Category: Southern Gothic

Drift Away

Good morning, Tuesday; the last day before a long and glorious fourth of July celebratory vacation weekend for the Gregalicious.

I managed almost two thousand words on the WIP last night when I got home from work last night, before Scooter’s lonely neediness kicked into full gear. I also managed to get the rest of the dishes done and loaded into the dishwasher, so all in all, the evening was a win on every level. Huzzah!

I also slept well somehow Sunday night and was totally rested and fine all day yesterday’; no being tired, no being brain dead, none of the usual nonsense on one of my long days, and I suspect that was primarily adrenaline from knowing I don’t have to work all week (HUZZAH!). I also got the final version of the manuscript i was editing into the publisher (check that off the list) and then also got started reading a short story I am reading for a friend–it’s quite a good story, in fact, I’m sure you will all get to read it someday.

So, it was quite a Monday for one Gregalicious. Let’s see how long I can keep this roll going.

I slept well again last night; I went to bed around ten and slept beautifully and restfully the entire night; not even waking up once, which was quite lovely. So this morning I am feeling extremely rested and able to get going, which is again quite lovely. Tonight I will come home and watch the season finale of what is one of the worst seasons ever of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills; so bad, in fact, that I may not continue watching when the next season rolls around. I have, however, apparently replaced it in my affections with Southern Charm New Orleans, which has sucked me in completely and I am not certain why; it’s first season was so atrocious, and the only explanation I can think of is that it’s the bromance between Jon Moody and Jeff Charleston; we’ll see how long they can hold my attention before i get bored and move on. Although I am hearing things about this season of Real Housewives of Potomac that might bear investigating.

Tomorrow I can sleep late and do whatever it is that I want to do, because I am on vacation and Paul is out of town. I want to finish reading I the Jury, which I will probably also work on today between clients–I did come up with an interesting idea for an essay, using Mike Hammer to extrapolate out further to toxic masculinity and the American male, and can even tie in Ayn Rand, who I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time–I even wrote the intro to the essay last night. I have no market for essays, of course; but I am doing a collection, which is slowly but surely coming together. Will my collection of essays find an audience? Highly unlikely, but it’s something I’d like to do. I’ve done so much essay writing and journalism over the years, it would be kind of nice to collect it all in one place, and an essay collection is certainly more easy than writing a memoir no one would want to read.

And after I conclude reading the Spillane, I am either going to move on to Kristin Lepionka’s first novel, or to Angie Kim’s debut; I’ve heard terrific things about both, and I was on a panel with Kristin in St. Petersburg and she impressed me with her intelligence and wit. She also has picked up the baton on promoting queer writers, which I appreciate.

I have to say that working on the Diversity Project this year has been incredibly enjoyable for me; I am only disappointed that it took me so long to diversify my reading list.

I will do better.

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

IMG_1241

Little Willy

Today’s title song always kind of amused when it was a hit; I was a tween at the time and since willy is also a euphemism for…well, you can see where this is going.

I found it highly (if more than a little bit juvenile) amusing that someone wrote a song about a small penis.

Hello, Monday morning of my sort-of-vacation! The vacation starts Tuesday evening when I get off work, actually, but it’s also kind of lovely to know I only have to work my two long days at the office this week before I can lounge around the house and do what I want when I want to do it. How lovely, right?

I did manage to squeeze out about thirteen hundred words or so on the WIP, and I also printed out the pages of the manuscript i am suppose to be dedicating myself to finishing in July. (I’ve already redone the first four chapters of it before I had to push it to the side for Royal Street Reveillon, whose time had come.) I did look at the first few pages again, and liked what I was reading. So, I’m still undecided about what to do. Should I push through on the WIP, getting that first draft finished, or should I get back to work on what I scheduled myself to do for the month of July? Truth be told, I am actually thinking that what with the five day vacation looming, I could theoretically go back and forth between the two; but the voices are so terribly different, I’m not sure how well that would work.

