Wednesday and it’s Pay-the-Bills Day again, hurray.
Last night’s sleep wasn’t as good as previous nights, but I do feel awake and rested this morning so that’s a good thing. I am also incredibly excited about my wagon, which i know is weird. I had a straight male co-worker look at it*, and sure enough, he was able to get the wheels attached properly. I stopped on my way home from the office to get the mail and thought, hey I had packages and my hands will be full, so let me use the wagon and it was marvelous. Clearly, I should have bought a wagon a long time ago–and it’s the right size to fit along the narrow walkway alongside the house. It’s actually going to make life so much easier for me now it’s almost scary, and it makes the most sense to actually keep it in the car–it’s out of the way, will always be there when I need it, and if I need it for anything else, well, the car is parked usually out in front of the house so it would be easy to get to. I am most pleased with the wagon, I have to say.
I’m also trying–not always successfully–to stay in control over my anxiety. I have all my pre-surgery appointments on Monday, so that’s when I am going to find out what the recovery is going to look like. I am taking unpaid leave from work (I don’t have near enough sick or vacation time to cover the time I need to be out, so here we are) which is going to be an issue I will deal with when it rolls around; but I do have the process started and I can get the documentation I need for Admin from those visits and turn everything in the following day when I go back to the office.
I wasn’t tired when I got home yesterday, but Tug was feeling lonely and needy, so I had to go give him a lap to sleep in for a while, and after watching another episode of Moonlighting and a documentary about Greek fire and the Byzantine Imperial Navy, I’d lost all motivation and was feeling tired and sleepy. I did nothing for the rest of the evening–nothing. I did go to bed around nine-thirty, and of course woke up just before five again this morning, but I think the body is beginning to adjust somewhat to the time change.
I got an unexpected royalty check (small, but I’ll take it gladly) in the mail yesterday along with my copy of David Valdes’ new Finding My Elf, which looks absolutely adorable, and I can’t wait to give it a read after the surgery. I am two books behind on my Donna Andrews reading, I need to read the new Lou Berney and Angie Kim novels, and there are any number of others I want to get to. I am assuming after the drugged haze of painkillers and so forth dies down afterwards, I’ll have lots of down time to read. I am going to have a rigid cast to keep the arm immobile for at least three weeks, and I am assuming that means limited options for doing things other than reading. I imagine typing one-handed is going to be incredibly frustrating, but it can be done. And during the drug fogs of those early post-surgery days, I can just reread things–like histories or true crime favorites or some Stephen King favorites (it’s been a hot minute since I reread Firestarter, for one, and ‘salem’s Lot and The Stand are always fun to revisit), or some of the other great favorites lying around the house.
I was also very happy to see that Ohio added abortion rights protections to the state Constitution as well as legalizing recreational marijuana–well done, Ohio!–and that Kentucky reelected their Democratic governor. There were some right-wing wins, but the great Blue Wave momentum from 2020 has continued, as well as the reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe–congratulations, Federalist Society, your hand-picked Supreme Court majority has effectively destroyed the conservative movement’s electability for a generation. The Democrats needs to hit hard on abortion and the illegitimate Supreme Court–Mitch McConnell’s legacy, by the way, have fun being hated for the rest of American history, douchebag–going forward, and frankly, they need to put Howard Dean–who engineered the historic gains of the 2008 election cycle–back in fucking charge of the DNC.
I always said thatabortion rights should be put on the ballot. This is the wedge issue that trumps (couldn’t resist) the Right’s religious zealotry and transphobia and racism.
But of course, they won’t learn the lesson that they’re unpopular and so are their policies and values–they’ll just see this in a paternal way: “clearly the voting public can’t be trusted, so we need to install authoritarianism for their own good.“
Yes, this is the same party that thinks they’ve successfully branded themselves as “true American patriots.” Fucking garbage is what they are.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back to check on you with more blatant self-promotion later.
*ah, stereotypes. Alas, we have a lack of butch lesbians in the department now, so had to make do with a straight guy. C’est la vie.
Today already feels off. That’s the time change, no doubt; it’s hard to believe I slept as well as I did last night–I went to bed early so I could get up earlier by the clock than by the body, figuring that was the easiest way to transition into getting up early for work this week. The weekend, which held such promise, was derailed by having to deal with getting my delivery items that were supposed to come Friday night delivered yesterday; they finally did come and it was taken care of–but the delivery window was 1-3, which fucked up the rest of the day for me to run the other errands I wanted to get done, which now have to be done this morning. It’s fine, but any change to routine triggers the anxiety so I am trying to not let it defeat me this morning. But the change in plans did kind of end up wasting my Saturday; the delivery came around two-thirty, and it was already too late for me to go out running errands. Of course this morning I am thinking no it wasn’t too late for you to start your errands but my mind works a certain way and usually I can’t see these things except in highsight.
I did read some of the novellas I have partially finished that have been lying around for years, which begs the question I could have sworn I’ve worked on these things more recently than the files I am finding, so have I lost track of all time completely? But for the one I am thinking of, it absolutely makes the most sense, as I now remember I’d actually submitted it to an anthology, which meant trimming it down from the length that it originally was. I have found a call for submissions which includes novellas–which was why I was looking at them again yesterday–which has me thinking about revisions and rewrites and what can be done with these manuscripts. One is slightly longer than forty thousand, and only needs a minimum of twenty-five thousand more to become an actual novel. I reread it yesterday, and it does center a bad trope that would have to be super-creatively pulled off to work, but I also think recentering the main character from a straight cisgender white high school girl to a gay teenager could easily help with that. (It also needs a name change, “Spellcaster” doesn’t really work and was also a drawback to what I had done.) The one I was looking for was “Fireflies,” which is another Corinth County story (I feel like I should always explain that the locals pronounce it “carnth”) and is one of the more disturbing county stories I’ve done, but I also think it’s one that works for the submission call. Or not; we shall see.
