Category: short stories

Monday Monday

I slept so deeply and well last night that not only did I not want to get up this morning, I am still groggy, despite many many many cups of coffee. It’s generally not a good thing to start a week off groggy, but there is a three day weekend on the horizon (HUZZAH!) look forward to. You’ve got to love that, don’t you?

I started reading The Sympathizer yesterday, and got about fifteen pages in. It’s quite good, and like the Whitehead novel, I suspect it’s going to take me a while to get through it. It’s interesting to see the Vietnam War from the perspective of an actual Vietnamese person (thus far I’ve only see the white/American gaze on the war), and I’ve been wanting to write a noir with its roots in the Vietnam War for quite some time, so this book is kind of a godsend. There’s also a very large Vietnamese community in New Orleans East, which I’ve also always wanted to write about (Poppy Z. Brite wrote about the New Orleans Vietnamese community in his novel Exquisite Corpse, which I should probably reread). The idea for the noir is still swirling around in my head; I have some basic idea of what it will be about and the story, but it’s still in that amorphous state. I didn’t get much writing or revising done yesterday (I did get some done, though. Don’t judge me.), but I did have a great brainstorm about the WIP, which is told in a very rigid, third person point-of-view; maybe I should show it from the occasional point of view of other people? I’ve made a note about this, but I am going to try to revise it with the point-of-view as originally seen intact; or maybe try one chapter in another p.o.v., see how it goes.

See? Revising can be fun.

I do want to get the new draft of “Quiet Desperation” finished this week, and I found a place to submit “Keeper of the Flame” to, so I am most likely going to do that on Wednesday, when I have a late night and as such don’t have to come back into the office until later.

And on that note, best to get back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for you.

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Sunday Morning Coming Down

Summer humidity finally arrived yesterday in all of its noxious glory. This morning, there is rain in the forecast for most of the day and my windows are covered on condensation. I slept very well last night, and also got most of my weekend chores done yesterday so today I can devote myself to writing, revising, and editing. It’s very lovely, you know, to wake up feeling rested. I think there’s another load of dishes that need to be run through the dishwasher, but other than that (and straightening up) I have my entire day free. I am trying to decide what novel to read next, and am leaning towards Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, but there are also some other books in the running. I’ll make up my mind at some point later today when I need to take a break from writing/revising/editing.

Last night, I did read Megan Abbott’s brilliant short story, “Girlie Show,” from Lawrence Block’s In Light or In Shadow. As always with Abbott, I was immediately drawn into the story; her remarkable gift for choosing just the right words, and for coming up with new, extraordinary word choices to describe something that create the picture in your head perfectly. She is also a very spare writer, able to do things with a five or six word sentence that other writers would need a lengthy paragraph to get across. The book itself is gorgeous, with reproductions of the Hopper paintings that inspired the writers. It’s also an incredibly impressive list of name authors–everyone from Block himself to Stephen King to Lee Child to Joyce Carol Oates to Jeffrey Deaver to Abbott herself; it is actually an incredible honor to be nominated in the same Anthony category as this book, frankly.

But back to Abbott’s story.

“She went udders out.”

“No pasties even?”

“Like a pair of traffic lights.”

Pauline hears them on the porch. Bud is telling her husband about a trip to New York City a few years ago. Going to the Casino de Paree.

Her husband says almost nothing, smoking cigarette after cigarette and making sure always has a Blatz in hand from the metal cooler beside him.

“Nipples like strawberries,” Bud is saying. “But she never took off her G-string. And she never spread her legs.”

The story is a return to period pieces, stories set in our more societally repressed past, like her early novels The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep, and Queenpin. I love her more recent novels, that are set in the present day, but no one writes period pieces quite as beautifully as she does. I’ve tried writing period stories, but am incredibly terrible at them, and I envy the ease with which Abbott spins her tales. She gets to the heart of her characters is such minimal yet insightful and clever ways; almost like she is tossing off a sentence so casually that at first it seems to just be another sentence, but there is so much truth and meaning contained within those few words that the reader gets an almost complete picture of who that character is…kind of like the story of Bette Davis, trying to understand her character Margo in All About Eve, and asking writer/director Joseph Mankieowicz for some insight. Davis later recalled, “He just shrugged and said ‘Margo is the kind of woman who treats a mink coat like a poncho,’ and I immediately knew exactly who she was.”

