Category: writing

The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You)

And here we are on yet another Pay-the-Bills Wednesday. Paul is leaving today, and won’t be back until a week from Saturday. I also don’t have Scooter for cuddles and company. Will I go mad living under conditions of absolute reality? Even larks and katydids are believed by some to dream.

Yesterday was a much better day than I’ve had in quite some time, all things considered. I slept incredibly well, so didn’t start off my day either sleepy or groggy or tired, which is always a plus. The work day was relatively low-key; we were slow in the morning but busy in the afternoon, and frankly, I prefer it that way; busy in the morning inevitably means tired in the afternoon, and if we’re so it’s agony. But over all, a good day at the office and an auspicious beginning to the month of August. (I also didn’t note that it was the anniversary of both of our moves to New Orleans; first in 1996, then again on August 1 2001 when we moved back home from That Horrible Year Away.)

I ran errands on my way home–mail, prescriptions, groceries–and then came home to a sink full of dirty dishes which needed attention, so I took care of that as well as another load of laundry, and then sat my ample buttocks into my desk chair and banged out the revision of Chapter 3 I’d been stuck on for a little less than a week (not so much stuck as tired and didn’t want to bother with it, in brutal honesty) and got it finished and under control before moving onto Chapter Four. I also worked on “Whim of the Wind” for a little while, and also did some more research into the history of the city I am fictionalizing for the WIP, which I continue to fail to discuss. Perhaps this weekend? Perhaps. I kind of want to see if I can get past Chapter 4 before I talk about the book publicly, but that’s nothing more than my own superstitions, which is pretty stupid. As a general rule I don’t believe in things like jinxes and curses and so forth, but I do believe you can actually speak things into existence sometimes. The only takeaway I got from Psych 101 in college was the concept of visualization; that picturing something in your mind can make it happen–but not like winning the powerball or anything like that, but more along the lines of why you always spill something full when you’re carrying it no matter how careful you are…because your mind cannot picture a negative–you can’t see yourself not spilling it; so when you think about not spilling it, you will because you see yourself in your mind actually spilling it. (It’s like how you cannot prove a negative–you can rarely prove you aren’t something; but it is incredibly easy to prove you are. I use this example: someone drinks a lot. They don’t think they have a problem, they don’t wake up in the morning feeling like death warmed over twice and wanting another drink. But once someone says, “You have a drinking problem”, you can’t prove that you don’t. You can say you aren’t, but that’s denial. You can stop drinking for a time period—but if you start drinking again, well, there, you see, you were in recovery and then relapsed! You cannot win, so why bother trying?) It is much harder to prove something isn’t true than it is proving something is. Guilt is the same way–how do you convince the cops, who are convinced you are, that you aren’t?

I will say this about the WIP–it’s more hardboiled and noir than what I usually write, I am having a lot of fun with it, and it’s been a long time since I wrote anything set in Florida, if I ever have? Dark Tide started as a Florida panhandle novel, but I moved it to the Alabama coast; “Cold Beer No Flies” was a panhandle story, too. But this is me fictionalizing Tampa–come to think of it, my main character in The Orion Mask lived in a fictional Tampa I am using again for this one–and I’ve not set foot in Tampa, other than flying in and out for Bouchercon in St. Petersburg, since I moved away in December 1995 to once again reboot and restart my life.

I was tired after all my errands yesterday–the thermostat in my car let me know it was 101 when I left the office yesterday; it is insane for it to be that hot, even in New Orleans. It’s exhausting dealing with this insane summer heat this year. But I did get some writing done yesterday, which was a good thing, and of course Paul finished packing. Heavy heaving sigh. Ah, well, I have Superman and Lois to catch up on, and My Adventures with Superman, and so many old classic films to watch, so I shouldn’t have any trouble keeping myself entertained so I don’t feel lonely or bored. And of course I could be writing, which is always difficult in August…I also think about how about eighteen years ago I was finishing (finally) Mardi Gras Mambo at long last in that last, fateful August before Katrina. It really was a completely different world all those years ago; maybe I ‘ll go back and read those old Livejournal entries from August of 2005, so I can remember the world before once again. I also have a lot of reading to get caught up on, as well. I have some errands to run this evening on the way home from work, and then I am going to be inside for the night. We did watch another episode of Gotham Knights last night–very intense, as the season finale moves closer–but now I have to wait for Paul to come home to finish. Heavy heaving sigh.

But perhaps I’ll use all this solitude productively. One never knows, and on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

Tuesday, and somehow we made it through Monday. It was definitely a weird-energy Monday, that’s for sure. I slept super-well Sunday night (or at least better than I had been_ and so wasn’t too terribly tired when I got off work last night. I had to pick up a prescription after work, and since I had to go to Mid-city I decided to get Five Guys as a dinner treat. It had been a hot minute, and was quite lovely. But I was hardly in the mood once I got home and had my treat–not to mention the great pleasure of running around in Midcity during a heat advisory, but here we are. I did putz around a bit in my journal, and I did work on Chapter Three, but other than that I wasn’t much in the mood for doing a whole lot when I got home from the office yesterday.

But the Five Guys was marvelous. It was hot as Satan’s taint out, and it was rush hour so there was ridiculous traffic, and I had to take I-10 and there were people doing stupid things behind the wheel and not understanding how highways work or when you can turn right on red and the usual annoyances and terrors standard for driving around this city, but I got home safely and in one piece and it was lovely. I was most pleased that I made the effort, and it was really such a simple pleasure. I so often deny myself these little joys in life because of the effort involved in obtaining them. It really is astonishing how little I want to leave the house once I am in it, you know. Today I have to pick up the mail and stop at the grocery store for very little; it’s going to be an odd ten days. I imagine I’ll enjoy the silence and the “I can do whatever I want whenever I want”–not that I don’t, but there’s always that little sense of just being alone with yourself that is kind of nice every once in a while. (It also serves to remind me how much I miss him when he isn’t here, and how I take him for granted.) I’ll get bored with being by myself at some point, and will tire of keeping myself occupied and entertained. But…there’s always something to read. I can always use the time to write. I can organize. I can ruthlessly purge the books again. I can reflect and try to get to know myself better–or at least delve into the delusions I maintain for the sake of my sanity and to keep myself going.

I read a couple of short stories over the weekend that I forgot to mention, both from the Alfred Hitchcock volume My Favories in Suspense. One was infinitely better than the other; I didn’t really like the “Sentence of Death” story by Thomas Walsh even remotely near as much as I enjoyed Dorothy Salisbury Davis’ nasty little story “Spring Fever.” The former was a mistaken identification case, open and shut until an unsure eyewitness sees the man she saw commit the murder. It was told in a style I don’t like–very little dialogue, and a lot of “he did this and then he did that and this irritated him and that made him do this” type of telling, which surprised me that, frankly, read like a synopsis of a longer piece got published as a short story. There were so many better ways to tell that story, I thought; and every last one of them better than the one Walsh chose. I mean, it was fine…but it could have been so much better; I think the editor brain took over while I was reading it, which is rarely if ever a good sign when reading for pleasure. On the other hand, Davis’ story, deceptively simple and easily told, was multi-layered and said so much about so many things in the short pages that I was most impressed. I think I’ve only read one other story by Davis, in that Sarah Weinman anthology a few years (I don’t want to know how many, actually) back. I know Davis was one of the great twentieth century women crime writers who proliferated after the war–along with giants whose novels I have read like Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Dorothy B. Hughes, and I also know she was particularly revered by Sara Paretsky–I think she may have helped with the founding of Sisters in Crime? I have some of Davis’ novels, both in print and in ebook form, here, and some day I really need to read more of her works.

