Category: goals

I Still Can’t Get Over Loving You

Wednesday, and Day 4 of Facebook Jail. You know something? I wonder if they’ve heard of unintended consequences over at the Facebook Community Standards department. I usually spend far too much time scrolling through my Facebook feed and interacting with friends. So far this week, instead of doing that, I’ve revised a short story, worked on an outline, read a book (a wonderful history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted), read several short stories, and gotten some other things done. As this thirty day sentence continues, I will probably visit Facebook less and less–it’s kind of frustrating being able to see things and not respond to them–and by the end of the sentence, probably will be completely broken of the need to go there, and hopefully my attention span will have snapped back to what it was in the days before social media. I’m also liking Tumblr, INstagram and Twitter–you don’t wind up spending nearly as much time there, at least I don’t, at any rate. Once I get used to not being on Facebook and having all this free time…look out.

I also read Lois Duncan’s young adult novel Ransom. Originally published in 1967 as Five Were Missing, it’s clear to see why Duncan was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America shortly before her death. I’ve not read all of Duncan’s work–I’m working my way through them all–but her novels were startlingly original and fresh, particularly when you consider when they were originally published. Ransom, inspired by a true crime in northern California where a school bus was hijacked and the students kidnapped, reads very quickly. The five students on the bus all are fully developed and fleshed out beautifully; and Duncan uses the kidnapping as a way of getting inside the heads of the characters and exposing them for what they are; the golden boy with dark secrets and feet of lead; the spoiled cheerleader who dislikes and resents her stepfather, only to learn that the father she idolizes is unworthy of her love; the military brat, deeply intelligent, who is the first to realize the truth of their situation and finds depths of bravery she never knew she had; the younger brother of the golden boy who realizes his own identity, and finds he has levels of potential strength his brother can only aspire to; and the orphan, being raised by his bachelor uncle with scars of his own to hide who finds out that self-pity only keeps him from enjoying his life. The dialogue is a little stilted and old-fashioned, but as I said, it reads very quickly.

Duncan was definitely a master.

Speaking of masters, I read a short story by Patricia Highsmith yesterday as well, “The Heroine,” which is the lead off story in Sarah Weinman’s Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives; a brilliant anthology of stories written by women crime writers from the 1940’s thru the 1950’s, a time when women dominated the industry and many of these wonderful writers are sadly, overlooked and forgotten.

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The girl was so sure she would get the job, she had unabashedly come out to Westchester with her suitcase. She sat in a comfortable chair in the living room of the Christiansens’ house, looking in her navy blue coat and beret even younger than 21, and replied earnestly to their questions.

“Have you worked as a governess before?” Mr. Christianen asked. He sat beside his wife on the sofa, his elbows on the knees of his gray flannel slacks and his hands clasped. “Any references, I mean?”

“I was a maid at Mrs. Dwight Howell’s home in New York for the last seven months.” Lucille looked at him with suddenly wide gray eyes. “I could get a reference from there if you like…But when I saw your advertisement this morning I didn’t want to wait. I’ve always wanted a place where there were children.”

I love Patricia Highsmith, and I have an enormous volume that contains all of her short stories. It’s really criminal that I, like so many other people, don’t read more short stories (hence my short story project, which I might make a year-long thing rather than just a few months), and it deeply shames me that I’ve had Troubled Daughters Twisted Wives sitting on my shelf collecting dust all this time without taking it down and reading it. This Highsmith story, “The Heroine,” is genius, absolute genius, in the cold, slightly detached way that Highsmith uses as her point of view, which makes her stories and novels so much more chilling. It’s very clear, almost from the start–ah, that foreshadowing–that the Christiansens are probably making a terrible mistake in not checking on Lucille’s references. And how the story develops is so much more chilling than you think it is when you get that uh oh feeling in your stomach when Mrs. Christiansen charmingly says she won’t check Lucille’s references. Highsmith’s authorial voice is so distant, so cold and matter-of-fact, and her word choice is always simple and spare…but she always gets that feeling of suspense, of oh my god what is going to happen that you feel amping up as you finish reading each sentence…and her denouements never disappoint.

Weinman has done an excellent job curating this collection; she also did a two-volume collection of novels by these writers called Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940’s and 1950s: A Library of America Boxed Set. Some of the novels included in that gorgeous set I’ve already read–Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, Vera Caspary’s Laura–but I am definitely going to have to get that set down from the shelf and read the others as well. Weinman is also pretty expert on the crime genre in general; very well read, fiercely intelligent and deeply perceptive, her newsletter The Crime Lady is amazing, and I read it every week for her thoughts on true crimes, the books she’s read and recommends…you can sign up for it here. You can thank for me for it later. She’s also writing a true crime of her own right now that I can’t wait to read.

And now, back to the spice mines.

