Category: television

Sweet Girl

The only reason I know it’s Wednesday is I got a text message confirming that my paycheck was deposited in my checking account, meaning it’s also Pay-the-Bills Day. I did that already over this first cup of coffee–shortly after my daily morning COVID test came back positive again (we are now on Day 5 of this, if the first day doesn’t count; six if it does) and now I am trying to get things done before the daily fatigue sets in. Yesterday was maybe the worst it’s been thus far; I spent most of the day drifting in and out of sleep in my easy chair. I can honestly say I’ve never slept this much in my life in a six day period as I have since last Friday–and yet am still able to fall asleep every night without a problem and don’t want to get up in the morning, and am still fatigued all day and can drift off again in the snap of my fingers. Ironically, I just realized while paying the bills this morning that today is our anniversary; Paul and I have been a couple twenty-seven years today. We obviously don’t make much of it, really–we really aren’t big on holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries as a general rule–as evidenced by the fact that I’d completely forgot about it until writing down the date in my checkbook (and yes, I still use a check register to track my account; many co-workers mock me about this but for fuck’s sake it’s how I learned and I am so fucking paranoid about being overdrawn it’s just easier to keep a running balance and periodically balance it).

And there’s the fatigue. I was wondering how much longer I had before it made its presence known. It’s so weird how it allows me an hour or so every morning, like a tease: today you’re going to feel good even though you still tested positive! PSYCH! Here’s some fatigue for you!

I am going to try to fight through it today to get some things done. If it means ‘get something done then go nap for an hour’ so be it. My house is a disaster area. Laundry and dishes have piled up, and there is mess everywhere I look here in the kitchen. I was so tired yesterday I never even got hungry, so I never made dinner and now that I think about it, I think all I ate yesterday was some coffee cake yesterday morning so I could take my pills. Lack of fuel can certainly play a role in the fatigue, can’t it? It’s so weird, I’ve never experienced anything like this at all. I can actually feel the exhaustion running down my arms and legs until all four limbs, including hands and feet, feel fatigued. Even as I type this the fog is encroaching on my thought processes and making my head feel, for wont of a better phrase, empty and hollow. My eyes are now tired. But…as I remind myself every day as I try to get out of my chair and almost weep from the effort, it could be worse. At least I can breathe, and the slight constriction I felt in my lungs the first few days is now gone. It wasn’t even that bad–the lung thing, I mean; it didn’t hurt or anything or restrict my breathing, I just was aware of it, if that makes sense; kind of like there was a plug or something there in the center of my lungs that I felt whenever I breathed deeply or moved, but was more along the lines of here I am don’t forget you’re sick! rather than Oh my God get me to the emergency room–and I am grateful for that. I feel a little strange complaining about this when it could obviously be ever so much worse; thank goodness for the four inoculations I’ve had.

As I drifted in and out of sleep we watched Mind Over Murder, a documentary series about a bizarre murder case in Beatrice, Nebraska (pronounced b-AT-triss) in which six people confessed to a rape and murder only to be exonerated years later by DNA. (One person never confessed; he was the one who led the charge to get the DNA evidence tested–only to die in a freak accident at work a year and a half after being released.) It’s a very weird story–as true crime stories often are–and it made me start thinking–through the fog–about the Jeff Davis 8, eight women who were murdered in and around Jefferson Davis Parish back in the aughts in similar ways, yet different enough to make it questionable as to whether it was a serial killer or not. I’ve always wanted to write about that case in a fictional novel–it’s the story I keep thinking about bringing Chanse back for–because nothing is as a bizarre as true crime, really.

Anyway, my brain is starting to get cloudier and focus is getting harder. It’s very weird to describe how this feels, really; my legs even as I am sitting here in the chair ache with fatigue, my shoulders feel very tired, and my body is telling me to go lie down again. Should I listen to my body, or fight through it? That’s the worst part of this–trying to decide if pushing through the sickness to get things done is worth risking making it worse, and the last thing I want to do is make this worse. I am really not used to this kind of illness, and I don’t like it–which is a rather silly thing to say; after all, who likes being sick? I am also unused to it. The wearing of masks and constant hand-washing/sanitizing had managed to keep me from getting even a cold over the last two years, so this almost feels like a betrayal of sorts. I have no one to blame but myself, of course. I allowed my diligence to slack off after the fourth vaccination, like a fool; it’s always when you stop being vigilant and become more careless that shit happens, as I well know from a lifetime of experience.

