Category: Saints

Point of No Return

So, what did we learn from our first Monday back at work? One, that it’s very important to get physical and mental rest from the day in, day out of full time employment, and that if I can stay focused and motivated…well, there’s really nothing I can’t do if I want to do it.

But that has always been true. It has always astounded me how much I can do–and what I can do–if I put my mind to it and ignore those horrible voice in my head (depending on what it is, they alternate between my parents, really–every so often a former teacher will pop into my head, working on my confidence and trying to paralyze me into useless futility). All that stuff I’d been dreading, and putting off? Handled yesterday with aplomb, minimal irritation or embarrassment, and now completely out of the way.

What have we learned from this? Probably nothing.

Last night, for the first time in over a month–since I was sick at Halloween, actually–I sat down, opened the latest version of Chapter One, and started revising. And while it wasn’t as easy as I would like–I deleted about a thousand words and added a thousand new ones, that make better sense and work better; certainly the voice of my main character is better defined and sounds more realistic–I still managed to get some work done, and it was good work. Very good work, with which I am very pleased. I was truly worried, frankly, that this book was never going to get kicked into gear; now it has, and now it’s possible that I might–just might–get this book finished this month and ready to do something with in January.

What a glorious feeling.

I slept really well again last night–going to bed earlier on the nights before these early mornings really does make all the difference–and since Paul was out to dinner with some friends, I came home and cleaned the kitchen, preparatory to getting some writing done, and so this morning my kitchen is pretty clean–there’s still a load of laundry in the dryer that needs to be folded, but I doubt I’ll get to that this morning–and so I am pretty pleased with that as well. I am pretty certain I’ll start feeling run down and tired by the end of the week again, but as long as I keep getting good sleep at night, I should be okay.

Or so I hope, at any rate.

It’s hard to believe it’s December already. Where did this year go? Football season can’t be almost over already, can it? Heavy heaving sigh. I was just thinking yesterday that the next few months are going to be nothing but madness, sheer madness. There’s Christmas, then New Year’s; and then of course it’s Twelfth Night and Carnival has started. There’s college football bowl games and play-offs; the Saints will be in the play-offs as well, and then after the parades are all over, at the end of March is the Williams Festival. Heavy heaving sigh. I am also heading up to New York in the middle of January; it’s been years, and that should be a lot of fun–exhausting, but fun.

And 2020! A sparkling new decade, exciting and new. That will be the decade I hit sixty at long last, and should I live that long, the decade where I finally am able to retire from the day job. Sooner would be better than later, of course; I am considering my options for going early–but that would also mean paying off most of my debt and the car. I think the car will be finished being paid off towards the end of next year or early 2021; I am on track to get it paid for in less than the five years of the loan, and who knows? I may, if there’s a windfall of some sort, even be able to get it paid for even sooner. And if I can make that Honda last twenty years–which I should be able to–I hopefully won’t ever have to buy another car before I die.

And on that cheery note, tis time to get back to the mines of spice. I want to get some more reading of Laura Benedict’s book, The Stranger Inside, done today, and obviously, it would be amazing to get more progress done on the book.

But I’m writing again, am excited about the book (as it goes into yet another draft), and feeling pretty good. Yay, Gregalicious!

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Is This Love

I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, Constant Reader!

Here it is, Friday, and the last few days of my vacation, such as it was. I do not intend to mourn not getting anything much accomplished over this week; I did get some things done and for that I am profoundly grateful. I am also truly grateful for the opportunity to relax, rest, sleep, and overall just recharge my batteries; at my advanced (advancing) age that is necessary sometimes.

Yesterday was lovely. In the morning I finished reading Colson Whitehead’s terrific The Nickel Boys (more on that later), which was simply brilliant–I think I liked it better than I liked The Underground Railroad, which I also loved–and then started reading Laura Benedict’s The Stranger Inside, but didn’t get very far into before Paul woke up. (I intend to spend some times with it this morning, once I get this filthy disgusting kitchen cleaned up.) We spent the afternoon watching the first three episodes of Dublin Murders (terrib;e, terrible title), which is based on Tana French’s In the Woods and The Likeness. I’ve not read Ms. French’s work; I do know she is critically acclaimed and enormously popular–but as I always say, too many books and far too little time. I do intend, after watching the first three episodes, that I will most likely now add French to the TBR pile. I do not know, for example, if the show is a faithful adaptation; there were a few things that confused me a bit, but I imagine that is made much more clear in the novels.

We also watched the Saints game (GEAUX SAINTS!). The game was strange and sloppy and weird; the Saints had difficulty scoring touchdowns, and at the last minute it looked as though the Falcons’ furious comeback attempt might actually succeed. However, the Saints defense looked pretty amazing for the most part, and they stepped up to sack Matt Ryan on a fourth down that pretty much ended the game, with the Saints clinching the division and guaranteeing that at least their first play-off game will be in the Superdome.

As I have said before, it’s been a banner year for Louisiana football fans, between the Saints and LSU.

