Category: shopping

Frankenstein

So, vacation. Five glorious days off, which are not to be wasted, but utilized productively; but I also intend to pace myself and give myself plenty of time to relax and read. It would be completely awesome to be able to get about three or four books read over the course of this holiday/vacation weekend; there are also some films I’d like to watch in the evening–and since I cannot watch any of the shows Paul and I are watching together, that definitely frees up some more time. There are some Hitchcock films available on Amazon Prime; I may do a Hitchcock film festival this weekend. Who knows? We shall see. The possibilities are endless, after all.

One chore I have to do is read the galley proofs for Royal Street Reveillon, which means the book is that one more step closer to becoming, you know, an actual book; which is of course incredibly cool and never truly ever gets old. At the rate I am going, of course, there’s no telling when there will be another book by me; I can’t seem to finish anything these days, but hopefully over these next five days there will be progress made and I can take great joy in getting something done. I am very scattered–that creative ADD I talk about all the fucking time–and seriously, it is rather daunting to think about all the things I have in some sort of progress–a collection of essays, two short story collections, at least three (now four, if you count the Chanse first chapter I wrote last week) novels in some sort of stage of being finished, and countless, endless short stories.

I’d like to send some more stories out to markets; perhaps this weekend, if I don’t get sidetracked and distracted, as I always seem to be. I always tend to think I’ll get more done over this little vacations than I wind up getting done, but on the other hand, I am also going into this vacation more well-rested than I usually do. I am not in the least bit tired this morning, and I wasn’t tired after I got home from work last night; which is a good sign. Perhaps I am adjusting, at long last, to getting up early in the mornings again and maybe I can go back to the times when I used to get a lot done in the mornings.

Then again, it only takes one shitty night of insomnia to derail everything, doesn’t it? But that didn’t happen last night again–thank you baby Jesus–and so this morning I am awake, rested somewhat, and thinking lazy thoughts already. Oh, I don’t need to do that today, I have five days after all–which is, quite naturally, how it always starts, you know? “Oh, sure, why don’t I just be lazy for two days–take a weekend–and then the last three days of the vacation I can be getting things done.” And then nothing ends up getting done at all…why not simply get everything done to begin with, and then take the weekend?

I got further along in I the Jury yesterday at the office between clients, and it is definitely something I’m glad I’ve taken the time to read—despite the limits on my reading time–and the essay I rather glibly assumed I’d be able to write after reading it is sort of taking form in my mind. It’s a short book, fortunately, but the philosophy behind it is one that generally doesn’t appeal to me; if toxic masculinity were a book, it would be a Mike Hammer novel. But at the same time, I can also understand and see why these books sold so ridiculously well, and why they appealed to so many (mostly) male readers; Hammer is an exaggeration of the so-called masculine ideal, the ‘lone wolf rugged individualist American man’, which goes hand-in-hand with so many of our societal and cultural problems–past of the mythology of this continent and this nation is based in that loosely defined (and periodically redefined) sense of freedom; this wild frontier and wilderness that had to be settled, tamed, reframed and repurposed. (I sometimes marvel at how remarkably beautiful this continent must have been before European civilization; it’s still stunningly beautiful today, with all the taming and civilizing that has happened.) After the second world war, as the American economy steamed full forward and the society/culture was itself reframed, modernized, and changed forever into what is now looked back at as the great modern society–that sense of wildness and freedom was gradually lost, and it was also the first true generation that didn’t really have that same sense of “hey let’s go west and start a new life” because the west was already “won”, and what men were taught as traditional forms of American masculinity, developed over decades and centuries (with the poison pill of white supremacy inside) were no longer possible and as the so-called good life of career, home and family became sanitized and suburbs and home ownership and consumer culture began subsuming and redefining American masculinity, writers like Spillane tapped into that dissatisfaction and gave them heroes/idols like Mickey Spillane, the rugged masculine ideal who all women wanted and desired; who lived by a strange code; whose methods were steeped in violence; and had no problem taking the law into his own hands–and was SUCH a ‘man’s man’ that even the police never tried to rein him in even as he violated the law and civil rights and the foundations of law and justice the country was built upon.

As you can see, the essay about Mike Hammer/Mickey Spillane is already starting to take form in my brain.

Maybe I could have been an academic, after all.

So, what’s on the agenda for today? I want to do some cleaning, and some writing, and I also have galleys to proof as well as a cover design to look over and approve (it’s so remarkably beautiful! It’s one of my favorite covers ever–Lake Thirteen will probably always be my favorite cover, but this one comes very close to supplanting it in my affections), and I also want to finish reading I the Jury. I also have to go pick up prescriptions and the mail today; I might make a grocery list and stop at Rouses as well–the less time I have to spend outside the house this weekend the better, quite frankly. After I read I the Jury I am most likely going to read either Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek, or perhaps dip into some horror; I’ll have to see how the spirit moves me once I get everything going. I also want to clean out my email inbox–there are emails in there I’ve ignored and done nothing about for far far too long, and they need to be gone.