But I am going to try to martial my energy and focus to do some things now, and I know I have some emails that need attention–even though just thinking about doing anything makes me want to weep from exhaustion and frustration. (Usually, too, when I am sick I can read and watch movies and so forth; no such luck with this, which makes it even more frustrating as I feel like I am losing and wasting time.)

And hopefully, tomorrow morning’s test will have only one line.

Stay safe and ever vigilant, Constant Reader.

Gold and Braid

Positive again this morning, despite waking up and feeling pretty good–and then I remembered the last few mornings were the same and it started kicking in about an hour after getting up. So, I am sitting here drinking my first cup of coffee, staring glumly at the two lines on my test strip, and waiting for this stupid virus to wake up inside my body and start fucking with me again. Ah, well, I should make use of this hour, shouldn’t I?

Yesterday was glum, really. I started experiencing fever for the first time since I tested positive last Friday or whenever it was, and that was particularly unpleasant. I did, however, realize hey one of the things you’ve never done is have things delivered rather than going to the store, and since I needed to be isolated from the world during this period, I thought why not go check and see if, say, Costco will deliver? So I went to their website, saw that yes, indeed, I could have an order delivered to my front door, and so I did. When Ashanti (my shopper/driver/delivery person) arrived, I put on rubber gloves and a N95 mask to go meet her at the gate–she saw the mask and gloves and wisely kept her distance (I have never before in my life understood how lepers must have felt back in the day the way I did when I saw the look on her face)–and then wore myself out lugging everything back to the Lost Apartment…but still, I got the stuff I needed. I couldn’t focus long enough to read anything–I had started Sandra SG Wong’s marvelous In the Dark We Forget at some point over the weekend, but I wasn’t really able to get far into it or focus on it yesterday, either–so I mostly spent the day under blankets in the easy chair trying to brainstorm and so forth on the things I am working on–without much luck. I also had a marketing meeting yesterday afternoon over the phone with Crooked Lane, which was daunting–reminding me again how far behind on everything I am, but it was nice for them to do and to give advice and tips on what to do, which was very cool. I also spent a good amount of time writing two emails–which ordinarily wouldn’t have taken long at all, but yesterday it took hours because of the inability to focus I mentioned–and after writing each, had to go sit and rest for a while as they wore me out. Dragging the Costco order back to the apartment in the heat also exhausted me.

Ah, there’s the muscle fatigue and joint aches I was missing when I woke up this morning.

Paul is feeling much better, which makes me tend to think he had it first and gave it to me (there’s no way of knowing, really, since it’s different with everyone) but I’m glad he’s feeling better, to be honest. If one of us has to be ill, I would prefer it to be me because I don’t worry about me the way I worry about him when he gets sick, if that makes sense at all? I hate that helpless feeling when someone you love isn’t feeling good and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. That’s the absolute worst.

We’re watching Becoming Elizabeth, and I have to say–while I am certainly not an expert by any means on Tudor England or on Queen Elizabeth (I do have some knowledge–for example, at one point last night a new character was introduced and I thought, “I bet that’s Amy Robsart” and I was right) I have to say this is one of the most accurate fictional series based on history I’ve seen. There aren’t many books about the period when young Edward VI reigned–obviously, it’s talked about in other books from a sideways view, like Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots–and the only one I can actually think of is Mary M. Luke’s A Crown for Elizabeth, which detailed the Tudor period from the deaths of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn through Elizabeth’s succession to the throne in 1558, and of course Carrolly Erickson’s marvelous Bloody Mary also covers this territory, but from Mary’s point of view. Sigh, I do love history, and watching this is making me want to reread not only Anya Seton’s Green Darkness but Philippa Carr’s The Miracle at St. Bruno’s.

And now I am feeling tired again, so am going to go sit for a spell. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

Violet and Blue

Well, I am still positive for COVID this morning; day four of this infection. I don’t feel quite as bad this morning as I did the last three, so I am hoping I’ve turned a corner of some sort. Then again, I felt okay the last few mornings and then worse as the day progressed, so there is that, too. My head still feels a bit foggy this morning, and my muscles still feel fatigued (my hip joints in particular are achy today) but I don’t overall feel sickly the way I have been feeling. It means yet another day of not leaving the house, but maybe today I can focus? We shall see–else it will be another day of drifting in and out of fever and exhaustion while watching movies, TV shows, or documentaries.

