown up. All I could think about was getting old enough to escape. Baton Rouge for college had been merely a way station—it never occurred to me to permanently settle there. New Orleans was where I belonged, and I’d known that the first time I’d ever set foot in the city. It was a crazy quilt of eccentricities, frivolities, and irritations sweltering in the damp heat, a city where you could buy a drink at any time of day, a place where you could easily believe in magic. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Any time I’d taken a trip before, within a few days I’d get homesick and started counting the hours until it was time to come home.

But this time wasn’t like the others. This time, I hadn’t been able to come home, and had no idea how long it would be before I could. Now, I was nervous, my stomach clenched into knots, my palms sweating on the steering wheel as I sang along to Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around” on the radio. It was everything I’d feared for the last few weeks when I thought about coming home, the anxiety building as the odometer clocked off another mile and I got closer to home.

It was different.

The most obvious thing was the lack of traffic. Even outside the airport, the traffic was usually heavy, sometimes slowing to a complete standstill. But other than a couple of military vehicles, a cement mixer, and a couple of dirty and tired looking sedans, I-10 was deserted. There was a film of dirt on everything as far as I could see, tinting my vision sepia. Huge trees lay toppled and debris was everywhere. Signs that used to advertise hotels, motels, restaurants, storage facilities, and pretty much any kind of business you could think of were now just poles, the signs gone except for the support skeleton. Buildings had been blown over, fences were wrecked and down, and almost everywhere I looked blue tarps hung on roofs, their edges lifting in the slight breeze. My breath started coming a little faster, my eyes filled, and I bit down on my lower lip as I focused back on the road.

No cars joined at the airport on-ramp, or the one at Williams Boulevard just beyond it. No planes were landing or taking off.

Most of the writing I did in the fall of 2005 was my blog, which at the time was on Livejournal. (The old stuff is still there, but I started making things private after a year because of plagiarism; I guess people thought they could steal my words if they were on a blog.) I documented as much of the experience as I could, so people outside of Louisiana could see that the city wasn’t fully recovered despite no longer being in the news. American attention had moved past New Orleans by the spring of 2006.

When I started writing the book, I was really glad I had done that with the blog, because more than anything else it reminded me of the emotions I was going through, that horrible depression and not remembering things from day to day, the need for medications, panic attacks, depression, and the way the entire city just seemed dead. I did repurpose a lot of stuff that was on the blog–rewritten and edited, of course–and I could tell, as I wrote the book, that I was either doing some of the best work of my life to that point or I was overwriting it mercilessly. You never can be sure.

But I also needed to flesh out the murder mystery I came up with, and I also wanted to write about a historical real life tragedy of the Quarter. The client who hired him that Friday before Katrina roared into the Gulf and came ashore was engaged, and she wanted Chanse to find her father, who’d disappeared from their lives when she and her brothers were very young. But what happened to her father? Who killed her, and why? Was her murder a reaction to her looking for him?

I had started using Tennessee Williams quotes to open my New Orleans novels with the third (Jackson Square Jazz: “A good looking boy like you is always wanted” from Orpheus Descending) and I liked the conceit so much I kept doing it. I knew someone who’d built a crime novel around the basic set up of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I thought, what if the person who knows all the answers has been in a mental hospital for decades? Then what if Mrs. Venable had succeeded in getting Catherine locked up with all of Sebastian’s secrets lobotomized out of her head?

I named the family Verlaine as a nod to the Venables, and aged Mrs. Venable as well as gender swapping her (this was also a bit influenced by The Big Sleep), and I was off to the races.

My editor wrote me when he finished reading the manuscript and told me it was one of the best mysteries he’d ever read. The reviews! My word, I still can’t believe the reviews, and how good they were. I got a rave in the Times-Picayune, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

And yes, it won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery.

  1. The irony that two books I wanted nothing to do with, let alone write or edit, ended up with each winning Lambda Literary Awards, does not escape me. ↩︎

Marshall’s Portable Music Machine

Wednesday morning and the downhill slide into the weekend. Today I have to see my surgeon before I go into the office, which means this might get posted later than my usual. I am awake and feeling pretty good, actually. I am going to the gym to do my physical therapy on my own Friday, which is kind of scary. But I will muddle through somehow, and take my time with it rather than trying to rush through the way I always used to.