I’m So Excited

Since earning a thirty day ban from Facebook yesterday because of the horror of posting pictures of sexy men in their underwear, I’ve decided to make lemons from this lemonade and start exploring other options of social media. Obviously, Facebook is one of the bigger ones; but I also am on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr; so why NOT explore those options and expand my following on those sites? So, thank you, fascist homophobic sexist Nazis at Facebook; you’re making me do something I wouldn’t ordinarily do, and at the same time, you might even be rendering yourself obsolete in the world of one Gregalicious.

Well done there, Facebook. Seriously.

Although these other social media platforms are…a little confusing.

Anyway, you can find me on Tumblr here, follow me on Twitter @scottynola, and my Instagram is here. Find me, follow me, and I’ll promise to be better about posting in those places!

As I said, my great experience over the weekend doing panels at Comic Con has kind of invigorated me; I am getting back down to serious writing again, and my creativity is raging out of control. I think that  part of it has to do with keeping a physical journal again; I can’t believe how much of a difference it is making having it with me at all times, and I certainly can’t believe I stopped carrying one with me at all times. I don’t even remember when it was that I did stop carrying one, to be honest. I was talking to another writer this weekend–Bryan Camp, whose debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes will be out this April, and I read an early draft, which was fantastic; I can only imagine how good it is now–and was talking about how much the business had changed, and how quickly it happened. I sort of knew what I was doing the first few years, and then came the Time of Troubles, which derailed me for several years…and when I really got my head back in the game, everything about the business had changed. There were ebooks and bookstores and newspapers were disappearing; magazines that used to review were gone or on their way out the door, Insightoutbooks was phasing out…it seemed like every time I was trying to adapt to something new something else changed, or the new thing was no longer a thing, and social media had become to go-to for marketing; although now it was being called branding. I’m still not completely comfortable with that term; I don’t like thinking of my books as product or of myself as something akin to Tide and Coca-Cola and Folger’s. But I suppose it does make sense from a business perspective; publishing is a business, and the idea is to move units, just like liters of milk and loaves of bread and cans of creamed corn.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, does it? Sigh.

Yesterday I read a short story by Truman Capote, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Four Other Stories. It was called “A Diamond Guitar.”

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The nearest town to the prison farm is twenty miles away. Many forests of pine trees stand between the farm and the town, and it is in these forests that the convicts work; they tap for turpentine. The prison itself is in a forest. You will find it there at the end of a red rutted road, barbed wire sprawling like a vine over its walls. Inside, there live one hundred and nine white men, ninety-seven Negroes, and one Chinese. There are two sleep houses–great green wooden buildings with tarpaper roofs. The white men occupy one, the Negroes and the Chinese the other. In each sleep house there is one large pot-bellied stove, but the winters are cold here, and at night with the pines waving frostily and a freezing light falling from the moon the men, stretched on their iron cots, lie awake with the fire colors of the stove playing in their eyes.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books, and it’s partly because he is so poetic, so charming, a writer in his word choices and the way he describes things. It always cracks me up when people tell me they love Breakfast At Tiffany’s because it’s clear they’re talking about the movie and not the Capote novella it was loosely based on; the novella is actually really dark and sad, as most of Capote’s work is; even if he didn’t always write about the south, he was very much of the Southern Gothic school of writers. In the novella Holly is basically an escort who’s looking for a sugar daddy–and so is her neighbor, the guy telling the story; he’s not George Peppard and he doesn’t fall in love with her because he’s gay, escorting and also looking for a sugar daddy; they bond in friendship over that similarity.

This story, “A Diamond Guitar,” is short and very poetically written; many Southern prisons are referred to as ‘farms’ and the prisoners work with the money from the sweat of their labor going to the prison (and usually siphoned off by someone). The story is about a convicted murderer, known in the story only as Mr. Schaeffer, and it tells the story of the only friend Mr. Schaeffer ever had in the prison, a beautiful young Cuban boy named Tico Feo. Tico brings the diamond studded guitar into the prison with him; the two men become friends–but not lovers; Capote is very clear that they are close as lovers but there is nothing physical between them; and finally Tico decides he wants to escape and he wants his friend to come with him. Tico does manage to escape, but Schaeffer does not; he trips and breaks his ankle and is left behind–it’s never clear whether this accident was actually deliberate or not, but it’s clear Schaeffer doesn’t really want to escape. But without hid only friend, Schaeffer closes himself off from everyone else in the prison, and under his cot he keeps the diamond guitar. The diamonds, of course, are just glass; just like Tico, everything about the guitar is phony.

It’s a really lovely little story.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Give It Up

It rained overnight, and is still damp and gloomy this morning. There really is nothing like sleeping during a downpour, is there, the constant strumming of the rain, the comfort and warmth of the mattress and under the blankets, is there?