We did finish watching Our Flag Means Death yesterday, and I really enjoyed it. I love pirates, always have; not sure why that is, and have never really explored it very much, but there it is. I greatly enjoyed Black Sails when I watched it a few years back, and I’ve always wanted to do an epic pirate novel set in the 1710’s; and yes, of course, I have a title and a starting place and have a broad idea of what it would be about. I started watching Our Flag Means Death back when it first was released, but it didn’t really grab me very much and so never went back to it, despite all the social media approval of the show which also mentioned gay content in it–which meant at some point I would have to circle around back to it, which we did this weekend. This time, obviously, I “got” it and found it highly amusing and very entertaining. I do recommend it highly–but I am not going to get sidetracked into thinking about writing my pirate novel, which is obviously going to be one of those things I will never get around to writing (I’ve sadly, once I hit sixty, come to terms with knowing I will never be able to write everything I want to write).

One of the most interesting things to me is how this illness is affecting me. Sure, I’ve read stories and talked to people who’ve had it, and it seems to be different with everyone in particular ways. For me, the weird thing is I feel fine when I first wake up in the morning. It takes about an hour after I get out of bed before i start feeling the fatigue and the general sense of not being well. So, every morning I am good for about an hour before my brain and my body remembers oh yeah we’re sick, aren’t we? and it’s all downhill from there. Doing anything is exhausting. I have a sink full of dishes and the dishwasher has a clean load in it just waiting to be put away–but yesterday folding a load of laundry resulted in a two-hour nap. And I usually don’t nap or fall asleep when I am in my chair unless it’s later in the evening and Scooter is sleeping my lap.

And now I think I am going to go lay down for a little while again because I just got hit with a wave of exhaustion. Sorry to be so dull, but…I’m sick. I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, Constant Reader.

It’s Late

Well, here we are on Day Three of the coronavirus and I don’t feel much better than I did yesterday. M throat still feels congested, and the mental/physical fatigue thing is exasperating, to say the least, as is the lack of focus. I often reference my ADHD–but usually when it comes down to it I am able to force myself to focus. I wasn’t really able to do that much yesterday. I did managed to finish reading Devil’s Chew Toy, which was a lot of fun, and I tried to start Sandra SD Wong’s In the Dark We Forget, which has a great opening, but once I started trying to read it my mind began to cloud and lost focus, which was the case for the rest of the day. Paul is also sick, so he came down and we watched documentaries at first–we watched Worst Roommate Ever, which was horrifying–before switching to entertainment (Red Notice, starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, which was charming and entertaining enough) before settling in for Our Flag Means Death, which is quite fun. I had tried to start watching it before but didn’t much care for it, but according to Twitter, I needed to give it another try, so we did and we really are enjoying it. Could it be COVID brain? I don’t really think so, to be honest.

I had intended to submit a short story to a submission call that ended on July 15th, Friday; all I had to do was go over the story one last time before sending it off–but it the mess of being sick and everything else, I completely forgot about it until yesterday afternoon. However, I just looked at it again and the deadline is July 31, so I got lucky there for a moment, didn’t I? I think I’ll do that this morning–go over it and then go ahead and send it along to the editors to be done with it so I no longer have it hanging over my head, which makes the most sense. I was also trying to brainstorm on everything else I am in the middle of working on, which wasn’t easy–the foggy brain thing again–so maybe, just maybe, I should try rereading everything I have in progress and figuring out from there where I need to go, but I don’t know how long or how often I am going to feel okay enough to work. When I woke up this morning I felt very clear-headed, but as I have been writing this (while blowing my nose and swilling my coffee) I can literally feel the fog rolling into my head, which is actually most unpleasant.

I can also feel the fatigue returning. There are few things worse than fatigue/exhaustion, to be honest, and I do think the fatigue is tied together with the brain fog.

I hate when I can’t focus on things. I have so much to do! But when my brain is like this it’s probably best that I try not to get anything done or work on anything much because I can’t be certain that I’ll be doing a good job of anything and everything. I hate that. I also hate being sick, to be honest–although I can’t imagine anyone liking being sick, you know? It also comes in waves, which is weird. I always feel relatively okay when I wake up (granted, it’s only been three mornings so far) but the longer I am awake the worse I start to feel; like waking up somehow triggers it out of slumber or it gets put on pause while I am sleeping–which of course makes no sense. And even writing this is taking longer than it usually does, which should give an indication of how my brain is functioning today. Even now I can feel the fatigue creeping through my body.

So I think I am going to go sit in my chair with my coffee and my book for a little while. Heavy heaving sigh. I hate complaining though, because this could be so much worse.

I’ll check in with you tomorrow.