Yesterday was an off-day, too, in which nothing particular was wrong or haywire or miserable, but the energy felt off all day which made the little treat of Five Guys seem that much better. Paul and I then watched a few more episodes of Gotham Knights, which is surprisingly involving and better than I was expecting; it’s better than the early seasons of Titans (I still haven’t watched the final season–something else I can do whilst Paul is away), as well as the firsts seasons of Smallville.

Last night’s sleep was epic. I didn’t wake up once last night, until five (I wake up at five every morning and go back to sleep); the kind of sleep that you never want to get up from, where you feel so relaxed that the bed is so comfortable that you don’t want to get up, ever. I feel better rested this morning than I have in quite some time, although not entirely or completely awake yet. My coffee is marvelous this morning, and the house feels cool this morning. Either the temperature dropped dramatically over night, or it rained–which would have helped with the sleep. I didn’t write very much yesterday, partly because of that weird/off/low energy thing yesterday had going for it, but it’s okay, I think. Sometimes it’s not possible or necessary to write every day–I’ve never stuck to that rule that a writer had to write every day else they are not a writer; and for that matter, purists, I at least write this every day, even if I personally don’t count it, it is writing–if not the kind I count. (It still blows my mind that I’ve been keeping this since December 2004; soon enough this blog will be twenty years old. Jesus, I am old.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will be back tomorrow.

Here You Come Again

Monday! Back to the office for the weekly routine! It took me awhile to fall asleep last night, but eventually Morpheus opened his arms and welcomed me into the Dreaming, although I don’t remember anything I dreamt last night. Yesterday was, over all, not bad. I’d slept fairly decently Saturday night, but had some trouble with motivation yesterday. I did write a little bit, but for the most part felt burned out and mostly tired for most of the day. The end of the month is nigh, of course, which is a bit of a trip–can it really be August already–and the year is slipping past. I have a busy rest of the year ahead of me, too–after Bouchercon I am having oral surgery, and I am trying to schedule a consultation so I can get my arm surgery scheduled before the end of the year. I’d prefer to do neither, but I am tired of mouth pain and am not sure how much longer I could last dealing with the pain from my teeth. I am just ready to be done permanently with mouth pain.

It was raining when I went to bed last night, so I imagine the sound of rain helped me fall into a deep sleep; if only we could have a thunderstorm every night when it’s time for bed. Paul is leaving Wednesday, so when I get home from work that night he won’t be here. I am kind of in denial about it, to be completely honest. I’m going to be excessively bored, undoubtedly, but the key is to make sure I utilize the time effectively rather than allowing myself to be bored, you know? I can always read something, there’s a lot of shows for me to catch up on that Paul’s not interested in–Superman and Lois, and I should finish Titans, and My Adventures with Superman–and there are other classic films I’d like to watch as well. I can also watch the television in the bedroom and read in bed every night if I so desire.

We did finish watching Last Call last night, which was terribly sad because of how the killer was able to get away with it–twice!–before they finally linked him to the gruesome murders, and the difficulties prosecutors had in determining jurisdiction. We had a serial killer in the aughts who was preying on gay men down in the bayou parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche back in those pre-Katrina times; no one’s ever written about him as far as I know, and most of his victims were homeless and/or hustlers, so no one cared much about the victims (similar to what happened with the Jeff Davis Eight in the same time period–women with records for prostitution and drugs murdered and no one ever caught or prosecuted) but at least they did finally catch the Bayou Killer (that’s not what his name was; I’m not even sure they gave him one since no one cared about the victims), but what the primary underlying theme to both true crime stories is that the police, for the most part, didn’t care about the victims so they didn’t try terribly hard to find them justice.

Yet another example of the fraught relationship between my community and the cops.

We also watched the first three episodes of Gotham Knights, which was better than I was expecting. DC’s continuity is something I no longer understand, as there are any number of Batman children and Robins and so forth having accumulated over the years, so I am not really sure about how the cast of this show came together–Batman’s adopted son, who isn’t a Robin, is accused of hiring the Joker’s daughter and some sidekicks to murder Bruce Wayne/Batman for the inheritance. Now they–with the help of a young Black female Robin–have to clear their names and catch the real killers, which involves the Court of Owls. I have no idea what’s going on these days in the comics with the Batman family–but I will always think of them as the originals I grew up with: Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Nightwing (my favorite).

I also spent some time reading Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt, which I am enjoying a lot. Kelly really gets the Southern working class voice and setting perfectly, and of course, she’s very literate in the way she writes. The book is layered and textured, and captures that small Southern community feeling more perfectly than most writers I’ve encountered. The queers are doing some really great work in crime fiction these days, which is pretty amazing–with amazing new voices coming along, it seems, fairly regularly over the last few years. Kelly, John Copenhaver, Margot Douaihy, Marco Carocari, Rob Osler and PJ Vernon are all doing amazing work and getting mainstream recognition, which is even cooler. Rob’s Devil’s Chew Toy continues to wrack up award nominations for debut novel; he’s currently up for both the Anthony and Macavity, and was one of the finalists for the first ever Lillian Jackson Braun award. Well done, Rob!

I, of course, didn’t complete my ambitious plans for the weekend, and that was in no small part due to that little voice reminding me in my head repeatedly what are you going to do while Paul’s gone–and of course, it never takes much persuasion for me to procrastinate or to be lazy, so I would give in and go do something besides sit at the computer and write, which is of course terrible. But I also didn’t want to not spend time with Paul while he was awake, either, since he’s leaving on Wednesday. Sigh. It truly never ends.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have as lovely a Monday as possible, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

Ups

Saturday morning in ye olde Lost Apartment. Yesterday was a productive one, yet I was tired. I slept better Thursday night than I had all week, and yet… tired, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. I got my work done, though, managed to get laundry and dishes taken care of, and finished page proofing. I was watching (listening) to a documentary on MAX about DC Comics (which was essentially a three hour informerical about DC entertainment–comics, movies, games, graphic novels, television shows, etc.), which I kind of enjoyed besides the obvious puff piece approach. They were brutally honest about bad decisions and down-turns in popularity, as well as the insane boom of the early 1990’s with the collectors’ stuff. I had that on while I page-proofed, and it was interesting. I’ve always been a DC guy (who has nothing but respect and admiration for Marvel; I love Spider-Man), so seeing all the previous incarnations of the heroes and the stories as they evolved and changed over the years. They did, in fact, bring up the weird period where Wonder Woman gave up her powers and just became Diana Prince, which was also the same period where Supergirl was poisoned and her powers came and went; were no longer reliable, so they dreamed up some tech to help her out when her powers failed her. I was already planning on writing about DC again, thanks to the breaking news of the casting of the new Superman and because I’ve started watching the animated series My Adventures with Superman, which I am loving. We also finished The Crowded Room (a bit disappointing overall, I think) and watched the new Minx as well as some more Awkwafina is Nora from Queens.

