Category: working out

Nightshift

Yesterday I kind of hit a writing wall; not a big deal, really, just that I was mentally and physically tired for some reason (I suspect upsetting my usual routine by having to go have blood work done in the morning, and now of course I want to write a story called Blood Work), and so I was only about to get about 2300 words out on a short story. I had hoped to not only finish the draft of that particular short story but also get another one done, perhaps even getting to work on a Scotty chapter. Heavy heaving sigh. Ah, well. I’m not going to beat myself up over the lack of productivity here; I am simply going to embrace that I got a pretty decent 2300 words done. So, that is a victory, and one that I am very pleased to have. Each word is another step closer to finished, after all, and once should never berate one’s self for not getting everything done you wanted to as long as you got something done.

I’d intended to go to the gym this morning but didn’t want to get out of bed. I had a good night’s sleep for the first time this week so, well, yeah, that happened. I’ll just have to go after work tomorrow; I have to keep my eye appointment tomorrow morning before work. It’s getting increasingly harder to keep to three times a week; primarily because of my problems sleeping. Heavy heaving sigh.

But…I am liking what I am writing, and I do enjoy going to the gym. (I was wondering what to watch now that Black Sails is over, only to discover season 2 of Versailles is up on Netflix, and I believe this is the season of the Affair of the Poisons!) I just wish I didn’t always get off so late at night that I can’t make it to the gym. There has to be a more efficient way of doing this; there simply has to be.

So,  my plan is to get these two short story drafts finished this week, as well as another chapter of Scotty; I want to have this finished by the weekend, which means a lot of writing today and tomorrow. I also need to get some short stories read for the Short Story Project, and then I think I want to read a novel. (I’ll still read short stories, but I want to read a novel; it’s been awhile since I’ve plunged into the pages of one. Kellye Garrett’s Hollywood Homicide is calling to me, for one thing, and there are any number of wonderful novels in the TBR Pile, you know.) I also want to get the order of the Bouchercon anthology stories finished this weekend, and I need to get my taxes finished and off to my accountant: MUY IMPORTANTE.

The Lost Apartment is again a pigsty; it’s amazing how easily that happens. It’s not as bad today as it was last Thursday, but still. I just don’t seem to be able to manage time properly anymore. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it definitely needs to STOP.

All right, I need to get some things done before I leave for the office this morning; I need to run errands as well before I head in.

For today’s short story discussion, we are going to look at a crime story by Lia Matera, and a literary fiction story by Irwin Shaw.

Lia Matera’s story is “Destroying Angel,” copyright Lia Matera, 1990, and this short story was first published in Sisters In Crime Volume II, 1990, edited by Marilyn Wallace.

I was squatting a few feet from a live oak tree, poison oak all around me (an occupational hazard for mycologists). I brushed wet leaves off a small mound and found two young mushrooms. I carefully dug around one of them with my trowel, coaxing it out of the ground.

I held it up and looked at it. It was a perfect woodland agaricus. The cap was firm, snow white with a hint of yellow. The gills under the cap were still white, chocolate-colored spores hadn’t yet tinged them. A ring of tissue, an annulus, circled the stipe like a floppy collar. A few strands of mycelia, the underground plant of which the mushroom is the fruit, hung from the base. I pinched the mycelia off and smelled the gills. The woodland agaricus smells like it tastes, like a cross between a mushroom, an apple, and a stalk of fennel.

Lia Matera is one of my favorite crime writers, and her Star Witness is one of my favorite crime novels; deliciously sly and incredibly witty and clever. As I was reading this short story of hers, I also lamented that she’s not published a novel in quite a while. This story is incredibly well-constructed, and devious as well; there’s a lot of information in it about mushrooms, as Our Heroine is a mycologist who works at a local nature museum and is dramatically underpaid; as she talks about her work and her mushrooming and working at the museum, and of course how careful one must be to differentiate between the deadly ones and the safe ones…well, you just know someone is going to be poisoned by mushrooms, don’t you? Matera pulls off a delightful sleight of hand in that regard, though, and the overwhelming sense of melancholy and sadness she permeates the story with is masterful. Her novels are available as ebooks now; treat yourself to one and you’ll never look back.

The Irwin Shaw story I read (reread, actually) was “The Girls in their Summer Dresses” by Irwin Shaw.

Fifth Avenue was shining in the sun when they left the Brevoort and started walking toward Washington Square. The sun was warm, even though it was November, and everything looked like Sunday morning–the buses, and the well-dressed people walking slowly in couples and the quiet buildings with the windows closed.

Michael held Frances’ arm tightly as they walked downtown in the sunlight. They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast and it was Sunday. Michael unbuttoned his coat and let it flap around him in the mild wind. They walked, without saying anything, among the young and pleasant-looking people who somehow seem to make up most of the population of that section of New York City.

“Look out,” Frances said, as they crossed Eighth Street. “You’ll break your neck.”

