Category: writing

Thank You for the Music

I have a late night of bar testing tonight, and as such got to sleep in a bit this morning, which was quite lovely. I am having lunch with a dear friend tomorrow (huzzah!), and I don’t really have any errands to run today before I go in to the office. I could, of course, run a few–there’s always something that needs to be done–but I can make a Costco run this weekend, as well as swing by the grocery store. I also have to pick up my license plate from the dealership, but I think I will also postpone that till next week. Plus I don’t have any deadlines, so I don’t have to worry about getting writing done this weekend so…yes, I can just run errands with a clear conscience this weekend and not worry about “when am I going to get my word count done?”

SO lovely, really. (And I may change my mind and run over to the dealership later today on the way to work….but it’s lovely having options.)

I do have some things around the house I need to get caught up–some cabinets need reorganizing and cleaning out; as do some of my kitchen drawers, and there’s always filing. Carnival is looming on the horizon; Krewe de Vieux is this weekend, and from all the reports I’ve heard and things I’ve seen on-line, with its theme of “The Crass Menagerie” they will be taking on the administration in Washington this year in their vulgar, hilarious and satiric fashion. I was reading some of the the descriptions of some of the floats and themes for the marching groups aloud to Paul last night and he replied, “So, when all of the pictures and videos go viral, the White House will declare war on New Orleans Sunday, won’t they?”

I replied, “I guess it depends on what Saturday Night Live does, really.”

I think, though, this morning I am just going to relax and ease into my late night. Drinking coffee, having some breakfast, and curling up in the easy chair with Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things does seem like just the right way for the day to get going, doesn’t it?

I’m also still a bit aglow from the weekend. It’s really so lovely to be around other writers and people who love books and love to read. It also recharges the batteries and feeds the creative muscles. Yesterday between clients I jotted down notes for a cozy mystery series I’ve been wanting to write for years, and could never quite wrap my mind around; oddly enough, after a weekend in Alabama I was able to get it all to click together in my head. Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen, but it was a lovely moment as all those clicks popped into place, you know? That’s always nice.

So, my chair and my book are calling to me, so I will leave you now, Constant Reader, with a hunk to get your day off to a great start.

The Name of the Game

Yesterday we had some heavy weather in New Orleans; the part of the city known as New Orleans East (which was decimated in the post-Katrina flood) was hit by tornadoes. It was, to say the least, kind of eerie. We of course got the severe weather alert texts at the office, and all moved downstairs and away from the glass. I spent five years or so living in Kansas, so I am well acquainted with tornadoes and what to do in case one is coming, but New Orleans East and the North Shore were pretty torn up. There are any number of places on-line to donate; and of course, if you’re local, there are some places where you can drop off supplies or volunteer to help out listed on both NOLA.com and TheAdvocate.com.

Wow, such a weird day. And it was my first day back at work, which required re-orienting myself back to the day job reality from a book weekend. The switch from one life to the other is always a bit disorienting, but I came away from the weekend with some great books to read (Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day; Peaches and Scream by Susan Furlong; Digging Up the Dirt by Miranda James; Stripped Bare by Shannon Baker; Run by Andrew Grant; and The Contractors by Harry Hunsicker. The authors who were there whose books I didn’t buy copies of are on my wish list).

I started reading Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things last night, and it’s quite good so far; I was sucked in almost immediately. I think she won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for this one; I know she was also nominated for an Anthony Award. I got to hang out with Lori a lot over the weekend, and she really made me laugh quite hard. She, Harry, Shannon, and I also made a field trip after the Homewood Library event on Saturday over to the Vulcan statue.

Lori was quick to note he wasn’t wearing pants.

I also came away from the weekend with more of a resolve about writing, the way I always do when I go to a book weekend or a writer’s conference or whatever you want to call those weekends when writers gather to speak to people who love books. I also figured out (finally) how to do the cozy series I’ve always been interested in writing (or trying to write; cozies are a lot harder than people think they are), and I also have some ideas about some other things I want to do. So, it was a big win, over all.

