Category: the apartment

Ghostbusters

Wednesday and a gray morning here in the Lost Apartment. For a brief moment I thought it was Thursday; I don’t know where the hell that came from, but it’s indeed Wednesday, and as I sip my second cup of coffee and look at cats sleeping on the scaffolding outside my window, I am girding my loins for an incredibly busy day at the office.

I’m enjoying thoroughly Alafair Burke’s The Wife, which I am reading about five to ten pages at a time at night before I turn off the light and go to sleep; I look forward to being able to dive into it a lot more thoroughly. I also managed another 1500 words or so on Scotty yesterday, and finished that darned essay. I don’t have to turn the essay in until this weekend, so I am going to let it sit for a few days before I reread it and tweak it. It’s about censorship, banning and sensitivity readers; my big fear is the points I make are going to be offensive.,.but maybe the fact that I’m worried about unintentionally giving offense is a good sign? I dunno.

We will have to see. It’s a very charged topic.

My kitchen is a mess this morning; and I have yet to decide what to take with me for lunch. Heavy sigh. I should clean up this mess so I don’t have to deal with it tonight; I should have dealt with it all last night. I hate when I do that.

I’m feeling good about my work again; which is something. Getting writing done is always the key to this; there’s an anthology I want to submit a story to whose deadline is the end of this month and I’ve only written a small part of the story. I’d hate to not submit, but the story also has to be really good. I could focus on it over the Thanksgiving break, of course, but I’d like to have a rough draft figured out and written before then. I hate when I do this to myself; and I have another that I’ve agreed to write by the end of December that I haven’t really started yet.

And on that note, this kitchen isn’t going to clean itself. For your Hump Day Hunk, here’s professional wrestler Ashton Vuitton:

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Jump

Sunday morning and the end of Daylight Savings Time. I woke up at the usual time, reset the clock to the correct time, and stayed in bed for another hour…but still got up early. It’s fine, I don’t mind, and I am actually awake rather than groggy. I need to get groceries–a minor run for some staples and a few things I need for dinner tonight–and I also need to get to the gym today. (I did not, in fact, go yesterday as planned.) I also managed to destroy my ancient iPod Nano. I took it out of my car (where it’s my music source) and put it in my jeans pocket Friday so I could take it with me to the gym, forgot about it, and yes, put it through both washer and dryer. Sigh. Now the screen is dead–the memory in it still works, if I connect it to my computer–but the controls don’t work, and they don’t make Nanos anymore, which totally sucks. I had that damned thing for almost seven years…so I guess I’ll have to use my iPod Touch, which is nine years old, for the gym instead until I can swing getting a new one, I suppose. So annoying. Then again, if it costs less than a new iPod Touch, it might be worth seeing if it can be fixed.

I suppose I could just use my phone, I suppose, but I hate how the music cuts off if you get an email or a text or something. It’s jarring.

First world problems, I know.

I am reading an advance copy of Laura Lippman’s Sunburn, and it’s really quite exceptional. It’s very different than anything she’s done before, and I have to say, it’s quite the ballsy move. It’s very easy to just write the same style and the same type of book over and over again, but Lippman has really stretched herself and grown in her stand alone novels; this, coming after the sublime Wilde Lake, is yet another gamble that is paying off big time. And as I said yesterday, reading amazing work by amazing writers is inspirational; I actually sat down at the computer yesterday and made myself write two thousand words; and they were good words. They took me longer to write than usual–my attention span is so shortened because of social media and everything else these days; I need to remember that the best thing for me to do when I get stuck is to get up and do something away from the computer; even if it is something as simple as rearranging a cabinet shelf; putting things in order and organizing, for some reason, always works as a writing trigger for me. But it’s more than I’ve written in a long time, and I am kind of excited about it, to be honest. I still have an essay to write, and there’s a short story I need to write, but I want to get some more of this Scotty done before I sidetrack myself again.