You never hear much about Irwin Shaw anymore, but he was one of the more successful American writers from the 1950’s to the 1970’s; his books were critically acclaimed and best sellers; the novels in included The Young Lions, Rich Man Poor Man and its lesser sequel Beggarman Thief, Evening in Byzantium, and Aurora Dawn (which was lesser known but one of my favorites; it was about a radio show sponsored by Aurora Dawn soap and was clever and biting satire about art vs. commerce). I read most of Shaw’s work in the 1970’s when I was a teenager; I would love to reread some of them again.

I read “The Girls in their Summer Dresses” for an English course in college; I don’t remember which course or which college; but the fact the story was taught gives you an indication of how well-regarded Shaw was. The insights the instructor gleaned from the story–a switch of roles between the young couple, where she took on the more traditionally masculine role while the husband took on the more passive, traditionally feminine role–struck me, at the time and on this reread some thirty years later as more of that MFA program claptrap taught and regurgitated by people who don’t really understand and appreciate the art of fiction. (Yes, as you can tell, I embrace my role as a non-intellectual.) At the time I read the story in college it struck me as a really sad story about a newly married couple whose relationship was, in fact, doomed to fail; and the point of the story showed how it was either doomed to fail, or if it was going to last, how the wife was going to have to completely subsume herself and sublimate her own needs and desires to his, constantly biting her tongue and becoming increasingly bitter about those compromises as the years pass. The young husband is a narcissist and an asshole, who, despite his wife very clearly telling him how much his ‘window shopping’ of every woman they pass on the street bothers and disturbs her–cares so little about how this behavior hurts and disturbs her that his attitude is too bad so sad I’m the man and I’m not going to change so you need to get over it. This is kind of the prequel, in some ways, to Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”–I can see this woman gladly strangling her husband in his sleep in the future after twenty years of being beaten down and humiliated over and over again.

Of course, I always tend to look at stories from the perspective of a crime writer now; so there’s that, too.

And now, back to the spice mines. Here’s a Throwback Thursday hunk for you:

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The Wild Boys

Sunday morning. We finished watching Altered Carbon last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it; hardboiled private eye story with an interesting concept about the future, gorgeously filmed, and well acted. I also only have one episode left of Black Sails, which I am still loving, and definitely am going to hate to see come to an end.

I didn’t write enough yesterday, but I finished revising two short stories, one of which I turned into the anthology that asked for it. Today I need to write, write, write. I also need to go to the gym, and I need to clean the living room. I’d also like to finish the Chanse short story I’m working on, but we’ll see how that develops. I have also fallen way behind on the Short Story Project, but feel confident that I will find the time today to read some more of them. There’s some others that I should edit as well. Paul is going to be gone all afternoon, so I should go to the gym this morning so I’ll have the apartment to myself this afternoon so I can focus on getting these things done. I’m not going to stress out about anything–I refuse to get stressed about things anymore, I get done what I can get done, which is helping dramatically with my moods and my sanity–but that doesn’t change the fact that things need to get done.

Paul might go visit his mom later this spring; I may take the same week off and just have a staycation. I tried this once before, with the good intentions of getting a lot done, and failed; but I do feel now that somehow things are different than they were at any point in the last four or five or six years; I feel as though I am rededicated, able to get things done; this year alone I’ve written five or six short stories from scratch already, five chapters of the Scotty book and four chapters of the revision of the WIP; which is quite  a lot for the eight or nine weeks we’ve had so far this year. I know I used to produce quite a bit back in the day, but it’s been awhile since I’ve written so much and been so productive; I am really enjoying it more than I remember doing so before, so I feel like this year is different somehow; I am enjoying working out again, I am enjoying writing again; and my self-confidence is coming back with a vengeance, which is, of course, absolutely lovely.

And on that note, I should get back to the spice mines. I want to clean the kitchen and revise another short story before I go to the gym for my workout; the windows also need cleaning, but that can wait until I get home from the gym.

Here’s a hunk to get you through your Sunday:

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One More Night

Thursday. I overslept this morning and thus didn’t make it to the gym–I’ll have to go tomorrow night after work–but I also had a really great night’s sleep and so am taking that as a win; now that I am out of bed my muscles aren’t tired or sore. I’ll do some stretching and my abs this morning before getting in the shower. I also have to get up tomorrow morning and go to the eye doctor; instead of my usual wimpy not complaining and accepting things, I called them and told them I can’t read in my progressive contacts so I need a stronger prescription. So, I am going in tomorrow to get a new trial pair and perhaps order my new glasses and a year’s supply of the contacts; depending on how the new ones feel.

The decisions have been made on the Bouchercon anthology, and all the people who submitted have been duly noted. This weekend I will read the chosen again and put them in order. I am currently waiting to hear back from all the selected authors. I think we’ll make the announcement of the table of contents next week. Huzzah!