Yesterday was a crazy busy day for one Gregalicious, who got up in the morning and did some work, cleaned, and then walked to Comic Con for a signing and a panel. The signing was fun, and the panel discussion about creativity and creativity triggers was also a lot of fun; as exhausting and draining as it is to do public appearances, I also always somehow forget, in the nervousness and terror of having to speak in front of a room full of people, how much I actually enjoy talking about writing and creativity. So, there’s that. I then came home, watched the ice dance final at US Nationals, and then the Saints play-off game, which was a nail-biter down to the very last play of the game (GEAUX SAINTS!). We stayed up and watched the Golden Globes before going to bed; I also managed to get some brainstorming done in my journal, and I also read a short story, to keep the Short Story Project going.

One of the truly fun things about the panel was that Tom Cook was on it. Tom was an animator/director for Hanna-Barbera in the late 1960’s/1970’s, and of course, one of the shows he worked on was Scooby Doo Where Are You, which tremendously influenced me in the direction of mysteries and crime when I was a kid. So meeting Tom, and thanking him for the influence, was kind of a thrill for the weekend for me. I am starting to feel energized about writing again, which is very cool.

The short story I read was “East Wind,” from Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll and Other Lost Stories.

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Nearly a hundred miles west of the Scillies, far from the main track of ships, lies the small, rocky island of St. Hilda’s. Only a few miles square, it is a barren, rugged place, with great jagged cliffs that run deep into deep water. The harbour is hardly more than a creek, and the entrance like a black hole cut out of the rock. The island rises out of the sea a queer, misshapen crag, splendid inits desolation, with a grey face lifted to the four winds. It might have been thrown up from the depths of the Atlantic in a moment of great unrest, and set there, a small defiant piece of land, to withstand forever that anger of the sea Over a century ago few knew of its existence, and the many sailors who saw its black outline on the horizon imagined it to be little more than a solitary rock, standing like a sentinel in mid-ocean.

“East Wind” is an early du Maurier tale, from early in her career (which people seem to want to divide into ‘pre’ and ‘post’ Rebecca); and in some ways the inexperience shows. The story is, as so many of her later stories are, very matter-of-fact; simply told with a move this  to that to the other; unemotional and simple. However, what is actually missing from this story that shows up in her later stories are layers of detail and complexity; stories like “Don’t Look Now” and “The Birds” have so many layers to burrow through, so much detail, and so much creepy, quiet horror that they continue to haunt the reader once the story is told. “East Wind” is an equally unpleasant tale, but doesn’t have the impact of the later stories in its telling.

As I started reading it, it reminded me of one of my favorite Stephen King stories, “The Reach”, which was the final story I think in Skeleton Crew, and was originally called “Do the Dead Sing?”, which is, in my opinion, a far superior title. That story was from the point of view of an old woman, dying in her bed on a cold, blustery winter night, and remembering something that happened many years ago–while also hearing her beloved dead one’s calling to her to join them. The story was brilliant and beautiful and haunting, and as I said, remains one of my favorite King stories to this day.

The du Maurier tale is similar in that it is about a remote island, where the inhabitants have very little contact with the outside world and because of a limited pool, have become more than a little inbred. The east wind of the title is brutal, blasting away at the little island and making the seas rough, so a brig of foreign sailors is forced to take shelter in the harbor, foreigners who don’s speak the same language. These exotic to the islanders strangers have an odd impact on the islanders, who become intoxicated in the strangeness and newness of this experience, which eventually leads to seduction and murder, changing and scarring the island forever; and of course, once this has happened and the east wind stops blowing, they get back in their ship and sail away because, of course, it was nothing to them. This is, of course, a terrific theme that du Maurier returns to again and again in her work; the dionysian influence of an outside force that causes trouble and then moves on without a care, leaving damage in its wake. The story itself, which is short and unemotional, is important as an early work because the reader, the duMaurier afficionado, can see how she developed themes she used extensively in her later career; her fascination with the concept of the unfeeling outside force on ordinary people’s lives, and the disruption such an influence can cause.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Adult Education

Thursday, and I am sitting in the kitchen shivering just a little bit. Of course, the ‘bomb cyclone’ or whatever it is they are calling it is pounding the eastern seaboard, and we have a bright sunny (if chilly) day here, so I am going to count my blessings rather than complain about how cold it is in my kitchen this morning. I have a space heater, a wool blanket, and coffee. Things could be so much worse, seriously.

Comic Con kicks off tomorrow, which will mean me rushing home from the main office so I can walk to the convention center in time to check in, get my badge, and head up to where my panel is. I don’t have to be there on Saturday, so I can use that day to run errands and do chores around the house as well as get some writing and editing done (also, US National Figure Skating championships are this weekend; we watched the ladies’ short program live last night on the NBC SN app on the Apple TV), and spend Sunday, when I am not at Comic Con, relaxing and trying to get some odds and ends finished.

My mind has been incredibly creative lately, which is not only an interesting thing–it feels like it’s been a long time–but I also find my mind wandering over to some projects that I started and never finished. Sometimes I get an idea for a book or a story, complete with an opening so strong and vivid that  I have to write it down or fear it will be lost forever.