And on that note, ’tis back to the spice mines. Here’s a Sunday hunk for you, Constant Reader:

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Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)

Saturday morning! I finished reading my advance copy of Alison Gaylin’s If I Die Tonight last evening, and was completely blown away by it–so much so that I tried to start reading something else and just had to put it aside for a while. I read my next book for a bit in bed before going to sleep–it’s an advance copy of Laura Lippman’s Sunburn, and it, too, is quite extraordinary–and this morning am still processing both. I’ll no doubt finish Sunburn this weekend as well–I am already itching to get back to it, although I have other things I simply must do this morning–but the kitchen is already cleaned up. I need to do the floors and put some finishing touches on things down here, and I might clean the windows. I have an essay to finish writing and I want to work on the Scotty book some; possibly some other things as well. It would be incredibly easy to sit in my easy chair and waste the day watching college football…but I’m not going to. Tonight is the LSU-Alabama game…sigh. Obviously, I want LSU to win, but it’s such a long shot, and Alabama just looks unstoppable this year. Sigh.

While work on the new Scotty has been incredibly slow going, part of that is attributable to the post-Bouchercon malaise, methinks. I feel very confident that I’m going to be able to get back to work on it today and make significant progress. I know what the underlying theme of the book is, and now it’s simply a question of being able to work the personal story and the crime story together and make it work. Rereading these old Scotty has helped; putting together the Scotty concordance/Bible is also going to help in ways I can’t even imagine right now.

Reading brilliantly written books also helps a lot. I can’t recommend reading great writers enough as a learning experience for writers. I always say that the best writers inspire me when I read their work; I think part of the reason I’m so fired up this morning to get to work is because I read a brilliant novel last night and started reading another one before bed…and have even more on deck that I know are going to be equally brilliant. This excites me to NO end, Constant Reader.

I also want to revise that old y/a manuscript and get it going. I know now, having both reread and outlined it, what was wrong with it and why it didn’t work. I am very excited about this, as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve been excited about writing, and it feels terrific.

And now, I should get  back to the spice mines. Here’s a Saturday hunk for you, Constant Reader.

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When Doves Cry

We finished watching Stranger Things last night, and were sorry to see it end; it was quite a lot of fun, and Episode 8 was a non-stop adrenaline rush from beginning to end. The last thirty minutes of the season was absolutely charming; those kids are just so damned appealing, and Winona Ryder was much better in this season than she was in the first. I also got much further along in Hell House; I should finish it today to end my official month of Halloween Horror reading. Some great crime novels have stacked up while I devoted myself to horror this month; can’t wait to start digging into crime again.

I finished outlining Jackson Square Jazz last night, and am going to start work on the Scotty concordance/Bible this week while I also work on Crescent City Charade. I’m still not completely sold on that title, let me say that right now; it’s very likely going to change before I turn it into the publisher. It’s been fun rereading (or rather, skimming) Jackson Square Jazz preparatory for doing the outline; I feel much more connected to Scotty than I was. The amazing thing to me is how many continuity mistakes I’ve made over the years. The lovely thing is that I can now go back to the original books and fix the errors–there’s nothing i can do about them in the later books. In fairness to myself, I don’t really remember much of anything I wrote pre-Katrina, but I could have–should have–gone back and reread the originals, and the Bible/concordance is way overdue.

It’s also amazing how much I did forget. The plot of Jackson Square Jazz was almost a complete mystery to me, and it was a much better book and story than I remembered it being. Ah, memory is such a strange thing, isn’t it?

I really do need to be better organized. The kitchen is a mess this morning, and I need to make another to-do list. I’ve got some laundry going and I need to do the dishes and make chili for the crockpot to cook all day. And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Halloween hunk for you:

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Breaking Us in Two

Sunday. It’s one degree warmer than yesterday morning–wow, right? But you will undoubtedly be thrilled to know that I get everything on my list done yesterday other than go to the gym; and after spending two hours in the storage unit moving boxes of books around, I was pretty damned exhausted physically, and then braved Costco on a Saturday afternoon (it wasn’t bad at all, other than stupid people, which is every day). I also came across some books in the storage that I thought hey, these need to be reread and so I took them out. One of them was Richard Matheson’s Hell House, which seemed, at least to me, to be the proper reread after The Haunting of Hill House, in that they’re very similar; one could even go so far as to say Matheson basically took Jackson’s story structure and turned the dial up a notch. I am enjoying the reread very much; although I’m not very far into it thus far. I also found my copy of Michael Rowe’s groundbreaking anthology Queer Fear, which I reviewed in the Lambda Book Report many years ago when I worked there, and was to be my first encounter with Mr. Rowe; I remember he came up to me at the Lambda Awards the next year, introduced himself, and thanked me for the lovely review. We’ve crossed paths a few times since, and have become friends over the years. I do remember loving Queer Fear, and look forward to delving into it and rereading its short stories again.

