Category: goals

Sweet Love

Wednesday morning, and it’s August. The end of summer is drawing nigh–although really, there’s at least another month and a half ahead of us–but I am also trying not to get upset with myself for how little I got done in July; it was, after all, an extremely hot and humid month and just having to go outside was draining. I also overslept this morning, and thus don’t have time for the gym; but I can make it tomorrow morning and even if I oversleep then as well, I don’t have to go into the office until two so I’ll still have time.

I worked on “Please Die Soon” a bit last night, but it dragged and I couldn’t really get into the rhythm of it. I am going to try again a bit today, but it’s a tricky story that I hope I can pull off. We shall see, won’t we?

Later this month I am going to focus the Short Story Project on Florida Happens, and every day I hope to talk about one of the short stories and provide some background on the story from the author, and some background on the author as well. It’s a terrific book, quite frankly, and you definitely should preorder it. If you are coming to Bouchercon, it will be there available for sale, and we are doing a launch event on Thursday at 1 pm that day, where you can get your copy signed by as many of the authors as humanly possible.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Intro by Tim Dorsey

The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight by Lawrence Block

The Best Laid Plans by Holly West

There’s An Alligator in My Purse by Paul D. Marks

Mr. Bones by Hilary Davidson

Cold Beer No Flies by Greg Herren

Frozen Iguana by Debra Lattanzi Shutika

The Fakahatchee Goonch by Jack Bates

The Case of the Missing Pot Roast by Barb Goffman

How to Handle a Shovel by Craig Pittman

Postcard for the Dead by Susanna Calkins

The Hangover by John D. MacDonald

Muscle Memory by Angel Luis Colon

The Unidentifieds by J. D. Allan

All Accounted for at the Hooray for Hollywood Hotel by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Southernmost Point by Neil Plakcy

Quarters for the Meter by Alex Segura

Breakdown by Brendan DuBois

Winner by Michael Wiley

Frontier Justice by John M. Floyd

When Agnes Left Her House by Patricia Abbott

The Ending by Reed Farrel Coleman

Intro by Tim Dorsey

The Burglar Who Strove to Go Straight by Lawrence Block

The Best Laid Plans by Holly West

There’s An Alligator in My Purse by Paul D. Marks

Mr. Bones by Hilary Davidson

Cold Beer No Flies by Greg Herren

Frozen Iguana by Debra Lattanzi Shutika

The Fakahatchee Goonch by Jack Bates

The Case of the Missing Pot Roast by Barb Goffman

How to Handle a Shovel by Craig Pittman

Postcard for the Dead by Susanna Calkins

The Hangover by John D. MacDonald

Muscle Memory by Angel Luis Colon

The Unidentifieds by J. D. Allan

All Accounted for at the Hooray for Hollywood Hotel by Eleanor Cawood Jones

Southernmost Point by Neil Plakcy

Quarters for the Meter by Alex Segura

Breakdown by Brendan DuBois

Winner by Michael Wiley

Frontier Justice by John M. Floyd

When Agnes Left Her House by Patricia Abbott

The Ending by Reed Farrel Coleman

Terrific, right?

Today’s short story, for the Short Story Project, is “Vincent Black Lightning’ by Tyler Dilts,  from Crime + Music, edited by Jim Fusilli.

It was the photo that got to Beckett. An old black-and-white eight-by-ten, yellowing around the edges, in a timeworn black frame. In it, a mean wearing nothing but a bathing cap, Speedo briefs, and sneakers was lying prone on an ancient motorcycle, his arms reaching forward to the narrow handlebars, his crotch perched over the read wheel, and his legs extended back into the air while he Supermanned across the desert floor.

The old dead man had the photo on his lap when he shot himself and some of the blood spatter had misted the glass. He hadn’t done a very good job of it. The muzzle of the snub-nosed revolver wasn’t angled squarely at the center of his skull and the bullet ripped open his forehead. A flap of skin and bone hung down over his right eye. Beckett wondered if there had been enough damage to the brain to kill him, or if he’d bled out. Either way, he was still just as dead.

This is a short, quirky story, about the police looking into the suicide of a man who was a bad father and all around kind of a jerk; it’s very well written, with strong characters, with a lovely jolt of a twist at the end.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Take Me Home

Saturday morning and I feel great. If you think that means I slept well last night, you would be correct in that assumption.  It’s amazing what a difference it makes; those of you who have no trouble sleeping at night and can get amazing rest every night? You have no idea how lucky you are, and how much I envy you.