It’s always such a lovely feeling when your inbox has been cleaned out completely, isn’t it? And it’s been far too long.

As for right now, though, I need more coffee and something to eat…so on that note, I shall leave you for the day and return to the spice mines.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!

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You Are The Sunshine of My Life

Sunday morning. It took me awhile to fall asleep last night; the last time I remember looking at the clock it was around three in the morning and I was still pretty much awake.  I did manage to doze off around that time, though, and while I still woke up around eight thirty, I feel somewhat rested this morning.

I didn’t do any writing yesterday; I wound up cleaning and organizing and doing that sort of thing for most of the day, interspersed with reading. It was, despite having to go out in the heat and humidity of the early afternoon, kind of a lovely day, really. It wasn’t as terribly hot as I feared it would be, and once I was back inside the cool of the inside of the Lost Apartment, I was able to get some things I needed to get done finished; I also need to finish the organizing I started yesterday but never quite finished. I also came up with some amazing and key things for the WIP, which technically I should be finishing up today–big surprise, it’s not finished nor will it be by midnight–so I am also trying to figure out what I want to do; should I follow my schedule and reluctantly put it to the side, to go back and spend the month revising the other I’d planned on working on for July, or should I go ahead and work my way through this first draft, trying to get it finished this week, and then diving back into the other?

Decisions, decisions.

I suspect I’ll keep working on the WIP, if I am going to be completely honest. Yes, it’s been horrible, like extracting teeth by gripping them with my fingers and yanking really hard, but also last night I had some more breakthroughs about the main character as well as the story I am telling. I also remembered some more things I need to go back and litter through the first sixteen chapters I’ve written–not that big of a deal, as they are all early draft and intended to be worked on more any way–but I am always feeling pressed for time, as is always the case.

Paul is departing to visit his mother for a week, starting tomorrow; I am taking a stay-cation of my own built around the 4th of July holiday. I am only working Monday and Tuesday this week before having a delightful five consecutive days off from work; suring which I have deeply ambitious plans to get a lot of cleaning, organizing, and writing done…as well as a lot of reading. I am going to step away from the Diversity Project with my next read–triggered by a Twitter conversation with the amazing Sarah Weinman–and am going to read Mickey Spillane’s I the Jury next. In a way, though, it’s really still a part of the Diversity Project, just not the way I’d originally seen it: a necessary adjunct, or rather, corollary to the Diversity Project should be reading, and examining, and critiquing, the crime genre’s long fascination with a particular type of masculinity; the Mike Hammer novels are certainly the perfect examples of that, almost to the nth degree.

And can I really call myself a student of my genre without reading Spillane?

I am sure the books themselves are problematic; almost everything from that time period is in some ways (I still remember reading a James Ellroy novel–I don’t remember which one–which had some incredibly horrible homophobia in it; it was painful and difficult to read, but absolutely in line with the thinking of cops in the 1950’s; and I do believe sometimes it’s necessary to read these problematic texts, to critique and understand them and the time period from whence they were originally written and published.

A conversation I had on Twitter with Rob Hart (whom you should also be reading; his next novel The Warehouse, sounds absolutely terrific and I am eagerly awaiting its release) also triggered a thought; that perhaps a non-fiction/memoir type book about me, my reading life, and queer representation in mainstream crime novels might be an interesting thing to write; whether or not there’s an audience or a publisher for such a work remains to be seen, of course, but it does sound like an interesting intellectual challenge.

It might also be horrifically difficult, but reading is about learning, isn’t it?

And on that note, none of this stuff is going to get done unless i start doing it, you know?

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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Brother Louie

I’m feeling a little better.

I think part of the problem was just exhaustion, in addition to some stomach upset. I spent most of the day yesterday (other than doing the laundry) pretty much curled up in my easy chair with Scooter sleeping in my lap while I read. What did I read? Nothing I loved enough to talk about publicly, frankly; my rule is to never post about a book that I didn’t absolutely love, or at the very least truly enjoy. I slip up with this from time to time, and have taken potshots at authors from time to time; it’s not something I’m terribly proud of, but reading is, after all, subjective; something I hate may be more to someone else’s taste, and I’ll never denigrate a book or author publicly because I know how much work it is to produce a novel.

At the very least, I like to show respect for a colleague’s hard work. And make no mistake about it, producing a novel is very hard work–hell, just typing  a novel is hard work.