It was extremely hot yesterday and I did not go outside. Even with the air conditioning on, I could tell everything outside was roasting. The air had that weird texture to it still, like it was almost scorched a bit from the heat. Today we have extreme heat advisory from eleven to seven, and I am considering not running my errands today if I can’t get it done this morning. I don’t want to be out in that if I don’t have to be, and if I do, at a time when it isn’t terrible outside. It is definitely the hottest summer I can remember in my life–and I do not just think that ever year and this year is no different. This year is VERY different, so hot it’s almost scary. The water in the Gulf is so hot, how can that be good for aquatic life? For the ecosystems of the shorelines? How hot are the rivers and lakes and creeks and streams? I have to run the cold water tap for quite a while every day before the water actually cools down to merely lukewarm. It’s very easy to get dehydrated, and it’s very easy to get heat exhaustion. Seriously, people, if you have to be out in this today, make sure you stay hydrated and out of the sun as much as possible. I also think it can’t be good for the car to be operating in this heat, either. But people in places like Palm Springs and Arizona drive and go out into the heat when it’s 114 or more outside. Maybe it’s just my natural anxiety, I don’t know. There’s always something to be anxious about.

Today I want to get some writing done. I want to finish revising that short story and I want to try to get that next chapter of the WIP revised as well. I may even try to write a story for a deadline in a few days, but even I am not arrogant as to think I can write a story that can get through an anonymous read in just three days. I also want to read a bit, and I want to work some more on the shelves in the laundry room. There’s just so many books, and I know I need to keep pruning. I need to be brutal and heartless, but so much I want to read and still think, hoping forlornly, that I will get to them…even as I buy more and more and read less and less. My mind is kind of all over the place right now, as it usually is when I don’t have something to focus on fully. Deadlines do impose some a forced focus onto me, but they also bring anxiety with them and I really don’t want to deal with any more anxiety right now, you know? Why invite chaos in, when you know damned well there will be anxiety no matter how much you convince yourself that this time it will be different? (It never is.) This love/hate relationship I have with writing is something I was actually thinking about yesterday as I put clean sheets on the bed. I was thinking that there are definitely parts of this I love–I love the creative aspects, I love working it all out in my brain, I love creating the characters and setting the mood and finding the voice. I enjoy revisions, too, but the element of despair is always added to the process when you are doing the revisions. By the time you’re doing what you hope is a final polish with almost every error excised or string tied up, you are heartily sick of the book, the characters, the story, writing in general and wondering why you ever thought you could do this, and would it really be that horrible a loss if you just walked away from it all? Then you hold your breath and click send, and then the agony of waiting starts, with all its paranoid imposter syndrome spirals and fears that this is the time you wrote something for which there is no editorial hope.

I mean, that happens every time I write a book, whether it’s on a deadline or not. The additional stress of the ticking clock a deadline adds to the entire process is what I’m getting to the point now where I can’t handle it or at least would prefer not to at the moment. I kind of just want to enjoy this moment where there’s no writing pressure and I can just work on stuff without being stressed about it at all, enjoy the process and the writing and creating itself. This is, after all, what I love about doing this. So why not do it under circumstances where I can savor the experience and enjoy myself? I mean, I do love writing, and I think I should be able to enjoy myself doing something I love all the time rather than being stressed out and anxious about it.

And I am enjoying writing again, being creative, feeling like yes I’m an author again, which is nice and frankly, a feeling I’ve missed. And it isn’t that things are so much better now than they were by any means, it’s just that now I don’t have to try to cram things into every day. Our civilization is crumbling around us and the world is on fire, but I don’t have to rush for anything other than being on time for work–and that I can live with. It seems wrong to be so calm and settled while the world is burning and our government is collapsing, but there it is.

I’ve always been selfish.

I slept well last night. I did wake up a couple of times, including the always every night five and six am wakes, which was just as annoying as it always is, but managed to go back to sleep both times and not get up until eight, which was really nice. I feel a lot more rested this morning than I have all week–naturally on a day when I don’t have to go to the office–and I am probably going to go ahead and run those errands today and get them out of the way. If I am making groceries, I don’t necessarily have to get the mail today; I can go to another grocery store rather than all the way uptown, for instance, and I do have to swing through Midcity on Monday to pick up a prescription, so I might as well do the mail that day anyway. I have other prescriptions that will also be ready in Uptown by Monday as well, so might just do a grocery run today and get that out of the way and then stay indoors as much as possible the rest of the day. It’s also kind of hard to believe Bouchercon is looming, as is my birthday. I made a to-do list this week, but I am so out of practice with using one that I never look at it anymore once it’s made and I need to stop doing that.

I am going to start reading Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt this weekend, and I’d also like to watch some more of My Adventure with Superman. I should probably also finish that blog entry on Superman and his evolution on film/television over the years, and how I will go to my grave a Superman fan. I may also finish Hi Honey I’m Homo by Matt Baume this week, giving me the opportunity to move on to another non-fiction tome, and will also need to post a review of it. And of course there are other entries I need to finish as well. Someday I will be caught up on this blog, you’ll see, Constant Reader!

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for now. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and stay hydrated and be cautious in this heat because I would miss you.

Evangeline

One of the great joys of my life has always been history. One of the many reasons I love New Orleans so much is because the city has never completely paved over and replaced its history; on a foggy night in the French Quarter, the sound of mules pulling tour carriage clopping on the streets can make you feel like you’ve somehow stepped through a window into the past, and I love that. I’ve never known much beyond some basics of New Orleans and Louisiana history; and I’ve been going down rabbit holes since right around the start of the pandemic, learning more and more about the history here. It’s humbling to realize how little I actually did know. I knew when the French arrived; I know how English Turn got its name and when Louisiana was turned over to Spain (1763, to be exact) and when it became American (1803). I also know Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans before he succeeded in forcing the Spanish to return it to France….so he could sell it to the Americans. I know New Orleans fell to the Union in 1862 during the Civil War; I know a little bit about Storyville and Huey Long; and I know that the landing boats used for the Normandy invasion in World War II in 1944 were built here. I know a smattering of things post-war about New Orleans–but the gaps in my knowledge are staggering, and I know even less about the rest of the state’s history.