I made groceries after work last night and picked up the mail, so I don’t have to pick it up again until the weekend. I am going to be doing a lot, it seems, on Saturday morning. But this is the first free weekend I’ve had that’s normal in a while. I finished watching the Netflix Alexander when I got home, with Sparky asleep in my lap. I folded laundry, too. All in all, a slightly productive night, as I also worked on a short story a bit. I hope to get both of these (one a first draft, the other a revision) by the weekend, so I can work on other things over the weekend. We were super busy at work yesterday; it’ll be a bit slower today but still busier than usual. The post Mardi Gras boost in testing, I suppose.

I’m not sure what project to work on next. I’m actually thinking that this longer story I am writing could close the short story collection…the manuscript itself is sitting at about 72000 words right now, so either story could run long and the book would be finished and can be turned in. This is of course great news; I would also need to write an introduction to it as well, but maybe–just maybe–I could get it turned in by the end of the month, too. I also have to finish the sequel to Death Drop–which means revising what I’ve already written so I am back into Jem’s head and into his life and story again, which is also fine. I feel like I can really do the book justice now more so than any time since the surgery.

I also need to get back on the promotion interstate highway again, too.

But the appointment with my surgeon went well. I don’t have to see him again unless I have pain or something odd going on with my arm again, and I am going to be gradually phasing out the PT now. I should be fully healed by the sixth month (which would be April) but he thinks I’ll be fully healed before then, since everything has progressed so nicely with the healing thus far. I won’t be completely back to absolute normal, most likely, for at least a year. But the strength therapy will be enormously helpful in that; the real curiosity is wondering, when can I start working my chest and back and legs again? I don’t think legs would be too much of an issue, other than lifting the weight plates. I’ll have to ask my therapist next Friday when I see him again. But yay, right? Huzzah for progress! But the weather is also starting to get nice again, so I think it’s time for me to start taking walks regularly again. It’s staying light longer, too. I also need to start stretching at least every other day, too.

And the festivals are nigh, too. Woo-hoo!

And on that note, I am going to bring this to a close so I can eat my lunch and answer some emails. May you have a Wednesday that is as awesome as you are , Constant Reader.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Weeheeheehee dee heeheeheehee weeoh aweem away
Weeheeheehee dee heeheeheehee weeoh aweem away

You’re welcome for that hellish ear worm.

Well, here it is Tuesday morning and I feel a lot better, more rested, than yesterday. I was extremely tired when I got home after work last night. I didn’t really do much of anything once I was home, other than cuddling with Sparky and watching this week’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which I always enjoy, as well as two more episodes of Alexander on Netflix, which I am enjoying. I was always interested in Alexander when I was growing up–I liked Egyptian, Greek, and Roman history and culture before moving to United States history, then British, and ultimately European. I also watched some documentaries on forgotten kings and queens of Europe. Sparky mostly slept in my lap for much of the evening, and I retired early. PT was rough yesterday morning, but this Friday I get to go to the gym on my own for the first time in well over a year. YIKES. I only have a few exercises to. do there, and I am a little bit excited about going for the first time and getting back into the swing of working out regularly again.

I am starting to feel acclimated back to my life again, and I am also thinking I am feeling more like myself. I’ve been flooded with story ideas over the last few days (Alabama always does that for me, for some reason), solutions to issues in works in progress that I’ve been struggling with, and book ideas. This is, of course, a relief, as I’ve felt kind of stagnant creatively since the surgery. It’s like my brain is finally waking up again, something I was concerned about, obviously–when your identity and most of your life is wrapped around being a writer, the loss of creative energy in my mind is even scarier than falling from a great height or cutting myself (two of my biggest fears). I suppose it would be okay, but I also can’t imagine never writing again.

I actually have thought about it seriously during this time of forced solitude and recovery. Writing and publishing is like a roller coaster ride–filled with ups and downs and frightening hazards to get past. 2023 was obviously a bad year for me, but I did produce two books I am proud of, Death Drop and Mississippi River Mischief. Is it any wonder that I wasn’t able to get much work done after they were finished and proofed and approved? Bouchercon was at the end of August, and when I got back was when I had my teeth done and went on the soft diet–no surprise I was low energy and not able to write very much–and then came the surgery and the recovery. And of course Scooter died last summer…yeesh, what a shitty year, underscored by the grieving for Mom. So, having not really written much after the books went into production, and not really being able to create while I recovered, made me take some stock and wonder if I wanted to keep doing it–the publishing side, anyway. But now that my overactive imagination has been reignited, all those doubts and self-questioning seem like self-pity. Waaah, I’m not Stephen King. So what? Sure, more money would be nice, but it’s not really the be-all end-all of why I do this, anyway. I love writing, I love telling stories, and I love creating characters I genuinely am interested in and want to get to know better.