After the Saints game, we tried to start watching the AMC adaptation of Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, but couldn’t really get into it. I tried reading the book, but couldn’t get into it, either. I also tried with Hill’s Horns, both book and film, to no avail. Hill is a fine writer–I absolutely loved the short stories of his I read during last year’s Short Story Project–and I want to like his novels, but am afraid they just aren’t for me. I’ll undoubtedly continue reading his short fiction, and will undoubtedly try to read his novels again at some other point.

I’m also sorry I missed the bizarre end of the Mississippi-Mississippi State game; I considered switching over to it after the Saints game ended, but as I am not a fan of either team…it’s hard to watch a game simply for the joy of watching a well-played football game if you can’t root for one of the teams; I always try to pick a team in any game I’m watching when I am not a fan of either….but wasn’t up for it last night. Apparently the Rebels scored a potential game-tying touchdown in the closing seconds, and simply needed to kick an extra point for overtime. But one of the Rebels’ players mocked the Mississippi State team by going down on all fours and lifting his leg, like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant (the MSU team name is Bulldogs) and they got flagged for a fifteen-yard penalty….and then missed the extra point, so game, set and match to the Bulldogs. An incredibly stupid thing to do in the heat of the moment, although I do feel a little sorry for the player–as he will never ever live that down.

No matter how frustrated I get with college players, I always try to remember they are really just overgrown kids; most of them still in their teens.

Tomorrow will be a big day of football–with Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn, and then LSU-Texas A&M; so I doubt I’ll get much done tomorrow. I do have some errands to run in the morning–prescriptions, mail, possibly grocery store–and after that I’ll be parked in my easy chair watching college football and reading during breaks. There won’t be a Saints game on Sunday, so I intend to spend that day trying to get organized and figuring out my writing schedule for the rest of the year–although I’ve not had much luck with scheduling writing this year so far, have I? But I do believe I’ve cracked the code of the current manuscript as well as the one on deck, and it’s just now a matter of writing it all down or correcting the computer files and pulling it all together.

Sounds easy, at any rate, doesn’t it?

And now to do these dishes, start my review of The Nickel Boys, and back to reading the Benedict novel.

Have a lovely day after Thanksgiving, Constant Reader!

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The Finer Things

Ah, Thanksgiving.

Yesterday I made mac’n’cheese for the office holiday pot luck; it was specifically requested, so despite the fact I am on vacation and could have easily laughed and said, “too bad so sad’…I actually went ahead and made it, then went into the office while I was on vacation. 

So out of character for me to be so nice.

But the good news is the missing flash drive was sitting on my desk, right where I left it. Huzzah! Crisis–such as it was–averted, and there was much rejoicing in the land. I immediately backed it up to both the Cloud and to my back-up hard drive (just in case), and am scheduling back-ups on my calendar. Perhaps someday I will learn from all these disasters and near-misses…probably not, actually. If I didn’t learn from the Great Data Disaster of 2018, nothing will teach me anything when it comes to backing up files.

It’s Thanksgiving, and it will be a quiet day in the Lost Apartment. After I finish this, I am probably going to go dark with the Internet for the day–it’s not really a holiday if you spend it on social media, etc, is it? I am going to retire to my easy chair after I post this and read The Nickel Boys, with an eye to getting it finished today. The Saints play the Falcons later tonight, for a chance to clinch the division–but given how they played a few weeks ago against the Falcons, I don’t hold out a whole lot of hope; unless that previous game was an utter aberration. It may well have been; I’ve not seen the Saints play that shitty since the game where Brees hurt his thumb earlier this year.

Although it does feel somewhat like my vacation is slipping through my fingers and I’m not getting hardly anything done. On the other hand, I undoubtedly needed a vacation to rest and relax and get back into the swing of things. The new goal is to get the WIP finished by the end of the year, possibly get the Kansas book finished by the end of Carnival, and then move on to Chlorine. I’d also like to get some of these short stories finished; I’ve decided which story to revise and submit to the Sacramento Bouchercon anthology, and I think it’s a good one. Probably wind up being too dark–my stories are always so much darker and cynical than my novels–but at I am going to give it a shot. I’ve not submitted to any Bouchercon anthologies other than the ones I’ve edited; I’m not sure why that is. I just couldn’t figure out anything that would work for the Raleigh or Toronto ones; so this is a step in the right direction.

So, what am I thankful for this year? I’m thankful for my day job, and my writing career, and all the gloriously eccentric and wondrous friends I have. I’m grateful to be able to live in New Orleans, my favorite city in all of the country, and even more grateful that I can write about it. I’m grateful that Paul and Scooter and I have managed to make it around the sun one more time, relatively healthy, and that I get to share my life with them.

Most of all, I’m thankful for my coffee this morning.

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Rock Steady

Watchmen is, quite frankly, brilliant television.

While I would never consider myself a comics nerd, I did grow up with them, and have periodically returned to them as an adult. I’m a fan of the genre of super-heroes, but would never consider myself anything more expert than any other sideline, keeps up with it slightly, fan. (Although the world of comics fans endlessly fascinates me; I’ve loved attending the local version of Comic Con, and suspect the bigger ones would be too overwhelming and too much for me.)  Anyway, that’s a roundabout way of saying I’ve never read the source material for this show, but have heard about it for years. I’m enjoying this show so much I now want to go back and read the original source material (which I’m sure is now readily available, certainly) as well as go back and watch the film that was made of it several years ago. I would say that’s a statement about how much I am enjoying the show, while admiring it at the same time; I now want to know the entire story, or as much of it as I can glean to get a better understanding of the show.