Abbott has that ability, and it’s always a pleasure to get lost in the richness of her words, the textures and layers of her stories.

And isn’t it way past time for a collection of her short stories? Just sayin’.

As I head back into the spice mines, I shall leave you with a Sunday hunk.

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Another Saturday Night

Well, it’s early afternoon in New Orleans. I’ve done my workout, run errands for both myself and Paul–including the always dreaded grocery run–and now am home, a bit worn out and needing to hop in the shower. The humidity is thick out there today, so thick I’ve already had to take a Claritin-D, and my kitchen is a mess and I have lots of laundry to do. I don’t think I’m going to do any writing today–my brain is tired; that may change later, one never knows–but I think I am going to just spend the rest of the day relaxing, reading, and slowly but surely getting the apartment straightened up and cleaned up and organized; the never-ending struggle not to live in a slovenly dump. Heavy heaving sigh. I also want to get back to reading About the Author, and select what I am going to read next (although I suspect, having gotten two anthologies in the mail–Storm Warning: Chesapeake Crimes and In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper—I may just curl up with some exceptional short stories.

Stranger things have happened.

We got all caught up last night on both The Handmaid’s Tale (which continues to be incredibly gripping while horrifying) and The Mick, which is a truly demented sitcom we are enjoying tremendously. I’m not sure what we are going to watch tonight–we’ve started watching the new season of American Crime, which seems to be about migrant worker, sex trafficking, and the opiod addiction crisis, and it really looks really gripping and good; I am really sorry the show has been cancelled. We never did watch the first season, so we can also always go back and watch it, but it’s a shame. Then again, a highly intelligent show about crime that shows the same crime from many different perspectives, with all the necessary nuance and complexity, without clear cut villains and heroes–well, it was bound to not last long.

Okay, some time has passed, and I indeed curled up in my easy chair with About the Author, and finished it. It’s terrific, full of twists and turns and surprises; and the author, John Colapinto, did a most excellent job of making an extremely unlikable protagonist, well, likable. I can highly recommend it; it still holds up, even though it is nearly twenty years old–obviously, technology has moved on–but other than that, it is so well done and so well told that you don’t really notice that sort of thing. Most, most excellent. I am currently grilling hamburgers while reading Megan Abbott’s story, “Girlie Show”, in Lawrence Block’s Edward Hopper anthology; it is, thus far, quite sublime.

And now, I need to go flip the burgers.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you.

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Coming Up Close

I wound up taking yesterday off from writing/editing, which really puts me under the gun today. But after working yesterday, getting groceries, and laundry, I was exhausted, and figured I’d get up early this morning and get going on the editing/rewriting. So, of course, I wound up sleeping late–I got almost ten hours of sleep last night, which is extremely unusual for me on any night. But I am not going to argue with it; I clearly needed the rest, right? So, I am going to get this entry finished up as a warm-up, clean up my email inbox as necessary, and then I am going to finish getting the kitchen cleaned up before showering and getting down to business here. I promised that I would get it finished today and turned in, and I am going to make this deadline no matter how badly I would rather curl up in a chair with About the Author, which I am absolutely loving, for many reasons.

I am only on my first cup of coffee right now, and am slowly waking up, which is kind of lovely. The shower will, as always, finish the process. It is a little disturbing how filthy the kitchen has become–out of order and all that. I am thinking about making shrimp creole for dinner, which means making it around two thirty (making the roux; etc.–it takes four hours to cook in the crock pot). I don’t think I’ll have a problem getting the edits/rewrite finished today, either–it really won’t take very long, I have very concise editorial notes and my editor really has a sharp eye for simple, easy ways to make the story and characters stronger, which is lovely. It’s simply a matter of not allowing myself to get distracted by anything, which is harder than it sounds.

At least, it is for me.

While I have been talking about Todd Gregory in the lead up to the release of his (my?) third Frat Boy book this week (its official release is Tuesday, for those of you who are keeping up), I’ve decided to skip over the vampire stories (“Blood on the Moon” and Need) because, while I enjoyed them and am proud of them, they are a different animal (there is a fraternity connection; my main character in both of those was a fraternity boy–Beta Kappa, of course–at Ole Miss) than the Frat Boy books. And while of course my Todd Gregory short story collection, Promises in Every Star and Other Stories, has little to do with either the Frat Boy books or the vampire stories, it’s more of a piece with the Frat Boy books than the vampire stories–although the short story “Bloodletting”, which is also Chapter One of Need, is included in it.

