Note to self: at least you can pay the bills without worry. Not everyone can say that, chuckles.
We were in a heat advisory yesterday and I haven’t acclimated to the summer yet. I ran errands after work yesterday, and was exhausted by the time I got home. Paul had worked at home yesterday, so shortly after I got home we started watching television–we started The Ipcress File, which is extremely well done, but Paul wasn’t enjoying it as much as I was, so after three episodes we switched over to First Kill, which isn’t bad but is essentially the same set-up, kind of, as the original storyline of Teen Wolf, only with vampires. There’s a family of vampires and a family of monster-hunters; naturally the hunter daughter and the vampire daughter–both of whom need to get their first kills (hence the title)–are attracted to each other, which sets up an interesting twist on the usual Romeo and Juliet type romantic tragedy. It was entertaining enough to keep watching, even if it is the same essential story as the Scott/Allison romance from the first seasons of Teen Wolf, without the homoeroticism.
I also got my first page pass copy of A Streetcar Named Murder yesterday; I gradually read my way through yesterday to get a sense of the book now and see if it all coalesced; I think it did and it reads very well. I did see a lot of mistakes–missing words, typos, etc.–that are going to need to be corrected, so I will spend some time with it this weekend taking notes of those issues so they can be corrected in the final edition. I am starting to get excited about the book’s pending release (December) rather than terrified; I also have to go blurb-shopping for it, which is my least favorite (well, one of my least favorite) things to do as a writer. I have a pretty healthy list of people to ask, so here’s hoping some of them say yes to me. Fingers crossed, everyone!
I didn’t write or read yesterday when I got home from work–Paul, as I said, was at home and running errands in the late afternoon/early evening heat/humidity had essentially worn me down–and as such, the kitchen is a complete disaster area this morning again. The dishwasher isn’t working again–it is full of water in the bottom, which probably means that a mouse has eaten through the hose one more time–but I honestly don’t mind washing the dishes by hand; I always do anyway before I load them in the dishwasher anyway (that’s another quirk you can blame on my mother), but it’s great to have the dishwasher racks as a place for the dishes to dry so it doesn’t take up my limited counter space (which I have to clean off completely when I get home from the office tonight). I do need to both read and write tonight; I hate this yearly adaptation to the heat. But you do eventually get used to opening the front door and stepping into a sauna, or leaving the office and sitting in my car that has been out in the sun all day and feels like a preheated oven when I get in–the buckle of my seat belt was too hot to touch yesterday so had to use my shirt to grip it. Madness.
I also got some great stuff–yes, more books–in the mail yesterday. I meant to take a picture of them for social media but…no clear space on the counters. Heavy heaving sigh. I also want to make a cucumber salad recipe I saw on the New York Times cooking section; my avocados have ripened and now I have to worry about them turning before I use them. So, when I get home tonight I need to do some laundry, put some dishes away, clear off the counters, make cucumber salad, do some writing and then some reading. Hopefully I’ll have time to get all this done this evening.
And on that hopeful note, I am heading into the spice mines on this “Pay the Bills” Day–and I should probably, you know, pay the bills.
I guess. It doesn’t feel like I accomplished much this weekend, but that’s nothing new. I always feel like I should have done more when the weekend–especially a long one–has ended; but I am trying not to beat myself up as much over stuff like this as I used to. It’s not good for my mental health, for one–always a shaky thing at the best of times–and it’s counter-productive. I feel very strongly that one should never regret things–no regrets is kind of a mantra of mine–because regret is really a waste of time and energy. You can’t change it, after all. (I am not saying this rule should apply to everything–murder, for example–but for anything that isn’t a crime, you should have no regrets. All you can do is change the behavior and not repeat it if you feel regret but wallowing in the regret is counter-productive and kind of self-defeating. I think you get the point. I’ve not had enough coffee to be certain I am making the point properly.) I didn’t finish reading my book, I didn’t write nearly as much as I could have, and I certainly didn’t get the apartment as clean and organized as I would have preferred. But it’s also a short work week, we have a regular weekend coming up and then another three day holiday after that; and then I am off to Florida for Sleuthfest–which makes that an even shorter week than usual. And since yesterday was a holiday, I actually get to use my Friday as my work-at-home day of the week. Huzzah! That will be nice, and I have all kinds of things I can take home and do this Friday.
We finished watching The Defeated last night and it’s really quite good. It was originally released in 2020 and approved for a second season, but the pandemic interfered and it looks like they went into production sometime last year, but where is the second (and final) season? It’s really good–if you enjoy Babylon Berlin or have any interest in the second world war and it’s aftermath, you’ll really like this show.
Well, yesterday I ran my errands–Metairie and the North Shore–and after I was finished and heading back home, I realized something: you can actually tell where an area falls on the political landscape based on the length of the drive-thru line at a Chik-Fil-A. The one in Metairie on Veteran’s Boulevard yesterday, for example–was so long it backed out onto Veterans and was blocking a lane of traffic. No offense to right-wingers, but there’s really no fast food in the world good enough for me to sit in a drive-thru line that would take that long (although now it occurs to me that it could also be an indication of how slow the line moves, which again–no fast food is so fucking good that it’s worth waiting in line for a minimum of twenty minutes for).
