Category: Uncategorized

Well, in very short order after my post yesterday, the subject not only lost his book contract but his job, so that’s something.

It rained all night last night, which meant I had trouble getting out of bed this morning, and of course I have to work late. The weather today, after the night’s rain, is absolutely stunning; that kind of spring day (yes, I know it’s February) that makes you feel lazy, the day you shouldn’t spend in the office but lying in a hammock with a good book and a bottle of wine. But that’s fine; I have a shorter work day tomorrow and am off Thursday and the parades start rolling again tomorrow night; I know Nyx is tomorrow but I can’t remember the one before it; Druids? Yes, it is Druids. Cool. I should be home before Nyx gets to my neighborhood. It’s always fun to walk homedown the parade route, and I will most definitely get my Fitbit steps in. Woo-hoo! And my favorite pizza place–That’s Amore out in Metairie–just opened a new place on St. Charles a few blocks from my house. Woo-hoo! I think I might have to go over there and get us a pizza on Thursday.

Yeah, the diet’s going well, thanks for asking.

I’m enjoying the not-writing time very much, I might add. I am starting to worry that I may not go back to writing at all.

Ha, like that would happen. I still have lots of ideas, and get more every day.

All right, that’s enough for today.

Here’s a hunk for you.

Well, that particular long weekend is now over, and it’s back to the office with me tonight. I’m doing bar testing tonight, so I don’t have to go in until later. So I am going to spend the next few hours writing before heading to run errands on my way to the office. This is a short week, of course–four days–and then another three day weekend and next week is also a four day work week.

I got pretty caught up on the book yesterday; still behind, of course, but if I keep pushing myself I may actually get the damned thing done on time. I don’t know why I do this to myself all the time, but I do, and it’s very tiresome.

VERY tiresome.

But I slept well last night and I do feel rested, which is a good thing, particularly since I have two late nights this week as opposed to just the one. I need to run errands on Thursday during the day, which is also going to cut into my writing time that day (I can’t do errands on Saturday as it’s our annual New Year’s luncheon at Commander’s Palace; which is also going to make writing that day a bit difficult since we generally drink at lunch), so I have to be prepared to get up and get going that day. (I’m skipping Costco this time around; it may just be a grocery run when I get up that morning and be done with it.)

I also did a purge of some books this weekend.

All right, now I am boring myself, so I am going to get cleaned up and get to work on the book.

Here’s a hunk for the day:

Everyone is making and publishing lists of their favorite books of 2016; I intend to do the same, of course, with the stipulation that I shall simply name my favorite reads of the year, regardless of publication date. I can do that because, you know, this is my blog.

So, in no particular order, my favorite reads of the year:

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

A haunting story of an ambitious state’s attorney whose current case forces her to confront her own past–as well as the way she remembers that past–with some sly social commentary about changing societal attitudes towards racism, classism, and sexism. It is also extremely well-constructed, alternating between the present day and the past with different tenses and distinct voices; the voice of a child and that same voice as an adult.

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

We watch them on television every four years when the Olympics roll around, marveling at their skill and being moved by their prepackaged and manufactured personal stories without wondering what really goes into the day-to-day world of raising a prodigy athlete, the sacrifices that must be made–and just how far is a parent willing to go to not only protect their child but make their dreams come true? Megan Abbott, one of our strongest writers, asks those questions in this chilling tale, and the answers aren’t what you might think.

The third novel by Edgar and Macavity Award winning author Alex Marwood might be her best yet; a compelling study of narcissism and the damage it can do to one family, structured around the disappearance of one of a pair of twins during a holiday weekend where the adults basically abandoned all responsibility and how the past is still affecting the present, when everyone from that weekend gathers for the funeral of the lost child’s father.

What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin

This astonishing tale of two murders, twenty-five years apart, is also a study of fame, and notoriety. Twenty five years ago a teenaged girl went to prison for murdering a notorious Hollywood director. Now, after getting out and married, her father-in-law is murdered in a very similar fashion. Did she commit both murders, or neither of them? The secrets and motivations from the past, long buried, now come rushing to the surface as all the players from twenty-five years ago have to face inconvenient truths long-buried.