Today I have errands to run, a house to clean, a workout to do; as long as I stay motivated I can easily get all of these things done. I also have writing to do–I want to finish “A Whisper from the Graveyard” this weekend, and I also want to finish making my notes on the Scotty book, at which point I need to revise the outline I did (after finishing the first draft) so I can start the massive edit/rewrite for the second draft I need to get done. As I also mentioned the other day, I also need to start reading the books on the Anthony shortlist for Best Paperback Original, since I am moderating that panel at Bouchercon this year. To jog your memory, those books are, as follows: The Day I Died by Lori Rader-Day; Bad Boy Boogie by Thomas Pluck; Uncorking a Lie by Nadine Nettman; What We Reckon by Eryk Pruitt; and Cast the First Stone by James Ziskin. I got some good reading ahead of me, don’t I? Yes I do!

Huzzah! This is, after all, always a good thing.

I am, alas, as always, behind on my writing schedule. I had wanted to get Scotty finished this month (ha!) before embarking on an a project that will consume August and September; and then I had wanted to work on the WIP in October and November before starting on Bury Me in Satin in December. I don’t see that happening now, alas, since I got so little done on Scotty this month. Then again, you never know. If I can maintain good sleeping habits and maintain meeting goals and staying motivated every day in the face of the oppressive heat of a New Orleans August, I just might be able to get back on schedule.

Here’s hoping.

I did finished reading Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister this week.

the favorite sister

A man whose name I do not know slides his hand under the hem of my new blouse, connecting the cable to the lavalier mic clipped to my collar. He asks me to say something–sound check–and for a single reckless beat, I consider the truth. Brett is dead and I’m not innocent.

“Testing. Testing. One. Two. Three.” I’m not only dishonest. I’m unoriginal.

The sound guy listens to the playback. “Keep your hair off your left shoulder as much as you can,” he tells me.  I haven’t had my ends trimmed in months, and not because my grief has bested my vanity. I’m hoping viewers are better able to see the resemblance to my sister. I have nice hair. Brett had beautiful hair.

“Thanks,” I reply, wishing I could remember his name. Brett would have known it. She made a point of being on a first-name basis with the crew–from the gaffer to the ever-rotating harem of production assistants. My sister’s speciality was making underappreciated people feel appreciated. It’s a testament to that quality that we are all gathered here today, some of us prepared to tell heroic lies about her.

This is Knoll’s second novel; her first, Luckiest Girl Alive, was stunningly brilliant and I loved it. I also believe she may have made the Edgar shortlist for Best First Novel. In this book, Knoll again takes as her theme ambitious women and the conflicts they have with each other, set against the backdrop of a reality television series which is clearly based, in some ways, on the Real Housewives shows. The show, Goal Diggers of New York, ostensibly focuses on five women who are all entrepreneurs, don’t have kids, and in most cases are also single. Goal Diggers has the same pedigree as the Real Housewives shows; originally intended as a docu-series focusing on real women and the struggles they have running businesses and so forth, it has descended into a ratings-hungry juggernaut predicated on pitting the women against each other emotionally and forcing them into feuds. The ultimate cleverness of the book is it follows, basically, the same trajectory as if it were, indeed, a reality show about women; it reads like a season of a Real Housewives franchise. There are three main point-of-view characters–sisters Kelly and Brett, and Brett’s former best friend, an author of color named Stephanie. Kelly narrates the action in the present, after all the events of the book are finished–the device used is her filming what is known as a ‘talking head’ interview; where the camera is trained on the cast member and asked questions. The rest of the book is about the filming of the most recent season of Goal Diggers, which ended in tragedy; that is shown from the alternating POV’s of Brett and Stephanie, who manufactured a feud for the season as a storyline but the ‘fake feud’ actually runs far deeper, with a far worse betrayal at its heart, than anything that was taped for the series. The book addresses a lot of current hot topics in our culture and society: racism, homophobia, same-sex marriage, sexism. It’s very hard to talk about the book without giving spoilers; like a season of a reality show, the twists and turns the plot takes are part of the joy the reader gets from the story, and to discuss them would spoil it for new readers. But it’s very well-written, and the characterizations are quite strong.

I have to say, I enjoyed every second of reading this book, and I can’t wait for Knoll’s next one.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Throwing It All Away

Well, the insomnia came back last night. I can’t complain, because while I am mentally fatigued this morning I don’t feel physically tired. Hopefully, sweet sleep will return tonight with a vengeance. I have a short day today; only five or so hours later on today at the office. I had wanted to get a lot done this morning, but the energy levels are kind of low at the moment. Heavy sigh. Maybe I can do a short grocery run or something; I don’t have to be at the office until two thirty.

Or I could curl up in my easy chair and read. Choices.

I have successfully frittered away most of July and got little to nothing finished. This is kind of normal, as I realized this morning as I started to mournfully beat myself up over it. I finished a book manuscript at the tail end of June; of course I’ve not been motivated this month to work on anything else or write very much; it happens every time. And it’s not like I haven’t been very creative this month; I have. I don’t think there’s anything I can actually come out at the moment and say that I’ve actually written this month, besides revising “This Thing of Darkness,” which is shaping up nicely methinks; there’s probably some other things I’ve written this month that I cannot recall this morning, and that’s fine. I think I can finish “A Whisper from the Graveyard” if I can just figure out how I want it to end; I;’m doing some basic research and its coming along nicely.