After finishing the disappointing novel, I turned to Anne Somerset’s Unnatural Murder, which is about the notorious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London during the reign of King James I of England; the murder was masterminded by the wife of one of the King’s notorious favorites. It was one of the most scandalous trials involving the royal court in English history, and the resolution, the revelations in the trial, and the later pardons from the King to both the favorite (Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset) and his beautiful wife Frances Howard, began an undermining of the monarchy, which inevitably led to the English Civil War, the downfall of the Stuart monarchy for a time, and the execution of King Charles I.

King James I, the man who brought the crowns of England and Scotland together in the same monarch, had male favorites rather than female; beautiful men he showered titles and honors on throughout his life. Whether James ever acted physically on his attractions and love for beautiful men is not known; he himself vehemently denied any kind of physicality with other men; but he certainly preferred the company of beautiful men to that of beautiful women. Robert Carr was only one of the many male favorites the King loved during his lifetime; Carr was followed by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was also close to James’ son, King Charles I. Whether the favorites themselves were gay–they also, like James, always had wives and children–or even bisexual is unknown; certainly in the case of Buckingham the King was the only male he was ever linked with. I do think it’s possible that James never had a physical relationship with any of his favorites; it may have been a “look and love, but never touch” sort of thing for him. He was deeply religious and his desires were, of course, anathema to the church, and he also had a very real fear of being murdered and/or deposed; his mother was deposed and later beheaded (Mary Queen of Scots was his mother), and his father was murdered (Lord Darnley), most likely in a plot masterminded by his mother’s lover. He was less than a year old when he became King of Scotland; he was nearly forty when he followed his mother’s bitter rival Elizabeth I to the English throne.

It is interesting (at least to me) that in this Elizabethan/Jacobean period (and shortly thereafter) produced many royals with same sex attractions; Henri III of France ruled during this time and his affections for male favorites was quite well known; Louis XIV’s brother Philippe Duc d’Orleans was also infamous for the same reason. There have been other sexually suspect kings and royals throughout history; James’ own granddaughter Queen Anne was, if not one in fact, a lesbian by inclination. (See The Favourite.)

This morning I feel much better; my stomach seems settled and I slept well, after resting and relaxing for most of the day yesterday. Today I need to venture out into the stifling heat and humidity, and I also need to write. Oh! Yes, I did spend some time in my easy chair with my MacBook Air going over the copy edits of Royal Street Reveillon, which is inching closer and closer to publication date, which is lovely. It’s been a while since the last Scotty book–Garden District Gothic, which I think was released in 2016? Has it really been three years since the last Scotty book? Then again, it’s also hard to wrap my mind around the idea that my first book was released seventeen years ago.

I also think taking a day away from the pressure of trying to get caught up on the WIP was a smart thing to do. I may try to write a chapter later today. I don’t know. I am wondering if I should just keep plowing through this until the first draft is finished before seeing if i can get the other manuscript revised in what time is left before August 1, when I have to dive into something else entirely for two months. There’s also short stories to write, revise, edit, and so on, and so forth. It truly never ends for me, you know. And there’s still yet another unfinished manuscript in a drawer that needs to be worked on as well. Heavy heaving sigh.

And let’s not forget, I also started writing another Chanse book this past weekend.

Heavy heaving sigh.

Focus, Gregalicious, focus.

I also need to figure out what I’m going to read next, quite frankly. I may take a break from the Diversity Project and read one of the many books in the dusty TBR pile…I don’t know. I’ll just, after getting everything done that needs to be done to day, just look through the bookcases and the piles of books and see what’s there to read.

And there’s always non-fiction, of course. It’s not like I don’t have a massive pile of books on Louisiana and New Orleans history and folklore I could get lost inside.

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

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Killing Me Softly with His Song

Strumming my pain with his fingers…

Much as I love this song, I’ve always found it a bit odd. I mean, that opening line alone! And I have to admit, when I was twelve and I first heard this song on the radio–it was played a lot–it took me a long time before I realized the sentence wasn’t strumming my thing with his fingers…which is an entirely different meaning.

My week of deep and restful sleep continued last night. It’s odd, but I think adding Breathe-right strips to my nightly routine–those things that you put on the bridge of your nose and they help you breathe better–this week might have made the difference. Between breaking my nose as a teenager and having it never re-heal properly (the cartilage is detached from the bone; I can literally flatten my nose by pushing on it), years of drug abuse in my twenties, and the sinus issues I’ve had since moving towards New Orleans, breathing during my sleep has become more of an issue, and since the nose strips seem to help me sleep better, it makes me tend to think that is the real answer to my sleep issues.