Like this one, the opening for a high school noir about a twisted mother-daughter relationship:

Razor blades look so innocent, really. Clean, precise, glittery silver, utilitarian and oh so useful, so useful they’re tucked away inside a vanity drawer close to the sink basin in everyone’s bathroom. There were so many uses for a razor blade. They cleanly scrape glue left behind when pulling tape off glass, for one thing, and of course a razor will cut that pesky unwanted hair away from skin. How many times had she sat in this bathroom, in this bathtub, using a razor without a second thought? Soaping up her legs, pulling the razor along in a long steady motion, her mind a million miles away but careful, always careful, to make sure she didn’t press too hard so that skin would be cut away along with the blonde hairs? She always put her phone into the iHome on the counter and would hum along with Katie Perry and Taylor Swift and One Direction, it made the effort of shaving her tanned legs so the skin would be silky smooth to the touch go so much faster.

These were safety blades. Safety meant there was a metal cap opposite the sharp side so it could be handled without danger of cutting skin. It seemed crazy, a stupid obeisance to some past lawsuit where someone was too stupid to understand how carefully a razor had to be handled was rewarded by a jury with millions. Flesh is delicate and tears so easily, after all, and once it’s torn, the blood flows so dark and richly red.

She wipes steam off the mirror so she can see herself, distorted, through the moisture on the glass. Distorted. Always distorted. She takes the safety blade and sets it on the side of the white bathtub, the emerald green shower curtain pulled to the side. Steam curls off the top of the water. She drops the robe and steps into the hot water, flinching against the heat against her skin as pores pop open and sweat forms under her arms and above her lip. She pulls the long blonde hair back, securing at the nape of her neck with a pink scrunchie. She lowers herself into the water, bracing herself against the shock. Down into the water she goes until all that is left above the surface is her neck, her head.

 Her lip trembles.

I don’t appreciate your guilt-tripping me. It’s over. His voice echoes in her head.

What the hell is wrong with you? Her father’s voice, screaming at her.

No one likes you because you’re such a bitch. Her former best friend.

A single tear dribbles from the corner of her right eye.

Her nose starts to run.

She picks up the razor blade and presses it to the inside of her left arm.

Next time remember to cut up, not across. Her mother’s voice, always sneering, dripping with contempt.

Always her mother, always.

She presses down and gasps at the unexpected pain, unexpected because she didn’t think she could actually feel anything anymore.

Up, not across.

She drags the blade up towards the crease of her arm.

Blood, not bright but rich and dark.

 It runs down and drips into the water, diffusing and spreading.

The blade goes into the other hand. Presses against the right wrist.

Up, not across.

Finished, she drops the blade into the soap dish.

 She closes her eyes and waits for death.

Creepy, right?

Here’s a hunk for you as I go back to the spice mines.

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Cover Me

The first day of the new year: 2018. It is currently twenty-eight degrees outside; which is hideous for New Orleans. Much as I would rather spend the day curled up beneath blankets with a good book today, I am venturing out for an early lunch with a friend before heading back home for the LSU bowl game. I am currently wrapped in a wool blanket sipping my first cup of coffee. I didn’t want to leave the warmth of my bed this morning; it was comfortable and warm in there under all those blankets. Tomorrow I have to work a long day which will entail getting up quite early; I am not looking forward to that as the temperature is supposed to be around the same as it is this morning.

Not a pleasant start to the new year, but i am grateful that at least our thermostat is in the positive numbers.

Yesterday after lunch at Commander’s, I stopped at Garden District Books and bought myself a blank journal; while watching the Saints lose (seriously, they couldn’t have played worse if they were trying to lose) I wrote three pages of notes on the WIP in it; and they are good notes. Sometimes, it’s necessary to go back to your roots to kick the cobwebs out of your mind and get things together. I’m glad I remembered that I used to do this with my journals, and I can carry it with me everywhere, just like I used to; and I can just scribble notes, even just brainstorming and free association the way I used to rather than rabidly checking my phone.

So, here are my goals for 2018. I prefer to set goals rather than make resolutions; goals sounds, for one thing, more positive, and not reaching a goal isn’t like failing; breaking a resolution sounds almost criminal, whereas not making a goal doesn’t mean the goal isn’t still attainable; just taking longer than originally anticipated. So, here goes.

Get to the gym at least twice a week. I was doing quite well with doing crunches at home several days a week, until I got sick a few weeks ago and it flattened me out. It will be easier to get to the gym now on the weekends since football season is past; ideally I should make it three times per week; but two is better than once; and once is better than never. Getting into a regular routine will help me get back into better physical condition; being in better physical condition will help me sleep better and help regulate my vitals–blood pressure, etc.

Write a short story every month. I always try to write more short stories; I set this goal every year, and I am even going to allow myself a little more wiggle room here with this one; I am going to expand it to mean just working on a short story every month. I have any number of short stories in a draft form, either unfinished or in need of rewriting/revising/polishing, and the sooner I can get those files off my desk the more room I will have on my desk.