The other one I was able to read was “Festival of the Redeemer,” which is another attempt at a du Maurier-like story set in Venice. Rereading “Don’t Look Now” recently, of course, put me in mind of this story, which is one of the few novellas that has an actual full draft done. (Several of the others are incomplete–“The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain,” “A Holler Full of Kudzu,” and “Once a Tiger”.) Rereading it yesterday reminded me of what I was doing with it–or trying to, at any rate–and I could see where I lost the thread and the voice, which was the most important thing about the novella. I also need to get organized on the next book project I am going to work on, but I need to write a proposal first. That’s the big goal for today; get better organized, run those errands, get the proposal organized, and start pulling the next book together. One step to getting things better organized is to complete a thorough to-do list and actually pay attention to it; these lists do no good if you don’t consult them at least once a day. I had gotten a great start on one this past week, so I think I am going to work on pulling that together.
I also need to measure the workstation windows before I head to Lowe’s.
The Saints are playing today at noon, but I think that’s the best time for me to be running errands and potentially hanging window blinds, so I think that’s enough stress and anxiety for me today–I can follow the Saints game on social media. A Haunting in Venice is streaming now, so we may go ahead and watch some movies later on, as we are all caught up on the shows we are watching (I am episodes behind on Foundation, but the beauty of streaming is you can always catch up at some point), and there’s another movie streaming now I am interested in seeing even if I can’t think of its name at the moment. I’ve already made a grocery list for today–I am making ravioli for dinner tonight and need to pick up some bread to go with it–and am hopeful that sometime either this week or next I will get my teeth at last and I can bid adieu to the soft diet…just in time for my surgery. I’ve done some research–which I’d been avoiding–on the recovery time from this type of surgery and mine is more complicated than the basic one I am finding out about on-line, so this is bare-minimums I am looking at–probably at least three weeks on medical leave from the office, which I will need to go talk to Admin and HR about at some point this week so I can get it taken care of, or at least get the process started. I will also need physical therapy for three to four months. Yay. Ah, well, at least I have the resources that this won’t bankrupt me, which is a good thing.
And on that note, I am going to get to work on things this morning and take advantage of this extra hour I have this morning rather than wasting it. So, have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, but be warned–there’s more blatant self-promotion coming along at some point.
Thursday and my last day in the office for the week. I also decided to go in a half-hour later than usual and stay until five instead of four-thirty; alert the media! I know how hard it is to go on without knowing these minute details of my life. But it was cold this morning, and Tug woke me at the usual time–but curled up and went to sleep next to my head on my pillow once I hit snooze for the first time. Of course now that he’s awake and eaten and had some water, he’s all over the kitchen counters this morning knocking things off. He is particularly fond of pens and cigarette lighters–Paul is missing any number of them, and I’ve noticed he always make a beeline to any lighter lying around. Why the fascination with my pens and Paul’s cigarette lighters is a mystery for the ages.
I was tired when I got home yesterday. I had book mail yesterday (Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, which is a horror writer’s version of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which I’ve already read two fictionalized versions already–Lori Roy’s and Colson Whitehead’s). I’ve not read Due before–my own fault, and no one else’s–but am really looking forward into digging into this one. I was also oddly tired by the time I got home; I felt fine when I left work, but after a couple of errands I was exhausted by the time I got home. The termite exterminator came by yesterday morning (the hole in the kitchen roof was partly rot and partly termite damage), and apparently Tug was fascinated by the Terminix man. I also watched another episode of Moonlighting last night–guest star was a very young, pre-China Beach Dana Delaney–(that’s another show I wouldn’t mind revisiting; does anyone else remember China Beach?) and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Paul and I then finished The Fall of the House of Usher, which was really quite good and very well done; I also had read a piece recently which stated that Mike Flanagan has placed Ryan Murphy and American Horror Story as everyone’s go-to horror television creator. I will even go further than this and say Flanagan’s surpassed him. There were, at best, three top-level seasons of AHS–“Murder House,” “Asylum” and the election one; but it would be hard for me to say than any Murphy season is superior to any of Flanagan’s work; Midnight Mass alone was so superior to any of Murphy’s seasons that it’s not even a fair comparison–and Murphy had Jessica Lange and all of those other amazing talents in his repertory company.
I also recognized yesterday that I’ve been in a bad place since somewhere around last Thursday. There have been moments this week where I’ve come out of it and gotten some things done, but it’s still there. When I came home yesterday I intended to finish laundry and the dishes, but Tug wanted a lap bed and I gave in, figuring I wouldn’t be there for very long. This was incorrect; he slept there for several hours and since I was tired AND comfortable, I didn’t disturb him and just stayed there, watching Youtube documentaries about the Holy Roman Empire and how it slowly but surely divested itself of its association with the Papacy; Charles V being the last emperor to be actually crowned by a pope. I’ve also been reading The Rival Queens, which is marvelous–it’s a history of Catherine de Medici, Queen of France and her daughter Marguerite, Queen of Navarre–known to history and literature as Queen Margot (which is also the name of the Dumas book about her). I’ve always wanted to write a suspense/intrigue novel set during that time period, and having to do with Catherine de Medici’s Flying Squadron–women who were trained spies and seductresses in her employ. Margot herself is fascinating–and both women would be in my history The Monstrous Regiment of Women about all the women who held power in the sixteenth century. Margot was as equally fascinating as her mother, and pretty much lived her life the way she wanted…which of course made her notorious. But the French, surprisingly enough, loved their princess with the loose morals–and the arrangement between her and her husband, Henri King of Navarre (eventually Henri IV of France) where they lived apart and took as many lovers as they could handle was also surprisingly modern for a royal couple.
I am hoping to spend some time with Lou Berney’s Dark Ride this weekend. Lou has become one of my favorite writers and favorite people in the crime fiction community over the years, ever since that fateful panel at Raleigh Bouchercon where I met and made some new friends who also are amazingly talented. (I think Lori Roy has a book coming out soon, too–huzzah!), and I also want to make a plan to stick to for getting things done this weekend. The LSU-Alabama game is Saturday night, so that will require me to do some strategic planning. I just hope for a good game. Obviously my preference would be for LSU to win–that’s always my default–but as long as we don’t get humiliated I am good with a close and/or exciting game–emotionally exhausting as that will be. I know my anxiety was involved in this funk I’ve been in for longer than I think I’ve been dealing with it–me thinking it started sometime late last week is laughable in its naivete–but I need to get some things done and underway before i get derailed with the surgery. Nineteen days from today I will go under the knife. YIKES.