Whatever may be the case, it’s lovely to have slept well every night this week. I cannot recall the last time I had an entire week of sleeping well. We’ll see what, if any, difference it makes in my life and my productivity–and never fear, Constant Reader, I will keep you posted as things develop.

I have a three day weekend this weekend, which is why I am not already at the office and instead am at my desk, swilling coffee and getting the laundry (it’s Bed Linen Friday) accomplished. I had thought about running errands today–I need to go to Costco, get the mail, and do some grocery shopping–and while it’s somewhat easier to do those things on Friday while most people are at work, I am thinking today might just be a good day to stay inside, clean, edit, write, organize, and etc–and I can run the errands tomorrow, when I am fully recovered from a week of work.

I got off early yesterday, as I do on every Thursday (except this coming one; it’s National HIV Testing Day; know your status, New Orleanians!) and stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the office, and did some straightening and cleaning up around here before venturing out to the neutral ground to catch the streetcar, so I could meet an author in from out of town for work at the Aloft Hotel on Baronne Street, Alexia Gordon (you can check out her books here, they sound interesting! Can’t wait to dive in myself), and a good time was had by me–although I’m not sure about whether she had a good time or not; as is my wont, I babbled nervously almost non-stop, barely giving her a chance to get a word in edgewise–which is why I have so few friends…well, one reason at any rate) but it was lovely. I love taking the streetcar, and I had some serious streetcar luck; the streetcar downtown was almost completely empty–just me and one other rider, and then the one uptown’s money machine was broken so the ride was free! It was also, once the sun went down, a lovely warm night with a delightfully cool breeze, and walking the two blocks home from the streetcar stop was lovely as a result. There was also a drunken white woman in cut-off jeans standing in the street as I turned the corner to my block. She looked terribly confused and was weaving a bit, her cell phone in hand, and as I drew nearer she said, “My car was towed and I don’t know who to call.”

“You should ask them at the bar,”  I said, gesturing back to the corner. “They can probably help you.”

Perhaps not very gallant or gentlemanly, but she was clearly intoxicated. Also, cars are rarely, if ever, towed from our street, and they certainly wouldn’t be after dark. So, my best guess was her car had either been stolen, or in her intoxication she’d forgotten where she’d actually parked it. And when last seen, she was walking back to the bar, so I am sure she was able to get assistance in figuring out where her car was.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if her car had, indeed, been towed by the city, she wouldn’t be able to get it until today (been there, done that).

Life in New Orleans.

But as I walked home from the streetcar stop, enjoying the warm evening and the cool breeze, I thought what a lovely evening this was, and it is lovely to get out and enjoy my city, albeit briefly, I should get out more and try to be more social–which I think whenever I am social and have enjoyed myself. But then the iron gate closed behind me and I unlocked my door and was safely back inside the Lost Apartment, and my tendency to be a shut-in hermit came rushing back…as I watched The Real Housewives of New York (again, the gold standard for reality television), I began planning my weekend so I can leave the house as little as possible.

Some things, you see, never change.

And so now, it’s back to the spice mines, and getting this apartment under control.

Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader.

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Rock and Roll All Nite

So, I got my new glasses yesterday.

The trip to Metairie and back was relatively pain-free, other than idiot drivers on the interstate (but that’s anytime you get on the interstate here), and I have to say I like my new glasses. I’ve always chosen glasses more based on functionality than as a “fashion accessory” (I actually only discovered that was a thing about twelve years ago, and it still amazes me on both ends–one, that it’s a thing, and two, that it never dawned on me in almost forty years of wearing glasses to pick them out based on how they look on me), and I have very little patience for trying on glasses or shopping for them. I like big lenses, because it always bothers/distracts me when I can things out of focus around them. It’s also hard to find glasses that are wide enough across the face, because the distance from ear to ear that the glasses have to reach across is not proportional to the distance between my eyes.

So my glasses seem to always have the legs jutting off to the side, rather than backwards, which looks odd.

But not these new ones. The lenses are so big I can’t blurry things around them unless I look hard left or right, and the frames are so wide that the legs go straight back to my ears. I also hadn’t realized how out-of-date my old glasses were (just two years, really; maybe three?) because now I see so much better with my new ones, and they do feel comfortable on my ears and to my eyes, which is quite nice, frankly.

And of course, I primarily selected these not for how they look but for their function. The lenses are big, and so are the frames. Whether they are flattering, I don’t know. The entire concept of glasses as an accessory to enhance my appearance is an utterly foreign concept to me. I guess it goes back to being a kid and wearing glasses being considered being a strike against the way you look? (Glasses and braces–hello, Jan Brady!–being the original dipso duo) The whole men don’t make passes are girls who wear glasses thing. I know that when I wear glasses rather than my contact lenses any concern I might have about my appearance goes away; I’m wearing glasses, you see, so it doesn’t matter; I couldn’t possibly look good.

