Category: New Orleans

Jump Then Fall

Sliding into Sunday with two storms heading this way, less that two days apart. Ah, 2020, you just keep 2020-ing, don’t you? We are in a flash flood warning from today through Thursday, as I see over at nola.com, and are in a hurricane warning as well. Parking restrictions have been lifted, and I am feeling fairly certain that this time around our street will likely flood again–as it has done only once before, and not during a hurricane–because the fucking two empty lots have a stupid condo building going up on it, so there’s no place for water to go this time. I’ll probably have to move my car this afternoon to get it up higher than where it is parked right now. I checked my phone this morning but there’s nothing from work; which is in and of itself interesting: with so few people actually working in the office, what exactly is the policy and procedure during a hurricane? Monday is supposed to be clinic hours, of course, but since the hurricane could be hitting us smack dab in the middle of those, are we really going to have our clinic? Although–looking at the latest track, it appears to have slowed down some and is now predicted to cross over us around seven pm on Monday–whereas last night before I went to bed it was one pm.

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

I just hope we don’t lose power–although the two storms will indubitably amp up the humidity, I don’t think it will be as hot. That was what saved us that week when Ike knocked out our power and hovered over the city for a couple of days; the cloud cover made it cooler, otherwise it would have been completely unbearable.

Yesterday was a rather relaxing one. I did run an errand–which I may regret, as I wound up buying more perishables, and–sigh–my freezer is full–and then came back home to relax some more. I worked on Bury Me in Shadows a bit, finishing Chapters Two and Three and pulling up Chapter Four before going to bed, and it’s coming along rather nicely. We watched Jojo Rabbit last night–didn’t really care that much for it, to be honest; I guess it was just too smart for me–and then started watching Warrior Nun, which really didn’t engage us very much after the first episode, but we are intrigued enough to give the second episode a chance–you can never really judge a show competently by its first episode (although the first episode of Lovecraft Country was off the chain amazing), and sometimes it takes an episode or two to get going (hey, Outer Banks took four episodes to hit the ground running), but our standards have been set pretty high this year–we’ve watched some amazing programs this year.

I also decided to treat myself to cappuccinos this morning because why not? Marco tomorrow, Laura Wednesday; the potential of living a week in August without power; yeah, who cares about the mess and all the moving parts of the espresso machine to clean this morning? Besides, the jolt I’ll get from two cups will power me through the rest of this morning and I’d like to get more chapters finished today–since who knows how long we’ll have power this week–and I am busily charging up all of my devices; granted, as long as the car isn’t under water and will start I can always go out there, turn the air conditioning up as high as it can go, and sit there while my phone recharges, like during Ike.

I also managed, from the looks of things, to get some organizing and cleaning done around the kitchen/office yesterday, which was not only necessary but needed. There are still some things I need to get straightened up, of course, and some things to get filed, but it’s not nearly as messy as it has been lately. I also tend to get neater the more into writing a book I get, so there’s that. I am really feeling my characters now, and I think I am doing some very good work on this book now. Ideally, it will be finished by the end of the month–that was the goal, and while it no longer seems likely anymore–am I really going to revise 21 chapters in eight days?–at least I am on track to get it finished and turned in sometime in September, which is lovely; and then I can get to work on the Kansas book and finally get that fucking albatross from around my neck.

I also gassed up the car yesterday just in case. And the lovely thing about a Honda is that IF we do need to suddenly have to evacuate, a full tank will get me pretty damned far. Although I am not worried about a sudden evacuation, of course; no one seems to be leaving New Orleans today and the storm will be here tomorrow.

It’s weird looking outside my windows this morning, which is definitely a sign that a storm is coming–that weird eerie stillness and surreal glow to the light.

And so, I need to put hurricane warnings and thoughts aside, otherwise my obsessive personality will find me sitting here, refreshing weather.gov every few minutes looking for updates, and waiting to hear from work whether I actually have to go into the office tomorrow. I am going to put all those worries and anxieties aside–as worrying and being anxious will solve nothing, it never does–so that I can be as productive as I possibly can this morning.

I think I’m going to have another cappuccino and curl up with Lovecraft Country for awhile.

Have a safe and lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

IMG_4163

Highway Don’t Care

I could get used to this sleeping late thing quite easily.

So yesterday, Facebook decided I could no longer crosspost this blog to my personal Facebook page because it’s “spam”; I don’t know if it was reported as such, or whether it’s just a new thing with their shitty new design, which they also forced me to start using yesterday (it really is garbage, and a complete rip-off of how Twitter looks if you use it through a web browser–but why would Facebook care about integrity of design? Why wouldn’t they rip-off another social media’s design even though there was absolutely nothing wrong with their original design in the first place?); in either case, it’s infuriating and frustrating.

It does allow it to go to my author page–in fact, I didn’t even try to post yesterday’s blog to my author page and yet there it was–but I can’t see some of the pictures on previous blogs. They also removed my birthday post (the one titled “August”) from my timeline. It’s still on the author page; how it’s not SPAM there but it is on my timeline is just one of those unsolvable, eternal mysteries of Facebook, its garbage staff, management, and design thieves.

Sigh.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to even use Facebook, and I often wonder about the advisability of social media in general. But I love communicating, and staying in touch, with friends I rarely see other than at writers’ conferences and so forth, which aren’t going to be happening for the foreseeable future either; as well as former co-workers, friends from long-ago times, and just people who either read my books or I’ve discovered through other actual friends who amuse me endlessly with their wit and snark. That’s what keeps me there–and while it saddens me that my blog may no longer be able to go onto my timeline, at least it still will go up on the author page and on Twitter; so maybe I am going to have to ask those who like it and want to read it occasionally to either like my author page or follow me on Twitter. I hate asking, because it makes me feel like I’m begging people to like me, but there it is. It’s one of the parts of being a professional writer I despise the most: self-promotion and marketing.

One of the loveliest things about getting older and gaining a better perspective on life is the determination of what is important and what is not; I’m not sure when it was that I decided I no longer cared if people like me or not, but it was enormously freeing. There are still vestiges in my psyche of what I have derisively termed “Homecoming Queen Syndrome”: the desperate need to be liked by everyone. Sure, I would prefer for people to like me rather than not, but it doesn’t bother me when someone doesn’t anymore. I am not to everyone’s tastes, certainly my sense of humor isn’t,  and my writing is definitely not. It was one of those great moments, you know–what Oprah calls the aha moment–when I realized that, after all, I don’t love everything I read and I don’t like everyone I meet, so what kind of narcissistic egomaniac thinks everyone should love them and their work?

Not I, I decided, and that was the end of that. I am still a work in progress, however, and so I still sometimes lapse into that mentality from time to time before I snap back to my senses and think, better people than you don’t like me.

Which has kind of become my mantra, really: Better people than you don’t like me.