Yet another example of why writers drink.

I started reading Mickey Spillane’s I the Jury yesterday as well. It’s a short novel, really, and I can’t imagine it taking a long time for me to finish. I’ve never read Spillane, but of course I know all about him, his writing, his character Mike Hammer, and everything he kind of stood for. Spillane was one of the last writers who kind of became a folk hero/celebrity of sorts; it was a lot more common back in the 1950’s and 1960’s; Hemingway, Spillane, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer all were celebrities of sorts; I believe Spillane even played his own character in one of the film versions of his work. He also used to regularly appear in commercials and advertisements as Mike Hammer in the 1970’s, which is kind of hard to imagine now. It would be sort of like Stephen King being hired to do commercials and print ads for, I don’t know, Jim Beam? The author as celebrity is something I’m not sorry we’ve gotten away from as a society and a culture, quite frankly. The idea behind reading I the Jury as part of the Diversity Experiment is precisely because it’s the kind of book I’d never really read; Sarah Weinman asked the other day on Twitter if Spillane counted as camp (I personally think it does; my responses was something along the lines of “Imagine Leslie Nielsen playing him”) and then realized I needed to read at least one of the books, as part of the Diversity Project.

But Gregalicious, you might be wondering, why are you reading a straight white male novelist writing about what basically is the epitome of toxic masculinity in his character Mike Hammer?

Well, first of all, the name of the character itself: Mike Hammer. It almost sounds like a parody of the private eye novel, doesn’t it, something dreamed up by the guys who wrote Airplane! and not an actual novel/character to be taken seriously. We also have to take into consideration that Spillane’s books were also, for whatever reason, enormously popular; the books practically flew off the shelves. (Mike Hammer is actually one of the best gay porn star names of all time; alas, it was never used in that capacity.)

But it’s also difficult to understand our genre, where it came from, and how far it has come, without reading Spillane; Spillane, more so than Hammett or Chandler, developed the classic trope of the hard-boiled male private eye and took it to the farthest extreme of toxic masculinity. Plus, there’s the camp aesthetic I was talking about before to look for as well.

Chanse was intended to be the gay version of the hardboiled private eye; I patterned him more after John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee than anything or anyone else. But reading a macho, tough guy heterosexual male character from a toxic masculine male author is also completely out of my wheelhouse; and therefore, it sort of fits into the Diversity Project along the lines of well, the idea is to read things you don’t ordinarily read; not just writers of color or different gender identities or sexualities than your own.

And there’s also an entire essay in Ayn Rand’s nonfiction collection of essays on art devoted to Mickey Spillane; it should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever read any of Rand’s fiction that she was a huge fan of Spillane. Given what a shitty writer Rand was, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement–but it also gives me something else to look out for as I read Spillane’s short novel.

There’s also a reference to Spillane in one of my favorite novels, Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show–in which some of the  boys are wondering if blondes have blonde pubic hair, and “the panty-dropping scene in I the Jury” is referenced.

Interesting.

And now back to the spice mines.

IMG_1242

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.

IMG_1316

Touch Me in the Morning

Friday morning, and a little under the weather. I’ll spare you the gory details, but my suspicion is it’s a bit of food poisoning, perhaps? Regardless, it’s terribly unpleasant, and hopefully temporary.

I really feel terrible.

Last night after testing all day in the Carevan, I walked back home and started feeling bad; so I just took something to try to settle my stomach and curled up under my blanket to watch the season finale of The Real Housewives of New York and then streamed another episode of Southern Charm New Orleans, which, despite all of its offenses and basic trashiness (what reality show isn’t trashy?), has turned out to be highly addictive. And Jon Moody is rapidly becoming my favorite reality star of all time–he’s extremely good-looking, enormously talented, surprisingly down-to-earth, has an incredible sense of style, and just really comes across as a decent human being and a good friend to his friends. Obviously, this is all a part of the infamous reality show bait-and-switch; in which the producers build someone up to be likable by giving them a great edit, and then in a future season try to make the audience turn by giving them a bad edit–showing the shitty things they do and say rather than leaving them on the cutting room floor as they did when giving them the good edit.