Which reminds me, I need to review my medical file and see what they say about the recovery period, or if it’s mentioned at all. And sometime before then I am going to get my teeth! Huzzah!
And on that note on this cold Thursday morning in New Orleans, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later, okay, for some more blatant self-promotion.
Wednesday morning and it’s cold outside this morning. It’s currently in the forties, and I turned on the heat once I came downstairs. This isn’t going to last long–I believe it’ll be back in the eighties for the weekend–but this morning going outside is going to be more than just a little painful, methinks.
I got off work yesterday and swung uptown to pick up the mail–the pothole at the end of the street finally resurfaced, and so my street is being resurfaced at the St. Charles end and is closed to access from that way, which makes getting home a bit more challenging than usual. I have to go uptown on the way home again today–long story short, I ordered a new lunchbox because Tug broke the strap on the old one, and it was overdue anyway; I should have ordered a new one long ago, and the new one is being delivered today in theory. It’s also the first of November, which kind of feels weird. This year has lasted an eternity already and yet here it is almost the end of the year already. I kind of feel in some ways like I’ve frittered the year away–and let’s be brutally honest, most of this year was spent working on things that were supposed to have been finished last year, and somehow nothing since those were both completed. Blame it on what? The heat, a difficult year, the injury, and everything else that seemed to go off the rails for me this year. Paul was working last night so I didn’t get a chance to do much of anything last night. I was too tired to read, and I also had an operating system upgrade to finish on the computer. It’s working in a most lovely fashion this morning, which is super awesome; upgrades have always worried me since the Great Data Disaster of 2018.
Which reminds me, I need to back up the back-up, as it has been a moment.
I honestly don’t know why I was so off last night, or how I managed to waste most of the evening. I started reading the new Lou Berney (Dark Ride) yesterday morning at the dentist’s office (oh wait, that explains the entire day being off, doesn’t it? I hate being so immured in my ruts of routine) and it’s quite good, although I didn’t get very far into it before it was my turn to get in the chair for the dentist. It was the final fitting for my new dentures, which fit snugly and tightly and look marvelous in my mouth. The next time they call me, I will come out of their office with my new teeth, which is very exciting. I am quite delighted at the thought of eating solid foods again. I also had to go out to the UNO campus to record “My Reading Life” with Susan Larson, who is always a delight and is one of the few promotional things I actually enjoy doing. And duh, that is why I was tired and off all day long; the usual daily routine was disrupted. I had to drive out to Jefferson Highway almost to Harahan for the dentist appointment, drove back into the city for work, then had to go out to the lakefront to UNO and back. That’s a serious disruption to my routine, and as I am learning, that’s the sort of thing that drains my batteries now.
But I greatly enjoyed this year’s Halloween Horror Month, even if the bad quality of the videos of Friday the 13th the Series on Youtube caused me to abandon the rewatch of that show for the month. We’ve been watching The Fall of the House of Usher, which has been a lot of fun and very well done, too–hopefully we can get that finished tonight or by the weekend. It was fun revisiting The Dead Zone, and the other reading I did this month was pretty awesome too. I am going back to crime fiction reading again, because the horror reading has been making my brain go into the horror direction, and I’m not really a good horror writer.
Yesterday Death Drop launched into the world–I’m going to do some more promotional posts about the book as well as some for Mississippi River Mischief, which is also dropping next week (this is what happens when you don’t make your deadlines, people–don’t be a Greg)–and it’s always nice when that happens. It sometimes feels a bit anticlimactic, and I am terrible about promotion anyway (doing it always makes me feel very self-conscious, which is something else i need to work on, because it’s also rooted in my anxiety). My anxiety has also been off the charts lately, and I don’t know why that is. The lack of an LSU game last weekend, perhaps, which served as another disruption to routine? I’ve also been studiously not answering my emails since last week sometime, as well, which is also not like me and another sign that the brain chemistry isn’t working properly again. But now that I know what the problem is with my brain chemistry (better late than never, right?) we are going to change my medications because I’ve been on the wrong ones, and come up with a different coping plan. I feel like I’m in the middle of yet another reboot of my life–new teeth, surgery on my arm, writing cozies, thinking about exercise and eating right again–which might be needed. It just feels like everything has been a slog for so long now; I do think it goes back to the Great Data Disaster of 2018, which started the whole mess. Or maybe it was the expense of buying a new car and having a car payment every month, which kind of did me in financially for a while (starting to see daylight again)–there’s no stress like financial stress, after all. Anyway, I’ve not really felt centered or in any semblance of control over my life for quite some time now, and I’m kind of tired of letting my life happen to me–which was where I was at when I was thirty-three and did the first hard reboot of my life.
I feel good this morning, rested and awake and alert and energetic and ambitious, and it’s been awhile since I felt that way. I may run out of steam at some point today–it does happen, after all–but I am starting to feel good again about a lot of things and when I can look at positives rather than be overwhelmed by the negatives…I’ll take that as a win gladly and keep going.
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous mid-week, and I will check in with you again later.
Tuesday and soon enough I’ll be heading out to the dentist for my final fitting of the dentures–which means the next time I go, I will actually get them and be off this hateful soft food diet once and for all. I’ve kind of gotten used to it, though–but as much as I will miss the pint of ice cream, I can still have yogurt and the super-hot-and-spicy ramen on top of everything else. I think I am going to give myself to the end of the year–since I missed out on so much unhealthy food since the surgery–before I change my eating habits in order to be healthier going forward. The New Year will also be about six weeks after the surgery, so hopefully I’ll be in better condition by then to actually go ahead and change the way both Paul and I eat–Paul already eats much healthier than I do; so I just need to adjust mine a bit. But I can cut the ice cream out, as well as some of the snacking. Popcorn is really healthier, and it’s not hard to make, either. And I like it, just as I like pretzels, which are also healthier than chips (I think). At any rate, I need to spend some more time in the kitchen figuring out how to cook things I’ll like that are good for me.