I also found my high school scrapbook and my diaries from the 1990’s. I used to buy blank books and carry them around with me everywhere, so I could jot down story and/or book ideas, or write diary entries whenever I wanted to. I am always hesitant to reread my old diaries; I often wince from my immaturity and my over-dramatization of events in my life. Yet at the same time, the diaries also served as a very vital source of self-reflection and self-examination; I suppose this blog has served that purpose since I started it on Livejournal back in 2004 (the idea that I have been consistently blogging for thirteen years rather staggers the mind, doesn’t it? But I’ve been writing in a diary of some sort, off and on, since I was a teenager; this seems to be a natural continuation of that process).

I also found the three ring binder where I kept everything from the Virginia situation of 2005 and 2006; including the ACLU letter to the school board. I’d always intended to write a non-fiction book about it all, called Gay Porn Writer, in which I examined what happened to me in the context, not only of the times but extrapolating it out further into what was going on in publishing and the culture. My memory lies to me now, of course, so I am not certain that I’ll ever write such a book–I don’t know that I would remember things correctly, and even then, what is colored by my perceptions of things. I’ve since moved on, of course–I mentioned the incident in passing on my panel at Bouchercon and had to explain it a little, which was kind of crazy. It was so long ago, and I used to get invited to speak about it all the time. The memories are now hazy and unclear, but I am definitely going to keep all this information.

You never know.

I think I am probably just going to scan everything in the scrapbook, in order to preserve it electronically, and then throw it away. I don’t really need to keep programs from my high school football games, or from choir concerts, and scanning them will better preserve them anyway.

I have one errand to run today, and I also want to go to the gym for a little bit, start dipping my feet back into the water of working out regularly, and despite the cold, I am going to give that a try.

And hopefully, I’ll get some writing done, or at least something done that will move all projects forward.

Here’s a Sunday hunk for you:

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Don’t Cry

Saturday in New Orleans. I have a big to-do list to get through today, and I must get it all done so we can stream season 2 of both Stranger Things and Freakish this weekend, guilt-free. I also want to get some writing/editing/reading done on Sunday before launching into yet another week of work. I also slept late this morning; which felt wonderful–probably because it is a mere fifty two degrees here (AIEEE!) but I feel rested, which is truly the most important thing. I’d wanted to get up earlier, but hey–them are the breaks, kids. So, when I finish this cup of coffee I’ll probably make one to go and start running the errands, so as to get them over and done with. We were going to go see It tonight, but decided to wait and stream things tonight; we can always watch it when it’s available for streaming later.

I did finish my reread of The Haunting of Hill House last night before going to sleep, and as always, it was just a wonderful experience. That final sequence on the tower staircase terrifies me, as it always does; my fear of heights and my fear of spiral staircases no doubt stems from reading this book and seeing the original film, which was fantastic and remains, to this day, one of my top five horror films. (Do NOT under any circumstances watch the horrific, embarrassingly bad remake.) After I finish all my errands today, I am going to dive into End of Watch, which will probably bring my Halloween Horror reading to a close for this year. I am most anxious to dive into some of these books by authors I love (Laura Lippman, Alison Gaylin, Donna Andrews, Alafair Burke, Adam Sternbergh), and then of course there are the books collecting dust for far too long in the TBR pile. I also realized yesterday that I’ve not reread Rebecca this year, but that may wind up being something I tackle over the Thanksgiving holiday season. (I was also thinking last night of the similarities between The Haunting of Hill House and Rebecca last night; which might make for an interesting essay at some point…must make a note of that.)

Heavy heaving sigh.

So much to do, so little time in which to do it.

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines…since I overslept I can’t get more in depth on The Haunting of Hill House  as  I would like to; perhaps later, when the errands are finished.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you, Constant Reader.