Yesterday I also started writing, of all things, a Chanse MacLeod short story. I know, right? I don’t think I’ll ever write another Chanse novel, but there are ideas I had for him that I don’t want to really waste, and hey, why not write short stories about him? I always had in mind to write about him returning to the town of his birth; I also had a story in mind involving his younger brother; another with him dealing with his fraternity past in Baton Rouge–all stories my publishers were never interested in since they weren’t set in New Orleans. As I have said before, I’ve never really known how to write a private eye mystery short story, but all this short story reading I’ve been doing has kind of opened my eyes in that regard; so thank you, Sue Grafton, Ross Macdonald, Laura Lippman, etc. I’ve already realized that the opening doesn’t work, and it’s just extraneous crap I don’t need. But I am going to soldier on, and hopefully today I will finish the first draft. I also have an idea for a short story involving Chanse’s partner, whose name I cannot recall; I’ve always been interested in writing about her–the straight girl who paid for college by stripping on Bourbon Street. I cannot for the life of me think of her name right now, which is annoying, but I always thought she was interesting. I’d even thought about spinning her off, even using Chanse as a supporting character in the books–but then, is there an audience for a series about a female private eye who used to work as a stripper? But I think I can make it work as a short story. We’ll see.

Last night while I was making dinner I reread some of the short stories I have in progress, and was quite pleased with them. I am going to try to get those revisions done as quickly as I can, so I can get them out of my hair so I can focus on getting the new project done.

I’m still behind on the Short Story Project, but I did manage to read Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind” yesterday; someone recently talked about it somewhere on social media as the perfect hard-boiled short story. It had been a while since I’d read Chandler–and I haven’t read all of Chandler, either, something I need to remedy–and so I thought it was a great opportunity to read this story, which I wasn’t familiar with.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

I was getting one in a flossy new place across the street from the apartment house where I lived. It had been open about a week and it wasn’t doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.

I’ve not read all of Chandler, or his hard-boiled cohorts Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, or noir master James M. Cain. What I have read I’ve greatly enjoyed; as I have greatly enjoyed John D. Macdonald. I think I’ve been influenced by all of them to some degree; and there simply isn’t enough time to read. I’d love to go back and not only finish reading all of their works but to reread the ones I’ve already read; The Maltese Falcon, for example, is way overdue for a reread and so are the Travis McGee novels; The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Lady in the Lake, along with Love’s Lovely Counterfeit and of course, the Archer novels (although I am reading the Archer short stories). Anyway, I’ve always loved these writers and their work, and I do need to go back and reread them, problematic as some of them may be to modern eyes.

“Red Wind” is a really good story, complicated and complex, but still moves relatively easily from A to B to C. It opens with Marlowe stopping in at a bar across the street from where he lives in an apartment building, and a murder occurs right in front of him and the other denizens of the bar. After dealing with the police he heads back to the apartment building where he runs into the proverbial ‘dame’ of these types of stories, she lies to him, of course, but also manages to save his life when the murderer shows up to eliminate the witnesses. But while the mystery of the murder is now cleared up, turns out the victim has left some loose ends behind–involving the dame and some others. He was a blackmailer; the murder had nothing to do with the shooting (a very clever shift by Chandler), and Marlowe is on the case, trying to solve the blackmail cases and dealing with the LAPD. The writing is choice, terse, and all throughout the story the Santa Ana wind plays a role, almost like another character, driving people to do things they might not do under normal weather circumstances.

And now, back to the spice mines; since I didn’t go to the gym I need to get other things done.

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Rhythm of the Night

Wednesday!

I decided to postpone this morning’s workout until tomorrow, as I was ridiculously tired both last night and this morning. It’s so lovely, though, to be back into a regular routine; because I know that skipping this morning doesn’t mean it’s a loss. I can switch days without worrying or stressing that I am sliding down that slippery slope to not going to the gym again. Huzzah! Definitely making progress.

I checked off another BIG item off the to-do list yesterday; HUZZAH! This morning I have some loose odds and ends to tie up in addition to that, and then I am very excitedly going to get it all together. Yay!

I also reread the short story I wrote Sunday last night, and as opposed to my usual reaction (which is to recoil in horror from something I’ve written) I actually was rather pleased with it. It’s rough, of course, and it needs some things to be added to it, some language needs to be cleaned up, etc, but over all I am rather pleased with it. I have a couple of other short stories in progress that also need to be cleaned up; I am hoping to get all of that finished this week so I can dive headfirst into my March project. While March actually begins tomorrow, I am going to spend the rest of the week tying up odds and ends–but I am actually going to slowly start putting my feet into the water of the March project tomorrow, then hit the ground running once all this other stuff is finished.

Must. Stay. Focused.

If I stay focused, I can get everything done, and done well.

