Today already feels off. That’s the time change, no doubt; it’s hard to believe I slept as well as I did last night–I went to bed early so I could get up earlier by the clock than by the body, figuring that was the easiest way to transition into getting up early for work this week. The weekend, which held such promise, was derailed by having to deal with getting my delivery items that were supposed to come Friday night delivered yesterday; they finally did come and it was taken care of–but the delivery window was 1-3, which fucked up the rest of the day for me to run the other errands I wanted to get done, which now have to be done this morning. It’s fine, but any change to routine triggers the anxiety so I am trying to not let it defeat me this morning. But the change in plans did kind of end up wasting my Saturday; the delivery came around two-thirty, and it was already too late for me to go out running errands. Of course this morning I am thinking no it wasn’t too late for you to start your errands but my mind works a certain way and usually I can’t see these things except in highsight.
I did read some of the novellas I have partially finished that have been lying around for years, which begs the question I could have sworn I’ve worked on these things more recently than the files I am finding, so have I lost track of all time completely? But for the one I am thinking of, it absolutely makes the most sense, as I now remember I’d actually submitted it to an anthology, which meant trimming it down from the length that it originally was. I have found a call for submissions which includes novellas–which was why I was looking at them again yesterday–which has me thinking about revisions and rewrites and what can be done with these manuscripts. One is slightly longer than forty thousand, and only needs a minimum of twenty-five thousand more to become an actual novel. I reread it yesterday, and it does center a bad trope that would have to be super-creatively pulled off to work, but I also think recentering the main character from a straight cisgender white high school girl to a gay teenager could easily help with that. (It also needs a name change, “Spellcaster” doesn’t really work and was also a drawback to what I had done.) The one I was looking for was “Fireflies,” which is another Corinth County story (I feel like I should always explain that the locals pronounce it “carnth”) and is one of the more disturbing county stories I’ve done, but I also think it’s one that works for the submission call. Or not; we shall see.
The other one I was able to read was “Festival of the Redeemer,” which is another attempt at a du Maurier-like story set in Venice. Rereading “Don’t Look Now” recently, of course, put me in mind of this story, which is one of the few novellas that has an actual full draft done. (Several of the others are incomplete–“The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain,” “A Holler Full of Kudzu,” and “Once a Tiger”.) Rereading it yesterday reminded me of what I was doing with it–or trying to, at any rate–and I could see where I lost the thread and the voice, which was the most important thing about the novella. I also need to get organized on the next book project I am going to work on, but I need to write a proposal first. That’s the big goal for today; get better organized, run those errands, get the proposal organized, and start pulling the next book together. One step to getting things better organized is to complete a thorough to-do list and actually pay attention to it; these lists do no good if you don’t consult them at least once a day. I had gotten a great start on one this past week, so I think I am going to work on pulling that together.
I also need to measure the workstation windows before I head to Lowe’s.
The Saints are playing today at noon, but I think that’s the best time for me to be running errands and potentially hanging window blinds, so I think that’s enough stress and anxiety for me today–I can follow the Saints game on social media. A Haunting in Venice is streaming now, so we may go ahead and watch some movies later on, as we are all caught up on the shows we are watching (I am episodes behind on Foundation, but the beauty of streaming is you can always catch up at some point), and there’s another movie streaming now I am interested in seeing even if I can’t think of its name at the moment. I’ve already made a grocery list for today–I am making ravioli for dinner tonight and need to pick up some bread to go with it–and am hopeful that sometime either this week or next I will get my teeth at last and I can bid adieu to the soft diet…just in time for my surgery. I’ve done some research–which I’d been avoiding–on the recovery time from this type of surgery and mine is more complicated than the basic one I am finding out about on-line, so this is bare-minimums I am looking at–probably at least three weeks on medical leave from the office, which I will need to go talk to Admin and HR about at some point this week so I can get it taken care of, or at least get the process started. I will also need physical therapy for three to four months. Yay. Ah, well, at least I have the resources that this won’t bankrupt me, which is a good thing.
And on that note, I am going to get to work on things this morning and take advantage of this extra hour I have this morning rather than wasting it. So, have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, but be warned–there’s more blatant self-promotion coming along at some point.
As if you weren’t sick of my self-promotion already, now I get to start promoting Mississippi River Mischief!
It’s hard to believe that this is Scotty’s ninth adventure. Not bad for someone who was just supposed to be a one-off, a stand-alone comic madcap adventure that took place during Southern Decadence. The idea for it came to me at Southern Decadence in 1999; on Saturday afternoon I somehow managed to get a prime spot on the balcony at the Parade to watch the massive crowd of sweating shirtless men partying down below at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann. I noticed a really hot guy wearing sweats and carrying a gym bag fighting his way through the crowd to get to the Pub downstairs, and I recognized him as one of the dancers for the weekend. In that instant, I had a mental flash of a dancer being chased through a crowd of shirtless sweating men at the corner by bad guys with guns and the dancer only wearing a lime-green thong. I held that idea in my head, and sometime later that weekend Paul said to me, “you know, you should write a book set during Decadence,” and I grinned and replied, “I already have the idea.” I had started writing a short story called “Bourbon Street Blues” a year or so before this; but realized that would make a better title for the stripper crime caper during Southern Decadence, so I made a folder for it and kept it in my files and in the back of my mind. Several years later, when talking with an editor about something else when I worked at Lambda Book Report, I asked if that might be something he’d be interested in. He said send him a proposal, which I did–having no clue what I was doing–and they offered me a two book deal, turning my stand-alone into a series. Having no idea how to write the second book in such a series, the money was too good for me to say no or to quibble, figuring I’ll figure it out when I need to–which is really the motto of my career.
The Scotty series has always had a bit of a “pantser” feel to it for me because I’ve always pantsed it. I knew that the first adventure–Bourbon Street Blues–was going to be that Southern Decadence story, and I also knew I was going to fictionalize a governor race, basing it on a senate race that occurred when we first moved here and we couldn’t believe that one of the candidates was actually a serious candidate (sadly, he was just a harbinger of what was to come in Louisiana; now he’d seem like one of the fucking sane ones), and I kind of borrowed, a bit unconsciously, from the Stephen King character of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone. Bourbon Street Blues was a prescient novel in so many ways–and I had no idea of that at the time, seriously. There’s a scene where the Goddess shows Scotty the potential flooding of New Orleans after a levee failure (in the book it was deliberate though) and of course I predicted the Right’s move into full-bore hardcore neo-Nazism as well in that book…never dreaming it would become a reality.
Scotty has always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants series; I’ve never really outlined or planned the books or the series in any way, other than an amorphous idea that the love triangle situation I created in the first book would take three books to resolve. During the course of the third book I realized I needed at least one more book to resolve that story, and so it went from stand-alone to trilogy to quartet…and then Katrina happened. Katrina created an unplanned gap in the series, and I never really knew how to do Katrina from a Scotty perspective. It struck me that they wouldn’t have evacuated, but Scotty wouldn’t have ridden the storm out in his apartment, nor would his parents have done so at their place; they would have all gone to the Garden District where Papa and Maman Diderot have a generator. I just didn’t see how I could write a funny Scotty book about the levee failure and the city’s destruction. Also, we learned something about Scotty in the second book (Jackson Square Jazz) that I meant to deal with in the fourth book. By the time I was ready and able and willing to write that fourth book in the series…well, I forgot that I’d planned on dealing with that issue from Scotty’s past in it, and never did ever circle back around to that resolution of something from his youth.