He is also responsible for what be my favorite reality show character appraisal of all time: “Cool ranch doritos.” That alone should earn him a spot in the reality television hall of fame.

I managed to recover the words I lost Wednesday by redoing them yesterday morning before heading out to work. It was lovely; they aren’t the same words, and they aren’t good words, but as always happens after such a work catastrophe, the reconstructed words are better than the ones I originally wrote. Maybe I can get some work done today on it as well, since I am unwell. Trying to keep focused isn’t always easy in these instances, but I think I am going to retire to the easy chair under a blanket when I finish this and read/nap for a little while. I am also exhausted this morning; my bones and joints are achy, in addition to the stomach issues, and I am not entirely certain what that’s about, either. My entire body feels achingly tired. I slept deeply last night, too–I don’t know what could be causing this.

I hate being sick, and I hate that is seems to be more commonplace in my life than it ever used to be–I used to go years without even catching a cold, and now it seems like every month or so something goes haywire. Other things no one tells you about getting old, either. I don’t mind being old; I never ever think to myself, oh how I wish I was young again. I don’t. I don’t miss being young at all–other than the energy, the ability to bounce back quickly, and not aching all the time. That I miss, and the energy and drive to go to the gym multiple times per week.

But I am going to bring this to a close and go lay back down now. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader.

 

 

IMG_0996

The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia

That baton was ON FIRE!

I do miss (original cast) Designing Women from time to time.

Today is National HIV Testing Day, so I will be working in the Carevan, parking in the Walgreens a block or so from my house, for nine hours today. We were also incredibly busy at the office yesterday, which was exhausting, but it was also nice; we’ve not been busy like that during testing hours at the new building since we moved into it.

I also managed, like a doofus, to forget to save the word document I was working on yesterday morning before I left for the office, and apparently the power here blinked on and off–long enough to make all the digital clocks blink, but not long enough to take them all back to 12:00. So, yes, the thirteen hundred words I’d done before work yesterday were gone when I got home (for some reason Word also didn’t save them as a temporary file I could recover, thanks Microsoft!) but I wasn’t irritated or overly annoyed; the words were bad bad bad, and whenever this happens and I have to reconstruct stuff from memory, it always winds up being better than what I did originally and lost.

And the stuff I lost, let’s be honest, was absolute garbage.

I was so tired when i got home last night I didn’t have the energy to reconstruct anything or do anything; the dishes remain in the dishwasher, loads of clothes remained in the washer and dryer, the mess in the kitchen remains a mess. Instead, I repaired to my easy chair, allowed Scooter to nap in my lap, and turned on the television. There really wasn’t anything I wanted to watch, so, with some trepidation, I went to Hulu and cued up the second season of Southern Charm New Orleans.

I have already confessed to my reality television addiction; it’s primarily Real Housewives franchises. I did watch the original, Charleston version of Southern Charm (always wondering how they actually managed to get actual members of the city’s upper class, with some actually old society money people, to agree to being on the show; but it got too dark for me with bad parenting, custody struggles, and drug addiction–I guess the reality was a little too real and noir for me), and it was with no little trepidation that I began watching the first episode of the first season when it originally aired a while back–but I either didn’t make it all the way through the first episode, or made it to the second before giving up.

I just absolutely loathed it.

But a friend who lives her part-time (we both tried the original season and gave up in despair and disgust) alerted me that she’d gotten sucked into season two; and I should give it another try. So, last night, to exhausted to do anything other than sit in my easy chair with a purring cat in my lap, and with Paul not home and nothing else to watch, I started.