I also submitted a short story to an anthology call; the deadline is this coming Monday, but hey–look at me turning in something early. Madness, right? I don’t know if they’ll use my story or not, but I am pretty pleased with it. It may not be up their alley, but I certainly am not going to be offended if it doesn’t get accepted, you know? (Right? I don’t even recognize myself anymore.) But it feels good. I want to get so much stuff out of the way before this weekend so I can totally immerse myself in the new project.

Altered Carbon continues to enthall, and so does The Black Prince of Florence. I am way behind on the Short Story Project, but am hoping to get my act together on that score soon as well.

And on that note, I should get back to the spice mines.

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Oh, Sheila

Tuesday!

As February winds to a close, and March lingers there on the horizon, I can’t believe that we are nearly three months into 2018 already. I’ve done quite a bit of writing so far this year; so much so, that in fact, I’ve already written more than I did all of last year. How scary is that? The next few months are going to be a bit on the insane side for me, as I have much to write, the Williams Festival/Saints and Sinners is also coming up quickly, and many many deadlines are looming as well. Which is cool, but stressful. I’m getting a lot done, though, and I am making progress on the goals I set for the  year. I’m not as consistent with the gym and working out as I would like, but I am already on pace to have been to the gym more times this year than last already, and that watershed is coming up soon.

We started watching Altered Carbon on Netflix this week. I’ve seen a lot of people trashing the show on social media; so I didn’t have high hopes going into it, but we’re enjoying it so far. Visually it’s stunning; it sort of reminds me of Blade Runner (which I haven’t seen in over thirty years; should probably rewatch that soon). It’s kind of a cross between sci/fi and a hardboiled detective story; which is part of why I find it intriguing. I also like the lead actor, Joel Kinnaman; I enjoyed him in the American version of The Killing, and you can’t go wrong with James Purefoy. And while there is a lot of nudity, for a change it seems pretty equally distributed between males and females, and they actually show full frontal male, which is extremely unusual. The show has also intrigued me enough to go back and read the books on which the show is based; and I am relatively certain the books are most likely better than the show.

I’m a little behind on the Short Story Project, as I try to wind down the Bouchercon anthology, but I did read “Three Little Words” by Nancy Pickard, from the MWA Anthology Manhattan Mayhem.

Priscilla laughed hysterically when her doctor told her she had only a few weeks to live.

When she saw the shocked dismay on his handsome face, she waved away his worry and kept guffawing like a four-year-old who had just heard the funniest knock-knock joke on earth. And, being a preschool teacher, she knew knock-knock jokes and four-year-olds.

Nancy Pickard is one of my favorite crime writers: her stand-alones, The Virgin of Small Plains and The Scent of Rain and Lightning are two of my favorite crime novels of all time (both are sorely in need of a reread). I also loved her Marie Lightfoot series; Marie being a true-crime writer, so her adventures were always interspersed with excerpts from the book she was writing about the case she was looking into in the book; a book within a book, and it was terribly clever. This short story is evidence of why I enjoy Pickard’s work so much. Poor Priscilla is a wealthy young girl who’s estranged from her family; she creates a bucket list when she finds out she had little time left to live: it consists of three little words, tell the truth. And that’s what she does; she goes around telling everyone the truth, whether they want to hear it or not. Then she is murdered, but why? The story is told from the point of view of her doctor, who is also her friend, and as the story moves on, each sentence makes the plot and mystery of who murdered Priscilla and why even more complicated and layered; this story is definitely a classic.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Lovergirl

I wrote a short story yesterday, which was kind of fun; I can’t remember the last time I sat down and wrote 4500 words in three hours, and a short story from beginning to end, to boot. I am very pleased with myself, as I am wont to be. It needs work, of course; but I am very happy that I was able to write it from beginning to end. I can now put it aside for awhile to get back to work on other things; but as its deadline approaches I won’t be pushing to get it written–and then giving up as happens so often.

Today I need to get some things accomplished; I am going to the gym this morning before heading into the office. I am doing happy hour bar testing this evening; so I don’t have to go in until later; which now provides me with a Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday weight lifting schedule, with room for replacement days if that becomes necessary. (I can always, for example, go on Friday evening after work if I don’t want to do Saturday; I can go on Sunday to replace Monday, ,etc.) Flexibility in one’s workout schedule is important, and makes success more likely than rigidity.

I need to get my taxes together this week as well; that’s one of the major things on my schedule this week. Ideally, I would love to have everything to my accountant by Friday, so I can get everything filed next week. I also have to get some work done on the Bouchercon anthology; and I need to finish a grant application by Wednesday. There’s a contest I am considering entering as well; we shall see if I decide to pay the entry fee for that (it’s only thirty dollars, but….thirty dollars is thirty dollars. Before I bought the car I would have thought nothing of spending the money; but now I am watching every cent I spend). So, I definitely have my work cut out for me this week; we’ll see how it all works out. This morning I feel energetic, and I know after I work out I’ll have that lovely endorphin rush going. Huzzah! Everyone wins.