I’ve also been thinking about the Scotty book and getting ideas and writing them down, which is enormously helpful. Hurray for that, right?

And the endless, endless struggle with the WIP. Seriously. My own personal Vietnam. It will never be finished, it seems. But the revision I am planning is going to be pretty awesome, I think, and will finally make it all click into place for me. Fingers crossed, Constant Reader!

We started watching Castle Rock last night, and it’s disturbing and eerie and interesting, which is exactly what I was hoping for. We’ll continue with the series tonight–I think there are three episodes currently available?–but I am hoping it doesn’t wind up being disappointing.

All right, I should stop delaying and get a move on to the spice mines before the morning completely escapes my grasp.

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Love Touch

Tuesday!

Time keeps slipping through my fingers. There’s only one week left in July, and there’s so much I have to do before August 1! Heavy heaving sigh. There’s nothing else for me to do but gear up, buckle down, and get to work.

Yay?

In other exciting news, the Bouchercon program was announced and I have three, yes, three, panels this year! Such a bounty of riches!

They are all on Friday, September 7, and first up, at noon is:

A Nooner–The Sex Panel

Helen Smith (M)
Hillary Davidson
Christa Faust
Greg Herren
Catriona McPherson

Fun, right?

Then, at three:

Anthony Nominated Paperback Originals

Greg Herren (M)
Nadine Nettman
Thomas Pluck
Eryk Pruitt
Lori Rader Day
James Ziskin

and then, last but not least, at 4:

The Rainbow Connection–LGBTQ Inclusivity

Terri Bischoff (M)
Kelly J. Ford
Greg Herren
Kristen Lepionka
Catherine Maiorisi
CS Poe

All I know for sure is I will be ready for a drink at five.

Today’s story for the Short Story Project is “Witch War” by Richard Matheson, from The Best of Richard Matheson:

Seven pretty little girls sitting in a row. Outside, night, pouring rain–war weather. Inside, toasty warm. Seven overalled little girls chatting. Plaque on the wall saying: P.G. CENTER.

Sky cleaning its throat with thunder, picking up and dropping lint lightning from immeasurable shoulders. Rain hushing the world, bowing the trees, pocking earth. Square building, low, with one wall plastic.

Inside, the buzzing talk of seven pretty little girls.

“So I say to him–‘don’t give me that, Mr. High and Mighty.’ So he says, ‘Oh yeah?’ And I say, ‘Yeah!'”

“Honest, will I ever be glad when this thing’s over. I saw the cutest hat on my last furlough. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to wear it!”

“You too? Don’t I know it! You just can’t get your hair right. Not in this weather. Why don’t they let us get rid of it?”

“Men! They make me sick.”

Seven gestures, seven postures, seven laughters ringing thin beneath thunder. Teeth showing in girl giggles. Hands tireless, painting pictures in the air.

This is a story that leaves you wanting a lot more. Those seven girls? They are the entire military might of whatever side they are fighting for, and as the story progresses their gossip and chatting about clothes and make-up and the things girls theoretically talk about when they are in groups is interrupted because the enemy is launching an attack, and the girls go to work….and then go back to their gossiping and chatting once the battle is over and the enemy annihilated. Very reminiscent of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, I also think this would have made a terrific novel; the story really leaves you wanting more.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Tonight She Comes

Reality television.

I started watching in back in the original days of The Real World on MTV; the social experiment of picking vastly different young people from vastly different places with vastly different backgrounds, to see whether or not they can learn from each other and grow; or simply clash and create drama for the cameras. I enjoyed watching, I’m not going to lie–I didn’t lose interest until later seasons, when it became all about the kids getting drunk and hooking up and so forth. But the influence of The Real World–and its sister show, Road Rules–on reality television is unmistakable.

I’ve stuck my toe in the water with several reality shows–I used to be completely addicted to Project Runway, until it left Bravo for Lifetime and I lost interest–and the same with RuPaul’s Drag Race–after the Adore/Bianca/Courtney season I didn’t see how it could be anything other than a disappointment going forward so I stopped (although I did tune in for the glory that was RPD All-Stars Season Two), but I never got into Survivor or The Bachelor or any of the others. But I do watch the Real Housewives–New York is, without question, the gold standard, with Atlanta a close second with Beverly Hills trailing them both substantially; I can’t with Potomac, Orange County, and Dallas. 

I also really enjoyed the first season of Lifetime’ UnReal, but got behind on Season 2, heard bad things, and so never picked it back up again.

My love of (some of) the Housewives shows has resulted in my winding up on two Housewives related panels over the years at Bouchercon (Albany and New Orleans, to be precise), which were enormously fun; and I have also managed to observe what a cultural phenomenon these shows have become. There are recaps everywhere all over the Internet; there’s the Bravo website itself; and these women are often sprawled all over the tabloids I see while in line at the grocery store. (And no, I have only ever watched about twenty minutes of a Kardashian show and it was so horrible I never went back. More power to you if you’re a fan, but they are just not for me.