Get an agent. This was a goal last year that I didn’t achieve; but last year I did start submitting queries. Now that I’ve ripped off that bandage, I am going to get going on this and get somewhere with it. However, part of this is having something to submit; and the WIP needs more work. So, I am setting May 1 as the goal date of having the WIP in shape and submittable. That gives me four months, and I should be able to get it done in that amount of time.

Finish the new Scotty and a young adult novel. I’ve had to stop the current Scotty because it was kind of a mess; I am debating whether any of the chapters I’ve written are even usable. I’ll need to reread them all, of course, but I am thinking that not only does the title need to be changed but the book itself needs to be overhauled. This is do-able. I also have about 40k of another y/a novel that’s been haunting my files for several years. It needed about another 20k, and I wasn’t totally satisfied with the plot. I think I know how to fix the plot and get it up to about 60k; with a goal of getting that finished by the end of the summer.

Pay down my debt. Buying a new car and having to have full insurance coverage on it put a major dent in my finances this year; so much so that it’s almost frightening how close to the edge I’ve skated at times. Obviously, the best way to not have financial concerns would be to pay down the debt that I owe, rather than just, as I said, skating along the way I have been, which means tightening my belt and maybe doing without. I am already denying myself new books until I clean out my TBR pile substantially (I will make exceptions, of course, to this rule), and frugality is the key to this year.

Do a better job of staying on top of the household chores, and maybe add a cleaning project each week. The condition of the Lost Apartment is really appalling, and trying to stay on top of things has been much harder than it should have been, but if I add one extra chore to the weekly ones rather than trying to do a massive, over-all all-at-once clean, I can get the house back under control in a matter of months and having it under control after a matter of months is better than never at all, right?

Those are all attainable, and putting them out there in public does make it slightly more likely that I will get them done.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines. I need to finish the laundry and grab a shower before lunch.

Here’s a Happy New Year hunk to kick off the year for you, Constant Reader, and as always, thanks for being here.

 

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Lucky Star

New Year’s Eve, a time to look back on the past year and reflect on goals either achieved or missed; to look at what was accomplished and what wasn’t, to think about and make plans for the future year.

So, what kind of year was 2017? I didn’t achieve many, if any, of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. I intended to write more short stories (which I sort of did) and publish more short stories (which I didn’t really do); I intended to start my search for an agent (which I did); but I didn’t seem to get much else done. I didn’t start working out more, but I did lose weight–so that one’s kind of a toss-up; I weigh 15 pounds less than I did a year ago. I did buy a new car, which was also a goal, and I’ve not regretted it once, despite the impact on my finances. I also didn’t write nearly as much this year as I had hoped/wanted to; there were no new novels published under my name this year; which is the first time I think that’s happened since 2005. That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did in 2005, to be honest; my self-worth and identity as an author apparently no longer requires me to write and publish at the insane pace that I used to keep.

I read a lot of good books in 2017, discovered a lot of great new-to-me writers, watched some amazing television shows and movies, but creatively I spent most of the year in stasis; just kind of getting through the day every day and then watching as those days turned into weeks and then months. I started a number of short stories that I either didn’t finish, or finished but didn’t know how to fix. The WIP, the manuscript I am shopping to agents, needs some more work. I had started sending it out in the fall, but I am going to hold back on it for a few more months as I revise and polish it some more. I always felt it was missing something, even though I thought it was a good manuscript, and I’ve recently figured out what that something is; and I’ve also realized part of the problem I had with the manuscript and fixing it has to do with my own stubbornness. It’s starting point needs to be before where I start the book; I flash back to the beginning of the story and that kind of is not only a cliche but also steps on the action. Also, where I start the book itself is kind of hackneyed and cliched. There’s another subplot or two that needs to be woven into the story, and I  need to develop my main character more; and there are things about him that I know that are kind of crucial to the story that don’t actually appear in the story, and some of the relationships between the characters need to be developed and deepened, more layered. It’s a very basic story right now, and it needs to be more complex; and it needs to go deeper into its theme.

So, that’s something, at any rate.

I also had a good year in that I was nominated for a Macavity Award (Best Short Story, “Survivor’s Guilt”) and an Anthony Award (Best Anthology, Blood on the Bayou). Both were completely unexpected surprises, and enormously gratifying.  As Constant Reader knows, I struggle with short stories and have very little to no self-confidence when it comes to them. So, to get nominated for a Macavity Award for a short story I wrote? That was probably one of the most meaningful things to happen to me in my career thus far. And I was nominated against some amazing writers–I read all the stories–and wasn’t in the least surprised when Art Taylor won; any of the other nominated stories were award-worthy. It was such an honor.

I was so certain I wasn’t going to win the Anthony Award that Paul and I booked our plane tickets home from Toronto for Sunday morning; I was boarding my flight to New Orleans when I started getting texts and tweets and Facebook messages that I’d won. It, too, was an incredibly lovely surprise, and I was extremely happy for the contributors, and thankful to them for their amazing stories.