And now, back to the spice mines.

One of Us

On Sunday, a panel I wasn’t on was asked by its moderator if they had ever met and embarrassed themselves in front of one of their literary heroes? I wasn’t on that panel, but had I been, my answer would have been “Yes, I met Stephen King at the Edgar Award banquet a couple of years ago and was a complete gibbering idiot.”

Although I am pretty sure he is used to that by now, it’s something that I still think about, and am embarrassed by, to this very day.

Then again, what DO you say to someone whose work you’ve admired for over forty years? Who inspired, and continues to inspire, you to this very day?

He won the Edgar Award for Best Novel that night for his book Mr. Mercedes. I have to admit I don’t read King the way I did for years; buy it the day it comes out and shut everything out and do nothing, watch nothing, ignore the entire world until I had devoured the book. I still haven’t read 11/22/63, haven’t finished The Dark Tower (have about four books to go in that series), put aside Doctor Sleep and Black House, and not only hadn’t read Mr. Mercedes, but none of the other two books in the Bill Hodges trilogy either.

Bad fan, bad fan.

But I took Mr. Mercedes with me on this trip, saved it for last, and just finished it a little while ago.

Whoa.

Augie Odenkirk had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage, but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job, and City Center was on the far side of town, so he decided to take the last bus of the night. He got off at twenty past eleven with his pack on his back and his rolled up sleeping bag under one arm. He thought he would be glad of the down-filled bag by three A.M. The night was misty and chill.

“Good luck, man,” the driver said as he stepped down, “You ought to get something for just being the first one there.”

Only he wasn’t. When Augie reached the top of the wide, steep drive leading to the big auditorium, he saw a cluster of at least two dozen people already waiting outside the rank of doors, some standing, most sitting. Posts strung with yellow DO NOT CROSS tape had been set up, creating a complicated passage that doubled back on itself, mazelike. Augie was familiar with these from movie theaters and the bank where he was currently overdrawn, and understood it’s purpose: to cram as many people as possible into as small a space as possible.

As he approached the end of what would soon be a conga-line of job applicants, Augie was both amazed and dismayed to see that the woman at the end of the line has a sleeping baby in a Papoose carrier. The baby’s cheeks were flushed with the cold; each exhale came with a faint rattle.

The woman heard Augie’s slightly out-of-breath approach, and turned. She was young and pretty enough, even with the dark circles under her eyes. At her feet was a small quilted carry-case. Augie supposed it was a baby support system.

“Hi,” she said. “Welcome to the Early Birds Club.”

“Hopefully we’ll catch a worm.” He debated, thought what the hell, and stuck out his hand. “August Odenkirk. Augie. I was recently downsized. That’s the twenty-first-century way of saying I got canned.”

The book deserved its Edgar Award. Wow.

One of the things I love the most about Stephen King’s work is how incredibly well he draws characters; he even manages to make the worst of the worst, characters you absolutely hate, understandable.

The prologue to the book is, as you can see above, set in a line for a job fair outside of an unnamed city in Ohio’s civic center. In the relationship between Augie and Janice, the young mother, he immediately creates two characters you feel like you know–the older guy who’s lost his job and is worried about his future; the young struggling single mother who just wants to work so she can provide for herself and her child. These are working class people who are hurting, who are worried, who are willing to do whatever they have to do. But as the morning sun begins to rise, someone driving a Mercedes jumps the curb and deliberately drives into the crowd–the last we see of Augie is him lying down on top of Janice and her baby to try to protect them from the car.

The book is, actually, a taut, fast moving thriller that begins after the prologue; about a duel of wits between retired police detective Bill Hodges (who was in charge of the Mercedes killer investigation) and Mr. Mercedes himself, the killer. The killer is now stalking Bill–divorced, estranged from his only child, now retired and with nothing to do. Bill sometimes takes out his gun and considers eating it…and the killer’s plan is to drive Bill to suicide.