A need I never felt, quite frankly, with The Walking Dead, and only somewhat with Game of Thrones (I won’t commit to reading that entire series until it’s completed, thank you very much).

The Saints also managed to win a heart-attack inducing game yesterday, which I was felt quite certain they were determined to lose for some unknown reason. But they managed to get the last second field goal and dodged the bullet; the Panthers missed their own just moments before. The Saints aren’t playing as solidly as I would like, but I would imagine there’s an adjustment period when you have to switch quarterbacks again–and it takes some time to get fully back into the old rhythms again. Still, we’re having a glorious football season in Louisiana, one that I hope everyone is taking the time to enjoy.

This week is Thanksgiving, and as I’ve been thinking about American mythology a lot lately, it seems only fitting that yet another myth looms on the horizon; a holiday where Americans gather to be grateful and give thanks for what they have…as the final, massive full frontal assault of Christmas commercialism looms just over the horizon. I watched another couple of hours of World War II-Pacific theater documentaries yesterday–I’m not sure why I am so drawn to that particular period of history lately, or that particular theater of that particular war; draw your own conclusions–and again, found myself as a present-day prosecutor, trying the United States for war crimes for the use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations. It is easy to be judgmental in hindsight; my living room in New Orleans in November 2019  is vastly different than the Oval Office in Washington in July 1945, and I certainly don’t have the future of the world in the palms of my hands; it’s easy to question decisions of the past with the hindsight of the present.

But I also find it hard to believe we would have used nuclear weapons on Germany.

Hindsight.

Looking back at the past with the mindset of the present.

Watchmen‘s entire approach to racism and the past is incredibly powerful, and also incredibly important. A pivotal event in the narrative is the obliteration of the a economically strong and growing black community near Tulsa back in the 1920’s; a horrifying racist slaughter and eradication of a community for daring to believe American mythology and trying to live the American dream as non-whites.

It also got me thinking about diversity, and the push for it in publishing, particularly in crime fiction lately, given some of the incidents that have occurred recently at crime events, or involving crime fiction organizations over the last few years. It occurred to me that inclusion, and diversity, are important words that may not carry with them their own importance; what we are really trying to accomplish is the desegregation of publishing and the creative arts; integrating writers of color and queer writers into the mainstream of publishing. Integration and segregation are much more powerful words; but desegregation is an incorrect term, in that it presupposes that there are separate but equal publishing worlds, which isn’t true; perhaps that’s why integration isn’t the word we use about talking about diversity in publishing.

But I think integration gets the point across more than inclusion does.

I am still reading both The Nickel Boys and Bourbon Street, hope to get more of the Whitehead read today, in fact. This first day of Thanksgiving week vacation–after three days of essentially relaxing and doing something periodically, but mostly doing nothing active–needs to be more of an active day than a passive one. I am going to work on my emails today, I am going to write today–not sure just quite yet what it is I will be writing, but I am going to be writing today for sure–and making other arrangements as well. There’s a lot of filing and cleaning that needs to get done, but I am going to be home alone all day with the needy kitty–who will insist on sitting in my desk chair once Paul leaves for the day–and I am determined to get all of this finished….or at least progress. I’ve kind of been letting a lot of stuff slide because I haven’t wanted to deal with it; well that day of reckoning has now arrived.

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

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Who Will You Run To

Vacation all I ever wanted….

Yes, I am off now for about nine days, which is incredibly lovely. Today I am getting the car serviced on the West Bank, and will most likely go ahead and make groceries while I am over there. After that, it’s home and chores; I’d love to get all the cleaning and organizing done today so I don’t have to worry about doing any of that over the next nine days–and possibly do some writing while I am at it. My writing muscles are horribly, disgustingly, rusty; almost as rusty as my actual muscles which haven’t exercised since earlier in the year. I am going to try to get back into a regular workout routine during this vacation period; I miss the endorphins, and I miss the feeling of genuine tiredness one gets from forcing one’s muscles to do work. I also need to stretch regularly and do the dreaded, hated cardio; I’m very disappointed in myself for letting my regular workouts fall by the wayside.

I also want to read The Nickel Boys, and get that out of the way.

We watched two more episodes of Netfix’ Unbelievable last night, and Toni Collette and Merritt Weaver are absolutely killing it. I do think this is a must-watch mini-series; the difference with which the two women treat the rape victims in their cases is such a 180 from the way the men treated poor young Marie in the first episode; and of course Marie’s entire life and experience has turned into garbage not just because she was raped but because of how she was treated, and not believed. I have a lot of thoughts about men and rape/sexual assault; I’ve had them for quite some time but have never truly articulated any of them–who am I to talk about these things?–but there’s a lot more complexity buried there that is never truly talked about or explored; as though there’s a third rail one cannot touch. I’m looking forward to finishing it, and getting caught up on Castle Rock, which is killing it this season.

