Category: television

Could I Have This Dance

Happy 4th of July, everyone! I’m going to listen to Hamilton today, maybe relax with some American history later this afternoon, and try to avoid social media as much as I possibly can.

Yesterday was kind of the pits, writing wise; at least it seemed to be that way. As you know, Constant Reader, the revisions have been going swimmingly, I needed to add some things here and there, correct some language that was egregious, delete repetitive stuff, but overall, when I made myself open up the document and start working through it, it was all easy and simple and I was starting to feel really good about myself: this is a really good draft already, isn’t it?

Yes, well.

Yesterday I reached the chapters where the serious revision was needed. I opened up Chapter 16 (of nineteen, see how close to being done I am?), humming happily along to Taylor Swift on the iHome (don’t judge me) and crashed up against the realization that the very first paragraph of Chapter 16 was, in fact, an entire scene rather than a paragraph where I summed up what happened in that scene. Then I realized that the next paragraph was, again, a summary of action that needed to be turned into a scene–none of which I wanted to do yesterday. I’ve been binge-watching the MTV series Scream (which Paul and I had abandoned about five episodes into season one) and have been enjoying it tremendously (it’s apparently better as a binge rather than watching from week to week); I’m reading both Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red and a couple of chapters of The Secret of Terror Castle as I drift off to sleep every night; and I started writing another short story yesterday morning (currently titled “For All Tomorrow’s Lies”). I also cleaned the bedroom, reorganized and filed in the kitchen–it’s absolutely amazing the lengths I will go to not work on these revisions. I even scrubbed out the bathtub and cleaned the upstairs bathroom. But I did eventually force myself to sit down and work on Chapter Sixteen–constantly going back to check Facebook and Twitter (I sometimes wonder how much social media has affected people’s writing habits), and seriously, expanding these paragraphs into scenes was like pulling teeth…until I realized at one point I’d written 1500 new words in between half an hour and forty-five minutes; in addition to the 700 or so I’d written on the new story. I wrote another 500 words, and thought, you know, two thousand new words is a lot in slightly more than an hour, maybe tomorrow it’ll flow easier so I, despite that nagging voice in the back of my head (“What if you don’t want to do this tomorrow, either?”), I saved the document and decided to go back to cleaning for a while before watching Scream. I checked my email…

..and discovered that a story I’d submitted to Mystery Week magazine a few weeks ago, “Keeper of the Flame,” had been accepted for publication, and the contract was already there!

There really is nothing like having one of those bad writing days where every word is like passing a kidney stone, where you begin to wonder whether or not the well has finally run dry and you’re finished as a writer, only to get this lovely kind of affirmation. It’s really just timing, more than anything else, and I try not to be superstitious and see things as ‘signs’, but you can see, can’t you, how easy it is to fall into that mentality?

“Keeper of the Flame” is a story I am very proud of, and it’s really dark. I originally wrote it to submit to a conference anthology–many conferences do these every year, and I thought I should maybe start writing stories to send in for more of them; this was my first or second attempt. After it wasn’t accepted (I found out when the anthology was released, which is incredibly poor form–you should always let people know whether their stories are being used or not; I decided not to submit to that particular conference anthology ever again. There was another one where I was asked, two years in a row, to submit; ironically the first time my story wasn’t used and I wasn’t told. They wrote me again the next year and wanted to use that story THAT year–I’d already sold the story elsewhere, as one does, so I wrote another and yes, once again, wasn’t notified they weren’t using it. The third time they asked me, I was rather curt with them. But I digress.), I revised it a little bit and submitted it to a magazine, which ultimately rejected the story–they did send me a lovely note, telling me it was a great story but not right for them–and I’ve been sitting on it ever since. About a month ago, Mystery Week came to my attention–I don’t remember how; someone I know either sold a story to them, or it was mentioned in a newsletter from one of the writing organizations I belong to, or something like that; my mind is frankly a sieve these days–and I thought, hey, nothing to lose, might as well try here.

And hey, I sold it to them. Huzzah!

I’ve been getting lots of lovely news lately, lovely affirmations that have been coming along at just about the right time, to be honest. I’ve gotten some lovely emails and Facebook messages and tweets from readers over the last few weeks as well.

Today, I feel like I can not only stare down those damned revisions but get them, if not finished, pretty damned close to being finished. And that’s a good thing.