It was exhausting, of course–the heat index was well over a hundred yesterday–but it was also a beautiful day for a drive across the lake. I used to loathe driving over the causeway bridge, and it’s still not a favorite thing for me to do (the five dollar toll to come back to the south shore doesn’t help; yes, it’s free to go to the north shore but you have to pay to come to the south; just like when the Crescent City Connection was a toll bridge going to the West Bank was free but you had to pay to come back to New Orleans), but I’ve adapted and can now relax (depending on the idiot drivers, of course; there are always a few) as I drive across and enjoy looking at the beautiful expanse of water. The bridge is twenty-four miles long, so you can reach a point where you can’t see land in any direction, like you’re out there in the middle of the water with no end to it in sight–I think that was what always used to bother me about driving across the bridge. The north shore is also actually quite beautiful, too–you really feel like you’re in the South on the North Shore, more so than on the south shore, where it feels like Louisiana, if that makes sense? (although it would make for an interesting thing to write about in a Scotty book, hmmm) I do wish I had more free time, because I would like to go exploring around the city a bit more–the north shore, the river and bayou parishes–but the cost of gas is also making such explorations prohibitive. Maybe over the 4th of July weekend I can head down to the river parishes….I kind of need to for this new Scotty book. Then again, I am inventing a parish out of my imagination, but it also doesn’t hurt to ground a fictional parish in reality, either.
And on that note, I need to head into the spice mines. Happy Tuesday and will chat at you again tomorrow, Constant Reader.
Holiday Monday, which is celebrating Juneteenth (if you want to know more about the holiday, this is a great place to start). It’s hard to believe, and more than a little sad, that it took until recently for this to become a federally recognized holiday. Honestly.
Better late than never, I suppose–which is hardly any consolation, really.
But it’s nice to have another three-day weekend (I can’t remember which holiday we gave up for this one at my dayjob, but we only are allowed no more than eight holidays for some reason), and I slept late again this morning. The cappuccino yesterday morning had no effect on my sleep, so I am having another one this morning, which is lovely. I really do love the way they taste; I just wish making them wasn’t so complicated and dirtied up so much stuff. I made Swedish meatballs yesterday afternoon and that mess still needs to be cleaned up as well. Heavy sigh. What can I say? I got caught up in watching television once the meal was ready and stayed in my easy chair until it was time for bed. We watched the new episode of Becoming Elizabeth, which isn’t bad but it’s not overly compelling either–which is weird, because the period between Henry VIII’s death in 1547 and Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558 was very fraught and very dangerous (Anya Seton brilliantly captured this period in her seminal novel Green Darkness, which I highly recommend along with the warning “it’s quite long”); but it’s not really translating to the screen very well in this production. I also spent some more time with John Copenhaver’s marvelous The Savage Kind, which I hope to do again today.
We also started watching an amazing show on Netflix that originally dropped in 2020 and whose second season was endlessly delayed by the pandemic (I checked it out on-line as we watched) called The Defeated starring Taylor Kitsch as a Brooklyn homicide detective who is “loaned” to a small precinct in the American sector of Berlin in 1946 to help rebuild their station along American police standards; which is a challenge. None of the people working as cops there have any experience in being police officers; some are young boys while the majority are women. The Germans aren’t allowed to have guns, so they have an “arsenal” where they keep their bedposts and other wooden sticks; the Russians are horrible; and Kitsch himself is looking for his brother, a soldier with mental problems who’s gone AWOL and whom Kitsch suspects is targeting and murdering Nazis. It’s extremely well done–think Babylon Berlin but only in another twenty years–and it also asks a lot of ethical and moral questions that really don’t have answers. The woman who runs the station, is the “superintendent” or captain of the squad–wasn’t a Nazi but her protestations about “we weren’t all Nazis” have the same credibility of a prisoner at Angola claiming innocence: no one admits to being a Nazi once the war was lost, after all. At one point she says, very poignantly, “The war is over and the entire world hates us because of what we did, or allowed, and who can blame them?” This seems particularly poignant given the current political climate in our country; I know it seems extreme, but I’ve seen other people comment on Twitter and other social media about how they feel sometimes like “they are living in Weimar Germany and it’s just a matter of time.”
I know I’ve certainly felt that way at times.