I also realized this year that something I used to do when I was writing–something that was highly effective, and I don’t know why I stopped doing it–was write about whatever I was working on in long-hand in notebooks. I started doing that again this year, in these last few months–and it proved incredibly helpful with a couple of things I was working on at the time. So, I am going to make that a goal for the new year; to return to buying a blank book to carry around with me at all times, to use for notes and questions I have for myself, for developing characters and things. I think I stopped using the blank books because I started keeping physical files, and it was easier to use a spiral notebook for notes that could be removed and put in the files. There’s no reason I can’t stop doing that, either; but the point is that I need to start doing things like that in long-hand again. It was an excellent way of brainstorming and free-associating that I’ve sadly gotten away from over the years.

Despite getting off to a rough start, LSU also had a great season, one with lots of highlights and excitement, and wound up 9-3 on the year, with a chance for a ten-win season with a bowl win. The future also looks fairly bright for the Tigers going forward; the Saints are also having a great season. Back in September this football season was looking really bleak; who could have foreseen that both of our teams would have such a remarkable turnaround?

I had a lot of fun this past year. Last January I did two library events in Alabama, which were way fun, and was invited back again this year; I also spoke at an event at the University of Mississippi as well as at the Alabama Book Festival (both events were in teh same week, so I was driving around the deep South quite a bit then), and of course, Bouchercon in Toronto was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to this year’s event in St. Petersburg, and I am also looking forward to a trip to England this spring.

We’re having lunch later at Commander’s Palace; our annual New Year’s Eve meal with Jean and Gillian, which is always a lovely way to ring out the old year. I’ve started reading John Hart’s Redemption Road–I greatly enjoyed his The Last Child and Iron House, so am greatly looking forward to this one. Next weekend I am appearing at Comic Con at the Convention Center every day; that should also be a lot of fun.

And so, I should get some things done before it’s time to go to lunch. The spice mines are always calling me, so here’s one last hunk for 2017, Constant Reader, and have a lovely and safe and happy new year.

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State of Shock

Good morning, Constant Reader, and everyone who only occasionally stops by, should you happen to stop by this chilly late December morning. It’s very gray outside, and the Lost Apartment is cold, and I have a slight sinus headache, but nothing I can power my way through. I still am not feeling at 100% yet, but am getting there; maybe by this weekend? One can hope.

I feel slightly cotton-headed this morning, and am trying to decide what to read next. I’m definitely doing a month or two of short story reading for the first two months of the new year, which I am kind of excited about. Yesterday I was tired all day, and never made my to-do list; I’ll have to get that done today. Today is also payday, so I’ll have to pay the bills today as well. I didn’t really want to get out of bed this morning, honestly; the bed was warm and comfortable and it was cold in the apartment–and I would gladly go back to bed if i could. Heavy sigh.

I know I have some short stories to work on, and I need to do some other things as well. I hate this cotton-headed feeling! It makes it really hard to focus. One short story, which is do this weekend, is almost finished; it only needs two quick tweaks and another read-through before I turn it in; the other story isn’t necessarily a big priority; I just wanted to get it done and out of the way months before it is actually due because I don’t want to have to want until the last minute to work on it and have to rush, if that makes sense. It sort of does, doesn’t it? (See what I mean about cotton-headed?)

It’s always something, isn’t it?

I am still enjoying Joan Didion’s Miami, and think I’m going to read, for fiction, Lisa Unger’s The Red Hunter next. I always enjoy Lisa’s work, and while I am still carefully doling it out so I won’t run out of Unger books to read, I think it’s safe to go ahead and read another one. I also suppose I should do a year recap here, as well as a goals-setting entry for 2018. Sigh.

Okay, back to the spice mines.

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Legs

Post-Christmas, and it’s gray outside. I have to work today; it’s a late night so I don’t have to go in until later. It’s gray and chilly outside, and the Lost Apartment is a disaster area. I don’t feel quite so ill today; in fact, I feel better today than I have in over a week. Dare I hope that whatever it is I was contaminated with is finally over? I think so. I am not coughing, I don’t feel feverish, and I don’t feel dizzy nor weak; how lovely to get over my illness in time to go back to work! I do have a three day weekend upcoming, but we are having lunch at Commander’s on New Year’s Eve, seeing I Tonya that evening, and of course, the LSU bowl game is that Monday. And the next weekend is Comic-Con, at which I will be exceptionally busy. Heavy heaving sigh.

I also now have to figure out what I need to get done. I’ve been in the fog of illness for so long I don’t remember what’s due and to who anymore.