I’m going to also share with you the first paragraph of the new story, which I figured out what the rest of the story was last night before falling asleep:

Lori first noticed the man watching her in the fresh section of the Rouse’s on Tchoupitoulas Street. She was busy thumping melons and feeling foolish, like she always did when thumping melons with her index finger. She’d never really learned how to tell the difference in sound denoting ripe versus non-ripe, but she was too self-conscious to simply pick up a melon and put in her cart without going through the time-honored ritual. It was a cantaloupe she was holding when she noticed the man, over by the bins for varieties of onions and potatoes, looking at her.

And revisions? Kiss my American ass. I will DEFEAT you today.

Photo 8

I Just Fall in Love Again

Monday, and I have the day off. This is day three of my four-day weekend, and it feels lovely. I feel incredibly rested, and I even woke up early this morning–earlier than I have the last two days, at any rate–and so clearly, the chamomile tea last night was enormously helpful in getting me to sleep.

I finished cleaning the downstairs yesterday, and today I will be tackling the upstairs. There’s only so much I can do upstairs without rearranging or moving things, and I am not sure how well that will go over once Paul returns, so instead I am going to just clean and organize and perhaps empty out drawers and so forth before tackling the floors. I’ve done absolutely nothing as far as working on the revisions are concerned, but I am going to do that today. Yesterday I repaired to my easy chair and finished watching season one of MTV’s Scream. I’m not really sure why Paul and I stopped watching; I do know at the time the MTV app on Apple TV was kind of wonky, and for some reason we didn’t care very much for the characters. But picking up on it last night, I found myself really enjoying going for the ride. Maybe it’s because we were watching them as they aired originally? Maybe Scream works better as a binge? I’m not sure one way or the other, but I do know that I’ll have it on while I am cleaning the upstairs. And I still have yet another day off! How wonderful is that?

I did make some notes on some ideas I have for short stories in progress yesterday while I was watching Scream; I also watched a documentary on HBO about the Children of God religious cult; apparently there’s a completely different documentary on Netflix about this cult, focusing on different victims. Who knew? But watching gave me the idea for a story (of course) so I scribbled down some notes on it as well. I have yet to get back to Tomato Red, but I will probably do that today; taking an hour to revise than an hour to read, giving up on both around five, at which point I will repair upstairs and start cleaning while watching Season 2 of Scream. 

I’d hoped to get more reading done this weekend, but hey, there’s only so much time, right?

Before going to bed every night I’ve been rereading an old favorite, The Secret of Terror Castle. One of my favorite kids’ series was always The Three Investigators; although back when I was a child Alfred Hitchcock got star billing in the series, despite rarely appearing in the books themselves. The books were ‘introduced’ by Hitchcock, and there was always a final chapter where the boys met with Hitchcock, discussed the finer points of the case with him, and he asked some questions that weren’t necessarily explained in the narrative. This quite naturally caused problems when Hitchcock died; they replaced him with a fictional author, and by the time several books with this author character were published, I had aged out of the series and moved on to other reading material. I think they even replaced the writer with someone else even later, and I would imagine they had to redo the first books that had Hitchcock, since they were now dated. But The Secret of Terror Castle is even more dated than one would think; it was predicated on the idea that a silent film star’s manager and business partner would still not only be alive, but young enough to be physically active and not seem ancient to three thirteen-year-old boys. Since the silent film era was phased out in the early 1930’s–even being generous and saying it lasted until 1932 would mean that it was eighty-five years ago, and anyone old enough to be a business manager in 1932 would be well over one hundred now! The books are out of print now, and hard to find–again, my childhood collecting days has a nest-egg of sorts in my kids’ series books, which I could always sell on eBay should I ever need cash.