I even wrote a very short book–which is no longer available anywhere–based on the filming of such a show in New Orleans; it was pulled from availability primarily because I was never truly satisfied or happy with it. I wrote it very quickly in a window between deadlines and never felt I was able to explore all the things, the issues, with reality television that I wanted to with it. And yes, I decided to use that same backstory–a Real Housewives type show filmed in New Orleans–to write the new Scotty book because 1) it’s a great idea and 2) since I am writing off dead-line I can do it the way I want to and hopefully say the things I wanted to say in the first. Some of the original elements of the story I used before still exist in this Scotty book, but there’s a lot of changes I’ve made so it’s not the same story. The draft is very very rough, and since I’ve finished it and put it aside I’ve had a lot of great ideas for it; fixes and changes and so forth.

I think it might be the best Scotty yet, and it’s certainly the most complicated.

I started reading Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister yesterday, and before I knew what happened most of the afternoon was gone and I was about half-way through. Her book is also built around a reality television show, and boy, is this book biting. I loved her debut, Luckiest Girl Alive, and this one is just as good. You’ll get a full report, Constant Reader, when I finish it.

Next up for the Short Story Project: “Don’t Walk in Front of Me” by Sarah Weinman, from Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman:

I wanted honest work and got it at Pern’s. A Jewish bookstore is a strange place to work for a guy like me, but I didn’t have much choice; a month of job hunting left me frustrated and ready to break things, and the ad stuck on the store’s main window was as close to salvation as I could get.

Thus Sam–we were on a first-name basis from the beginning–was very particular about which items I could handle and which I couldn’t (“Anything with God’s name on it, leave it to me”), he left me to my own devices when it came to  handling teh cash register, stocking the books, and helping out customers. I hadn’t know much at all about Judaism, but I sure learned fast.

When I told my mother where I was working, she was understandably confused, but got over it quickly enough. I had a job, and a pretty decent one, and that was what mattered to her most.

“I worried about you, Danny, the whole time you were incarcerated. She articulated each syllable, just as she did every time she used the word. Which was a lot, because my mother adored big words. It was her way of showing how much more educated she was than the rest of the mamas in Little Italy.

Sarah Weinman is a fine short story writer; her stories in Lawrence Block’s stories-inspired-by-art are two of my favorites. Her upcoming study of the kidnapping case that inspired Lolita, The Real Lolita, will be out this fall and I can’t wait to dig into it. This story is another one of her little gems: a guy with a criminal past takes the only job he can get, and slowly but inexorably gets drawn into trying to help his boss solve a personal problem, and how things get out of hand from there. Brava, Sarah! WRITE MORE SHORT STORIES.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Love Touch

Sunday morning, as I sit here in my cool workspace swilling coffee, trying to wake up and figure out what to do with the rest of my day. I need to go to the grocery store and I should also probably make an attempt to go to the gym; but I can’t seem to find my iPad, which makes doing cardio pointless (I read or watch TV on my iPad while on the treadmill; perhaps not having my iPad is simply an excuse for not going; what if it’s gone, lost, stolen? I am trying not to think that way and am hoping that I simply left it at the office. If not, I am terribly screwed because I don’t know where it is and I currently don’t have the cash on hand to replace it. So, yes, let’s just continue pretending happily that it’s as the office, shall we?)

I could, of course, just go to the gym and do weights. That always feels good, at any rate. Perhaps once I finish swilling this coffee….

I slept late yesterday, and I slept even later today. I spent most of yesterday not only reading but doing chores around the house, on the pretense that today I would not only go to the grocery store and the gym, but I would also spend some time writing today. I need to finish a short story; I need to revise still another, and there’s that new one struggling to take root in my brain that I haven’t really decided what to do with just yet. There are two others swirling around up there in my head, as well as others I’ve not thought about or have forgotten about in the meantime. But now, now as I wake up I feel more confident about running the errands and going to the gym and actually doing some writing today.

I’ve been reading The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, and greatly enjoying it; is there anything quite like well-written non-fiction? It’s why I love Joan Didion and Barbara Tuchman; one of the things I love to do while reading is to learn, and non-fiction fills that need quite beautifully. I also like non-fiction that makes me think; which is why I am looking forward to reading Dead Girls by Alice Bolin. I still would love to do a collection of my own essays, book reviews, and so forth; but egad, what an odious chore pulling all of that together would be. I struggle with essays, but I also think that the writing of essays; the ability to pull thoughts from my head and extrapolate them out to their fullest meaning, is vitally important and a skill-set I wish I had honed more properly. A friend once pointed out to me, as I bemoaned my inability to write essays, that my blog itself is nothing more than years of personal essays. That took me aback, because it was, in many ways, correct; there is definitely some truth to that, but it’s hard for me to take the blog seriously in that fashion, because so much of it is simply written off the top of my head in the morning as I wake up and drink coffee and try to figure out what to do with the rest of my day.