And every once in a while, I can make Swedish meatballs or shrimp-n-grits as a treat…
Yes, because looking at food as a potential reward/treat is completely the healthy mindset I should have.
I’ve always had issues with my body and with food, for that matter; a lot of it stupid, a lot of it a product of my malfunctioning brain, and part of it from being, well, shamed for not being in the best physical condition possible. I don’t know when it all started, but I know when I was in high school–when I really started paying attention to male bodies–that I wasn’t built like other boys, and certainly not the ones all the girls were madly crushing on (for the record, I have never, nor will I ever, understand straight women’s taste in men), so I began thinking there must be something wrong with my body. I did eventually stop doing sports and so forth once I was in college, and that was also right around the time my metabolism slowed down from what it had been previously, so I gained weight–and I’ve never really been right in the head about my body and weight management ever since, I’m over sixty now, of course, and a lot of that body image stuff is in the past–but I do sometimes see pictures of myself and cringe at how big I look, which is patently absurd on its face and a mentality I need to get rid of once and for all. This soft food diet has helped me drop some extra weight–about ten pounds or so at this point–and I bet I lose even more after the surgery. Note to self: you need to buy a wagon to carry groceries in from the car, since you won’t have the use of both arms for a while.
It’s below sixty this morning and we’re having a middle of the week cold snap, even getting colder than fifty theoretically tonight. It’s also supposed to rain throughout the day. I am off to the dentist in a little while, so it’s one of those wretched days when I have to run all over town throughout the day, which is fine. I woke up this morning at five–and of course, Tug did his usual morning leap over Paul onto me and curled up on my pillow at around five-forty-five, waiting for the alarm so I would get up and feed him. He really is adorable, and loves to play like all kittens do; I need to buy him some toys, is what I need to do, and several laser lights because he got hold of the original one I bought and it’s disappeared, probably either under the couch or behind something. Maybe I should either swing by Petco or order something from their website to be delivered. I think he’d love one of those birds on a stick things; he was playing fetch with one of Scooter’s mice last night. But he’s adapted completely now to being our indoor cat, and he definitely feels like he is King of the Castle. He’s also curious about everything and still fearless, climbing under the couch or the dishwasher or wherever he can get–and he loves getting into the cabinets. He also broke my lunchbox yesterday; he knocked it off the counter after I packed it, and the clip for the shoulder strap broke. Sigh. I had to order another one.
I also got some book mail yesterday: Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives and Lisa Unger’s Christmas Presents. Lisa Unger is one of my favorite writers, but is one of those I always forget to mention when people ask me about favorite authors in interviews and things. I read some more short stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories That Scared Even Me, and they were okay; more morbid and weird than anything else, but interesting. One was “It” by Theodore Sturgeon, which was very peculiar and strange but was kind of fun to read (even though a dog dies terribly in it) and “Casablanca” by Thomas M. Disch, which was interesting; about an American couple visiting Morocco when a nuclear war breaks out between the Soviet Union and the United States, and how things change for them during that period, as they slowly lose their ugly American haughtiness and privilege. It was difficult to feel sorry for them because they were so awful and so used to their being American being a magic ticket that they become nasty and unpleasant as they begin to realize that being American means nothing anymore. It was kind of haunting to remember that paranoia we were so used to living with when I was a child; that fear that at any moment bombs would be incoming that would change the world forever; the American cultural obsession with nuclear doomsday when I was growing up was really something and popped up in movies and books and stories all the time. The one I remember the most (literature wise) is Alas Babylon, and the movies–Testament and The Day After. When I was in high school PBS ran a documentary about the possibility of nuclear war and what it would like; which was when I learned nuclear missile bases dotted the Midwest and particularly Kansas–the abandoned missile base just outside of Bushong in north Lyon County was actually mentioned in the show as a target despite being abandoned in the early 1970’s (that missile base shows up in my story “This Thing of Darkness,” and sometimes I think it might be fun to set an entire book there–high school kids exploring an abandoned missile base only to find something horrible and deadly there), which was all we could talk about at school that week–the morbid fascination that out there in the middle of nowhere Kansas we were still Soviet targets.
Ah growing up in the second half of the twentieth century was such a joy.
And on that note, I am going to get showered and cleaned up and head for the dentist’s office. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.
I have always loved to read. I always escaped from the world into the pages of books, and quite often thought and/or believed that the world as it appeared in books was a much better place than the world I lived in. Being different from other kids, on top of all the other chemical imbalances and so forth going on in my head (hello anxiety!) left me constantly on edge; never knowing when the next unkindness or disruption to my life was going to happen. My parents worried often that I read too much instead of playing and doing little boy things–which never held much interest for me–but never knew that it was my life, and those societal little boy expectations, that I was trying so hard to withdraw from. I don’t know how old I was when I began realizing that the world was nothing like the books I read; and that interpreting and viewing the world from a perspective primarily gained from the reading of books for children–which were very much about establishing norms and behavioral expectations of kids–was a mistake. Even books for adults–which I started reading when I was about ten years old–didn’t really help me in dealing with the world.
But books were my solace and my job as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, and even all the way through my thirties. I also drew comfort from rereading favorites over and over again; if I didn’t have the time to start something new I’d just take down an old favorite and reread it again. I recently realized I don’t do that anymore and haven’t in a while; on the rare occasions when I do reread something it’s a choice–“it’s been a while since I reread Rebecca, I should give it another whirl”–and just assumed it was because I have little time to read so I don’t reread anymore. That’s not the actual case; I could reread things instead of going down Youtube wormholes, but I don’t…because my life isn’t so horrible that I need that escape from it anymore and I don’t need the comfort from revisiting the familiar. This is progress, after all, and I am very happy about that realization.
But I digress. I read a middle grade ghost story recently, and it was exactly the kind of book I used to look for at Scholastic Book Fairs and at the library.
“Ouch!”