Which of course always comes down, as ever, to Imposter Syndrome; the fear that I am not intelligent, smart or articulate enough to talk about sensitive things or subjects or topics; which is what holds me back from writing personal essays. Laura Lippman recently announced that her essays are being collected into a book called My Life As a Villainess, which will be released next year, and I can’t wait for it. Her essays are amazing and smart and well-thought out, articulated beautifully; but then again, she is one of our finest writers publishing today, so why wouldn’t they be? Laura once told me, when I said that I am not a strong essay writer and am not very good at them, “Um, you write a personal essay every day on your blog.” It was very kind, and meant a lot to me, and there’s possibly some truth there; but I always see the blog as a kind of free-form rambling, stream of consciousness thing that I do every morning over my first few cups of coffee as I shake off the cobwebs of my sleep–which was glorious again last night, by the way–and try to prepare to face a day of who knows what being thrown at me.

I’m also looking forward to the LSU-Arkansas game this Saturday night on ESPN. The Tigers, despite the dismal defensive showing in Oxford last Saturday, remain the Number One team the country–I still can’t believe this season and how it’s turned out–and of course the Saints game Sunday at noon. The Saints bounced back from that disgraceful outing against Atlanta two weeks ago, and we’ll see how it goes from here. It’s weird to have the top ranked team in college football at the same time as one of the top teams in the NFL; how crazy would it be if LSU won the national championship in the same year that the Saints won their second Super Bowl? Magical indeed; as well as unlikely, but my God, would that ever be cool, and the entire state would lose its collective mind.

As I have said a lot lately, I’ve felt disconnected from my writing life lately–my reading life, too–and I’m not sure what that is. I am hesitant to say “writer’s block,” because it’s not something I truly believe in; I do believe writers can go through fallow periods when they have nothing to say, or can’t think of anything to say; not being able to put words to page. But I don’t believe that–which I often refer to as a ‘malaise’–is the actual problem; I’ve always believed writer’s block is a symptom of depression. One thing I’ve often noted when reading up on writers of the past is how many of them had drinking problems, or certainly drank to excess fairly regularly; so regularly that I’ve sometimes wondered whether there’s a connection between creativity and addiction. I do think creative types are more emotionally volatile than their fellow citizens; more susceptible to vulnerability and emotional instability, which can lead to depression, which can lead to not being able to write, which then turns around in a vicious cycle to make the depression worse, and some people deal with that by using alcohol. I myself have a medicine cabinet filled with medications to help me navigate the fast-flowing, submerged danger everywhere river of my life, and they’ve helped with my own particular brand of crazy.

So, in a little bit I’m going to take a shower and head across the river to the dealership; and hopefully when I come home I’ll be able to get some clear-headed thoughts down on the page as well as some seriously deep-cleaning done on the Lost Apartment.

So it’s off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader.

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Cross My Broken Heart

I slept well again last night, so here’s hoping that Monday night’s shitty night of sleep was an aberration. I feel very rested and well this morning, which is a lovely change from yesterday morning’s horror.

Paul was home late last evening, so I was able to finish watching Greatest Events of World War II in Colour, which I highly recommend. It’s incredibly well done, and powerfully moving. The final two episodes, “Liberation of Buchenwald” and “Hiroshima”, are the perfect pair to end the series with; in my last post I talked about how the “Dresden Firestorm” episode brought up questions of morality, both national and that of war; how absolutely fitting that “Liberation of Buchenwald” was the very next episode; so that any sympathy one might have felt for the German citizens killed during bombing raids and so forth, evaporates almost immediately. The documentary is also one of the first times I’ve ever seen anything about World War II and the Holocaust that absolutely puts the lie to the German everyday citizen’s claim, afterwards, that they didn’t know anything about the death camps. They knew, and at best, just didn’t care. At worst, cheered the mass slaughter of “undesirables”. Thank God Eisenhower brought in the press to document the horrors of the camps.

Even more horrifying is knowing that the threat of Soviet Communism was deemed so terrible that the Western nations chose not to pursue a lot of war crimes trials against horrible Nazis, and instead helped rehabilitate them into German society, deciding it was simply better to move on–the past was the past, the Nazis were defeated, and Communism was apparently worse–to our everlasting shame.

“Hiroshima” naturally deals with the development of atomic weapons and the lead-up to the decision to use them on the Japanese. The reason given at the time was that Japan would never surrender, and the conquest of the home islands would have cost many American lives; so President Truman–also wanting to finish off Japan as quickly as possible, before the Soviet juggernaut could turn east–made the decision to wipe two cities off the map–and the xenophobic racism that allowed the Americans to be more brutal with the Japanese then they ever were with the Germans; had the Germans won the Battle of the Bulge and taken Belgium back, would the Americans have dropped atomic bombs on say, Frankfurt and Munich? Highly unlikely.