One of the problems for me with personal essays is, ultimately, the issue of self-deprecation, which I’ve addressed in previous blog entries about my writing and my career and my books; who am I to write about this subject? Am I expert enough in this to write about it, or am I simply talking about things that smarter, better-educated people have written about long ago and having the hubristic belief that I am the only person to see this truth for the first time? 

And, in considering myself self-deprecatingly as not that special or particularly smart, I defeat myself and never write the essay.

And of course, there is the problem of all the lies my memory tells me.

But yesterday, I took the afternoon to finish read an ARC of Lou Berney’s new novel, November Road, and was blown away by it.

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Behold! The Big Easy in all its wicked splendor!

Frank Guidry paused at the corner of Toulouse to  bask in the neon furnace glow. He’d lived in New Orleans the better part of his thirty-seven years on earth, but the dirty glitter and sizzle of the French Quarter still hit his bloodstream like a drug. Yokels and locals, muggers and hustlers, fire-eaters and magicians. A go-go girl was draped over the wrought-iron rail of a second floor balcony, one book sprung free from her sequined negligee and swaying like a metronome to the beat of the jazz trio inside. Bass, drums, piano, tearing through “Night and Day.” But that was New Orleans for you. Even the worst band in the crummiest clip joint in the city could swing, man, swing.

A guy came whipping up the street, screaming bloody murder. Hot on his heels–a woman waving a butcher knife, screaming, too,

Guidry soft-shoed out of their way. The beat cop on the corner yawned. The juggler outside the 500 Club didn’t drop a ball. Just another Wednesday night on Bourbon Street.

Lou’s previous novel, The Long and Faraway Gone, won every crime-writing award under the sun that it was eligible for: Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and I don’t know what all; it was the crime publishing equivalent of the EGOT. It was, obviously, an exceptional novel. I met Lou when we were on a panel together at the Raleigh Bouchercon, along with Lori Roy and Liz Milliron; moderated by the amazing Katrina Niidas Holm. It was funny, because the panel topic was, I think, writing about small towns which, in fact, none of us on the panel really did, but we had fun with the topic and I know I brought up Peyton Place at least once and pointed out that suburbs are small towns with the primary difference being suburbs are bedroom communities for cities while small towns aren’t attached in any way to a larger city. It was fun and spirited and I liked Lou, thought he was incredibly smart, as were Liz and Lori. Lori and Lou went on to win Edgars for that year; and I admire their work tremendously. I’ve not had the opportunity to read Liz’ work; but she did have a terrific story in the New Orleans Bouchercon anthology, Blood on the Bayou.

Anyway, I digress.

I’ve been looking forward to November Road since I finished reading The Long and Faraway Gone, but I still need to go back and read Lou’s first two novels, Whiplash River and Gutshot Straight. 

I also have to admit, I was a little hesitant about Lou’s new book; it’s built around the Kennedy assassination in 1963, which always gives me pause (I have yet to immerse myself in Stephen King’s 11/22/63). I’m not sure why I don’t care to read fiction around the Kennedy assassination, but there you have: an insight into my mind. But the Kennedy assassination, while a primary plot device, is just that: a device to set the story in motion. Frank Guidry is involved with a mob boss in New Orleans, and after the Kennedy assassination he is given instructions to fly to Dallas, retrieve a car, and drive it to Houston to dispose of it. While he is doing this, he realizes that he is getting rid of evidence that may be of vital importance to the investigation into the president’s murder–and as such, is a loose end who knows too much and figures out he’s got to disappear now because they’re going to want to kill him. And sure enough, they do send someone after him, Paul Barone, a remorseless killer and tracker. The cat-and-mouse game between them builds suspense throughout the book.

But it’s not just about Frank, and it is a credit to Berney’s talent, creativity and imagination in that he throws in another primary character, constructed carefully in all the facets and layers that make her live and breathe: Charlotte. Charlotte is a wife and mother in a small town in Oklahoma, married to a useless drunk fuck-up with whom she had two daughters, and her salary working for the local town photographer is the primary thing keeping a roof over their heads. Her own ambitions for being a photographer herself are constantly shat upon by her boss, her society and culture and environment: she is a woman, a wife and mother, and in 1963 that so thoroughly defines her that any other ambition she might have throws her identity as wife and mother into question. Trapped, with the walls closing in on her closer every day, Charlotte takes the president’s assassination as a sign for her to run away with the girls and start over. Charlotte is an extraordinary character;  her relationship with her daughters is the strong backbone of this story. You root for her, you want her to make her escape and make her dreams come true.