After I got past the initial laughter at the fact the show is called Southern Charm New Orleans and the majority of the cast actually doesn’t live in New Orleans (Mandeville and Covington are on the north shore, in St. Tammany Parish, and twenty six miles across the lake from Metairie–also not New Orleans), and I kind of thought it was kind of funny the way the show simply flashed the names of their towns across the bottom of the screen when showing their homes, as though they were New Orleans neighborhoods, like Gentilly and Lakeview, but the more I watched, the more I began to get sucked into it. By the end of the second episode I had so many questions, had already taken sides in some of the oh-so-heavily-handed-manufactured-drama on the show, and had committed to watching the next two available episodes when I can.

I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but I think I was absolutely, positively pulled in when Bravo and the producers did this amazing, amazing thing–part of the story is that a married couple from season one–Jeff, the retired Saints player, and his horrible wife, Reagan, gave up on their failed marriage and got divorced between seasons, while she has moved on to an old-flame from her college days, Reece, whom we do not see or hear about other than “Reagan’s new boyfriend” in the first episode, other than a scene of him showering from behind—and yes, we see his wet, soapy, not particularly attractive bare ass (which was when Paul, who’d come home about halfway through the episode and sat down and watched with me, bailed). In the second episode we see this again, as well as Jeff fully unclothed from behind also in the shower (for comparison sake?), and I was all, well, okay then, if you’re not going to show the two incredibly hot men of color bare-assed, why must we suffer through these white boy butts?

The big drama was, of course, her introducing the new boyfriend to her ex-husband and her friends, which she did at a party for launching her new “jewelry store” at One Canal Place; the hilarious thing was how the meeting was shown on television–the two men walk away from the party to talk (which makes everyone else freak out, of course, wondering why “they had to walk away and talk”, honestly, come up with better unscripted scripts, producers), and what was absolutely hilarious (other than hot artist Jon Moody describing the new boyfriend as “cool ranch Doritos,” which is instantly iconic Bravo shade) was that Reece, the new boyfriend, is, as so many New Orleanians, a huge Saints fan, so of course he was excited to meet Jeff, the ex-husband. What was even more hilarious was they kept cutting from the two of them having a remarkably adult conversation to first a talking head from Jeff, clearly unimpressed and quoting things Reagan had said to him about Reece, then cutting to Reece in a talking head saying what Reagan had told Jeff. 

It was, frankly, one of Bravo’s finest reality show scenes, ever.

JEFF: “Well, Reagan told me he was a huge Saints fan, so she said he’s going to have a man crush on me.”

REECE: “I’m a huge Saints fan, so I’m really excited to meet him. I already have kind of a man crush on him.”

JEFF: “And I was on the Super Bowl team. He got a Saints tattoo on his side after we won the Super Bowl, so he probably wants to date ME.”

RRECE: “He was on the Super Bowl team! Hell, I’d like to date HIM.”

And so forth.

It was amazing.

And just like that, I was sucked into Southern Charm New Orleans, damn you to hell, Bravo. I was ready to bail on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and even starting to tire somewhat of The Real Housewives of New York (still the gold standard, but still not as good as it was), and so I was almost free of my Bravo addiction….and then, of all things, Southern Charm New Orleans pulled me back in.

Sigh. And now back to the spice mines.

Know your status, peeps.

IMG_1026

Will It Go Round in Circles

  Well, I wrote over two thousand words on the WIP yesterday, so whatever the fuck that was is hopefully over. The words aren’t good, of course; in fact, I suspect they are really quite embarrassingly awful. Not nearly as magical and wondrous as those words I wrote on Sunday, of course, on the project that has to be pushed to the side even though I already know what the second chapter is, and yes, it’s perfectly shaped in my head. Complete, even. I could probably bang it out in an hour or two.

But I must not. I can not. I must go back to the wretched WIP and write some more awful words on it tomorrow. But what was holding me back–the knowing how badly I was botching it, and not wanting to continue moving forward…but also finally understanding that of course this is going to be the case.  This draft isn’t about any of that; it’s about getting the story down and correct, a very complicated and twisty plot, more so than anything I’ve tried before, fixed and correct and down,  before I go back and make everything else right–the dialogue and the characters and the scene and so forth. I hate when I have to write what I call a story draft–a draft where I am working the story out as I go because I am not entirely certain where it’s going to end, so I have to focus solely on that–because I hate not focusing on the things I like the most about reading and writing.

