Tomorrow morning when I am swilling coffee at this time, I’ll be getting ready to head to the airport for my flight to Washington for Malice Domestic. I am already checked in and packed; which is always a lovely thing to have accomplished before the day of the trip. I think I have everything I’ve agreed to do–drinks, meals, etc.–on my calendar so I can access it from my phone whilst I am there. I have the books I intend to read while traveling in my carry-on, and I am also hoping to get some editorial work done while I am gone but…yeah, that doesn’t always go the way I planned. I had hoped to get it to my editor by the 1st, which is Monday, but I don’t know if that is going to happen or not. I hate being as far behind as I am on this, but you never know. Stranger things have happened. I don’t want to spend my entire weekend, of course, sitting in my room editing away like a madman (I had to do that at a conference once before, and it was NOT fun at all); and I do need to reconnect with my writing and my friends in the community–always the most important part of such a conference.
It’s also Wednesday Pay-the-Bills Day, which I somehow–I am blaming the pre-trip jitters–forgot was today! How do you forget it’s PayDay? Heaven forfend. Madness. And I do have to remember to check in for my flight this morning, too. I had intended to pack last night, but went into a “revision” wormhole and stayed there for a good while until my brain stopped functioning (in part due to the loud caterwauling as his Majesty was enormously displeased that I was not providing a lap for him to sleep in) and when Paul got home we watched this week’s Ted Lasso, which was a lovely episode. Not quite as lovely as the week before’s, but still lovely. I love that they haven’t turned Nate into a super-villain and are showing his still softer sides; the romance with the waitress/hostess at A Taste of Athens is quite lovely, actually. I think I also saw the seeds of the Jack/Keeley break-up being sown; no offense but I will flip a table if the show doesn’t end with her back with Roy Kent. I mean, after all, he’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where. I also liked the continuing growth and personal development Jamie is showing…he’s becoming one of my favorite characters, which is some pristine and incredibly excellent writing, frankly. It also saddens me that every week means we are one episode closer to being finished with the show. Heavy heaving sigh. Maybe there will be a spin-off? Or several?
I had intended fully to start packing last night, at least to make a list of what I need to pack, but that didn’t happen, alas. I still don’t have a packing list, either, for that matter, which I’ll have to remedy today. I think there’s enough food in the house for Paul to fend for himself, and he certainly is capable of going to get something somewhere if there’s nothing in the house he wants, or wants to fuss with. I do need to do the dishes when I get home tonight, and a load of laundry, too. The weather is going to be a bit chillier than I would prefer; I’m probably going to need to bring along a jacket, which I hate. I may not even leave the hotel when it’s cold enough for the coat, but you also never know. I know we are leaving the hotel for dinner on Friday night, and I think tomorrow night I am also having dinner off-site with my friend Ellen. Saturday night is the Agatha banquet, where I will lose the award for Best Children’s/Young Adult, which is also fine. I never expect to win awards, and they certainly aren’t ever on my radar when I am writing something.
The revision is coming along, slowly–very slowly–but I am also really pleased with it so far, you know? The trick is to ignore the ticking clock until the deadline and focus on making the book as good as I can and not worry about running out of time and rushing the damned thing, which is what usually happens in almost every case. Heavy heaving sigh. But at least now the boys’ involvement in the case sort of makes sense. There’s going to be a lot of coincidence in this book, which always worries me, and then I remember that it’s a Scotty book so it’s supposed to be wacky and crazy and over-the-top…and then I start worrying about whether it’s over-the-top enough. Because you can never win when you’re a writer. Sigh.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and will check in with you again tomorrow.
Monday morning of Malice week. Ugh, all the little things one has to do to get ready for traveling. Make a list of what to pack, take inventory of the kitchen to make sure Paul has what he needs while I’m gone, and so on and so forth. Heavy heaving sigh. But my flight Thursday isn’t super early; eleven-ish, if I recall correctly, which means I don’t have to be at the airport until around nine, which isn’t bad. I’m going to take some books with me to read for pleasure at the airports and while in flight; I will be editing when I can in my room periodically trying to get this revision finished by the end of the month. The weekend wasn’t nearly as productive as it could have been–there was another wave of depression and grief to be gotten through this weekend, unfortunately–but I did make some progress, which I am taking as a win. I did also make a to-do list for the week; that should help in some ways.
We watched A Knock at the Cabin last night, which I enjoyed; a lot more than I usually enjoy an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I had also enjoyed the book on which it was based, The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, who is one of our best horror writers today; I’ve enjoyed everything of his I’ve read thus far. The film follows the book very closely; it’s one of those claustrophobic horror stories where some city folk take a vacation in the country at a remote cabin–but remote and country are very much staples of horror; someone really should do a look at the trope of “city folk in the country” horror–and things of course go very south. The film is very well cast; Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge play Eric and Andrew, a gay couple who’ve adopted a young Asian girl they’ve named Wen and they make an adorable little family group. The location of the cabin is idyllic and tranquil and beautiful; the perfect spot for some city folk who want to get away from the every day and rest and relax. Wen collects grasshoppers in a jar because she wants to study them; the movie opens with her catching grasshoppers and then catching a glimpse of a very big man coming through the woods to talk to her. This is Leonard, played very well by Dave Bautista, who is the leader of a group of four people who have seen visions and have concluded that in order to stop the apocalyptic end of the world, they must come to this cabin and present the family with a horrible choice: they have to sacrifice one of their own in order to stop the end of the world. Are they crazy? They sound like it, as they try to reason with the family…but what if they aren’t? The movie’s ending is different than the book’s–there was no way they could film the book’s ending, really–but I do prefer the book’s ending than the film’s; it seemed like the inevitable outcome, and made the most sense. It’s a good movie, I do recommend it, but one thing I’ve always been curious about since reading the book and was only heightened by viewing the film: why a gay family? I gave Tremblay props when I read the book, because they were very real and didn’t seem forced or stereotypical at all; I thought it should stand as an excellent example of someone who is not gay writing gay characters. The politics of the representation–gays in peril–is one I am not going to give any time to; sure, the gay family was in danger almost from the minute the credits rolled, and it was nice having a gay couple to root for in a horror film. Horror by its very nature is disturbing and tragic; you cannot have gay representation in horror and then not expect the gay people to go through some things, you know? And having gay characters also adds another dimension to the home invasion situation–are they crazy, are they telling the truth, or did they target a gay family purposely? There’s an essay to be written about the book and the movie from a sociopolitical and sociocultural perspective, but I don’t know that I am the right person to write such a thing; I’m not an academic, after all, and have very little desire to ever be an academic.,.although that sometimes can explain my insecurities about thinking deep and heavy thoughts and wanting to write deep and heavy essays picking apart and deconstructing gay representation in modern fiction, with an emphasis on horror and crime.