But as I’ve been rereading The Secret of Terror Castle these last few nights–a chapter or two per night, as I am falling asleep–I am again struck by how well-written and well-plotted the books are. The Three Investigators–originally the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Series, then Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, finally just The Three Investigators–were each individuals, developed and well-rounded, never acting out of character–and there was also a strong sense of continuity throughout the entire series (I’ve never finished reading the series; when it stopped being hardcover and went to paperback originals, I stopped; the writing in the later books wasn’t as tight and the plots not as well thought out, or I was older–but rereading the books as an older man who also happens to be a mystery writer, The Secret of Terror Castle is certainly holding up); there weren’t the continuity mistakes that riddled, say, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the Dana Girls–which had everything to do with transitions from original text to revisions. The Three Investigators always had to solve a mystery; following clues that often took them from a basic case–a search for a missing parrot, for example, that led them to an entire series of parrots, all trained to speak a single clue. All the clues had to be put together, and then their meaning figured out; so a lost treasure could be found (this was The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot), and I’ve always loved treasure hunts. Often times, the keys to solving the mystery lie in the boys’ abilities to observe things that they didn’t think about at the time, but later didn’t make sense–a little boy’s gold tooth led to the solution of The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure, for example–but again, the problem with the series later was getting past the death of Hitchcock, and the books becoming a little dated with changes in technology and so forth. Even when I first read The Secret of Terror Castle, when I was about twelve, it couldn’t really be current because, as mentioned before, the manager would have been borderline too old–at least older than he appeared to be in the text.

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I picked the book up again, really, because I watched Truffaut Hitchcock, a short documentary on HBO the other night about the famous week-long interview Francois Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock about every film in his long career, his direction of them, and his vision for each film. These interviews became a book, and a very influential one, according to some of the directors in the documentary who talked about reading it and being influenced by it when they were young–including Scorsese, Bogdonavich, and Fincher. I’ve also been thinking about how, when I was a kid, there were all these anthologies with Hitchcock’s name on them–Alfred Hitchcock Presents Tales to Terrify You, that sort of thing. Hitchcock of course simply had licensed his name for these books–like he had with The Three Investigators–and of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which still exists today. (I imagine those anthologies were stories collected from the magazine.) Getting a story into AHMM is on my bucket list…and of course, I’ve never submitted anything to them. As this year is ‘cross things off my bucket list’ year, I’m going to submit something to them–one of these stories I am working on hopefully; if not, maybe something new I haven’t started working on yet. The documentary is quite good, by the way–I highly recommend it. Listening to Truffaut and Hitchcock discuss movie-making–story telling–can also be useful to writers.

Man, would I love to reboot The Three Investigators! When I was a kid, I wanted to write one, or a Hardy Boys, or a Nancy Drew. I also wanted to write my own kids’ mystery series. Maybe I should put those on the bucket list?

And now, it’s back to to the spice mines.

I’m a Believer

Thursday!

Paul leaves this afternoon, so I will come home from work tonight to an empty house, a herd of hungry cats outside, and an incredibly needy one inside. Which is, of course, fine; I can handle Scooter’s neediness, and of course the herd outside just wants to be fed and petted on the head every now and then. But I am always somewhat amazed by how much space Paul takes up; the apartment always seems enormous, silent and empty when he’s gone. Ah, well. I can get started on the Cleaning Project tonight, while watching documentaries or movies on the upstairs television; the upstairs is Paul’s responsibility–so whenever he’s out of town I, of course, give it a thorough cleaning/organizing. After I get off work tomorrow I don’t have to be back at work until 3 pm on Wednesday next week; four-and-a-half glorious days of cleaning and organizing and writing and revising and reading and–let’s face it–being incredibly lazy and just sitting in the easy chair watching shit on television with Scooter sleeping in my lap.

There are worse ways to spend an evening.

I’ve been, alas, too tired when I get home the last few evenings–after making dinner and doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen. etc–to do anything other than sit in my easy chair and watch television, so I’ve not been able to get back to Daniel Woodrell’s amazing Tomato Red; hopefully I can spend some quality time with it this weekend and get it read. I think after that I am going to read a book by a woman; my reading has been overly male lately (other than that wonderful Lisa Unger Ink and Bone, which is going to be on my Top Ten list for the year, along with Dan Chaon’s Ill Will), but I am also thinking I might read The Great Gatsby next.

My Fitzgerald set arrived this week:

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Aren’t they lovely? I can’t wait for the Steinbeck set to arrive.

To be honest, I was stunned to pick it up and see how short The Great Gatsby actually is; it’s less than 200 pages. I should be able to read that relatively quickly.

So, anyway. Back to the spice mines with me.