I am on the final season of Black Sails, and it continues to enthrall, although I am very well aware that it won’t end happily; but I also have some idea of who will survive the season and who will not.

All right, I need to get my act together and get to the gym. Till later, Constant Reader.

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You Belong to the City

Saturday morning and I have sooooo much to do it’s terrifying. Tonight we have tickets to the ballet; Les Ballet de Monte-Carlo, to be precise. They are performing Romeo and Juliette. I have, as I have said before countless times, never seen ballet performed live. I am very excited, obviously. I have an idea for a ballet noir–I have so many ideas, really–and I love that I merely mentioned this one night while watching the superb ballet documentary Bolshoi Babylon, and that he remembered, with the end result we have the tickets for tonight.

He really is quite a dear.

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I am writing so many things right now, and working on so much, that it can overwhelm me a bit when I stop to think about it; therefore it’s best not to think about it. The Scotty novel is going to be the most complex plot I’ve written since Mardi Gras Mambo, which means I have to really be careful and pay attention in order to prevent enormous mistakes and errors as I go along. The short stories I am writing…it’s interesting, but in some cases it’s so much easier to just have an idea and then write to figure it out; sometimes when I finish the first draft and get to the end I know what has to be fixed, added, and changed; in other cases, I literally have no idea. My writing process is so bizarre and different than anyone else’s, and I cannot say I honestly recommend the way I do things to any beginning writer.

Take, for example, a story I wrote and submitted to the MWA Anthology Ice Cold numerous years ago. The anthology was for stories set during the Cold War, and I decided to risk writing a story with a gay theme, even if that theme was buried deep inside the story until about the middle. I also started with an image; a man in the depths of winter, standing on a stone bridge over Rock Creek in Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, dropping a gun into the cold, gray water. Stubbornly,  I held onto that image as the opening of the story through numerous revisions and rewrites. The story was rejected; and I’ve tried revising it again and again. It was recently rejected by another market, with a lovely note: You’re too good of a writer to get a standard rejection letter. This story moved too slow, but do send us more of your work. (And it is a sad indication of this ego-destroying business that said email made my day: they like me! They like my work!) And yet the best part of that rejection email was this minor, five word piece of feedback: this story moved too slow. As soon as I read that I realized that the structure of the story was its ultimate failing: the dropping of the gun into the creek wasn’t where the story began, so I am going to revise the story another time, reordering the events of the story. Maybe it doesn’t even begin where I’m thinking it does now; but I won’t know until I start working on it again.

Likewise, another story I am in the midst of writing right now opens with the sentence The ID’s were fake but no one seemed to care. It’s a great opening line, and it was the first thing to come to mind when I started writing the story, and it just evolved from that opening line; I wasn’t really sure what the story was, but I wanted to use that as an opening line, and so I started writing there. Am I tied to that as the opening line? I tend to be a bit stubborn about these things…which is definitely a fault of my own. I was so determined, for example, that the WIP must begin at a certain place that I was trying to make it work–but soon realized that its Chapter One was really Chapter Three, and a lot of the things I was doing were trite and cliche; so I moved the timing of the story back a few weeks. Sometimes, being stubborn is not a plus for a writer.

I am also going to, in today’s edition of the Short Story Project, talk about two Daphne du Maurier short stories that I read for the first time this week, from the New York Review of Books collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories. As I have said before, I’ve not read all of du Maurier’s work; I hold back because I don’t ever want to run out of things of hers to read. I have several of her short story collections on hand (my favorite, of course, being Echoes from the Macabre, which I read first when I was a teenager, shortly after I read Rebecca for the first time–which also reminds me, I am terribly overdue for a reread of Rebecca), but unfortunately the problem with du Maurier collections is they often overlap; stories tend to appear in more than one collection: “Don’t Look Now,” for example, not only is in Echoes from the Macabre but headlines this particular volume; “The Birds”, which I talked about the other day, also appears in both.

Today’s stories, though, are of a type: “Indiscretion” and “Ls Sainte-Vierge” are both relatively short, and, like several of her other stories, wait until the very end to twist and shove the knife into your throat. This is not easy to do, and I’ve tried it with stories with little to no success; I think my best successes with these style have been “Keeper of the Flame” and “Annunciation Shotgun.”

“La Sainte-Vierge” doesn’t even seem all that dark, through most of it:

It was hot and sultry, that oppressive kind of heat where there is no air, no life. The trees were motionless and dull, their drooping leaves colorless with summer dust. The ditches smelt of dead ferns and long-dried mud, and the grasses of the fields were blistered and brown. The village seemed asleep. No one stirred among the few scattered cottages on the hill-side; strange, uneven cottages, huddled together for fear of loneliness, with white walls and no windows, and small gardens massed with orange flowers.