And then I begin to wonder–was it when I started having to wear progressive lenses, which fucked up the ability to wear contacts, that I started not caring about how I looked? I do remember thinking, once I had to go to progressives (no longer called bi-focals, because that’s a stigmatizing term that indicates GETTING OLD) that I could never wear contacts again; it was around this same time that I hurt my back at the gym and had to stop working out for nearly a year–a year away from the gym from which my body never truly has recovered. (And this was also, oddly enough, around the time that I decided to teach myself how to cook and bake….so my caloric intake went up around the same time that my caloric output dramatically decreased. I often wonder if the reason I feel so old and  tired so often is because I don’t work out regularly anymore)

But I like my new glasses, and I don’t know whether they are flattering or not–but i also got new progressive contact lenses as well, and I am trying very hard to adapt to wearing contacts again. When I do wear my contacts I feel differently than I do when I wear glasses; and I know damned well that it’s a completely mental thing that has nothing to do with reality. I am conditioned to think I look better without my glasses, whether I actually do or not. It’s all part and parcel of the cultural and societal conditioning I grew up with.

I started wearing glasses quite young; I was either seven or eight when I got my first pair of glasses, and to this day I remember the first time I wore them outside the house, to school. As I walked the block and half to my grade school, I remember looking at the trees and the houses and everything and being astonished at how clearly I could see everything; I also remember thinking this is how everyone else sees all the time. My entire life up until that point I’d seen everything as blurry, indistinct shapes of color the further away from them I was, and it was wondrous to be able to see the world clearly for the first time.

The fact that I wore glasses–and this is another one of those ridiculous societal things we were all brainwashed with back when I was a child–also made people think I was smart, because there was some strange correlation made between wearing glasses and being intelligent. I was intelligent, of course, but the glasses had nothing to do with it; it was, I suppose, one of those strange things where the stereotype had built up that people who wore glasses strained their eyes studying and because of the glasses they couldn’t play sports and therefore couldn’t be dumb jocks. Glasses did make it difficult for me to play sports, but my primary problem wasn’t my glasses but the problem I had (and still have, to this day) with depth perception.

My grandmother, for the record, always believed I needed glasses because I read too much in the car, which is completely insane, but she absolutely believed this and convinced my parents of it as well–so they didn’t let me read in the car for years. I guess that’s one of those “old-wives’-tales-from-back-in-the-holler” that my parents took with them to Chicago when we moved up there when I was two years old.

Rural Southern wisdom, for what it’s worth.

All right, I’ve got a lot to do today and I need to get going on it. Tis off to the spice mines with me, and have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader.

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Junk Food Junkie

Well, Constant Reader, we made it through another week successfully, and the weekend is nigh. I slept pretty well again last night, which was lovely. It’s my half-day today at the office (the second of two in a row) and after I get off work I have to travel out to Metairie to pick up my new glasses, and then its back home to clean and organize and maybe–just maybe–do some writing today. I’ve not written a thing all week, which is pretty shameful. I was tired most of the week from not sleeping deeply, and then yesterday–the first day where I’d slept well–I was busy trying to get caught up on the things I was too tired to do on the long work days when I was feeling tired. I have to make a birthday cake for a co-worker this weekend (red velvet cheesecake, thank you very much) and so while I am at Target today I’m going to buy one of those cake carrier things. I will have to make a grocery run tomorrow as well, but other than that I am going to mostly hang around the house this weekend and get writing/editing done. The editing is the most important thing; that manuscript is coming up due soon, so I really need to get it finished.

Heavy heaving sigh.

But next weekend i have a three day weekend. I have Friday off because the following Thursday (our pay weeks, oddly enough, run from Friday thru Thursday) I am working an eight hour day on National HIV Testing Day in the Carevan at the Walgreens in my neighborhood. So I can literally roll out of bed, shower and get dressed and walk over two blocks to work, and walk two blocks back home when the day is done. I love me some three day weekends, Constant Reader, as you are undoubtedly already aware, and then two weeks later I am taking a mini-vacation around the 4th of July. (I will most likely take another one around my birthday in August as well; then there’s Labor Day, and the end of October is Bouchercon.)

The Lost Apartment isn’t nearly the mess it was before I got home from work yesterday. I did some laundry and a load of dishes–there’s another load that needs to be done as well, and then of course the bed linens, which I do every Friday–and I really need to do the floors as well. I’m not certain about what to do about dinner this evening–well, I suppose nothing, as i just remembered Paul won’t be home this evening as he has made plans with some friends–so I’ll be home pretty much alone most of the day once I get home from Metairie.