A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You

It’s raining this morning, and in what can only be described as an odd phenomenon, I could hear the rain as I sat down at my desk this morning….but when I looked out my windows, I didn’t see raindrops, all I saw were crepe myrtle blossoms falling at a rather alarming rate, like pink snow. Even odder, the crepe myrtle trees are to the right–I can see them through my right window–but the falling blossoms were clearly visible from each of the three windows. So where were those blossoms coming from? Quite peculiar. I can still hear rain–the blossoms have stopped falling–and everything outside is wet and dripping, but I still don’t see any raindrops.

Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee yet, which is entirely possible.

I am getting close to the end of this round of revisions–I should finish, as I had hoped, by Friday, so I can spend my four day weekend polishing up the language, slowly and gradually, taking breaks to read and clean. Paul leaves for his mother’s tomorrow–so when I get home from work it’ll just be me and the needy kitty. I’ll be able to get caught up on American Gods while he’s gone, and I’ve saved any number of documentaries and movies to watch on my Netflix queue that he wouldn’t want to watch, so I am going to have a lot of fun over my lengthy weekend. My goal is to stop at the grocery store on my way home on Friday to get whatever I might need for the weekend, so I won’t have to leave the house other than to go to the gym or go to Tacos and Beer for food over the weekend. Scooter is going to be having his usual abandonment issues once Paul has left, but I am determined to get as much done as I can, while relaxing, over the long weekend–once I go back to work next week, even with him gone it’ll still be all about just trying to stay on top of things. And he’ll be home a week from Saturday, so that next weekend I’ll just have that day to get things done.

I made a list of everything I am working on, and man, am I ever all over the place. Once I get this draft finished, the polishing will be a little bit easier, so I am hoping over the weekend I’ll get a chance to keep working on short stories as well. I printed out the draft of the story I’ve selected to submit to that anthology; it’s really just a matter of rereading it and deciding how to make it work. Given that it was originally written in either 1989 or 1990 and not edited/revised since the first draft, my guess is that most of it will have to go into the garbage and all I’ll be able to retain are the characters and the basic idea behind the story; just looking at the first page (it’s also incredibly short) I know there’s a lot that has to be redone. I’ve actually been thinking about this story a lot lately–I had been thinking about turning it into a novel–and hey, if the anthology doesn’t end up wanting it, I may still do that. But for now, I think it works best as a story rather than as a novel…and I’ve already written a y/a heavily influenced by the basic concept behind this story (Lake Thirteen, if you’re wondering) so writing another, similar style novel would be repetitive, unless I completely change the concept behind it. I am being very oblique and vague, I realize, but there’s no way to be more specific without spoiling both, but I’ll give it another try: both are ghost stories, trying to resolve unsolved crimes from the past, with just a touch of reincarnation thrown into the mix.

We watched another two episodes of Animal Kingdom, and while it is still quite enjoyable, there are some behaviors that don’t really add up in the grand, overall scheme of things; I am hoping that will be resolved as we watch the Season One finale tonight before moving onto the second season. I also see how the stage is being set for some major drama to come in the second season, so am very intrigued to see what direction the writers take the show.

And Ellen Barkin is just killing it.

I suppose I should head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a Hump Day Hunk for you:

 

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Last Train to Clarksville

Tuesday morning! It’s gloomy and a bit gray out there outside my windows; the sun is shining but its behind a haze of some sort. I would think it’s humid, but my windows are completely dry–no condensation, so that makes me tend to think it’s not as humid as it probably could be. I’ll find out in a little while when I head to the office. Today, tomorrow and Thursday I am ending my shifts working in the CareVan doing testing in the parking lot of the Walgreens at Felicity and St. Charles; part of our annual partnership with Walgreens for National HIV Testing Day. This is incredibly convenient, as I can walk home in a matter of minutes once we are finished in the van. Paul, of course, is leaving town on Thursday (nine days of a needy cat with abandonment issues!), so there’s that. I took Monday the 3rd as a paid day off, so I have a four day weekend and with bar testing that following Wednesday night, it’s actually more like four and a half days off. Huzzah!