A greater silence still filled the fields, where the pale corn lay heaped in awkward stacks, left behind by some neglectful laborer. Not even a breeze stirred the heather on the hills, lonely treeless hills, whose only dwellers were a host of bees and a few lizards. Below them the wide sea stretched like a sheet of ice into eternity, a chart of silver crinkled by the sun.

It’s set in a small fishing village on the coast of Brittany; the point-of-view character is Marie, a fisherman’s wife who is very young and desperately in love with her husband. He is about to go out on another fishing voyage, and she has these terrible premonitions that something terrible is going to happen. He brushes aside her concerns repeatedly, telling her she’s completely foolish and superstitious (never a good sign in any story, let alone a duMaurier), so after he leaves in the evening to get the boat ready, she creeps out of the house to a local church to pray to a statue of the Virgin. Du Maurier’s description of the poor village’s cheap and tattered statue and the church is which it resides is morbid, sad and a bit tragic; yet as Marie prays the moonlight comes into the church and transforms the statue before her believing eyes, and she is shown a vision in her religious ecstasy. Happy and content, she returns to her home…but that something terrible the story has foreshadowed all along does occur, just not what she, or the reader, could have possibly seen coming.

The other story, “Indiscretion,” is equally marvelous in the same way but different; this story, in structure and ending, reminded me a lot of de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.”

I wonder how many people’s lives are ruined by a momentary indiscretion? The wrong word at the wrong time–and then finish to all their dreams. They have to go on living with their tongues bitten a second too late. No use calling back the spoken word. What’s said is said.

I know of three people who have been made to suffer because of a chance sentence flung into the air. One of them was myself; I lost my job through it. The other fellow lost his illusions. And the woman…well, I guess she did not have much left to lose, anyway. Maybe she lost her one chance of security. I have not seen either of them since. The curt, typewritten letter came from him a week later. I packed up then and came away from London, leaving the shreds of my career in the waste-paper basket. In less than three months I read in a weekly rag he was claiming a divorce. The whole thing was so needless, too. A word from me–a word from her. And all through the sordid little street that runs between Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square.

This story basically is about fate and coincidence conspiring to wreck the lives of three people who, again, never saw it coming; and how happiness can be destroyed in just a matter of seconds. It’s bitter and sad and melancholy, like most of du Maurier’s work; but it also works beautifully, and her gorgeous writing style contributes to its terrible beauty.

And now, back to the spice mines.

 

Miami Vice

This wasn’t one of my better weeks, to be frank. I had issues with sleep and motivation; being tired had something to do with that. I didn’t get up Wednesday morning and go to the gym like I should have; I am hoping to go tonight, Sunday, and Monday, so as to get back on track. I did get a horrific transitional chapter on the Scotty book finished, though–and I also did some major brainstorming about the plot and how to make it work. It’s probably going to be longer than Scotty books usually are; it may come in somewhere between 90 and 100k. I am also being rather ambitious with this plot, too. It’s going to be complicated, and I am also going to take on some issues, which I generally do not do in the Scotty books. Here’s hoping it plays out the way I want it to.

I also have some deadlines coming up this coming week, which has me petrified with fear. I have several short stories in process…no, I’m not going to think about it. That will just paralyze me some more. Instead, I am going to think good thoughts about how wonderful the stuff I am working on is, rather than freaking the fuck out about everything I have to get done. Tomorrow night we are going to the ballet; I am very excited about this as I’ve never seen one live before. This was one of my Christmas presents from Paul, and I can’t wait…although it is probably going to make me want to write about the ballet and push everything else to the side.

Because the stuff I need to work on is never the stuff I want to work on.

I did read a lot of short stories yesterday, after several fallow days of not reading any. I had to do testing at Nicholls State University yesterday afternoon, which is about an hour and a half drive from the office. I didn’t drive; I rode in the backseat and read stories on my way to and from there, and then last night as I watched the Olympics I read some more. That’s the beauty of short stories; you can read a lot of them in a very short period of time. I think I may have read six or seven yesterday, so I’ve got them stockpiled for the Short Story Project. Huzzah!

And sorry to be so brief this morning; but I’ve got to get to the office.

Here’s a hunk for you as I head back into the spice mines.

s-l1000

 

 

Cool It Now

I still have that horrible throaty cough periodically, but my voice is more normal and I don’t feel off, which I am counting as a win. I also think that my body has changed on me again; my eating habits are bad–I often forget to eat and rarely, if ever, get hungry–but now my blood sugar will drop, leaving me feeling tired and ill. I need to start making sure that I fuel my body properly; gallons of coffee in the morning aren’t the way to go, and that is also inhibiting my sleep at night.

Heavy sigh.

