Category: writing

I Just Fall in Love Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow

Sunday morning and I have a rather full plate today. I need to finish cleaning the downstairs, and I have to get back to work on the revisions. This should all be easy enough to do–my office is in the kitchen, which is also the last part of the downstairs that needs cleaning, so I can go back and forth between the two. Also, while I am waiting for the kitchen floor to dry, I can repair to my easy chair and get back to reading Tomato Red, which is fantastic. I am behind on the revisions; I had hoped to be working on the last, final polish over this weekend; instead I find myself finishing the fourth draft; four chapters to go until it is all done and ready to move on to a final polish. I am hoping that I can get that done today, take tomorrow off, and then focus on the final polish on Tuesday before returning to work on Wednesday.

It’s a good plan, anyway.

I’m still recovering from the enormous shock of the Macavity nomination for “Survivor’s Guilt.” As Constant Reader knows, I don’t have a lot of self-confidence with short stories; I struggle with writing them and I often wonder if even the ones that get published are any good. I remember one anthology I was in, early in my career, in which the editor wrote a lengthy afterward to the book, discussing every story in the anthology in great detail–except mine. He discussed the fifteen or so other stories at great length, marveling about their themes, characters, and the language–pointedly not saying a word about mine. I had been extremely proud of being accepted into that anthology; and once I read that afterward–I never even bother putting the contributor copies in the bookcase reserved for my own work. It was such a stunning slap-in-the-face, and I–always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt even while I am being slapped across the face–could not, and still cannot, come up with any logical or kind explanation why an editor would do such a thing.

How do you discuss all the stories in the collection and leave out ONE?

I’ve never been able to decide if it being deliberate is worse than it being a careless mistake; both, in my mind, are equally bad.

I’ve never spoken to that editor again, either–didn’t respond to emails, didn’t help promote the book, etc. Maybe a bit childish, but that was so rude and so nasty, and I was so early in my career…I considered, and still do, that insult along the same lines of the creative writing teacher who told a nineteen-year-old me that I would never be published. I sometimes wonder if that is where my insecurity about writing short stories comes from; as though in my subconscious my slight success with writing novels didn’t really disprove that teacher’s smug, smiling and ever-so-condescending comments to me; since he was basing his opinion on a short story I’d written for his class, I had to get some kind of success with short stories in order to finally put that damage to my psyche to rest.

“Survivor’s Guilt” was a story I never thought I would write, nor should, to be honest. It’s a Katrina story; and the kind of Katrina story I certainly didn’t think I should ever write, or try to write. I’ve not done a lot of Katrina writing, which may surprise some people. My story in New Orleans Noir, “Annunciation Shotgun,” is a post-Katrina story that doesn’t really address the disaster at all; Murder in the Rue Chartres is the only novel I wrote that dealt directly with the aftermath. My essay “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” is the only one I’ve published about my own personal experience, and what I observed before, during, and after. After Rue Chartres, I pretty much put the disaster in the rear-view mirror and only mentioned it, in my New Orleans novels, slightly in passing from there on out. Scotty never really dealt with Katrina and its aftermath much; just some passing references and so forth, finally having Scotty deal, slightly, with his past issues and his own PTSD a bit, in Garden District Gothic  a little.

“Survivor’s Guilt” was originally inspired by a story I was told sometime in the months after Katrina, after I’d returned, and was at a cocktail party at a friend’s home. In those months after Katrina, we all had a bit of ‘disaster-fatigue’; one of the hardest parts about coming back as early as I did was that as others returned, you had to relive your own experience in conversation while listening to other people’s stories. This went on for over a year before finally, it was happening less and less.  It’s very hard to recover from PTSD when you are constantly being forced to relive the events that led to your psychological scarring in the first place. I kind of refer to the years 2005-2009 as My Crazy Years–emotionally raw and on-edge, never knowing what would trigger a manic episode or a breakdown of sorts.

But I digress. We all saw the images of people trapped on their roofs, begging for help, begging for rescue; those images are seared into the collective American consciousness. But the pictures, those images, didn’t tell the whole story; yes, they were horrifying and heart-breaking, but we couldn’t really get a true sense of the suffering being endured; the unbelievable heat, the humidity from the presence of all that water, the smell, the sense of hopelessness and despair. But it also occurred to me, even then, in my horror–not even sure I would be able to return to New Orleans, not sure if I would ever be able to write again; that such a disaster was also the perfect cover for people to get away with murder, or to cover up one. I sketched out an idea for a short story in a hotel room sometime in early 2006, about just such a thing. I thought of it as a horror story, more so than a crime story, frankly; because I couldn’t imagine having to endure something like what those who didn’t evacuate did without losing my mind. I saw the story as being told by a narrator rendered unreliable by what he was enduring; what was real, what was a figment of his breaking mind? But I put the story aside, because I didn’t think I could write it (certainly not at that time) nor did I think it was my story to tell; I evacuated and watched it all happen from a distant remove.