I feel good this morning. I woke up and didn’t feel fatigued, either. I got a lot of work done at the office yesterday, which was awesome, and tonight when I head home I am making groceries and have some chores to do around the house, too. And…hopefully will get some writing done, too.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, and I’ll check back in with you later.

Reunited

I am off to Alabama later this morning. I have PT in a bit, some errands to run, and then home to get cleaned up and hit the road. Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree is cued up on Audible. It should be a nice day for a drive, but it’s going to be cold in Alabama. I’ve not taken a nice drive in almost four months, and it’s always good for firing up the creative synapses and loosening the bindings on my imagination. The worst part of the drive for me is always getting out of New Orleans through the East and I am not a fan of the twin spans to the north shore or getting through Slidell. But once you get on I-55 North, it becomes a very relaxing drive through rural Mississippi. Not much traffic other than around the bigger cities (Hattiesburg, Meridian, Laurel) and then you’re in Alabama. Alabama is also beautiful, and of course it always always always makes my mind wander back to my childhood and stories of the county, histories and legends and gossip and tall tales of a time so different it may as well be an another planet.

I submitted a story yesterday, which felt like progress back into my career again. I finished editing it last night and sent it off without a second thought, logged it into my spreadsheet (which didn’t include my last sale, so I included it as well) and started working on my swamp ghost story again. I made some necessary changes (correcting the wrong geography by using a map) and moved on a bit. I am very pleased with the story, but it’s already very very long so there will be some necessary cuts and revisions in future drafts–but again, it felt good to be writing fiction again. I’ve also been getting things written in my journal–lists of things to get for the apartment as well as what stories to write and submit where; what books I want to work and finish this year and when I’m going to write them. It feels good, frankly, to be creative again.

Paul didn’t make it home last night before I went to bed, which was a pity, but I’ll see him before I leave today; he should be up by then I would hope.

I did watch this week’s episode of Feud last night. The performances are amazing, the show’s production values (particularly in set and costume design), but it’s also not a lot of fun to watch someone on a downward self-destructive trajectory, either, particularly when they’re as talented as Capote was. That seemed to be a lot more common place with writers back in the day–they all seemed to have substance abuse problems, but I suppose if you had to type everything…it would eventually drive you to drink.

I also slept really well last night, too. Sparky woke me up by clobbering me in the face this morning, claws out, so I now have a scratch on my nose and another on my cheek. Perfect timing, right? Heavy heaving sigh. I also have some scratches on my shoulders and chest, from him riding on my shoulders. We really do need to learn how to trim his nails. I also caught him last night trying to get on top of the refrigerator again. He really is a mischievous child. Sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I have to leave for PT in a moment, and I need to start getting everything together for the trip. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and bear with me–I may not be back until Monday.

I Will Survive

Mom died a year ago today.

Sigh.

I didn’t sleep well last night, for the first time since getting the new night meds, and as I sit here blearily this morning drinking my coffee it occurs to me that anticipation of this day probably had a lot to do with it.

Yesterday was a nice day. I slept super-well and even a bit late, came downstairs, posted three blog entries throughout the day, and managed to get a lot done. I got some laundry done, cleaned out the sink and ran a load in the dishwasher, straightened up around my desk some, did some filing and organizing, worked on cleaning up computer files, and so came downstairs to a relatively clean kitchen. Huzzah! I also started making lists of things I need to write this year as well as the things I need to write this year. I am also trying to sort my short stories predicated on submission calls I’d like to send work to and establish some kind of timeline (just the remotest suggestion of one, knowing mood and energy levels will affect that and I won’t make all of them) for getting them done and keeping myself on track. I also want to finish this y/a novel that’s been languishing in the files for quite some time, and I even started thinking about Scotty X, Hurricane Party Hustle1 , which was kind of nice, too.

In other words, yesterday was one of the best days I’ve had since the surgery, and today will probably not be one of my better ones. I don’t feel grief-stricken or anything, but it’s still difficult. I’m glad I am meeting Dad in Alabama this weekend2. I feel good now that the caffeine is percolating through my veins and my body is responding to it. I don’t feel fatigued, but then again it’s also still early in the morning and I haven’t yet had the inevitable caffeine crash that will come this afternoon. I do have to make groceries again today (it really never ends), but I think after that I can just go straight home, which is great. Any other errands can wait until after PT on Friday, before I head up north to Alabama. I know I’ll be sad once I am around Dad, and it’ll be hard saying goodbye on Sunday and heading back south, but that is a lot easier than having to live in her house.

And really, I had my mother for sixty-one years. Thank God they started young, right?