But once the Olympics are over, I can go back to getting in bed at ten and reading for a half an hour or so before going to sleep; I am greatly enjoying The Black Prince of Florence, as well as my other current non-fiction read, Joan Didion’s essay collection After Henry. Didion is amazing; the way she crafts sentences and paragraphs is both lyrical and beautiful. I wish I had one tenth of her skill. I also made some progress with the Short Story Project, and am thinking I may write a Chanse short story. Reading all these Tess Monaghan (Laura Lippman) and Kinsey Millhone (Sue Grafton) and Lew Archer (Ross Macdonald) short stories are showing me how it’s possible to write and craft a private eye short story; and I have an idea in my head about one where Chanse goes back to LSU for a fraternity reunion that might turn deadly. It’s just a thought; I’ve always wanted to do that in a novel, but it might just be a short story, you know? One of my problems has always been that I think in terms of novels as opposed to short stories; I’ve certainly turned short stories into novels (Sorceress and Sleeping Angel come to mind), and am even thinking of turning another one into a novel. Reading all these short stories has been inspiring me to write short stories, which is incredibly cool. I have several in progress right now; I’ve been asked to write for two anthologies where the story is inspired by a song; which is something I have certainly done before, and I’m having a lot of fun with those. I also want to write something for the MWA anthology, and I have another I am writing to submit to another anthology as well. I am still working on the WIP and the Scotty, never fear–the Scotty is taking a timely and dark turn, which is kind of cool–but I have all these short stories dancing around in my head!

Bitchin’.

I also read two short stories over the weekend. The first was Sue Grafton’s “Long Gone,” from her Kinsey and Me collection.

September in Santa Teresa. I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around. it’s the season of new school clothes, fresh notebooks, and finely sharpened pencils without any teeth marks in the wood. We’re all eight years old again and anything is possible. The new year should never begin on January 1. It begins in the gall and continues as long as our saddle oxfords remain unscuffed and our lunch boxes have no dents.

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m female, thirty-two, twice divorced, “doing business as” Kinsey Millhone Investigations in a little town ninety-nine miles north of Los Angeles. Mine isn’t a walk-in trade like a beauty salon. Most of my clients find themselves in a bind and then seek my services, hoping I can offer a solution for a mere thirty bucks an hour, plus expenses. Robert Ackerman’s message was waiting on my answering machine that Monday morning at nine when I got in.

One of the things that rarely gets mentioned in discussion about Sue Grafton’s work is how funny she can; and this particular story, with Kinsey having to interview a husband who wants to hire her to find his wife, and having to deal with his three children, all under five, is actually, despite its dark tone and subject matter, kind of breezy and funny. Kinsey’s droll sense of humor, and her sympathy for the missing wife–which comes from her own dour outlook at marriage and family–made me laugh out loud several times during the course of reading the story. It’s a pity that Grafton didn’t write more short stories, because these are gems.

I then moved on to “The Barber” by Flannery O’Connor, from The Complete Stories.

It is trying on liberals in Dilton.

After the Democratic White Primary, Rayber changed his barber. Three weeks before it, while he was shaving him, the barber said, “Who you gonna vote for?”

“Darmon,” Rayber said.

“You a n*****r-lover?”

Rayber started in the chair. He had not expected to be approached so brutally. “No,” he said. If he had not been off-balance, he would have said, “I am neither a Negro- nor a white-lover.” He had said that before to Jacobs, the philosophy man, and–to show you how trying it is for liberals in Dilton–Jacobs–a man of his education, had muttered, “That’s a poor way to be.”

A writer friend of mine–probably one of my closest friends who is also a writer–is a huge Flannery O’Connor fan. As I mentioned when I talked about reading her story “The Geranium,” I had read her A Good Man Is Hard To Find and wasn’t overly impressed with it. Also, as I said when I read “The Geranium,” the racism and use of the n-word is kind of hard for me to see. And yet…in this story, it fits and has to be used, even though it fills me with distaste to see it on the page and to read it. “The Barber,” you see, is the perfect personification of what it’s like to live in the South and be confronted by in-your-face racism all the time. This doesn’t excuse it by any means, or say it’s okay; but wow, how honest and true this story is.

Rayber is a liberal, who clearly believes in racial equality; he is a teacher at the local college and when he is confronted with the racism from his barber and some of the other men in his shop, he is startled, shocked; doesn’t know what to do. Part of his white privilege comes from being surrounded, he believes, by people who believe the same way he does; that racism and bigotry and segregation is wrong and a moral evil. He doesn’t know what to do when he is confronted by it in the face of his barber, someone whose chair he has sat in for years, presumably, and allowed to apply a straight razor to his face and neck. Now, this pleasant person whom he has never really paid a whole lot of attention to and has never really given much of a thought to, other than he provides a service well that Rayber needs, is confronting him with a hideousness that is quite horrifying while holding a sharp razor at his throat. What makes this all the more brilliant is how O’Connor doesn’t even make that connection for the reader; she just puts it out there and lets the reader come to his own realization. And afterwards, after being mocked by the barber and his friends in the shop for how he chooses to cast his vote, he spends the next week angry and bitter about the experience, and preparing to explain his vote logically and rationally the next time he gets shaved; to reason with the barber and tell him how wrong racism is…and inevitably, when that times comes, as the barber jovially mocks him for his vote, he eventually becomes frustrated and physically lashes out.