When I was asked to contribute to New Orleans Noir, I immediately thought of that story and was going to write it; but the authors were all assigned to a neighborhood, and my assignment was my own neighborhood, the lower Garden District, which didn’t flood. So, instead I conceived of “Annunciation Shotgun,” which is still one of my favorite stories of my own, and once again, put the rooftop story aside. A few years later, there was a horror anthology submissions call, and I decided that the rooftop story was a good fit for it. I sat down and wrote it, calling it “Blues in the Night,” which was always what I thought was the right title for it. I wrote it, submitted it, and didn’t get into the anthology. I took that as a sign that I’d originally been right; it wasn’t my story to tell, and it went back into the drawer.

When I got the opportunity to edit the Bouchercon New Orleans anthology, Blood on the Bayou, I wondered about whether or not I should write a story for it myself; there seems to be a school of thought out there that a writer/editor, when doing an anthology, shouldn’t include one of his/her own stories and take a slot from someone else. I have gone back and forth on this myself; and usually my policy is to simply write a story for it, and if someone drops out or I don’t get enough stories turned in, then I put my own story in the book. (The fact that almost all of my anthologies include one of my own stories stands as proof that someone always drops out at the last minute.) But I decided, as I rewrote “Blues in the Night” and changed the title to “Survivor’s Guilt,” that I was going to go through the same process as everyone else who submitted a story: a blind read by a small, select group of readers who would rank the stories. I was enormously pleased that the readers chose my story, and so felt a bit vindicated there. When the book came out, some of its reviews singled out my story as good, which was also lovely.

The story’s opening was cribbed from a draft of another short story called “Sands of Fortune” that I never did anything with; it’s still in a folder and I may do something with it, but that opening sentence: The sun, oh God, the sun, just really seemed to fit in “Survivor’s Guilt.”

Of course, my story was disqualified from various crime story awards for any number of reasons (I didn’t get paid since it was for charity! I edited the anthology so it was really self-published! etc. etc. etc.), and so the Macavity nomination was something I wasn’t even thinking about as even a remote possibility. When I got up Friday morning and the first thing I saw on-line was being tagged on a post of the award nominations, I just assumed Blood on the Bayou had been nominated in the anthology category; as it had been already nominated for an Anthony Award as well. It was quite a shock to scroll through the list and see that there actually wasn’t an anthology category; I was terribly confused, so I started going through the categories one by one and there I was, in the Short Story category, of all places.

I still can’t believe it, frankly; I am not the best judge of my own work, and maybe am far more critical of my own work than I should be–but there were so many damned great stories in Blood on the Bayou that I thought if any stories from it were short-listed for awards, mine was at best a long-shot. (Awards, though,  are also always a long-shot for everyone; they aren’t something you can count on or look forward to; all you can do is hope. So much crime fiction is published every year, and so much of it is fantastic, so you can just do your best work and then it’s out of your hands.)

You can only imagine what a thrill it is to be nominated against such amazing writers as Lawrence Block, Joyce Carol Oates, Art Taylor, Paul D. Marks, and Craig Faustus Buck. (Not a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, either–so I can just enjoy the thrill of being nominated and not get uptight about winning.) The class of 2017 Macavity nominees, all over, includes some incredible writers; people whose work I love and enjoy and respect. I am still processing that, to be honest–that, and having to show up for two award ceremonies at Bouchercon in Toronto this October.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Oh! One of the things I did yesterday while cleaning the living room was put all my author sets on the same book shelf. Don’t they look nice there, all together? The blue ones to the left of the Steinbeck set, which you can’t read the spines on, are the Daphne du Maurier set: Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn.

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And yes, that is one of our collection of Muses shoes on the shelf above.

That Was Then, This Is Now

I slept late again this morning; it felt absolutely lovely. I have an appointment at 11 today, and I have to get the mail at some point–I may not bother until next week; we shall see how I feel; I might just go to my appointment then turn tail and come back home. The windows are covered in condensation this morning and my coffee tastes amazing. (Time for a second cup, methinks.)

Yesterday was a bizarre day; I woke up late then too, banged out a quick blog entry, and then went over to Facebook as I drank my second cup of coffee preparatory to going to work; I was stunned to see Art Taylor’s post, tagging me, about his own nomination for a Macavity Award and congratulating the other nominees, including ME. Still not thoroughly awake and aware, I clicked on the link, assuming “oh, Blood on the Bayou must be an anthology nominee.” I scrolled through the list quickly and got to the end, completely puzzled; there wasn’t an anthology category. “How can this be?” I thought, and then started looking at the nominees in each category, gasping so loudly Scooter took off running when I saw my name listed under Best Short Story! The story was from Blood on the Bayou, “Survivor’s Guilt,” and as I looked at the other nominees–well, it was humbling and shocking. How on earth was something I’d written in competition with work by Craig Faustus Buck, Paul D. Marks, Art Taylor, Lawrence Block, and Joyce Carol Oates?

I mean, seriously? It didn’t seem like it could be real…and then came all the posts, tags, congratulatory comments, tweets…I felt like I’d slipped into The Twilight Zone. I’m still processing the fact that I am nominated for an Anthony Award (anthology for Blood on the Bayou) and now for a Macavity for short story. It just doesn’t seem quite real to me, you know? And then, after I got to the office, the Internet went down all over New Orleans. As I joked to one of my co-workers, “apparently, my being nominated for an award broke the Internet.”