We also watched a classic old Bette Davis film, The Letter, which I’d realized I’d never seen yesterday so I pulled it up and started watching. I had read the original short story by Somerset Maugham a few years ago for the Short Story Project, and enjoyed it tremendously. The story is told from the lawyer’s point of view, while the movie certainly shifts the focus over to Leslie Crosbie, wife of a Malaysian rubber plantation owner, who shoots and kills a man she accuses of trying to rape her. Everyone believes Leslie…but you see, there is this letter that exists that contradicts her story, and the more lies she tells, the less her lawyer believes her–although he ultimately pays a blackmailer to get the letter back so she escapes conviction. In the story it’s all from the lawyer’s point of view; she’s merely the wife of a friend he is taking on as a favor, and he doesn’t know her well…but as he (the lawyer) discovers the existence of the letter and recovers it, he slowly begins to see through her lies and to see her as she really is. He doesn’t expose her–he allows her to escape her punishment–but he confronts her with the letter after the verdict and she confesses everything…only to return to her loveless marriage at the rubber plantation. The story and the movie both are steeped with the Imperialistic and racist overtones of the time the story was written and the film made; the ending of the movie is different than that of the story because of course, for the Hays Code of the time she couldn’t be seen as not being “punished” for her crime; she is murdered at the end by the Eurasian widow of the man she killed (his marriage to this mixed-race woman is what sets the tragedy in motion) during a party celebrating her verdict. There was one scene in particular that really made me shake my head: after she has told her story of being almost raped and committing murder to protect herself, she makes dinner for her husband, a friend of the family, and the local police magistrate and they sit around eating and talking about things like nothing’s happened. As we watched this season, Paul–who had no idea of what the movie was about–said, “Oh, he didn’t try to rape her, did he? She’s a cold-blooded killer.” GREG: “It’s Bette Davis, what do you think?”
Although it did make me think about false accusations of rape again, which is one of the myriad of reasons women generally tend to not be believed about being assaulted. There’s probably a really good essay to be written about that.
I also wrote yesterday, which was really lovely. I managed to get the first chapter of that manuscript written; I plan to look at it again today and tweak it a bit. I have a lengthy errand to run–must go over to the North Shore–and when I get home, I plan to write for a while before retiring to my easy chair with my Copenhaver book (I am really enjoying it, y’all) before we finish watching The Defeated (y’all, it’s really good). I’m not sure if what I wrote yesterday is actually any good or not; it remains to be seen, I suppose, and let’s face it, I am not (nor have I ever been) the best judge of my own work. But we shall see today, I suppose. It felt good to be creating again and it felt good to be finishing something, even if it’s just a shitty draft. I’d like to be able to get a lot more written today, if I can…
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Talk soon, Constant Reader!
Sunday morning and to celebrate the holiday weekend, I decided to not only sleep in–almost till nine!–and then made myself a cappuccino when I finally rolled out of my bed. I feel marvelously rested, which is lovely, and the cappuccino is amazing. (I was only going to have one, but I may have a second…but then I worry about sleep tonight and sigh.) I hope to have a marvelously productive day–yesterday wasn’t that productive–and I think I can power through everything I want, or would like, to get done today.
Or I may not.
I didn’t do much writing yesterday, alas, but I did get some done. I did my self-care errand (Ugh, such modesty; I don’t know why I am being so coy. I got my back waxed, but don’t come for me. I don’t care if other people are into body hair, I don’t care if other people like having hair on their backs. I am not one of those people. If I am not saying too much, I am very hairy and since I can’t see it, in my head I always imagine it’s much worse than it probably is, and I don’t like it. I feel better when my back is smooth, okay?) After that I went to the post office and picked up the mail (which included such marvelous books as The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames; The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas–which I want to read back-to-back with Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; and It Dies with You by Scott Blackburn, a debut) and then did the making groceries thing. By the time I had done all that the heat and humidity had sapped my strength, so I decided to take a break once the groceries were done and watch the rest of Slow Burn, that Watergate documentary series I mentioned the other day. Scooter, of course, seized that opportunity to turn my lap into his bed, and that lulled me into a sense of relaxation that also turned into my rewatching Tootsie on HBO MAX rather the reading–Paul got home while I wasn’t very far into it, but I was already not enjoying it. (I’d forgotten that Michael Dorsey doesn’t decide to pretend to be Dorothy Michaels until at least twenty to thirty minutes into the film, while the time before that is spent showing us what a horrible, difficult, narcissist he was before he got in touch with his feminine side…which isn’t fun at all.) I’d seen the film in the theater–in those halcyon days of the early 1980’s before we truly discovered how horrible Ronald Reagan really was and what he was going to to do to the country; Tootsie was the latest in what could be considered an attempt to “queer” the movies; it came out in the same year Victor/Victoria did (we rewatched that recently to see if it had aged well or had become problematic; it actually does) but I suspected that Tootsie–the year’s other “gender bender” comedy, probably did not. When I mentioned how unlikable the Michael character was and how hard the opening of the movie was to watch again, Paul smirked, “Oh, you mean when Dustin Hoffman was playing Dustin Hoffman?” I laughed–but he wasn’t wrong.
Paul and I then watched a four hour documentary series about fundamentalist Mormons–you may remember the ones with the compound in the early aughts, whose children were taken away because they not only subscribed to plural marriage but also to child marriage and conception? (Girls under the age of consent were being given to men sometimes three or four times their age as wives and had children; yet another example of who the real fucking groomers are.) It’s called Keep Sweet–the credo of the fundamentalist Mormons for how women should behave, which is horrifying in and of itself–and it was terribly interesting. We then caught this week’s episode of The Boys (huzzah for adding Jensen Ackles to the cast!), and then of course, retired to bed. I also did some cleaning and organizing yesterday, which was nice–and I did get a few chapters into John Copenhaver’s marvelous The Savage Kind, which is really compelling. I did do some writing–not much, but some, and the character in that project is starting to come to life, and this is really my favorite part of writing. Yes, it’s daunting to start writing a new book project–knowing there’s so much more work to come–but this is the part where all the possibilities are swirling and other characters are trying to take shape and I am also trying to figure out how to shape the story. I also thought about how to develop and carry the chapter I was working on forward, so hopefully today I can get that done as well as some other structuring and planning for the rest of it. I also want to work a bit on “Never Kiss a Stranger” today; I am feeling like my creative mojo is back in some ways and I really want to take advantage of that while it lasts. And of course, I need to get some things done for Scotty, too.
