Tag: Alejandro Spietzer

Rumor of Love

Monday morning, and the first infusion to treat the ulcerative colitis. I have no idea what this is going to be like or what it will do to me or how it will make me feel for the rest of the day, so who knows what is in store for me today? I did do some reading–interestingly enough, the treatment I am getting is also the treatment for plaque psoriasis, which I also have (it’s been under control since I got some steroid shots for it last year)–and there are some side effects to the treatment, which I hopefully won’t experience, either. The part I always forget is that I am immunocompromised now, and the medication will also negatively impact my immune system. I have to be very careful going forward about getting sick, need to have my liver monitored, and I also need to beware of tuberculosis. But after the infusion I am heading into the office for the rest of the day, so we’ll see how that goes.

I didn’t write much yesterday (like a bad boy) but I will tonight after work, depending on how I feel from the transfusion. I did get some things done around here and took a lot of notes so progress was made, but we basically spent the day watching the end of The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which was fun; Julianne Moore’s dark new movie on Apple Plus, Echo Valley, which was interesting; before moving onto a Spanish-language Mexican show on MAX, Coyotl: Man and Beast, starring our old Spanish-language crush, Alejandro Spiezer. I also finished Incident at Loring Groves (more on that later) and picked out Sing Me a Death Song by Jay Bennett (my favorite y/a writer of all time; definitely more on that forgotten crime master later) to be my next y/a read. I’m taking Summerhouse with me to read during the infusion; two to two and a half hours of being forced to lie down with an IV in my arm is a good time to read, don’t you think?

We also had some marvelous thunderstorms last night; there was a major one, with some of the longest thunder I can recall. It was one of those “lots and lots of rain in a very short period of time” storms we have here all the time, which is a kind of tropical rain, I suppose. I slept really deeply and well–didn’t want to get up this morning, frankly, which made Sparky the Hungry Alarm Cat very agitated. He was very cuddly last night, too, as I sat in my chair writing notes in my journal; he climbed up and gave me some head butts before wanting head scratches, collapsing his entire body into me and not letting me stop scratching his head for about half an hour before it was bedtime. I like that he is finally becoming more affectionate and cuddly as he gets older–although he can flip into demon cat who wants to play rough at any moment. Usually head scratches devolve into him playing with fangs and claws out within seconds, so I was a bit surprised at how long he put up with my affection last night.

LSU plays UCLA tonight in the College World Series at six tonight, so I’ll have to get home from work quickly tonight so I can get some things done around the house before the game starts.

I feel rested this morning, and this isn’t a very long week. I only have to go into the office or three days this week with the holiday falling on Thursday this year, which is kind of nice. I need to get some writing done–I probably won’t finish everything I want to send out for submission calls, because I won’t make the deadlines, but that’s nothing new. I was looking around yesterday, trying to remember all the stories I’ve not finished that might work for submission somewhere (picked one out for Ellery Queen), and remembered even more as I filed and put things away last night. It’s also weird how my short stories often veer into the occult and the macabre. I also, when going back to something I’ve not worked on for a while and thus have new eyes to bring to it, am amazed at how quickly I can see what is wrong with the story and why it doesn’t work–and often, it’s because of the tone and the voice.

Ah, well, time to get cleaned up and head out on the highway for today’s infusion. I doubt I’ll be back today, so will let you know how it went tomorrow morning. Have a great Monday, Constant Reader!

Queen Hatshepsut, Egypt, Grand Egyptian Museum

Vulnerable

Today’s sexy man objectification photo certainly doesn’t seem like the right illustration for today’s title, does it?

He kind of looks like the alternate world Flash from the television show and turned out to be the villain of Season 2, Zoom, Teddy Sears, and I think he is in the second season of Netflix’s The Politician, as part of the throuple relationship Judith Light’s character is involved in. He is really pretty, even if he is not the guy in today’s picture, who is also really pretty.

But then assuming that a big muscular handsome man can’t be vulnerable as well is misandry, I suppose. Everyone, after all, can and should be–and definitely shouldn’t be afraid to be–vulnerable.