This story resonated strongly with me. Whenever I am confronted with something I find morally abhorrent, to my face, it catches me so off-guard that I can’t really respond logically and rationally–sometimes even at all– because it is hard for me to understand that there are people out there who actually can hold positions I hold morally abhorrent; I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around, for example, homophobia. I don’t get it. I do not understand how anyone can simply devalue and deny another human being their humanity. It’s hard for me to write homophobic characters because I cannot fully flesh those characters out and make them anything other than one-dimensional; I cannot grasp hatred like that. But, as one editor told me early in my career, even Hitler loved his dogs. I could relate to O’Connor’s character, and his inability to understand, to realize, what he was dealing with; that behind the friendly face and jovial attitude is someone whose core values and beliefs are so repugnant to him that they didn’t seem POSSIBLE.

And that is the mark of a truly gifted writer.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that story since I read it, and again, the mark of a great writer. Ms. O’Connor made me think, made me reflect, got under my skin and made me question my own self, not only as a person but as a writer.

Wow.

And now back to the spice mines.

RyanPaevey14

Everything She Wants

I am ill.

It’s been threatening since last Thursday morning, when I woke up with a nasty, periodic cough that hurt at the base of my throat; I hoped it was sinus-related since the weather went through one of its typical New Orleans bipolar moments and went from cold and damp to warm and humid overnight; but this morning I woke up with a croaking voice, a slight headache and a mild fever. I chose to stay home from the office today and nurse it, hoping to head off something even worse. I am going to be drinking hot tea with lemon and honey, and chicken noodle soup. I do not wish to be sick in any way, shape or form. I cannot be sicker. I have too much to do.

The odd thing is I felt good enough yesterday to go to the gym for the first time in weeks, and even felt fantastic the rest of the day. Oh, I still had the periodic cough that hurt, but my body felt terrific. I didn’t even wake up feeling sore this morning. But my throat hurts, and coughing feels like gargling acid. And then there’s the damned fever. Sigh.

Although now I wonder if the energy I used at the gym is what opened the door for the illness to take over? BASTARDS.

All right, I am going to go dose myself and try to feel better. Ugh, I hate being sick. And this is twice in less than three months.

So, here are today’s short story offerings.

First, we have “The Shoeshine Man Regrets” by Laura Lippman, from Hardly Knew Her.

“Bruno Magli?”

“Uh-uh. Bally.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Some kids get flash cards of farm animals when they’re little. I think my mom showed me pictures of footwear cut from magazines. After all, she couldn’t have her only daughter bringing home someone who wore white patent loafers, even in the official season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Speaking of which–there’s a full Towson.”

This is a Tess Monaghan story, which opens with Tess and her old friend Whitney bored while waiting for their car from the valet service, so they start playing a game: identifying the shoes of the other people waiting for their cars. A laundry truck has the parking lot blocked so everyone has to wait. The ‘full Towson’ is approached by an elderly man of color, who points out his shoes have a spot of mayonnaise on them and asks if he wants a shine. The ‘full Towson’ is a typical asswipe, an altercation eventually ensues, and the old man is arrested–and confesses to a forty-year-old murder….and this is when Tess gets involved. Very satistfying, and a most excellent denouement.

Next, I pulled out the MWA anthology Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War, edited by Jeffrey Deaver and Raymond Benson, and read the first story, Deaver’s own “Comrade 35.”

To be summoned to the highest floor of GRU headquarters in Moscow made you immediately question your future.

Several fates might await.

One was that you had been identified as a counter-revolutionary or a lackey of the bourgeoisie imperialists. In which case your next address would likely be a gulag, which were still highly fashionable, even now, in the early 1960s, despite First Secretary and Premier Krushchev’s enthusiastic denunciation of Comrade Stalin.

Another possibility was that you had been identified as a double agent, a mole within the GRU–not proven to be one, mind you, simply suspected of being one. Your fate in that situation was far simpler and quicker than a transcontinental train ride: a bullet in the back of the head, a means of execution the GRU had originated as a preferred means of execution, though the rival KGB had co-opted and taken credit for the technique.

As I read along, the story seemed familiar, and yet at the same time I couldn’t remember much about it. When I finally reached the end, I realized I had read the story before, but it’s a good story and I enjoyed it very much. Deaver is of course a bestselling author; and I’ve read many of his Lincoln Rhymes novels–years behind on him, of course. I actually submitted a story to this anthology, and was rejected. I still haven’t placed that story anywhere, either–but I think I finally know how to fix what’s wrong with it.

And now, to my reclining chair and some soup.

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