I also resent the time I spend wrestling with story drafts.

But the story is taking shape, and I set the stage with this transitional chapter (I also think I hate writing transitional chapters more than I hate writing anything else; they always seem so forced and tedious to me) for the rest of the book here. Now comes the tricky part; the final act where all the various threads of the book and the subplots have to all start coming together.

Heavy sigh. And you KNOW I am itching to write the next chapter of this Chanse book that I shouldn’t even be thinking about yet. Such is my life.

I finally slept fairly decently again last night after two bad nights; I was on a roll last week, sleeping great every night and even slid into the weekend feeling incredibly well-rested. I do feel somewhat rested this morning, but also feel like another two hours in bed would be the bee’s knees, to throw out another silly cliche.

We watched the third episode of season two of Big Little Lies, and while it seems like the show isn’t getting as much buzz in the second season as the first did, I think the second season is even better than the first. The women are all dealing with the aftermaths of their personal traumas, as well as the big lie they are all concealing–that Bonnie pushed Perry down the stairs, and in their shock and horror after it happens they all agreed to lie to the police and claim he just fell–and the reverberations from that lie, while forming a deeper bond between the women, is also wrecking their marriages and their lives. Meryl Streep is just absolutely stunning as Perry’s mother, come to town and very suspicious about all the lies being told–she also, as a loving mother, cannot wrap her mind around the idea that her son is this monster–and while she reads as terrible (her insensitivity in her own grief is wince-inducing but also understandable as she tries to wrap her mind around the truths of her son’s life, while wading through the lies her love for her son refuses to allow her to believe), her addition to the show was simply genius on the part of the writers and showrunners. I highly recommend this, if you aren’t already watching, and the performances themselves–Nicole Kidman, Streep, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz, and Reese Witherspoon–are all award-worthy.

Just stunning television.

And now back to the spice mines. Pray for me as I start to sort out the third act of the book.

aussiebum

My Love

Monday morning gave me no warning, of what was to be.

Heavy sigh.

I’m still reeling from a highly productive day yesterday that, ultimately, achieved nothing. Writing the first chapter of a new Chanse novel–when I had thought I was finished with the character, outside of short stories–was probably not the smartest way to go with my work, but at the same time I’m not terribly upset by it or see the day as wasted. I did managed to write over three thousand words in less than two hours, and they were actually good words, ones that I probably won’t be discarding if I decide I want to work on this more–I can always keep it there in my back pocket, and if I get stuck on something else I’m working on, I can work on it, and therefore never lose a day to not being able to figure out what’s going to happen next with anything.

Sigh. I told you I have creative ADD. The struggle is real, yo.

I’ve not worked on the WIP now for two solid weeks, which is completely insane. I’d hoped to have the first draft finished by the end of June–which now is not very bloody likely–so I could move back to the Kansas book and get it revised by the end of July. I’d like to keep to that schedule somewhat; if I can somehow manage a chapter a day on the WIP I’d be awfully close to finished by the end of the month, and the revisions on the Kansas book might actually allow me to go back and forth between the two throughout July. It would be awesome to have both finished by the end of July, although not very probable; the heat here is going to start picking back up again (it’s already in the nineties every day) and the heat and humidity are such energy drains. My preference for a New Orleans summer would be to never go outside unless absolutely necessary; that unfortunately isn’t possible, so I try to deal with it the best I can…which is changing my socks regularly, washing my face every few hours, and praying for October to arrive.

Football season is also just around the corner, and experts are predicting terrific seasons for both LSU and the Saints; we’ll see how that goes.