I am also going to spend some more time with John Copenhaver’s book this morning as my mind and body continue to wake up. I am almost finished with this cappuccino, but I am afraid I’ll probably have to switch to regular coffee rather than having another one; far, far too much caffeine that I will most likely never wear out of my system today. But….that doesn’t mean I can’t have one tomorrow; maybe I can have one a day before switching to regular coffee? I guess we’ll see how it affects my sleep tonight. Fingers crossed that it will be not at all. I’ve been sleeping well for quite some time now; let’s hope the cappuccino doesn’t fuck that all up.
And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee, take Copenhaver with me to the easy chair, and read for about an hour or so. Have a lovely Sunday/Father’s Day, everyone.
Saturday morning and I feel rested, somewhat. Later today I get to head out into the heat to run errands–one of which involves self-care, so we’re counting that as a necessity, and I also figured it was easier to do all the errands I need to run all at the same time to get them out of the way. On the Monday holiday I intend to return to the gym for the first time in months (huzzah!). I got to sleep in all the way till eight this morning, which is pretty amazing for me lately. I also got most of my chores around the kitchen done last night–the few that are left I will get to over the course of the morning, before I have to get cleaned up and head out for the errands–and Paul didn’t get home terribly late. We watched the new Emma Thompson movie on Hulu, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which wasn’t bad–nothing like I expected, but enjoyable; Emma Thompson is always fantastic in everything she does–and then two more episodes of Why Are You Like This?, which continues to amuse us. While I was waiting for Paul I started watching a documentary series on Epix about Watergate–I watched the first episode about Martha Mitchell, since we’d just watched Gaslit–and then I was watching the last episode (I know the sequence of events and I know the story, so watching the entire thing in order wasn’t necessary), which was about the Saturday Night Massacre. I think it’s good that Watergate is getting talked about again since we are in the midst of more congressional investigations into the possible criminality of a president; it’s also interesting seeing that some of the same players–Roger Stone, for example–were involved then as they are now. The short term memory of our collective nation is appalling, really; it’s also appalling that there are people who continue to support a criminal even as the depth of the criminality is exposed as even more reprehensible in fact then it appeared from the outside.
I mean, no one’s talking about or reporting on Ukraine anymore, it seems; it’s like that war is over and we’ve all moved on to the next bright, shiny object. Guess what? It’s not.
Today I am going to do background work when I get home from the errands (and shower again). I managed to get some work done on a project yesterday, which was lovely; so today I kind of want to do some writing–always need to do some, every day, no matter what–as well as planning, and then I am going to curl up in my easy chair with Scooter in my lap and The Savage Kind by John Copenhaver in my hands. Tomorrow I hope to spend mostly reading and writing all day–we’ll see how that goes–and the same for the work holiday on Monday (I also have to run an errand to the North Shore that morning). The excitement truly never stops around here…but I am feeling good again this morning, just as I did yesterday morning, so that’s always a good thing. (I am worried that the heat outside, however, will defeat my good intentions and wear me out by the time I get home; we are at that point already in the summer where going outside is exhausting. It’s amazing the way heat and humidity can leech the energy right out of you.) But i must say it felt really good to write some last night–which was a lovely change from the recent “pulling teeth with pliers” way it’s been going lately, and even after I stopped writing (Scooter was most insistent that I provide a lap for him to sleep in) I was still thinking about what I had written and what I would write next on that particular project.
Which makes for a lovely change from the malaise I’ve been going through since I finished the edits of Streetcar.
I also need to edit and rework some short stories; I want to get some submissions out before the end of the month. Some of which will be long shots, as always; others more of a safe bet, but everything in this business is a crap shoot. I think part of the problem I’ve been having is that I don’t have a clear picture of what I want to write and what I want to submit and when things need to be turned in and so forth. I had hoped to have a second short story collection ready to go this year, but I don’t think that is going to happen–which is okay; I’d also wanted all the novellas to be finished and turned into a book this year as well. Ah, well, dreams die first.
And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. I have an appointment at eleven, and I need to get ready for that as well as stop to air up my tires on the way there. I hope to be home around two from everything, and yes, I will be completely drained and exhausted from being out navigating the heat and so forth, as well as lugging groceries in from the car. Heavy heavy sigh. But best to get it over with and out of the way today…and we shall see how the rest of the day goes.
Tuesday and it’s back into the office with me today. Huzzah.