We also watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter yesterday afternoon, and it was very entertaining, although it’s very hard to maintain suspense once you know it’s based on the captain’s log entries from Dracula, and the movie opens with the ship wrecked on the shore with no survivors. SPOILER. right? But it was a clever idea–I’m always a fan of expanding the mythology from books that weren’t addressed fully in the book, especially for movies and television (like Castle Rock and Chapelthwaite built out from the Stephen King universe), because I think it’s cool, it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the originals, and I’ve done some homage work myself (Timothy).

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day!

  1. I’m not sure of this wisdom of this title, honestly. It was supposed to be the fourth Scotty, and I had sent the proposal to my editor the week before Katrina. Certainly, there’s a lot of superstition involved in that kind of thinking, but at the same time I feel kind of squeamish and may come up with something else. ↩︎
  2. I was thinking about my next Alabama book, too. ↩︎

The Second Time Around

…for Chanse, that is.

Oddly enough, the second Chanse was the fourth novel I published, and therein lies a tale.

Funny how with these earlier books there’s always a story, isn’t it?

So, I sold Murder in the Rue Dauphine to Alyson in September of 1999–but the pub date wasn’t until February 2002. I saw no point in writing a sequel to the book immediately; primarily because there was a nearly two and a half year wait between signing the contract and when they were able to schedule me in. So, I figured I had about a year and a half before I needed to get it finished (everyone told me it would be released a year after the first, and in all honesty, what was the point of writing two or three books while waiting for the first to come out so the others could be scheduled?), and so, with time to spare and a lengthy period of time to “waste”, I decided to start thinking about the “what ifs”–what if the book sells super-well and is popular? What if this isn’t just a one-off standalone and could be turned into a series? The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea and I liked letting my mind roam.

So, what would I do if the series took off and I needed to write more?

Being creative and full of energy in my late thirties, and thrilled to death that now I wouldn’t die without having published a novel, I reread the manuscript and my analysis of who Chanse was and why he was who he was, and I started mapping out a personal journey for him, that lasted several books. He was a cynical loner, with a couple of friends, and he was still really not adjusted to being gay when the first book opens. He was estranged from his immediate family of younger sister and brother and his parents; he never returned to Cottonwood Wells after leaving for LSU. He’s ashamed of his family but he also knows they will never accept his sexuality, either, so it’s very easy for him to cut them off almost entirely. So, his journey was going to be like that of the main characters of the show Moonlighting; each case would teach himself something about life and himself, and he would grow from the lesson learned in each book. Each book going forward would have a life lesson for him (Rue Dauphine did as well; the lesson was ‘you can’t just trust someone automatically because they’re queer.’); and the one he’d learn in the second book would be about love and trust (the third would be about sacrifice, the fourth would deal with his family, the fifth would have him fall in love with someone else, the sixth would deal with him dealing with losing his best friend to her husband and realizing he does need other people, and the seventh, the swan song for the story, would find him ready to finally commit to someone and live with them, so the series would be seven books long).

Shortly after I sold the first book, I again learned that lesson myself–the case in the first book was inspired by a gay con artist who’d gotten involved with a non-profit here in the city and then blew out of town overnight, having stolen/embezzled a shit ton of money and leaving a pile of debts behind. I had written to a local color magazine for the gay community (I can’t remember the name!) about writing for them. I wrote something for them, and they hired me to be editor of the magazine, as the business was expanding and it would free up the founder to focus on the new directions while I ran the magazine. It was fun, I got to work with a lot of fun new friends, and…then it all blew up in our faces. It was very similar to the earlier situation–a gay con artist blows into town, makes a lot of promises, runs up a lot of debt and then it just blew up completely. Turns out the guy was a con artist with a record of credit card fraud, and he was on the FBI watchlist so yes, I did get interviewed several times by the local office of the FBI.

The second book, which had the working title Murder in the Rue Royal, was based on that story, but I had already been playing around with a stalker storyline, and then I realized how I could cross the two stories into one seamlessly and write the book. I managed to get another first draft finished when a two-book deal to write the Scotty series for Kensington and Alyson dropped the option for the second book, saying “two mystery series with a gay main character in the same city by the same author are too similar to each other”–which I took as a challenge to make Bourbon Street Blues and Scotty as different as I possibly could to prove them wrong. So, the manuscript went into a drawer and I started happily working on Scotty instead…and again, it was a stand-alone that morphed into a series.

This was the Insightoutbooks edition cover of Murder in the Rue St. Ann
This is the new cover the book got when Bild Strokes Books republished the book as an ebook.