Desert Angel

Remember how I felt a little off yesterday morning? Like my brain was tired but I felt rested? I also woke up congested, and took a Claritin–assuming that it was my sinuses and the weather, as it generally is this time of year. Yet after the Claritin cleared my head, I realized that the entire time I was writing yesterday morning’s entry, my nose kept running. This was, of course, unusual…and then I remembered someone at work had tested positive for COVID this week, and I needed to test myself again (I was negative Thursday afternoon). Guess what? Twenty-eight months into the pandemic, after being exposed literally every day at work for the last two years plus, after traveling to New York twice and going to three conferences….I finally, at long last, tested positive for COVID. I am not complaining; this seems to be a mild if unpleasant case–thank the Lord–and I can still smell and taste things, which is great. Mostly yesterday it was brain fog, not feeling great, and a lot of fatigue. By the early afternoon I was exhausted, and of course there’s the coughing and sinus drainage issue. My throat is a bit sore, my voice is an octave or two deeper than usual with a raspiness I usually like in a singer, and the brain fog isn’t great. It’s hard for me to focus–I tried reading yesterday to no avail–and so instead watched some reality television and played some historical documentaries while Scooter snored away contentedly in my lap most of the day. Paul got home and we watched the finale of Stranger Things–I was clearly mistaken as for it being the finale of the series; that was apparent when we reached the end of the episode and I just confirmed there’s a season 5 coming which is the end.

I have already zoned out twice writing this, or gone off on other tangents. I can see COVID brain is going to be a lot of fun. I am also feeling fatigued, which isn’t great. Most of the time it feels like a bad chest cold, or a lower level flu–I’ve yet to have a fever, praise be–where I mostly feel off and tired with the occasional dry cough that hurts the lungs a little bit. My eyes burn periodically from the fatigue–which is fine, I can live with that–but I literally spent most of yesterday drifting in and out of sleep. Was it the COVID, or was it Scooter using his sleep super-power to make me nod off here and there? I did sleep through the night mostly. I woke up at five again this morning but managed to go back to sleep, same as the night before–and got up shortly after seven. I am hoping today will simply be a milder repeat of yesterday, but I am definitely feeling loopy this morning. I have a lot of work to do, but I don’t know if my focus is going to be there in order for me to get things done; if yesterday was indicative of how my brain is going to work for the duration of this illness…not good. It could have been the DayQuil giving me medicine head (for the most part, the symptoms–the cough, the sore throat, the sinus drainage–was kept under control by DayQuil; alas, the DayQuil doesn’t help with fatigue and foggy brain) but I think I had foggy brain before I took it–when I was writing the entry yesterday morning I remember thinking my brain was fatigued.

Well, at least I don’t need to come up with excuses for not going to the gym this weekend.

It’s unpleasant, to be sure, but I consider myself lucky. I don’t need to go to the hospital and I am not having trouble breathing. If this is as bad as it is going to get, I can live with it for a few days. I am not entirely sure what about my day job–I notified them yesterday as soon as I could, but the compliance officer is out of the office until Tuesday, and I think the information shared with me by upper management (the department head is also on vacation and my supervisor’s last day was last Friday) indicates that I have to remain in quarantine until five days after my symptoms go away–which means if I wake up tomorrow without symptoms and it has passed, I can return this coming Friday, but other than that I am not sure. I’m not going to worry about it; there’s no point in doing so until I speak with the compliance officer on Tuesday.

And now? I am going to go lie down in my easy chair and see if I can focus enough to read. Worst case scenario? Sitting in my chair watching movies all day. I am also a bit dehydrated, too. Yay.

Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and will chat with you again tomorrow.

Battle of the Dragons

Friday. I am taking a personal day today so I can try to get caught up on some things that slid while I was gone and haven’t had the chance to do anything about. I have to head out to Metairie to pick up my new glasses, have another errand to run out there, and also have a prescription to pick up at some point. I also have to make groceries and go to Costco sometime soon; maybe today, maybe not. We’re supposed to get a lot of rain this weekend–it’s summer in New Orleans: hot, humid, chance of rain–and am thus hoping that I’ll be able to not only get a lot done but be able to read cozily under a blanket while listening to the rain in the background. I slept very well last night, and am just going to do some mild stuff around here before it’s time to go run the errands and get back home to firmly set nose to grindstone. I feel very well rested this morning, despite getting up before eight (I actually woke up at five, but was easily persuaded into going back to sleep for a few more hours), and am looking forward to a restful if productive weekend.