I made up for not working on the revisions yesterday by getting three chapters finished; if I can stay on track to do the same again today, I will be finished with the revisions by Thursday, which will allow me to take Friday away from revising, maybe even Saturday and Sunday off as well, and then spend Monday doing the last minute polishing. I want to get a lot done around the Lost Apartment over the weekend, and I also want to get not only the WIP finally polished like a diamond and ready to be seen by people but I want to dive into the next book too; ideally, I’d like to get the first draft of the next book finished by August 1 ( a bit of a reach, if I do say so myself), and the next finished by September 1, but we’ll see how that all turns out. Stranger things have happened.

I also realized yesterday that the story revision I was working on won’t work for the anthology call I was planning on sending it to–a quick reread of the guidelines made me realize it wouldn’t work, didn’t fit, and was beyond a big stretch to fit (several times before I’ve submitted stories to anthologies that was a stretch to fit the theme; every time the story was turned down. It’s entirely possible the stories weren’t good, but at the same time, they wound up being placed somewhere else, so there’s that…anyway) so I decided that there was another one that did fit, so I dug it out, printed it, and am going to read it sometime this week to get a better idea of how much revision it will need. Considering the only draft of it was written in about 1989 or 1990, I’m assuming that would be a LOT of revision required. It’s kind of a stretch as well, but it could work.

I wasn’t able to get near Woodrell’s Tomato Red yesterday, but I’m taking it with me to the CareVan for testing; I can read it between clients. Last night, we got caught up on both Orphan Black and Veep; tonight it’s back to Animal Kingdom.

Such an exciting life, eh?

So, here’s a hunk for you on a Tuesday to get you through till Hump Day tomorrow:

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Daydream Believer

Monday morning, and this is an odd week. Paul leaves to visit his mom for a week on Thursday, and then it’s a four-day holiday weekend for me after I get off work on Friday, not having to return to the office until the following Wednesday. I have, of course, big plans for the weekend–plans which involve cleaning, organizing, and writing/revising, of course, as I always seem to, and most likely, I won’t get everything done that I want to get done. This always seems to be the case.

I started reading Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red yesterday, and while I  didn’t get very far into it, it’s extraordinary, and I can see why Megan Abbott is not only a fan of his (she wrote an introduction to this edition of the book) but why she also recommended his work to me so highly. The voice! The language choice! And the action starts almost immediately within the first sentence. I am really looking forward to getting further into the book.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about Reflections in a Golden Eye yesterday, which makes me tend to think that perhaps I should have blogged about it so soon after reading it; McCullers’ genius is kind of a slow burn. The seemingly cold, emotional remove she took from her characters–which I initially understood as not caring about them–was actually kind of necessary for the reader to be exposed to the lives of these damaged people who lived near a Southern military base, and McCullers also didn’t offer up their lives for authorial judgment; instead, she presented the entire story and the characters  as “here are some people and here is what really goes on behind closed doors, past the facades that everyone puts up to fool everyone else into thinking they’re normal, although what really is normal anymore?”

We also started binge watching Animal Kingdom yesterday; I finally found Season One on Amazon Prime, and whoa, what a show. Hot guys, a crime family headed by Ellen Barkin in a sizzling performance, a gay subplot, lots of gratuitous male skin, and a story that twists and turns in ways the viewer can’t anticipate; I don’t understand why this show isn’t generating more buzz or more interest, and Ellen Barkin’s failure to get an Emmy nomination for Season One (maybe it wasn’t eligible until the next Emmys, I don’t know) is a mystery to me. I don’t get why more people aren’t talking about this show; I think I only heard of it because we were watching something else on TNT or TBS (Samantha Bee, most likely) and I saw a preview for Season 2, which is currently airing. Anyway, I’m glad I found it. We have three more episodes to go in Season 1 before we can move on to Season 2, so between this, The Mist, and Orphan Black, we’re kind of set on things to watch now. While Paul’s gone I am going to watch shows/movies I wouldn’t be able to see if he were home–stuff he doesn’t want to want or has no interest in–and I’m also hoping to get a lot of reading and writing done.

We’ll see how that plays out, won’t we?

So, here’s a hunk to start your week off properly.