I took a streetcar named St. Charles down to Canal, crossed the street and walked down to Royal.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning on one of those splendidly sunny September days that makes you glad to be alive. Taking the streetcar had been a good idea. The long heat of summer had broken, and the air was crisp and in the mid-seventies. The sky was that blue unique to New Orleans, with wispy white clouds scattered across its expanse. There was just a hint of cool moisture in the air. There were a lot of people milling around the sidewalks on Canal— a good sign for the tourist season. Canal used to be the main shopping drag of the city, with huge department stores like Maison Blanche and D. H. Holmes. Those were long gone. They had either gone out of business or fled to the suburbs— now it was mostly hotels, fast food, and Foot Lockers.

There were hopes that putting the Canal streetcar line back in place would stimulate a recovery for the street. So far, all the construction work had simply made the Quarter difficult to get to from uptown. Add to that the chore of trying to find a place to park that would get me a ticket in two hours or cost ten dollars, and I was kind of glad I was having car trouble—the streetcar down and a cab home was very simple.

Not that riding the streetcar didn’t bring its own set of aggravations.  If the cars ran on any fixed schedule, I’d never been able to figure it out. You could wait for one for half an hour and then three in a row, all packed to the gills, would show up. The streetcar ostensibly operated as public transportation, but was also a de rigeur tourist attraction. There was no way of telling when you’d be able to catch one with a place to sit. But when you did, it was nice to find  a window seat on a sunny day and enjoy the city clacking by.

So, when Alyson chose to drop the Chanse series after I signed with Kensington, Murder in the Rue Royal went back into a drawer, which was fine–it wasn’t a good book–and I moved on with my life. The advance for signing with Kensington paid for our move back to New Orleans from Washington, and moving back here was absolutely worth ending the Chanse series for, seriously. I still didn’t have an agent, but I’d been signed to book contracts by two publishers already, and I figured it might be easier now. We accomplished the move, get our new apartment set up on Sophie B. Wright Place, and started putting our lives back together. I don’t remember the timeline of how it came to be, but I was still working with Alyson on my first and second erotic anthologies (Full Body Contact and FRATSEX), so I was aware when my editor left and a new person, that I knew slightly, moved from assistant editor to senior editor. We were talking on the phone one day about Full Body Contact and she casually mentioned, “I don’t see your second Chanse book here on the schedule, what’s going on?” and I told her the story, “Oh for fuck’s sake, when can you get it done by?” and that became the second contract for Chanse.

So, after finished Jackson Square Jazz and turning it in, I broke out Murder in the Rue Royal (the title had already been changed on the contract to Murder in the Rue St. Ann; my new editor didn’t like the alliteration) from the drawer, blew the dust off it, and reread the manuscript. I looked at my timeline for the series, and saw that this was the one where he was supposed to fuck up his relationship, but I didn’t see it in the manuscript. I reread the first book, thought long and hard about Chanse and who he was at this point in his life and after several long days of musing it hit me, between the eyes: jealousy. Jealousy would be what fucks up his relationship, and it only made more sense to me that Chanse would be the jealous one. Paul had a loving, accepting family and was more secure in and of himself as a gay man and what he wanted out of life. Paul was considering becoming ground-based at the New Orleans airport so he could settle down and have more of a life with Chanse, which also has Chanse very alarmed and makes the jealousy even more intense….so what would be the thing that would set Chanse’s jealousy off? Something from Paul’s past that Chanse didn’t know but finds out about in the worst possible way?

I had had some issues, believe it or not, with stalkers over the years. I had always wanted to write about a stalker, so what if Paul had a stalker? Why would Paul have a stalker? And then it occurred to me that Paul had a past he wasn’t ashamed of, but had never mentioned to Chanse. Not out of a fear that Chanse wouldn’t understand, but mainly because he had no need to tell him because it wasn’t anything dark. He had done some nude modeling when he was younger and he had also done some soft-core wrestling fetish porn, which is where the stalker came from. And what if I could work the con man he’s been hired by was someone Paul knew from the soft-core fetish porn? What if the guy contacted Paul because he’d been getting threatening notes on top of everything else going on in his life? And what if Chanse ran into Paul when he was leaving the con man’s offices, which brings all this out about Paul’s past? What if it shook a jealous, possessive, insecure Chanse enough for them to fight about it? And what if Paul disappears after the con man is murdered?

That was something I could work with, and so I did.