Sigh, Metairie. I think I’ll stop at Atomic Burger on my way home. I love their food. I don’t eat fast food that much anymore–living in New Orleans definitely broke both Paul and I of the bad fast food habits we have before we lived here. I think from my graduation from high school through going on my get-healthy kick in 1995 I probably ate most, if not all, meals at fast food places. Which explains the ballooning weight during those eighteen years, and my general not-good health during that period. Now, I so rarely eat fast food that it generally doesn’t agree with my system and it reminds me why I don’t eat it anymore–but there are some exceptions. Five Guys, Sonic and Whataburger remain favorites, but I don’t eat at any of them very often–and they also don’t make me feel sick in the aftermath, either. I do like Atomic Burger in Metairie, though–I’ve only eaten there twice over the last two years or so–but it might make a nice treat for me today to reward myself for the trip to Metairie. But it should be at a time going and coming back that shouldn’t be too terrible, traffic-wise.

I hope, anyway. Even the day I had my eye appointment and had to come back into the city during rush hour wasn’t that terrible, really.

Fingers crossed, at any rate.

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

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Take the Money and Run

Ah, being a writer.

The first month Paul and I lived in New Orleans, we went to a fundraiser for the LGBT Center–I don’t remember how or why we found out about it, or were invited, I don’t know. It was at the Country Club–back when the Country Club was a seedy, queer-only, clothing optional place–and the only thing I truly remember about that evening was they had a tarot card reader, and as someone who’s always been fascinated by the occult and the tarot in particular, I let her give me a reading. We went through the whole thing of me cutting and shuffling the deck, then holding them in my hands and concentrating on my question before handing the deck back to her.

She dealt the cards and smiled. “The answer to your question is yes–but it won’t be anything like you think or hope or expect it to be.”

The question, of course, was will I ever be a published author?

And of course, her response was incredibly vague, could apply to any number of questions, and so on and so forth…but here I am, twenty three years later, a published author and you know what else?

It’s nothing like I thought it would be like, or expected, or hoped.

And to be honest, it’s so much lovelier than I ever thought it would be. Sure, it’s not my sole source of income, like I’d hoped it would be, nor do I get glamorous book tours where I fly around the country to appear and sign books for crowds of adoring, worshipping fans, or have to watch Hollywood studios conduct a bidding war for the rights to turn my books into films or television shows…but it is lovely in so many other unexpected ways: the readers I’ve met, the other writers I’ve befriended and gotten to know, the conventions like Bouchercon…I never thought about those sort of things.

And I do love writing–although I groan about it all the time–even though it never seems to get easier. I’ve not written a single word on anything this week–not a fucking word–and I really need to make up for that this weekend else this manuscript is never going to be finished…and I really need for it to be finished so I can finish the other one. I hate the thought of just putting this one aside for now…but on the other hand, maybe coming back to it at a future date after letting it sit for a while might just be the trick? It’s hard to say–that’s certainly worked in other instances. And maybe working on something else over the course of this weekend might kick the WIP back into shape. At any rate, I have to do something because I can’t just keep letting time go by while not getting anything done.

And the house is a mess. My kitchen is a disgrace–the sink is full of dirty dishes, the counters covered with debris and garbage and things that need to be put away–and I haven’t even done anything to the living room in well over a month. Today is one of my half-days; I am going to stop at Rouse’s on the way home to pick up some things, and then I am going to get the kitchen cleaned and the laundry done and do some work on the living room before sitting down to write some things. I want to get some short stories submitted–I think “The Carriage House” and “This Thing of Darkness” are pretty much ready to go (but I do want to reread them and possibly tweak them at least one more time before hitting the submit button), and I do want to think about some of the other some more as well…and there’s also that goddamned proposal to work on.

No rest for the eternally wicked, is there?

And on that note, the spice mines are calling my name. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader!

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With Your Love

Here we go again, on the rollercoaster that is my usual work week! Good morning, Monday, how the hell are you?

I am still rather sleepy this morning; more of a tired eyes thing than anything else, really. I got new contact lenses (a trial pair) from my optometrist on Thursday; yesterday was my first time trying them out in real life, as it were (I wore them home from Metairie on Thursday, taking them out as soon as I got home). The new lenses didn’t really seem to fit in my right eye; that lens felt off the whole time Thursday, and again when I put them in yesterday. But within minutes my right eye adjusted and they became comfortable; the progressive lenses actually began to work as well, which they hadn’t any time I had tried previously with another set of lenses. I wound up wearing them for almost seven hours yesterday, which was kind of lovely. Today and tomorrow, however, are too long of work days to try them out again; I’ll hold off until Wednesday before trying them again. But it’s nice to have contact lenses again; I’ve not really worn contacts since discovering, five or six years ago, that I need progressive lenses (what used to be called bifocals).