I did remember when I decided to write Mississippi River Mischief, though. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with Royal Street Reveillon, in which something happened in Scotty’s personal life that was tied into the case, but I couldn’t write another book and pretend that never happened, even though it would be hard to deal with in the text of the book and story. But then, as I was trying to work it out in my head, I realized now you can circle around back to that issue from Scotty’s teen years because this is the right place and time for him to be reminded of it because of what happened to Taylor.
And you know what? I think it made for a better story now than it would have almost fourteen years ago.
Scotty has grown a lot over the twenty or so years (!!!) I’ve been writing him, but who he is at his core has never changed. Scotty is a good person, with a genuine sense of kindness, and is pretty level-headed and never really lets things get to him the way I let things get to me–and God knows, he’s dealt with a lot more shit than I have in life. I like his sense of humor, I like his spirituality, and I like his untrained, he-doesn’t-know-how-it-works psychic abilities, and of course, I love his family. His parents are amazing, his older brother and sister are also pretty cool characters, and of course Frank and Colin are also fun to write. I also never knew how subversive I was being by creating a throuple long before anyone ever talked about these kinds of relationships within the queer community–and it’s lasted all these years. There have been ups and downs, of course, but they always wind up coming back together again no matter what happens–and a lot has happened. Both Scotty and Frank have been shot a few times, not to mention all those car accidents–and he’s also helped cover up a crime (no spoilers here, no worries!).
Imagine my delight and surprise to discover that the meeting I thought I had to go into the office for later this morning had a virtual option, so I am not leaving the house today–other than to run a necessary errand later.
I may even put that off until tomorrow.
Yesterday was a lovely day at the office. Everyone was in a pleasant mood, and everything flowed well. I enjoyed all my client interactions and everything ran smoothly the way it is supposed to always run, and that was lovely. I wasn’t even terribly tired when I got off work, but knew I’d be in a mood by the time I got home. Why? Because there was a Saints game last night in the Superdome, and traffic in the CBD was going to be a nightmare. It was, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and I made an impatient decision about the route home that was a big mistake. It took me about forty-five minutes to get home from work–what usually takes at most fifteen minutes; Wednesday night, for example, I detoured up to the Carrollton corridor to go to the Rouses, and still managed to grocery shop and everything and get home less than an hour after I left the office. Saints game also meant crowd at the bar on the corner, which meant difficulty finding a place to park. No big deal, I did find a place to park and then came inside.
Heavy sigh.
So, we have guys here working on the roof and the gutters. There’s also a bridge from the patio upstairs over to the carriage house gallery. It had apparently rotted; so they’ve been working on that. The patio is directly over my kitchen. I came inside, and there was debris all over the stove and that counter. “Weird,” I thought, and actually said out loud, annoyed, “well, I’m glad I cleaned in here” before looking up to see a blue sky. Yes, while they were working on the bridge yesterday, they were trying to do something and the kitchen ceiling/patio floor gave way. Unable to help myself I yelled, “Oh, fuck!” Well, the thing about a hole in the ceiling is the poor workers–who hadn’t really done anything wrong; it wasn’t their fault that portion of ceiling/floor had rotted out, of course–heard me. And then I went outside to see what they were doing and one of them sheepishly asked me how I was doing, and I replied in full candor, “well, I’m not thrilled about the hole in my kitchen ceiling” which led to apologies and explanations and they even came by several times to apologize again. They also cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and put up a piece of plywood to cover the hole, reassuring me this was a stopgap measure and they’d repair it. It was amusing–well, it is now, not so much at the time–but I then found myself reassuring them I knew they didn’t do it on purpose, thanking them for cleaning up the mess and covering the hole, etc etc etc. I had intended to work on my short story in progress, “The Blues Before Dawn,” when I got home and maybe read some of Angel Luis Colón’s Infested, but that of course disrupted the entire evening so I grabbed Tug and he slept in my lap while I watched the last episode of the first season of Moonlighting (it was a late midseason replacement and the first season was only six episodes, including the pilot). Paul came home, he went through the stages of grief about the kitchen ceiling that I already had, and then we watched The Morning Show and Our Flag Means Death before I went to bed (I actually fell asleep during OFMD so have to rewatch at some point today or tomorrow).
I slept deeply and well, not arising this morning until eight (other than the usual “Tug needs food NOW” daily five a.m. wake-up) and now am facing my day. I am going to get this done and posted, probably work on some emails before starting my work-at-home duties, which will also include chores around the house (laundry’s first load already going in the laundry room) and hopefully, I will get some work done on that short story. I had decided to write this as a Sherlock-in-New-Orleans story, but not told by Watson–which is a risk on top of a risk–and then see how it went. In talking to a friend yesterday I also realized part of the reason I am having trouble writing and/or getting started on a new project is because everything is in limbo because of my arm surgery. I don’t know how long the recovery process is going to be and I also don’t know how much writing I’ll be able to do in a cast and sling (and not the good kind of sling, either–see what I did there?) I’m afraid to commit to a deadline knowing that I can’t even self-delude myself that I’ll make that deadline (I never do, but I never agree to one knowing ahead of time I won’t make it). It’s also been an extremely rough year for me, and there’s nothing wrong with not being as productive as you would like because other things are going on in your life that you simply can’t avoid dealing with–which is usually my preference, immature and childish as it is–and recognizing patterns of behavior within yourself. I’ve done a lot of self-examination and reevaluating my past as well as who I am along with why I am who I am, if that makes sense. A lot of that had to do with Mom dying, as well as me recognizing that probably my absolute best work inevitably always winds up being set in Alabama. That Alabama tie, those roots, run so deep inside me that they’re inescapable, really.
I also started reading Death Drop last night. Reviews are starting to come in, and friends are reading it and telling me they’re enjoying it, and the truth was I couldn’t really remember a lot about the book so thought it was probably a good idea to reread it. So much was going on during the process of writing the book–it and Mississippi River Mischief, which doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that I was actually writing two books at the same time (not recommended, aspiring authors, don’t be a Greg; be smarter)–that I couldn’t really remember much of it (I may need to reread Streetcar too) and being familiar with your own work that you’re promoting is usually smart. Now that my memory isn’t what it used to be, rereading my work is like reading something new by another author because I don’t remember anything about the book itself other than the drudgery of writing, editing, and revising the damned thing. But I was very pleased with it–I wasn’t able to finish the reread, but got pretty deep into the book–and it flows well and there are parts that are seriously funny. Of course, like always I started nitpicking at it, but after about chapter three I turned off the internal editor and just read it as though I was reading it for pleasure rather than reminding myself of what I had written. The characters are likable and all of them–even the minor ones–seemed fully realized and with their own agency; by which I mean they aren’t always just dropping everything to rush to help Jem out at the expense of their own lives and aren’t there to simply feed him information or help him work through his problems. I also liked the voice, and I really like my main character Jem Richard, the glam artist just dipping his toes into the world of drag performance. I intended it to be a drag queen origin story–the answer to the question “so how did you start doing drag?”–and it absolutely works in that regard.