I’ve always called Murder in the Rue St. Ann my most under-appreciated work. By the time the book had come out, Paul had lost his eye to the muggers and we were in recovery mode. I didn’t do much of anything to promote the book (other than a signing at Outwrite in Atlanta, where I signed all of my books until they closed), and it kind of came and went quickly. I felt it was the most unappreciated of all my books. Jackson Square Jazz had come out earlier in the year before Paul was attacked, and it sucked all the oxygen up that year intended for me–it was the Lambda nominee, not Rue St. Ann–and I didn’t pay much attention to the book after it came out, either. The ‘christians” came for me a few months after the book’s release as well, and then Katrina…so yeah, Rue St. Ann got no press, got no attention, but somehow still managed to sell well.

I did have the next one planned, Murder in the Rue St. Claude, which there was a proposal in for, but Alyson was also going through other, deeply concerning changes that showed how little the higher-ups knew about anything, let alone publishing. But that’s a tale for another time, I think.

Le Freak

Happy Mardi Gras!

I woke up to a very cold apartment. The temperature dropped overnight and so, this morning I switched the HVAC from “cool” to “heat” and will wait to shower and so forth until the apartment is warm and toasty. I slept late again today–something I’ve done every say since Friday–but it felt good and every day I’ve felt rested and relaxed. PT was brutal yesterday and so when it was time for Proteus and Orpheus…the combination of exhaustion/fatigue along with the falling temperatures kept me very much inside. The good news is I am doing so well in PT that next week I am graduating to one PT session and one session at my gym on my own–I am trusted and recovered enough to try light weights for the arm and shoulder. This is nice, actually, and the transition from going to PT twice a week to going to the gym twice a week, gradually adding a third day, is going to be awesome. For me, it’s still going to be about fatigue and exhaustion until my stamina returns. And the only way for stamina to return fully is to…well, keep pushing myself, and isn’t that what exercises are about in the first place? It’s going to be a long and tough road, I reckon, but putting it off will only make it harder. And in all honesty, I actually enjoy going to PT. I love the endorphin rush, I love how I feel…it’s just been a while since I’ve felt exercise fatigue. and need to get used to it again.

I also made groceries last night after PT (and picked up the mail) and totally stocked up in a way I haven’t in a while; or it was just the most I’ve spent at the grocery store since my surgery. I also had the gods of Carnival parking looking out for me, as a spot in front of the house was open when I got back. On Orpheus Monday. That’s three times now that the parking gods have blessed me with ease. Paul apparently finished off our last king cake last night (I didn’t buy another, as you aren’t supposed to eat them on or after Ash Wednesday, so it would have had to be completely eaten today, and that’s a nope), which is great. I’ve maintained the weight loss from the surgery so far–my weight now fluctuates between 203 and 208, whereas before it was between 216-220; I’ll take it, thank you very much, and now that the Carnival “excuse” is over, I can’t really justify eating sweets and chips and things except as an occasional treat. I’ve been living on turkey sandwiches now for several weeks, for the most part. And if I start taking walks every night around the neighborhood (or on the nights where I don’t have to run errands), that will also help me sleep better (although that’s not been an issue since my new meds; apparently I slept soundly through a horrific overnight storm, which included hail in some places and flooding rains, on Sunday night). 2024 is my get healthy year, and by that I mean both mentally and physically.

Once I experienced the endorphin crash yesterday I was pretty much down for the day. I did do some cleaning and organizing, but then I crashed into my chair and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the day. I pretty much wasted most of the day, in all honesty, because I was definitely fatigued. I also got a book I’d bought from eBay that I had always wanted to read but never did, and thought of it recently for some reason I cannot recall right now: The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts. Ms. Lofts is very much forgotten today and never talked about much, but she was a terrific British mid-century writer who wrote historical novels, occasionally wrote about the romantic lives of royal women (some of her subjects included Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hortense de Beauharnais, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Isabella of Castile, to name a few) and she also wrote modern stories, usually some sort of suspense novel. The Little Wax Doll is horror/suspense, and it’s kind of irritating that I’ve never read it. I picked it up and read a chapter, was sucked in, and read another few before putting it down. I loved her short story collection of ghost stories (Hauntings: Is There Anybody There?), and look forward to reading this book and talking about Lofts more.

Zulu is passing; one of the fun things about waking up on Fat Tuesday is hearing a parade passing at the corner. When I woke up there was a Whitney Houston remix playing, now I can hear a marching band. I’m kind of glad it’s cold today, because I won’t wax sentimental about staying in on Mardi Gras. It’s not like I wouldn’t collapse with exhaustion by the time we walked to Canal Street anyway.