Yesterday I entered data until my eyes crossed, but I got everything caught up. I also, once I was finished with my work for the day, walked over to Office Depot and got some more organizational items to try to make the kitchen workspace–and the kitchen overall–better organized and pulled together. It’s better now–looking around at the space this morning it certainly looks better than the hot mess it’s been for quite some time–so that’s something, I think. I slept fairly well last night, so as I am slowly waking up this morning over my coffee I am thinking this looks pretty good around here this morning. I also decided that since it’s still Pride Month my reading should continue to be queer books, at least for this month, so I plucked John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind out of the TBR pile (it did win the Lambda Award for Best Mystery this past weekend after all) and hope to start reading it this evening when I get home from work. I made a binder for “Never Kiss a Stranger” as well as ones for Chlorine and Mississippi River Mischief–which definitely helped getting loose piles of paper and file folders off the counter tops, and at the same time felt strangely like I actually was making some kind of progress, which is always enormously helpful with feeling like you’ve gotten some place, accomplished something.
I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere with anything these days, but my mind has really worked strangely over the past few years. My concept of time is completely altered–not that it was ever really strong to begin with, honestly–and I struggle with memory lapses; my memory doesn’t really work the way it used to, which is incredibly concerning, or used to be; it seems like everyone is having the same kind of problems, and it probably is pandemic/interesting times causing it for everyone that seems to be affected (of course, if this was a suspense thriller, some mad genius would have done something to trigger this in people around the world for their own nefarious purposes–you can tell I watched a James Bond film last night), but it still is distressing to say the least.
I am also glad I took the weekend off. I feel like it was absolutely necessary, and there’s a three day weekend coming up this weekend, which is really nice as well. I don’t think I’ll be able to take the entire weekend off again this weekend–certainly not all three days–but it’s a very pleasant thought, I must say, and I am looking forward to getting through the rest of this week so I can rest up this weekend.
Whine, whine, whine.
And yes, we did watch the final Daniel Craig as James Bond thriller No Time to Die last night. It was gorgeously shot, and Craig is much closer to the Bond Ian Fleming wrote about in the books so many decades ago (I was very young when Fleming died), and while watching last night I thought about the original thirteen Bond books that Fleming wrote all those years ago and how badly those stories have aged–and how little the movies based on them resemble the books. The book Live and Let Die was horrifically racist (I read it again a few years ago, since it’s been decades since I read them) and then watched the movie again, which is also bad in that respect. Live and Let Die was also the first Bond movie I saw in the theater–and parts of it were filmed/set in and around New Orleans, so that part of it has always been sentimental for me in some ways…but yikes. The stereotypes! And the Bond books themselves celebrated imperialistic colonialism–many of the books are set in Jamaica or other possessions of the British empire, and that oh-so-British sense of superiority is very present in the books. But No Time to Die was a perfectly adequate Bond thriller film; Daniel Craig is a commanding presence on the screen, even if the villain, played by Oscar winner Rami Malek (which prompted me to say, “Freddie Mercury would have made a great Bond villain”) wasn’t really developed enough to really hit hard as the bad guy.
Then again, are any of the Bond villains ever really developed?
But watching a James Bond movie, coupled with me reading The Great Betrayal about the 4th Crusade, has me in mind of writing a Colin thriller again–I could of course set it at any time, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be current; the lovely thing about a Colin series is I could literally go back and set them in and around Scotty books, which would/could be very fun to do–but I am just not so great about writing action, I suppose–and thrillers are a lot of action, from beginning to end. I also don’t know enough about guns, really–how can I write about a gunfight or being shot at, or shooting back–but it could be fun….I already know the opening scene (set in 1204, as the city is on the brink of falling; the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church calls in a couple of warrior priests to smuggle something to safety, and that something is the MacGuffin the entire story turns on: the Pope/Rome wants whatever it is, and the Patriarch would rather burn in hell than let what he considers the Roman heretics have it) and I also know what the first chapter would be–Colin rescuing a politician’s daughter from the terrorists who kidnapped her–and then we would get into the MacGuffin/treasure hunt, with of course the Vatican being the bad guys (seriously, only Nazis make better bad guys than the Vatican) and all kinds of fun stuff.
Someday, perhaps.
And on that note, tis time for me to get back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.
Today’s emergency weather situation in New Orleans is an air quality alert; per the email I received this morning, people with breathing issues are encouraged to not go outside unless absolutely necessary; our air quality is at an “orange” level–not sure what that means precisely, but suspect it has something to do with a color-coded charted that I kind of don’t want to go look up, just in case. There was a heat advisory yesterday (IN JUNE); it’s clearly going to be one of those summers here in New Orleans.
I wound up taking the entire weekend off for the most part–no writing, no emails, no stress or anxiety. I finished reading Tara Laskowski’s marvelous The Other Mother yesterday afternoon; I kept reading my 4th Crusade/sack of Constantinople book; and then last night we finished off Gaslit (Julia Roberts was amazing; and yes, Martha Mitchell was right from the very beginning) and started watching a new show (for us) on Acorn, The Victim, which is actually quite interesting and has a great concept and a truly terrific cast. We watched the first episode, and I am rather curious to see where this is going to go. One way in which British crime series are superior to the American counterparts is in that there are always so many layers to the British ones, and they often tackle complex situations that made you wonder, who is the good guy, who is the bad guy, or is the entire system bad and in need of overhauling?