And the book itself is gorgeous, simply gorgeous. I couldn’t be more pleased.
It’s also weird having two new books drop in such a short period of time. It certainly wasn’t planned that way, and entirely happened because my life blew up and I didn’t make deadlines for either. But I promised myself I would be better about promotion and so forth, so here we go.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later or perhaps tomorrow.
I withdrew a short story I had submitted to a magazine in September of 2022; thirteen months is more than enough time to decide whether or not you want a story or not, and if you haven’t gotten to it by now, well, how long do you need? There’s a serious conversation about short story publishing that needs to be had at some point–but I think that aspect of the business isn’t taken as seriously as “book” publishing, and there aren’t many people who primarily focus on the short form for the abuses of writers that occur in that small part of the business to really be brought to public attention because, let’s face it, nobody really cares. I know that one of the big name prestigious crime short story publishers always takes twelve to fourteen months to respond to submissions…and when you know that going in, that’s one thing. This market I’ve published in before and it’s never taken even a fraction of this long to get a response to a submission; it had been pending on Submittable since the day after I clicked “submit.” It may be right for another market I am looking at right now–and I had wanted to include it in my next short story collection as a republished story. Heavy heaving sigh.
Maybe someday I will do a blog post about the slog publishing short stories can often prove to be. I was in one anthology that sat on my story (and everyone else’s) for at least three years (more like four, if not five); finally released the book but never sent me a print copy (I did get the electronic one) and I never did get the really nice check they offered me to get me to write the story. There were rarely any updates, either–and certainly none since it finally saw “print.”
Sigh. The glamorous life of a writer is mostly spent tracking down payments and author copies, seriously. Well, maybe not mostly, but it takes up a lot more time and energy than a non-writer might think.
I slept really well last night, with Tug making his usual five a.m. supplication, and I’ve already discovered a quirk: if I give him food, he will squeak at me until I dump out his water bowl and refill it–every single time. He won’t even start eating until he hears the water running in the sink. Granted, I always change out the water every time I feed him–but it’s part of his routine and he won’t eat until he knows he’s getting fresh water to go with the food. I think he’s completely settled into our lives as our house cat, too. He certainly believes he’s Lord of the Manor, and when he’s full grown he’s going to be a terror–because even pint-sized as he is now, he can get up to places you wouldn’t think; he’s a climber, so any possibility of a Christmas tree again is completely gone; which is fine, really. I do love Christmas, but it’s really for kids, and the older I get the more I care about the time off than holiday joy and gifts and things like that.
I made groceries on the way home last night at the Carrollton Rouse’s, which is becoming my favorite Rouse’s; the ones on the CBD and on Tchoupitoulas are convenient, but the one on Carrollton has more selection; which means going there I can get everything in one stop, whereas at either of the others I need to go to another vendor to get the rest of the things I need, which is very frustrating; and so even the extra time it takes to get up there and back is actually made up by the times savings of only going to one store. I was also very tired when I got home–we’d had a rather busy day at the office–so I didn’t read or do anything much other than put the groceries away; Paul had a board meeting so he didn’t get home until late, either. I did work on my story “The Blues Before Dawn”, and made some decent headway on it; the question is whether I want to make it another “Sherlock-in-New-Orleans” story, which I kind of want to do; I think I’ll do that for a draft and then do a second where the detective isn’t Sherlock, but I like the idea of writing a Sherlock story from someone else’s perspective, as well. I really like the idea of writing a bunch of Sherlock short stories in 1916 New Orleans, with Storyville (cliché, I know) and the Italian immigrants in the Quarter and the little Chinatown district on either side of Canal and illicit queer bars servicing sailors and so forth; how fun is that? And of course the Opera House was still there in the Quarter too–and people still spoke French in New Orleans, or at least the bastardized Louisiana version of it. I think my goal for the weekend is to finish a draft of the story and do some more work on the second Valerie novel.
And I have to go into the office tomorrow for my work-at-home day; which I may switch over to Monday; I’m not sure and I haven’t really decided yet, to be honest. I have to go in for a benefits meeting, and was thinking that maybe the thing to do would be to work in the office since I have to go there anyway; but….now I am thinking I should just go for the meeting and maybe work at home around it; I am not sure, and I suppose I will decide tomorrow morning when I get up–depending on when I get up, that is. Frankly, I am leaning towards just going in for the meeting and being done with it and coming back home. I like not having to get up on Friday mornings–even if I rarely sleep past seven as it is–but the lack of alarm going off is actually quite lovely.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Have a great one, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.
Well, we survived a Friday the 13th in October–terrifying!
It was actually a rather beautiful day in New Orleans, in all honesty. I had a bit of a morning–there’s been some anxiety building inside my head since I got home from work on Wednesday to discover a jury duty summons in the mail. (For the record, I am not one of the majority of Americans who hate doing this little part of their responsibilities as a citizen; I always think, these are probably the same people who bitch constantly about our flawed criminal justice system–which is not incorrect–but you don’t get to complain about juries and the system when you resent serving on juries or try to get out of doing it. The system is only as good as the jurors selected, after all. Anyway, I digress. I got the summons on Wednesday afternoon, and I was supposed to report this morning. Obviously, it was delayed or went out late or something, but the last thing I need to do is deal with jury duty between now and my surgery; all those tests and appointments and so forth that i have to do before the surgery, etc. etc. I decided to fill out the form on-line and ask for a deferment; alas, it wasn’t until I finished registering that I found out if I wanted to be excused, I needed to go to the courthouse and ask in person as well as provide a note from my doctor. Wow, I thought, kind of like being back in high school. I had an MRI scheduled Friday morning, so I figured I’d ask them then. Well, my surgeon wasn’t in the office and no one else wanted to do it, suggesting I check with my primary care. As my primary care office is near the courthouse and I had to pick up a prescription there anyway, I went by. Primary care wans’t in, and was advised to try my surgeon. Jesus fucking Christ, apparently I woke up in a Kafka novel. So, I decided to go to the courthouse and see what happened….and they literally told me to have my doctor email it to the court clerk, gave me a card with her name and email address, and sent me home.
Who knew the Orleans Parish Courthouse would be the easiest, “no big deal” part of this? Certainly not one Gregalicious, that’s for sure.
I came home and did my work-at-home chores, as well as my laundry chores, and then Tug settled in for a nap in my lap while I finished reading the Riley Sager (which I enjoyed; more on that later) and started Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill and am quite liking it as well. Paul and I watched a horror film from 2007 called Trick r Treat, which was kind of clever yet neither of us had heard of it before. That was in honor of both Friday the 13th and it being spooky season and all. I do love fall in New Orleans. It was lovely running around this morning doing all that stuff with lovely sunny but cool weather; the kind where you can wear sleeves and jeans outside comfortably.