I know that the Cajuns are actually Acadians, from French Nova Scotia, kicked out after the French and Indian War and forced to resettle elsewhere–many of them, after a long and mostly horrific journey, arrived in the swampy wetlands of Louisiana and made their home here. I know that Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline”, about two lovers tragically separated during what is called le grande derangement–the Great Expulsion–who promise to find each other once they reach Louisiana. It’s a tragic poem, and of course the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinsville is supposedly the”place” that the fictional lovers finally found each other after so many years, but their pairing was simply not meant to be–the story is a tragedy, after all–but that was how the “Cajuns” came to be Louisianans, and even after they arrived it wasn’t easy for them here. The Creoles of New Orleans looked down their aristocratic noses at the lower class farmers, and so they settled in the part of Louisiana still known as Acadiana to this day.

I have a copy of Evangeline somewhere. I really should read it.

One of these years, I am going to explore my state more. I’ve lived in Louisiana now for almost twenty-seven years, and I’ve never done much in terms of exploration, sight-seeing, and research. The Atchafalaya Basin fascinates me, as does Acadiana. The more I read about the history of both New Orleans and Louisiana, the more I realize how little I know (I always laughed off being called a “New Orleans expert,” because there’s literally a library filled with information about the past of both the city and the state to completely humble me and make me realize I know actually very little about either, and definitely do not qualify to be called expert on anything Louisiana.

I’ve slowly started writing about the rest of Louisiana, but I often fictionalize the places I write about; they are loosely based on the reality but I get to play around with that sort of thing and that’s better for me than trying to write about the real places and making it all up. My first time outside of New Orleans writing about Louisiana was really Bourbon Street Blues, when Scotty is kidnapped by the bad guys and winds up deep in a swamp. “Rougarou” was when I came up with a fictional town and parish outside of New Orleans, which I’ve used since then again. Need had portions that were set in the rural parishes outside of the New Orleans metropolitan area. The Orion Mask and Murder in the Arts District also were heavily reliant on being set (at least partially) in a fictional parish between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. “Solace in a Dying Hour” is another one of these stories. Oh, and Baton Rouge Bingo also had a lot of action outside of New Orleans as well.

I probably should have majored in History for college, but what would I have done with that kind of degree other than teach? Ah, the paths not taken, since I never had any desire to be a teacher, probably my subconscious saying um, you cannot be a teacher because of who you really are which was probably smart. Besides, I wouldn’t have ever been able to pick a period to specialize in; I would have had to be like Barbara Tuchman, interested in everything and picking certain periods that intrigued me for study. How could I ever choose between the Wars of Religion and seventeenth century France, or the Hapsburgs in Spain and Austria? Although I suppose I could have specialize entirely in the sixteenth century, primarily because it was such a tumultuous transitional century. I wish I was a trained researcher, but I suppose I could still learn how to do research properly despite my great age; the problem is time. Fall Saturdays are given over to college football (and I am not giving up one of the great joys of my life) and of course Sunday I watch the Saints. But if I am going to write historical fiction set in New Orleans or Louisiana, why wouldn’t I avail myself of all of the magnificent research facilities here in the city? UNO, Tulane, Loyola and I’m sure Xavier all have archives in their libraries documenting the past here; there’s the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Williams Research Center and really, so so very much. I also need to explore the bayou parishes and the river parishes, and make my way further north to explore Acadiana…and if I ever want to write a book based on the Jeff Davis Eight, I would need to go visit that parish and look around, get a grasp for how it feels and looks there.

So much to do, so little time…and one of the great problems about Louisiana and New Orleans history is trying to decipher what is fact and what is fiction; as so many “historians” and “writers” (looking at you, Robert Tallant and Harnett Kane) often wrote legends and lore as historical fact. I’m not sure how much of Gumbo Ya-Ya is actually true or not, but for writing fiction…perhaps it doesn’t matter as much how right it is? I have this idea for a story, predicated on something I recently discovered again–I have a tendency to forget things–but there was a community just outside of New Orleans called St. Malo, which was settled by Filipinos who’d escaped bondage on Spanish sailing ships. Filipinos in Louisiana in the eighteenth century? But it’s true; and the community was mostly houses and buildings built over the water; the 1915 hurricane destroyed it completely and it was never resettled, with those who survived moving into the city proper. I have an idea for a story called “Prayers to St. Malo” that would be built around that, but the story is still taking shape. There is always more to learn about regional history here…and since I am doing such a deep dive into Alabama history, why not continue diving in regional here?

Louisiana is unique and special and different–which is why I think I felt at home here that fateful thirty-third birthday when I came to New Orleans to celebrate it. New Orleans was the first place I ever felt like I belonged, and I’ve never regretted moving here. I just wish I’d started diving into the local history sooner.

Eperdu

And it’s a work-at-home Friday, which means we’ve somehow managed to survive yet another week of going into the office whilst living through more heat advisories. Hurray! Hurray! I slept much better and more restfully on Wednesday night, so I didn’t start the day off yesterday dragging and tired. I think I am finally getting used to getting up so early, as I get sleepy earlier than I ever have and even on days off, I wake up at six before going back to sleep for another hour, maybe even two if I am particularly lucky. Paul got his plane ticket to visit his mom, and so he is departing this coming Thursday for ten days. No Paul, no cat? What the hell am I going to do for ten days without Paul or a cat to entertain me? Hopefully, I’ll apply the lesson learned Wednesday night, where I come home and rest for a little while before springing into action. I want to get a lot done this weekend, if at all possible.

Paul and I had a lovely long chat the other night, which was nice. We’re often both so tired and worn out by the time he gets home we generally end up just watching television and not really talking all that much. But it was in the course of that conversation that I had a brilliant insight into the Scotty series and why I’ve been so hyper-critical and tough on myself with the most recent one, which will be coming out this fall. I’m not going to get into that here, but it was yet more evidence of how “not talking about your work in progress or how you feel about it” is bad advice; because in talking to him and saying it out loud and hearing it seemed to unlock some door in my mind where BLAM, now I know the answer, and so my questions over the last few years about whether I should keep the series going or not kind of became moot. Sometimes you really can’t see the forest for the trees, so talking it out, saying things out loud, actually is an enormous help.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about myself and my work; and it’s been invigorating, really. I was telling Paul, during the course of that conversation the other night, that the main thing I remember feeling over the last few years was defeated; I felt defeated and run down and like I was always behind, which only amplified my own stress and anxiety and made me feel even more defeated to the point where I often felt helpless and paralyzed in the face of everything. Losing Scooter was the final jolt that just kind of made something in my head snap, for want of a better way to describe and/or say it. Everything has just been so miserable for so long, and so much completely out of my control, that it’s very easy to feel defeated, beaten down, and thinking well at least I’m old and have had a good life now that the world and civilization is burning to the ground isn’t really much help in picking up my own spirits, inspiring me and motivating me to get back to work. Reading Megan Abbott’s latest was, as ever, not only an inspiration for me to work harder and do better work but her brilliance was also kind of a kick in the pants for me; the depth of thought and perception she puts into her characters is what, for me, makes her books so powerful and special (the language usage and choices are also exceptional) and made me think I need to dig more deeply into my own characters, and perhaps spend more time carefully crafting sentences. I think I do that in my short stories, but because a novel is so much longer and I am always behind, I may not do it as much in the longer form as I should. (I did, I think, succeed with that in Bury Me in Shadows and #shedeservedit.)

