Tag: About the Author

Another Saturday Night

Well, it’s early afternoon in New Orleans. I’ve done my workout, run errands for both myself and Paul–including the always dreaded grocery run–and now am home, a bit worn out and needing to hop in the shower. The humidity is thick out there today, so thick I’ve already had to take a Claritin-D, and my kitchen is a mess and I have lots of laundry to do. I don’t think I’m going to do any writing today–my brain is tired; that may change later, one never knows–but I think I am going to just spend the rest of the day relaxing, reading, and slowly but surely getting the apartment straightened up and cleaned up and organized; the never-ending struggle not to live in a slovenly dump. Heavy heaving sigh. I also want to get back to reading About the Author, and select what I am going to read next (although I suspect, having gotten two anthologies in the mail–Storm Warning: Chesapeake Crimes and In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper—I may just curl up with some exceptional short stories.

Stranger things have happened.

We got all caught up last night on both The Handmaid’s Tale (which continues to be incredibly gripping while horrifying) and The Mick, which is a truly demented sitcom we are enjoying tremendously. I’m not sure what we are going to watch tonight–we’ve started watching the new season of American Crime, which seems to be about migrant worker, sex trafficking, and the opiod addiction crisis, and it really looks really gripping and good; I am really sorry the show has been cancelled. We never did watch the first season, so we can also always go back and watch it, but it’s a shame. Then again, a highly intelligent show about crime that shows the same crime from many different perspectives, with all the necessary nuance and complexity, without clear cut villains and heroes–well, it was bound to not last long.

Okay, some time has passed, and I indeed curled up in my easy chair with About the Author, and finished it. It’s terrific, full of twists and turns and surprises; and the author, John Colapinto, did a most excellent job of making an extremely unlikable protagonist, well, likable. I can highly recommend it; it still holds up, even though it is nearly twenty years old–obviously, technology has moved on–but other than that, it is so well done and so well told that you don’t really notice that sort of thing. Most, most excellent. I am currently grilling hamburgers while reading Megan Abbott’s story, “Girlie Show”, in Lawrence Block’s Edward Hopper anthology; it is, thus far, quite sublime.

And now, I need to go flip the burgers.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you.

IMG_2120 (1)

Last Friday Night

I had to fast after midnight until I had blood drawn this morning at nine a.m., which meant NO COFFEE until I was finished. Naturally, I brought a cup in a travel mug, and as soon as my arm was bandaged I started drinking it. I am still way behind in my daily caffeination, and as I have a strict no coffee after twelve rule, I have got to up my game.

Or I’ll be sluggish all day. And it is Friday.

Hmmm.

I also reschedule Wacky Russian to tomorrow morning, and I think I am going to see if I can just make Saturday our regular day rather than Wednesday; I hate getting up early on Wednesdays and I am going to be alternating late nights weekly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so having an early morning workout on Wednesday just doesn’t work anymore. Nobody wants to be around a physically exhausted and sleepy Gregalicious. And if I work out at ten, then I’ll be awake and endorphined and ready to get shit done, plus that night  I’ll sleep really well. It really makes the most sense.

Yay for that!

Let’s just hope that it works out.

And next weekend is a three day weekend, which is absolutely lovely. So much to do, so little time, which is, as always, the story of my life. But I want to finish reading About the Author, not only because I want to see how it ends but because I want to move on to another book in the TBR pile; I am leaning towards the Pulitzer and Edgar award winning The Sympathizer, but there are so many others in the pile that are begging for my attention…and I was thinking it might even be nice to reread Mary Stewart’s Airs Above the Ground. I am enjoying The Affair of the Poisons, my current non-fiction read, as well. We have this week’s episode of The Handmaid’s Tale to watch, and we are also bingeing–and enjoying–The Mick on Netflix. There are some movies available for streaming now also that I want to see. Huzzah! Should be a lovely three day weekend….might even be a That’s Amore deep dish pizza kind of weekend!

It also pleases me to no end that I can fit into size 33 waist pants and shorts again. I may need to do a bit of reorganizing in my closet again…(a chore for the three day weekend) and the book purge is also going splendidly. Now I need to get back to writing…although I am still in the aftermath of having edited/revised a manuscript, which usually makes it harder to get back into writing again. I did do some work on my short story “Quiet Desperation” this week; being a total rewrite of the original draft, trying on another way of structuring and telling the story, which I am not entirely sure is working, but I am also getting some lovely ideas that maybe I can use in the final version of the story. It’s kind of cool, actually. Like I said, I am enjoying writing again, and am even enjoying the revising/editing that I usually despise.

Who fucking knew?

Okay, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Friday hunk for you:

10_lg

Blank Space

It always feels good to finish a project. It’s not entirely in the books yet, of course–there’s another round of edits, and then page proofs to get through–but this stage is completed and it feels lovely.  Ironically, it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would; I’d started working on it Friday night, and had gotten much further along in it than I’d remembered. I then repaired to my easy chair and read some more of About the Author, which is terrific; a really great noir I can’t wait to finish. I did have to put it aside, though, because it reached that point I always call the “uh-oh” moment; the part where the character makes the really bad decision that will eventually bring him down. It’s an extremely well put-together novel, structurally speaking, which gives me some ideas about a noir I want to write–the long-thought about Muscles.

Reading is such a lovely gift to one’s self, really. I am so glad I learned to read very young, and fell in love with it. It’s a terrific pleasure.