I was a little surprised to see that the last two episodes of Stranger Things are much longer than the previous ones; the series/season finale is two and a half hours long. So we watched the one and a half hour second-to-last episode before switching over to this week’s Loot. I guess we’ll finish watching Stranger Things tonight, but it was disappointing; I thought for sure we’d be able to finish it last night. Why do the last two episodes total four hours of viewing? It doesn’t make much sense to me, and again, I was rather disappointed, primarily because I am really enjoying this season and am looking forward to finishing the series. On the other hand, watching the series finale will take up all of our television time this evening, so we won’t have to make a decision about what else to watch tonight at any rate. Conundrums a’plenty here, aren’t there?

I also want to finish Rob Osler’s book Devil’s Chew Toy, which is charming but I’ve been too drained to look at this week. I’m not sure what I am going to read next–I have so many options, all of them good–and of course today I have to polish a short story since the anthology closes for submissions at midnight. I’d like to get the copy edits for the Bouchercon anthology out of the way once and for all–a goal for the weekend–and I am thinking perhaps for my next read I might read something horror rather than mystery; I can’t really decide and as usual, will actually go ahead and decide once I’ve finished the current read and see what appeals to me. I have such a plethora of riches here in the massive TBR stacks and piles it’s not even funny. (I am also resisting the urge to buy more books, doing which would not be a good thing. A lot of really good books are dropping right now, but I have to be strong and hold firm.) I think when I get home from my errands today I may just curl up in my easy chair and finish the book. I don’t want to give the impression I am not enjoying it; my brain is often fried after I get off work and do some writing and/or editing once I get home and all I am good for is watching something mindless, like Real Housewives’ Ultimate Girls’ Trip, which has been highly entertaining so far, until Paul gets home.

I also need to pick out a Tennessee Williams quote for the opening of Mississippi River Mischief.

I’m not very exciting or interesting this morning, am I? Sorry about that, I think my brain didn’t reset over night or something; it feels rather intellectually burnt out, if that makes any sense. It’s okay, most of anything that I’ll be doing today doesn’t really require my creative brain but rather the editorial side, yet it would be nice to get some new writing done–on the other hand, I am going to be out running around in the heat today, which is going to be tiring and exhausting and probably by the time I get home from it all, I’m just going to want to collapse into my chair and read, which is also fine. A very important rule for being a writer is to also be a voracious reader, and I’ve not exactly been voracious in a while. I didn’t read hardly at all, for example, at Sleuthfest–but on the other hand I was also doing a lot there and not sleeping well. (I also didn’t write much while I was there; I did get some writing done in the mornings but it literally wasn’t a good writing weekend for me, either.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Another cup of coffee, another load of laundry, and some cleaning are in order for the next hour or so. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader!

Thousand Days

Last night was definitely the best night’s sleep I’ve had since I left for Florida last week, which was really nice. I still didn’t want to get up this morning, of course, but the weird thing is I feel very rested; I actually have every morning this week, which should say something about how well i’ve been sleeping, right?

Yesterday after work I had to head uptown to run an errand before heading home to the Lost Apartment, where I cleaned the kitchen and did a load of laundry before settling in with a grilled cheese sandwich (with bacon, guacamole, and two slices of Creole tomato–marvelous, simply marvelous) to watch some more episodes of Stranger Things, and I think we should finish it tonight. We also caught up on Only Murders in the Building, which I am enjoying–but not so sure how I feel about the latest plot twist in the story, but I am enjoying the show this season; the cast is top-notch, of course, and the writing is still strong, but the plot does seem to be dragging a bit this season. Not a complaint, merely an observation. We also have some episodes of Becoming Elizabeth to get caught up on; I love me some Tudor drama, and it’s funny how we very rarely see the incredibly turbulent times between the death of Henry VIII and the coronation of Elizabeth I on film or in novels (one exception: Anya Seton’s marvelous Green Darkness), so it’s nice seeing the years of Edward VI being dramatized; I’ve always felt the younger years of Elizabeth before she became Queen were just as interesting as those of her reign, particularly since the lessons she learned during those years held her in good stead when she did mount the throne…I wonder, now that I think about it, whether Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones was sort of based on Elizabeth Tudor?

I am starting to feel sort of back to normal again, so I am recovered fully from the trip this past weekend; and since I am not going anywhere again until September for Bouchercon (provided any of our current pandemics don’t suddenly worsen between now and then) I can get settled into a routine and hopefully–hopefully–start making it back to the gym again as well as settling into a routine of writing and editing. It’s not with the slightest hesitation that I can happily state that I am pretty much finished with all editing for A Streetcar Named Murder (all that is left is the page proofing), and all Imposter Syndrome aside, it’s actually not a bad book. After going through the copy edits and doing some slight tweaking, it actually holds together pretty well; I think my main character is likable enough; and I think I may have actually done a good job with the New Orleans stuff. Suffice it to say, I am pleased with it and hope that everyone who does read it will be as well.