This weekend, on June 1, I started posting on social media about queer crime books in order to celebrate Pride Month (last year I simply posted a queer book cover every day for Pride; this year I am specifically focusing on queer crime novels). I want to be absolutely clear that, in case there’s any confusion, I am posting queer crime books that were influences on me; or influential at some point in my lengthy (!) career. At the end of the month I will post the entire list here for more easy access to anyone looking to look at queer crime novels, or looking for such a list–I may not be an expert on queer fiction, or even on queer crime fiction, but I do have my list and I do know the books I read and enjoyed that made me think and develop my own queer crime novels.

And if I can bring attention to a queer crime writer who has somehow fallen off the radar, so much the better.

Yesterday we went to brunch at our friend Pat’s lovely deluxe apartment in the sky; she really has the most spectacular views of the Mississippi River at what’s called the Riverbend (from her dining room) and the rest of the city (from the terrace outside her living room). Her apartment is filled with natural light, gorgeous built in bookshelves filled with wonderful books, and amazing art everywhere. It’s kind of a dream apartment for me–one I’d never be able to afford in a million years–but every time I set foot in her apartment I do spend a moment or two fantasizing about living there (just as I always fantasized about living in her partner Michael’s former home in Hammond). It was, as always, a lovely afternoon, and enormously relaxing. I wasn’t able to do anything when I got home around six because I was so relaxed; instead, I started watching Chernobyl on HBO, which is incredibly sad and disturbing. I remember when Chernobyl happened in real life, just as I remember the Three Mile Island scare in the late 1970’s. It’s interesting that since those two scares that nuclear power plants are pretty much not talked about or thought much about anymore, when back in the day they were quite controversial (I’ve mentioned Scotty’s parents protesting nuclear power plants in the earlier books in the series) but that controversy doesn’t seem to exist as much anymore, as though activists have maybe given up on their dangers…or it’s not glamorous enough to be considered newsworthy anymore. I do recall after the natural disaster in Japan several years ago (earthquake/tsunami) there were concerns about a Japanese nuclear power plant…but those concerns also evaporated once the news cycle moved on from the Japanese disaster.

One thing that was interesting about visiting Pat’s apartment was her view of the river, mainly from the dining room windows–which was my first experience this year actually looking at how the river is in its flood stage. The river has apparently been in flood stage longer than it has any time since the Great Flood of 1927, which changed everything as far as governmental policies and procedures for fighting floods; this was the natural disaster that created the Southeast Louisiana Flood Project, building levees and dams all along the river and its tributaries. For only the third time in history all the spillways north of New Orleans are being opened–and the tributaries are all still flooding and continuing to rise. The river itself it almost to the top of the levees in Baton Rouge, and apparently a levee on the Mississippi breached further north yesterday or this morning; I saw the report on social media earlier this morning but didn’t read it; I think it was in Illinois, maybe?

Anyway, the river is really high and this reminds me that the river being high was a plot point in Bourbon Street Blues, all those years ago, and it also reminds me of how vulnerable the city is for this year’s hurricane season–if the river is already almost to the tops of the levees, a storm surge coming up the river would overtop them quite easily; which begs the question, would the levees be blown below the city to save it? Any time there’s potential flooding of New Orleans there’s always the belief that levees are blown to save the city; people believe the levee failure during Katrina was planned, to save the French Quarter and white Uptown; people still believe the levees were blown below the city for Betsy in 1965.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Getaway

Friday morning, and I survived not only going out to Metairie yesterday for my eye exam, but driving back into New Orleans from Metairie during rush hour. It wasn’t that bad, actually, but if I had to do that every day–well, let’s just say there would be a body count and leave it there, shall we?

Yesterday I also managed to finish Chapter Thirteen; only got slightly over 900 words done, but it’s hard for me to start a new chapter when I know I’m not going to finish it in one sitting, you know? That’s how I  generally like to mark my daily progress; a chapter a day, and it unsettles me when I leave a chapter unfinished overnight. I think so far this has been about a 7000 word week (maybe more, I don’t remember when I wrote Chapter 11; but if it was this week I passed the 10k mark. Huzzah!); and today when I leave the office I am going to get the mail and stop to make groceries–just a few things–before heading home to clean and hopefully get some writing done. I’d also like to get some more reading done; I am enjoying Black Diamond Fall so am hoping to have some more time to read it this weekend.

And whoa, boy, is this season of Killing Eve amazing! Seriously, binge it, people.

Well, here it is five o’clock this afternoon and I never finished this entry this morning before work, did I? I actually even forgot I was writing it until I just now saw the tab open. Not sure what that says about either my attention span or my short term memory, but there you have it.