So, yesterday–my do nothing be a slug day–was lovely. I didn’t really do the Internet much, and I realized, at one point, as I was reading through All That Heaven Allows,  a biography of Rock Hudson that I am reading as research for Chlorine (I checked it out from the library) that, since it’s actually research I should have been marking pertinent pages with post-it notes; because it’s actually a gold mine–not just about being a gay actor in the period I am going to be writing about, but about gay history in general (I found an interesting bit about a gay sex scandal involving the University of Kentucky football team in the early 1960’s! And a bit about a FUCKING GAY BAR IN LEXINGTON KENTUCKY DURING THAT PERIOD!!!), and so I started flipping back through the book and finding passages I remembered, marking them with post-it’s so I can make notes and so forth on paper or in a word document…and then the book mentioned Tab Hunter, and I thought, oh yes, I have his memoir Tab Hunter Confidential, and being the anal/OCD person I am, I immediately had to find my copy, and then got swept into it–I’d never read it, and then, of all things, came across a bit about Tab doing a theater production of Chapter Two with Joyce DeWitt in the early 1980’s and how he didn’t know who she was because he didn’t watch television and again, I thought to myself, wait a minute–you’ve not only met Tab Hunter, JOYCE DEWITT WAS WITH HIM WHEN YOU MET HIM. He came to the TWFest BECAUSE you met him at a Publishing Triangle party with Joyce DeWitt!

In fact, when I–several sheets to the wind at the time–got up the nerve to introduce myself to Mr. Hunter, and asked him if he would ever do the Festival because I knew he’d done a production of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore with Tallulah Bankhead (how I remembered that given how wasted I was, I have no idea) and he was quite enthusiastic–not only about the Festival but that I knew that obscure detail of his long career. The last thing I remember about the conversation was Joyce DeWitt writing down his contact information for me on a fucking cocktail napkin that has undoubtedly been lost at some point over the years.

How the hell did I lose a cocktail napkin with Tab Hunter’s contact information on it, written down by Joyce DeWitt? 

And as I went through his book, and I got to the part about that particular stage production–darling Marian Seldes was also in that cast! Marian set the standard high for graciousness and loveliness. I also really liked Frances Sternhagen, Zoe Caldwell, and Shirley Knight a lot.

Huh. Maybe I should write a memoir, after all. I’ve certainly got a lot of funny stories about meeting famous, or rather sort of famous, people.

I suspect the biggest problem with writing Chlorine will be dragging out the research for as long as possible because I am enjoying it so much…I mean, reading these two nonfiction books have really amped up my creativity and inspiration!

There are two hurricanes this morning out there heading for the Gulf Coast; Laura and Marco. Yesterday New Orleans was in the direct center of Laura’s Cone of Uncertainty; this morning that has shifted west some–but we’re still in the cone. Marco was on track yesterday to come ashore anywhere from Corpus Christi to Grand Isle, which meant we were also in THAT Cone of Uncertainty as well; and the forecast of timing meant both were going to come ashore around the same time. It also meant that the extremely rare weather phenomenon known as the Fujiwhara effect could happen (why not? The Midwest already had a rare derecho storm last week); it’s only happened twice on this side of the continent (it’s more common in the Pacific). Essentially, when two hurricanes form and come within 800 miles of each other, they can begin to rotate counter-clockwise around a centralized point between them. If they are within 680 miles of each other, they can merge into a bigger storm.

I wonder how the evangelicals are going to blame this on the gays?

So, this morning I am going to go back to work–I am going to start digging through my emails, going to run an errand I’d rather not run, and dig into Bury Me in Shadows. I’ll probably also spend some time with my Rock Hudson biography as well.

Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader!

IMG_4096

Epiphany

Friday, and day two of a Gregalicious long birthday weekend.

The actual birthday yesterday wasn’t too bad. I ran by the office and got my prescriptions, ran to the post office and got the mail, and then stopped at the Tchoupitoulas Rouse’s to make groceries. Of course, when I left the house it was sunny and humid, and by the time I made it to the Rouse’s parking lot it was pouring rain–like always whenever I go make groceries. Heavy sigh. But then I lugged everything in, and by the time I had everything put away I was completely exhausted. I wound up hanging out in my easy chair, getting caught up on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and then Paul and I started watching something neither of us really cared for–a comedy series, which seemed to think bigotry with a smidgin of homophobia is still uproariously funny and should be played for laughs. Needless to say, I didn’t find it engaging or particularly funny. It was a high school thing, and after watching Never Have I Ever, Sex Education, and various other teen comedies that didn’t need to stoop to such sophomoric levels to be engaging, funny, and charming–how this other shit got on the air is a mystery to me. We won’t be watching any more of that, believe me. I was pretty tired for some reason last evening, so I retired early and found myself waking up terribly late this morning–much later than I usually get up (oooh, I slept in a WHOLE EXTRA HOUR, alert the media! Then again, given my occasional bouts of insomnia, this was a quite lovely development.)

So, overall it wasn’t a bad day. I am going to have my scroungy day today, where I don’t shower or shave and spend the whole day in dirty yet oddly comfortable sweats that should be going into the laundry but I’m willing to wear one more time first–oh, don’t sneer. We’re all basically slobs at heart, and imagine how disgusting we’d allow ourselves to get if we didn’t have to clean up. Oh, is that just me? Never mind then. Although I am also thinking I should probably shower to just wake up, if not for hygienic purposes. And while it is Friday and day two of Gregalicious Long Birthday Weekend, I fully intend to keep up the Friday tradition of laundering the bed linens. I am going to spend some time being sluggish today–I want to spend some time with Lovecraft Country, and I am weeks behind on The Real Housewives of New York–but emails and so forth have been piling up during my exile from doing anything of consequence yesterday, and so I am going to have to start doing something about that today, little as I want to. The Lost Apartment is also a dreadful mess.

There are two tropical storms out there, with another tropical something forming off the coast of Africa. Laura has already formed, and her track has New Orleans on the outer edge of her Cone of Uncertainty; the other in the Gulf, forming off the coast of the Yucatan, will be named Marco when and if he becomes anything. Currently both are slated to hit the Gulf Coast merely as Category 1’s, but those are no picnic, and I do hope they all miss Puerto Rico (isn’t it odd how no one ever talks about, or reports on, the Puerto Rican recovery?).  Interestingly enough, both storm tracks show that they will hit landfall on the Gulf Coast within hours of each other, and each, as I said, have New Orleans on their outside track. So, Laura could be hitting anywhere from New Orleans to Pensacola at around two in the morning on Wednesday, while Marco could be coming ashore at around the same time anywhere from Corpus Christi to New Orleans. 

Talk about a one-two punch. And if ever there was a base for a Scotty story, simultaneous hurricanes would be it–although I do think Tim Dorsey did this in one of this Florida novels, and if I recall correctly, the eyes converged somewhere over central Florida. As I have, in recent years, come to a greater appreciation of Carl Hiassen (I have a PDF of his next one in my iPad; and I really should read more of his work), I should give Dorsey another go. Back in the day, the genre I’ve come to call “Florida wacky” never appealed to me, but once when I was on a work trip to DC I finished reading all the books I’d brought with me and went to a nearby Barnes and Noble, and Hiassen’s Bad Monkey was on the sale table for $2.99 in hardcover and I thought, oh, why not, and bought it–and couldn’t put it down. It also made me laugh out loud numerous times, and I went on to read several more of his with great appreciation–so perhaps I should give Dorsey another go. Dave Barry, the columnist, also wrote a couple of novels that fit into this category, and I know I read his first and really enjoyed it. 