Instead, Bill is reinvigorated upon receipt of a nasty letter from the killer, and so begins a cat-and-mouse game that kept me turning the pages and up way later then I needed to be. Wow; what a great story! And I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series–there were some loose ends there that will be tied up in later books in the trilogy.

VERY recommended.

Does Your Mother Know

It is so wonderful to sleep in your own bed after being away for almost a week. I don’t sleep well anywhere other than my bed, no matter how tired I am, and so last night when I tumbled into my own bed for the first time since the previous Sunday night, I was asleep almost the moment I hit the pillow and slept deeply and well. I feel very well rested this morning, if a little disoriented from traveling, which is always a good thing. And the new car is a rock star.

I have the day off from work today, so I can decompress and run errands and get everything around here back under control; jumping back into the day job today would have been a mistake and I would have been tired the rest of the week, which is never optimum. The house needs tidying and there’s laundry to do as well; and at some point I am retiring to my easy chair in order to finish reading Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes. I’d thought I’d be able to finish it this past weekend in Birmingham, but alas–we were all having so much fun I wound up getting back to my room too late to spend some time reading. Thank you to Margaret Fenton and Tammy Lynn for organizing a wonderful books weekend to support two libraries, and thanks to the engaged audience of readers who showed up in both cities. I got to hang out and get to know some acquaintances better, some quality time with good friends, made some new ones, had a lot of laughs, went to visit the Vulcan statue in Birmingham, AND SOLD ALL OF MY BOOKS. Yay! I also feel very energized about writing again, and I (of course) came up with an idea for a new series while there.

I call that a win.

One of the many books I read last week was Last Words by Michael Koryta. I had an ARC from a few years ago (thanks Erin!) that I had not read, and so I decided to take it along with me on the trip to read. I’ve been a huge fan since I read So Cold the River a few years back, and his Those Who Wish Me Dead was one of my absolute favorites books of the year a couple of years ago. He is one of those writers whose books I parcel out to read because I don’t want to be out of new Koryta books, you know? I never want to think, “I’ve read all of his books and will have to wait for him to write a new one”.

But Last Words reminded me again of how great a writer he is, and I am going to have to resist reading everything he’s written over the next few weeks. I may allow myself another, though.

The last words he said to her: “Don’t embarrass me with this shit.”

In later days, months, and years, he will tell everyone who asks, and some who do not, that the last words from his lips to her ears were “I love you.” Sometimes, during sleepless nights, he can almost convince himself that it is true.

But as they walked out of their building and into the harsh Florida sun that September afternoon, Mark Novak didn’t even look his wife in the eye. They were moving fast even though neither of them was running late. It was the way you walked when you were eager to get away from someone.

Great beginning, right? Pulls you right into the story.

Mark Novak is the our main character, but there’s also another point of view character, Ridley Barnes. Ridley isn’t a reliable narrator (it is a third person point of view novel, but the point of view of both characters is so sharp and strong it may as well be first person). Mark and his wife worked for Innocence Incorporated, a non-profit legal firm that investigates death row cases to prove the innocence of the convicted (a not-so-well disguised fictional rendition of The Innocence Project). His wife was an attorney, Mark is an investigator. When they separated that hot summer day, she was off to interview a psychic who’d contacted them about one of their cases; he thought it was a waste of time and they argued about her going. SHe went off to the interview and he headed for the beach house they’d rented for a vacation…and time passes and she never shows up. Koryta does an excellent job of walking the reader through the stages of this sort of thing: the annoyance that she’s late; the anger because he hadn’t wanted her to go in the first place; and finally, worry and fear that something has happened. Something did happen: eventually, state troopers show up to let him know that her car was found in a ditch and she was dead; shot in the head.

Flash forward a couple of years, and Michael is still reeling from his wife’s death, and has done some things that have put his job in jeopardy. His boss has sent him up to Indiana to look into a murder case where there was no conviction or even a trial; Ridley Barnes was the chief suspect in the death, but there was never enough evidence against him for a trial or even an arrest. Barnes has written to them, and wants them to look into the case; to prove once and for all whether he did or did not commit the murder.