I slept most of yesterday. I woke up early, put the turkey in the slow cooker, tried to do the dishes and some straightening up, and then Paul and I binge-watched The Night Manager, which was remarkably good. I kept dozing off during it, though, missing almost all of episode 3,  as well as significant chunks of 2 and 4, but I did see all of 5 and 6. I’d never really seen Tom Hiddleston in anything before–not counting Thor–and I see why he is such a big deal. Handsome and talented and extremely charismatic, and those eyes! We then watched an old BBC miniseries with Daniel Craig, Archangel, and I also slept through most of it. Then I went to bed and slept like a stone. I think the sleep was a desperately needed part of the healing process, to be honest; the illness kicked off with an inability to sleep for three consecutive nights, which continued through the illness. So, finally being able to sleep well, and get some rest, was something I greatly appreciated and clearly needed. My mind does seem clear this morning, even if the disaster area that is the apartment is defeating to look at. But I must persist, because cleaning the apartment is long overdue, and it’s tragic how quickly it can get out of control.

I am delving more deeply into Joan Didion’s Miami every night before I go to sleep, and the book is simply fantastic. I’m amazed at how she wrote; the way she effortlessly creates a mood with her word choices, which are clever and insightful and spare at the same time. I’ve also decided to make the month of January “Short Story Month” again, perhaps extending it into February as well, since I have so many marvelous anthologies and single-author collections to choose from. And really, how difficult is it to read a short story every day? Not very.

And so, on that note, it is back to the spice mines with me.

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Caribbean Queen

It’s raining this Sunday morning in New Orleans, with the occasional growl of thunder and a constant leak from the gray skies overhead. When I woke up, this leak was a faucet, turned all the way to high and so loud I wasn’t certain it could actually  be rain; my first thought was I wonder if the streets are flooding again and my second we have tickets to see The Last Jedi at one fifteen; will we be able to make it to the Palace theater in Harahan? As my first cup of coffee brewed this morning I checked to see if there are any reports of flooding in the city; there aren’t, and none are, apparently, expected. And yet any rain here carries with it the possibility of rising water and ruined cars, fears of hundreds of dollars in repairs if you are lucky, scrambling to find the money for a new one while battling with your insurance company and your lender in the meantime.

I worked yesterday, ran some errands, came home and made myself barbecue-flavored chicken nuggets in the oven; the TGIFriday’s brand, frozen food, heated for ten minutes on each side at 375 degrees in the oven. It’s easy and quick, doesn’t taste horrible, and fills the emptiness; Paul was also at work and we were going to a Christmas party last night in Uptown so I didn’t see any need in actually making any food that would make a mess; I’ve not had time to clean and organize and file this week; but I am hoping to get all of that done this morning before we brave the storms to see our movie. There’s something comforting and relaxing about rain, though, despite its imminent and constant threat here, I’ve always found rain to be a relaxing experience, a cozy one; safe inside from the wetness and able to witness it through windows, warm and dry and somehow protected.

Yesterday I finished reading yet another book, another one that I enjoyed tremendously; Reality Boy by A. S. King. I’ve had the book for quite some time, it’s been in my TBR pile for years now. I don’t remember why I bought it, other than an interest in the subject matter; the after-effects of being a reality show celebrity as a child. I’ve always watched, enjoyed and been fascinated by reality television; one of my early ideas for a Scotty novel involved a Real World type show being filmed in New Orleans (that show has filmed here twice; the first time in my neighborhood). Even early on, I saw, in The Real World, the classic Agatha Christie set-up: a group of strangers thrown together in a confined space, forced to interact with each other and all for the benefit of cameras, some hidden and others hand-held. It seemed perfect for a classical-style locked room murder mystery; the locked room, of course, being the cameras. I toyed with it and played with the notion for several years, before finally deciding on the bizarre plot that became Mardi Gras Mambo; the first iteration of that novel was the reality show plot that I eventually lost interest in and threw away so I could start over. Reality television has taken over our culture in so many ways; you are just as likely to see a reality “star” staring at you from the covers of the tabloids and celebrity magazines in the check-out line at the grocery store as you are to see an actor or an actress or a member of British royalty. I do watch some reality television still to this day, primarily franchises of the Real Housewives, some more so than others, and other shows I absolutely will not watch, as though some of these shows are somehow more highbrow, more morally and intellectually pure, than others.

As I said the other day, I had decided to get through some of the young adult fiction in my TBR pile once I’d finished Krysten Ritter’s Bonfire, and I greatly enjoyed The Truth About Alice. Reality Boy has been in my pile for quite some time; and I pulled it out and started reading it Friday night once I’d finished the Ritter and Alice. Reality Boy was, in a word, quite extraordinary; I’m not sure that I would classify it as full-on noir, but it’s definitely domestic suspense bordering on domestic noir.

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I’m the kid you saw on TV.

Remember the little freak who took a crap on his parents’ oak-stained kitchen table when they confiscated his Game Boy? Remember how the camera cleverly hid his most private parts with the glittering fake daisy and sunflower centerpiece?

That was me. Gerald. Youngest of three. Only boy, Out of control.

One time, I did it in the dressing room at the mall. Sears, I think. My mom was trying to get me to try on some pants and she got the wrong size.

“Now you stay right there,” she said. “I’ll be back with the right size.”