Last night, TCM aired the old Lana Turner movie Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Sirk, and I watched it for the first time, while paging through Sam Staggs’ gossipy book about it, Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of “Imitation of Life.” I love Staggs’ books; I’d already read both All About ‘All About Eve’, Close-up on Sunset Boulevard, and When Blanche Met Brando. They’re wonderful books about the stories behind the making of iconic films–including gossip, of course–and also wittily written and compulsively readable. I do want to read the others again; I recently bought a bunch of them in a lot on eBay  just for that purpose. This one also includes information around the notorious Johnny Stompanato murder–he was Lana’s abusive lover; one night he was threatening her and he was stabbed by her daughter, Cheryl Crane–and it was after this scandal that Lana was cast in Imitation of Life. The movie itself works on so many levels; it’s campy but self-aware, and everyone plays it straight, which makes it even better. Turner plays Lora, an aspiring actress with a young daughter, whose life becomes entwined with that of Annie and her daughter, Sarah Jane–Annie is black and the two come to live with Lora and her daughter Susie, who is about the same age. Lora of course becomes a huge star, and the drama surrounding her has to do with her own self-absorption and basically she allows Annie to raise Susie–but it’s the story of Annie and her light-skinned daughter–who hates being black and passes for white, abandoning her mother until of course, at the very end, Annie has died and Sarah Jane comes back too late, that is the real story here. The movie doesn’t face any of the racial issues, they just are–there’s one perfectly horrible scene where Sarah Jane’s boyfriend, who has found out she is black, beats her (played by Troy Donahue) which is about it, really. There’s a sort of sense, at least on my first viewing, that the terrible situation for people of color in the US at the time was taken for granted; but I can only imagine how controversial the movie was at the time of its release. It was an enormous hit, and Juanita Moore and Susan Kohlar, as Annie and Sarah Jane, both got Oscar nominations. The film is flawed, but Turner is actually pretty good in the role (she was always considered a beauty who couldn’t act), but I also couldn’t help thinking how amazing Joan Crawford could have made it–it was the kind of role she or Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland could have played in the late 1940’s/early 1950’s.

born to be hurt

If you like books about Hollywood, you have to read Sam Staggs’ books. They’re terrific.

So, this week I am getting back to the WIP, and hope to get some good work done on the short stories I’m struggling with. Woo-hoo! But I’m actually looking forward to getting back to the work I had to put aside to work on the edits of this other manuscript. (Keeping up? Sometimes I can’t keep up with what all is going on with me, so I am often curious if people reading this can follow along.) I should make it clear that the manuscript I just revised from editorial notes is one that will be published under a pseudonym; and the one I am now getting back to is neither a Scotty nor a Chanse. I mentioned a few entries ago that I was looking through Mardi Gras Mambo, and I do think I do need to make the time to reread the entire Scotty series as written thus far before trying to get back into writing another one. It’s long overdue, frankly; I’ve not reread the pre-Katrina Scottys in years, and I think, for this next one, it’s kind of necessary. The nice thing is it’s not like I need to read them deeply, I can sort of skim-read, get a sense of the voice and the characters, and the story.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines.

Sugar Sugar

So, I finally watched the season finale of Riverdale last night, and I have to say, well done! I went into Riverdale not sure what to expect–and worried I’d be disappointed–but the show really worked on many levels The writing was strong, if a bit uneven at times; the way it was shot–the production values, cinematography, use of color, etc–was always on point; but the biggest strength of the show was the cast. The young actors playing the Gang were appealing and imminently likable; and following the lead of Pretty Little Liars, the older members of the cast were former teen heartthrobs (Jason Gedrick, Luke Perry) or had become successful as young stars (Madchen Amick, Robin Givens). I am really looking forward to the second season.

Well done, Riverdale!

I slept really late this morning, which kind of felt good. I need to finish going over my editorial notes, and making those corrections–I intend to spend tomorrow polishing the book from beginning to end, and I also have to go into the office for a few hours today, as well as make groceries. I’d thought about doing the groceries this morning, but oversleeping took care of that, as well as wiping out my plan to finish the editorial notes. I’ll now have to do that when I get home from the office/making groceries. That’s fine, too; this morning before work I can organize/clean the kitchen and finish the laundry and do all those other lovely chores before running to get the mail and heading in to the office. Hurray! (There really needs to be a sarcasm font.)

I also started reading John Colapinto’s About the Author last night. It was recommended to me by a friend when I told them the basic premise behind my short story “Quiet Desperation”. I am only a few pages in but I am enjoying it so far. When I finish, I think I am going to read either The Sympathizer (won both Pulitzer Prize and Edgar) or Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (recently won the Edgar). Definitely some good reading in my future! Huzzah!

I also, for the first time in a while, looked at Mardi Gras Mambo, aka Scotty Three, and was more than a little startled by how much the tone, how much the character, had changed since then. People change, of course–things that happen affect who you are, affect how you react to things, change your perspective–but in just reading the introduction and the first three chapters, the change was so dramatic it was startling. Should I go back to Scotty–when I go back to Scotty–it only makes sense to read the series over again, from start to finish. Maybe it’s too late to get that sense of the earlier Scotty back now, I don’t know. But some things I’d been feeling make sense now; maybe in rereading the entire series I can figure out how to do the new one.

I have to say, I am starting to enjoy myself again with writing and editing. I think the break from deadlines was precisely what I needed.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you:

 

456d2da057cb048966f9754624cdcbed