I highly recommend this series. World War II changed the face of the world, and politics, forever; and almost everything that has gone on in the world ever since the war ended has been affected and colored by the war. It was the war that made minorities in the United States–who fought, bled and died for this country in a brutal and bloody war–no longer willing to accept second class status. For many closeted queers, it gave them the opportunity to meet others like themselves, and planted the seeds for the gay neighborhoods in places like San Francisco and New Orleans and New York–gay men and lesbians no longer felt isolated and alone, knew there were others like them, and tried to make community, eventually leading to the queer rights movement. Women participated in the war and stepped up to replace the fighting men in their jobs, and soon realized they could be more than wives and mothers, chafing against their once-again restricted roles after the end of the war–which of course led to the Women’s Movement…and that’s not even taking into consideration the changes wrought in the world in geopolitical terms.

Even if you aren’t interested in watching all ten episodes, I strongly encourage everyone to watch “The Liberation of Buchenwald.” The Holocaust was real, it happened, the Western nations allowed it to happen, and it must never happen again. And if you have the capacity to even consider, for one moment, the notion that it was a hoax–fuck all the way off, and I hope your death is slow, painful, and horrific.

I kind of want to revisit Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War/War and Remembrance series; such a well done fictionalization of the war, as seen through the eyes of the Henrys, a naval family. Of course the two volumes total something like three thousand pages–I’ll never in a million years ever have the time for a deep reread–but they were amazing, and I read them as a teenager.

Yesterday I taped Susan Larson’s “My Reading Life” with Jean (J. M.) Redmann, which is always a delight. Susan is smart and fun, as is Jean, and it’s all I can do to keep up with them and not come across as a drooling idiot. But it’s always lovely to talk to Susan and Jean about books and writing, and even more delightful, Susan told me she’d enjoyed Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, which was of course the crowning jewel of my month. As you know, Constant Reader, I have constant doubts about my short story writing ability, and so getting Susan’s stamp of approval meant a lot. I’ll post a link for the show when it airs.

Today is a half-day, and after tomorrow my vacation for Thanksgiving begins. I’m hoping to get a lot done–like always–and maybe I won’t; but at least I feel confident I can get a lot of reading done. I also have my blog entries about The Hunter by Richard Stark and The Ferguson Affair by Ross MacDonald to write. I also would like to catch up on all the things–little things, nothing major–that I always seem to let slide since I don’t have much time.

LSU has also managed to maintain its number one ranking, despite the abysmal showing of the defense last Saturday against Mississippi. I saw an interview with Joe Burrow after the game in which he simply shrugged and said, “You know things have changed at LSU when we score 58 points and get over 700 yards of total offense and the locker room mood is disappointment at how badly we played.” YIKES. But I tend to agree–I was enormously disappointed by the defense in both the Vanderbilt and Mississippi games; but the offense was spectacular in both games and ordinarily I’d be aglow by those high-scoring offensive performances. Maybe it’s true; maybe we do get spoiled quickly–God knows I get annoyed when the Saints don’t play well and they’ve consistently been one of the best teams in the NFL since 2006. Sigh.

But the last two games of LSU’s season are at home, against Arkansas and Texas A&M, and if they win either of those games they clinch the West division and are going to Atlanta to play Georgia for a shot at LSU’s first SEC title since 2011. Woo-hoo!

I hope to start reading Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys today; today is my half-day and so I can get home earlier, possibly do some writing, and then curl up in my easy chair while I wait for Paul to get home. I still haven’t written a damned thing recently, and I really need to get back on that.

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

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Don’t Get Me Wrong

Monday morning and I’m not fully awake yet this morning, which isn’t really a surprise; I had a feeling when I went to bed last night I’d not want to get up this morning. I was correct; I was awake when my alarm went off but the bed felt so lovely I simply wanted to stay there other than get up and get the day started. I have to work both of my long days this week, which is going to be a bit rough. But next week is Thanksgiving week already, and I have that entire week off, which is going to be absolutely lovely.

I got some very good background writing stuff done yesterday–the old “let me sit and think about this some more” mentality, and I think it worked; I am, at the very least, very pleased with the changes I came up with for the manuscript, and realized I need to go back to the beginning to input those changes rather than moving forward with it. While I’d much prefer to simply keep going forward, I need to go back and put those changes in, because they shift the tone a lot and plus, it’s excellent character backstory for my main character, who I’m starting to feel like I know a lot better. I know what I was trying to do with him–mostly make him somewhat unreliable–and in order to do that, I was keeping my distance from him; making the story told in a distant first person point of view. But I felt like this made my character distant and cold and unrelatable; there’s a way of doing this–which hit me smack dab between the eyes yesterday–where I can make him relatable and likable, even if he isn’t being completely honest with the reader.

And that, I think, makes the story work even better.

The Saints won yesterday at Tampa, putting the bad taste left in everyone’s mouth from last week’s inexplicable loss to the Falcons away. It was a good weekend for Louisiana football, what with LSU winning (if sloppily) Saturday and the Saints on Sunday. It’s looking like both teams will be in the play-offs, with a good shot at possibly running the table. It’s certainly going to be a memorable season for both, which is lovely for us fans. I did some more cleaning yesterday around the game, and finished reading The Ferguson Affair, about which I’ll probably be writing a more detailed blog entry about–knowing full well I still owe one for Richard Stark’s The Hunter.