And to protest having to wait, or having to try on pants, or having to have a mother like her, I dropped one right there between the wicker chair and the stool where Mom’s purse was.

And no, it wasn’t excusable. I wasn’t a baby. I wasn’t even a toddler. I was five. I was sending a message.

As much as I enjoy the reality shows I watch, one thing that has always put me off about them is when adults use their children as props on these shows. It’s one thing when you’re an adult, or when your children are adults and have the kind of agency to decide whether they want their life to be turned into a circus or not. It’s entirely another when parents decide they want their young children trotted out for the cameras like some dog-and-pony show to show off what great parents they are, or how talented their children are, or how cute they are. I particularly loathed those ‘nanny’ shows, where ‘problem’ children were trained by a some Mary Poppins stand-in to be behave better when their parents can’t control them; those videos and tapes are going to, I have often felt and believed, haunt those kids for the rest of their lives.

The premise of Reality Boy is precisely that.

Gerald, at ages five and six, appeared with his family on one of those nanny shows, and his particular problem was that he defecated as a sign of rebellion and protest; in his mother’s shoes, in the hallway, etc. He became viral and forever known as the Crapper. He is now sixteen going on seventeen, his family is still just as dysfunctional as ever, and he is regularly taunted, mocked and bullied for his reality show past. Being a teen is hard enough for any number of reasons–as explored in The Truth About Alice, for example–but imagine being famous/infamous for behavior when you were a small child, on television.

Reality Boy is about Gerald’s learning to cope with his past, learning to cope with his future, and recognizing, at long last, that he could have a future. It’s exceptionally well done, and as King reveals the layers of dysfunction that led to Gerald’s behavior, the truth of his life and his own reality, why he is been labelled a problem child and a disgrace, are even more horrible. And yet Gerald has to find the strength to cope, to deal, and to by the time the book ends, there’s hope that Gerald’s life is going to get better. It’s extremely well done, Gerald comes to fully-realized life beautifully on the page, and his burgeoning relationships with new friends and maybe, even, just possibly, a girlfriend–help him to grow and understand. It’s incredibly well done, and it’s also a cautionary tale that needs to be sent to anyone who’s ever trotted their children out for the cameras for fame and money. It makes you wonder what Honey Boo-Boo’s life is going to be like when she’s seventeen, or Teresa Giudice’s daughters (they’ll probably still be on television). It also makes you wonder just how complicit those of us who watch these shows are in the possible damage being wrought on these children.

My current Scotty book has me returning to the reality well, only this time with a Real Housewives-type show. I’ve already done nine chapters, and had already decided to toss those and start over because it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to go; I wasn’t saying what I wanted to say in the book. I had planned on starting it over again, but now…now I am thinking I need to sit down and think through what I want to say in it, maybe plan it a little more than I’ve ever planned a Scotty book before. I don’t know, but I’ll be keeping you posted.

The Warrior

Wednesday, and I finished the first draft of my short story yesterday. It’s quite dark, and I quite love it, but it needs some serious polishing and editing. I changed my mind about the ending while i was writing it, you see, and that changes some things back at the beginning. I want to have that finished by the end of the weekend, as well as another story I’ve worked on recently. Huzzah!

I am also thoroughly enjoying Krysten Ritter’s Bonfire. I do highly recommend it, even though I am not even halfway finished with it, it’s that engaging. Sure, the plot could go off the rails, but I rather like the main character and the story she is telling–both the crime itself as well as the main character’s story in confronting her past–is quite enjoyable.

This weekend, I have to work Saturday and we are going to a Christmas party that evening; Sunday we have tickets for The Last Jedi and I am very excited. I’m a huge Star Wars fan, of course, and I wisely chose to buy tickets in IMAX during the Saints game, so I am assuming the theater won’t be full. Hoping, at any rate, and since we live close to the Superdome the traffic will be going the other way in both instances as we head out to Harahan to see the movie. It’s a much more busy weekend for me than I would ordinarily prefer, but the next weekend is a four day weekend for Christmas and of course, the next is the three day weekend for New Year’s. So…not really having a full day at home this weekend isn’t going to be nearly as traumatizing as it could be.

Anyway, I am really happy with my story. I was asked to write a story for an anthology of crime stories inspired by the work of Joni Mitchell, and when I chose my song, read the lyrics and listened to it again, I really went down a rabbit hole and man, did it ever get dark. Really dark. But what was also fun about it was having to research malls in the early 1990’s; research can be a bit of a drag sometimes, but for me, most of the time it’s so much fun because it triggers a lot of memories, or inspires me even more if it’s from before my time. (note to self: do some research on Washington DC in the early 1950’s; I’ve written a story set during that time but I’ve never done the back-up research, which could be incredibly fun.) Usually, when I write a story that’s set during a time I lived through, I depend on my memory–which ain’t what it used to be, but priming the pump by looking up things on-line triggered memories; memories of stores and displays, the way malls smelled, the parking lots and so forth.

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

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