Huzzah!

I have one other major chore on my list to get done by Monday, and then once it’s completed I can go ahead and get down to work on the new Scotty and everything else I am working on. Everything is a process, of course; but once I get the errands I need to run done tomorrow (which I am taking off) I should be able to sit around and focus on everything I need to get done in the meantime. I am excited about getting my new glasses tomorrow (the ability to see clearly is vastly underrated) and at some point I need to run by Costco as well as make a significant grocery run–there’s literally so little food in the house we would be hard-pressed to get through an entire weekend, quite frankly–and perhaps part of my “straight home from work” night chores should include a thorough cleaning out of the refrigerator (I may make grilled cheese again tonight; Creole tomato season doesn’t last forever after all) as well as reorganizing things in there to utilize the space better. I have a load of clothes in the dryer that will need fluffing and folding once I am home, as well, and I have a short story to edit before turning it in tomorrow for a submission call I’d like to make it past the cut–but on the other hand, I won’t be terribly upset if I don’t. I am not sure my story actually fits within the perimeters of the actual call, so it’s already a long shot before taking into consideration whether the writing or anything is any good.

I also need to figure out where I am with a lot of other things. This weekend will be good, methinks, for centering myself. I also want to finish reading Devil’s Chew Toy this weekend, and I also have a blog post or two about some things I’ve read I need to finish and post. It’s always something….

Until tomorrow, Constant Reader!

Long Distance Winner

Wednesday and I got the copy edits done! Woo-hoo!

I honestly don’t know why I am so weird about edits and so forth. Both my editorial letter and the copy edits this time around were practically nothing–incredibly easy fixes that literally required very little thought or effort– yet in each and every instance I put off doing them because I was just so goddamned sure that navigating them would be a nightmare. But now I can finally put A Streetcar Named Murder into the “finished” folder (I will still have to proof pages, of course, but for all intents and purposes this manuscript is pretty much finished; I won’t be working in Microsoft Word on it anymore and so I can close the file) and give all my attention to the things I am working on now. I need to get through the copy edits on the Bouchercon anthology and I need to edit/polish a short story this week before submitting it for an anthology call that is due this coming Friday.

I had to run an errand last night–which required me going into Mid-city during rush hour (the horror of it all!) before coming home. It actually didn’t turn out too badly; I took the highway and got there in no time at all, and it was shockingly easy to get home as well. There was some massive rain in uptown yesterday–it sprinkled at the office–and I could tell there had been flooding in my neighborhood. I suspect our street–which has only flooded once in the nineteen years we’ve lived there–is going to flood more in the future since the hideous condo building went up over two empty lots (where the water used to spread out; something I think is going to continue to be problematic for the entire city as our green spaces and empty lots disappear because there’s money to be made in real estate why should anyone be concerned about flooding in a city below sea level?) on my block…I really need to finish that story about killing a greedy real estate contractor, don’t I?

But in the wake of finishing the copy edits of my book (huzzah!) I am now trying to figure out what I need to get done next and how to best utilize my time. My new glasses have arrived, so I can go pick those up on Friday (I am taking the day off to do that and some other things that need doing) and I get to pick out a new, more current author photo. Sleuthfest gave us the option to pay to have new headshots done, and as little as I wanted to do this…I also recognized my black-and-white author photo is from 2008 and the one of me with the stacks of books is from 2014 or so. I mean, I look the same as I did then–if not as thin, at any rate–but some of these photos are good. and I’m also getting to the point in life where I just don’t care that much anymore. I spent so much of my life worrying about how I looked–the curse of vanity coupled with insecurity–and how my body appeared that it’s rather freeing to not really be so concerned about it anymore as I used to be. I don’t know if the insecurity was put to rest by getting older, or whether the vanity fell by the wayside, or some combination of the two, but now I want to get back to the gym not because of the cosmetic effect but to make my muscles and body feel better; I definitely need to get stretched out at some point. I just wish I had a dedicated open space in the Lost Apartment where I can sit on the floor and stretch everything.

Someday.