As I often have said, short stories are often more problematic for me than writing novels; so of course, having a short story collection put together has always been a dream of mine–from having enough stories to actually having any interest in such a book from a publisher. And Bold Strokes gave the collection a great cover.

promises in every star

You really can’t go wrong with that cover, can you?

It wasn’t my first short story collection, though. This was:

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That book happened in late fall, 2004. A publisher approached me and wanted to do a collection of my wrestling stories. I hadn’t published enough stories at that time to make up a full book, so I had to write some new ones, and I did. The book didn’t come out when it was supposed to, I never got paid anything for it, I wasn’t even sure if it was available anywhere–to be honest. The subsidiary rights were sold to Insightoutbooks, and it did very well there–again, I never saw any money because of ‘problems’ with the publisher. In the fall after Katrina, I got an offer from the publisher for a flat cash settlement to return the rights to me, terminate the contract, and get all remaining copies in stock at the warehouse….which ended up being nine copies. I seriously doubt the print run was that small, you know? In other words, I got thoroughly screwed…but at the same time, I wanted the mess over and done with and didn’t have the time nor interest as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and living situation after the flood, you know? I think you can still find copies of it somewhere on line–for ridiculous amounts of money. I personally only have one copy left. Maybe I should do it as an ebook. It can’t hurt, it’s just sitting there, right?

Anyway, I digress. As I look over the table of contents for Promises in Every Star, I see that only two stories–“Man in a Speedo” and “Will You Love Me in September?”–were the only stories in it to be previously unpublished; I’ve not really written any Todd Gregory short stories since the book came out, which is kind of odd, really. People just stopped asking me to write stories for their anthologies. Not sure why that is, but there you have it.

I love all of these stories–“Promises in Every Star,” “The Sea Where Its Shallow,” “Unsent,” and “Wrought Iron Lace” are particular favorites of mine–and I was terribly pleased to have them all in one book.

I’d love to do another collection of my darker stories–crime and horror–and I think I may have enough published to do one, although I’d probably have to write some new ones (and I do have some unpublished ones on hand) but I might have to do it as a self-published thing. Who knows? We’ll see.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

1, 2, 3, Red Light

Friday morning in the midst of an unusual cold spell for New Orleans. It’s the second weekend of Jazz Fest, and the high today–and yesterday– was merely seventy one degrees. It’s in the frigid low sixties right now; but it’s going to be sunny and clear and lovely all day; no rain in the forecast for the weekend. I have some appointments tomorrow, but am going to stop for groceries on my way home from work tonight so I don’t have to deal with that tomorrow. I’d like to make some further progress on the WIP tomorrow, as well; hope to do so today, too.

As I have said lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Alabama, primarily due to events I’ve done in that state this year (the first time I’ve ever done anything there). I have written short stories (full disclosure: only two have been published) set in Alabama, and only one book set there. Many years ago, I thought about doing a whole series of books set in Alabama, and all connected (what can I say? I was reading Faulkner) in one way or the other. I created a fictional town and county (thank you, Mr. Faulkner) and families and connections and the whole ball of wax, but never wrote any of them, of course. (I was always big on the ideas phase, not so much on the writing phase.) The town was Corinth, Alabama, and the county had the same name. Recently, as I’ve been doing research into Alabama history (when I’m between clients at work), those ideas have come back to me. Taylor, Frank’s nephew in the Scotty series, is from Corinth; Frank’s mother was from there and that’s the Sobieski connection to Alabama. My favorite short story of all the ones I’ve published, “Small Town Boy,” is also set there, and of course, when I started writing Dark Tide, my main character, Ricky Hackworth, was from Corinth–and somehow related to characters in the short story; we never know what the main character’s name is in the story, but the story focuses on his relationship with a Hackworth whose mother has just shot his father–“those trashy Hackworths.”