I also have to decide what to read next, and there’s such a plethora of good things to read in my TBR pile I am not sure where to go next. I am torn right now between John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind (which just won the Lammy for Best Mystery this weekend–go John go!), Curtis Ippolite’s Burying the Newspaper Man, Rob Osler’s The Devil’s Chewtoy, or another Carol Goodman. I’ve also been wanting to revisit some classics I’ve not reread in a while–anything by Mary Stewart, really; or du Maurier’s Rebecca or Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, or maybe one of the du Mauriers I’ve not already read before.
Taking the weekend off felt absolutely lovely, if I am going to be completely honest. I did do some minor chores around the Lost Apartment–laundry, dishes, etc.–but nothing major; the place is a bit of a mess this morning. I do have to run some errands later today–prescriptions, mostly, and I need to put air in a tire–and I am going to swing by Office Depot as well to get some file organizational items so I have place to put all these files that are piled up all over the place around my desk area. After I am done with the day’s data entry (always a happy chore for me) and am free for the evening, I will spend it doing some cleaning up/organizing around here. I had hoped to start going to the gym again today, but I suspect I am not going to wind up making it over there after all. I also need to start getting binders together for the new book projects; I think I will make one for the novellas as well as one for the other three books that are currently in progress (yes, I am a glutton for punishment) but I do find that the binders are helpful for also editing and making notes and so forth.
And of course as always I need to make a to-do list for the rest of the month.
Heavy heaving sigh.
But one thing that is true after this weekend is that I feel refreshed, rested and recharged. I don’t know how long that will actually last or not–it’s always a crap shoot, let’s be honest–but fingers crossed it lasts for a long enough time to make a serious dent in the weekend. We have a paid holiday coming up on Monday, which is lovely–three days weekends are always nice, and July 4th also falls on a Monday so that’s another lovely three day weekend coming up in a few weeks–and of course, later that week I am off to Fort Lauderdale. Woo-hoo? Woo-hoo!
Paul and I also booked our plane tickets for Bouchercon last week, so that’s a go for me as well. Woo-hoo!
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow morning.
Yes, that’s right–I didn’t get out of bed until the sinfully late hour of eight thirty. (It’s kind of sad that I now consider that to be late, isn’t it?) But I have eaten two pieces of chocolate-marble swirl coffee cake (my GOD, it’s good) and am about to have the first of my morning coffee. Yum, marvelous. There really isn’t anything quite like the first cup of coffee in the morning, is there?
Yesterday morning’s workshop went okay–there was a light turnout, which I had kind of worried about–so rather than going with the whole presentation I’d prepared (I remembered the correct notes to take this time) I tailored it down to fit a smaller audience and made it more intimate conversation. I don’t know if it was any good or the attendees got anything out of it, but I guess it went well. They did have questions, and there were answers I didn’t have for them–but I also didn’t pretend to know them, either, which I think is worse than not having an answer. I did stop at That’s Amore on the way back home and got us a deep-dish Chicago style pizza, which was absolutely lovely, but other than that I really didn’t do a whole lot yesterday. We finished watching Queer as Folk, which I have thoughts about–am curious to see what other people think about it–but regardless of anything else, the show certainly made New Orleans look beautiful, or rather, really did a great job of capturing how beautiful New Orleans actually is. (One of the only reasons I kept watched Real World New Orleans: Homecoming beyond the first episode was specifically to see my city and how beautiful it looks on television…I am not entirely sure I am going to continue watching it because I don’t really care about any of these people.) We also watched the new episode of The Boys, which we enjoyed, and then I toddled off to bed for the evening. I am going to spend this morning swilling coffee and reading Tara Laskowski’s The Mother Next Door, and then maybe this afternoon I’ll do some cleaning and writing on “Never Kiss a Stranger.” I realized that last week at this time I was scrambling to finish the edits, so this is really my first free weekend in quite a while…and so I think, after taking yesterday off after getting home, I may just take all of today off as well.
How fun is that?
And yes, the kitchen is a mess, but I’ll get around to it at some point today–there’s also a load of laundry that needs folding–but for right now, the entire concept of being lazy and slothful for the rest of the day, to completely recharge my batteries (or finish recharging them) sounds entirely too good to pass up, and so I don’t think I will. AND NO GUILT ABOUT IT EITHER IF THAT IS THE PATH I CHOOSE.
I did spend some time yesterday reading some history in the form of Ernie Bradford’s The Great Betrayal: The Great Siege of Constantinople, which has to do with the Fourth Crusade–and if Constant Reader has been around long enough, they would know that I am fascinated by this historical event, which was of a far greater import than Western historians ever give it–there are reasons for that, too–and has always seemed to me to be the starting point for a great treasure hunt/adventure story, and one that I have always wanted to spin Colin off into. (I’ve always wanted to spin Colin off into his own Indiana Jones/Clive Cussler/Steve Berry type series, where he goes around the world in his role as an operative for the Blackwood Agency…but I’m not really great at writing action/adventure, and of course whenever you write something like what I see as the first Colin adventure, you kind of have to be good at it–I also don’t see how you can tell a story like that making it up as you go along, either.) So, in some ways it’s research that may prove useful someday–which is how I always read non-fiction; with an eye to it being useful to me in some way in the future–and I am learning about the crusade and the fall of the city, which is always a good thing, at least in my mind–I always think learning new things at any age is crucial and vitally important.
it’s also Father’s Day and I forgot to mail my dad his card–which I will put in tomorrow’s mail–as usual. I really am a terrible child.