A young girl and her boyfriend had gone into the Trapdoor Cave and gotten separated. After days of searching, Barnes–who was an expert caver and an expert on the mine–separated off from the search party and eventually came out carrying her dead body. Michael is convinced the case is a waste of time–and it’s winter in Indiana. But once he gets to the small town and starts asking questions, strange things start happening, and what he remembers from his first day of questioning people is completely different from other people who witnessed the events report back. Has Michael lost his mind, or is everyone in the town part of a conspiracy to make him look crazy? And Barnes himself, who claims he doesn’t remember what happened down in the cave when he found the girl, often goes into the cave (or others in the area) to get away from people and calm himself. He believes that the cave is sentient and speaks to him; and there’s also a ‘dark man’ down there.

Two of my biggest fears are the dark and tight spaces (I have severe claustrophobia), and there are scenes when Barnes is working his way through the cave where I literally got so creeped out I had to put the book down, from the descriptions of the dark and the tight spaces. Barnes also has to get back into the cave with another search party when Michael is kidnapped and left alone in the cave in his underwear, in the cold and the tight and the dark with no idea where he is. That entire sequence is so chilling I thought I would have nightmares.

But as the book rushes along to its final solution, the pacing is exceptional, the writing vivid and exceptional, and the characterizations strong and great; reminding me again why Michael Koryta is one of my favorite writers. His most recent books is a sequel to Last Words, and I am really looking forward to getting into it–but I am resisting temptation as I have already selected the next book I am going to read.

Highly recommended.

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)

So I turned in the essay yesterday, and now I have nothing hanging over my head as far as deadlines are concerned, which is kind of lovely. Oh, sure, there are edits and revisions that are bound to come; and then page proofs and all of that, but this is the first time Ive not had a deadline in I don’t know how long. Seriously. I am visiting my family this week preparatory to doing Murder in the Magic City this weekend in Birmingham and Wetumpka, so I may or may not be around much until I am safely back in New Orleans Sunday evening.

The drive took about eleven hours–maybe about ten minutes over, and considering that Google Maps said the drive would take eleven and a half hours, I think I made great time, stopping a total of three times (twice for gas, once to eat). The car handles wonderfully, and the ride is very smooth as well. All in all, I am very pleased with my purchase–which, given how much I spent (and will spend) on it, is an enormous relief. It would be terrible to spend that kind of money on something and not like it, you know?

As I was packing and going through my bookcase, looking for books to bring along to read on the trip, I realized, much to my shock, that my bookcase contained a Laura Lippman novel I hadn’t read; it must have come out in a year when I was judging a book award or something, and so it went onto the shelf and by the time I was able to read again, she must have published another book–or something like that. It is inexplicable to me, otherwise. But what a find! Here I was thinking I was going to have do without a new Lippman to read until 2018.

They throw him out when he falls off the barstool. Although it wasn’t a fall, exactly, he only stumbled a bit coming back from the bathroom and lurched against the bar, yet they said he had to leave because he was drunk. He finds that hilarious. He’s too drunk to be in a bar. He makes a joke about a fall from grace. At least, he thinks he does. Maybe the joke was one of those things that stays in his head, for his personal amusement. For a long time, for fucking forever, Gordon’s mind has been split by a thick, dark line, a line that divides and defines his life as well. What stays in, what is allowed out. But when he drinks, the line gets a little fuzzy.

Which might be why he drinks. Drank. Drinks. No, drank. He’s done. Again. One night, one slip. He didn’t even enjoy it that much.

“You driving?” the bartender asks, piloting him to the door, his arm firm yet kind around Gordon’s waist.

Laura Lippman is one of those authors who never disappoints. I always say that the best authors are the ones who write books that make me think, make me reevaluate how I write and create, and make me want to do better. One of the reasons I decided to go off contract and no longer have deadlines was a sense that I was rushing too much; that my work might be better if I wasn’t pressured to do it in a set amount of time, and that I could explore doing different things if I had more time to polish and rewrite and think about the book at hand; and part of the reason I think that way is because of reading amazing writers like Lippman.