Dark Tide is one of my personal favorites of my books, and I think it’s partly because it was a return to Corinth. The book wasn’t set there–Ricky leaves Corinth for a summer job on the Gulf Coast of Alabama as a lifeguard–but Ricky was from there, and I was able to draw on the rich background I’d created for the town in my twenties as backstory for the book. I also tried to do something with the writing style that I’d never done before, which was mimic the pacing of swimming strokes with the pacing of the book. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I know some of the best work I’ve done is contained inside the pages of that book–there’s one particularly creepy scene where Ricky is swimming in the bay and he has this feeling that there are carnivorous mermen down in the depths of the bay beneath him as he swims, and then imagines it as he strokes through the calm morning waters. I also really liked the character of Ricky; he’s grown up relatively poor and motherless (the reader never knows what happened to his mother), and thinks back to how he is treated by the richer kids, how he is picked on for his suspected sexuality, how deeply closeted he is, and how he met, at a swimming camp his father could barely afford to send him to at the University of Alabama, he met and fell in love with someone who basically changed his life and helped him see that he wasn’t a freak. I loved the character of Ricky, and Dark Tide also is one of few novels I ever wrote that has a big twist that flips the story completely–there are hints, of course, I would never cheat–and I am very proud that I pulled it off.

The book was originally conceptualized and titled as Mermaid Inn. When I was a kid, I used to read comic books voraciously; I sometimes wonder how I found the money to buy as many comic books and kids’ series books as I did (I tend to suspect, now that I am in my fifties, that I was a great deal more spoiled as a child then I thought I was). DC Comics used to publish two comics that were more horror/mystery related than super hero oriented; House of Secrets and House of Mystery. EC Comics, which deeply influenced Stephen King, was no longer around by the time I was reading comics, so these two comics–with secret and mystery in their titles, which is what drew me in to them–were the first horror I read, and I loved how the stories always had a big twist at the end (and come to think of it, that’s the way I write horror, which is probably why I don’t sell any horror short stories). There was one issue that was completely devoted to a story called “Bloody Mermaids,” and I remember it to this day. It was an interesting tale; a scholar who was fascinated by the legend of the mermaid was determined to find one and thus prove they were real. He comes to an old inn along the seashore where mermaids have supposedly been sited over the years, only is horrified to discover that rather than beautiful and kind sea creatures, the ones who inhabit the sea at this place were monsters who feasted on human flesh and blood, and only come out at night; kind of like sea vampires. At the very end he finally finds one, he is horrified by the truth of what she is, and she knocks him out and is ready to drink his blood when the sun starts to rise and she has to flee back to the safety of the water. And the narrator–both comics had them–said something along the lines of ‘be careful what you wish for, the reality of what you seek may be something you don’t want to see.’ The story always fascinated me, and it inspired me to create a story of my own.

dark tide

 

The engine of my pickup truck made a weird coughing noise just as I came around a cruve in the highway on the Alabama Gulf Coast and I saw Mermaid Inn for the first time.

My heart sank.

That’s not good, I thought, gritting my teeth. I looked down at the control panel. None of the dummy lights had come on. I still had about a half tank of gas. I switched off the air conditioning and the stereo. I turned into the long sloping parking lot of the Inn, pulling into the first parking spot. I listened to the engine. Nothing odd. It was now running smooth like it had the entire drive down. I shut the car off and kept listening. There was nothing but the tick of the engine as it started cooling.

Maybe I just imagined it.

Hope springs eternal.

I took a deep breath while sitting there, listening closely to make sure.

The last thing I needed was to spend money on getting the stupid old truck fixed. Maybe it just needed a tune-up. I couldn’t remember the last time it had one.

Once Ricky arrives at the Inn and gets settled, he finds out the lifeguard from the summer before disappeared, and the longer he stays, the more he realizes that things in Mermaid Inn–and the nearby town of Latona–are not what they seem.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

I had a great workout this morning; the first time in a long time I can say that. Usually, I am so tired and brain-dead I just go through the motions, whining, but this morning, after some good sleep, I was wide awake and rarin’ to go, and also enjoyed it for the first time in a long time.  I didn’t sleep well Monday night; never fully going to sleep, spent most of the night in that horrible half-awake state, and was exhausted all day yesterday, which was a long work day for me culminating in a late night of bar testing. I also had trouble falling asleep last night, but I think I wound up with about five full hours of deep, restful sleep. I woke up before the alarm went off, but even that small amount of good sleep was what my body needed.