I also read some academic treatises this weekend, one about being gay and the gay rights movement’s intersectionality and how it got away from that in the beginning only to circle back around to it in the present day, and the other about the television show Dark Shadows, which probably had more influence on me, my writing, and my preferences when it comes to reading, film, and television than anything else I’ve watched or read in my life. I know I used to watch classic black and white films with my grandmother (she was a big fan of the gay icons, ironically: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Katharine Hepburn; she also liked horror and noir, and she was a fan of Dark Shadows, as was our babysitter down the street, Mrs. Harris), so pretty much my course was set when I was a little boy–gay writer was my future. I should write more about Dark Shadows–I was actually thinking last night that I should write a memoir of being a writer; my influences and how they shaped my creativity and what I actually write–not that anyone would be interested in reading such a thing, of course; which is partly why I don’t write more personal essays. Just as I’ve never really been interested in writing a writing manual, or one of those Greg Herren teaches you how to write a novel things. I always feel like a fraud when I talk about writing; never does my Imposter Syndrome strike as hard as it does when I am talking about writing or teaching a workshop. I don’t know.
It’s back into the office with me today. It’s a light day for me; mostly busy work, like data entry, filing, resupplying testing rooms, that sort of thing. It’s always nice to ease back into the week with an easy day in the office. It’s also weird to know that I am leaving on Thursday morning; the trip doesn’t seem real to me yet even though I’ve already made plans to meet up with people while I am there. Looks like I’m going to have to take a Lyft or an Uber from the airport once there, which is fine. And then of course when I get home I have to make up for lost time with the manuscript. Heavy heaving sigh. It wasn’t a good weekend for working, really; I kept spiraling and had to finally, on both days, remind myself that my mental health was more important than a deadline and so focused on positivity and and worked when I was able to get things done. The house isn’t nearly in the kind of shape I would like for it to be in when I am leaving for a weekend (two in a row; the next weekend I am off to Alabama) but seriously–when is it ever? I just need to make sure everything is in order before I go away on Thursday morning. Heavy heaving sigh.
And my books that I’ll be taking to read with me are going to be That Summer Night on Frenchmen Street, Wined and Died in La,, Let Me Die in His Footsteps, and Monday’s Lie. I am not going to get through all of these, of course; I may even cut it down to two–like I won’t be buying books in the book room, please–and I will also be working on the revision while I am there, too. (I so wanted to be finished before I leave…)
And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head into the office. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.
Sunday morning and it looks to be a lovely day out there today. Yesterday, while I ran my errands, I was regularly amazed at how nice of a day it was, and how I wished I could take full advantage of it. It would have been a wonderful day to take a walk. Instead I was inside doing stuff and trying to get everything under control; the apartment mess, the book, and so forth. I have a long day in the spice mines ahead of me today, too. I also cannot believe that I’ll be at Malice this week; leaving on Thursday morning. I’ll need to make a packing list, of course, and I am looking forward to all the lovely plans I have for that weekend. I know I’m having dinner with some friends on different evenings, and brunch with another friend on Saturday after my signing, and of course Saturday night is the banquet.
I slept pretty well last night, and was already awake when the caterwauling began this morning. I stayed in bed for a little while longer after getting His Majesty’s breakfast for him, but finally decided to stop avoiding getting up and getting back to work. SO here I now sit, with a cup of steaming coffee in front of me, trying to decide what to have for breakfast. Toast? Cereal? A sausage, egg and cheese croissant out of the freezer? Or nothing at all, which is also always an option. I’ve also got some mess here in the office area I need to take care of this morning as well before I can really and truly dig into the manuscript.
We finished the second season of P-Valley last night, and got caught up on Yellowjackets, too. This means tonight we don’t have anything to watch–I am going to suggest we watch A Knock at the Cabin, and maybe the latest Scream is streaming already? I don’t know. I enjoyed P-Valley; I always kind of like shows about marginalized people doing what they need to in order to survive, as well as getting the occasional shot at higher stakes than usual. The next season is already set up so we’ll be watching out for that in the near future, but what I really want to see is the second season of Reacher. I did go up into the storage attic yesterday and found a box that can go directly to the library sale; alas, then I remembered I won’t be in town for the next two Saturdays so there was no point to bringing the box down. I also made the decision yesterday that I am most likely going to just go ahead and destroy my papers. I’m tired of having them around, frankly, taking up space and collecting dust, and no one is ever going to want to look through all that crap anyway. It’s all disorganized and scattered and in no particular order; who is going to ever have the time or inclination to go through all of that shit? And almost everything I have on paper is available electronically. There may be some things, some older manuscripts, that I no longer have electronic versions of anymore because the programs have aged out; old Word files and old operating systems no longer open with current systems anyway. But if I can clean out all that paper, and donate all those books in the attic, I can store other stuff up there and alleviate the clutter in the apartment itself. That is the plan for the rest of the year; and hopefully by December I’ll be able to close out the storage unit.
There’s a lot of files in my filing cabinet I can dispose of, too; I don’t need all my tax records going back to 2007, for sure (I saw them in there yesterday when filing away this year’s return) and do I really need contracts for short stories going back to 2000? Probably not. Anything where the rights have reverted back to me can certainly be tossed, and old file folders for ideas that may never go anywhere at this point might as well be discarded as well. I just really felt, yesterday, very strongly, for the first time utter and total disgust with all of this clutter and stuff. I’m thinking about it because of course my sister and nieces are helping my dad go through Mom’s stuff and things, and she was a bit of a packrat who didn’t like to throw things away as long as there was still a use for them–clothes and so forth, as well as papers; they found the receipt for the first washer and dryer she ever bought, back when we moved to the suburbs in 1971 and how pleased and delighted she was to no longer have to drag everything to a laundromat (kind of how I was when I got my first ones in 2005–there was something adult like about buying appliances, you know?) and realizing I don’t want anything to have to sort through all of this shit when I die; may as well make it as easy as possible for the survivors, whoever they may be.