We continued watching Stranger Things last night, which we are really enjoying–but I could do without the Russian subplot, quite frankly. It’s weird seeing how much older the kids have gotten since that first season, but time waits for no one. I do enjoy my 1980’s nostalgia, even if it was a hellish decade and one that on a personal level I would love to completely forget like it never happened, but I still like a lot of the cultural stuff from that decade–music, books, movies, television shows, etc–but I don’t know that I would ever write anything set during that time period. I have lots of ideas for stuff set in the 1970’s–I gravitate toward that decade, methinks, because it was so formative and it was my adolescence for the most part–and “Never Kiss a Stranger” is even a 1990’s story…but it never crosses my mind to write anything about the 1980’s. The decade simply doesn’t inspire me, and I am sure a lot of that is me not wanting to revisit the personal angst I went through then. (I have been thinking a lot about my novella “A Holler Full of Kudzu,” which is a Corinth County story and is set in the 1970’s lately, as well as my 1970’s Chicago suburbs story Where the Boys Die, which is a great title but I don’t think I want to use it for this particular story, to be honest; but it’ll do as a working title because, as we all know, I cannot write anything if it’s not titled.)

But I am looking forward now to getting back in the saddle and writing again. Mississippi River Mischief is developing nicely in my head; another project I am working on is also starting to coalesce, and I need to plan out the next few chapters of Chlorine. Feeling pretty good about things–I assume that will last about another hour.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Twisted

Ah, Tuesday morning and back to the office. I slept decently last night–woke up a couple of times, always able to go back to sleep–so I feel somewhat better this morning than I usually do on Tuesday mornings, but then again, we’ll just have to see how the rest of the day/week goes. I did my work at home duties yesterday, some chores and errands, and last night we started watching the new season of Stranger Things, which I think is the final season. The first episode was a bit off to me, but it certainly started picking up speed in the second and now we are all in after the third. I didn’t write or read much last night after work, but I do have some things i need to get finished today–quite a few things, actually–but I feel rested and maybe when I feel more awake than I do now, it might not be a problem getting everything done today that needs to get done. Stranger things, indeed.

I do have things I need to get ordered on-line today, too–and we need to go to Costco again at some point, perhaps this weekend. It’s always something.

I’m still, to be honest, coasting a little on the high from this past weekend in Florida, if I am being completely honest. I’m still feeling connected to my writing, which is lovely, even if I have to figure out a few things and get a few things pulled together. I also can’t believe it’s July already–and we’re almost halfway through the month, at that. Crazy, you know. But this year is already have over as well–what the hell? And then the next thing you know it’s football season. The twitter accounts for both LSU and the Saints are counting down the days until the season starts. It’s a new era for both–new coaches, essentially new teams, for that matter–so it will be interesting to see how the season goes for both. I also have a book to write during football season (as ever yet again), which will be challenging of course, as it is always is, and then it’s Christmas and New Year’s and BOOM. Carnival time again! #madness

Oh, and I have a book coming out in December right around the time my next Scotty manuscript is due, so as always, the promotion of a new book will have to occur (or start occurring) around the same time as I have to finish another. Now, there’s the workshop I would like to attend: how do you stay focused when you are finishing a book at the same time you are promoting a new release without going completely insane? That’s the part they never tell you about in creative writing classes and workshops–although I suppose those who have agents probably have the agent to walk them through that part (although sometimes I do wonder if I over-romanticize what it’s like to have an agent, since I’ve never had one? Oh if I had an agent they’d take care of this for me–I suspect that’s all too often not accurate. I also suppose that if and when I do ever land one, I will inevitably be disappointed with what they don’t do for me). Someday, I suppose, I’ll find out one way or the other.

And on that note I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

If Anyone Falls

I absolutely loved the tag line for the marvelous television adaptation of Megan Abbott’s equally brilliant novel Dare Me: “There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenaged girls.” It’s also incredibly accurate; our teen years often impact and influence who we become and can color the rest of our lives. I loved Dare Me; it was lyrically, hauntingly written, and the story it told, while actually pretty simple, showed how the intricacies of relationships between young girls and authority figures who aren’t much older than they are, can become so complicated and complex; layers of love intermingling with hate and jealousy, the power dynamic shifting and changing as the characters themselves shift, change, and grow from their experiences.

I write, sometimes, books where the main characters are young–teenagers, either in high school or college or having just completed college–and those books are often labeled and marketed as “young adult” fiction, even though I generally just consider them novels about young people. I mean, technically novels about young people are young adult novels, and yet while I am resigned to this marketing label I am never certain if my books truly qualify or not. Perhaps that’s some kind of internalized arrogance and a sense of subconscious superiority to what I consider something lesser; it’s definitely something I should unpack at some point. But I think it is also an interesting starting point for one of my endless essay ideas, and perhaps someday–when I am less scattered, less all-over-the-place mentally and creatively–I’ll be able to sit down and write all those essays I want to write.