Florida–at least the panhandle–played a part in my childhood and shaping me as a person; I also lived in Tampa for four years as an adult, and I have spent quite a lot of time in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Miami over the years. I had originally intended to set Timothy in Miami; I eventually went with Long Island because same-sex marriage was legalized there long before it became national, and I didn’t really feel quite as comfortable writing about Miami as I did about Long Island. It also made more sense to set it on Long Island–although I found the perfect house on one of the Miami islands to base the mansion on. I eventually had my main character meet his future spouse in Miami–South Beach, to be exact–but it really made more sense for it to be based in New York City and Long Island and the Hamptons. I’ve written a little bit about Florida in my fiction; “Cold Beer No Flies” was set in the panhandle, and I have innumerable other ideas that would be set either in the panhandle or my fictional version of Tampa (Bay City), but New Orleans is still my center and still where I inevitably set everything I write.

I’ve always wanted to send Scotty on an adventure in the panhandle–Redneck Riviera Rumble–and perhaps I still might. There’s an amorphous idea in my head for such a tale, which would involve Frank’s retirement from professional wrestling and his final show somewhere in the panhandle, sex trafficking, and drug smuggling; if I can ever pull it all together, you can bet I will be writing it.

And on that note, I need to get to work being a slug. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader.

 

 

August

And, once again, it is my birthday. 59, and the official start of my sixtieth year; my fifties are now in the rear view mirror. It’s so strange. I don’t think I ever believed I would make it this far–I certainly didn’t during the plague years, when I just assumed I would inevitably contract HIV and begin the slow agonizing descent to death I had watched so many others experience. It’s weird how much the world has changed since when I was a little boy reading my middle-grade mysteries and dreaming of someday becoming a writer like Carolyn Keene or Franklin W. Dixon (little did I know at the time that neither was a real person and a number of different writers had written the books I was so addicted to). I’ve been watching a lot of 1970’s movies lately during my condom packing work-at-home days, and even that seems like the distant past…although it kind of was; 1979 was over forty years ago.

How terrifying that thought is!

I’ve never minded getting older; frankly, there were times in my life when I was relatively certain I wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. So every birthday, in some ways, feels like a triumph of sorts. Back in the 1980’s and 1990’s–before the development of the “cocktail”, infection and death seemed inevitable to me, and I became sort of resigned to it. That feeling of inevitability, I think, was part of what finally pushed me into pursuing my writing dream seriously–I never knew how much time I had, and I didn’t want to die regretting never having put any serious effort into it. It seems strange to be oddly grateful to a plague for pushing me to pursue my dreams…and yes, if I had to choose between being pushed to chase my writing dreams or having all those who died back, I would always choose having them live; the world would be a better place had they had more time. I don’t think I will ever stop grieving for the dead, for the lives unnecessarily lost, and as this more recent pandemic has reminded me, the other plague is yet  another source for my PTSD.

My birthday has ceased to have any meaning for me, other than as simply a marker of getting older. With every year the value of my birthday, my special day, has declined and decreased. I always say that my parents never made a big deal out of my birthday, and that’s both untrue and unfair–the older I get, the more fair I try to be with my parents–they were both very very young when I was a child, and both worked full time; and my father was also going to school at night. They never allowed my birthday to pass without there being cake and presents, but it wasn’t like it was ever like a whole day of celebratory; it was my birthday and it needed to be acknowledged and celebrated, but it wasn’t like they could take a day off and ignore their other obligations. As I got older my birthday inevitably was disappointing for me; my parents and sister obviously cared about it, but no one else seemed to, and there was a point when I realized that if I wasn’t the one making plans for my birthday, no one else would do it. I wanted my birthday to be a bigger deal, and to celebrate it, but my friends never seemed to care and many often simply blew it off. That kind of hurt, actually, and I think it was sometime in my mid-twenties that I finally decided to stop setting myself up for being hurt and disappointed and to put my birthday into its proper perspective: it wasn’t a special day, it wasn’t anything worth being disappointed over, and I made up my mind that I would never make a big deal of my birthday ever again–nor would I allow anyone else to do so. I would simply always take the day off from work, and do whatever it was I wanted to do.

Of course, it was my thirty-third birthday when I came to New Orleans and my life changed forever; hard to believe that was twenty-six years ago that I finally found my place, the city where I belonged and where I could have the life I wanted and my dreams would come true for me. My love affair with this crazy, wild, madcap, frustrating, infuriating but wonderful city began on my thirty-third birthday, which remains one the best birthday of my life thus far–and I can’t see how any other birthday could inevitably be better than that one. That’s another reason to not make a big deal out of my birthday, really; my thirty-third (and my forty-fourth) set the bar so high for wonderful birthdays that I never want to try to top those. Frankly, I don’t see how I ever could, really.

Last evening, when I got home from work I was very tired and worn out. Usually Wednesday is my work from home day, where I spend the afternoon making condom packs and watching movies. Thursdays I got into the office and make kits for the syringe access program on Fridays; but since this week my birthday fell on a Thursday and I intended to keep up my tradition of not working on my birthday, I went into the office yesterday and spent between six and seven hours making the kits. I was dog tired when I was finished; you can’t do it sitting down, so I was on my feet the entire time, other than short breaks to have something to drink or to have my lunch. I stopped at the grocery store on my way home to pick up a few things and rolled into the Lost Apartment, exhausted and tired and hot and sweaty….and then began unpacking my backpack, only to discover that my prescriptions, which I’d picked up on my way into the office, had been left behind at the office because I hadn’t gone back to my desk before leaving. This put me into a funk–I was already tired and bitchy, and while I know intellectually that I could probably go a day or two without my blood pressure medicine–the last of the previous refill was taken this morning–I really didn’t like the idea of going three days in a row without taking it. SO, grumble grumble grumble, my plans for today–essentially, not going on line, not dealing with emails, not doing any work of any kind while just being a slob (no shaving, no shower) and just throwing on sweats and finishing Lovecraft Country while also getting caught up on my Real Housewives shows was not to be; I was going to have to get in the car and go to the office; and my sanctuary day at home of not going out in public was going to be ruined. But as I sat and grumbled to myself while Scooter purred in my lap and I rewatched the LSU-Texas game from last season while playing Bubble Pop on my iPad, I realized: your birthday is an arbitrary day, really, and it doesn’t matter WHAT day you celebrate it. So, go by the office tomorrow; pick up the mail and go make groceries and pay the bills and do all the things you were planning to do on Friday, and make FRIDAY your hermit-away-from-the-world day.

So, that’s what I am going to do. I am going to spend the morning straightening things up around here, deciding what I want to make for my birthday dinner, trying to clean out the inevitable mass of emails in my inbox, and run those errands while trying to keep a positive face on the day. I may not get to everything I probably should–hey, it’s my birthday–but I will go ahead and make a good faith effort, and at least I don’t have to worry about the day job today.

And on that note, I’m going to get a second cup of coffee and start making some casual progress on things through the day–and I am still going to try to catch up on the Housewives  as well as spend some time in Lovecraft Country.

Have a love day, everyone.