Frank and Charlotte cross paths in New Mexico, and Frank sees them as his salvation; his murderous pursuers might be thrown off as they are looking for a single man, not one traveling with his wife and kids; the book becomes even stronger and more suspenseful once they are all together. Frank and Charlotte become close, despite not being completely honest with each other; they are both keeping their cards close to their vests, but yet form a loving bond. WIll they escape, or will they not?

November Road reminded me a lot of Laura Lippman’s Sunburn; the same kind of relationship building between a man and a woman where a lot of information, important, information, is held back from each other, and that lack of trust while falling in love is an important theme in both books: women trying to make their best lives, even if it means making morally questionable decisions, while becoming involved with a man who isn’t completely honest with her. Berney’s writing style, and tone, and mood, also put me in mind of Megan Abbott’s brilliant Give Me Your Hand. If you’ve not read yet the Lippman and Abbott novels, I’d recommend getting them and holding on to them until Berney’s book is released in October and reading them all over the course of a long weekend.

Bravo.

Sleeping Bag

Saturday morning and a lovely night’s sleep was had last evening; today is, I think, going to be a lazy day. We’re in a heat advisory, and I do want to go to the gym this morning, but after that I might have to just stay inside the rest of the day. The heat can be so oppressive; I worry about just how high my power bill is going to be, and it feels like my car never completely cools down when I’m driving here or there, hither and yon.  New Orleans summers are quite brutal; it’s hot and above all else, damp. Hydration is vital because you lose a lot of body fluids through sweating. Just walked to the car from the Lost Apartment, my socks get damp and so do my underarms and forehead. The wetness of the air is, naturally, wonderful for wild plant life; part of the reason New Orleans is so lush with vegetation is nature’s determination to return the city to what it was originally: a swamp. The sidewalk alongside the house is covered in pink crepe myrtle blossoms, like it snowed pink overnight.

I really don’t want to go outside.

But I will always prefer heat to cold. That will never change. I don’t, after all, have to scrape humidity off my car or shovel it off my sidewalk. And really, the anticipation of dealing with the heat is always worse than it ever turns out to be.

The kitchen is a mess this morning, so I definitely need to unload the dishwasher and do another load of dishes this morning. I’ll probably do the floors as well; in for a penny and all that. I may just wind up spending the day reading Lou Berney’s brilliant November Road. My reading has slowed down a bit; I’m not sure why that is, and I also need to read some more short stories this morning, as I only have two that I’ve read left to blog about; but the lovely thing about short stories is they are short, and don’t take a long time to read. I can read three or four in less than an hour, and I’ve got all kinds of anthologies and single-author collections piled up all around the house and in my iPad.

Or…I could just blow everything off and deal with it tomorrow. I’m going to have to make a grocery run anyway.

Weekends.

Next up in the Short Story Project is “The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons, from his collection Prayers to Broken Stones and other Stories:

I loved my mother very much. After her funeral, after her coffin was lowered, the family went home and waited for her return.

I was only eight at the time. Of the required ceremony I remember little. I recall that the collar of the previous year’s shirt was far too tight and that the unaccustomed tie was like a noose around my neck. I remember that the June day was too beautiful for such a solemn gathering. I remember Uncle Will’s heavy drinking that morning and the bottle of Jack Daniels he pulled out as we drove home from the funeral. I remember my father’s face.

The afternoon was too long. I had no role to play in the family’s gathering that day, and the adults ignored me. I found myself wandering from room to room with a warm glass of Kool-Aid, until finally I escaped to the backyard. Even that familiar landscape of play and seclusion was ruined by the glimpse of pale, fat faces staring out from the neighbor’s windows. They were waiting. Hoping for a glimpse. I felt like shouting, throwing rocks at them. Very deliberately I poured the red Kool-Aid into the sand and watched the spreading stain digging a small pit.

They’re digging her up now.

Dan Simmons is a terrific writer. The first of his I read was Carrion Comfort, which I remember fondly, before moving on to (among others) Song of Kali, Summer of Night, and Children of the Night. There was also a really terrific one set in Hawaii whose name I cannot recall right now; but it was about volcanoes and Pele, and I also really enjoyed it. The television adaptation of his The Terror was simply phenomenal television, and while I disagree strongly with his politics–I try as hard as I can to separate the artist  from the work.

This story is absolutely fantastic, and chilling, and creepy. Humanity has developed the technology to revive the dead, but rather than going into any explanations of how that works or why you would do such a thing, Simmons focuses on the point of view of a child whose mother has died and is being brought back…and how other people react to such a thing. This could easily make a terrific novel; and the themes of isolation, being viewed as outsiders and being ostracized by your community, is handled beautifully and can be extrapolated into symbolism about any outsiders. It’s really quite terrific.

And now on to the spice mines.