The Most Dangerous Thing is a fine novel, and while there is a core crime at the heart of the book, Lippman uses that crime to explore her characters, and how that crime affects and changes the course of their lives, how they interact with each other and how people can become locked into perceptions, not only of themselves but of other people–and how reality can be so very different from what you perceive it to be.

HIGHLY recommended.

Voulez-Vous

A final push today and the essay will be finished. Huzzah! I also need to pack today and prepare for the trip; I will also have to go to bed early as I want to get an early start tomorrow. The drive is about eleven and a half hours, not including stops; with stops, figure maybe twelve to thirteen. (The times are estimates, of course; I’ve made the drive in less than eleven hours before and it’s also taken longer.) I also need to clean out my email inbox before I go; make sure there’s nothing left hanging that needs to be taken care of, and then drug myself early into a nice, restful sleep (I really do need to go to bed around ten tonight, which is a minimum of an hour and a half earlier than I usually do.) I stocked the larder yesterday, have paid all of the bills that fall due before I get paid again, and other than the essay and packing, I’m pretty much done. If I can knock the essay out early, I can then go ahead and do some straightening/cleaning (I cleaned out the refrigerator yesterday after getting groceries, in an attempt to get everything to fit in there).

I did finish reading Gore Vidal’s Empire yesterday, and frankly, wasn’t all that impressed with it. Oh, Vidal was a great writer; he knew how to use words and string them together, but at least in this book he didn’t create great characters; his characters are emotionless ciphers that don’t engage the reader. Vidal was an incredibly smart man, and a very great thinker; no one can take that away from him. But just because he was smart didn’t mean that he was right, you know? Often as I read the book, I would think to myself, man, he really hated this country; and then I would also find myself wondering, or is my reaction to his cynicism about this country a part of my own brainwashing?

As a child, going through public school, watching television with my parents, I was instilled with values and beliefs, some of which I have come to not only question but violently disagree with as I developed, through reading, my own experiences, and my own witnessing, my OWN set of core values and beliefs. Periodically I do catch myself thinking something automatically and not critically; and then I have to examine the automatic thought, figure out where is came from, and whether it actually has any value, any basis in reality and fact. Much of what I learned as a child has been, in fact, unlearned as an adult.

I’m not sure I agree with Vidal’s analysis of our country and its history. To be fair to Vidal, I’ve not read his other fictionalized histories: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Washington D.C., Hollywood, and The Golden Age; nor have I read his essays and nonfiction on the subject. I’d like to read Burr at some point; just to get some better idea of Vidal’s thoughts about American history and what was true. Obviously, Aaron Burr is not a hero of American history, and yet Vidal seemed to think he was; I am curious to revisit this. I have always been taught that Burr was a villain; and in the interest of confronting things I was taught to decide on their veracity and validity, it may be necessary to reexamine that period of time in American history (which is why I am also interested in reading Howard Zinn’s “People’s Histories”).

Interesting thoughts on a Sunday morning with an essay to write about writing crime fiction in New Orleans.

But the book I have selected as my new bathroom read is a book called Royal Renegades by Linda Porter. It is not published in the US, only the UK; I ordered my copy through Book Depository, and I don’t recall how I heard about the book in the first place. The focus of the book, which is nonfiction history, is on the marriage of King Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and the lives of their children. I have some knowledge of Stuart England, but am not as well-informed as I would like to be, particularly on the 1620’s (which is a period of particular interest to me for a secret project, which I have been trying to research for years, without a great deal of success). This particular royal marriage–which, of course, led to disaster for the Stuart dynasty; with repercussions well into the eighteenth century, only ending with the final defeat of the Stuarts in the 1740’s–started a string of Stuart marriages in which Protestant English kings married Catholic princesses and made them Queens: two of their sons not only became king but also took Catholic wives; their second son even went so far as to convert (and this led to his deposal). Henrietta Maria was not only French, but her mother was Marie de Medici–yes, so her lineage went back to Italy and Florence and the amazing Medici family, reestablishing Medici blood into the French royal lineage after it died out in 1589. This was also the period of Cardinal Richelieu, one of my favorite historical statesmen; the Thirty Years’ War in Germany; and the further colonization of North America by the European powers. Anyway, this history begins with the first meeting between King Charles I and his French wife; she would be the last French-born Queen of England, and she was, indeed, the first French-born Queen in nearly two hundred years, after centuries where a French queen was the norm, not the exception. I’m looking forward to it.