Ava peered at her fingertip, where a bead of blood was forming. She stuck her finger in her mouth and glared at the rosebush she had been hacking away at with a pair of clippers. Her blood tasted coppery on her tongue and made her feel sick. She took her finger out and pressed her thumb against the spot where the thorn had pricked her. There was a little sliver of black visible beneath the pale pink skin.
“You need to get that out,” Cassie said. “You could get sporotrichosis.”
“Sporowhat?” Ava asked.
Her sister swept her long, dark hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. She, of course, was wearing gloves. “An infection caused by the Sporothrix schenskii,” she said. “It’s a fungus that grows on rose thorns. among other places,” she added when Ava stared at her with one eyebrow cocked. “Named after Benjamin Schenck, the medical student who first discovered it, in 1896.”
“Oh, right,” Ava said. “Benjamin Schenck.” She pointed at Cassie with the clippers. “Why do you know these things?”
“I was reading up about roses,” Cassie said. “Because of the garden and the Blackthorn roses. It just came up.”
“Most girls our age read about pop stars,” Ava teased.
I’ve debated about trying to write for middle-grade readers most of my life. While there were books I enjoyed when I was a kid, as I mentioned before, the stuff classified as “juvenile” in those days rarely depicted kids who were anything like kids I knew in real life; often-times the books always featured kids who never broke rules, never got annoyed or frustrated or angry; paragon children that the authors wished real world children would be more like. (The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew are perfect examples in their revised versions) I enjoyed the mysteries (and the historicals), but never could really relate much to the characters.
The Lonely Ghost isn’t one of those books, and as I mentioned earlier, had Mike Ford been writing these types of books when I was the right age for them, he would have been one of my favorite writers. Look how great that opening scene is–we meet the two sisters, get a sense of who they are and what their relationship is like predicated on how they speak to each other (sisters who love each other and are fond of each other but also are very different). This book follows the classic horror trope of an unsuspecting family moving into a spooky old house–either inherited, or purchased very cheaply–where they hope to make a new life for themselves, only to find the house isn’t what they expected. What we don’t learn about Ava and Cassie in that opening scene is they are fraternal twins–which is also incredibly important to the story. Ava’s more worldly and outgoing, a soccer star; while her sister is quieter, more studious, and into Drama Club, where Ava also ends up because they didn’t get her application for soccer in on time. But there’s something going on in the house that has to do with the previous owner–who also had a fraternal twin–and strange things start happening; and Cassie also starts acting strangely. Ava and her new friends have to get to the bottom of the haunting of Blackthorn House before it actually harms Cassie.
The book flows really well, and the girls–and their friendships–seem absolutely real. It’s been a minute since I’ve read something middle-grade, and aside from language and situations, the primary difference between it and young adult seems to be lower stakes in every way–no murders or sexual assaults or anything that might be too much for younger readers. It’s easy to get lost in the story because of a strong and compelling authorial voice, and the girls are all distinct enough within who they are and what they look like–which isn’t always the case–and it reads very quickly.
Mike Ford is the middle-grade authorial name for my friend Michael Thomas Ford, by the way, and yes, we’ve been friends for a long time but I also believe he is one of the best gay writers of our time and doesn’t nearly get the recognition or rewards that he deserves. I’m looking forward to reading more of these stories!
Monday morning after a relatively relaxing and stable weekend. I did a lot, mostly chores that needed to be done and reading, but it was also very nice. The Saints won their game yesterday, which was a very pleasant surprise, and we finished watching this most recent season of Élite, which I realized yesterday I’ve always put the accent on the wrong e, but it’s pronounced ah-lee-tay, so it made sense to me for the accent to go there.
Or maybe I’ve been saying it wrong.
Anyway, this seventh season was disappointing, as the storylines and the crime focused on parents rather than the students–which was a major error, I felt. The season did end with a murder–I’d wondered how long that character, an abusive and controlling lover, would last without being killed or redeemed; I got my answer in the finale–but the primary issue with the season is I don’t really care very much about any of the characters anymore. One of the show’s greatest strengths in those early fantastic seasons was how well the characters were developed (and the talent of the actors playing them) was that they were multi-faceted; even when they were being bad or doing terrible things, you understood them and why they were doing it so they were sympathetic. Now they are all just kids who bad things happen to who have no control over anything that happens or what they do–which is the problem. Before, in the earlier seasons, the kids had agency, and while originally the show was the Gossip Girl we all deserved, it slowly turned itself into Gossip Girl, which was fun but had little depth. A pity. We’ll stick around for the eighth season, which is the last one, while mourning its former glory.
Tomorrow is Halloween, and I signed up to make a cheesecake. The mistake I made was forgetting that I have to go to the dentist tomorrow morning before work, and the other was I must have gotten rid of my cake carrier during one of my pandemic decluttering purges, so I have nothing to carry it to work with–and I don’t like the idea of it sitting in my car while I am at the dentist. Going back home to get it after the dentist isn’t an option, either, because I am trying to spare paid time off as much as possible with the surgery coming, as I also have to run off to UNO after lunch to record “My Reading Life with Susan Larson”. Big day indeed. I guess I can just put the cheesecake into a box and bring it while still in the springform pan? AH, well, all I know is when I get home from work tonight I have to make a cheesecake and figure out the rest tomorrow.
These difficult life decisions, seriously.
I did manage to read Mike Ford’s The Lonely Ghost yesterday which I quite enjoyed; middle-grade books tend to read a lot faster than those for older readers and there will definitely be more on that to come. I will say for now that had he been writing when I was a kid, Ford would be one of my go-to authors, like Phyllis A. Whitney.