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Photograph

Another good night’s sleep. I barely know what to do with myself. Today is my Sunday, since i have to work tomorrow, but that’s fine. I have to run a couple of errands but intend to spend the day cleaning, watching football, maybe doing some editing, and trying to finish reading Anna Dressed in Blood. October is winding down, and I still need to reread The Haunting of Hill House and I want to read Stephen King’s End of Watch by the end of the month. Then I am going to get back to crime reading–I have the ARCS of the new novels by Laura Lippman (Sunburn), Alafair Burke (The Wife), Alison Gaylin (If I Die Tonight) and Ivy Pochoda (Wonder Valley). Such a plethora of riches…and I also have a lot of other wonderful books waiting in the TBR pile.

The house is a disaster area, quite literally, and if I don’t get something done about it today I may just lose my mind. I had lunch with my friend Laura yesterday, and after getting back from yesterday’s errands I had literally no energy left. I don’t know what has happened to my energy levels, but I definitely think I need to start going back to the gym regularly. I haven’t since August, and I think my body is sending me an SOS. I hate when that happens. I am thinking about going to the gym later today before the LSU game and doing a light, get back into the groove work out. I also was thinking of doing just that tomorrow night after work as well.

We’ll see, as I always seem to say.

But yes, I have to stop feeling tired and using that as an excuse for not getting things done. I am way behind on everything, did nothing on the to-do list I finally put together last week, and this shall not stand. I have way too much to do–of course, maybe I am allowing the amount of things I have to do overwhelm me which creates the self-fulfilling prophecy of getting nothing done–but today I am determined. I am not feeling tired the way I usually have when I’ve woken up this week from my good night’s sleep, and so I am going to try to get caffeinated and get moving on everything,

And on that note, I am off to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for you.

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Human Nature

I slept well again last night–which keeps the streak of good sleep alive at five nights and counting. I don’t have to work today, which is lovely; I am hopefully having lunch with a friend and running a couple of errands before coming home to clean, edit, revise, and hopefully do some writing.

The Lost Apartment is also a mess, so part of my day will be taken up with cleaning. It really is tragic how messy this apartment can become over the course of a week, and I haven’t done the floors in forever. The windows are also pretty nasty; this lovely cool weather we are enjoying will be most helpful in that regard, since I know I won’t be drenched in sweat the moment I go outside. I need to make a grocery list, and I also want to read some more of Anna Dressed in Blood, which started kind of slow but is starting to pick up a little. I also want to start rereading The Haunting of Hill House this weekend, which means I need to finish reading Anna.

I got caught up on Riverdale last night, and I have to say the first two episodes of this season are pretty damned dark. There were three murders in the second episode of this season (SPOILER), and now that they’ve recast Reggie, he’s front and center–and a drug dealer. Wow, didn’t see that coming. The young cast continues to get better, and are incredibly appealing, and apparently the ratings are really up, which is terrific. Now we need to get caught up on The Exorcist, and maybe give the reboot of Dynasty a whirl. I’m not sure how I feel about Dynasty being rebooted; I guess they decided, since the Dallas sequel never really caught fire, to just start over with the tale of the Carringtons and the Colbys, which I guess I can understand…but I also don’t want them to follow the original storylines, either. From everything I’ve read so far, they aren’t doing that…and it looks like Steven’s homosexuality isn’t going to be so “is-he-or-isn’t-he” as it was back in the 80’s, when it was hugely controversial (and the show completely ignored HIV/AIDS) to have a gay character in the first place.

A story I’d sent out for submission was rejected yesterday, which I was expecting. My short story game isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be, and while I love this story, it doesn’t really fit in well with the theme of crime, you know? I also wasn’t pleased with how it ended, which means that the ending wasn’t set up properly, so I am going to let it sit for a while before rereading it and figuring out how to tweak that ending to make it work properly. It clearly didn’t work the way it’s currently written. But it’s a story I want to tell…and even last night, as I mourned in the usual way I do when rejected (even when I’m pretty sure the submission will be rejected) it did occur to me that I might know a way to make it better already. So I need to make that note and shove it into the folder.

Onward and upward, as they say.

And here’s a hunk to slide you into the weekend:

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Dead Giveaway

Tuesday morning, it’s sixty degrees and I’ve had another glorious night of sleep. I am still a bit groggy, only being on my second cup of coffee, but today it’s back to reality after the bliss of Bouchercon and being wrapped up in the world of writing and publishing for almost a week. Heavy heaving sigh. I think we brought the cold weather back down from Canada with us! But I am digging out from under–I really did go AWOL while we were gone on a lot of things–so this morning I need to get caught up on my email and get the house back in some kind of order. I have Friday off as well, since I am working Sunday (condom outreach at the Gay Halloween tea dance at Crescent Park), so that will also help some as far as getting caught up is concerned.