Afterglow

Birthday Eve, in the year of COVID-19. Tomorrow I will turn 59; although it’s actually my sixtieth birthday (you aren’t born aged one; so your birthday actually ends the year which age you are supposedly turning; this is the start of my sixtieth year, which actually will end on August 20, 1961, when I “turn” sixty).

So, today is Wednesday but my Friday, since I am taking a long birthday weekend to luxuriate in the joys of being Greg, and I am going to head into the office rather than work at home today (the stuff I usually do in the office on Thursday I will have to do today). I’m also going to pick up my prescriptions and run by the post office at some point today as well.

The Australian publisher ClanDestine Press announced the table of contents for The Only One in the World: A Sherlock Holmes Anthology, which is the anthology that features my story “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy;” you can access the press release here. I am very proud of this story, and am equally excited to be in this anthology. As I have explained before, Sherlock is a bit out of my wheelhouse, so I had to push myself and stretch a bit to get the story done. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the experience, and now find myself sometimes looking into the possibility of writing another such story. I really like the 1916 universe of New Orleans I created for the story, and that was such an interesting period of New Orleans history–so much going on, really, and so much material to choose from–that I will probably write some more about the period, if not with Holmes/Watson centered in the story. The press release was a lovely thing to wake up to this morning.

I am feeling oddly rested this morning, despite waking up multiple times during the night and staying up later than I should have to continue streaming The Morning Show. I am telling y’all, this show is terrific, and the cast is amazing. I marvel at Jennifer Aniston’s performance in every episode, but the entire cast is terrific, and the writing is superb. We’ll probably finish watching tonight, and I sure hope there’s going to be a second season.

And after today, I am of course on the mini-staycation I mentioned earlier. I am going to try to get some work done when I get home from the office–I’d really rather not spend my birthday cleaning the house–and I am debating whether or not I should actually try to get some work done on Bury Me in Shadows on my birthday. I don’t see why I shouldn’t; I would dearly love to spend my birthday doing things I enjoy, and I actually enjoy writing. I would love to finish reading Lovecraft Country, and possibly some short stories (I am so behind on The Short Story Project it isn’t even funny) and I may–I know, I know–spend some time working on the top drawer of the filing cabinet. I actually enjoy organizing and getting my filing system under control and into some sort of actual working shape would be marvelous; almost like a birthday gift to myself.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

 

Soon You’ll Get Better

Saturday morning in New Orleans, and all is as well as can be expected in this hellish timeline we are all living through at this point. I’ve been sleeping exceptionally well lately–not sure why, but don’t want to question it and simply enjoy it for as long as it lasts, frankly–and I may even just stay in bed as long as I want to tomorrow; I could have easily lazed in bed much longer this morning. I may treat myself to cappuccinos while I get everything on-line done that I need to get done before closing my browser and shutting the Internet down for the rest of the day so I can get to work on Bury Me in Shadows, which I haven’t even looked at all week, much to my deep and abiding shame. I’ve not completely adjusted to working 8:30 – 5 every day, really; and am always tired and mentally fatigued when the daily shift comes to an end; too mentally fatigued to read anything, let alone write anything. I did manage last night to clean up/organize some electronic files, though.

While I was condom packing yesterday (I filled three boxes of them, a personal best thus far) I continued my journey through 1970s cinema, with yesterday’s theme being paranoia. Paranoia was a big thing in the 1970’s, and the films and novels of the decade reflected that–not surprising, given it was also the decade where Vietnam came to an end (1975), when Watergate occurred (1972-1974), and of course, the decade where terrorism really became a thing–it was the decade of the Munich Olympic massacre, the Entebbe skyjacking, etc. It was a decade where trust in institutions began to erode and fade; where conspiracy theories really began to come into their own; and cynicism replaced optimism–if optimism could be said to have ever been an integral part of the American outlook and not simply another part of the mythology we were being sold. It was the decade of the Bermuda Triangle, the Amityville horror, UFO’s, and countless other strange conspiracies and/or cover-ups; when Area 54 really entered the public consciousness, and a time when it became much easier to believe that the government was lying to us about everything and that corporations and billionaires were truly running the world for their own benefit and profit. (This was, of course, the primary theme of Taylor Caldwell’s bestselling novel Captains and the Kings, a thinly veiled history of the Kennedy family’s rise to wealth and power, which was made into a mini-series later in the decade.)

The two films I watched yesterday while condom packing were definitely reactions to the paranoia of the times: The Parallax View (starring Warren Beatty) and Three Days of the Condor (starring Robert Redford). Both were based on novels; both were about conspiracies and/or cover-ups led by incredibly powerful people; and both had very cynical endings. The Beatty film was about the cover-up of a political assassination, in which Beatty played a crusading journalist trying to get to the bottom of the story; the Redford film was about a man who worked for a CIA front (the American Literary History Society) and whose job was to read books, articles, journals, etc., looking for coded references to spy organizations and conspiracies (which was, in and of itself, another example of paranoia); the Redford character finds some curious reoccurring references in some South American and Greek novels and articles and writes a report. One day when he goes out to pick up lunch for the office he returns to find everyone dead; even the guy who called in sick was murdered in his apartment. Redford, whose code name is “Condor”, is not a field agent and has no idea what is going on, other than his life is in danger and he needs help. He winds up taking Faye Dunaway hostage at some point at gunpoint and getting her to help him–she eventually succumbs to Stockholm syndrome, winds up helping him rather than escaping, and they even have sex together*–and throughout the course of the movie you never are certain who can be trusted or who cannot, as people keep switching sides, including the professional assassin (played by Max von Sydow), and the end of the movie is also cynical, implying that not even journalists can be trusted (subverting the popular 1970’s trope of the crusading reporters, inspired by Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of Watergate).

It was an interesting decade to experience puberty and adolescence through, that’s for certain.

We’re nearly finished with The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, and are really enjoying it. I think we’re going to go with Never Have I Ever next; we’ve pretty much been watching non-stop noir-like heavy crime dramas for quite some time now (although the foreign ones have been absolutely delightful) but I think some light comedy will be welcomed gratefully into the Lost Apartment.

We also had an astounding thunderstorm/flash flood warning yesterday afternoon, which seems to be happening almost daily now. I love rain–I don’t even mind being caught in it as long as I am not having to lug shit into the house while it pours–and there’s nothing quite so comforting as being safely warm and dry inside while it pours outside and the sidewalks get covered in an inch or so of water. I’m not sure if it’s going to rain today–there’s nothing but sunshine and blue sky outside my windows this morning–but I feel fairly confident it will at some point; after all, it’s pretty much a daily occurrence now.

I also realized belatedly last evening that part of the funk I’ve been in lately has to do with the impracticality and uncertainty surrounding the football season for this year. I usually spent most of August excitedly reading everything I can about the Saints and college football, wondering what the coming season will hold; will it be an exciting one or a disappointment; but no matter what happens, I am always entertained–and last season was, as Paul reminds me pretty regularly, one for the books. As huge LSU fans last season was like a fairytale, a Disney film come to life–with every element in place for a great uplifting movie, and the ending was perfect, too; LSU stuck the landing and gave all us fans a season we will always remember with a smile. I am deeply grateful I got to see that championship team play twice in Tiger Stadium–we went to the season opener against Georgia Southern and the Florida game, which was one of the best times I’ve ever had in Tiger Stadium, and we’ve been to exciting games before but that one was everything–and am even more grateful I got to see Joe Burrow play, not only those two games last year but in the games we were able to see the year before. Not knowing if there’s even going to be a season, or if there is, what it will look like, has been kind of depressing on top of everything else; it’s as though all the things in life I find joy in are all gone, with just the bullshit left in its place. I’m not even sure how I feel about the conferences trying to make a limited season happen; it just seems vastly unfair to the players to put them at so much risk, and I don’t know if I should encourage that by even watching the games if they do happen and air on television.