Grim to be thinking in those terms, but once sixty is in your rearview mirror, you need to start thinking that way. How much mess is someone going to have to deal with when cleaning out my home? I’ve always been singularly unprepared for almost every life-changing thing that has happened to me; maybe I should actually prepare for this one. No worries, everything is still working the way it’s supposed to and while my working parts may not work as well as they used to, but overall I am still relatively healthy. And I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of regular trips to the gym next month as well.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I’m going to finish this, drink some more coffee, finish all this filing, and get cleaned up so I can dive headfirst into this revision. You have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Ah, it’s marvelous having a dryer again. And it’s an upgrade from the last one, which actually cost more, so winning on chore fronts here in the Lost Apartment.
Which says a lot about how spoiled I am. My grandmother used to wash the clothes in an agitator on her back porch that she had to fill with hot water and had a ringer to crush excess water out of the clothes before hanging them on the line. IMAGINE how long that must have taken, and how long it took for the clothes to dry in the heat and humidity of an Alabama summer when it could also rain at any moment without notice. Modern conveniences are quite marvelous, really, and I don’t think we appreciate how much time they actually do save us. Granted, I could load all the laundry up in the back of the car and go to a laundromat and get it all finished in about two hours; but that’s two hours where I would have to sit in a laundromat and either read/ or stare at my phone…and it’s never really quite comfortable in a laundromat anywhere. Also, the one around the corner closed due to the pandemic so yeah, I’d have to get in the car and take it somewhere, and have coins and all that nonsense; although I suppose with all the marvelous modern technology that has sprung up since the last time I went to a laundromat (when the washing machine was broken and we were waiting for its replacement) would enable people to use electronic payments? I don’t know, and I’d prefer to never find out, quite frankly.
But you know something? Sitting at my desk doing data entry to the washing machine agitating and the dryer tumbling and heating was weirdly comforting; a return to my normal Friday routine of chores and day-job duties–almost like the world has been slightly tilted off its axis for a while and has finally settled back into the way it’s supposed to be around here. I also wound up having to run my errands after work yesterday, because I remembered (fortunately, thank you, Facebook) that today is the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which makes access to everywhere I would need to go nearly impossible or an enormous time-consuming pain in the ass. So I picked up the mail and made groceries after I finished work yesterday, and will see about washing the car on Sunday (and possibly a trip to the Fresh Market, since it’s right there). Saturday will be my day of not leaving the house, which is probably for the best–although I do need to take clothes to the dry cleaners. Hmmm. They aren’t open on Sunday. Hmmm. *adds dry cleaning to Saturday to-do list*
I had to disassemble the bottom shelf of the laundry room so they could remove the non-heating dryer and install our new one, and once I finished my work for the day I started putting the room back together again–I have framed covers of my books on the walls in there, and I had taken those down too. I started putting the covers up not remembering where they were originally and I thought well, who wants it to look the same again for the next ten years anyway and so I just started hanging them wherever. The same with the books. I had to put the shelf back and then the books; so I started reorganizing and pruning, and then started working my way through the upper shelves to make it at least look neat, if cluttered. The fun thing about doing this sort of thing is you start unearthing treasures–“oh, there that is!” and “Oh, I’d forgotten about you!” and “oh yes, I still want to write that story this was research for” and “Oh, yes, definitely want to reread that sometime” and “Oh, I am so far behind on her series!” that makes it kind of like an adventure and less like an odious chore.
Plus, making it all neater looking to the eye pleases my OCD, and I can fold my arms with a smug sense of satisfaction when I look at them. Now if only I can accomplish the same in the living room…
I slept really well last night, and even stayed up later than usual. Paul came home last night (!!!) and we watched the LSU-West Virginia gymnastics meet, which was way fun, and then this week’s The Mandalorian. I did wind up staying later than I would have preferred–not sure how that happened, to be honest–but I feel very rested and relaxed today, which means I think it will be a good and productive day. Paul has his trainer later this morning and then will head off to the office, so I have the day to myself to clean and write and read and do Gregalicious things. Once I finish this I am going to repair to my easy chair with my coffee and Cheryl Head’s Time’s Undoing, which I am looking forward to finishing–it’s sooooo good–and getting my act together. This week I am seeing my doctor about my toe (appointment on Thursday afternoon) and I need to make the ENT appointment as well as try to get my dentistry needs taken care of, and I should probably make an eye appointment, too. Maintenance becomes increasingly important the older you get, you know. The toe is much better–still hurts, but not throbbing –and of course, by the time I see the doctor, it’ll probably be all fine and he’ll think I’m completely insane, not that he doesn’t already.
Most people do, at any rate.
But the new dryer just beeped which means the last load from yesterday has finished drying, and I am going to go fold some clothes, perhaps put some dishes away (there’s a load in the dishwasher, too, clean) and then read while I swill the rest of my morning coffee. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I may check in with you again later.
Friday and working at home. I slept in a bit–almost to eight–but of course, the primary problem of getting up at six four mornings per week has of course trained Scooter that he gets breakfast at six every day, so at six every morning if he hasn’t been fed he raises holy hell. For a sweet cuddlebug of a cat, he can certainly yowl quite loudly when he puts his mind to it. So I got up and fed him before going back to sleep for another hour or so. I feel rested this morning, which is quite lovely when you are heading into a weekend with lots and lots to do; it’s nice to not feel tired in such a situation. I am going to try to fix the dryer this morning before I start working–wish me luck–and of course, the Lost Apartment, as always on Friday, has become a disaster area over the course of the week. But the weekend dawns anew, and so maybe, just maybe, I can maybe even get sort of caught up on what I am behind on?
Perish the thought, perchance to dream.