Methinks I need a to-do list.

I started writing a short story yesterday; it’s an idea that’s been lying around in my head for a really long time and I thought, hell, I should start writing this, partly because an idea for the opening came to me. For the longest time this dark noir story was set in Kansas in my head–I even wrote, I think, a rough draft a long time ago but have always wanted to revise it as a noir, and reading Craig Pittman’s Oh Florida! made me realize that part of the problem with the revision I was having was because it should have been set in the panhandle of Florida. (I really recommend the Pittman; Im enjoying the hell out of it and it’s bringing back a lot of memories for me of all the time I’ve spent in Florida) I had started writing another one last week–“Sorry, Wrong Email”–that I would also like to finish this week….so much to do; I really need to make that damned to-do list.

First thing on the to-do list: make a to-do list.

Second thing on the to-do list: figure out what my next horror read will be. (I’m thinking I need to finally finish off Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes trilogy with End of Watch, which is more paranormal than mystery; but I may save that for a weekend read.) Maybe it’s time to reread The Haunting of Hill House, which I haven’t gotten around to doing yet. Hmmmm. Decisions, decisions.

And man, looking around my kitchen at the messy wreckage…I need to get this mess cleaned up.

Okay, enough procrastination. It’s back to the spice mines with me, and here’s a hunk for your Tuesday morning:

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I’ll Tumble 4 Ya

I slept very well last night and woke up to sunshine this morning. Nate kept turning to the east as he headed for land last night. We didn’t even get high winds here at the Lost Apartment; and just a little sprinkling rain. He also came ashore much sooner than originally anticipated; the weather at the Michigan-Michigan State game looked much worse than it was here. LSU also won yesterday, a nail-biting and highly nerve-wracking 17-16 win over Florida in Gainesville, which we watched while we waited for Nate to arrive.

I’m enjoying Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and it has a lot of interesting things to say about modern society and the zombie apocalypse; basically, the theme is that modern society is just as much a zombie apocalypse as an actual one. And it’s an interesting world he’s building there, with his post-apocalyptic Manhattan. This is a zombie novel, but it’s also literary; I appreciate Whitehead’s take on zombies, but it’s more literary than zombie, if that makes sense. I’ll keep reading it, because it has a lot to say, and the insights and language are quite lovely…but nothing has happened, really, and I am about 100 pages in. When you compare that to, say, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which is only about 170 pages long…I decided yesterday that the thing to do was read it along with something else; maybe a chapter or two a day of Whitehead while reading something else more traditionally horror. I got started on two more books that didn’t pass the fifty-page-test and went into the donation pile, and then started Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrels, which is pretty interesting so far. The voice is pitch-perfect; and I am curious to see where it goes. I found a couple of more books in the TBR pile to add to the Halloween Horror Read-a-thon; let’s hope those pass muster.

I didn’t get as much done yesterday as I would have liked; I did go to the grocery store but failed to get the things I really went for–so was unable to make Swedish meatballs for dinner last night. (Seriously, the most important things to get were ground sirloin and heavy cream…the two things I didn’t get.) So, today I am going to focus on getting things done. I did get the filing done yesterday, and today I need to make a packing list for the trip; a to-do list for the week; a submissions spreadsheet for the agent search and short stories; and I need to clean. I am also going to go back to the beginning of the Scotty and start revising, to write my way out of the hole I’ve gotten myself into. I’ll take the other WIP with me to Toronto to make notes. I’ve also relaunched my wrestling blog, which I kind of let slide for the last years or so, with a goal of posting at least once or twice a week. That’s something that’s just fun for me; I need to do fun things periodically in order to keep my writing fun. I was thinking last night about a short story I wrote, that was in the collection Wanna Wrestle?, and how much thought I put into structuring it and the story I wanted to tell…I think I might rush my short stories a bit, just coming up with the idea and not thinking about it before I start writing it, which could be why I am so not-confident about them as I should be.

Something definitely to consider.

And on that note, this spice isn’t going to mine itself.

Here’s a hunk to get the week started for you, Constant Reader.

 

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