The refrigerator is being delivered today, so I have to make room for the delivery guys and hope that they come earlier rather than later. I have no control over this whatsoever, so I am just going to roll with it and see where things wind up. While I wait for the refrigerator I am going to try to get this done as well as some other things; trying not to get anxious or worry about things that cannot be controlled. They have my cell phone number, after all, and if I keep it with me…it’s really irrational to get anxious about things like this, isn’t it? Just like it was irrational to get so worked up and tense over the jury duty thing this morning. It’s just wasted energy and it just leaves me tired, and I really don’t need anything else in my life to make me tired; I can do that quite well and need no further assistance with that, thank you very much. UPDATE: it is out for delivery and expected between 3:30 and 7:30, which means most likely groceries will have to wait until tomorrow and I can actually spend the morning cleaning up down here and making it not quite the disaster area it currently appears to be. A quick glance at Twitter shows that Tulane won at Memphis last night, and apparently Colorado blew a big lead and lost to Stanford.
I slept really well last night–and woke up at five, like always. I fell back asleep until Tug (Paul has started calling him Sparky because he gets the zoomies–but the next time he does I’m getting the laser light out–nothing like the red dot to wear your kitten out of his BIg Kitten Energy.) wanted his breakfast at six–can’t blame him, and I’m kind of awake already anyway. I stayed in bed until about seven before rising, thinking that was a lot m rore rational than trying to stay in bed–especially since I knew the delivery window was between eight and eight; hope springs eternal that it was going to be a morning delivery. DENIED. Tug now is completely at home and curious about everything; there are bottle caps everywhere from him chasing them around, and of course I always have to be careful with what I leave on surfaces. It’s also election day here in Louisiana, and I must go vote so I can vote against our evil attorney general’s bid for governor, which would be a disaster so great people would start remembering Bobby Jindal’s disgraceful tenure in Baton Rouge with nostalgia.
The salt intrusion has been slowed significantly–the last I heard the salt water wouldn’t be here until around Thanksgiving–a month later than projected, and there was a chance it would dissipate before then, too. I should probably pay more attention, but I have a flat of water and a two-gallon jug (which I will save for hurricane season in the attic, if the salt doesn’t get up here after all, and I should always be prepared for hurricane season anyway), but probably won’t have to buy any more of that.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. There’s a lot I can get done this morning, and I intend to do it before curling up with my book with whatever game is on at eleven in the background. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader; I’ll probably be back later.
Yesterday was a little frustrating, I am not going to lie. The day went off the rails early and just never seemed to get back on track. Frustrating news, irritation, depression, and high anxiety all combined to make yesterday a challenge for me to stay on track and balanced, so much so that I just felt overwhelmed and didn’t even try to cope or stay centered because I felt tired all day on top of everything else that was going so irritatingly wrong yesterday.
I did sleep well Sunday night, but I was still worn out from the driving and so forth from the weekend.
So yeah, I was channeling some Major Bitch Energy yesterday, but managed to keep it all inside and not inflict it on anyone else. This was the big win of the day–because I used to just give rein to it and everyone else would just need to get out of my way or else. But I didn’t snap at anyone, I didn’t swear at anyone when I was driving home after work–but I did drive straight home after work, despite needing to run errands. I was smart enough to realize how close I was to snapping at someone or just being a dick in general, so I went home to spare the world and some unsuspecting person my foul mood.
Sigh.
And then I got home to find out that they’d started working on the house today–not really sure what they are doing but it’s an old house in New Orleans so it literally could be anything–and didn’t give any warning–as evidenced by the kitchen wall clock lying in pieces on the kitchen floor (it’s easy to put back together), and then I noticed a lot of the framed pictures in the laundry room were on the floor. The workers didn’t give any warning nor did our landlady; but Sam the handyman knew there were things on the walls so he called Paul. He got five minutes notice, but didn’t think about the clock in the kitchen–and why would he? It’s a whole different room, even if it is connected to the laundry room and one wall is also the back wall of the house.
I also slept wrong or something either Saturday or Sunday night so my neck was sore yesterday (still is this morning, in fact)–turning my head to the left hurt, which of course made driving an absolute joy. I do remember taking good health and not always hurting for granted for way too long. Sigh, I guess there is some truth to that saying you really don’t know how much you’ll miss something until it’s gone; it never even crossed my mind to be grateful I was in good physical condition. I didn’t even know how lucky I was; but I certainly am very well aware that I am a physical wreck at sixty two. Heavy heaving sigh. My neck is still sore this morning, but Ben-Gay has been doing the trick and it’s not quite as bad this morning as it was yesterday.
So, by the time I finally got the laundry started last night, I was already in a mood and said fuck it and repaired to the living room with Tug for some lap time. A purring sleeping kitten in your lap is the best thing for anxiety and stress after a bad day.
Hopefully today will be a good day. I am going to attempt to start eating more “not soft” foods this week at some point. I do still have a lot of that soft food stuff to get rid of anyway, so its just as well I was wrong about how long it would take to get my dentures (I don’t think I ever really told a timeline, which was why I got confused) because all this remaining soft food I’ve not gotten to yet will get used and it won’t just sit in the cabinet for months (years) waiting for me to get fed up at last and start pitching things, right? And I don’t need to have the expensive ice cream–it just has a high calorie count and is very filling and I like it, so I can probably start doing without that; maybe switch to something less expensive and with chunks of stuff in it. I don’t know that I can’t chew so much as I can’t bite into things, which is why I am going to start practicing with other foods. Most of this soft stuff is just carbohydrates, which my body is turning into sugar which is making me pre-diabetic which is also building up my uric acid which is manifesting as gout (everything is connected in your body–everything). I did make it into work, only had to use two hours of my sick time (I get to use two more on Wednesday when I get my sonogram), and managed to get some things done both there and on the home front.
As I was driving both to and back from Panama City Beach over the weekend, I also went down memory lane back to my childhood again. I hadn’t been back to Panama City Beach since the summer I graduated from high school, back in 1978; we went on a trip to visit the relatives and the beach and all for about three weeks that summer, right after I graduated. We never used I-10 back then–was there an I-10 then? Probably–but once I took the exit for 331 south, I knew exactly where I was; Defuniak Springs, and 331 was the road to my grandmother’s old place on Choctawhatchee Bay. And sure enough, 331 took me to the bridge over the bay–no longer a draw bridge or a two lane bridge; now it’s two separate bridges with two lanes crossing in either direction–and the gas station at the corner where you’d turn to go to my grandmother’s is now a park, which I didn’t catch until I was past it. I was going to turn and drive down there on the way home, just to take a look, but by the time I got across the bridge I was deep into The Only Good Indians and I was tired and just wanted to go home. But these old sites–and the incredible beauty of the beach at Panama City Beach–brought back a lot of memories and thoughts about me, my life, and my writing; as did spending time with my aunts and uncle on my father’s side of the family–none of whom I’d seen outside of weddings or funerals since that last trip down there before we moved to California in the the first months of 1981, and that made me go down that road. We spent most of Saturday after I arrived watching football games–Alabama-Texas A&M, and then Notre Dame-Louisville–which reminded me again of how deeply rooted football is as a family thing; we bond over watching football games, pretty much rooting for the same teams while hating the same ones. (They all overlook my LSU fandom, but they’re all Auburn fans who hate Alabama with a passion–my dad and mom and our little branch were the exceptions; rooting for Alabama unless they were playing Auburn. For me, the SEC is now LSU–with Auburn a distant second and Alabama just behind them in third. We all hate Tennessee and Florida–but they hate Georgia; I don’t. Even Dad hates Georgia.) But it made me think more about the panhandle books and the Alabama books I still want to write–and I was also laughing at myself for trying to make the books set there (like the ones in Kansas) so based in fictionalized reality that I feel tied to making the towns almost exactly the same; it’s fiction, lunkhead, so you can change things; it’s okay. (This also kind of dovetails with my “NOLier than Thou” post; because I realized I’ve always created fictional places in New Orleans while still trying to get the city right…it’s really about the mentality than the actual geography.)