I am also looking forward to digging into Cheryl Head’s Time’s Undoing, which looks fantastic and I’ve been itching to read since I first learned of it, and of course, Bobby Mathews’ Living the Gimmick, which I am also excited to dip into. So many good books on hand to get through, so little time. Heavy heaving sigh. And of course, if I fix the dryer and it actually works–I am very nervous about this, as one can probably imagine; but I am equipped with Youtube videos to help and I do think it’s kind of sad that I am so unskilled with tools and so forth. The three things I wish I could do over? I wish I had taken Auto Shop and Typing in high school, and I wish I’d learned how to build things with, you know, hammers and wrenches and so forth. I hate not being able to feel confident about doing simple repair work, like replacing a fuse in a dryer (which may not be the issue with the dryer, but this is the only thing I can potentially do myself without calling in a repairman, at which point it’s probably less expensive to simply replace it–which is disgusting. We’ve really become, over the course of my life, a disposable society where it’s easier and less expensive to simply replace something rather than get it repaired), but I am also looking at it this way: even if the fuse wasn’t the problem–and I do think that’s what it is–if I can successfully move the dryer out, disassemble the back, and replace the fuse, I am going to take that as a win even if that doesn’t fix the problem, because at least I tried before simply replacing it.
Today feels like it might be a good day. Grief isn’t linear, as I am constantly being reminded by those who have been through this already, and I also instinctively know that; I can remember other traumatic life events in the past being this way; one day or two is a good day, then you have a low, shitty day, and so it goes, on and on ad nauseum, ad infinitum. I also kind of feel like I can actually get something written after work tonight? I do have some errands I need to run at some point later today–which is always exhausting–but I think I can get away with staying in most of the weekend. I do want to wash the car and vacuum it out; I’ve put nearly three thousand miles on it in February, so there’s a lot of wrappers and trash and debris in the floorboards, plus dirt tracked in from rest stops and so forth. I want to be better about taking care of the car, if that makes sense? I am doing a great job with it as far as maintenance (the fact that newer cars don’t require as much regular maintenance as the old ones I am used to is an enormous help in that regard) is concerned, even having the tires rotated regularly. The car is dented and dinged up, and perhaps someday I will get those dents and dings repaired, but on the other that does not keep the car from functioning properly and therefore that’s not a priority for me. Maybe someday, but certainly not now.
Ugh, the kitchen/office is such a disaster area. I really need to do something about that…and that is probably the proper and best way to transition over into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow morning.
My God, my email inbox is completely out of control.
At one point in mid-January and before February I had it almost emptied; there was blank space at the bottom of the inbox for more emails to be viewed but there weren’t any. It was a glorious feeling, frankly, for the few weeks it lasted before everything went off the rails. I suspect now that I can get through it all even faster than I did back in mid-January, but it’s sooooooo daunting.
Yesterday I swung by Home Depot to buy the fuse I need for the dryer, which they don’t keep in stock. The helpful man in the Appliance Accessories aisle told me of one place I may be able to find it in stock, and so I called them (and Lowe’s) from the parking lot and found that neither do, so I went ahead and ordered it on-line and it should be here Tuesday. The suspense, right? Will we need a new dryer, or will Greg somehow be able to repair the one they already have? There will undoubtedly be an update on this fascinating case on Wednesday; in which we either have a working dryer or have gone ahead and ordered a new one. Sigh. I also swung by the mail and the Fresh Market; I am going to have to actually venture into the grocery store at some point this weekend (Sunday morning most likely) because I also woke up to an email that my grocery order was canceled due to the system at the store being down this morning; it was originally postponed from yesterday to today, so I think the system has been having problems for a hot moment already; although I do suppose I could order them from the store on the West Bank, which means I could stop at Sonic on the way home and…it really takes so little to make me happy.
I finally booked my flights for San Diego Bouchercon! So my two trips for the year–Malice Domestic and Bouchercon–are all booked and ready for me to travel. I also need to do some more organizing and filing this morning, too–I also have to put the dishes away and do another load of laundry, and I really should work on cleaning up around here. My toe was worse yesterday than it’s been in a while, but this morning the swelling seems to have gone back down and while it’s still painful, it’s not throbbing the way it was last night, which was very painful. Adding message doctor tomorrow on medical app to the to-do list. We also watched two more episodes of Class last night, which differs from Elité enough to make it something new, but it’s funny how the personalities of the actors affect the characters. While many of the storylines are the same, the season of this Indian version is a few episodes shorter, so some of the emphasis on secondary storylines isn’t there as much as in the Spanish. But I want to finish it because Outer Banks’ third season dropped last night, and it looks completely insane and over-the-top, which is wild because the entire run of the show has been insane and over-the-top; I’m really glad it hasn’t been one of those Netflix shows that get orphaned after an amazing first season (so many I couldn’t even begin to name them all). So, today I think I am going to spend some time in my easy chair with my toe elevated and an icepack on it. I want to finish reading Body and Soul Food so I can move on to another book in the TBR pile–there are so damned many, Jesus Lord God–and I do want to keep my reading habit satisfied. I’m been struggling not to buy more books–it’s so damned tempting, especially when you have books out there by favorite authors just begging to be bought–and I also need to start writing thank you cards to everyone for their kindnesses these last few weeks.
And of course, there’s that horrible inbox. But if I start answering and saving my answers as drafts this weekend, I can maybe have the entire thing cleaned and cleared out by Monday afternoon? Perchance to dream….
And then of course I am very behind on writing everything I should be writing, but have had little to no desire to even look at anything these last few weeks. I’ve always felt writer’s block had more to do with depression than anything else; an endlessly revolving cycle in which you get depressed about not writing and then can’t and that renews the depression. I do think I need to start writing something for myself about Mom–if for no other reason than to keep the memories fresh–and I do think that could break the logjam in my brain and get me writing again.
And on that note, I am going to make some more coffee and repair to the chair with the icepack and the book. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check back in with you again later.