I will never forgive the non-maskers for the loss of this football season, or however it turns out–whether it’s shortened, messed up, or cancelled. NEVER. Thanks for being such complete selfish assholes! You, for the record, are why we can’t have anything fucking nice–although the loss of college football is the LEAST of your crimes. Enjoy meeting your God with that black sin on your soul.

So, I am going to finish this and head back into email hell for a while, before showering and getting back to work on my book. I’ll probably try to do some cleaning and organizing while I’m at it; I still haven’t started–or even selected–my next fiction read, although Poe Dameron; Free Fall is sitting right there….but I also want to read Lovecraft Country before I start watching the show.

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

*This is the same trope that Robert Ludlum used in The Bourne Identity, in which his character, Jason Bourne, who has been shot in the head and now has amnesia and no idea why everyone is trying to kill him, kidnaps a woman and takes her hostage; by the end of the novel they are in love and making a future together–and no one thinks anything of this, and it’s presented as normal; another sign of the times, I suppose. I’ve been meaning to reread The Bourne Identity as well as revisit Ludlum; his career as a novelist actually began in the 1970’s with a paranoia novel, The Osterman Weekend, which was also made into a movie, and almost all of his books have some sort of paranoia at their heart. I loved Ludlum when I discovered him in the late 1980’s; I’ve meant to revisit him for quite some time now, to see how he holds up. My favorites of his were The Chancellor Manuscript, The Gemini Contenders, and of course, The Bourne Identity, but I read all of the books he wrote himself until he died–I’ve not read any of those written by other authors since his death.

Cruel Summer

As far as summers go, I’d say this is one of the cruelest of my life thus far. (Nothing, however, including this one, has been as bad as 2005; let me make that very clear–but this one also isn’t over yet and apparently the Saharan dust storm that was hindering the formation of hurricanes is over now. Yay.)

I read an interesting piece on Crimereads about Robert S. Parker and his creation of his iconic character, Spenser, which put me back in mind of how I came to create MY character, Chanse MacLeod–who I have been thinking about lately ( I’ve decided that rather than writing novels about him I’m going to work on some novellas, and then put four of them together as a book; currently the working titles for the first three are “Once a Tiger,” “The Body in the Bayou,” and “The Man in the Velvet Mask”–I still need a fourth, and it’s entirely possible that any of these could turn actually into a novel, and I do have some amorphous ideas about what the fourth one could be), and reading this piece, which is excerpted from a scholarly tome about the genre I would like to read (Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-boiled History by Susanna Lee), made me start thinking about how I created Chanse, and the entire process that the series actually went through over the years of his development.

It also made me think about looking at Chanse, the series, the characters, and the stories I chose to tell in a more critical, analytic way; I am not sure if I can do this, actually–while I’ve not published a Chanse novel since Murder in the Arts District back on October 14, 2014 (!!! Six years? It’s been six years since I retired the series? WOW)–which means I do have some distance from the books now, I still am the person who wrote them…even though I barely remember any of them now; I cannot recall plot points, or character names, outside of the regulars who populate every one of the books (I also cheated by using some of the same regulars in the Scotty series; Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague, the police detective partners, appear in both series; and Paige Tourneur, Chanse’s best friend and a reporter, originally for the Times-Picayune who eventually moved on to become editor of Crescent City magazine, also turned up in the Scotty series, in Garden District Gothic and then again in Royal Street Reveillon. Serena Castlemaine, one of the cast members of the Grande Dames of New Orleans, who shows up in the most recent two Scotty books–the same as Paige–is a cousin of the deceased husband of Chanse’s landlady and erstwhile regular employer, Barbara Palmer Castlemaine).

I first created the character of Chanse MacLeod while I was living in Houston in 1989, and the series was intended to be set in Houston as well. I didn’t know of any crime novels or series set in Houston, one of the biggest cities in the country, and I thought that was strange (and probably wrong). Houston seemed like the perfect city for a crime series–huge and sprawling, economically depressed at the time but there was still a lot of oil money and speculators, con artists and crime–and the original story was called The Body in the Bayou (a title of which I am very fond, and is currently back in the running to be the title of a Chanse novella), because Houston also has bayous. I was reading John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series at the time, and loving them–I particularly loved the character of Travis McGee–and how twisty and complicated (if sometimes farfetched) the plots of the novels were. I had read The Dreadful Lemon Sky when I was thirteen, and liked it; but promptly forgot about MacDonald and McGee; a Book Stop in Houston that I frequented reminded me of them and I started picking them up. I had also discovered Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky by this time, and was falling in love with the crime genre all over again, developing a taste for the more hard-boiled side I disliked as a teenager. This was when I decided to try writing in this field again–for most of the 1980’s I was trying to write horror and science fiction (and doing so, very badly).

But coming back to the field that I loved as a kid, tearing through the paperback stand alones from Scholastic Book Club and all the series, from Nancy Drew to the Three Investigators to Trixie Belden before graduating on to Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner, seemed preordained, and also seemed somehow right; writing mysteries, or crime fiction, seemed to me the right path to becoming a published author (turns out, that was the correct assumption for me to make, and one that I have never regretted).

Chanse was originally, as a straight man, a graduate of Texas A&M and a two year veteran of the Houston Oilers; an injury eventually led to early retirement and joining the Houston PD, where he only lasted another three years before quitting and getting a private eye license. He had a secretary, a woman of color named Clara, who was heavyset and in her early fifties. That was about as far as I got; I think I wrote a first draft of a first chapter which established him as having his office near NASA, in Clear Lake (which was near where I lived) and his first case was going to involve a wealthy oil family in River Oaks. Chanse was also six four, dirty blond hair, green eyes, and weighed about two-twenty. When I fell in love with New Orleans four or five years later, I started revising the character and started writing The Body in the Bayou while I lived in Minneapolis. By this time I’d discovered that gay fiction was actually a thing, and that queer mysteries actually existed: Joseph Hanson, Michael Nava, RD Zimmerman, etc. I wanted to write about New Orleans, and I wanted to write a more hard-boiled, MacDonald like hero than what I was reading. (Not that Hanson, Nava, and the rest weren’t doing hard-boiled stuff; they were–I just wanted to subvert the trope of the straight male loner-hero detective.)