I started reading Howard Zinn’s The Twentieth Century over the course of the weekend; while I still want to keep up with the Diversity Project–which has been amazing so far–I think I might spend the summer reading mostly non-fiction. I have all these books about New Orleans history, as well as Louisiana history, and I really should start making my way through those as well. The primary problem, of course, being that reading nonfiction often kickstarts my creativity genes into gear and I start coming up with other ideas for stories and novels–as it is, if I spent the rest of my life writing the ideas I’ve already had, I’d never be able to finish writing them all, so having new ideas all the time is hardly the best thing for me…although don’t get me wrong, I don’t ever want my creativity to ever just completely shut down on me, either.

I can’t imagine ever having my creativity just completely shut down.

I hope it never happens–although I always worry it will.

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

IMG_1035

Bad Bad LeRoy Brown

So, rather than working on either the WIP, the other manuscript I need to revise, or any of the short stories I intended to revise this morning…I started writing another Chanse book. Oh, it’s going to have to be shelved for a while–these other manuscripts need my attention and I can’t keep pushing them to the side–but I had the Chanse idea, I wanted to get the first chapter down because I’d seen it in my head, and I managed to write three thousand words, quite easily, in less than two hours.

And all I could think, when I finished, was this is how easy it’s always supposed to be yet never is.

Sigh.

And it’s actually not bad writing. I printed it out to keep in a folder and reread it, and while there are some tweaks needed here and there, and some things that need to be added to it, it can pretty much stand on its own. It was spooky, too, how easily I immediately slipped back into Chanse’s voice and head; how the tone just flowed perfectly out of my fingers as I typed.

And yes, this is why writers drink.

But don’t get your hopes up too high, people and Chanse fans. I have to finish at least two other manuscripts, and do another project, before I can focus on writing this book–if I decide to go forward with it. I’m just trying to get all the ideas down now, as they are coming to me, so when I have the time and can work on it, it’s all there and I don’t have to try to remember it. I’d wanted to finish this WIP, go back and finish revising another manuscript before I have to devote myself to a special project for two months. This is why I wanted to have the first draft of the WIP finished by the end of June; so I could spend July revising the other manuscript before the two-month project–and then I wanted to write the first draft of the next Scotty (working title: Hollywood South Hustle) before revising the current WIP and getting it ready to go. But now I have a Chanse book crowding it’s way into my brain, and I know I am not going to be able to stop thinking about it until it’s fucking finished and written and turned in.

But you know what? So be it. When I finished Murder in the Arts District I thought I was finished with Chanse, and there wasn’t anything else for him to do or say or anything. And yet, here we are, with all kinds of ideas bursting out of my head, for a new Chanse. And yes, it’s inspired by the case of the Jeff Davis 8, but it’s not going to be ripped from the headlines; I’m going to take the basic set-up of the murders and use that for a Chanse book…one that doesn’t take place in New Orleans. I was always reluctant to have either Chanse or Scotty do anything that wasn’t in New Orleans, which was always limiting, and now that I look back on it, kind of stupid. As I said the other day, I am getting more and more interested, not only in New Orleans history, but in the rest of Louisiana as well. I’ve always liked mysteries/crime fiction set in small towns, and why not use a Louisiana small town for one?

And the dynamics of the Jeff Davis 8–the set-up for it, the town, everything–is just too perfect of a starting place for me to just pass up.

And it’s not like it’s the first time I came up with a story idea based on actual events.

Plus, it gives me the opportunity to explore some themes and ideas I’ve been wanting to sink my teeth into for a while.

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

59698686_10156839834491001_1057981183809290240_n

Crocodile Rock

Oh, Louisiana.

My beautiful, beautiful state. Louisiana is basically a lush, fertile state chock full of important natural resources, and also sports the nickname “Sportsmen’s Paradise,” because outdoor sports–hunting, fishing, etc.–are abundant here. Lots of hunting, lots of fishing, that sort of thing.