Work-at-home Friday, during which I also have to get ready to leave town tomorrow. That means making groceries, picking up a prescription, and packing all on top of my work-at-home duties–which means I’ll have to work a little later than usual. I’ll be on Bereavement leave next week, so I don’t have to work again until Friday (which is a work at home day, but it won’t kill me to come into the office that day anyway; I’ll need to pick up my work-at-home stuff at some point–although I could swing by the office on my way home from Alabama…or, I could just drop in on Friday morning next week to pick it all up. I don’t know, I guess I am going to play it all by ear from now on.
January seemed to last forever and a day; yet February is flying past like an Air Force flyover at Tiger Stadium. Granted, I think I lost the thread of time after Mom’s stroke, but I was incredibly startled yesterday at the office writing “02/16/23” as the date on forms. 02/16/23? How weird does that look? It makes me vaguely uncomfortable whenever I see it, thinking that can’t be right, can it? But it is correct, and since I put the reminders in our clients’ files for when they need new paperwork along with the date their current expires, I have to use 2024 which really looks wrong.
It’s going to be weird being back in the part of Alabama where I’m from–I’ve not been there since my grandfather’s funeral at least twenty years ago and more likely even longer ago. I had been wanting to go back out of curiosity more than anything else; wanting to see how different it is now from what I remember, and I’d like to drive around taking pictures of things and so forth–I’d also like to see my maternal grandparents’ graves, since I am there–and just in general remember, you know? See how much of it I got wrong in Bury Me in Shadows, and if there’s anything to inspire my next Alabama book. You never know, right? I am probably going to leave early enough on Saturday so I can do some of that driving around before checking into the hotel–see how lost I can get, right?–because really it’s all not very far away from where I’ll be staying. The nearest motel is about seventeen miles away from the cemetery, and the cemetery itself is in between the county seat and where we’ll be staying. It’ll be interesting to see how differently I remembered things for the book as opposed to the current reality.
I didn’t go out to the parades because I have somehow managed to injure my big toe. This is making walking a bit of a challenge, and I am not exactly sure what I did or when it happened. I don’t think it was an obvious oh my God fucking ouch moment, but more of a little twinge or something that I thought I hope that doesn’t hurt and promptly forgot about until I stood up again, but suffice it to say the toe is painful and swollen. I don’t think it’s broken as I can move it without pain, but putting weight on it is an entirely different story. But Paul managed to get his annual shoe from Muses (a particularly nice one I’ll post a picture of at some point) before the predicted downpour occurred and managed to get home without getting wet. So, all in all Muses was quite a victory for Paul again this year, even though I had to skip it. I doubt that I will go out there at all tonight, either. If my toe is better Monday I may go out for Orpheus, but parade season has been a bust for me this year so far.
I slept late this morning, too–it’s been a hot minute since I had the chance to actually, you know, sleep late–and it did feel rather marvelous. The toe doesn’t hurt as much this morning as it did last night and I think some of the swelling has gone down. Since I’m home I can alternate heat and cold on it for a bit to see if that helps at all. I’d rather not be limping at my mother’s funeral–and seriously, how can I not remember when I did it or how? Sigh. But my coffee is wonderful this morning, and it’s chilly outside, and I have a couple of errands that need running later. Sigh–including a trip to CVS to get stuff to keep the toe wrapped up with. Such terrible timing for this, too. Heavy heaving sigh.
But I’ve downloaded Tara Laskowski’s One Night Gone and two Carol Goodmans (The Other Mother and The Seduction of Water) to listen to in the car on the way up there and back; I’ll take my hard copy of whichever one I decide to listen to in the car with me so I can finish reading it while I am there and can listen to something else on the way back to New Orleans on Monday morning.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May you all have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably post here before I leave tomorrow morning before they close the streets for Iris.
Masculinity is something I’ve always felt I viewed from the outside.
It’s very strange; for someone who doesn’t look back very often and has a rather healthy disdain for nostalgia, for some reason since the pandemic started, I’ve been revisiting my past a lot. I don’t know, perhaps it was triggered by having dinner with an old friend from high school a while back (which also inspired me to write a horribly dark short story); or perhaps it’s because of short stories or novel ideas I’ve been toying with, but lately, I’ve been thinking about my past much more so than I usually do, and what it was like for me growing up. I wrote a Sisters in Crime quarterly column several years ago about the first time I realized, once and for all, that I was indeed different from everyone else–it centered the first time I heard the word fairy used towards me as a pejorative, as well as the first time I was called a faggot. I’ve also been examining and turning over issues of masculinity inside my head for quite some time (most of my life). #shedeservedit was itself an examination of toxic masculinity and how it reverberates through a small community when it’s allowed to run rampant and unchecked: boys will be boys. Some short stories I’ve published have also examined the same subject.
What can I say? My not being the American masculine ideal has played a very major part in shaping my life and who I am; how could it not? I used to, when I was a kid, pray that I’d wake up the next morning and magically be turned into the kind of boy I was supposed to be, the kind that every other boy I knew–from classmates to cousins to everything I watched on television and at the movies.
Society and culture have changed in many ways since I was a little boy who didn’t fit so easily into the conformist role for little boys; roles for male and female were very narrowly defined when I was a child, and children were forced into conforming to those roles almost from birth. Boys were supposed to be rough and tumble and play sports and get dirty and like bugs and frogs and so forth; girls were supposed to be feminine and play with dolls or play house, wear dresses and mother their baby dolls. Boys weren’t supposed to read or enjoy reading (but I was also supposed to get good grades and be smart), and that was all I wanted to do when I was a kid. I used to love Saturdays, when my mother would go to the grocery store and drop me off at the library on her way. I loved looking at the books on the shelves, looking at the cover art and reading the descriptions on the back. I loved getting the Scholastic Book Club catalog and picking out a few books; the excitement of the day when the books I’d ordered arrived and I could go out on the back porch when I got home and read them cover to cover. I was constantly, endlessly, pushed to do more “boyish” things; I played Pee-wee baseball (very much against my will), and later was pushed into playing football in high school–which I hated at first but eventually came to love…which just goes to show, don’t automatically hate something without trying it. But yeah, I never loved playing baseball. I was enormously happy when we moved to Kansas and I discovered, to my great joy, that my new high school didn’t have a team.
One less traditionally masculine thing for me to participate in was always a bonus.