Yesterday evening, after chores were completed and work was done for the day, Paul and I watched the European Figure Skating Championships on our NBC Sports Apple TV app. we are both huge fans of the two-time defending world champion French ice dancing team of Guillaume Cizeron and Gabriella Papadokis; their performances are breathtakingly beautiful.

And so are they; Guillaume also, apparently, works as a model.

You can see why. I’ve never understood why American male figure skaters and male gymnasts don’t get contracts as underwear models, at the very least; those bodies are en pointe.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Chiquitita

Ah, the South.

Constant Reader knows I am a child of the South; my childhood is filled with memories of summers spent at my grandmother’s in the country in Alabama: picking wild blackberries in the woods, orangish-brown creeks and rivers, fields of cotton and corn, towering pines trees and hollows filled with kudzu. I remember the heavy thick humidity of lazy afternoons, the four o’clock bushes blossoming every day at four, the round rocks in the gravel roads, the way darkness pressed against the screens at night with moths and other insects fluttering their wings trying to get to the light, lightning bugs floating in the air glowing yellowish-green as the sun went down, the sound of rain beating out a rhythm on a tin roof. Next week I am off to visit my parents, and will be driving through the south; through Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee. I used to get creative on those long drives, particularly through Alabama, where exit signs and Birmingham itself trigger a lot of memories, things I’ve forgotten, and make me itch to sit down and start writing. I’ve written a lot about Alabama, but have only published two of my Alabama stories (“Son of a Preacher Man” and “Small Town Boy”), as well as one book, Dark Tide. But even though my main character in the novel was from upstate Alabama, it was set down on the Alabama Gulf Coast–which is really not much different than the Mississippi or Florida panhandle coasts.

I really do think the next book will be an Alabama one.

If you’re not familiar with Ace Atkins, you need to go buy his books NOW. He wrote a wonderful New Orleans-based series, featuring music history professor Nick Travers, some terrific stand-alones, and now is writing the Robert Parker Spenser novels in addition to a great series set in upstate Mississippi featuring former Ranger Quinn Colson. I am several volumes behind on that series–I am taking one with me next week–and they are truly fantastic; the first two were back-to-back finalists for the Best Novel Edgar award. Yesterday, I read his contribution to Mississippi Noir, “Combustible.”

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.

“Hell you shouldn’t,” Shelby said. “You fucking owe me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you want to meet Lyndsay Redwine?”

“Ever since I saw her in a bikini at the city pool.”

“Then shut the fuck up and drive.”

Shelby was fourteen. And she talked like that.

This delightfully dark little story, which plays with point of view (not easy to do in a short story), is incredibly well done. Atkins has an eye for the rural South; he makes it easy to imagine and visualize the area, the characters, and the situations they find themselves in. A lot of this is done through voice, again not easy to do, and the story, as the best ones often do, inspired me to want to write something.

I do recommend it, and so far Mississippi Noir is knocking my socks off.

And now back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk to start your weekend off:

S. O. S.

I was incredibly tired all day yesterday; so much so that I’m surprised my eyes weren’t crossed most of the day. This is to alert you, Constant Reader, that I did not read another short story yesterday, and so have nothing to offer you this morning. But to give myself a little bit of credit, I’ve done much better this Short Story Month than I have in previous years, so that’s something. And in reading these stories, I’ve also learned a lot about the craft and art of writing short stories, and I’ve also had to think about that as well–so this is the first time Short Story Month has actually had the desired effect on me. So I am counting this as a win, no matter what others might think. So there.