I don’t mind not getting eight hours, as long as I get some good sleep.

I was so tired yesterday I couldn’t focus, so of course, got nothing done that I needed to get done. That always sucks, of course, but I am hoping that with the rest, and the endorphin rush I have from working out, that I’ll be able to plough through a lot of things today. I want to finish reading Cleopatra’s Shadows, and then I am going to read Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle. I also am going to start restructuring the WIP, which is going to be probably an odious chore, but I am going to do that before I start the revision/editing process with it to get it ready. In an ideal world, it will be finished by the end of this month; in a realistic world more like the end of June. I also want to get the next draft of “Quiet Desperation” finished. (I have an idea for another story I’d like to get started, “In Lieu of Flowers”, so the sooner I can get the one finished, the sooner I can start working on the new one.)

I’m also thinking about the next book I want to write. I know, it’s crazy to start thinking about the next book I want to write while I am still working on the current WIP, but there are two I am toying with in my head–one would be called Girl X, the other You’re No Good–and I’ve had these ideas floating around in my head for quite some time now. (There are always lots of ideas percolating in my head at any time, in case you haven’t noticed by now.) So I am just going to brainstorm those whenever I get stuck on something else I am writing; both are, ironically, stories about the relationships between mothers and daughters–which is odd, since I am neither. But hey, what can I say?

Well, here’s a hump day hunk for you.

hump day hunk

 

Sweet Inspiration

Friday morning, and I finally slept like the dead last night. It was truly marvelous. I feel rested and like I can get a lot done today, but I really don’t want to go get groceries. I honestly feel like I could go the rest of my life without ever setting foot in another grocery store and wouldn’t miss it in the least. In fact, as I sit here, I am contemplating how I could conceivably put off going until tomorrow or Sunday. Paul’s visiting friends on the North Shore, and I am driving over there tomorrow to have lunch with them before driving home (Costco on the way home, too). But really, isn’t it best to get it over with now and be done with it completely? Not have it hanging over my head?

Heavy heaving sigh.

I’ve almost finished outlining the WIP, which is quite exciting. I intend to spend part of this weekend playing with it–fleshing out characters, getting deeper into the town itself, and its history, putting together all the back stories so that I can go into writing the next draft–which will include some rearranging and some shifting in structure, as well as polishing language and making it sparkle and shine–and I am actually looking forward to it, which is rather bizarre, considering how much I LOATHE revising/editing/rewriting. But there is something to having let the manuscript sit as long as I have; I’m not sick of it, I’m not tired of the characters, and I am bringing a fresh new perspective to it.

I’m also rediscovering my joy in writing. I hope to get the new draft of “Quiet Desperation” finished this weekend as well. We’ll see how it all goes, though, won’t we?

All right, I really need to get some things done this morning.

Here’s a hunk for Friday for you:

 

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Hey, Western Union Man

We continue to watch Thirteen Reasons Why, and last night we got through Episode 10, which was heartbreaking. Tonight when I get home from work we’ll watch Episode 11–spoiler! It’s when Clay listens to his own tape, and while I am absolutely riveted, I am also dreading the episode. I also am getting further in the book, which is different in some ways from the show.  At one point watching last night, I said to Paul, “I’m so glad I’m not a teenager now,” even though I feel relatively certain that the things that happen in the book/show probably happened when I was a teenager–I, like Clay, was probably unaware/oblivious to it all–which is a horrifying thought. I find that I am often unpacking a lot of things from my past, recognizing behaviors that were no big deal back then but now are horrifying.

I’ve been processing a lot of that lately, to be honest, and in no small part because of the manuscript. I didn’t do any reading/outlining yesterday, nor did I touch “Quiet Desperation,” primarily because I felt kind of tired and out of it yesterday (another wretched night’s sleep  Tuesday, followed by Wacky Russian on Wednesday morning), and while I certainly slept better last night, Paul’s alarm and his constant smacking of the snooze button this morning got me up earlier than I would have preferred. Tonight is yet another late night of bar testing, and tomorrow is the drive to Montgomery and the Author Welcome Party. Heavy heaving sigh. But I’ve pretty much decided not to spend the extra Saturday night in Montgomery; Saturday morning I’ll check out and head over to the Book Festival, spend the day there, and then drive back to New Orleans. That way I have Sunday here to run errands and do things, before driving up to Oxford on Monday. After all this travel I am going to get into a regular workout schedule upon my return, as well.