The things that I really wanted to do weren’t considered masculine pursuits, and as a general rule I was denied them as much as possible. My parents forbade me from reading books about girls–Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, Trixie Belden–which, quite naturally, made me want them more (my entire life the best way to get me to do something is to tell me either not to do it or tell me I can’t do it…either always makes me want to do it). Oddly enough, when my reading tastes became more adult–when I moved from children’s books to reading fiction for adults–they didn’t seem to care that I was reading books by women about women quite so much as they did when I was younger; either that, or they gave up trying as they finally saw me as a lost cause–one or the other; I don’t know which was the actual case. Maybe my embrace of football in high school overrode everything else suspect about me. It’s possible. My family has always worshipped at the goalposts…and I kind of still do. GEAUX TIGERS!
I spent a lot of my early life trying to understand masculinity and how it worked; what it was and why it was something I should aspire to–and never could quite wrap my mind around it. The role models for men always pointed out to me–John Wayne, etc.–never resonated with me; I always thought they were kind of dicks, to be honest. The whole “boys don’t cry, men never show emotions, men make the money and the entire household revolves around their wants and needs” shtick never took with me, and of course, as I never had any real sexual interest in women…the whole “locker room talk” thing was always kind of revolting to me, because I always saw girls as people. It probably had something to do with the fact that I was more likely to be able to trust girls than boys; I had so many boys decide they couldn’t be friends with me anymore because at some point other kids calling me a fairy began having an negative impact on their own lives all through junior and senior high school (to this day, I’ve never understood this; why were we friends before, and what changed? It wasn’t me…I didn’t suddenly switch gears from butch boy to effeminate overnight) it’s little wonder I have difficulty ever trusting straight men…but in fairness, I have trouble trusting everyone. But I never quite understood the entire “boys are studs girls are sluts” thing, but I also never truly understood the dynamics of male/female attraction. Yes, I dated in high school; I dated women in college before I finally stopped entirely. And yes, I also have had sex with women, back then–but never really enjoyed it much.
In all honesty, I still don’t understand masculinity, at least not as it was defined in my earlier decades of life. I’ve never understood the cavemen-like mentality of responding with violence (no matter how angry I get, I never get violent); I’ve never understood the refusal to recognize that women are human beings rather than life support systems for vaginas and wombs and breasts; I’ve never understood the mentality that a man’s desires should trump (see what I did there?) bodily autonomy for women. No man has a right to a woman’s body, nor does any man have a right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. Maybe always being an outsider looking in and observing has something to do with my mindset, maybe my difference and always having mostly female friends most of my life is what shaped me into understanding these things.
I also mostly only read women’s books, to be honest. There are some straight male writers I read and admire (Ace Atkins, Bill Loefhelm, Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Chris Holm, Stephen King, Jeff Abbott and Paul Tremblay, just to name a few) but I really have no desire to read straight male fantasies that reduce women to caricatures and gay men, if they do appear, as stereotypes; but after I recently read I the Jury by Mickey Spillane, a comment someone left on my post gave me a whole new perspective on how to read such books from the 40’s 50’s, and 60’s; the perspective of reading these books as examples of post-war PTSD…and that opened my eyes to all kinds of questions and potential critical analyses; that the horrors of World War II and what the veterans saw and experienced shaped the development of the culture of toxic masculinity that arose after the war (not that toxic masculinity didn’t exist before the war, of course, but the war experience certainly didn’t help any and it most definitely reshaped what “being a man” meant). I was thinking about doing a lengthier critical piece, on I the Jury, along with the first Travis McGee novel, and possibly including Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark and possibly Alistair MacLean. There’s certainly a wealth of material there to take a look at, evaluate, and deconstruct–and that’s not even getting into Ian Fleming and James Bond.
I’ve also always found it rather interesting that Mickey Spillane was Ayn Rand’s favorite writer. Make of that what you will.And on that note, I am off to bed. The last two days have been long ones, and tomorrow and Sunday will also be long days. I’m planning on driving back to New Orleans on Sunday–timing it so I get back after the parades are over so I can actually get home–regardless of what happens here. It’s not been an easy time here, and I am very tired.
So, when Ellen Byron was preparing to interview me for our live stream event from Murder by the Book, she sent me some questions to prepare myself with. They were good questions, actually, and I thought that taking time to answer them when I can think about the responses would be an excellent BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION post.
So, without further ado, here we go!
What inspired your book? Series premise and the specific story?
That’s an interesting story, actually. I had been toying with the idea of writing a cozy for a long time–I’ve always liked them–but never was sure I could do it; there were rules, after all, and I’m terrible about following rules, always have been. Several friends have been encouraging me for years to do it, but I always hesitated. It was (I thought) outside of my comfort zone, and while I would toy with ideas here and there, none ever came to anything. My partner’s office is near a costume shop, and he’d had to go in there one day for some reason or another, and as is his wont, he struck up a conversation with an employee about the costume business, how they made money, how they stayed open all year, etc etc etc. He’s very curious. Anyway, that night I mentioned to him that someone had yet again suggested I write a cozy, and he wasn’t sure what one was, so I gave him a thumbnail overview, and he said, “Oh, you should do a costume shop” and proceeded to tell me about his conversation with the shop employee. I agreed it was an interesting idea, and stowed it away in the back of my head for future reference, and would think about it now and then, come up with characters and a community for the main character to be a part of, and so on. But at the same time I kept thinking New Orleans wasn’t the right place for a cozy series–basically looking for ways to fail instead of reasons to succeed, which is the underlying theme of my life, really–and so it went. An editor I’ve worked with before was interested in the idea of my writing a cozy series, so I wrote up a proposal and sent it off. They liked it, but couldn’t sign it, and recommended I take it somewhere else, so I did. It evolved from a costume shop to an antique shop during the process of me signing a contract with Crooked Lane; they liked everything about my idea except for the shop itself, so I had to change that. I went down to Magazine Street and walked for a block, writing down every kind of shop I saw, and sent the list in–and we all came to an agreement about the series being structured around an antiques business. As for the story, well, I wanted to talk about and explore the gentrification of New Orleans that has been ongoing almost this entire century, and how real estate has just exploded around here. (It still staggers me that our rent was $450 when we first moved here; the lowest rent I’ve seen advertised in our neighborhood is around $1500 for less than thousand square feet. Our original apartment now rents for $2500 per month now, which is insane.) What happens to Valerie–the fear of a new tax assessment pricing her out of her house–actually happened to a friend of mine; and the prices just seem to keep going up all the time. You can’t even buy a condo in my neighborhood for less than $350, 000 now–the asking prices for houses in the neighborhood are completely insane. Every time I see a new listing in the neighborhood for half a million dollars or more I think, we really should have bought when we moved here–but home-ownership is New Orleans isn’t something Paul or I have ever been terribly interested in. Termites, tornados, hurricanes, floods, black mold–no thanks! But man, what a return on our investment had we bought in 1996!