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Keep On Loving You

Sunday and I have a lot of work to get done today. My kitchen is an absolute mess; I have a load of laundry in the washing machine; and I have to get back to writing and revising. I was terrible yesterday; I took the day off from doing anything and everything. I was tired, and so thought relaxing was okay for me. I did wake up early this morning and feel somewhat refreshed and relaxed, which is quite nice, actually. I intend to get a lot done. Yesterday I intended to get a lot done, but got sidetracked by the LSU baseball game (GEAUX TIGERS!), and the Tigers defeated number one ranked Oregon State for the second day in a row to make it to the finals this week; a best of three series starting Monday night. It’s an all SEC final; the Tigers are taking on the Florida Gators, whom they defeated in the SEC tournament finals and will have vengeance on their minds. Should be a fun series, and of course we’ll have an SEC team as national champion again, regardless of who wins. Woo-hoo!

I read Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye yesterday. I enjoyed reading it, and McCullers has a really unique grasp of language. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a really short novel, and I would have liked to see it go a little deeper. The book felt very emotionless and cold to me–not something I recall taking away from The Member of the Wedding all those years ago–and given the twisted personal dynamics of the characters and their interactions with each other; the adultery, the deeply closeted self-loathing,  the mental illness of Alison  and her strange relationship with her Filipino houseboy, the odd single-mindedness of the young private with whom the self-loathing closet case becomes attached to; there were just so many ways to tell this story more deeply rather than skimming over the surface the way McCullers chose to tell her story. And it’s such a fascinating story, too. I’d like to watch the film again–I saw it on television years ago and so much had been cut out it was barely understandable, but a great cast including Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and Julie Harris.

My next read will be Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red.

We started watching Spike TV’s The Mist last night–I finally found the Spike app for my Apple TV, duh–and while the dialogue isn’t great and the acting is not good, the premise is great, and I’m hoping the show finds its voice and the actors find their characters; it’s great when a show starts out of the gate on fire, but some are more of a slow burn before they get their legs. Supernatural, for example, really got going in its second season. The Mist is one of my favorite King novellas, and I actually really enjoyed the film that was already made of it. I’m not sure why they decided to make a series out of it–there are so many great King stories and novels that haven’t been adapted, and some of the others seem much more series-friendly than The Mist…I would personally love to see The Talisman made into a series, for example, and The Eyes of the Dragon–hell, even Insomnia would make a great TV series. Or The Regulators/Desperation…oh, maybe someday when I am a television producer.

As if.

All right, I guess I should head back into the spice mines. Here’s a Sunday hunk to get your week off to a pleasant start.

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Time for Me to Fly

I took today off from work; I am starting to wear a little around the edges (it happens more frequently the older I get, alas) and so two long weekends in a row, I felt, might be necessary in order for me to recharge my batteries. I’m not sure why–other than I’m older, which is something I refuse to either accept or accede to–but there it is. I started rewriting a story yesterday–this is the sixth draft, but I think I’ve finally figured out how to make it really work, and last night we watched another episode of Claws, which is really terrific; it’s so nice to see Neicy Nash finally in a complex role and she is tearing it up. We’re also going to start watching the Ellen Barkin series, Animal Kingdom, probably this evening. I can’t seem to find The Mist anywhere, though; but its reviews aren’t good, so maybe that’s a good thing? Pity, because it’s one of my favorite King novellas.

I also finished reading Lisa Unger’s Ink and Bone last night.

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Daddy was on the phone, talking soft and low, dropping behind them on the path. Nothing new. He was always on the phone–or on the computer. Penny knew that her daddy loved her, but she also knew that he was almost never paying attention. He was “busy, sweetie,” or “with a client,” or “just a minute, honey, Daddy’s talking to someone.” He was a good story-teller, a bear-hugger, always opened his arms to her, lifted her high, or took her onto his lap while he worked at his desk. Mommy couldn’t lift her anymore, but Daddy still could. She loved the feel of him, the smell of him. He was never angry, always funny. But sometimes she had to say his name like one hundred times before he heard her, even when she was right next to him.

Dad. Dad? Daddy!

Honey, you don’t have to yell.

How could you not hear someone who was right next to you?

If Mommy was out and Daddy was in charge, then she and her brother could: eat whatever they wanted (all you had to do was go into the kitchen and take it; he wouldn’t even notice); play on the iPad forever (he would never suggest that they read a book or play a game together); ride their plasma cars up and down the long hallway from the foyer to the living room. And it was only when they got too loud that he might appear in the doorway to his office and say: “Hey, guys? Keep it down, okay?”

I can’t remember who it was that insisted I read Lisa Unger, but I owe that person a tremendous debt of gratitude.