But Louisiana also is known for corruption, being backwards in many ways, and some truly bizarre politics/politicians. It’s easy to say that Louisianans have a very cynical view of politics and politicians–no one is really surprised when one of our elected officials is caught doing something criminal or morally questionable; the basic presumption is that they’re all crooks and liars unless proven otherwise. We can never forget that one gubernatorial election featured bumper stickers and campaign slogans that read Vote for the crook, it’s important–when Governor Edwards, convicted for taking bribes in office, was running again after serving time and his opponent was notorious racist and former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

And for the record, that election was in the early 1990’s–not that long ago.

As I said yesterday, I watched a four hour documentary on Hulu this past week called Murder in the Bayou, about what is called the “Jeff Davis 8”–eight women murdered over a period of less than three years in and around the Jefferson Davis Parish village of Jennings. The women all  had issues with drugs, and also came from really poor backgrounds. The documentary was interesting, and seemed geared to the idea that there was a serial killer operating in the parish–and for some reason, the cops simply couldn’t track said killer down, and eventually the killings stopped.

I also remembered that there was a book about the murders, with the same title, by New Orleans journalist Ethan Brown, and I had a copy. So, after I finished watching the documentary Friday afternoon, I got the book down from the shelves and looked to see if there were any photographs included. There weren’t–just the flyer with the reward posted, with photos of all the victims on it. I started reading…

murder in the bayou

On May 20, 2005, Jerry Jackson, a soft-spoken slim African-American retiree with a short salt-and-pepper Afro, prepared to cast a fishing line from a hulking bridge over the Grand Marais Canal on the outskirts of Jennings in southwest Louisiana. Jackson peered down at the muddy rush below, the corroded, cylindrical rain pipes along the canal belching water, the collapsed pedestrian bridge far out in the distance. As he prepped his fishing line, Jackson imagined the catch that day, white perch, a small bass with a strong spine that’s so abundant in Louisiana it’s the state’s official freshwater fish. In low-lying southwest Louisiana, where rain is constantly siphoned to prevent flooding, drainage canals are as common as the perch. These canals provide sustenance for poor Louisianans for whom fishing is both a generations-old tradition and a day-to-day necessity. For hobbyists such as Jackson, who made the approximately ten-mile trip to Jennings from his cramped trailer on a dead-end street in nearby Welsh, drainage canal democratize fishing. Expensive shrimp boats and fishing equipment aren’t necessary–all one needs to do is drop a line into the water.

As Jackson peered deeper into the Grand Marais Canal, he spied the outline of a human body. “It had come up on the news that someone had stole some mannequins,” Jackson told me, “so I thought that one of the mannequins ended up in the water somehow.” Jackson focused his eyes on the figure. “I saw flies, and mannequins don’t attract flies.”

It didn’t take me long to get into the book to realize there was information, crucial information, about the victims in the book that wasn’t included in the documentary; in fact, the documentary left a lot of important information out. Yes, the women all had addiction issues, but they also were sex workers–turning to sex work to either get drugs, or to get the money to buy drugs. The police didn’t cooperate much with Mr. Brown, and the sister of one of the victims played a very prominent role in the documentary; she was only mentioned by name once in the book. Brown also shared the information that many of the victims were witnesses to other crimes, and theorized they were all killed to silence them–and that it wasn’t a serial killer after all. Brown also isn’t convinced completely that the police were so inept and incompetent to handle these kinds of investigations (something that came up a lot in the documentary), but that the parish police were actually corrupt, involved in the drug trade, and connecting all the dots also led to a peripheral involvement by a powerful politician. Naturally, the police and the politician disagree with Mr. Brown’s theories and conclusions…but he also includes, in the book, other crimes in the parish that may or may not have been connected to the murders, as well as corruption within the police department; things that were not in the documentary.