When I mentioned I was reading The Ferguson Affair, a friend on Twitter tweeted at me, “the lovely thing about reading MacDonald is it doesn’t matter which one–as they are all the same” and I soon realized that while I was initially resistant to the statement, she was actually kind of right; and the tropes were all there in this book, which wasn’t a Lew Archer–but it might as well have been. The primary trope of MacDonald’s work–the wealthy, beautiful woman haunted by demons from her past and that of her family–was certainly front and center in this one; the main character was a lawyer in a small California coastal town called Buenavista whose wife is about to give birth any day now. I was, however, particularly interested in the book (as I read it) for two particular reasons–there was a tie to Hollywood in the story, and there was some interesting dynamics of race and class at play in Buenavista; which is why I want to give the book its own blog entry. But now that I have finished reading it, I can now move on to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, which I am really looking forward to. Whitehead has become one of my favorite writers–and that, of course, is entirely predicated on my reading Underground Railroad, which I absolutely loved. The Nickel Boys mines the same territory as Lori Roy’s superb The Disappearing–the boarding school for troubled boys in Florida, which is an idea I’m also terribly interested in (John Hart also wrote about the ‘reform school’ in Iron House), but with all of those heavyweight talents already covering the same material I don’t see much point in my doing so as well.

I also watched a Netflix series called Greatest Events of World War II in Colour, in which they’ve taken the actual black-and-white war footage from the second world war and colorized it. World War II fascinates and repels me at the same time for any number of reasons, but I never tire of watching or reading about it. I’ve been trying to find the old The World at War series that aired on PBS when I was a child, but can’t seem to find it anywhere. As I watched the first six episodes of ten (the war begins, the rescue at Dunkirk, the battle for Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Normandy) I kept thinking about Herman Wouk’s epic novels about the war, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, wishing I had the time to give them a reread. I also remembered the absolutely brilliant Foyle’s War series, which I loved and should probably rewatch, and also was reminded of yet another book idea–one which would require several trips to Hawaii for research. I’ve not read a lot of World War II fiction–From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, etc.–but have always meant to get around to it. I suppose one of these days I actually will. I particularly want to read the unabridged version of From Here to Eternity, which apparently includes depictions and scenes of the underground military gay scene in Hawaii on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack. Reading I the Jury by Mickey Spillane and, to a lesser degree, The Hunter by Richard Stark, has also reminded me of the period…and I do think that essay about toxic masculinity and PTSD and how that played out in the Spillane novel could still work.

If I only had the time to write the damned thing.

We also started watching Netflix’ Unbelievable last night, and what that poor young girl went through with the cops–and everyone basically in her life after she was raped–was horrifying, and I also got the sense that the way they depicted how someone is treated after they are raped–the necessary medical exams and tests, the constant having to repeat the story of your trauma, over and over again, to unsympathetic people who clearly don’t know if they believe you or not–was absolutely horrifying. I always knew rape was underreported and part of that was due to the dehumanizing experience of reporting…I had no idea, naturally, as a man just how horrible and horrific it is.

As we watched, Paul said, “It really is a wonder any woman reports, you know?”

And this also gave me thoughts about the Kansas book.

I also started a new journal this weekend. Huzzah!

And now back to the spice mines.

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I’ve Been In Love Before

And just like that, it’s Friday again in New Orleans, with a weekend dawning full of promise and potential. How I choose to squander that promise and potential remains to be seen, quite frankly.

But I am sure I will earn another Olympic gold in procrastination and justification. I am getting rather good at it.

So last night we watched the season finale of American Horror Story: 1984. Sigh. Another season of  great potential, an interesting and diverse cast, and a terrific idea….yet the entire season left me feeling meh. Paul and I laughed our way through the finale, which, for a “horror story” is perhaps not the best intended reaction? I guess making an homage to slasher films from the 1980’s, including a summer camp, and then making it completely camp wasn’t what I was expecting, and frankly, when it comes to clever campy homages Scream set a bar so damned high that its sequels couldn’t even clear–but they came close. For a brief moment, as I watched, I did think oh, this is clever–he’s doing a pastiche of an entire series of slasher movies, like following the arc of the Friday the 13th’s first few films or so…but no, I wasn’t right. But that would be a much more clever idea than what we were given, frankly.

I’ve always said that the line between the horror and crime genres–be it film, novels, short stories, or television–is a very thin one that gets crossed rather frequently. The Silence of the Lambs is considered a horror film (I’ve not read the book; it’s in my TBR pile along with Red Dragon, and I will eventually get to them both), but it’s also very much a procedural: Clarice Starling, federal agent, is part of the team trying to catch a brutal serial killer, Buffalo Bill. Filming it as a horror film made it suspenseful and terrifying; much more so than had it been filmed as a straight-up procedural (which is why I am very curious about the novels). I’ve always wanted to do a straight-up novel about a mass, or spree, killing–which is what slasher movies really are at heart–that begins in the aftermath of a night like Halloween, when the police are called to the scene of a mass killing with brutalized, butchered bodies everywhere–or when the state police arrive at the camp at Crystal Lake; the first quarter/third of the book is the discovery of the bodies and the lead detective trying to place together the time-line of the murders. That’s as far as I’ve ever gotten with the idea, honestly; if I can ever figure out where to go from there, I’ll probably write it (although it occurs to me that what would be rather clever would be to alternate between the night before, when it’s happened, and the following morning as the detective puts the time line together….hmmmm *makes note*).