Ink and Bone is the second Unger novel I’ve read (the first was Crazy Love You, which I read last year and loved), and I enjoyed this one even more than the first one I read, and I loved that one.  Unger is an extraordinary writer; with an uncanny ability to tell her readers who a character is with a few brushstrokes that are so honest and real and true that the reader immediately knows exactly who that person is; and her ‘villains’ are all the more terrifying for being so absolutely real.

Both books I’ve read of hers were set in (or around) a small town in upstate New York known as The Hollows as well as in Manhattan. The Hollows is one of those towns; like Stephen King’s Castle Rock, a town where paranormal things happen: people can see ghosts, commune with the dead, or hear The Whispers in the woods; the dead trying to tell their stories. There is also human evil in The Hollows; whether these people are drawn there by the paranormal force (one character in Ink and Bone calls the town a ‘hellmouth’) that is active there, or if that force draws the evil out from their hearts.

The story at the heart of Ink and Bone is missing children: the Gleason family rented a woodsy cabin in The Hollows for the summer; the marriage between Wolf and Merri is teetering because of his adultery and her Vicodin addiction. Merri is too zonked out on Vicodin to go for a walk in the woods with her family; on that walk both her husband and son are shot, and her daughter Abbey taken. This disappearance, and the fact that both parents are considered suspects by the police, has further shattered the marriage, perhaps beyond repair, and Merri is convinced her daughter is still alive. She goes back up to the Hollows and hires a local private eye, Jones Cooper, to look for her daughter. Jones works with Eloise Montgomery, an elderly local psychic–but in this case, Eloise passes the case along to her granddaughter, Finley.

Finley is a the crowning achievement of this narrative; a young heroine with complicated emotions and a gift she doesn’t quite understand, doesn’t know how to control, and isn’t sure she wants. She is heavily tattooed; the ghosts she sees she has transformed into tattoos on her body. She is sort of involved with a tattoo artist, Rainer, who loves her and followed her to the Hollows from Seattle, setting up shop in the small town. She isn’t sure how she feels about him, or whether she can get more serious with him thanks to her gift/curse. She has a close relationship with her (sometimes maddening) grandmother, who sort of Yodas her about the gift; never really explaining anything and often responding to her questions with ambiguous non-answers. She has a difficult relationship with her own mother, who is estranged from Eloise and has rejected fervently the gift. Finley, though, is seeing things now; things that may lead her to Abbey.

The book is extraordinary, and while Finley is the primary point-of-view character, we get to see things from several others as well; secondary point-of-view characters who not only advance the story but also enhance our understanding of what is going on, who they are, and Unger makes us care about them, warts and all. She is an incredibly gifted storyteller, and I defy anyone to put the book down during the last hundred pages or so.

Unger has written many novels about the Hollows, and about Jones Cooper; having not read them all nor having read them in order, I can’t say whether reading them in order enhances and enriches the reader’s experience or knowledge; maybe reading them in order is a more satisfying experience. But I can say that not reading them in order isn’t a hindrance, like so many other series or interconnected books.

You need to be reading Lisa Unger, Constant Reader.

And I think next I shall read Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye.

And now back to the spice mines.

Roll With The Changes

Ah, Tuesday.

There’s a potential hurricane out there in the Gulf; yesterday the Gulf parishes and those adjacent went into hurricane watch status, with flash flood warnings and all that entails. Hurray! Only nineteen days into hurricane season…and we’re off to a good start. But I am very happy that this hurricane season I have a new car; which I still am in love with, I might add. I am still not used to the easy maneuverability; it catches me off guard sometimes with how easy it is to turn, or park, or get out of  parking spaces. All of which, of course, is lovely, as is the smooth ride.

Anyway, tropical storm conditions should be here sometimes this afternoon, which should make the drive home from work pleasant. It’s already gloomy and gray out there this morning; they’re saying this one might be named Cindy, and while I haven’t read everything on Weather.com thus far, it looks like Bret’s coming into the Caribbean Sea as well; although he looks to be more of a danger to South and Central America, Heavy heaving sigh. Looks like we’re going to have a highly active hurricane season this year.

Yay.