Chanse was definitely a loner, and after I moved to New Orleans I once again started revising the manuscript and story that eventually became Murder in the Rue Dauphine. He was cynical about life, love and relationships, even as he was slowly inching his way into a relationship with a flight attendant named Paul Maxwell; he had only two friends, really: Paige Tourneur, who’d been his “beard” while he was at LSU and in a fraternity and was now a reporter for the Times-Picayune; and Blaine Tujague, a former one-night stand and fellow gay man on the NOPD (I changed his backstory to having attended LSU on a football scholarship and a career-ending injury in the Sugar Bowl at the end of his senior year, which led him to joining NOPD, where he lasted for two years before going out on his own). He also lived in a one bedroom apartment on Camp Street, across the street from Coliseum Square in a converted Victorian, the living room also served as his office–and that was the same place where Paul and I lived when we first moved to New Orleans.

The series and the character evolved in ways I didn’t foresee when I first imagined him as that straight private eye in Houston; or even when I rebooted him into a gay one in New Orleans. The original plan was to have him evolve and grow from every case he took on–which would parallel some kind of personal issue and/or crisis he was enduring as he solved the case–the first case was about his concerns about getting involved in a serious relationship as he investigated a case that made him realize he was very lucky to have found someone that he could be with openly; the second case was about investigating someone who wasn’t who they claimed to be while at the same time he was finding out things about Paul’s past that made him uncomfortable. Katrina, of course, came along between book two and book three and changed everything; I know I also wrote another that dealt with the issues between mothers and children which made him reexamine his own relationship with his mother.

The great irony is I probably need to revisit the books to talk about them individually, or to even take a stronger, more in-depth look at the character; maybe that’s something I can do (since I have ebooks of the entire series) when I am too tired to focus on reading something new or to write anything.

And it’s really not a bad idea to reexamine all of my books and short stories at some point, in order to get an idea of what to do (and how to do it) going forward.

And now back to the spice mines.

All You Had to Do Was Stay

Ironically, yesterday when I was talking about vampires, I buried my own lede; I actually have done some vampire fiction myself. (Clearly, I am terrible at this self-promotion/marketing thing.)

When I first moved to New Orleans, the city was somehow synonymous in my mind with vampires, which was primarily due to Anne Rice’s novels. This doesn’t, on its face, make that much sense; the novels are, for the most part, set in various other places around the world more so than in New Orleans. Louis, the main character of Interview with the Vampire, is from Louisiana, and he encounters Lestat and is turned originally in New Orleans–and while there are passages in the book set here and in Louisiana, the story itself is being told to the reporter in San Francisco. The Vampire Chronicles themselves occasionally return to New Orleans; but for the most part the stories themselves rarely take place here. (It would actually make more sense for me to have had that association from Anne Rice’s work made between New Orleans and witches; as most of The Witching Hour takes place in New Orleans.) After moving here I also discovered local author Poppy Z. Brite; his novel Lost Souls might actually be the definitive New Orleans vampire story. Since that well–New Orleans vampires–had been drawn from so often, so well, and so memorably by other authors already, I never really thought about writing vampire stories set in New Orleans. How could I compete with either Rice (with her legions of adoring fans) or Brite (with his smaller but equally adoring fan base)?

I was writing the Scotty series for Kensington when my editor there suggested I write a vampire novella for a collection they were doing called Midnight Thirsts; they had already done one volume of gay-themed erotic vampire stories that did very well for them, and I was enormously flattered to be asked to write one. As is my wont, when I started writing “The Nightwatchers” I began to slowly create an entire universe of supernatural beings, with rules; it actually grew from an original story I had written several years earlier with a female main character that was set in a theater group; more talented than the woman who always got the lead roles, she and her other actors believed that the woman getting the leads was sleeping with the director; one night at rehearsal a mysterious man shows up in the back of the theater, later approaches the main character and somehow–I don’t remember this part–shows her that her suspicions are true, and promises her eternity; she accepts his gift and then uses her new power to kill the director and the lead actress. It wasn’t a very good story, frankly, and was poorly thought out and poorly written, but it contained a structure that I wanted to use for “The Nightwatchers.” Several thousand words into the rewrite/adaptation I realized it didn’t work, so I got rid of the theater company and turned my gay male lead into a hustler who lived in one of those wonderful old decaying buildings in the Quarter, where you used to be able to get cheap rent if you didn’t mind rotting and tilted floors, insects, poor insulation, cracks in the walls, gaps around the windows, and staircases on the verge of collapse. His best friend, Rachel, lived in the same building in the apartment across the landing from his; she worked at a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny. One night while Rachel is working–one of those wonderful foggy winter nights in the city–an older man with a foreign accent is in the shop and she’s waiting for him to leave so she can close. Philip, meantime, is off to a regular client in Uptown New Orleans. Philip is, unbeknownst to him, being stalked by a vampire; the old man is a “Nightwatcher,” who is aware the vampire is after Philip and is enlisting Rachel’s help to save him.

It’s actually not a bad story, really; (I was rereading it because I couldn’t remember many of the details, like character names and so forth) I had even considered writing an entire novel based on the premise, in which this would serve as the introduction..but I never got around to it. Life has a habit of interrupting my plans.

A few years later, when I was asked to write another novella, this time using the Todd Gregory name, for Midnight Hunger, I wrote “Blood on the Moon,” and used a lot of the same concepts I had originally used for “The Nightwatchers.” (I had originally planned on having Philip, who was turned in “The Nightwatchers,” be the vampire my main character encountered in the Quarter during Carnival; but since I was using a different name, didn’t see any point in trying to link them other than using that same universe.) And since I was writing the “fratboy” books as Todd Gregory, I made the guys down in New Orleans for Carnival fratboys from my fictional fraternity’s Ole Miss chapter. Cord Logan was the main character, and he falls in with a fraternity of vampires when he “gets separated” from his buddies and explores the gay end of Bourbon Street. He also winds up getting targeted by a male witch, having to be rescued, etc etc etc, and the story ended with Cord being completely turned, and joining his new brotherhood. I brought Cord and his best buddy from the actual fraternity back in the story, “Bloodletting,” which eventually became the first chapter of my one and only vampire novel, Need–which I’d hoped to be the first in a series of supernatural erotic gay novels; the next was going to be Desire, and I was going to get deeper into the mythology I had created with that one, as well as bring in the rest of the characters from “The Nightwatchers” (Rachel and the old man were a part of Need).

Cord was a special breed of vampire because he not only had become a vampire but had also drank the blood of the male witch–which to some of the other vampires made him an abomination; and he certainly was one to the witches, which meant the Council of Thirteen, which oversees all the supernatural creatures of the world, wanted him dead–as well as his fraternity brother, whom he’d had to turn. That was going to be the primary plot thread of Desire, which alas never came to be.

Here’s how “The Nightwatchers” opened:

Go home, old man, Rachel thought, tapping her black fingernails on the counter.

It was quarter till nine, fifteen minutes before she could lock the doors. Everything was clean, and the cash register was already counted down. All she really had left to do was dump the remains of the day’s coffee down the sink, lock the cash drawer in the safe, and turn everything off. She’d be gone by ten minutes after at the latest.

She glanced out the big windows fronting the coffee shop. The streetlight just outside cast a yellowish glow in the thick mist pressing against the glass. She shivered and looked back at the old man. He was sitting in one of the tables in the far corner, with the same cup of coffee he’d ordered when he came in around seven thirty. He hadn’t touched it. It was still as full as when she’d filled the cup, only no steam was coming off the black surface now. He didn’t seem to be watching for anyone, or waiting. He never glanced at his watch, which she’d spotted as a platinum Tag Heuer, nor did he ever look out the window. Every once in a while he would look up from his newspaper and catch her staring. He’d smile and nod, then go back to his reading.