The weather has turned hot here in New Orleans, so much so that I am seriously considering getting my car windows tinted. Is it just me, or has the sun gotten brighter and hotter; or am I simply more sensitive to it now that I am older? These and other questions plague me constantly these days. The air is also humid, so heavy you can almost feel yourself moving through it. The river is also really high, and there’s still more flooding up the river basin that has to make its way down here. As we enter hurricane season, these things are always in the back of my head.

But I got the mail and made groceries on my way home, and I’ve been doing the bed linens and cleaning odds and ends while my mind roams and wanders. I need a nice day of cleaning to clear my head of noise and refocus on the WIP. Chapter Thirteen ended with a lovely twist, but now I have to figure out how to deal with the fall out from that twist; a way that makes sense for my characters without coming off as either preachy or contrived or unearned or melodramatic–it’s a very fine line.

But I am glad I came across this; so that I can finish and post.

Back to the spice mines for me, and I’ll check in with you tomorrow, Constant Reader.

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Saturday Night

Well, it’s certainly Saturday morning. I woke up around eight, yet remained a lag-a-bed until around nine-ish, and you know what? Not sorry, not sorry in the least. I clearly needed to rest more–the work week seems to take more out of me these days than it used to, thank you, aging process–and now that I’m awake and swilling coffee, I feel more rested and relaxed than I did for most of the week. I still intend to write a lot this weekend, as well as get some serious cleaning done around here, and perhaps this is the time for me to finish reading Jamie Mason’s superb The Hidden Things, which is really fucking fantastic. She reminds me, in voice, style, and plotting, a lot of the great Patricia Highsmith. As I get deeper into the book and the stylish complexity of the plot becomes deeper and more tangled than I could have ever imagined when I read page one, I despair of the things that keep me from having more time to read so I can finish this exquisite gem of a novel. I am perhaps just over half-finished–which should give you an indication of how tired I’ve been lately; it’s taking me a really long time to finish this book–certainly longer than it should, given it’s consistent high quality.

The Anthony nomination this week (I still can’t believe it, to be honest) effectively derailed my entire week–but only because I allowed myself to bask in the glow of the enormous pat in the back from my colleagues, as well as the flood of congratulatory messages, posts, comments, and tweets. But now we’re in the afterglow stage of having to come back to earth and reality and get my life back together and on track yet again, particularly when it comes to writing. I really couldn’t afford to lose the days of writing I lost this week through my self-indulgence, and yet I did lose them. Chapter Eleven of the WIP has been a bitch to write; I started this past week and got about halfway through, and now have to go back to finish it and see if I can get on some kind of roll with writing it. I am going to try something; I am going to try finishing that chapter today and then move on to some short stories that have been languishing in my files for a while. Last night–or more properly, sometime yesterday–I finally figured out how to fix my story “And The Walls Came Down”; it’s a shift in the plot which will require some extreme changing. I also want to revise “This Thing of Darkness” one more time, and I’d like to get some done on my lengthy short story that is turning into a novella, “Never Kiss a Stranger.”

We watched Widows last night, which was good, but could have been better. The acting was topnotch, as were the relationships between the women–but the plot was so complicated and twisted I wasn’t sure I was actually following it and knew what was going on for most of the movie; that could also be entirely my fault. But Viola Davis is one of the finest actresses of our time, and I would watch her in anything, to be honest; her performances are always complex, nuanced, and brilliant.

We also need to catch up on Fosse/Verdon, which I can’t recommend highly enough, and we have yet to start season two of Killing Eve, which I am also excited about watching; although I am very worried about sophomore slump; season one was so brilliant and fantastic that I have concerns that the second season won’t pass muster.

Today I have to go by the Cat Practice to get another bag of Scooter’s expensive food (no, his Majesty is NOT spoiled, thank you very much), and then have to swing uptown to get the mail and make some groceries (not many, thank you Baby Jesus) before returning home, where I plan to spend the rest of the afternoon writing and cleaning (and probably doing some preparatory cooking for next week, as well). I may get the car washed as well; it’s looking pretty dirty, and the Uptown Car Wash does a lovely job; or perhaps I can put it off until next week, what with the three day weekend and all.

Yes, there’s a three day weekend lurking on the horizon, which is exciting. Huzzah! I am obviously thinking I’ll be able to either get a lot done over its course, or get a lot of rest, or some combination of the two, which would also be incredibly lovely.

I also have to start pulling together an article for Sisters in Crime for my diversity column. I have some ideas for it,  and I know who I want to speak to for it, but at the same time I’ve not been able to come up with an over-all hook for it. Maybe some brainstorming over the course of this particular weekend will do the trick for me.

And on that note, Constant Reader, it’s back to the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday!

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