I depart on Monday for a trip to the frigid North to visit my family, and then on the way back, as I previously mentioned, I am doing the Murder in the Magic City weekend event in Birmingham and Wetumpka before returning home to New Orleans a week from this Sunday. I don’t have anything pressing to work on while I am gone–still, taking the MacBook Air just in case something comes up (despite hating to work on it), but hoping nothing will. I hope to do some reading–I’m taking four books with me; including an Ace Atkins and a Michael Koryta and a Laura Lippman–and I also have a lot of comic books on my iPad to catch up on as well.

I also think I am starting to come out of the post-book(s) malaise a bit; I woke up this morning with a great idea about the essay I need to write, and am very hopeful that I can bang that out today and tomorrow so I can not worry about it this weekend. Huzzah!

I am also going to try to read Ace Atkins’ story in Mississippi Noir for tomorrow.

And on that note, I am going to get my day going. I am going to run some errands before going into the office–another late night of bar testing looms–and then after tomorrow, my vacation starts, so yay!

Here’s a hunk for you, Constant Reader.

Money Money Money

I made my first car payment today, and despite everything I’ve done with the car since going to the dealership–registering it, getting a brake tag, insuring it, driving it, learning how to use the functions, teaching myself how the bluetooth works, etc.–now it seems like it’s really mine; even writing the check for the down payment didn’t make it seem real, you know? But authorizing the electronic transfer of the first payment from my bank to the finance company–the first payment that’s coming from my paycheck–has made it all too real.

I worked on my short story “Quiet Desperation” and my essay yesterday, without much success; writing anything this week has turned into a horrible chore. I don’t know if that’s because of the usual post-book malaise I usually go through–and I wrote so much last year I never really was able to allow the malaise to play out; or rather, I did and then was forced to do a lot to meet deadlines. I don’t know; I don’t know why I can’t just sit down every day and spend two hours of dedicated time to writing. Yet it never seems to work out that way for me; and I just can’t seem to make myself do it. I can usually, on a good day, write anywhere from three to five thousand words in two hours or so; so if I did it every day imagine what I could get done in a year. But…yet…I don’t know why I can’t ever make myself do these things that would, ultimately, make my life so much easier.

Heavy heaving sigh.

Ah, well.

So, I read another short story yesterday, yet another one from The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, edited by Laura Lippman. There are some terrific authors in that collection, as well as some whose work I have not read before. I was going to read the James Lee Burke story, but then decided to read one by someone whose work I’ve not read before. I chose Ed Kurtz’ “A Good Marriage,” because I have a copy of his novel The Rib From Which I Remake The World in my TBR pile, and thought I should get started reading his work, since I probably won’t get around to the novel for a while.

Wow. What a chilling, yet great, story.

We were at the Allens’ anniversary party, which I hated, and Hannah hated it too. It was not as though we didn’t like the Allens–Joe Allen, anyway, a big, fat, affable bear of a man–it was just all so tacky. I was of the opinion that notifying other people of one’s forthcoming birthday was vulgar enough (don’t forget my gift!), but an anniversary always seemed like a private thing, a husband/wife thing, nothing to do with me or my debit card. Joe could buy his wife lunar real estate for all I cared, just leave me out of it. As far as I knew, Hannah felt the same way.

But Joe insisted, and his wife made sure to send us their wish list by e-mail, so with twin engine grumbling we went and presented them with the Waterford vase they wanted. She cooed hungrily over the damn thing and he nodded with appreciation. There were a lot of people there. The gifts were piling up in the corner by the fireplace. Finally, after the inimitable Mrs. Allen opened their (her) last gift, the assemblage was freed to drink, drink, and be drunk. A trio of hulky guys whose guts were threatening the structural integrity of their shirts swarmed the keg. Hannah and I opted for the crappy boxed wine.