Which brings me to John Copenhaver’s second novel, The Savage Kind, which I just finished reading yesterday.

If I tell you the truth about Judy and Philippa, I’m going to lie. Not because I want to, but because to tell the story right, I have to. As girls, they were avid documentarians, each armed with journals and buckets of pens, convinced that future generations would pour over their words. Everything they did was a performance. Everything they wrote assumed an audience. After all, autobiographers are self-serving, aggrandizing. Memoirists embellish. It’s unavoidable. To write down your memories is an act of invention, to arrange them in the best, most compelling order, a bold gesture. Some of the diary entries that follow are verbatim, lifted directly from the source, but others are enhanced and reshaped. I reserve my right to shade in the empty spaces, to color between the lines, to lie.

You may balk, dear reader, but I don’t care. I need to get this right.

I could take different approaches. I could contrast the teenage girls: the black hat and the white, the harpy and the angel, the cunning vamp and the doe-eyed boob. Or I could draw them together, a single unit: Lucy and Ethel, Antony and Cleopatra, Gertrude and Alice, Holmes and Watson, or even, I dare say, Leopold and Loeb. But neither of those angles would work. The complicated facts are inescapable. These girls are both separate and together, but many times, they followed their own paths and even crossed one another. Things are never that simple, never that black and white, that good or evil, or that true or false. I’m not writing this to assign blame, or to ask forgiveness, or to tie it up in a bow for posterity. It’s not that kind of book.After all, an act of violence committed by one may have originated in the heart of the other. That’s to say, this is a story about sisters, and like many of those dusty and gruesome stories from ancient literature, here sisterhood is sealed in blood.

I should know. I was one of them.

Great opening, right?

John’s debut Dodging and Burning won the Macavity Award*, and was quite the impressive debut. II was completely blown away by the book myself–it showed a maturity and sophistication in theme, writing, and characters that one rarely sees in a debut novel. One of the things I thought was very interesting about the book was that while it did focus on a gay story, the main voices in the book were young straight women; I thought that was a risky thing to try to pull off, but he did a really excellent job.

As good as Dodging and Burning was, I wasn’t prepared for how good The Savage Kind would be.

The heart of the book is the friendship/relationship between two damaged young women in the post-war afterglow of the late 1940’s in Washington DC. (Both of John’s novels are set in the post-war period, when the world was trying to go ‘back to normal’ after the massive paradigm alteration of a global war that left most of Europe and significant parts of Asia in ruins; tens of millions dead, billions in property damage, and the world needed to rebuild from the rubble–and normal was also being redefined; the paradigm shift caused by the war made going back to “the way things used to be” practically impossible–which makes it a very interesting time to write about.) Philippa’s mother died giving birth to her and she has a slightly adversarial relationship with her stepmother, Bonnie. Judy was raised in an orphanage and adopted by a wealthy couple who had lost a daughter in a particularly brutal way–Judy was adopted to replaced their raped and murdered daughter, but her adoptive parents are still too scarred and damaged from the lost of their own child to raise and love another, and this history also colors Judy’s personality and who she is. The two girls find each other and become very close friends; so close that their love for each other might go even deeper than the Platonic ideal of friendship–their teenaged hormones raging out of control, are romantic/sexual feelings also developing between the two of them?

They are also playing girl detectives, trying to get to the bottom of a mystery that they don’t know has anything to do with them beyond the idle curiosity (and their dangerous boredom) but as they look further into the mystery revolving around a classmate, a favorite teacher, and that classmate’s family–as well as their own–they become more and more deeply enmeshed in danger and cling even tighter to each other.

As if that juggling act isn’t tough enough, Copenhaver makes all of these characters realized, fully developed and realistic in their emotions, their feelings, and their reactions. He also tells the story in alternating points of view between the two girls while they are experiencing the events, as well as a narrator voice from the future, telling the story in retrospect as well as talking directly to the reader. This is hard to pull off, particularly the omniscient future narrator–the last time I saw this used so effectvely and memorably was in Thomas Tryon’s The Other (at least, this is the book that popped into my head as I was reading, and it’s a favorite of mine).

The Savage Kind was nominated for a Lefty Award, and it very deservedly won the Lambda for Best Mystery recently. I highly recommend it!

*I may be wrong here, but I think he might be the first openly gay author of a book with gay characters and themes to win the Macavity Award; I know I was nominated once for a short story–but my characters and themes weren’t queer.