It looks like we might be giving up on Between; the third episode, which we watched last night, passed the campy enjoyability of overacting and bad writing to just bad. We may give it another episode–primarily because we don’t have anything else to watch as of yet, although we might go back to Turn, which we lost interest in during its second season (primarily because of a bad storyline that they seemed determined to drag out as much as possible) but was otherwise quite enjoyable; plus Jamie Bell, who plays the lead, was Billy in Billy Elliott when he was younger, so I am rather partial to him. I also love the time period, having a lifelong fascination with the Revolutionary War/colonial period (well, I love American history, and all history, really) but it was my fascination with the colonial period/Revolutionary War that initially triggered my interest in history.

I managed to rip through two chapters of the revision yesterday, and if I keep this pace going, I should be able to get the revision completely finished going into my long weekend of the 4th of July, which is when I intend to do all the polishing I need to get done. Paul will be off seeing his mother, which means I will get a lot of cleaning and reading done, and will probably be looking for old movies to watch–I’ll probably watch the live-action Beauty and the Beast while he’s gone, and of course there are a couple of shows we started watching that I can go back and finish–like MTV’s Scream–in order to keep myself entertained while he’s gone.

I also started writing a short story yesterday for a romance anthology I want to submit to; “Passin’ Time.” This is a story I’ve wanted to write for a long time; it’s kind of a sequel to “Everyone Says I’ll Forget in Time”, which was, I think, in the Foolish Hearts anthology (or was it Fool for Love?) about ten years or so ago. I’ve always wanted to write the sequel story, revisiting the burgeoning romance set up in the original story. (I very rarely want to revisit short story characters, so actually thinking about a sequel to a story I’ve written is in and of itself a curious enough occasion to make me want to do it.)

It’s now dark and raining outside; so I guess the outer, initial bands of  this storm i are starting to come ashore, or a storm front coming in ahead of the storm is here. (The bands weren’t supposed to be here until later this afternoon.)

So, I should probably head back into the spice mines before work.

Here’s your Tuesday morning hunk:

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De Do Do Do, Da Da Da Da

Ah, Monday.

I was shameless yesterday; I blew off not only going to make groceries, but didn’t revise or write a damned thing. But I also started reading Lisa Unger’s Ink and Bone, which is wonderful; I’ve quickly become a fan of la Unger. Like Dan Chaon, her work straddles the line between crime and horror; and also like Chaon, her use of language is exceptional and mind-blowing, which of course makes me feel like a rank amateur.

On the other hand, I don’t mind that feeling; it certainly keeps one humble.

But I am now further behind on the revision than I originally intended, and I have a lot of original writing/revising of short stories to do now; I found (while filing) my folder full of submission calls and so forth for short stories–this is how I miss deadlines; I print them out and make notes–even noting on the print out what story is right for that submission call–and then put them in that file and never look at it again for months.

Clearly, my system is flawed. And as I glanced through the folder yesterday, I noted what stories need revising for submission purposes: “Death and the Handmaidens,” “The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain”, “Fireflies”, “The Ditch”, and “The Terrortorium.”

Heavy heaving sigh. I also need to write a new one for another call–for romance short stories; although I won’t mind so much if I miss that one. I’m not very good at romance, as I have repeatedly proven over and over again. But I keep trying.

Last night, we officially gave up on The Magicians. I just didn’t care about any of the characters, nor did I care about the growing conflict between different types of magic that was clearly coming. We started watching a Netflix original called Between, which is set in a small town in Canada called Pretty Lake (how do I know it was Canada? The gang of bully-ish high school jocks are hockey players!), where some strange ailment strikes the town suddenly, and everyone over the age of twenty-two dies quickly and painfully, without showing any symptoms. The town is immediately quarantined by the government, fenced off and guarded by armed soldiers–no one in or out–and while some of the conflict between characters seems a bit forced, and some of the characters aren’t particularly likable..we’re hoping the series picks up as it goes, like that weird mishmash show that combined The Walking Dead and The Breakfast Club that we enjoyed and whose name I can’t think of right now. I will keep you posted, Constant Reader–although I keep forgetting that we also have Amazon Prime streaming on the television and never look for things there very often. #madness

So, that’s where I am on this fine Monday morning; reading Lisa Unger and worrying about how I am going to get all the writing and revising done that I need to.

And as I head back into the spice mines, here’s a hunk to get your week started off properly:

todd sanfield