I was tired when I got home yesterday in the broiling heat, but still managed to do some laundry and clear out the sink as well as put away the dishes in the dishwasher. So, I am coming into this weekend slightly ahead of the game. I tried getting to work on the laundry room shelves–which are absolutely disgraceful–but it was too much for me so I gave up on it and went back to the sink to wash everything now that the dishwasher was emptied and I could reload it (and yes, I wash my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher). I also worked on revising an old short story of mine. I hadn’t reread it in quite a while, and the last time I tried to do anything with it was a revision with severe tweaking to fit the theme of an anthology call (it was a terrible attempt I regretted submitting almost immediately after sending the email), and I realized several things. This is the story that never quite worked completely but my professor from my second attempt at taking a college level writing course praised so highly and told me was publishable, finally reawakening the dream and the goal again, made me believe, if only for a little while. I’ve thus kind of always thought of the story as sort of holy in some way; beautifully written and poignant, with a strong voice and so forth that I would always just kind of skim it and think, no, I still can’t think of any way to make this better. Yesterday evening I opened the document again and started reading…and started making changes. It seemed suddenly very bare bones and simple, which worked…but didn’t go deep enough, if that makes sense? Anyway, the story was about 2130 words when I started working on it (much shorter than I remembered as well) and am not even halfway into it and it’s at almost 3000 now, and its actually working. Yes, it’s lovely and simple in its original form, but it didn’t work because of the central core of the story–the late night visit to the graveyard to look for a supernatural occurrence that happens every year but only on that night. The legend, the ghost story if you will, was predicated on a “family history story” that I now know is apocryphal to the point of being trite (having addressed this very issue in Bury Me in Shadows), so I had to change that–and in changing that, the rest of the story started falling into place in my head. I hope to finish working on the story tonight after work. I also have page proofs to finish going over this weekend, and I want to work some more on the book I am currently writing. Hopefully, I can get the laundry shelves taken care of this weekend and the laundry room itself; Paul’s looming visit to his mother and absence for ten days frees up a lot of time for me to purge and clean and get shit done around here.

Excellent timing, too. I’d love to have the place shipshape in time for my sixty-second birthday.

I also want to spend some time reading this weekend. I know I am being overly ambitious and the weekend is only two days–which is how I always end up feeling like a failure; by setting myself up to feel that way by placing unrealistic expectations on myself that I somehow convince myself (I’m doing it right now in my head, even as I type this) that those expectations are not only realistic but feasible. It’s always a fun time inside my head, isn’t it?

I watched a documentary while waiting for Paul to get home (he had a board meeting), and it was about an app I’d never heard of that was apparently a thing but I was completely oblivious to while it was going viral. (You know me, always with my finger on the pulse.) It was interesting but weird; when it finished I wasn’t really sure what the entire point of making the documentary was since there really wasn’t a cohesive story. Some weird shit happened, sure, but nothing that made it stand out so much from the rest of the weird shit that is always happening to deserve a documentary on MAX (which I always pronounce the way Carol Burnett doing Norma Desmond would), but it held my interest for stretches of time, therefore keeping me from doom-scrolling social media. Twitter, er X (I changed my name on there to “Madame X”, just for shits and giggles) is literally burning to the ground right in front of us; I don’t precisely remember what evil thing Facebook did but it’s not much fun anymore, and while I do appreciate visuals a lot, looking at pictures will only hold my interest for so long. In a way it’s kind of good, because the more it bores or enrages or produces any kind of negative reaction from me the less time I spend there…and that time can be better utilized doing things that are productive. I understand its uses–and the continued belief that a presence there can somehow move books for you–but I don’t like how being on there for a prolonged period of time makes me start thinking and reacting. That kind of negativity and toxicity is something I’ve always, since I started recognizing it for what it was, been trying to cut out of my life, so why am I participating in something that not only envelopes me in it, but makes me want to behave or even just think in ways I’ll not be terribly proud of later? There are enough random blows in life that come at you out of nowhere that you have to deal with; so why would you invite more chaos into your life?

It doesn’t make sense. And I really don’t need to waste the time there. I’ll still use it, of course, to check in on friends and post my blogs and about events and things I am doing and books I am hawking, but I am trying to limit it. I’d rather stay in touch with people I genuinely care about in other ways that liking or replying to a post or tweet or x or whatever the fuck it is this week.

And on that note, I am getting another cup of coffee and heading into the spice mines. I’ll probably be back later on at some point; I seem to have gotten into the habit of multiple posts per day somehow lately. Not sure what that is about, either, but rolling with it.

Half-Gifts

Thursday morning and the last day of in-office work for me. July is coming to a close, and we are slowly inching our way to the end of the dog days, when a sweat-bath is no longer included with any venture outside. For those who wonder how we can stand to live with the heat of summer, it’s primarily because, with the rare occasional cold spell, it’s beautiful here from mid-September to mid-May. It wasn’t so bad yesterday, in all honesty. When I got in my car in the morning to go to work I thought this isn’t so bad and checked my phone. The heat index said it felt like 97 degrees and I thought it was cool.

Ah, summer in New Orleans. Even when I came home, it was still high–but was a “feels like” in the low 100s, so I was actually okay with it. I was tired, though, when I got home from work. I had a ZOOM meeting but it was canceled, and I hadn’t slept well again last night. I’ve not had a good, deep sleep since around Saturday night, I think. It’s no wonder I’m feeling a bit tired. I collapsed in my chair and watched some informative Youtube history videos on the Apostolic Majesty channel; a particularly good one about Charles V’s failure of his primary goal–the creation of a unified Burgundy under his control. I love this shit, seriously. Then I got up, put on some classic dance music from the “dance all night days” (seriously, Jonathan Peters’ remix of Whitney Houston’s “My Love is Your Love” is one of the greatest dance recordings of all time) which gave me some nostalgia from the years I spent the weekends haunting the bars in the Quarter, listening to great music and dancing and just enjoying myself thoroughly. I did some dishes while listening (and dancing, and performing–I always perform) and some laundry. The dance music picked up my lagging spirits and put me in a good mood. (I was a little bummed by some things I found out yesterday, which made my spirits sink to the bottoms of my feet; I’ll talk about them both at some point, but it was a rather dispiriting day with bad energy.