We both write series set in New Orleans. Why do you find it so inspiring? Especially when you’ve lived in so many other places?
I’ve lived all over the country–we’re from Alabama, and I’ve lived in Chicago on the south side, the suburbs, Kansas, Fresno, Houston, Tampa, Minneapolis and then New Orleans. New Orleans is the only place I’ve ever been to where I felt like I belonged, where I fit in; where I didn’t seem like the eccentric one. New Orleans embraces its eccentrics and doesn’t judge them, and I like that. I knew that first time I came here on my birthday in 1994 that if I moved here all my dreams would come true. And they have, which has been kind of lovely. And no writer could ever exhaust the inspiration New Orleans provides. I’ve written fifteen books set here and countless short stories at this point, and haven’t even scratched the surface. I’ve never written about the music scene here, for one glaring example, or restaurants or the food industry or…you see what I mean? There’s not enough time in my life to write everything I want to about New Orleans.
Tell us about your protagonist. Where did the inspiration for her come from?
My sister never had any interest in going to college or having any kind of career other than being a wife and mother. She was a straight A student and had numerous scholarship offers, but had little to no interest. I used to always think she had wasted her potential, but gradually came to the realization that she has the life she always wanted when she was growing up, and has never missed having a career outside of the home–so rather than feeling bad about her lost potential, I should have been happy that her dreams came true. I started thinking about that more, and thought that would make a great starting place–a woman like my sister who wasn’t really very interested in college but went because it was expected of her…only to fall in love, get married, and drop out when she had twins. I really like the idea of a woman who’s not yet thirty, who wasn’t really sure what she wanted from life and then sidetracked to wife-and-mother, but with her kids now off to college and her husband having died…what do you do for the rest of your life when you’re a widow at thirty-eight and your kids have left for college? And the more I thought about her, the more I liked her and wanted to write about her.
Why did you choose the Irish Channel as the neighborhood?
My Scotty series is set in the French Quarter, and the Chanse series was set in the lower Garden District (where I’ve always lived and always default to it for that very reason), so I wanted to do something different this time out. Before I moved here, I had friends who lived in the Channel and I loved their house and I loved their neighborhood. I had already started writing a novella set in their old house, and I thought, why not use that same house for this series? The Channel did used to be considered a bad part of town, too, when we first moved here (so was the lower Garden District, which we didn’t know), and so I thought the gentrification issue would work better there than in my neighborhood. That part of the Channel is one I used to spend a lot of time in. As my character mentions in the book, I used to hang out at the Rue de la Course coffee shop at the corner of Magazine and Harmony–it was where I would meet friends for coffee. I’m still bitter it closed.
Similarities in our series: both widows, both have family mysteries, both live in the Irish Channel, you have jokes about potholes, I have a plot point about them. Let’s talk about NOLA’s potholes.
Oh, the potholes! Ironically, an active one ate one of my car tires a few weeks ago. Usually, if I am going someplace and have to turn around, there’s usually room for me to make a U-turn or I can turned into a driveway and turn around. This particular day the bar on the corner had reopened after being sold, closed, and renovated for a few months. So, there were cars everywhere, including blocking the driveways, and I thought, fine, I’ll just go around the block, which I hadn’t done in years. Because I hadn’t done that i years, I forgot there’s a massive pothole right when you make the turn so you have to jog left to avoid it. I hit the pothole, hard, and when I did, I thought oh that’s not good and as I continued driving I noticed the car was pulling to the left–which was the tire that hit the pothole. Sure enough, it was flat. It had a nail in it, and I happened to hit the pothole perfectly so that the nail dragged, tearing a hole in the tire. So, yes, New Orleans is a city of potholes–all different shapes, sizes, and depths. When the streets flood the water hides the potholes, and if they are really deep…the one on our street (which is reforming after being filled in and paved over for like the fiftieth time) ate a pick-up truck when that end of the street flooded a few years ago, so our street was blocked until the water went down and a tow truck could get in.
You have a Nolier than thou joke – I have OhNo!LA, an app that’s a runner in the book.
I wish I could claim credit for that joke, but I stole it from Bill Loefhelm, another New Orleans crime writer when we were on a panel together talking about writing about New Orleans and the need to get things right. He responded to a question about accuracy by saying something like “Yes, you really don’t want to set off the Nolier-Than-Thou people” and it still makes me laugh whenever I think about it because it’s so true! In all honesty, I am one of those people–nothing is more infuriating to me than reading something set in New Orleans that doesn’t get it right–but I’ve loosened up some as I’ve gotten older. I was even wondering if that was still a thing while I was writing this book…but since it’s come out I’ve seen any number of locals posting reviews and comments about “how (he) got New Orleans right” so it is still a thing. (And I’m glad and grateful people think I get ir right.)
How would you say your past experiences and jobs in life inform your writing?
I always say that life is material, as is every experience you’ve had. I’ve had so many jobs over the years and have been fired so many times I can’t keep track of them all anymore. But I also had a huge variety of jobs–fast food to retail to food service to banking to insurance to an airline to being a personal trainer to managing a health club to being a magazine editor to my present job working in an STI clinic as a sexual health counselor. Whenever I am creating a character and need a job for them, I inevitably fall back on one of my experiences. The main character in The Orion Mask worked at an airport–I’ve written a lot of characters who work for airlines–and so I try to get away from my own experiences once I catch myself doing it again. I have always had jobs that required interaction with other humans, so I’ve gotten to observe a lot of human behavior. I’ve written about high school students in Kansas (where I went to high school). I’ve written about fraternities because I was in one (hard as it is to believe now). I played football in high school, I’ve written about football players in high school. The only places I’ve lived that I’ve not written about are Chicago, Houston, and Tampa (I have written about Florida, but just the panhandle, where I spent of time as a kid).