The one thing I am going to do today is figure out what all I have to get done and make appropriate lists.
And on that note, I am heading to the easy chair with my morning coffee and The Mother Next Door. Talk to you tomorrow, Constant Reader, and have a great Father’s Day.
Today I am heading out to Kenner to do my sex writing workshop at the North Kenner Library; I had thought it was the East Jefferson Parish library, but was incorrect. We’ll see how it goes.
Yesterday was kind of a shit day. I had to take the day off so I could take Paul out to Metairie for an appointment, and the weather–slightly overcast and sprinkling–had turned super-ugly by the time we left. It wasn’t raining terribly hard here, but by the time we got on the highway it was a downpour, flash flood warnings were in place, and water spouts were being spotted on the lake. I got soaked running back to the car from the building where his appointment was, and we decided to go into a sporting goods store that was just across the parking lot, with the hopes of spending enough time shopping so that when we were finished the storm would have mostly passed. That strategy did pay off, but we then stopped at Costco, and after unloading the car, I went and made groceries. By the time I’d unloaded the car and put said groceries away, I was exhausted and happily retired to my easy chair for the evening. We did watch some more episodes of the Queer as Folk reboot, about which I am having mixed feelings. (I did spot my supervisor as an extra being totally extra in a couple of scenes, which was very fun.) I also made dinner last night–I wasn’t really sure what to make, so finally settled on something easy from Costco that just had to be heated in the oven. I didn’t write at all yesterday, and I was too brain-fatigued to read anymore of Tara Laskowski’s The Mother Next Door–but I did read some of it while I was waiting for Paul to be finished with his appointment. It’s quite good, and after I get home this morning I intend to do some more reading…tomorrow I will write.
I did sleep really well, though.
Sigh.
I guess when I get home today I will work on chores, as they are always waiting for me. I need to figure out something–I’m not entirely sure what, though–to do about files and so forth; I don’t really have as much room as I need for the files that are working or those that need to be put away. (My filing cabinet is an utter disaster that needs desperately to be worked on, but it’s also full to overflowing. I don’t have space for a taller file cabinet, which could be the solution to the problem, but who knows? I have a file box under my desk and off to one side that is supposedly “working projects”…but it’s not easy to access and I forget often that it’s even there. Maybe tomorrow I will walk over to Office Depot in the miserable heat and humidity to find something to use for files that I can make room for somewhere to look at…)
So, in some ways, today is kind of a day off where I don’t plan on writing anything or running any kind of errand or so forth; rather, today is a “clean up and get organized” day around here, which is kind of nice. I am also going to stop at That’s Amore out there to get us a deep dish Chicago-style pizza, which will most likely take care of any food needs for today and tomorrow–although since I made groceries and went to Costco yesterday, there’s not really a whole lot of room in the refrigerator–and then tomorrow I can do some writing. I also want to make it to the gym tomorrow, for my return to the working out regularly plan that I want to put into place for over the summer. It’ll also be fun to start walking through the neighborhood again, taking pictures and remembering the past again.
I guess today could be seen as a transitional one. I need to start thinking about my Scotty book, but what I would really like to do is reread some of the Scottys to get a sense of him and his world again before trying to write him again–and of course, maybe, just maybe, the best way to do that is to finally compile the over-arching Bible of the series, which lists all the recurring characters as well as the who the villains are, as well as to trace out the Diderot/Bradley family tree. I also have to figure out how to weave the elements of the story I want to include together and have the plot coalesce and take shape as well. Some of the action is going to take place in a fictional river parish (I had thought about using the same fictional river parish I’ve been using for other stories–Redemption Parish–but decided not to use that one after all; there are more than one river parishes in Louisiana as well as more than one bayou parish), and so I have to also figure that out.
Heavy sigh.
I’d also like to get this revision of “Never Kiss a Stranger” finished as well.
And on that note, I need to get ready to head out to Kenner. Wish me luck, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Preparing for a workshop on writing sex scenes is not as easy as one might think. And of course, I have to do it today since the workshop is tomorrow morning, but I am going to have to do it around appointments and driving all over the metropolitan area of the city and it looks like we’re going to be having a shitty weather day on top of it all. Huzzah. I did sleep in this morning–I suspect my Fitbit, which I am not so sure I trust anymore is going to tell me that I didn’t sleep well (oh, there was some thunder!) and in just now checking the weather I see we are going to be having thunderstorms during the entire time I will be out dashing around the city. Huzzah.
Heavy heaving sigh.