But without a purring kitty sleeping my lap, I couldn’t just sit in my easy chair all evening and wallow in misery and disappointment–not when there’s fun gay dance music to dance to while I clean and do chores and so forth. Lesson learned and note taken: there’s nothing gay dance remixes can’t make better. Looking around this morning, I realize I am heading into the office for the last time this week, and I am going into the weekend with the laundry and dishes caught up, but the kitchen organized and yes, there’s still some clean-up and filing necessary to be done–but without having to worry about doing laundry and dishes and so forth? Easy-peasy. I’d like to get some writing done this weekend; some short stories need work, I need to write another one from scratch, and I want to keep working on this new work-in-progress which I’m not quite ready to talk about just yet; I want to get these first four already written chapters edited and revised and see how easy the next few chapters come before I am going to talk about it publicly yet. I do like the story, and I do like the concept behind it; I like the main character who’s a good guy but kind of a loser–well, maybe not necessarily so much a loser but someone who can never really catch a break of any kind; just one would have completely changed and transformed his life and who he is into something completely different. He’s had a hard life, been burned by lovers, and now just is kind of coasting into whatever happens next. This is more hardboiled noir than what I usually do, but I am trying not to replicate someone else’s style this time so much as to kind of create my own, if that makes sense? A friend, a fellow writer far more successful than I could ever dare hope to be, once told me, your blessing and your curse is that you can write anything and everything. It was probably the most penetrating insight anyone has ever give me about anything in my life, and I think about that all the time. Do I have a distinct authorial voice? Am I not more successful because I write all over the place, without a structured and detailed plan of what to do next and where to go and so forth.

But I also don’t know if that’s me. It was me, before the Time of Troubles when everything derailed, and since then I’ve not really just ever taken the time to sit back and really put some thought into what I want out of my writing career. Since I started writing again after the Time of Troubles, I’ve just kind of bounced from this sounds interesting to oh I think I’ll write about this next rather than, what kind of books do I really want to write and what kind of career do I want to have in the time that’s left to me, and what do I need to do to get there? I do think somehow my work has matured to another level over the last six or seven books, and I know my short stories are getting better as I write more of them. I am so fucking proud of “Solace in a Dying Hour” and “The Ditch” (forthcoming in that terrific anthology School of Hard Knox that I posted the TOC from the other day) I could just burst. I really want to write something for the Malice anthology, and there’s a couple of deadlines looming on open calls I am sort of interested in.

A rather ambitious program for the weekend, methinks. But definitely do-able.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

One More Chance

My first series will always be special to me, even though I’ve retired Chanse MacLeod…at least for now, at any rate; I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that I shouldn’t ever say never when it comes to my writing career. Chanse will always be special for me in that he was the main character in my first book to be published as well as the first series of mine to see print. I originally created Chanse in 1989–can you believe that? Thirteen years from the time I first started constructing the character and him getting into print.

When I left California and moved to Houston that year, I decided to put the miseries of the 1980’s behind me, forget the past, and try to move on to the future I wanted for myself. I still had no idea what I wanted to do to make a living, but I knew I was never going to become a writer unless I actually, you know, wrote. When I moved to Houston, I moved away from reading mostly epic fantasy and horror to reading crime and horror. Sue Grafton’s F is for Fugitive had just been released, and the bookstore–Bookstop?–I frequented in Houston had a store catalogue that had book reviews and author interviews, and Sue Grafton was on the cover. I thought the alphabet titles was a great idea, so I bought the first three and took them home. I loved them, and started diving back into the crime fiction genre headfirst. I also started reading the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novels again–I’d read some when I was a kid–and I also started reading the rest of the Travis McGee series (I’d read, and not liked, The Dreadful Lemon Sky when I was thirteen; I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the series) and absolutely loved them. I loved McDonald’s writing style more than anything else, and the descriptions of McGee sounded, well, hot.

I started creating Chanse MacLeod as a blend of Kinsey and Travis McGee, really; I was driving to work one day and crossed a bayou. noticing the sign for the first time, and thought “The Body in the Bayou would be a great title for his first book” and so i started constructing the character and his world. He was a former cop turned private eye in Houston; he’d played college football at Auburn but suffered a career-ending injury his senior year and so he went into law enforcement, eventually going out on his own. He had a secretary named Clara that he shared with a couple of lawyers in an office suite in downtown Houston, and most of his work involved trying to get evidence of adultery for wealthy and suspicious spouses. In 1994. after I fell in love with New Orleans, I moved Chanse to New Orleans and his college experience to LSU; I also was discovering gay crime novels around this same time, so I decided to make Chanse a gay man; from a small town in Texas with homophobic parents and family, playing a sport where homophobia is rife, and he too discovered and fell in love with New Orlean…so he became a cop when his football career ended, eventually becoming a private eye. I started rewriting the four or five chapters I’d written with the story set in Houston…but once I moved to New Orleans and began to grasp what it was actually like to live here, I threw the entire thing out and started over.

That manuscript I started over became Murder in the Rue Dauphine, and the first place I submitted it to offered me a contract six weeks after I mailed them the manuscript. Alyson was home for the first five books in the series…before Alyson Books went belly-up, without paying me the advance for the fifth book and no longer paying me royalties on the others (the entire series was still in print when Alyson folded).

Burn in hell, corporate trash who bought Alyson.

(The company had been doomed for a while, and the unfortunate last minute attempt to rescue it failed, which I thought was horrifically unfair to the person who they brought in to save it. The final collapse was hardly his fault; his predecessors had made so many unbelievably stupid mistakes there was no saving the business, really. And ebooks and so forth started eroding away at the reader base, at the same time the business began to crumble. I’ve always felt bad for the poor dude who was the last to hold the title of publisher. I don’t think he had any staff and he was the only person working there by the bitter end.)

But when Alyson went belly-up and chose to stop honoring their contractual obligations to pay their writers, I’d already moved the Scotty series to Bold Strokes Books and was doing not only anthologies for them but also editorial work for them, so moving the Chanse series there was a no-brainer.

The last two books in the series were done with Bold Strokes Books.

As with anything with my career, I had a plan for the Chanse series but of course, man plans and the gods laugh. I had always intended the series to be seven books, from the very beginning, and I had this emotional journey for him all mapped out: the series would chart his progression from lonely, damaged and scarred loner with a snide sense of humor to more centered, more grounded, more mature and more settled into his life. So, when the series opened, he was–against his better judgment–seeing a hot flight attendant, and wondering if he was actually falling in love and had the opportunity to be happy for once in his life. I really did give him a miserable backstory; alcoholic mother, abusive drunk redneck father, grew up living in a trailer park in a snotty small Texas town where no one would let him forget he was trash until he showed some football playing ability–and he was just cynical enough to understand they still considered him trash, but trash with a skill they appreciated. He went to LSU and joined a fraternity in a final attempt to banish the homosexuality from his brain (it didn’t work), and then was injured in a bowl game so his career was over–he’d been considering going for the NFL draft. He was a big man, as such; and spent a lot of time in the gym working out and keeping fit. I also had to make a horrific decision while writing the second book–with every intention of walking that ending back in the third.

And then Katrina happened, and everything changed.