We also watched a hilarious (to us, anyway) movie on Prime yesterday, Totally Killer, which starred Kiernan Shipka in the lead of a hilarious mash-up of Back to the Future with a slasher movie playing Jamie, whose mom was the final girl of a spree killer thirty-five years earlier, who comes back in the present day to kill her mom. Her mom is obviously very into self-protection and more than a little paranoid–which of course makes Jamie even more sullen and distant. Her best friend is trying to build a time machine as a science project out of an old photo book, and for some reason the science fair takes place at an old, abandoned amusement park. Anyway, the killer kills her mom and chases her into the amusement park, she ducks into the photo booth and accidentally turns it on, and then the killer stabs the console with his butcher knife–which activates the time machine and sends her back to 1987, with a new task and mission: catch the killer before he kills anyone and thus save her mother–and with the benefit of her knowledge of the history, she knows who is going to be killed and where. A great plan, of course–but her being there slowly starts changing the future. It’s very clever and funny, and the juxtaposition of a modern teenager into a teenager back in the highly problematic 80’s and the cultural/societal differences are absolutely hilarious–especially to those of us who lived through them the first time. It’s light and fluffy, fun and entertaining and not to be taken terribly seriously. Also, because it’s Halloween Horror Month, I’ve been reading a lot of books that would fall into the slasher versions of horror–Clown in a Cornfield, Final Girls–so I’ve been thinking about the trope a lot lately too.
Maybe my next y/a should be a slasher novel? It could be fun.
And on that note, off to the spice mines! Have a lovely All Hallows’ Eve Eve!
I love Daphne du Maurier, and I love Venice, so it is no surprise that one of my favorite works of fiction is her long story, “Don’t Look Now.”
I know I’ve talked about this story endlessly already, numerous times, but you can also close the browser window now if you don’t want to read me talking about the story more. If you’ve not read it and would like to, this is a good time to navigate away–because I am going to give spoilers aplenty in this entry–because part of the great pleasure of reading “Don’t Look Now” for the first time is all the surprises and twists and shocks.
Du Maurier was a master of the plot twist.
“Don’t look now,” John said to his wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotize me.”
Laura, quick on cue, made an elaborate pretnse of yawning, then tilted her head as though searching the skies for a non-existent aeroplane.
“Right behind you,” he added. “That’s why you can’t turn round at once–it would be much too obvious.”
Laura played the oldest trick in the world and dropped her napkin, then bent to scrabble for it under her feet, sending a shooting glance over her left shoulder as she straightened once again. She sucked in her cheeks, the first tell-tale sign of suppressed hysteria, and lowered her head.
“They’re not old girls at all,” she said. “They’re male twins in drag.”
Her voice broke ominously, the prelude ton uncontrolled laughter, and John quickly poured some more chianti into her glass.
“Pretend to choke,” he said, “then they won’t notice. You know what it is–they’re criminals doing the sights of Europe, changing sex at every stop. Twin sisters here in Torcello. Twin brothers tomorrow in Venice, or even tonight, parading arm-in-arm across the Piazza San Marco. Just a matter of switching clothes and wigs.”
“Jewel thieves or murderers?” asked Laura.
“Oh, murderers, definitely. But why, I ask myself, have they picked on me?”
It had been a hot minute since I’d reread “Don’t Look Now,” and rereading it this time was an incredible pleasure, as it always is. I originally discovered this story in her collection Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories, and was completely enthralled when I read it as a teenager.
This is the copy I found at Zayre’s when I was about twelve, and discovering duMaurier for the very first time.
That opening sequence between John and Laura is a masterclass in opening a long story, frankly. (Now, by the way, is the time to navigate away from the entry if you’ve not read the story but want to–I can also highly recommend the Nicholas Roeg film adaptation starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.)
What do we see in that opening sequence? A couple, probably married and in love, having dinner at a restaurant in Torcello–and playing a delightful couples game in which you pick random diners at a different table and make up stories about them. I myself do this all the time whenever I am in public and alone; I just start looking around and making up stories about people based on their appearance and where they are and so forth. (This is an excellent exercise for new writers trying to hone their art and craft, by the way; take a notebook with you, have a meal by yourself, and pick out a table to observe, then start creating character and story based on what you’ve observed. I love doing this, frankly.) I also love that the opening three words of the story itself are also the title–as though “don’t look now” is actually what they call the game, and this innocent game actually is the first domino to fall in a series that results in tragedy. But du Maurier has already hooked us into this couple and their story, and we eagerly read on. What is this story about? Who are John and Laura? Why are they in Torcello? (When I originally read the story I didn’t know that Torcello is one of the smaller islands in the Venetian lagoon; but that soon becomes obvious.) One of the twins-in-drag gets up and goes to the restroom, and Laura, all in on the game now, follows her into the bathroom to see if she really is a man in drag, and there is much hilarious conversation between them about what might happen if it truly was a man in drag (and with all the bathroom battles currently being waged in this country, this scene took an an entirely different resonance in this reading), and we are left alone with John.
And once we are alone with John, we find out a lot more about the couple. They’re British, for one–safe to assume in a duMaurier tale–and as he sits there waiting for her to come back, he remembers why they are there; they’re touring Europe as a getaway as well as an attempt to help Laura (and John) get over the loss of their daughter Christine, who died of leukemia (this was changed in the movie to great effect) and Laura hasn’t been able to shake her sorrow, so John thought this trip would help, and this entire conversation–the resurrection of this game they used to play in happier times–has given him glimpses of Laura before the loss, giving him hope that the wound is finally beginning to heal. They have a son, too, who is off at school, but Christine was Laura’s darling and her favorite (I love that du Maurier would have none of that sentimentality about parents loving their children equally; she dismisses that nonsense out of hand. Of course parents have favorites. They’re human.) and so the loss is even more felt.
But then he notices that Laura has been gone a while…far too long for a quick trip to the restroom. And when she returns…
He could tell at once there was something wrong. Almost as if she were in a state of shock. She blundered towards the table he had just vacated and sat down. He drew up a chair beside her, taking her hand.
“Darling, what is it? Tell me–are you ill?”
But Laura shakes off the shock, and is radiant with joy as she explains to John the incredible encounter she had with the old woman in the restaurant rest room. One of the old women–the one who was staring–is blind but also psychic. She saw their daughter, Christine, sitting with them at the table laughing happily. John, of course, is delighted that his wife is happy but at the same time he’s aggravated at the woman–how very dare she say such a thing to his wife! He doesn’t believe in any of this nonsense and he is deeply irritated and annoyed that his wife–not really fully recovered from her loss–is so quickly taken in and ready to believe the story.