But I would like to go back and explore; perhaps Paul and I can find a place over there to rent for a few days–a condo or something so we can eat at home and so forth; Paul would be more than happy to just be given beach access 24/7–and then I could think about the two or three books I want to set there. (I also want to set some books and more stories in the fictional town of Tuscadega, which I invented and based on Freeport, where my grandmother lived. “Cold Beer No Flies” was set there, for example. And driving through Mobile made me think of Dark Tide, too.) It was also interested because the Google Earth views I’d looked at made Panama City Beach look a lot different. It is a lot different than it used to be–more built up, no vacant lots, and yes, there are condos and massive resort hotels built on the beach side of Lower Beach Road (there was only a Beach Road back in the day–now there’s Lower, Middle, and Upper Beach Roads), but there are still public beaches where you can drive up and park right by the dunes and walk a very short distance to the beach, and those tourist-serving little shops that sell gimcracks and souvenirs and beach towels and inflatable rafts and suntan lotion are still there–not as many, but there are some, bearing names like Surfin’ Safari and so forth. I also took some pictures to help me remember things if and when I write about the area again. (It’s where I want to set my Where the Boys Are/slasher novel mash-up that I am calling Where the Boys Die. )
And another story–another one of the ones from back in the day when I was still in college and trying to figure out how to become a writer (which is what I thought those classes were for; they were not) I had written another one that I had turned in with “Whim of the Wind” (the first semester with a good teacher, I had started to feel like I could be a writer again, and by the second semester when I took the class a second time–you were allowed to take it twice–I decided to write a lot of stories to turn in….which was when I first started writing fast, I suppose. Anyway, when I turned in “Whim of the Wind” I turned in another story called “Thunder Island,” which was also set in the panhandle. It was also well received by the class, but not as well as the other, and so I’ve never really thought much about the second. I tried rewriting it once, but to no avail, and since then it’s just kind of been languishing in the files. Ironically, the story was about someone who was returning, after a long time, to the area after a funeral and was remembering a summer when he was a kid, staying on the bay with his grandmother…but while the story was good and worked, now it’s problematic. I’d have to update the story and change some things, and it’s not a crime story at all–although technically in its original problematic form it was an inadvertent crime story. Funny that I completely had forgotten writing a story set in the panhandle almost forty years ago that actually predicted the drive I just took. Maybe I should look it over again? May not be a bad idea.
But the most important thing for me to do today is assess my situations and figure out where I am at with everything, and what I need to get done. I am still in the midst of medical processes–part of yesterday’s problems stemmed from me either never being told or misunderstanding the denture process, which is much longer than I thought and I won’t be getting the final ones for another four to five weeks–and tomorrow morning I am having a sonogram on my heart and Friday an MRI on my shoulder. I need to get a handle on things because all the medical stuff keeps pushing everything else out of my brain; how do people prepare for surgery when they have a gazillion other things to do on top of that? I guess you just endure. I have no control over the situation–which is probably part of my problem with the whole thing–and just have to put my fate in the hands of others, which is something I never like doing and always chafe at; it’s part of the reason why flying is such an issue for me (one of the many reasons, all of which have to do with my faulty brain wiring)–I have no control over anything. You have to surrender control of your fate to the airline once you walk into the airport until you walk out of the airport at your destination and that really chafes at me. Anxiety, of course–on the one hand I know what the general disorder is and that everything else I thought was wrong with my brain’s wiring is just a symptom of the macro disorder, and I am better about controlling it now that I know what it is…but yesterday was one of those days where I felt no control at all over my life and situation and so that started the spiraling and it just got out of control.
But I am happy that I’m better and more balanced (and better rested ) this morning–the neck is still stiff and sore–and on that note, will head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will be back later, probably.
(NOTE: I started writing this post back in January, after I’d returned to New Orleans from my last Mystery Writers of America board meeting–this is to give context to the opening paragraph– as you are no doubt well aware, Constant Reader, that I’ve not been back to New York since January; so this is that same trip where this happened and I started thinking about these things, which have never been far out of the forefront of my mind since then.)
While I was in New York recently, walking around to and fro, here and there, hither and yon, I was always checking my phone (and yes, I hate that I’ve become one of those people) and then shoving it back into my pants pocket without putting it to sleep first or closing the app that was open. As I walked around, of course this led to my phone doing all kinds of weird things –closing an app and opening another, etc.; but at least there were no butt dials, right? At one point, when I pulled out my phone as I took a seat on the subway, somehow what was open on the screen was a google search for my book A Streetcar Named Murder–and when I went to close that screen I touched one of the images by mistake, which took me to the Goodreads page for the book. Bear in mind, I never look at Goodreads for any of my books, let alone Amazon–the temptations to start reading the bad reviews is too great, and while I can usually laugh them off, occasionally–and it depends entirely on my mood, of course–one will get under my skin and it will annoy me, and that’s not good for anyone.
This particular day on the subway the Goodreads page opened to the bad reviews first–its average is four stars, which I will always take because I am not Lauren Hough–and the very first one made me laugh out loud on the subway. Paraphrased, it was basically someone taking umbrage at “someone who doesn’t live here or know the first thing about New Orleans” writing a book about New Orleans. The reason they had come to this conclusion was because Valerie referred to Mardi Gras as “Fat Tuesday”, and according to this one-star reviewer, no one from New Orleans would ever say Fat Tuesday instead of Mardi Gras.
Well, I’ve lived here for twenty-seven years and I have heard any number of locals say Fat Tuesday rather than Mardi Gras, and so of course I had to click on the reviewer’s profile…and grinned to myself when I saw that they actually live in Metairie, not New Orleans…which to locals is a bigger crime than getting something wrong about New Orleans: claiming to be from New Orleans when you actually live in Metairie. (the rejoinder is usually along the lines of “bitch, you live in Metairie.”)
It was also kind of fun to be accused of inauthenticity when it comes to writing about New Orleans, because I personally have never claimed to be an expert on anything New Orleans (others have said that about me, and I always am very quick to reply not even close); the more I learn about the city the more I realize how little I actually know about the city. There’s an extremely rich (and often incredibly dark) history here; it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that the New Basin canal was there as long as it was, or that there were several train stations around the French Quarter (including one that essentially was in Storyville–rather convenient for the whores and pimps, right?), or that where UNO is now used to be the lake shore resort of Milneburg, or that the only way across the river or the lake was by ferry until Huey Long built a bridge at the Rigolets (the narrow inlet between lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne).