We also watched some more Abbott Elementary last night, and I have to say I love this show. Everyone in the cast is fantastic and the kids are adorable for the most part. And it’s clever, character driven, and funny as hell.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. It’s still a bit cold in there, so the shower will definitely have to wait, but I can get some other things done in the meantime. Have a lovely Tuesday, everyone, and I may be back later.

Da Ya Think I’m Sexy

Lundi Gras, aka Orpheus Monday, and I have taken the day off from work. I have to make groceries and lay in supplies since we’ll be trapped in the neighborhood except for a brief six or seven hour window after Orpheus and before Zulu tomorrow morning. I am up early because of PT at ten this morning, and here’s hoping I can get this done before it’s time for me to fly. It looks like a lovely day out there already, which means a hopefully lovely night for parades. Orpheus is my favorite night parade, mainly because I love Ole Smokey, the Orpheus train float, which is gorgeous. Orpheus also throws a shit ton. I did very well at Iris on Saturday morning, and while my endurance was sapped, I am glad I started going to parades again this year after missing last year. My moods this year are all over the place, since this is when Mom was in hospice last year. The anxiety medication works, of course, but even it isn’t strong enough to conquer grief, I guess.

I worked on the house yesterday a bit but my mind was too fatigued to read, which was a real bummer. I want to write this afternoon after I get home; time really slips through your fingers the older you get. I do need to work on the house some more today as well. We also streamed more of Abbott Elementary, keeping track of the Super Bowl on my phone. I did watch the boring first half, so gladly changed the channel when Paul came downstairs to take a break from working. Ironically, the second half turned out to be a lot more exciting, with the Chiefs winning in overtime 25-22. That sound we all heard last night was MAGA heads exploding. They are still exploding this morning–especially the MAGA christians (lower c deliberate, not a typo)–who’ve decided that the only Black woman in the Kelce suite (Ice Spice), who was wearing an upside down cross, is a Satanist because of it. The horrors! Satanism!

I’m sure it has nothing to do with her being Black. Might as well include a side of racism, right?

Fucking idiots. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Have fun in hell, apostates. I do love calling them on their sanctimony with a Bible verse. 1 Timothy 2:12 is my favorite when they’re women…

But then again, we’ve known they were dangerously stupid morons since 2015, and every day is a new lesson in their dangerous stupidity.

Heavy sigh.

I did do some good scribbling in my cool new journal yesterday as well. It’s always lovely when you’re starting a new journal, with all those fresh and clean pages to fill in, and there’s always a bit of sadness when I finish the old one. This last one was red, and one of the things I need to do either today or tomorrow is transcribe any notes on any story or book or essay that’s written in there that I haven’t already. I think I’ve managed somehow to get everything from the early part of the journal done, but you never know. If I don’t transcribe them, I need to at least put sticky notes on important pages so they are easier for me to find.

My memory continues to suck royally, but the lack of anxiety about it is nice (thank you, new medications!). I’m still trying to adapt to this new world for me; and of course I worry that my lack of anxiety is going to be a problem with motivating myself to write. I don’t think I’ve actually finished anything since the change in meds, but that was also correlated to my surgery and the recovery and the loss of stamina/endurance….which has me wondering how long I’ll be able to last at Orpheus, especially since I’ll be exhausted from PT this morning. I just checked the weather and it’s going to be windy and chilly tonight, in the low 50s, which is also unappealing.

Sigh.

Ah, well. It is what it is, I guess. So I am going to put on my PT clothes, finish my grocery list, and get a little more cleaned up before leaving for my appointment at PhysioFit. I will probably be back later. One never knows.

Hot Stuff

Sunday morning and everything aches. I went out to Iris yesterday by myself (see previous post) and had a lovely time. It was indeed a gorgeous day and a wonderful reminder of how much I love everything about Carnival–and why I put up with the challenges of living inside the box; because once you are safely home and have parked your car, the convenience of the parades being only a half-block away simply cannot be beat. I got a lovely haul of beads, caught numerous plushies and cups and various other toys–including a super-hero Iris cape–which I gave to the children who were near where I was standing. I also gave away a lot of beads. Despite my gradual exhaustion that came on slowly, it was marvelous and despite having to spend the rest of the day in my easy chair (and still feeling the muscle fatigue this morning) I do not regret going out there, just as I will not regret going out there for Orpheus tomorrow.

I guess the Super Bowl is tonight and I also suppose we may end up watching. I don’t really care about either team that much, honestly; I lived in Kansas so I have a connection to the Chiefs, and I also lived in California and San Francisco is the motherland of my people. Of course, I’ll wind up rooting for Taylor’s boyfriend because it is fun watching the MAGAts lose their minds over this. I also love that “liberals” have now ruined football for them. They can’t root for Taylor’s boyfriend so they’ll root for the queer homeland and Nancy Pelosi’s team?

Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Eat shit and die, MAGAts. You don’t own football, either.

Paul stayed up late Friday night working and so he was asleep until shortly after I came in from the parades to find a toy for Sparky on our doorknob from the neighbor ladies; it’s one of those serpentine tunnels for cats, and Sparky loves his already. I think I’m going to get him some more toys once i get the house back into some semblance of order. I am going to try to work on that today and work on some writing as well; I also want to spend some time reading Lina Chern’s book, which I’ll probably do after I finish this post. It’s quite good actually, despite my taking so long to read it–which definitely should not be seen as a criticism of the book, which will get its own entry at some point. Once he got up we watched My Best Friend’s Exorcism on Prime. It’s based on the Grady Hendrix novel, and I do need to read his work. (I really loved Paperbacks from Hell, which was his first book, about the horror boom of the 1970’s thru the early 1990’s.) He’s also openly gay, and the movie is terrific. It’s set in the 1980’s, and while I was a teenager in the 1970’s I was only in my twenties during the 1980’s, so all of it–cultural references, clothes, the music–was also pleasant nostalgia for me. (The 1980’s was a difficult time for me, but I really need to confront that decade and my memories and move past them at some point.)

I then showed Paul the pilot for Abbott Elementary, and we then binged the entire first season and well into the second before it was time for me to call it a night. This show is amazing, and I had always meant for us to get around to it. I’m glad we finally are watching, because the cast is fantastic; the writing is sharp, crisp and funny; and the characters are fun and interesting. Highly recommended, and looking forward to getting back into it before watching the Super Bowl (or not. I can certainly follow the game on social media).

And on that note, I am bringing this to a close. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll catch you again later.

Vincent

Here we are on Iris Saturday and I feel fine.

PT was hard yesterday–it keeps getting harder every time–but I got through it, did very well with it, and then walked outside, my endorphins pumping through my veins and it was simply a beautiful, sunny day in New Orleans. I picked up my prescription before PT, and got the mail afterwards before driving home down Prytania Street. I did have trouble finding a place to park on the way there, so was a few minutes late–it’s close to Napoleon and people were already camping out on the parade route for the night parades–so I was certain I wouldn’t find parking when I got home. My spot was there Thursday night when I got home, so what were the odds I’d have parade parking luck two days in a row? But lo and behold, my spot was waiting for me when I got home.

Needless to say, that also dramatically picked up my spirits! And now the car won’t move again until Monday…which begs the question, will I have parking when I get home after PT Monday morning?

I spent most of my time out on the corner Thursday night just marveling at it, the way I always do at first–so many people, so many costumes, so much partying and so much joy; how dark it is here at night, so it’s like the dark is reaching down from the sky to absorb the lights from the parade and flames of the flambeaux, and everyone is a good mood. It’s so lovely to just go out and hang with friends and neighbors and strangers. You always end up talking to total strangers and having a good time, relaxed and a slightly buzzed (some people do overdo it and become Carnival tragedies) and watchings kids tossing footballs around on the street when there’s a break between parades (or a breakdown in the parade) and of course, the marching bands are fucking amazing. I am going to write about Mardi Gras again soon, so it’s good to drink it all in again and remember fun times of past seasons.

I was too fatigued from the PT yesterday to go out there last night, so we watched LSU Gymnastics beat Georgia last night and then just relaxed for the rest of the night. I did watch the first episode of Abbott Elementary, which I really enjoyed, so we’ll continue watching that, I think. Despite a great night’s sleep, I am still feeling fatigued this morning, which means I’ll be dead tired after Iris today. We’ll see how I feel about Tucks after Iris is over. Sunday is always insane down there at the corner, so we generally skip Sundays, and then it’s Orpheus Monday.

I did get some chores done yesterday, too. I worked on the laundry room and swept the living room, got all the bedding laundered, and rested after getting my work-at-home duties completed. I think since it’s Iris Saturday, all I will do today is read and watch television or some movies or something. I did finish reading Deliberate Cruelty, so I am going to try not to start another one until all the ones I am in the middle of are complete. I also need to make a series of to-do lists: one for the apartment, one for my career, and one for my every day life. I need to snap out of the lethargy, and I really need to dive headfirst into writing again. I want to get these stories finished and I want to get back to work on the book I’m in the midst of and has been stalled for quite some time.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and ready for Iris to roll. See you later, Constant Reader, and may your Saturday be everything you desire in one.