The desperate urgency in her voice made his heart sicken. He had to play along with her, agree, soothe, do anything to bring back some sense of calm.
Before, when reading this story, I always kind of felt John was kind of a dick. His wife is deeply saddened and depressed over the loss of a child, and he doesn’t seem to much care that he, too, has lost a beloved child. But this time through, I felt a pang of recognition there in John’s behavior; he was actually sublimating his own grief in that time-honored way men historically have–by ignoring it and pushing it away and focusing on taking care of his (so-believed) much more delicate and emotionally fragile wife; he has to be the MAN and take care of things, which is du Maurier’s sly way of inserting a critique of societal mores and expectations of straight white men. So, rather then processing his own grief, he buries it beneath concern and worry for wife, which isn’t healthy for either of them.
As John listens, horrified and appalled and even a bit angry, his wife explains to him that their daughter also is worried about them, that they are in danger in Venice and must leave right away. (There’s also a throwaway line that the psychic twin also mentioned that John is also psychic “but doesn’t know it.”) Naturally, she wants to leave while John, confounded and horrified by this turn of events–completely dismissing her out of hand, without the slightest bit of even trying to understand–will have nothing to do with their holiday plans being changed. Laura’s improvement in mood and spirit fades away and as they walk to have dinner, they become separated briefly, and he hears a cry from across a canal in the dark, and sees a child fleeing in a red hooded jacket, jumping from boat to boat until she escapes the sound of running footsteps behind her by crossing the canal by crossing over the boats. He and Laura are reunited, and he thinks no more of it. They have dinner, return, and discover that their son has fallen ill with appendicitis, and perhaps they should return. Laura sees this as the vision of the “danger” and even as John thinks about it, she goes about making the arrangements for them to get back to England. She gets an open seat on a chartered flight, and he will collect their things and their car and drive back. She takes off, he checks out, makes the car arrangements, but as he is coming back to the hotel he sees Laura and the twins, passing him by on another vaporetto. Disturbed by this change in plans, he decides to go looking for the twins, find out what happened and how they convinced her to stay, etc. eventually going to the police to try to track down the twins.
While at the police station, another British couple–there to report a stolen purse–tells him about all the murders going on in Venice that have the police so worked up; he thinks nothing of it, and then of course they find the twins who’ve not seen Laura–who also calls him once she has arrived in England.
Confused and upset and uncertain of what is going on, he goes out for another late night walk and once again sees the child in the red jacket running away. He himself chases after her to try to help her–only to catch her, find out it’s actually a demented little person armed with a powerful knife, who slashes his throat–and as he sinks to the ground dying, puts it all together–he’s psychic; he saw Laura and the twins together in the future when Laura has returned after his death to claim the body; and all along it was all right there in front of his face, only he refused to see it, thinking, as he last thoughts, as he hears shouts and people running towards him, what a bloody stupid way to die and proceeds to do so.
Du Maurier’s prose is, as always, literate and smart and brilliant; her characters seem absolutely real, and Venice springs to magnificent life in her hands. The structure of the story and her remarkable job at misdirecting the reader into missing, along with John, what is really going on around him in this Venice holiday is fucking brilliant. She gives John, and the reader, all the hints they need to piece it all together, but she is so completely into John’s head, his inner monologue, that the reader sees only what John sees, until it’s too late, and you realize this story never was what you thought it was in the beginning, or along the way; or that it is just not the way you expected it to be.
I’m already excited to read it again, and watch the film–a masterpiece–as well.
I love Stephen King, and have since I first read Carrie when I was thirteen.
I will also go out on a limb and say that while he has written some amazing fiction and novels in the last forty years, the run of novels between (and including) Carrie and Misery in the 1970s and 1980’s was probably one of the greatest runs of incomparable work ever accomplished by any writer in any sub-genre or genre of fiction, period. There wasn’t a single stinker in that run, and even the one I personally dislike ( Pet Sematary) isn’t bad–it’s actually a testament to King’s skill that I’ve refused to reread it since that first time; it made me incredibly uncomfortable in so many ways viscerally that I’ve really never wanted to read it again.
And isn’t that the real point behind horror?
I also saw something recently about how people who suffer from anxiety often rewatch movies/television shows and reread books when they are anxious because there’s comfort in knowing how something ends. It had never occurred to me that this was a thing, but I used to reread books all the time when I was younger, often picking one up and just opening it at random and diving into the story again. I reread most of the earlier Stephen King novels countless times, as I have also reread books like Gone with the Wind and kids’ series books and other particular favorites. I still reread some periodically, like Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House. When I picked up The Dead Zone to reread it–I realized that I don’t really reread the way I used to when I was younger. On the rare occasions when I thought about it, I figured it was because I don’t have the time and there are so many unread books around the house that I shouldn’t revisit something when I have unread books collecting dust and moldering on the shelves. But reading that about people with anxiety made me recognize myself and I also realized that I don’t reread as much as I used to (or rewatch) because I don’t have as much anxiety as I did when I was younger. (Don’t get me wrong, I still have too much of it for me to be comfortable going forward without doing something for it, you know.)
I’d thought about rereading The Dead Zone in the wake of the 2016 election; I had posted on social media early on during that campaign season, “Is anyone else reminded of Greg Stillson?” But I couldn’t, just as I couldn’t go back and revisit Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here or The Handmaid’s Tale or any of the other great collapse of American democracy novels. But this reread…made me truly appreciate all over again what a literary genius Stephen King actually is–and an American treasure.
By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.
They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals/ The little kids were just farting around the way little kids had done since time immemorial–their ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile ws still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.
Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung over his shoulder. AT six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids’ hockey gamesyet, but able to skate rings around most of the other first-graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.
Now he skated slowly aruond the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he could go backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and crackle mysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts of the hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridges on its way to U. S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He was very glad to be alive on this fair, winter day. Nothing was wrong with him, nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing…except to be able to skate backward, like Timmy Benedix.