I read a blog post where you talked about your relationship with the city. How has it morphed over the years and where does it stand now? It sounded like doing promotion and writing about the city reignited your love for it. What’s your writing process? You write in different genres. Is the process different?
As sad as it is to admit, it’s very easy when you live here to start taking New Orleans for granted. As I said before, I usually am so focused on what I am doing–work, writing, errands, chores, etc.–that I don’t pay much attention to my surroundings as I should (I think we are all guilty of this to some degree). About a year before the pandemic, my day job moved. I had worked in our office on Frenchmen Street for well over ten years–right across the street from Mona’s, in that block between Decatur and Chartres, so I was a block outside the Quarter five days a week, and we also used to do a lot of testing in the French Quarter gay bars and passing out condoms during Carnival, Southern Decadence, and Halloween. So I used to spend a lot of time in and around the Quarter. It was lovely–I could go to the Walgreens or the Rouse’s on Royal and there was a bank branch on Chartres Street, too, by the Supreme Court building. Anytime I didn’t have anything in the house to pack for lunch I could just walk into the Quarter and get something not only amazing but inexpensive. I used to walk past where Scotty lives all the time. After we moved into our new building in the 7th Ward, I don’t go into the Quarter much anymore. So I was starting to feel a bit disconnected from New Orleans already before the pandemic shut everything down. But I realized when I started doing promo for this book that I am not disconnected from New Orleans. I’ve just lived here so long that I don’t take as much note of the unusual or the weird as I used to–it’s become normalized to me. I’ve acclimated. It’s still just as weird and wild and crazy here as it always has been, it just doesn’t strike me as weird and wild and crazy the way it used to. I need to take more walks and spend more time exploring the city and checking things out. I don’t know if all the hidden places I used to take friends to eat in the Quarter are still there, either. Maybe after Mardi Gras…
I made quote again yesterday, which was nice; at this rate while I’ll be killing myself over the course of this weekend to get this finished by the end of day January 1, I should be okay. It’s 52 degrees this morning but it feels pretty chilly in the apartment this morning as I swill my coffee and try to figure out what to write here without boring the hell out of everyone. I ran errands after work yesterday and wasn’t terribly tired when I got home–but for the life of me cannot recall what I did once I did get home. I know I put the dishes away and the laundry was already done, and I didn’t have the brainpower to read anything, so I guess I must have just watched history videos on Youtube until Paul came downstairs and we watched a few more episodes of Sex Lives of College Girls, which remains hilariously funny and clever. I also got some books in the mail yesterday–the ones I ordered with Christmas money–more Ruth Ware, That Summer on Frenchmen Street by Chris Clarkson, Blackwater Falls by Ausma Zehanat Khan, and a nonfiction, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller–and have a few more on the way.
I feel a little off-kilter this week because of the holiday on Monday; I kept thinking yesterday was Monday and this morning I keep thinking it’s Tuesday. This will probably persist until my work-at-home Friday, and again I’ll be messed up next week because of a holiday on Monday. It takes so little these days to fry my brain and make it unworkable, seriously. I slept really well last night. Scooter continues to get into the bed and cuddle with me once I slip under the covers; last night I was already asleep by the time he joined me, and it wasn’t until Paul got into bed and woke me that I realized the cat was sleeping curled up with me and purring. It’s nice–he’s very particular and only likes one side, and I have to be facing that way or he won’t cuddle. I’m sure it’s nothing more than the cold weather and the bed is probably the warmest place in the apartment when someone is in it, but I’m going to continue to appreciate my cat’s affection in the meantime.
I have some errands to run today after work as well–yay–but tomorrow is the last day I have to get up super-early this week, so I am going to not mind that at all after work today. I also get to leave work early–a vagary of working hours with holidays in the pay week left me with extra time so I can leave early one day, and while perhaps I should have chosen Thursday as my day to leave early, I thought tomorrow made the most sense predicated on our appointment schedule. This week has been a light work week schedule-wise; to the point where I am not sure it makes sense to have the clinic open in the first place. Fortunately, those decisions are well above my pay-grade, and honestly, if I have to be there anyway the clinic might as well be open while we’re at it, you know? This is always a slow week; who wants to get an STI test after Christmas and before New Year’s? (Okay, granted it’s smart to get checked out for anything sexually transmitted before New Year’s Eve, just in case–but it’s already too late for the results to come back in time for treatment, so before Christmas is really the sweet spot for your New Year’s Eve get drunk/get laid plans.)
Heavy heaving sigh.
I should probably spend more time being reflective about the passing of time and the advancing of my age, what with another year turning and all this weekend, but the truth is I barely even remember the beginning of this year! I know I was supposed to go to New York in January and the resurgent pandemic at the time kiboshed those plans; yet I did manage to make it to Albuquerque for Left Coast Crime in either February or March. I traveled quite a bit in 2022, especially considering how little I had traveled in the previous two years. And as I said the other day, I accomplished a lot more this past year than I would have thought once I started thinking about it. The year was bookended by book releases, too–#shedeservedit coming out in January, A Streetcar Named Murder coming out in December–and while I didn’t spend as much time writing this year as I would have liked (which is the case for every year, let’s get honest and real for a moment) I did manage to get some writing done this year. I’d like to get even more done in 2023; one of the goals for the new year is to make writing more of a priority in my life. I want to get at least two, if not three, books written in 2023, as well as finish the novellas and some other short stories.
Ambitions. I have a few.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I feel good today, rested and relaxed and all that marvelous stuff, and hope to also have a good day. I hope the same for you, Constant Reader, as this year continues to run down like a clock in need of winding (does anyone else remember clocks you have to wind?), and may your day be as bright and lovely as you are at your best.
Queer and Loathing in America 