God, I’ve been to that party.

“A Good Marriage” is a terrific story. Kurtz paces it nicely, building up steam as we soon learn that ‘good’ is really dependent on, to quote Obi-wan, “your point of view.” The story isn’t about the party at all; but the party is what kicks off the story, and there’s an incident there–mild, nothing, innocuous–which triggers what happens in the rest. And that nothing incident triggers such a strong reaction that the reader begins to understan, subtly, that things are not as they appear in this tale of marriage; and that in fact this ‘good marriage’ is anything but…and in fact, it’s quite horrifying. He also flips the script; what’s wrong in this marriage isn’t what usually is wrong in this type of marriage. Chilling, and very well-done.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for you.

The Winner Takes It All

I wrote over three hundred thousand words’ worth of novels last year.

That is only the final word counts on the books I wrote last year. That doesn’t count any words written and discarded; essays; this blog; short stories; or even emails.

I realized this yesterday afternoon when I got home from work; I walked into the Lost Apartment and saw that the scaffolding was finally down (I’d forgotten how much space there actually is in the living room; no worries, it still needs to be painted though); this startled me so much that I just put the groceries away and decided to sit down and read for a while. I still haven’t finished reading the Pelecanos novel; not that it isn’t good–it most definitely is–but I am trying to read a short story a day and that, of course, has cut into my reading time. I plan to finish reading that this weekend, though–it’s not one of the books I am taking on vacation with me so it must be finished before I go.

But realizing that last year I probably wrote close to half a million words (at least) was a bit of a shock; one that I am still reeling from this morning.

So, when it was time to retire to my easy chair, I looked at the pile of anthologies, single author collections, and magazines for my short story reading…and had that weird feeling of…well, nothing there moved me. The only thing I wanted to read was another story from Laura Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her, and having just done one of her stories I wasn’t sure that I should do another. I looked through my bookcases and a book I’d forgotten about’s spine screamed at me from the shelf: The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, edited by Laura Lippman. I grabbed it and retired to my chair, opened it up…and giggled.

The first story was by Megan Abbott.

As I curled up and started to read, I smiled to myself in cat-like satisfaction. Abbott AND Lippman, I thought to myself as I started to read, does life get better than this?

The story was originally published in the Dangerous Women Volume One anthology, edited by George R. R.Martin and Gardner Dozoir in 2014.

He waited in the car. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

“Okay,” she said.

On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kind of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

Almost everyone who writes novels about crime–well, probably every author, my familiarity runs to crime writers–always get asked in interviews where they get their ideas from. I can’t speak for other crime writers, but I know I often get inspired by the news. I’ll see a story, either in the paper, on-line, or on the news, and will think to myself, “Hmmm. I wonder what really is going on there?” True crime is often much more twisty and fascinating than actual fictional crime. I sometimes do think that I read crime, and write about it, in order to understand it better, make some sort of sense out of it because MY mind doesn’t work that way. Who are these people, where did they come from, what made them the way they are?

Megan Abbott’s wonderful story from this collection, “My Heart is Either Broken”, is about a Casey Anthony-type mother whose daughter is stolen from her from a coffee shop. She asked a stranger to watch the little girl while she ran to the bathroom; when she came back the stranger and her daughter were gone. No one believes that she didn’t kill and dispose of her child; her behavior doesn’t seem normal for a grieving mother, nor does she seem to particularly miss the child that much–at least in the public eye. She is one of those people–I’m one of them–who reacts to stress or tension or nervousness by smiling; which of course gets her reamed in the court of public opinion and in the press. The story is told from the point of view of her husband, the baby’s father…who wants to believe his wife, desperately wants to believe the woman he married couldn’t have killed their child…but the mounting evidence is making him doubt her, and hate himself for doing so. The story is genius, really; in conception and execution. The end is a real punch in the mouth, too.

And where is the single-author collection of Megan Abbott short stories?

And now, back to the spice mines.