I was on a panel once at the Tennessee Williams Festival with Bill Loefhelm (if you’re not reading Bill’s books, shame on you and correct that immediately) and the question of New Orleans authenticity came up, and Bill’s response (paraphrasing) was that New Orleanians have a tendency to play a game called “NOLier than Thou,” in which they try to one-up each other to see who the true New Orleanian actually is–which is, of course, gatekeeping. (And yes, I immediately turned to him and said, “I like that and am going to steal it” SO CONSIDER IT STOLEN.)
It does bother me somewhat when I read books set in New Orleans written by people who have never lived here; you can tell, but I also get over it pretty quickly; who is to say who can and can’t write about a place? There’s a significant difference between visiting and living here, which I realized almost immediately after we moved here, and that also becomes very apparent in fiction. I had started writing the book that would become Murder in the Rue Dauphine before I moved here, and I realized, once I did live here, that everything I’d written about New Orleans was completely wrong. I didn’t work on the book for another two years; and even then I wasn’t entirely sure I’d lived here long enough to write about the city. So…I kind of cheated by making Chanse MacLeod not a native either; he’d moved to New Orleans after getting his degree in Criminology from LSU, and had been here about six or seven years when the story opened. So he was an outsider, too; so his views on the city and how things work around here were from an outsider’s perspective, like mine; that was easier. With Bourbon Street Blues, I decided that Scotty was not only a native but came from two old-line society families, from the Garden District and Uptown. One of the greatest joys of my publishing career was having the Times-Picayune’s mystery reviewer, as well as the Books Editor, both say repeatedly that I got New Orleans right in my books. (Thanks again as always for all of your support, Diana Pinckley and Susan Larson!)
And I never really worried about it too much from then on. I wrote about New Orleans as I saw it–the potholes, the cracked sidewalks, the leaning houses, flooding streets, oppressive weather and hurricanes. As the years passed, I became more and more aware that my New Orleans writing was primarily confined to the Quarter, the Marigny, the CBD, the Lower Garden District, the Garden District, and Uptown–a very narrow slice of the city, but those were also my slices of the city, so that’s I wrote about. Sometimes I’d venture into another neighborhood–Lakeview, the Irish Channel, English Turn–and sometimes the story would take the characters to another part of Louisiana–the bayou and river parishes, the Maurepas swamp, the Atchafalaya Swamp, Baton Rouge–which, oddly enough, I had no qualms about fictionalizing. I’ve created numerous fictional towns and parishes surrounding New Orleans; I’ve even invented a sleazy gay bar in the Quarter (the Brass Rail).
So, was I doing New Orleans (and Louisiana) right by making stuff up, inventing places like the Royal Aquitaine Hotel, the Brass Rail, Bodytech Health Club, Riverview Fitness, etc.? Sometimes you have to fictionalize things, even if they are based on something that really exists. I never really thought much about it; I felt like I was getting the feel of New Orleans right, that my characters talked the way people in New Orleans do and react the way people here do, and that I was putting enough reality into the books for them to ring true to locals, natives, and tourists. Sometimes the cases are based on, in or around something that actually happened or exist; like the Cabildo Fire, the Fire at the Upstairs Lounge, Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing flood; termite swarms; Huey Long’s deduct box; and even the court case in, I think, Murder in the Irish Channel that triggered the murders was actually based on a civil trial I served as a juror on.
When I started writing A Streetcar Named Murder, I realized a lot of things I was writing about had to be fictionalized; I couldn’t set a murder at a Mardi Gras krewe ball and use an actual krewe that exists in real life, for one thing (like I had to invent a French Quarter hotel for a couple of murders to occur in) and while I didn’t want to use the cheat that Valerie had moved here again, like I did with Chanse, I wanted her to be of New Orleans but not be of New Orleans…so her parents are from Georgia and moved here after college and marriage, so Valerie was born here, went to school here, met and fell in love with and married her husband here–but her roots aren’t very deep, so she is both insider and outsider at the same time. I liked that idea; like how I am of the South but not of the South, she was of New Orleans but not of New Orleans at the same time. When creating Jem Richard in Death Drop, again, he’s a recent transplant to the city but his father is from New Orleans but relocated to Dallas, where Jem was born and raised. Jem spent a lot of his summers in New Orleans when he was growing up with his paternal grandmother, so he too is of New Orleans but not of New Orleans; which I am really liking as a method of storytelling about the city. I also moved Jem to a different part of the city; he lives in the 7th ward, on St. Roch Avenue in what is known as the St. Roch neighborhood (aka what realtors are trying to redefine and rename as the “new Marigny”, in order to raise prices) which is also very close to my office. Part of this was to move the action out of the neighborhoods I usually write about (although he does wind up in both Uptown and the Quarter) and so I could explore another neighborhood/part of the city than what I usually write about.
I also had recently–prior to the pandemic–started feeling more disconnected from the city than I ever had before. Primarily I think this was due to my office moving; we had been on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny, one block from the Quarter and where Scotty lives, so whenever I needed some Scotty inspiration I could walk a block, stand under the balconies of his building and just look around, drinking in the sights and sounds and smells of the block. To get past this, I started joining New Orleans history pages on Facebook, like Ain’t Dere No Mo New Orleans or the HNOC page and various others–you do occasionally run into Confederate apologists and racists there (they usually cry about the “crime” in New Orleans–you know, the usual dog-whistles from the white flight racists who fled to Jefferson Parish or the North Shore to escape desegregation of the public schools) and reading more histories of the city, state, and region–which are incredibly fascinating. That reading/research helped me write my historical Sherlock in New Orleans short story, “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy”–but I have also since realized I got some things wrong in the story too, but there is just so much to know. I set the story in 1916 for example….without knowing New Orleans was hit by a MAJOR hurricane in 1915 that wiped out any number of settlements and villages around the lakes and the bay shores (that will turn up in a story sometime; the destruction of the lake front village of Freniere is just begging to be fictionalized and written about). When I mentioned this to another writer, who primarily does historicals, she snorted. “It’s impossible to know everything, and would people in 1916 still be talking about a hurricane from 1915?”
Probably, but if it doesn’t have anything to do with the story being told, why would I mention it?
A very valuable lesson, to be sure.
So, yes, lady from Metairie: you caught me. I’m not from New Orleans, you’re correct. But I’ve also published over twenty novels and umpteen short stories set here, and have even won awards for doing it.
And I’ll call it Fat Tuesday if I fucking want to.
The Huey P. Long Bridge at sunset, photo credit Marco Rasi
I do, I really do. I was thinking about this the other night; I was thinking about my trip this weekend to spend time with relatives I’ve not really talked to much over the last forty or so years. Rereading Jackson Square Jazz (I finished last night) has also been revelatory. It’s a pretty good book, and rather ambitious in its scope, but there are some things I’m going to need to revise out of it–primarily words and phrases that have since become problematic. (They were always problematic, but unfortunately we weren’t as aware of these things back then as we are now.) But the purpose of the book overall in the scheme of Scotty’s growth as a person and development of his character definitely played out here, and it definitely worked, so I was rather pleased with the reread.