The Watcher in the Wall by Owen Laukkanen

My first Owen Laukkanen novel definitely won’t be my last. A teenager commits suicide, and the FBI becomes aware of ‘suicide groups’ on-line, where suicidal people go for solace while opening themselves up to the potential predatory conduct of a sick voyeur who enjoys watching teenagers commit suicide on live cam. By showing us how the predator was created, and the point of view of the current victim he is nursing along, Laukkanen takes this from just another thriller to a complex and complicated exploration of human nature, how damage begets more damage, and how far the law is behind our modern technology.

Crazy Love You by Lisa Unger

Also my first Lisa Unger, and it won’t be my last. Gorgeously written, Unger keeps the reader guessing what is really going on with her protagonist right up to the end–and even then, the reader still isn’t sure. Phenomenal.

Dear Daughter by Elizabeth Little

Published a couple of years ago, Elizabeth Little here tells the tale of a Paris Hilton like celebutante, convicted of murdering her mother when she’s seventeen and released on a technicality ten years later. Her main character is untrustworthy and untrusting as she embarks on an attempt to find out who really killed her mother ten years earlier–if she didn’t do it–and the trail leads her to a bizarre small town in the Dakotas where the secret of her true past is hidden.

The Ex by Alafair Burke

One of the best legal thrillers I’ve read, Burke’s main character is a tough, driven defense attorney whose personal life isn’t the best, takes the case of an ex she treated badly years before, which she has always felt guilty about. But does her belief in her client’s innocence justified, or is it based in her own guilt? As the evidence mounts against him, she begins to question her own motivations and values as she struggles to defend her client. Extraordinary.

Stranded by Bracken MacLeod

This story of an ice-locked freighter and its crew is almost unbearable in its tension and suspense. Told from the point of view of the ship’s scapegoat, who despite everything manages to rise to heroic behavior in the face of unspeakable terror and horrific conditions to save the ship, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

There was a reason Margaret Millar was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and this novel is an example of why. A car breakdown outside of a strange religious cult’s farm leads our unlikely hero into a long-dead murder mystery going back quite a few years, and it has a strange connection to the cult.

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor

A must read for every Star Wars geek out there; it’s not only a history of the films and the merchandising but a history of the fandom. Most enjoyable.

So, there it is: my favorite reads of the past year off the top of my head. I didn’t read everything, of course, and I am sure I forgot books from this past year that I deeply enjoyed. But those are the ones I remember from the top of my head, without reviewing my blog for the last year.

I may add some before the end of the year.

And now back to the spice mines.

Another gray morning in New Orleans. I don’t have to be at work until later; a short day in store for me, so I am going to run a couple of errands this afternoon and diligently work away at my computer while also trying to straighten out/clean the kitchen/office. Seems like every day, doesn’t it? Ah, well.

The best of lists are coming out now, and as expected, I am seeing some books that I absolutely loved this past year (Laura Lippman’s Wilde Lake, Alison Gaylin’s What Remains of Me, Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me, Alex Marwood’s The Darkest Secret, Alafair Burke’s The Ex) showing up on many of them; as well as many other books in the TBR pile I’ve not gotten to yet. The awards season for crime fiction this next year is going to be something, methinks. I’ll do one at some point this months of my favorite books that I read this year; I don’t limit myself to books published in the current year, of course. I love to read, really. I’m always amazed when people tell me they get bored, because it’s mystifying to me; how can you be bored when there are so many wonderful books to read, so many that even as voracious a reader as me will never even get close to scratching the surface of every book I want to read?

Reading is so satisfying. I’m very glad I have a passion for it. I only wish I had more time for it.