One of the things that struck me, while watching and again when reading the book, is how tragic the cycle of poverty is in these small towns, not just in Louisiana, but across the country. The class divide–marked in Jennings by literally railroad tracks that separate the good part of town from the bad–is truly staggering; I would imagine it’s much the same in big cities only not as obvious. The poor and uneducated people in places like Jennings are trapped in a terrible cycle of poverty that they cannot seem to break, which is truly sad, and the disruptive nature of the families they were born into doesn’t help much, either. And once someone starts spiraling down into drug addiction, there’s nowhere to turn to for help getting off the drugs…and there’s no money for rehab, which is incredibly expensive.

I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to stuck like that, with no hope for the future.

The book is very well written, and it’s not terribly long; I read it in one day, and it’s a terrific read. I do recommend it, and I also recommend watching the documentary as well. I’m curious about why they chose to leave some stuff out of the documentary that’s in the book–perhaps it has something to do with both using the same title but not adapting the book or using it as source material, or something along those lines–but it’s very interesting to see the two very different takes on the murders.

And yes, learning more about these murders did, in fact, give me an idea for another Chanse novel; the first idea I’ve had for a Chanse novel since I wrote Murder in the Arts District. I can easily see fictionalizing this story, with Chanse as the investigating private eye…or someone else, really; it doesn’t have to be Chanse, and the issues at play here–the disposability of drug addicted sex workers, class distinction, and corruption in the parish power structure–are things I would love to explore in a novel.

Like I don’t have anything else to write already, right?

And now back to the spice mines.

Let’s Get It On

A half-day today before a three-day weekend.

Huzzah!

So, I started rereading short stories yesterday that I thought were finished and had sent out to markets only to suffer cruel rejection….and as I read the first one, catching mistakes as I went from beginning to end, I literally cringed to think other people had read it as it was. Heavy heaving sigh. I do love the story, and I love the idea behind the story, and I love what I was trying to do with the story; I just need to work on it a little harder. Short stories are so my Kryptonite. I don’t know how or why I struggle with them so much, but I do, and it really sucks.

Heavy sigh.

But I keep writing them, keep struggling with them, and keep hoping that I am going to someday find the magic key that will somehow make writing them easier.

And yes, I’m still looking for that magic key to make writing novels easier, as well.

Hopefully this weekend I’ll find the time to revise these stories–maybe work on the WIP as well–and get things finished. I feel right now like I have all of these pending things hanging over my head– some things I do remember and other things I keep forgetting about and then remember, with horror–and so I need to get sorted. I slept really well again last night–this week has been odd in that I’ve pretty much slept extremely well every night this week; here’s hoping this turns into a regular trend–and maybe it means I’ve at long last reset my body clock.

I also want to get a lot of cleaning done, as I always do. I think tomorrow will be my “run-the-errands/clean-the-house” day, and then I can spend Saturday and Sunday actually, you know, writing and getting some things done. I also am going to sit down (probably tomorrow afternoon, after the errands are done) and reread the WIP. I’ve not worked on it or touched it or done anything to it in several weeks. This is a concern, of course; and the longer that goes the more likely it is to get shoved into a drawer and join other aborted manuscripts which I will not allow to happen. Like I’ve said before, the WIP is a struggle for me, but it’s also a book I’ve been wanting to write since the late 1980’s (which is when I wrote the original short story the book developed from) and I do think/believe that what is holding me back on writing this, why I am struggling with it so much, is fear: fear that addressing the issues I am trying to address in this book are out of my wheelhouse and things that I am not good enough to write about, if that makes any sense? In other words, it’s a crisis of confidence, but I also believe strongly that the books and stories that are the hardest to tell, the ones that trigger all these things, are the ones that need to be told. If I fail at what I am trying to do, I fail.

Which is the issue I have with another short story, another one of the ones I am rereading. I’ve not sent this one out to any markets; I am again attempting to address a social issue in this story, and I am worried that telling it from the point-of-view I am telling it from might be problematic. But problematic stories are sometimes necessary, I think; maybe I am crazy for trying to be so ambitious and should stop chasing waterfalls, sticking to the rivers and the lakes that I am used to….oops, sorry for getting sidetracked there; had a TLC moment.

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

Alen-Clippinger-5