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Rumors

I wrote a short story the other day; or rather, I finished writing one. It’s called “This Thing of Darkness” (I love that title. It’s from Shakespeare; The Tempest, to be exact.) and it’s one I started writing several months ago and then set aside to work on other things. I’ve always wanted to finish it, and while the story I should have been working on was kind of stalled out for me, rather than trying to force it or work some kind of voodoo magic somehow, I thought, oh, I should just finish “This Thing of Darkness” and soon enough have the first draft banged out. It needs work, of course, but I am very pleased, as the writing has been very slow going this month.

The second story I am writing, the one I really need to finish, continues to be a slog. Heavy sigh. But I am hoping to have a breakthrough on it really soon; otherwise I am just going to have to push myself to write through it.

I really hate when the writing stalls, don’t you?

I also started another story this week. It was one of those things where it came to me Monday night as I was sitting in my easy chair watching the news unfold, and shaking my head in disbelief, frankly. It’s called “Please Die Soon” and I think it’s kind of a clever idea; we shall see if I can deliver on its original promise, shan’t we?

Our anniversary–the twenty-third–is this Friday, and to celebrate we are going to go see a movie on Saturday and go out to dinner. There’s no end to the living large, is there?

And hurray for Thursday! I’ve almost made it through the week.

Today’s short story is “Prey” by Richard Matheson, from The Best of Richard Matheson:

Amelia arrived at her apartment at six-fourteen. Hanging her coat in the hall closet, she carried the small package into the living room and sat on the sofa. She nudged off her shoes while she unwrapped the package on her lap. The wooden box resembled a casket. Amelia raised the lid and smiled. It was the ugliest doo she’d ever seen. Seven inches long and carved from wood, it had a skeletal body and an oversized head. Its expression was maniacally fierce, its pointed teeth completely bared, its glaring eyes protuberant. It clutched an eight-inch spear in its right hand. A length of fine, gold chain was wrapped round its body from the shoulders to the knees. A tiny scroll was wedged between the doll and the inside wall of its box. Amelia picked it up and unrolled it. There was handwriting on it. This is He Who Kills, it began. He is a deadly hunter. Amelia smiled as she read the rest of the words. Arthur would be pleased.

The thought of Arthur made her turn to look at the telephone on the table beside her. After a while, she sighed and set the wooden box on the sofa. Lifting the telephone to her lap, she picked up the receiver and dialed a number.

Her mother answered.

“Hello, Mom,” Amelia said.

“Haven’t you left yet?” her mother asked.

Amelia steeled herself. “Mom, I know it’s Friday night–” she started.

She couldn’t finish. There was silence on the line. Amelia closed her eyes. Mom, please, she thought. She swallowed. “There’s this man,” she said, “His name is Arthur Breslow. he’s a high-school teacher.”

“You aren’t coming,” her mother said.

Amelia shivered “It’s his birthday, ” she said. She opened her eyes and looked at the doll. “I sort of promised him we’d…spend the evening together.”

Every one who was old enough to watch television in the 1970’s knows this story, because everyone watched the made-for-TV movie Trilogy of Terror, which starred Karen Black. Trilogy of Terror was an anthology film; three short stories adapted into thirty-minute stories, all starring Karen Black, and “Prey” was the final story. It was completely unforgettable, because it was absolutely terrifying. It gave me nightmares for weeks, and I had to sleep with a night light on for months. All three were stories by Matheson; Matheson only wrote the screenplay for the third segment. It’s equally chilling as a short story as it was a short film; Amelia buys a fetish doll for a male friend with whom she has a date that night. She has to cancel a visit to her mother, who is very controlling, but while she is on the phone with her mother the gold chain that keeps the spirit of the fetish doll imprisoned and trapped falls off….and the real terror begins.

Absolutely unforgettable.

The movie was also produced by Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows fame, who also produced and directed Burnt Offerings.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)

Thursday! Yesterday was strange; I was enormously tired all day, it felt like I’d never woken up mentally the entire day. I wasn’t physically tired, I was mentally tired all day, and had little or no energy. I guess I didn’t get good rest on Tuesday night, despite sleeping fairly well. As such, I made little to no progress on anything yesterday.

The other night Paul and I watched the documentary Dancer, about Russian ballet dancer Sergei Polunin. (I guess that makes him a ballerino, which term has never really caught on; most male ballet dancers are just called ballet dancers, which is interesting.) The documentary was pretty amazing; particularly when it focused on showing him dance. I will be the first to admit that I have not watched nearly as much ballet as I would like to have; not as many ballets are recorded on film as perhaps we should wish. I have spent time on Youtube watching Nureyev and Baryshnikov and the gorgeous Italian Roberto Bolle, which is how I originally came across “Take Me to Church,” the video of Polunin dancing to the song and shot by Dave LaChappelle (if you haven’t seen it, you really need to; the things he can do–how high he can leap, how gracefully he can spin–just take your breath away). I really do want to write a noir about ballet; it’s on the list of things I want to write.