But it was (is?) interesting to see how I’ve changed and grown as a writer in the ensuing twenty years. I was also a little impressed at how ambitious this book was, in its scope and its story-telling; I don’t remember being that ambitious when I was writing the book. I remember where the idea came from, and how long it gestated in my head before it became Scotty #2; ironically, this was the plot I was going to use to try to write a mainstream mystery with Paige as the main character…at least, that was how I first thought of it. I will have to go back through the manuscript and start making corrections and finding the errors–with the actual finished book on the table beside me to consult for corrections and so forth–and I am also going to need to have the iPad around, so I can do searches in the other Scotty books to verify things. There were also a couple of interesting things I noted in the book as I was rereading it–I did a really good job of setting up the big twist in Mississippi River Mischief that was twenty years in the making–but there were also some things in there that I’ve not followed up on or I’m pretty sure are incorrect; the way I described the apartment on the top floor of Scotty’s building is way off; I am going to have to reread Vieux Carre Voodoo again as well and see what other continuity errors I’ve made with that building over the years. I also kind of liked Scotty’s not-totally-an-adult yet voice; he was a bit of a Peter Pan throughout his twenties, and didn’t start settling down until he was well into his thirties, which was also kind of interesting to me. This book also contains my first car chase (and my first writing about a car accident, for those who keep track of how many accidents Scotty has been in–Chanse has been in a few, too) and some of its geography was wrong; so I am going to need to clean that scene up a bit as well. I guess the best thing to do is reread the version that came out in print next, and put sticky notes in the places where I think I made mistakes in the manuscript to see if it got cleaned up in the edits.
I mean, I really tried a lot of shit in this book, and it actually worked! Good for me!
I ran errands on the way home from work yesterday (mainly so I don’t have to again today) and was a bit tired by the time I got home. I did get started on the chores before Tug decided he needed my lap, and of course, once I was in the chair and he was in my lap it was all over. I did manage to put away the dishes and do another load, as well as get started on the laundry, which I will have to finish tonight. Tomorrow is a work-at-home day, which will be nice. I do need to take the car in for an oil change and tire rotation before I leave on Saturday; whether I do that tomorrow morning or Saturday will depend on a number of things–primarily whether I hear from the dentist that my temporary plates are ready; I really would like to have those before I leave for the weekend because I’d really rather not have to remain on the soft food diet and try to figure out what to stop and eat on the way there and back.
I also picked up two books yesterday, which will come in handy for Halloween Horror Month: Elizabeth Hand’s retelling of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, A Haunting on the Hill, and the Jonathan Maberry edited Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weirdness. I also got my three Anthony nominee certificates from this past Bouchercon in the mail, which was incredibly lovely and still doesn’t quite seem real to me yet. It still feels like it happened to someone else. I never got the certificates from the previous years–I didn’t know they actually made them for us–and the first time I actually picked one up was at Malice, when they gave out the ones for the Agathas (which was the first time I found out that they make these for the nominees. Just as well–I don’t have that much wall space and boy did that ever sound arrogant!) this past spring. It’s very nice to have these, too, but I am not sure where I can put them. Like I said, I don’t have much open space left on the walls of my kitchen/office. On the other hand, it may be time to mix that all up, anyway, and rehang things or replace things that have been up forever. Do I really need the glamour shots of Joan, Bette and Kate? Probably not.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.
Wednesday morning and another good night’s sleep down. I didn’t want to wake up this morning–rather, didn’t want to arise from the comfort of my warm soft bed and the pile of blankets that help me sleep better–but of course there’s Big Kitten Energy in the house now, and Tug wanted breakfast. So, at around a quarter to six Big Kitten Energy launched itself at me and started cuddling and purring and wanting petting as well as feeding. He’s currently galloping around downstairs and just having a marvelous time. Yesterday was his first day at home alone with both of us out at the office; so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got home. What mischief had the bored little kitty gotten up to on his own–what had been knocked over, knocked off counters and/or tables, what had he found to turn into a kitten toy which probably shouldn’t be a kitten toy, and so on. He didn’t come galloping down the stairs either once I got home, either. But by the time the groceries were put away I heard him coming down the stairs, and then we repaired to my easy chair where we just cuddled and I started rereading Jackson Square Jazz instead of doing chores–which I will now have to do tonight when I get home…but who could resist Tug’s insistent little face that he needed a lap to sleep in?
Yes, in case you were wondering, Tug has indeed taken his place as head of the household.
As the salt intrusion continues to make its way up the river to New Orleans, the panic is getting more realistic. I stopped to make groceries on the way home yesterday, and there was plenty of bottled water. I bought another gallon to go with the case of smaller bottles I got last week–doing what was advised, merely getting water every time I shop–so the initial panic-buying of water has at least some to an end. There’s also a cold front on its way down here, supposedly arriving around Friday–but looking at the weather forecast, all it means is it will be colder at night, dipping down into the sixties while hovering in the high seventies/low eighties during the day. That’s livable, of course.
I was tired when I got home last night, so didn’t do much of anything other than cuddling with the kitty and watching Youtube documentaries about long-forgotten Byzantine emperors (it really is amazing how little history of eastern Europe we learn in school) and the new Matt Baume (probably not new) video about Some Like It Hot, which, while now widely regarded as one of the greatest screen comedies of all time, was highly controversial at the time and went through some serious battles with the censors. (If you aren’t watching Matt Baume’s Youtube channel, you really should; he does some amazingly researched videos about queer rep in film and television throughout the history of both media, and his book Hi Honey I’m Homo is essential reading material tracing queer rep in sitcoms.) Now I want to rewatch Some Like It Hot, which I’ve not seen in decades. I don’t think I’m going to run any errands on the way home today–there’s some things coming in the mail, but they can wait for tomorrow’s drive home (or perhaps even Friday, really; nothing important coming other than maybe some copies of books I’m in or have written); Claiborne heading uptown is a mess after you pass the I-10/Highway 90 spaghetti mess, as the far right lane is closed there where it meets Martin Luther King along with an off-ramp from the highway, so everyone is trying to get over to the left lane from the right ones and of course, the far left lane is also closed, so about five lanes are trying to compress into two or three right at the intersection, which makes for aggravating, patience-challenging snarls. I did find myself losing patience while I was driving uptown yesterday and I wasn’t as able to control the rising anxiety as well as I have been doing since learning that’s what’s wrong with the wiring in my brain. I think that was another reason I was so tired when I got home; the emotional rollercoaster triggered by the rise in anxiety on the drive wore me down…and there’s nothing better for peace and calm than a purring kitten sleeping in your lap.
I am so glad we got Tug.