Apparently, he was determined to read every word.

She stood up, bending backwards so her back cracked. The night had been really slow. The Jazz Café, even on weeknights, usually was good for at least thirty to forty dollars in tips. Tonight, when she’d counted out the tip jar, yielded less than seven dollars. Just enough to get her a pack of cigarettes and a twenty ounce diet Coke at Quartermaster Deli on her way back to her apartment. It wasn’t, she thought, wiping down the counter down yet again, even worth coming in for.

See what I mean? Not bad.

Although talking about this stuff has made me intrigued by it again; it really is amazing how many book ideas went nowhere for me. Maybe someday I will write Desire.

And now you see why I never get anything done. I call it creative ADHD.

And on that note..let me get back to work.

The Truck Driver and His Mate

And somehow here we are at Friday again. Christ, these weeks seem to last forever, and yet somehow I still manage to get so very little fucking done. It seems as though every Friday morning I find myself staring into the gaping maw of my email inbox, with so many emails to answer and some not only need to be answered by require me to do something; to look something up; to verify something; or make some sort of decision. I’m trying very hard not to make myself crazy (crazier, at any rate) and yet…and other emails are getting pushed down further into my inbox, and I know what I really need to do is reverse the order so that the oldest ones are at the top, but I shudder at the very thought of that. And yet, realistically, I know I have to do that one morning and deal with those emails, because with every day they become that much older.

Yesterday was exhausting. By the time I got home–after making works bags all afternoon for the needle exchange and gathering today’s supplies for condom packing (I have calls to make today, so rather than watching my next selected films–Alien and Aliens back to back on HBO MAX–I will be talking on the telephone as I make my condom packs, at least for part of the day; multi-tasking, as it were). And when quitting time rolls around later this afternoon, rather than curling up with Blacktop Wasteland, as I would much rather prefer, I am going to have to start the heavy lifting on the revisions of chapters one thru ten of Bury Me in Shadows, because in order to remain on schedule with it I need to have that finished by Sunday evening in order to begin work on chapters eleven through twenty.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I wonder if I will ever reach a point in my life where I don’t feel crushing guilt for not responding to emails within five minutes of their reception; for not having the energy after a lengthy day at the office or of doing day-job activities at home to work on my writing or read a book; for not having the drive to get things done, for not always being in motion, for not being, basically, a Stepford wife. My apartment is a disaster area, there’s another load of dishes to be done, and its Friday, the day I usually launder the bed linens. The car has a tire with a slow leak in it, so at some point I need to find the time to head over to a gas station to refill the tire with air, and also need to find the time to take it back into the dealership to have the tire dealt with, as well as have routine maintenance done. I am sleeping deeply and well every night, but so deeply that every morning I could probably, if I could, sleep several hours more and my body harbors a resentment towards my brain for forcing my body out of the bed and pouring coffee down its throat and trying to get some kind of grip on the day ahead. Even as I sit here typing I can see the number changing on the tab where my email inbox is opened; possibly more junk to simply be deleted, but there will inevitably be something in there I need to read, that will need to be responded to, will perhaps require me to think or take some kind of further action.

Partly this malaise I feel this morning is inevitably connected to the relief that the lumps in my pectorals are nothing more than genetic fatty deposits hardening into cysts that do not endanger my health nor require any further action or activity on my part; while I was doing my best to repress those worries and push them down deep into my brain and consciousness, the worry and stress wasn’t gone, and the feeling of relief has released a lot stress I wasn’t aware I was carrying. There’s probably some other sort of cathartic release of pent-up stress and energy I could and should be doing; that might help me get motivated and stop feeling so defeated every day.

And I probably should get back into therapy, if I only could carve that time out in my weeks.

Part of it has to do, I am certain, with the sense that I am not organized; but I am also very well aware that even should I carve a day out to get organized it won’t help at all with the sense of drowning and being overwhelmed; the feeling that I have that each limb and appendage is tied to a horse facing a different direction and someone is about to fire the starting pistol. And yet, even now, as the coffee and caffeine from my first cup courses through my veins and my mind begins to throw off its sluggishness and that melted feeling begins to fade from my muscles, I am aware that all the things that I allow to frustrate me (I wish I had a place where I could spread the manuscript out and piece it back together after tearing it all apart and I wish I had enough space for all my books and I wish I could rearrange my time so that I had time for everything I need to get done and I wish I could stop being so lazy or at least stop imagining and believing that I am lazy and I wish I had more self-confidence and I wish I could I wish I wish I wish) can neither be helped nor changed by simply wishing it to be so, and therefore allowing these immutable, unchangeable facts about my current situation in life to defeat or frustrate me is, ultimately, self-destructive (a regular pattern in my life deeply rooted in my consciousness from being told repeatedly that I was a loser so I started believing it, believed it for years, and revert to that mentality frequently whenever under stress or pressure) and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, instead I should be looking back at this past year and what I have accomplished. I have had any number of successes with short stories, giving the lie to the insidious belief that I am not a good short story writer. Just this week I sold another one, “The Snow Globe”; I had two come out in anthologies around the same time (“The Silky Veils of Ardor” in The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Joni Mitchell and “The Dreadful Scott Decision” in The Faking of the President); I sold “The Carriage House” to Mystery Tribune and “Night Follows Night” to an anthology titled Buried; I pushed myself by writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy,” to The Only One in the World anthology; and my story “A Whisper from the Graveyard” was sold to an anthology I really need to follow up with, as I’ve not heard anything about it in quite some time. I still have two out on submission, but those are both long shots I don’t have a lot of confidence will land–and that is not self-deprecation; both are fine stories, but are undoubtedly buried in piles of hundreds of submissions, hence the strong possibility they won’t be sold. Both stories are works I am pleased with, “Moves in the Field” and “This Thing of Darkness,” and while the short story market has certainly dried up dramatically since I started publishing, I enjoy writing stories and would love to publish more of them.

But I need to get Bury Me in Shadows finished and turned in, so I can get the Kansas book worked on one more time and turned in as well, and then I can get going on Chlorine. I can get everything done that I need to get done, and need to stop allowing negativity to creep into my brain; there’s enough negativity in life already that I don’t need to create my own.

And so I am going to go get my second cup of coffee, and I am going to start digging through the emails. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and remember–don’t let anyone, especially yourself, hold you back.

Violence

So I had a new and interesting experience yesterday: a mammogram.

Yes, that’s correct, I said a mammogram. I’ve had a lump in my right pectoral for years now, and two others just below. I had asked my doctor about them several times over the years during routine exams, but they always kind of blew it off, saying it was nothing to worry about, and so I never did…although, occasionally during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’d touch it thoughtfully, and wonder. As I said, this last time when I went to for my check-up, and she was so relentlessly thorough, she came across it while examining me and said, “How long has that been there?” and I replied, “well, a long time, frankly. I’ve always been told not to worry about it.” She frowned back at me. “Well, if it hasn’t grown or been painful, it’s probably just a fatty cyst, which is a genetic thing and nothing to worry about, but by the look on your face you’d prefer to know for sure, wouldn’t you?”