Sergei:

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Roberto Bolle:

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I will never, I fear, have the time to write all the books I want to write. This is one of the reasons I always beat myself up when I have either an unproductive day (yesterday) or a lazy one (say, last weekend, for example). But I somehow cannot write every day; no matter how much I try. I need to get focused on finishing my short story “A Whisper from the Graveyard,” and I need to start getting the Scotty rewritten as well as some work done on the WIP. July is slipping through my fingers, and with less than three full weeks left, time is running out. Which is how I then start berating myself and sliding into negativity, which usually correlates with self-flagellation, and a further downward spiral.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

But, as I said earlier in the week, I did have a massive breakthrough on both the WIP and the Scotty; both are going to take some serious work, but I feel confident that I can get them done. Just not so confident that I can get them done by the end of this month, but hey, focus is the key. I want to get the short story finished, or at least a draft of it, before I can focus totally on the Scotty; and I really need to reread the entire WIP from start to finish, to make notes and figure out what and where can be salvaged and what needs to be jettisoned.

But I do highly recommend Dancer. I think, even if you aren’t a ballet fan or don’t know anything about ballet, if you’re an artist of any sort you would enjoy it; it’s really about sacrifice in the name of art and success; Sergei was separated from his family at a very early age in order to pursue his talent for dancing–the sacrifices his own family made are extraordinary (his went to Portugal to work to pay for the training; his grandmother moved to Greece to do the same, and neither saw their family for years; his family never even had the opportunity to see him dance after he went away to London to train) and how the enormous early success, plus not having any family to ground him, caused him to crash and burn–not in a dramatic way, he just had an emotional breakdown and walked away from his career not once, but twice.

One of the things I found most interesting was his own take on things–basically, he reached the pinnacle of dance at an early age, and then, what was there left to achieve? Which is an interesting concept, an interesting question, for any artist: when you’ve reached the top of your field, or produced your best work, what do you do next?  I kind of crashed and burned early last year, which resulted in a desultory year where I not only didn’t write but didn’t really want to; it is incredibly easy to fall into that trap. I failed to see the point in it anymore, and I once heard myself saying to someone during that miserable year, well, I’ve published this many books, no one can ever take that away from me, I will always be an author no matter what, and as the words came out, as I heard them, they bothered me.

It took me a while to realize that they bothered me because I hadn’t accomplished everything I had set out to do when I decided to take writing seriously some twenty-odd years ago; and there was a hint of resignation and defeat in the words. But I do think last year was necessary, for my personal growth as well as my professional. It made me take stock of things, made me remember what I wanted, and even though it took me a long while to get to a point where I was ready to write again and felt invigorated and recharged enough to do so.

I do feel like the work I am doing now is some of the best of my career thus far; so there is also that. Maybe I’m fooling myself and maybe I am not; we shall see.

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

 

Why Can’t This Be Love

Wednesday and I am very tired this morning; not sure what that’s all about, but there you have it.

I had yet another breakthrough this week on something I’m working on–which brings the breakthroughs in recent weeks to an almost ridiculous level. I finally recognized, through my own stubbornness, that the story I was trying to tell in the WIP is the wrong story; I kept trying to  make it fit the story I wanted to tell, ignoring the little voice I would hear every once in a while telling me no, this is the real story, why won’t you listen to me? Finally, on Monday night, it hit me upside the head with a two-by-four; and when I finally stopped fighting it and  listened to the voice, the entire plot fell into place and all the problems I couldn’t seem to iron out completely magically answered themselves. And you know what? Once again it all comes down to me being ridiculously stubborn when I didn’t need to be, and not listening to  my inner voices.

Seriously, you’d think I’d know better by this point. But I never seem to learn. And of course, rereading the previous paragraph now I realize it sort of makes me look sort of insane. But you know, I don’t know any other way to say it than a voice in my head. I kept trying to make this manuscript, characters and town fit this story I was trying to tell, with the end result that I wasn’t seeing their real story.

And now I can’t wait to fix it and make it better.

I am so behind on so many things I need to get done–I need to get the Scotty revisions done; I need to get to work on this; I have a short story I need to write….madness. And I have so much reading to do! I need to get back on the Short Story Project, and I want to read Lou Berney’s November Road and Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita and Alex Segura’s Blackout and…heavy heaving sigh.

We watched a really good Australian show this weekend, Secret City, which starred Anna Torv (been a fan since Fringe, and she was also terrific in Mindhunter), which had a lot going for it–the cutthroat world of domestic and foreign politics is at the core of the story, which opens with a young man being murdered and a reporter (Torv) happening upon the crime scene and starting to investigate. I do recommend this show highly, and there’s also a wonderful subplot where it turns out that Torv’s ex-husband is a transwoman, and I thought the show handled it beautifully, with one slight quibble.

We also started watching HBO’s Sharp Objects, which I thought was spectacular. I actually preferred this Gillian Flynn novel to Gone Girl, the book that made her famous and a publishing superstar, and I still need to read her other novel, Dark Places.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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