That’s the plan, at any rate.

So, this morning I am going to pack for the trip, clean the kitchen and get some laundry done, do some writing, and maybe read a bit. I am having lunch with a former intern of mine from a million years and several jobs ago–she’s now a lawyer, how bad-ass is that?–before I head to work. We are lunching at the Irish House, a pub-style restaurant whose chef won Chopped  many years ago, and they have pretty awesome fish-and-chips, and it’s a short walk from the Lost Apartment (I’ll take the car, though, so I can take my time and then drive to work from there). So the dryer is spinning, the washer is agitating, and I am sitting here with my second cup of coffee listening to a playlist on my iHome stereo waiting for the clouds to clear out of my head completely before I get up and unload the dishwasher and get the day going.

This morning I also picked out the story I’m going to revise/rewrite for an anthology I want to submit to–getting into it (it’s annual) is on my bucket list and I will keep trying until I do get in. I’ve submitted three or four times so far–failing every time–but two of the rejected stories ended up somewhere else, so that’s always a good thing. I am really taking my short story writing a lot more seriously than I used to; I am no longer allowing myself to think I am not good at it because that is self-defeating (another one of my daily affirmations, which really, as weird as it seems and as ‘new agey/touchy-feely/mumbo-jumbo’ as it feels and I’ve always dismissed it as, actually is seeming to work. 

I just wish I had thought this way twenty years ago. Ah, well, no regrets.

Live and learn.

Here’s a Throwback Thursday hunk for you, Grant Aleksander, who played Philip Spaulding on Guiding Light:

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Never Give You Up

As I get deeper into the outlining of the manuscript I am working on–yes, I am outlining it after writing it, which only makes sense in Bizarro World, but welcome to Greg’s Wonderful World of Writing–I am very pleased with what I managed to accomplish in this first draft. I touched on a lot of issues and themes that are important to me, and it’s not nearly as repetitive as I feared it might be. The trick is going to be the winnowing down; it currently sits at 97,000 words and needs at least three more chapters to get to the resolution and be finished. Even if those are only three thousand words or so, a young adult manuscript of 106,000 is probably way too long. I also think I managed to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish with it, even though it’s technically not finished. There is, apparently, something to be said about writing a manuscript you are really passionate about without the pressure of a deadline. All in all, from the moment I started writing the first chapter to when I realized I’d written it too long and the original end I’d planned would require another three chapters–or I’d really have to rush it all to get it all done in one more–was a total of forty-five days, and I didn’t write every one of those forty-five days. I think the actual writing days were at most thirty, and may have been as few as twenty-five.

I am actually dreading getting to those last few chapters I’ve written, to be honest.

Another thing I am doing is making a list of every character named in the book as I go–I’ve already discovered multiple character name changes–and another thing I am going to do is really get into the characters’ lives and histories by writing biographies of them, putting all the things I know in my head about them down onto paper and filling in the gaps. I’m amazed at how many characters there are–some of them are really only seen or mentioned in passing–and there are some things I really want to hit harder that I just seemed to lightly pass over as I wrote the first draft. But there aren’t a lot of mistakes, no awkward sentences, no bad paragraphs, and most of the dialogue works.

If you couldn’t tell, Constant Reader, one Gregalicious is quite pleased with himself and this manuscript.

I’ve also decided to NOT take the detour on Chef Menteur Highway on my way to Montgomery, and think I might do that on my way to Oxford on Monday instead. The drive to Montgomery is more time sensitive–there’s an author party I should go to on Friday night, and the event in Oxford is on Tuesday, so it doesn’t really matter what time I get there, so why not do it when I am not going to be pressed for time? It only makes sense. And I am also really pleased with how “Quiet Desperation” is coming along in its rewrite.

Wow. Who am I, and what have I done with myself? I think the affirmations are helping, seriously.

We got through two more episodes of Thirteen Reasons Why last night, and I have to say, I am becoming rather a fan of Ross Butler. He was simply stellar in the episode about Zach’s tape, and I was already aware of him from playing Reggie Mantle on Riverdale, and that casting was pretty bad-ass: a role traditionally Caucasian being played by an Asian-American actor (yet another reason to love Riverdale is its diverse casting choices). Ross is also easy on the eyes:

ross butler tank

See what I mean? And now, back to the spice mines.