My vacation week was actually rather lovely; I would get up in the morning and drink my coffee and answer emails, write a blog entry; edit what I wrote the day before, go run some errands, come back home and write for four or five hours until the well went dry; and then curl up with a book in my easy chair while I waited for Paul to come home. This, I thought, is the life. Now that I am going back to the office every day, my timing is more tight and thus I have to juggle my time a bit better. There isn’t the time, for example, to laze around because any wasted time is time taken from my writing or editing; usually what this means is I have to cut out my reading time. I try to create a balance between work and relaxation; if I don’t I get stressed and tired, have trouble sleeping, and that affects the next day.

Which is why I get behind.

Sigh.

My office is such a mess I feel claustrophobic.

All right, I need to get back to the spice mines.

Here’s another French farmer:

One afternoon a friend of mine and I were really bored. We were just sitting around smoking pot and watching MTV and everyone else we knew were at work and we didn’t have anything to do.

“Hey, let’s go see a movie,” he said. “There’s a new John Carpenter movie playing.”

I agreed. I wasn’t really sure who John Carpenter was, but I’d heard the name before. I was vaguely aware he was a horror director; I knew he had directed the remake of The Thing and he had also directed Escape from New York, which I’d really liked.

I hadn’t really gotten into horror movies much in the heyday of the slasher movies; I’d never seen any of the Friday the 13th movies (still haven’t) or any of the Halloween films (I’ve seen them all now); I wasn’t really into the gory movies with lots of graphic violence and dismemberment and splashing blood–but I did enjoy horror; this was when I was trying to write it, was using Stephen King as my guiding force and writing lots of (really bad) short stories. I don’t know what I was expecting when we went to see this movie–but I was absolutely terrified almost from the very beginning.

The premise of the movie is incredibly clever. The devil of the Bible actually was an extraterrestrial being with amazing powers of darkness and evil. At the beginning of time, God and this being fought for control of Earth and the universe. This being knew he wasn’t powerful enough to win, so he sealed his son’s essence in a container and buried it in the Middle East till the day his son could assume form and attain his own power, and free his father from the other side, which God was going to banish him to. He was banished, and his son, sealed into his canister, was forgotten about. But Jesus knew the story and told it to his followers, none of whom believed him because it was so crazy, and it was in the best interests of the Catholic Church to not tell people that evil was actually an outside force rather than something within, so they kept it a secret for several thousand years “until science had advanced enough to prove Jesus was right.” For some reason, they moved the canister containing the devil’s son to a church named St. Godard’s in Los Angeles (it is never made clear why), and he is watched over by the Brotherhood of Sleep. Now, there has been a change in the canister–the priest guarding him has died–and the Archdiocese, represented by a priest played wonderfully by Donald Pleasence, enlists the help of several different schools of science from a local university, including quantum physics, to not only prove the story so they can warn the world…but at the same time figure out a scientific way to stop the prince of darkness.

From the opening credits, when the score (also written by John Carpenter, and one of his creepiest) the sense of dread grows. I watched the movie again a few years later on video, and it was just as terrifying.

I watched it again last night, in preparation for writing this blog entry, and it wasn’t scary at all to me; then again, I also knew what was going to happen so it wasn’t likely to work again. I did think it was just as clever a premise as before (you can never go wrong with old secrets about religion in my book), and I enjoyed watching.

The best parts are, of course, Donald Pleasence, and how, as the power of the prince grows, how he is able to take control of first the creatures around the church–the insects, worms, etc–and then the students themselves. (He also is able to control the minds of the homeless people who live in the neighborhood, which is kind of homeless-phobic, in implying that as homeless people their minds as weaker somehow). But I did enjoy it–I also enjoyed the weird dreams that everyone who sleeps in the near vicinity of the church all share (they all have the same dream; which is actually a broadcast through quantum physics from the future).