My editor at Alyson Books at the time, Joe Pittman, was new. He had come on board shortly after my previous editor was let go (I had a different editor for each of the first three Chanse books, and in fact had a different for the last two–so the Chanse series went through five editors at Alyson…now I would see that as a sign), and I was assigned to him as a gay mystery writer. He got in touch with me after Katrina to check in on me and of course, to encourage me to write about Katrina, which I did NOT want to do whilst I was in the middle of experiencing the aftermath still. I was still unhoused at the time, staying with my parents in Kentucky, before moving back to Hammond, Louisiana, just before Rita to housesit. Paul and I talked on the phone one morning and suggested we do a fundraising anthology for Katrina victims…but I wasn’t interested. Joe called me that afternoon and with the same suggestion, so I told him Paul wanted to do one and that was how Love, Bourbon Street came to be. Joe also kept insisting to me that I should write a post-Katrina book as the next Chanse book, and despite my reluctance I decided to go ahead and do it. Part of the problem, as I saw it, was, how do you end a book on a hopeful note when the city is still in ruins and most of the population still displaced? Joe kept pushing me, and I finally agreed to write Murder in the Rue Chartres–and I really don’t remember anything about writing the book other than I did actually write it, and it turned out to be one of my best books. It won the Lambda, for one thing, and got great reviews everywhere.

The fourth Chanse novel was, in my opinion, the weakest of the series. They’d fired my editor before I signed a contract for the fourth book, and when that finally happened, they needed me to write in like eight weeks. I asked for a two book contract so I would never have to write another book in eight weeks again (LOL at my naivete), and they were so desperate for the fourth they agreed. (I had already written a Scotty book that was just sitting in a drawer; I turned it into the fourth Chanse and to this day I think it was a mistake.) Of course, they did publish the fifth, but they never paid me a dime for Murder in the Garden District. The only money I’ve made off that book is from the ebook Bold Strokes put up–I gave them the entire Chanse backlist for ebooks, and those Chanse books still sell.

Maybe I shouldn’t have ended the series at seven?

But it felt like the right place to stop. Chanse’s personal story of personal growth and how it happened kind of got lost along the way; he grew and changed as the series progressed, but writing the last two–which I also think are good–felt a little paint-by-the-numbers for me; I felt that writing the sixth and when I felt it again in the seventh, I decided to stop there. I wasn’t getting any satisfaction for writing the books anymore, there was no joy derived from doing them, and since I’d already planned to stop at seven…I stopped at seven.

I still get ideas for Chanse books, of course. I have an LSU fraternity murder that would be a perfect Chanse story–I planned it as a novella–and of course, I’ve always wanted to fictionalize the Jeff Davis Eight murders as a Chanse novel, too. Maybe I could do three Chanse novellas published in one book?

That would make a lot more sense, and could be even more fun to write than one long single story novel.

Or I may not do anything with Chanse at all, and use those stories/plots for something else.

Rilkean Heart

Wednesday morning and all is well in the Lost Apartment. We’ve reached mid-week successfully, which is always a plus, and have survived thus far. Yesterday was another good day, in which I got things done. I finished revising the first two chapters of the new work-in-progress, adding about 1500 words in total; the end result both chapters now clock in at a total of eight thousand words combined. I don’t know many words I deleted, though, so I am going to just round it up to 2000 words written over the last two days, which isn’t stellar but isn’t bad, either. I didn’t sleep well again Monday night, but it was better than Sunday’s sleep, so I was dragging by the time I got off work and had to head uptown to get the mail (the new Laura Lippman and Michael Koryta were waiting for me there) and then made some groceries before heading home. I feel very good about this book.

I also am feeling good about writing again. Go figure. I’m kind of enjoying this lessening of my anxiety, too. Being able to breathe, being able to not have to rush through things because there’s so much else to do always, but the truly tragic part is that it took loss for me to slow down and step back away from everything. I know I am in a weird place right now, with the grief, with the acceptance of the realities I’d prefer not to face, but I also don’t think it’s ever a bad thing to be introspective and really think about, well, everything. The work I’ve been doing on the new project is very good, don’t get me wrong; the writing itself is kind of satisfying me in some way it either hasn’t before, or that I simply don’t remember (yay for memory loss!) from before, which is also lovely. In a way, it almost feels like I am discovering a new way to think and process and write? I don’t know what it might be, but I know I am enjoying myself writing in a way I feel like I haven’t in a while.

On the other hand, I could also be completely insane and not remembering anything.

But the absence of anxiety could be what is making the difference. I am anxious about everything–driving, paying the bills, cleaning the house–and it’s also interesting to dissect how being anxious about everything somehow translated into a kind of rigid stance to keep from having anxiety about being an author–not reading reviews, never looking at the reviews posted on Amazon or Goodreads, staying away from things I know will make me feel beaten and utterly defeated. It’s also like finally recognizing and realizing that most of my neuroses are based in anxiety I inherited from my mother has also somehow loosened the power of the anxiety to control and run my life? I was a bit tired yesterday when I got home from work–I am not sleeping as deeply this week as I usually do, but it’s not insomnia so I am not complaining–but I still got the writing done, and did some more dishes, and was going to do more laundry but stopped myself since there wasn’t a full load. Paul was late getting home last night so we didn’t watch much television. Instead, we talked about his trip home to visit his mom (he booked the ticket and will be gone for ten days), the refrigerator issue, and about getting a new cat. We need to get a new refrigerator–ours never fully recovered from the power outage during Ike (or was it Isaac?) in 2008…so we’ve been living with a not fully operational refrigerator for quite some time. (It’s not that bad, only over the last year has it really started having ‘we need to replace this thing’ vibes.) The problem is the kitchen cabinets run above the refrigerator, so there’s only so much room for the height–and of course, I can’t find one anywhere on line that will fit and that I want. I want the freezer on the bottom, since I don’t go into as much I wouldn’t have to bend down as much (aging issue), but those are inevitably an inch or two too tall; I can’t even find one with a freezer on the top that will fit. So, we either have to keep looking, or we need to have those cabinets taken down. I am all about taking the cabinet down–it’s above the refrigerator so it’s impossible to use anyway, and anything in there hasn’t been needed for years so can be tossed out–but I don’t know how easy that would be or what kind of pain in the ass it could be to remove. All I need is a single inch more clearance, and we’d already have a new one. I also managed to get a couple of extra entries done yesterday; one about Nancy Drew and another about writing my book Need.

Tonight I’ll be coming straight home from work, and maybe tomorrow night the same. I’ve a ZOOM meeting tonight, so when I get home I’ll need to put the dishes in the dishwasher away as well as do another load (they’re soaking in the sink now), and then can probably relax for a bit before the call, maybe get my words in for the day as well. Maybe I’ll start another blog essay about another teen sleuth character. Maybe I’ll finish some of these others I’ve already started and have yet to finish. I’m feeling super-productive, and of course once Paul leaves on his trip I’ll have nothing but time on my hands when I am not at the office, so there’s no reason why I can’t get a lot of things done while he’s gone other than pure laziness, which is always a possibility. I’ll also not have a cat to keep me company, which is deeply unfortunate. But I have chores and books to read and things to write, so that I have no excuse other than pure laziness for not getting anything done while he’s gone.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

Need

Ah, vampires.

I never really meant to write a vampire story. For one thing, Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice had already done the New Orleans vampire story and set the bar super-high for anyone else wishing to write about vampires in New Orleans; Charlaine Harris also kind of cornered the market on Louisiana supernatural novels, too. It really seemed cliché to do New Orleans vampires, and I never would have, had I not been asked, and offered a lot of money, to do so. I make no bones about writing for money; if that renders me an unreadable hack, so be it.