Magic Carpet Ride

I got up early this morning to take a friend to a doctor’s appointment, and so, having finished Finders Keepers, dug out my copy of Jay Asher’s 13 Reasons Why to take along to read while I waited for her.  We watched another three episodes last night–it really is compulsively watchable, if more than slightly annoying (Paul and I have a tendency to yell at the television periodically “JUST LISTEN TO THE REST OF THE TAPES DUMBASS!” but other than that, we are really enjoying it, despite some plot holes). I managed to read almost 100 pages during the hour or so I waited–it’s a quick read, the book isn’t as long as it looks–double spaced, big font, lots of short, one sentence paragraphs–and again, despite some plot holes, it’s compulsively readable; I want to know all the reasons. The book is also different than the show, in that Clay apparently does what Paul and I want him to do in the show–he listens to the tapes all in one night. I can see why that isn’t possible in the show; you probably couldn’t get thirteen one hour episodes out of the story if it all took place in one night, but on the other hand…does it really need to be thirteen hours? But the young actors are all incredibly appealing and are quite good in their roles, as I said before, and it’s compulsively watchable.

The show also pushes buttons from time to time for me; “wow, are they really showing the kids getting high? Drinking beer? Getting drunk? How incredibly irresponsible!” and then I have to snap out of it. Teenagers deal with these things, they did when I was in high school, and one of the things that annoyed me about entertainment aimed at teens when I was one is that it was so unrealistic.

Then again, Judy Blume was just getting published and writing frankly about teens, and scandalizing the country and getting banned everywhere, when I was a teen–and I always see Judy Blume as the person who changed the world of young adult fiction, and for the better.

Ironically, I just checked the schedule for the Alabama Book Festival this weekend and see that Jay Asher is speaking there. Synchronicity, or serendipity, or both?

I think one of the reasons I’m enjoying Riverdale as much as I am (the young actor who plays Reggie on that show is also on 13 Reasons Why; the first time he turned up on screen I said out loud, “Reggie!” He and the character are being under-utilized on Riverdale, which I hope changes) is seeing the squeaky clean, highly sanitized comic books I read when I was very young made more realistic. Riverdale is a dark teen soap, owing debts not only to Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210, but also a big one to Pretty Little Liars–which in turn owes a debt to The Edge of Night, the long running daytime soap whose story-lines were based not only in romance but in crime and suspense. 13 Reasons Why is another teen soap built around a mystery; while Riverdale‘s main driving story is”who killed Jason Blossom, and why” this one’s is “why did Hannah kill herself, and why the tapes?”

I’ve also been thinking about my own young adult fiction a lot lately, probably because of what I am currently working on. I’ve put the Scotty book aside for the time being, because I just wasn’t feeling it, to be honest, and writing it felt like I was forcing it and the story itself didn’t work for me. So, I am going to take a break from it for a bit, work on some short stories, and forge forward with this manuscript I am intent on revising. I’m actually enjoying myself doing all this editing and revising because there is no pressure of a deadline. I can take my time, think things through, rather than trusting my instincts and hoping for the best while the clock inexorably continues to tick as time slips through my fingers. (There really is something to be said for no deadlines.)

Sorceress began as a short story of slightly less than ten thousand words, and I originally wrote it in 1989, long hand, on notebook paper. I remember paying someone to type it for me, and as a lengthy short story it didn’t work–it was too rushed, too much happened in too short a period of time on the page. When I reread the story, it occurred to me that it was really just a lengthy synopsis, and might make a book. It was the third novel I completed a first draft of (in 1993!), and it eventually made it to publication in 2010. I know I wrote it originally as an homage to Jane Eyre, Victoria Holt, and other gothic writers I had long admired; I gave it more of a supernatural edge, though, but it was really the same premise that even Dark Shadows began with: a young orphaned girl comes to live in a big, spooky house where mysterious things happen. (I wonder why so many books/stories of this type start this way? Is it because it’s a voyage to the unknown, or a fresh start in a new place? 13 Reasons Why kind of fits into this as well, since part of Hannah’s problems begin with her being the new girl in town.)

Hmmmm.

All right, it’s back to the spice mines with me.