I’m nominated for an award for a short story. Me. A short story.

The insanity of it all hasn’t completely sunk in  quite yet.

All right, I’m off to the shower now.

OH! The Steinbeck set arrived yesterday.

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Isn’t it lovely?

And now back to the spice mines.

 

Shell Shock

I’ve been without Internet for most of the day, but am still kind of in shock. But I wanted to get the list of Macavity Award nominees posted here. Lots of friends on this list, lots of great writers, and somehow, there I am too.


The Macavity Award Nominees 2017

The Macavity Awards are nominated by members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal and friends of MRI. The winners will be announced at opening ceremonies at Bouchercon in Toronto, Thursday, October 12. Congratulations to all.

If you’re a member of MRI or a subscriber to MRJ or a friend of MRI, you will receive a ballot on August 1, so get reading. To check if you’re eligible to vote, leave a comment below with your email.

Best Novel 
• You Will Know Me, by Megan Abbott (Little, Brown)
• Dark Fissures, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
• Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley (UK, Hodder & Stoughton; US, Grand Central Publishing)
• Real Tigers, by Mick Herron (UK, John Murray; US, Soho)
• Wilde Lake, by Laura Lippman (Wm. Morrow)
• A Great Reckoning, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Best First Novel 
• The Widow, by Fiona Barton (UK, Bantam; US, NAL)
• Under the Harrow, by Flynn Berry (Penguin)
• Dodgers, by Bill Beverly (No Exit Press)
• IQ, by Joe Ide (Mulholland Books)
• Design for Dying, by Renee Patrick (Forge)

Best Short Story 
• “Autumn at the Automat,” by Lawrence Block (In Sunlight or in Shadow, Pegasus Books)
• “Blank Shot,” by Craig Faustus Buck (Black Coffee, Darkhouse Books)
• “Survivor’s Guilt,” by Greg Herren (Blood on the Bayou: Bouchercon Anthology 2016, Down & Out Books)
• “Ghosts of Bunker Hill,” by Paul D. Marks (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Dec. 2016)
• “The Crawl Space,” by Joyce Carol Oates (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sep.–Oct. 2016)
• “Parallel Play,” by Art Taylor (Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning, Wildside Press)

Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Novel 
• A Death Along the River Fleet, by Susanna Calkins (Minotaur)
• Jane Steele, by Lyndsay Faye (UK: Headline Review; US, G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
• Delivering The Truth, by Edith Maxwell (Midnight Ink)
• The Reek of Red Herrings, by Catriona McPherson (US: Minotaur; UK: Houghton Stodder)
• What Gold Buys, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Heart of Stone, by James W. Ziskin (Seventh Street Books)

Best Nonfiction 
• Mastering Suspense, Structure, and Plot: How to Write Gripping Stories that Keep Readers on the Edge of Their Seats, by Jane K. Cleland (Writer’s Digest Books)
• Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (Liveright Publishing)
• Sara Paretsky: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, Margaret Kinsman (McFarland)
• Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula, by David J. Skal (Liveright Publishing)
• The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer, by Kate Summerscale (Penguin)

Steppin’ Stone

Friday at last! I came home last night to an empty apartment and a very needy, abandoned kitty. I was very tired; I had to get up to an alarm almost every morning this week already, and for whatever reason–certainly psychological–whenever I have to wake up to an alarm I always feel like I am dragging all day, could just fall back asleep at any moment. This morning, however, I was able to sleep late and get up when Needy Kitty decided he’d waited for breakfast long enough. So I actually feel very rested this morning, which is incredibly lovely; and I just have to get through the day today and then I have basically four and a half glorious days off. Huzzah! I am hoping to get the draft of this manuscript finished either today or tomorrow, before getting the final level of polish on, so that Wednesday morning I can start submitting it to agents.

Fingers crossed!

I also hope to get some of these short stories finished over the next week, and there’s of course the incredibly thorough house cleaning that needs to be done once and for all. I am trying to decide if it makes sense to stop at the grocery store tonight on my way home or to go tomorrow–I have an appointment uptown tomorrow, so I have to go up there anyway and I have a prescription to pick up as well; so might as well make a day of it, right? And I need to start paying the bills. I woke up a little later than I would have liked this morning–but I clearly needed the rest, and I love being able to go into the weekend feeling rested than starting out tired.

Watching television in bed last night was quite lovely, I have to say.

And so, sorry to be brief on this last morning of June, but I did sleep later than I should have, so I need to get back to mining spice. Here’s a Friday hunk for you, to slide you into the weekend.

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I’m a Believer

Thursday!

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

There are worse ways to spend an evening.

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

My Fitzgerald set arrived this week:

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

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

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

A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You

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

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

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

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

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

And Ellen Barkin is just killing it.

I suppose I should head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a Hump Day Hunk for you:

 

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Last Train to Clarksville

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

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

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

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

Such an exciting life, eh?

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

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Daydream Believer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Keep On Loving You

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

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

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

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

As if.

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

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