It was also interesting rereading Jackson Square Jazz last night for the first time in years–I rarely reread my own work from start to finish; usually I just look for information inside an old Scotty that I need for the one I am currently working, and this experience of rereading (okay, I just started rereading it last night) this old book of mine–my third novel–has been revelatory. For one thing, I am a very different writer now than I was then, and wow, has Scotty changed both in voice and character over the last twenty years! Scotty has grown up quite a bit–kind of hard for that not to happen, given everything he’s been through since I first created him–and the book is actually kind of time capsule. I remember deciding not to update any of the Chanse books when it was time to put up the ebooks; it would have been a lot of work for not much return in terms of satisfaction; the books are of their time, and changes in technology and the world happen too regularly to waste time revising and updating old books. I did feel that urge a little bit as I read through the manuscript pages (I am reading the uncorrected and unedited final draft I turned in)–Scotty had just gotten his first computer at the beginning of the book, for example, and while he had a cell phone he hated it and called it his “hell phone,” which mirrored how I felt about cell phones at the time. On-line chats and chatrooms were still a thing when I wrote the book; how would one update or revise that? Have the messaging through Grindr, instead of instant messaging? It’s actually a lovely time capsule of a time long past–showing what it was like to be an unrepentant gay slut with a healthy sexual appetite who lived in or near the Quarter in the years before Katrina…which makes it all the more important that I not only make it available again, but I also have to make sure, as I go through it, that it’s consistent with the books that came later–so I am going to have to work on that long-overdue Scotty Bible, and it’s really past time that I get that done; I certainly have a stack of Scottys with post-it notes all over them that have been waiting for me to do something with them. I’ll keep rereading it when my brain is too tired to process something new, and I think I’ll slowly make my way through all of the Scottys, to make sure the consistency is there.
Maybe I should revisit my old work?
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
I didn’t want to get up this morning–Tug the kitten also has the same superpower that Scooter had, which was lulling us both to sleep somehow; he fell asleep in my lap last night while we were watching television so I, too, fell asleep. There’s really nothing like a nice warm little kitten sleeping in your life for calming purposes. Scooter was also an anti-anxiety holistic medication for me, so it’s nice that Tug (still not sure about that name, but it may change to Tiger) works the same way with his little purring engine. He’s so cute! I’m glad we rescued him and I’m glad we got a kitten–because I’d forgotten how adorable kittens are. It’s so cute watching him practice being the Big Cat Hunter and pouncing on his toys after sneaking up on them. He also remains completely fearless, which is great. I’m glad he already feels so at home here in the Lost Apartment.
I also recognize that this is turning into a kitty stan blog, which is very understandable given that we have a new kitty.
Yesterday was a relatively relaxed one at the office. I’d forgotten that I’d been filling in for someone who was out on medical leave for the last two months, and that he was coming back to work yesterday. I was mentally prepared to spend the day working with clients and doing my other duties around the appointments, which is what I’d been doing for the last two months all four days in the office. I’d literally forgotten that Monday was my catch-up day in the office when I usually took care of all the things I started doing between appointments for the last few months because I no longer had Mondays free to catch up on everything. It’s going to take me a moment to get used to this again, but it was nice. I left the office and came home and just immediately collapsed into my chair. I’d intended to spend some more time with the Riley Sager book, but for some reason didn’t pick it up and instead spent the evening doom-scrolling through social media while Tug slept in my lap and I waited for Paul to come down. We started watching a new show on Apple, Inside Man, which had an exceptionally good cast led by David Tennant, and opens with Tennant, as the vicar, getting caught up in a very bad situation due to him not only being the vicar but having to think very quickly on his feet–a member of his flock, who has a horribly abusive and vile mother–pressed a flash drive onto him as his mother was coming for a visit and she “always” found his private stuff. When Tennant’s son’s maths teacher (see what I did there?) arrives and opens her laptop, the flash drive gets connected to her computer and the son claims it’s his, covering for his dad while not knowing what was actually on it–which was child pornography. This puts Tennant into a quandary of faith. It’s not his son’s kiddie porn, but ethically he cannot say where it came from; and the show ends with her locked in the basement and knowing that he’s going to have to kill her because he can’t let her go. It’s very interesting–there’s also a side story with a reporter the teacher encountered on the bus and two men on death row (one of them played by Stanley Tucci) who are also somehow connected to the same reporter. It’s very cleverly done, the interweaving of stories based on random encounters, much as they occur in real life.
I worked on a short story yesterday but of course it’s one I don’t have a market to send it on along to for submission, rather than either of the ones that are being specifically written and/or revised for actual calls–because of course that’s what I always do. I’m beginning to feel like I am falling behind on the publishing of short stories I’ve written, but the truth is it’s just my anxiety spurring my brain along. I’ve published two short stories this year, “The Ditch” in School of Hard Knox and “Solace in a Dying Hour” in This Fresh Hell, two stories of which I am really proud and also skate along the edge of supernatural horror. I don’t think I write actual horror, but more suspense with supernatural occurrences in them. I don’t do jump scares or anything like that, but rather mine are told with mood and setting more than anything else–and of course, voice. I’m also stuck on this story anyway–as always, in the second act–and so will move on to the stuff that, you know, actually has a market/call to send them into. I need to work on my story for the Bouchercon anthology, due by the end of the month, and I also have one for my Sisters chapter anthology that I’d like to get finished and turned in as well. (I love my Sisters chapter, by the way.)
Sigh. Being a writer can be quite a joy sometimes. It’s no wonder so many of us drink to excess.
Tomorrow I am getting a sonogram to see if I have the same heart defect my mom had. She had arterial tortuosity syndrome, which, if you follow the link to rarediseases.org, is described thus:
Arterial tortuosity syndrome (ATS) is an extremely rare genetic disorder characterized by lengthening (elongation) and twisting or distortion (tortuosity) of arteries throughout the body. Arteries are the blood vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood away from the heart.
I don’t remember which artery it was, but I think her femoral artery came out of her heart and inside the chest cavity, instead of being straight it was twisted into a candy-cane shape, which meant when it clogged, it was an extremely complicated procedure to put a stent into it; and when the stent clogged, it was too complicated to put another one in…and then she had the massive stroke and died in hospice. The key words in that paragraph from rarediseases.org are “extremely rare genetic disorder”, with an emphasis on genetic. My maternal grandfather died in his sleep in his forties, and we really don’t know why. Obviously, this is concerning for me, and the fact that my former primary care doctor’s attitude was “we’ll worry about that when we have to”–which, while making sense since nothing can be done about it, isn’t reassuring from a medical professional–and I’d frankly rather know if I have something wrong that could eventually kill me. Since bad cholesterol clogs your arteries, the fact that the cardiologist immediately put me on stronger medication than I had been using for the last fifteen years kind of told me that my primary care wasn’t paying much attention to that, either. It made sense, right? If my bad cholesterol is close to the amount that is concerning, and the medication I am taking isn’t doing more than keeping it from going into the danger zone, maybe give me something stronger after fifteen years? Malpractice doesn’t actually have to be malice; it can also be carelessness.
And yes, I am very aware of the irony of the fact that part of my job entails encouraging my clients to strongly be advocates for themselves with their health care–practice what you preach, right? But I’d been feeling dissatisfied with my primary care provider for quite some time now, and this stuff from this year was the last straw for me.
And on that cheery, uplifting note I am heading back into the spice mines. Y’all have a great Tuesday, all right?
Queer and Loathing in America 