I also have an idea about a novel set in a ghost town in the California mountains–I’ve had this idea for quite some time, going back to the 1980’s (almost all of my California ideas were born in the 1980’s, when I lived there), and my mind keeps coming back to it from time to time. I think the idea was born from reading Stephen King’s short story “The Raft”, and then seeing it on film in Creepshow 2 (Paul Satterfield in that skimpy yellow speedo made quite an impression on me; it even occurs to me now that may have subliminally had a connection to my short story “Man in a Speedo”); the basic concept was the same–five or six college students decide to spend a weekend camping in a ghost town, getting drunk and high and having sex–only to have it all go South in the most terrifying way. I also realize that the “group of young people come to a remote location and all get killed off gradually” is probably the more hoary of the horror tropes; in order to do something like that one has to not only do it exceptionally well,  but say something new. I wanted to call it Sunburst, because that would be the name of the remote ghost town; a town that sprung up around a gold mine that eventually petered out and the town died with it. I also wanted it to be set in the mountains because–well, because the mountains in California are so beautiful–I wanted to set it on a mountain top that had a lovely view across a valley or canyon to Yosemite National Park.

This is why I never get anything done, really–I have so many ideas, and get new ones all the time, and so things get pushed to the side and forgotten until something reminds me of the original idea. I also like to think that I will eventually come back around to the idea and write it…it has happened before, of course–Sara, Sorceress, Sleeping Angel, Dark Tide all come to mind–and so it’s not so hard to believe those ideas’ time will eventually come. Hell, even Bury Me in Shadows was originally conceived of in the 1980’s, as a short story I wrote called “Ruins”–and the idea was always there in the back of my mind; which is partly why I finally decided to write the damned thing.

Finishing it, on the other hand, seems to be an enormous problem thus far. I am hoping to break this lengthy non-writing streak–well, I’ve been writing a bit here and there, just not producing on a daily basis the amount I not only should be but can do as a general rule–this weekend. The LSU game is Saturday night, and while yes, Auburn-Georgia is in the afternoon, I’m not so sure I care that much about watching it. Background noise, maybe, and if it’s a Georgia rout I can always turn it off….and I’m not so sure when the Saints game is on Sunday. I am also falling into the trap of thinking oh I have a week off for Thanksgiving come up and I can finish it then. No, no, NO. I should finish it before then, so I can spend that week polishing it and making it pretty before sending it off on December 1.

I seriously don’t know what to do, to be perfectly honest. I just know I need to be writing more than I am–and if not the book, then a short story or something. AUGH.

And since I don’t have to go in until later, I might as well do some this morning.

Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader.

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To Be a Lover

LSU beat Alabama yesterday, 46-41.

I still can’t completely wrap my mind around it, but it was a great game–I was never relaxed, from the opening kick-off until I realized LSU could simply run out the clock and that the game was actually, in fact,  already over, if not officially–and both teams acquitted themselves well. LSU played exceptionally well; at half-time I said out loud in disbelief, “we’re ahead of Alabama 33-13 at half-time?”

In my wildest dreams of LSU beating Alabama again, I never dreamed it would go down the way it did yesterday afternoon. Like I said, I can’t wrap my mind around it.  But, as I say, to be the best you have to beat the best, and Alabama is the gold standard of college football, and has been since 2008. You just don’t get better than the Alabama program–historically or recently. Their recent dynasty has pulled them ahead of other gold standard programs–USC, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan, Notre Dame–because you simply cannot argue with the success they’ve had. Every national champion since 2008 has had to beat Alabama to get there–or it was Alabama. Every national champion from the SEC since 2009 has been from the western division–and if you go back another two years, LSU won it in 2007 (Florida won in 2006 and 2008).

And it looks like, at long last, we might have another shot at it again this year.

GEAUX TIGERS!

Needless to say, I literally got nothing done after the game was over. I didn’t read anything, didn’t write anything, didn’t clean anything. I just kind of stayed in my easy chair, scrolling through social media while the Tennessee-Kentucky game played in the background, to see the reactions to the game and the videos of the team plane landing in Baton Rouge to an enormous crowd–which even lined the road cheering as the team busses took them back to campus from the airport. We all are, of course, huge fans of the underdog, and what is this year’s LSU team is not a team of underdogs? No one wanted running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire; too small to play in the SEC, they said. He was phenomenal last night–that final first down that iced the game once and for all was an incredible display of running as he dragged almost the entire Alabama defense the entire ten yards to put the game away once and for all. The transfer quarterback who didn’t get the starting job at Ohio State; now almost has a lock on the Heisman Trophy and has already broken most, if not all, of the quarterback records at LSU.