Last night after Paul and I got home, I finished (I’d started the night before while I was waiting for Paul to come home) watching the first episode of The Real World New Orleans: Homecoming, or whatever it’s called. We used to watch The Real World religiously; I think we stopped watching during the Austin season, and never went back. But we were very excited back in the day when the New Orleans show was announced, and of course, even in those pre-Internet days stories about the cast and the filming used to break in the newspaper. They also were living in the Belfort mansion, which isn’t far from where we lived then (and now), but in the years since it’s turned into a boutique hotel. (The owner–mentioned but not by name–used to work out at my gym.) I am not sure where the house they are living in for this taping is, but I think it’s on Esplanade Avenue; I don’t recognize it from the exteriors. I never really had put a lot of thought into the shows before it filmed here–but once it started, I started to understand that “reality television” wasn’t really reality. They weren’t on camera 24/7, like the show claimed, and they also set up shots and maybe there wasn’t a script, per se, but it wasn’t “real”–we used to see the cast walking around the neighborhood, followed by a film crew that wasn’t filming them. They also filmed in places we knew; Danny the gay one worked as a bartender in one of the gay bars (I want to say Oz? I could be wrong, it’s been over twenty-odd years), and of course we used to see them and the signs on the doors of businesses announcing that the show would be filming there, the time they would be filming, and being present inside during those times meant consent to being filmed unless you advised the crew otherwise (those people who are pixilated out in background scenes didn’t give consent). The “job” the cast did while here was to produce a talk-type television show on local public access which began airing while they were still filming; Paul and I actually caught it by mistake flipping through the channels, and as we watched it, we both said, “Oh, this isn’t going to go over well here”–they were being hypercritical of the city, and yes, as you can imagine, it didn’t go over well. Places began denying them the right to film there, they were criticized everywhere–from all the local newspapers to all the local media–and they eventually had to apologize in order to get places to let them film. (I actually kind of felt sorry for them–they were kids, for Christ’s sake.) The reunion show is weird to watch–again, they were going to places I recognized (the drag show was at the Bourbon Parade, the dance club above the Pub), but it’s also weird to see how they look now, who they’ve become, and hear their stories about the impact being on the show had on their lives.
Then Paul came back downstairs and we watched the first two episodes of the new Queer as Folk, which was filmed here and is also set here. New Orleans is a beautiful city, and that’s one thing the producers and editors decided to play off; the show is beautifully filmed, and they made sure they showed off the city’s beauty at every opportunity they had. It was kind of choppy at the start–uneven, but first episodes when you’re launching a new series often are; it is the rare show that pulls off the first episode perfectly, especially when there’s a large ensemble cast. I love the cast, by the way; it’s mixed and diverse and displays a broad spectrum of the community, as opposed to the original (with its focus on white cisgender men, with the token lesbian couple thrown in just for fun). Paul and I watched the original primarily to be supportive; we knew it was a groundbreaking show and we needed to support it so networks would see there was value in queer programming, but neither of us were really fans of the show itself. It was very earnest, very ABC Afterschool Special and preachy when it came to important topics; and then would veer off into the ridiculous. For me, it was this weird mix of a Very Special Episode and silliness, and it is virtually impossible to do both. Daytime soaps make it look easy,but it’s not that easy to do–we always kept saying, “they need to either decide if they want to be a serious drama or gay Melrose Place” (obviously, we were hoping they’d go the Melrose Place route), but it seems like this reboot–despite the shaky opening–is off to a good start. We will continue watching, and hoping for the best (my supervisor at my day job filmed with the show; he does drag as Debbie with a “D”–his outfits and lewks are fucking amazing, so I am also hoping to see Debbie on the show)–and as Paul said, (and is why I’ll keep watching that awful Homecoming show) “at the very least, the city looks beautiful.” Babylon, the queer bar in the show, was actually in the neighborhood of my old office; it sits on the corner of Frenchmen Street and Chartres, and that neighborhood you see in the show isn’t the Quarter but the Marigny (I miss my old office on Frenchmen Street). We will probably continue watching it tonight, and I am kind of oddly looking forward to it. I am definitely here for all the queer rep on television lately, even as the trash continues to come for us and our rights.
Yes, I said trash, even though the word hardly expresses my deep, abiding, and utter contempt for those who hate me and my community and wish us dead.
And there’s the rain.
AND the obligatory flash flood warning came right after it started, of course.
Heavy sigh.
I did work on “Never Kiss a Stranger” yesterday some; it’s now about twenty-four thousand words, for those who are keeping track. I am really liking the story and I am really enjoying working on it, for those who were wondering. It’s nice to be writing again and enjoying it–it’s been weird this past year how that has gone; but I’ve also come to recognize that I have had periods of my life where I was going through depression and didn’t realize its extent until it had passed. I feel like I’ve been experiencing at the very least low-key depression since March 2020–the kind where I am tired all the time, not sleeping well, and even when I look back at that period, I’ve either forgotten everything and what I actually can remember…it’s through a bit of fog, with darkness around the edges…and I’ve not really been enjoying writing since March 2020, if I’m going to be honest. I am enjoying it again–good thing, since it’s compulsive for me and I always will do it, regardless of how I feel about it–but my writing has always been a source of joy for me, and having that not be the case has been very unpleasant. I’ve really not been finding much joy in anything since March 2020, but I also feel like I’ve kind of turned a corner, somehow–my brain snapped or something and it snapped back into the place where it should have been all along.
And on that note, best get ready to head out to Metairie in a thunderstorm in flash flood conditions. Woo-hoo!
Queer and Loathing in America 