But the acting is really horrible, and I can’t help but wonder what Carpenter was thinking. All of the characters are supposedly grad or Ph.D students–and there isn’t enough make-up or soft lighting to make them look young enough (and yes, older people can be students, I know that, but when everyone in the cast is at least in their early thirties….) The male lead is Jameson Parker of Simon and Simon fame, with his eighties porn stache, with Lisa Blount as his love interest…and the absolute worst, Susan Blanchard, whom I recognized, even in 1987, as the actress who played Nurse Mary Kennicott on All My Children in the early 1970’s. Even having an older cast would have been fine, but the characters are written young, and having a woman who is in her mid-thirties play the part as a gum-chewing pony-tailed co-ed was just a silly choice.

I would be very interested to see this remade, actually; the concept was great.

And now back to the spice mines.

Yesterday I was tired, but had slept well. I didn’t get as much done as I would have preferred–I still make to-do lists thinking I have the energy I had ten years ago; what I wouldn’t give for that–but I did make an awesome chicken/white bean chili for dinner, so that’s something, isn’t it? I did work on the story a bit, cleaned a lot, and started reading Bracken MacLeod’s Stranded, which is quite wonderful so far.

As we delve more deeply into October, the month I am devoting to horror, I decided to examine another book by Stephen King today, a novel this time, and one that I don’t think gets nearly enough attention–and certainly hasn’t gotten enough attention in this particular election cycle. It’s always been a favorite of mine, and I haven’t reread it in years; I know I’ve read it more times than I can count. And yes, true confessions from my derivative self; just as I used the same framing device and structure as Christine for Sara‘s original draft, I did the same thing with Sleeping Angel in its original draft, only using The Dead Zone.

By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.

They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals. The little kids were farting around the way little kids have done since time immemorial–their ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty-degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile was still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.

Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung around his shoulder. At six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids’ hockey games, but able to skate rings around the other first graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.

That is one terrific opening, isn’t it? It’s the prologue; King offers us an insight into what it is to come, as young John, skating around the pond and having a good time as six year olds do, is accidentally mowed down by one of the hockey players. He is sent flying across the ice, out of control, and crash lands, hitting his head hard–which of course brings all the adults and other kids running. Before he comes to consciousness, he is muttering…about how something had taken all the charge it could take…and then he comes to…and soon is skating around again like nothing ever happened, the way kids do all the time.

Only a few days later, one of the men gathered around him is charging a car battery, which becomes overcharged and explodes. No one remains what little Johnny said, or connects the two incidents.

The book then flashes forward to John, now a college graduate and working as a high school teacher in a small town in Maine, dating another young teacher whom he thinks he might be falling in love with, and they are going to a carnival, where Johnny has a ridiculous run on a roulette wheel…and is involved in a terrible car accident after dropping Sarah off, that sends him into a coma for five years. And when he finally comes out of the coma, the world has changed dramatically–and that dormant power in his brain, that he first experienced after the fall on the ice, is back and even stronger than before.

The problem, of course, is that he has become a modern-day Cassandra–he can see the future, but no one believes him.

That story, in and of itself, is genius enough to drive a novel; the moral implications, the having to deal with trying to take action vs. doing nothing–in one instance Johnny is blamed for what happens since he foresaw it–and what kind of responsibility do you have to the world in general? The crushing burden of foresight–added to how the world changed for Johnny himself during his coma (Sarah fell in love with and married someone else; his mother, always religious, has been a zealot) and having to deal with all of that would make for an incredibly compelling story.

But King goes one step further; the book also examines not just Johnny’s life but that of the rise of Greg Stillson, a sociopath whose only true interest is money and power; how he is building a political machine–dismissed as a clown but has a “populist” message that has him rising and defying the odds to run for high office. King exposes the dark underbelly of the character; the reader knows Stillson is a monster–and then Johnny goes to one of his rallies out of curiosity–and shakes his hand.

And sees the future, a future where an insane Stillson has become president of the United States, and has his finger, literally, on the button to launch a full scale nuclear war.

The end of the world.

Does Johnny have a responsibility to stop him?

The Dead Zone is absolutely brilliant, and almost horrifyingly prescient. I am writing this from memory as I don’t want to revisit this book just yet–but I do want to read it again.

And now, back to the spice mines.