And of course, Coach O–the interim coach who finally got the job after two bigger names turned it down; the coach LSU “settled” for, who went on to lose to Troy in his first full season as head coach. Remember that? It was just two years ago, and everyone wrote Coach O for dead that season. Even this year, Coach O was “on the hot seat”, according to every sports journalistic out there–the Cajun home-state coach with the gravelly voice; who wages a battle at every press conference with the closed-captioning. And yet, here LSU sits, 9-0, ranked Number One, having just gotten the Alabama monkey off its back for the first time since the 2011 season and suddenly is everyone’s favorite for the college football play-offs.

After the Texas game, when LSU won in Austin, I said to Paul, “how cool would it be for LSU and Ohio State–Joe’s two teams–to meet for the national championship, and how fitting would it be to write, as Joe’s final act as a college football player, to beat the team that wouldn’t start him to win the national title?”

It seemed far-fetched at the time, but now? It’s definitely possible.

LSU has to keep its head in the game though–there are three games left in the conference (Ole Miss, Arkansas, Texas A&M), and then the conference title game–most likely against Georgia; even if Georgia loses to Auburn they’ll win the East–and should Georgia win out, and LSU win that game…it will be the fifth time they’ve beaten a Top Ten ranked team this season.

Sorry if you’re not a football fan, but I am aglow still this morning, and that glow will probably last for me a little while…but the Saints are playing the hated Falcons today at noon, so I’ve got to get ready for that game, too.

GEAUX TIGERS!

If you could have turned the joy in Louisiana last night into pure energy, we could have powered the entire country last night.

Thank you, and bless you, boys.

JEAUX BURREAUX FOR THE HEISMAN!!!!!!

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Mandolin Rain

Thursday, aka Friday Eve, has arrived and I have a purring kitty interfering with my computer usage this morning before I go to the office. Which is fine; he usually doesn’t want to sit in my lap when I’m at the computer and he seems to be okay with that this morning, which is lovely.

It’s been a week for the publishing world, let me tell you, Constant Reader. I am not going to talk about any of that here; I have another blog entry I am working on, where I talk about reading The Hunter by Richard Stark, which correlates with the crazy publishing week, so it’s best left to there.

Last night we watched perhaps the best episode of Castle Rock that has aired, either season, to date; as we learned about Annie Wilkes’ childhood and her relationship with her parents–and the two actors who played her mother and father were astonishingly good. It was riveting television, and I was truly sorry to see the episode end. It also seriously paid homage to Misery, and a lot of the things we are familiar with Annie saying were all learned from her parents. I know Castle Rock is theoretically set in an alternate universe to King’s novels, which enables them to use his characters, settings, and stories to create new versions–which is genius, really–and doing an entire season with Annie Wilkes as a younger woman was incredibly smart. Lizzy Kaplan is giving an Emmy worthy performance as young Annie, and watching this is making me want to reread Misery, which I still consider one of the best books of the last century.

Ironically, I wasn’t able to finish this entry yesterday; it’s the first blog day I’ve missed in quite a while. There’s been a lot of drama in two writing communities I belong to this week, and I’ve not been able to look away from either–one in particular I described to Paul as a slow-motion train wreck, and just when you think the last car has finally come off the tracks, here comes another train on the same line. Today, however, I am determined to ignore the train wreck as much as possible because I have too much to get done. I’ve not even been able to catch up on my emails, and the inbox just keeps filling up every damned day. So, today I am going to finish paying the bills, clean out my inbox, and do some goddamned writing. I’ll never finish this fucking book if I don’t focus, and I have some short stories that need to be reworked and revised and so forth as well.

Last night we watched the second-to-last episode of American Horror Story: 1984, and have just about decided that the only way one can watch a season of anything produced by Ryan Murphy is to simply not think about it, because once you start thinking about it you see all the holes in the plot and all the contrived behavior that makes no sense in terms of character–because the characters are only there to service the plot, which is the penultimate story-telling sin. But I can’t stop myself from watching–and somewhat enjoying–these shows. Some of the kids at work were streaming the Hotel season, which I’d stopped watching as it aired and never finished; and it seemed a bit more cohesive in a binge. I may go back and rewatch it, just to see if it works better as a binge show where you don’t have time to think about these things.

It certainly worked with The Politician.

I also want to finish reading The Ferguson Affair, which is making me think about some other issues with old works being read through the present-day lens (which also occurred with me reading The Hunter and, a few months back,  I the Jury)–and the age-old question of separating the artist from the art (not in Macdonald’s case; as far as I know he was never problematic, but the attitudes of the time, translated into fiction, are what I am talking about in this case–in particular, women and minorities and how they are represented on the pages of the book).

I am also slowly but surely making my way through Richard Campanella’s Bourbon Street, and enjoying the trip immensely. New Orleans history–dark and bloody as it is–is endlessly fascinating, and I am always finding inspiration for more stories and books the more of it I read.

I’m not really sure how much I am going to get done this weekend–the emotional drains of the LSU-Alabama game on Saturday, followed by the Saints-Falcons game on Sunday–is probably going to be prohibitive of doing any writing–unless I do it in the mornings–all weekend. So, mostly reading will be on the agenda this weekend, methinks.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. I don’t have to head into the office until around noonish, so I have this morning free to write and answer emails and put away dishes and…sigh. I’m getting tired just thinking about it, so I better just do it.

Til tomorrow, Constant Reader.

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