So begins the prologue to The Dead Zone, a King classic that doesn’t get nearly the respect it probably should–especially in wake of the 2016 election. Johnny does, in fact, learn how to skate backwards, but is so excited about it he doesn’t notice he is heading right into the hockey game, where he gets hit broadside by a teenager and sent sprawling, hitting his head on the ice and knocking himself out. As he slowly comes back to consciousness, he starts muttering things that make no sense to the worried kids and adults gathered around him, including saying to “stop charging it’ll blow up”. But then he wakes up, is fine, goes home and doesn’t even tell his parents what happened (imagine a child knocking himself out and the parents not even being told today–never happen). A few days later one of the men’s car battery is dead, he jumps it–and it blows up in his face; only no one remembers the things Johnny was muttering; everyone’s forgotten about it.
The second part of the prologue introduces us to the other main character of the book, or the person who is fated to have the biggest impact on John’s existence, which also begs the question of fate and destiny; these two men’s lives are going to intersect, and the rest of the book follows their lives–primarily focused on Johnny’s, with the occasional swing over to see what’s going on with Greg Stillson and his climb to power and success. That prologue introduction to the traveling Bible salesman in Oklahoma who kicks a dog to death lets us know who he is right from the very start–he’s the bad guy, the reason all these things are happening to Johnny so their lives will cross.
Johnny’s story has three acts: first, the car accident that leaves him in a coma for five years (and introduces us to him, his love interest Sarah, and his parents) and inevitably ends with him catching the Castle Rock Strangler, using the abilities that he woke up from the coma with; the second, which concludes with the vision about the graduation party ending in fire and mass death; and the third, where he realizes he is the only person who can stop Stillson’s political rise, the country’s descent into fascism and a final cataclysmic nuclear war (which was an every day reality for us all back when this book was written, by the way).
The most interesting character to me, always, from the story of The Trojan War (I loved mythology and ancient history as a child) was Cassandra, the princess who was given the gift of prophecy accidentally (her ears were licked by one of Apollo’s temple snakes; he cursed her by having no one believe her and this frustration drove her mad); I always wanted to write from her perspective. John Smith is a modern-day Cassandra, a young man who unwillingly was given the gift to see the future as well as have psychic visions, and his story plays out very similarly to Cassandra’s, and asks the big question: if you had the knowledge and foresight to stop Hitler in 1932, even if it meant killing him, would you do it? The personal good vs. the collective good?
I thoroughly enjoyed this reread, and it definitely holds up, even if it is a time capsule of the 1970s, which also made it a big more fun.
(Oh, and that fall he took as a child? While it is never really explained where his abilities come from, King implies that that first head injury awakened the talent in him; the later head injury and coma woke it up again and gave it more power.)
Sunday morning and I managed to get a lot done yesterday while watching games occasionally. I got bored watching Georgia throttle Florida, laughed about the Kansas win over Oklahoma, watched Tulane almost blow a significant lead and lose to Rice, and got bored with Tennessee-Kentucky so switched over to Elité on Netflix–and this seventh season is simply terrible. We have one more episode in this season and it’s over, and I can’t say I’m sorry to see it go.
But I did get a lot done yesterday. I cleaned. I ran errands,,,and I worked on the filing. Yes, there’s still work to be done, but my workspace no longer looks like I need to. just take a flamethrower to it, and even the laundry room is beginning to look like it’s more together than it should be. I do have to do some refiling, but everything is properly sorted and where it needs to be, if not alphabetized properly. I also discovered a lot of duplicate files–I am sure there are even more to be found, once the filing truly starts getting compiled and sorted properly. I also need for some of these files to just go away; I am never going to get to all of these ideas and I am never going to write all these stories and novels or essays and nonfiction books, either. But which ones to keep, which ones to abandon for good? I’ve been saving ideas and files and stories and scenes and characters for well over forty years now; you can only imagine how much I’ve forgotten about that are buried deep within this insane file-hoarding situation; it’s almost as bad as my book situation.
But getting all this clutter and debris sorted and put into a semblance of order also helped me get focused more–I think perhaps that’s been part of the problem with focusing on writing anything, really; knowing how out of control the filing had gotten and not knowing where anything was, or what I was working on could be found, and so forth. I’m going to try to get back to work on my next book today–after I get some more of these blog entry drafts completed and posted–and I am also going to try to work on the files some more. I decided that I am not, after all, going to be able to get my story “The Blues Before Dawn” finished in time to submit to the Bouchercon anthology, so it’ll go back into the files for now for a while. I never could quite get the story write, but that opening–my main character walking home in the misty morning hours of the Quarter while listening to someone playing the blues on a saxophone on a balcony, hidden away in the fog. I love that image, and I know that my main character is an apprentice waiter at Galatoire’s and sometimes turns tricks for money at Ma Butler’s bordello in Storyville; I also know it’s a Sherlock Holmes story from the perspective of someone who has a crush on Mr. Holmes–and now has to depend on Sherlock to save him from wrongly being accused of murder. The rest? Not so much…and it’s due on Tuesday, so that’s not going to happen. A pity, yes, but a Sherlock story from the perspective of a sometime male harlot was a long shot for the Bouchercon anthology anyway.
I did start reading The Lonely Ghost by Mike Ford, which is quite delightful, along with a reread of Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels (also one of my favorite books of all time, and definitely one of the greatest ghost stories of all time) when I had a few down moments to spend (I’ll get back to The Lonely Ghost later on this morning), and I also have to make a cheesecake this morning and get the white bean chicken chili started so it’ll be ready for tonight and the rest of the week, of course. Halloween is going to be one of those frantic unsettling days, but that’s okay; I can make it through it all.
I slept really well last night, which was lovely; my sleep lately has been pretty marvelous, honestly. Relaxing in the evenings last week, letting the anxiety not get to me, and getting good night’s sleeps this past week was really kind of lovely and nice. I also slept late this morning, opting to stay in bed later than I usually do because it frankly felt nice, you know? Today I am also planning some self-care and grooming, which will be nice. Maybe even take a walk later in the day, when it starts cooling down? Although without the humidity yesterday’s low eighties felt marvelously and delightfully cool.
And on that note, the spice ain’t gonna mine itself, so off I go. Have a marvelous Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again.
Queer and Loathing in America 