And so the mammogram was yesterday. And it was precisely that, a fatty cyst which is genetic (note to self: thank parents for that, along with tendency for high cholesterol and high blood pressure), and not only that–there were two more in my left pectoral I wasn’t even aware of. They aren’t harmful or dangerous in any way, and I was advised against having them removed–“it just leaves an ugly scar, and no one will ever notice them unless they fondle your chest”–and so made the decision not to bother with them. And yet–I felt an enormous relief when the radiologist told me all of this, so clearly on some levels it was stress and worry I was retaining.

As we tell our clients at Crescent Care, you really need to advocate for yourself. Going forward, I am not going to let my doctors with their silly medical degrees pooh-pooh a concern that is actually very real to me. There’s no reason I couldn’t have had this subconscious worry put to rest years ago. Lesson learned.

And now I can officially tell you, Constant Reader, that I have placed another short story! “The Snow Globe” will be this coming year in Chesapeake Crimes: Magic is Murder, edited by Barb Goffman, Donna Andrews, and Marcia Talley. I am quite thrilled by this–as I always am whenever I place a story somewhere–and have had to sit on the news for a few days before the official announcement. I still have two out on submission that are pending, but I’m having a fairly lovely year when it comes to placing short stories thus far. “The Snow Globe” has an interesting genesis; a thread on a friend’s wall about Hallmark Christmas Movies and an enchanted snow globe that featured in one, and I commented “I’d be more interested if it were CURSED”, and this was around the same time a publisher was doing a War on Christmas anthology, so I decided to write about a cursed snow globe for it. I messed up the story on that iteration; the notes I got with the rejection note showed me that I had, indeed, made the wrong decision with the story (which I had suspected) and so even though it wasn’t being included (that anthology would up not happening, either), I went ahead and revised it based on those notes and changed it to the way I had originally thought it should be before I second-guessed myself and changed it. And now it has found a home.

The funny part is the opening line was actually lifted from an idea I had for a Halloween story for an anthology the Horror Writers Association was doing (I never wrote this story). One night, years ago, I was standing on the balcony at the Pub/Parade during Halloween weekend (in my usual slutty whatever costume; my costume default always involved slutty in the title and involved lots of exposed skin) and someone came out of Oz across the street as Satan–horns and a wig and goat legs, but also a bare torso body painted red–and I thought, wow, Satan has a great six pack and laughed, thinking that’s a great opening line for a story. I was going to use it for my Halloween story, along with the Gates of Guinee; I never wrote the story, but when I was figuring out my cursed snow globe story, I thought, You know, “Santa has a great six-pack” is also a great opening line, and you can work Guinee into this, and thus “The Snow Globe” was born.

And yes, it’s a story about a gay man placed in a mainstream anthology, which pleases me even more. (I mean, an opening line like that would have to be the start of a story about a gay man, wouldn’t it?)

I watched two movies while making condom packs yesterday: 2001 A Space Odyssey and Altered States, which, while they may not seem similar at first glance, after watching them they kind of are. I’ve never really been a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick (I hated his version of The Shining; Barry Lyndon was probably the most boring film ever made; and while I enjoy A Clockwork Orange…it’s not something I’d care to watch again, frankly), and when I watched 2001 for the first time, years ago, when it debuted on television, all I could think was I don’t understand this movie at all. I went on to read the book, by Arthur C. Clarke (who co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick), which sort of explained what was happening better, but it wasn’t until I saw and read the sequel, 2010, that it all began to make sense. Visually and sound-wise, it’s an exceptional film, particularly for when it was made; no science fiction space movie had looked so realistic before, and would Star Wars have been possible without 2001? But as with other Kubrick films I’ve seen, the acting wasn’t terrific (although Keir Dullea is stunningly gorgeous to look at; he came to the Tennessee Williams Festival a few years ago, and has aged spectacularly well), and there was a distinct coldness to the movie, a distance that I felt was deliberate–to show how vast and empty and cold space is. It was also kind of funny in that the flight out to the Moon in the beginning was a Pan American flight, and on the station there was a Howard Johnson’s restaurant; they had no way of knowing that either, at the time the movie was made, would be no longer in business by the actual year 2001. It was also interesting that women were still in subservient roles in this fantasy 2001, except in the case of the Soviets (also no way of knowing there would be no Soviet Union by the actual year 2001); which always makes futuristic films interesting time capsules once the future they depict has come and gone in actuality. The basic plot of the movie–sandwiched in between the strange appearances of the monolith at the dawn of mankind and encountered again at the end by Dave–is a horror/suspense tale, told unemotionally and rather coldly–about the malfunction of the computer, HAL 9000, who controls the spaceship and begins trying to kill the astronauts aboard, which undoubtedly also influenced Alien.

Altered States is a Ken Russell film, starring a very young William Hurt and Blair Brown. Hurt is still in the full flush of youthful male beauty, and like in his other early films I’ve watched lately (Eyewitness, Body Heat) his body and looks are highly sexualized; he’s naked a lot in this, and there’s even a brief view of his penis in one shot, which I am sure was quite shocking for the time. Like Kubrick, I’ve never been a particular fan of Ken Russell as an auteur; Altered States is a deeply flawed film that could have been so much more. Hurt and Brown play highly educated academics at the top of their field who eventually become professors at Harvard. Hurt is primarily interested in his field of research; he believes that in a heightened sense of consciousness, one can tap into the millions of years of human development that is locked into our brains and DNA. He is conducting experiments into altered consciousness in the beginning of the movie, by putting himself into a sensory deprivation tank (remember those?), which is part and parcel of the times in which the film was made. Eventually, he discovers there’s a remote native tribe in the mountains of Mexico that still performs, and lives in the same manner, as their Toltec ancestors; they also have visions and regress when taking a type of brew made from a certain kind of mushroom only grown where they live during a mystical ritual. (Interesting aside: Greek actor Thaao Penghlis, who gained fame playing Tony DiMera for decades on Days of Our Lives, plays the Mexican anthropologist who not only tells Hurt about this tribe, but takes him there–because he was dark-skinned with dark eyes and dark hair, of course he was convincingly “Mexican” to play the part) As expected, things go terribly wrong and he becomes more and more obsessed; by taking the drug concoction made by this tribe while using a sensory deprivation tank he is able to unlock primordial memory as well as regress physically as well, until his friends intervene and his love for Brown somehow manage a strangely weird happily ever after. It’s really just another film warning about the hubris of scientists and playing God, in the long line of tradition dating back to Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Blair Brown is also naked a lot, for no apparent reason other than to show off her body, and it was, as I said, flawed. But the climactic scene where he changes again physically and has to fight off regressing to early man is also reminiscent of both the beginning and end of 2001–which shows the birth of mankind and intelligence, and how Dave (Keir Dullea) becomes, thanks to the strange monolith, also regresses and changes and evolves, into what was called the Starchild. (You really have to read or watch–or both–2010 for any of that to make sense.)

We also continue to watch Babylon Berlin with great enjoyment; we have but one more episode to go in Season 1.

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