I was initially asked to write a New Orleans vampire novella for a collection of four to be called Midnight Thirsts, which Kensington was publishing. Once I signed the contract and got paid half the advance, I decided to adapt a vampire short story I’d written, probably in or around 1997 or 1998, called “The Nightwatchers”; the main character was a young wannabe actress with a lot of talent but a lot of insecurity, who discovers that the reason she hasn’t been getting good roles in her theater company is because the woman who does is fucking the director. The story wasn’t good–she is easy prey for a vampire looking for a companion, who kills the director and the competition actress before turning her–but there was some lovely stuff about the French Quarter in the fog and her crumbling apartment–this was when you could still get a decent enough apartment in a crumbling old building in the Quarter for a price that seems unbelievable and unrealistic today–that I thought I could use. I also like the title, and as is my wont, when I started world-building and creating, I went overboard on back story. There were two point of view characters; the main, Philip Rutledge, who works as an escort, and his best friend Rachel, an aspiring singer who works in a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street, as well as a third; an older man who is a “nightwatcher,” member of an ancient society that reins in supernatural threats to humanity all the while keeping them in the dark about the reality of supernatural creatures and beings in the world. He has followed a rogue vampire to New Orleans, who has set his sights on Philip. I left the ending open, because I thought there was more story–if not a book, if not an entire series–in this idea. I decided I was going to write the vampire novel after finishing Mardi Gras Mambo…which wound up being delayed over a year. Then Katrina happened, and by the time I was ready to write about vampires again, too much time had gone by, alas. But they were doing another collection of vampire novellas, and asked me to do a Todd Gregory story for them (they had started publishing the Todd Gregory fraternity novels by this time), and that story became the novella “Blood on the Moon.” But rather than starting fresh, I used the same structure and world I’d created with “The Nightwatchers”–and tied it into the fraternity novel world as well, making the main character a member of the fraternity’s University of Mississippi chapter, visiting New Orleans for Carnival and winding up getting turned (it’s a longer, more complicated story than that, but that’s the bottom line). I brought Rachel and the old man from “The Nightwatchers” back–and when I was doing the anthology Blood Sacraments, I wrote a short story “Bloodletting”, that basically picked up where “Blood on the Moon” left off.

So, when Kensington asked for an erotic vampire novel rather than another fraternity book, I decided to use “Bloodletting” as the first chapter and build on the story from there, also using “Blood on the Moon” as the foundational story and the supernatural world I’d created for “The Nightwatchers.” This was to serve as an introductory work to a new supernatural Todd Gregory series.

It’s working title was A Vampire’s Heart. The powers that be didn’t like that title, thinking it sounded more like a romance novel title (which wasn’t wrong), and suggested Need, which was a recurring theme in the book.

And I really loved the cover.

The damp air was thick with the scent of blood.

It had been days since I had last fed, and the desire was gnawing at my insides. I stood up, and my eyes focused on a young man walking a bicycle in front of the cathedral. He was talking on a cell phone, his face animated and agitated. He was wearing a T-shirt that read Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Dem Saints? and a pair of ratty old paint-spattered jeans cut off at the knees. There was a tattoo of Tweetybird on his right calf, and another indistinguishable one on his left forearm. His hair was dark, combed to a peak in the center of his head, and his face was flushed. He stopped walking, his voice getting louder and louder as his face got darker.

I could smell his blood. I could almost hear his beating heart.

I could see the pulsing vein in his neck, beckoning me forward.

The sun was setting, and the lights around Jackson Square were starting to come on. The tarot card readers were folding up their tables, ready to disappear into the night. The band playing in front of the cathedral was putting their instruments away. The artists who hung their work on the iron fence around the park were long gone, as were the living statues. The square, so teeming with life just a short hour earlier, was emptying of people, and the setting sun was taking the warmth with it as it slowly disappeared in the west. The cold breeze coming from the river ruffled my hair a bit as I watched the young man with the bicycle. He started wheeling the bicycle forward again, still talking on the phone. He reached the concrete ramp leading up to Chartres Street. He stopped just as he reached the street, and I focused my hearing as he became more agitated. What do you want me to say? You’re just being a bitch, and anything I say you’re just going to turn around on me.

I felt the burning inside.

Desire was turning into need.

I knew it was best to satisfy the desire before it became need. I could feel the knots of pain from deprivation forming behind each of my temples and knew it was almost too late. I shouldn’t have let it go this long, but I wanted to test my limits, see how long I could put off the hunger. I’d been taught to feed daily, which would keep the hunger under control and keep me out of danger.

Need was dangerous. Need led a vampire to take risks he wouldn’t take ordinarily. And risks could lead to exposure, to a painful death.

You see why they suggested we rename it Need? That opening pretty much says it all.

I had never really put a lot of thought into writing about vampires, in all honesty. To date, I have only published two novellas, one short story, and the novel, of course, but while I was writing Need that world began to expand and grow in my head as I worked on the story. I wanted to tie both “The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon” together, with Need as the continuation, so I brought back both Rachel and Nigel from the former, while keeping Cord from the latter as the main character. Cord Logan (how is that for a gay porn star name) was, despite being young in terms of being a vampire, quite powerful and growing in his power exponentially by the day. Headstrong, he’d broken away from the coven of vampires that turned him during Carnival, without learning everything he needed to learn first. What he didn’t know–and his former coven also didn’t–was that because of the circumstances involved in his own turning–when a male witch also tried to steal his power from him, he inadvertently wound up transferring his own power to Cord, who was then turned into a vampire to save his own life. This combination of witch/vampire is actually quite dangerous–as are any vampires Cord himself might create, which was the entire problem he faced in the story “Bloodletting” and didn’t understand.

The Supreme Council wants Cord summarily executed, but Nigel wants to keep him alive, to study and learn from, as well as to try teaching him how to control his powers. For me, Need was the introductory tale to a much longer story, where I’d be able to bring in vampires and shifters and witches and faeries and pretty much every kind of supernatural being. The next book was going to be called Desire, and every book was going to have a one-word title. I had a lot of fun with writing Need, and was really getting excited and writing lots of note for Desire…but the book didn’t do very well. It did okay, but not in the kind of numbers that would make a sequel a no-brained, and by then I had already moved on to writing the young adult books. The reviews weren’t great, either–but I never really care or pay much attention to them. The real problem is that there were sex scenes, and I don’t write the kind of gay sex scenes people want to read anymore. Mine are physical, lots of sweats and smells and experiencing how it feels and so on…most people want the sex scenes to be more esoteric and romantic and sweet.

I don’t think I’ve ever had sweet, romantic sex. I’ve certainly never written it.

Every once in a while, when I am writing something more along the lines of horror or with a supernatural tones, I remember my vampires and the world I created for them with a slight ping of sadness.

Maybe someday I’ll write Desire, but it’s highly unlikely at this point.