Yesterday was a good day–which seems to be par for the course lately, which is absolutely lovely. I got a lot of work done yesterday–granted, most of the day was spent making condom packs, which is my lot in life when it comes to working from home these days–but they are needed and necessary for the works kits we pass out during syringe access, and it’s hard to keep up with the demand. One of the nice things about making condom packs is I can watch something while I make them; the last two Wednesdays I’ve been watching The Mickey Mouse Club production of the Hardy Boys serial, The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure, which is loosely based on the first Hardy Boys adventure, The Tower Treasure. It was interesting to see the changes Disney made to the Hardy Boys to appeal more to their young audience–the Hardy Boys weren’t seventeen and eighteen, as they were in the books (I don’t recall how old they were in the original texts; Nancy Drew went from sixteen in the originals to eighteen in the revisions), and of course, Mrs. Hardy doesn’t exist in the serials. In fairness, their mother was never much of a character in the series–her name even changed from Martha in the original texts to Laura in the revisions–and their father’s sister, Aunt Gertrude, was more of an adult parental figure in their lives than even their father, and she replaces Mrs. Hardy in the Disney serials completely. The basic premise of the book is that the Tower Mansion is robbed, and suspicion falls on the father of their friend, Perry Robinson, who worked there; the burden of being fired means Perry has to drop out of school and of course, everyone in Bayport believes his father is guilty. Even in the revised texts, where a lot of the characterizations and color is dropped from the plot and the Hardys themselves become more two-dimensional, the way the Robinsons are shamed and ostracized by the town is very well-done; naturally, the Hardy boys, who want to be detectives like their famous father, go to work to clear the Robinsons.

In the serial, Perry is a juvenile delinquent from “the city” who is sent to Bayport to get away from bad influences, and works for crazy old Silas Applegate (in the book, his name was Hurd and he had a sister; both were known as “eccentrics”); soon Perry is framed for stealing tools and the Hardys, taking sympathy on him, take him on as a client. The Applegate treasure is an old pirate treasure of Jean Lafitte’s that was stolen from the mansion some ten years before; and no one really believes that it ever existed as Silas isn’t exactly mentally stable. It’s actually not a bad adaptation, and two of Disney’s biggest child stars, Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk, play the Hardys; any flaws it has are flaws of the time and the need for Disney (and pretty much all television shows) to sanitize and clean up small towns (well, life in general); what i always call the “Mayberritization” of American life. (Peyton Place, which was published during this same period, is far more accurate–which is partly why it was so scandalous.)

I started watching the second Hardy Boys serial, The Mystery of Ghost Farm–but I can also see why the Hardy Boys serials ended with this second one. It’s not as well done or as well plotted as the first; primarily because it isn’t based on one of the books and is wholly original…and while I can certainly understand why they didn’t base it on the second boo, The House on the Cliff (the plot of which centers on the boys looking for their father, whose been kidnapped by a gang of smugglers), they could have just as easily used Book Three, The Secret of the Old Mill.

These are, oddly enough, on Youtube rather than Disney Plus, as are some of the other serials, like Annette, and some of the two-part mysteries that originally aired on The Wonderful World of Disney.

And, as I’ve talked about recently, I’m thinking about reviving my middle-grade mystery series that I’ve been tinkering around with ever since I was about eight years old and started reading the kids’ series in the first place.

We also finished Dark Desire last night, and there were a lot of surprising plot twists in those final four episodes, and a great season cliffhanger at the end as well. I do recommend it, because it’s great fun and trashy yet engaging; and of course Alejandro Spietzer is gorgeous and charismatic. It’s apparently been renewed for a second season; Paul discovered this yesterday while searching for other series and/or films starring this gorgeous Mexican actor. Yes, we’re fan, and yes, we’re just that shallow.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll shout at you again tomorrow morning.

The View from Your Balcony

And here we go, Sunday and a new week. Huzzah, I suppose.

Yesterday was actually a very good day. Not only did I manage to get some work done on the Secret Project, I got some excellent work done on the Secret Project. It was quite a relief, actually; I’ve tried this first fucking chapter I don’t know how many times and could never get it right; plus I could never get the voice right, it seemed. I despaired, in fact, that I would ever get this under control. But yesterday I opened the most recent draft of the first chapter, started reading it, and thought oh no this will NOT do at all and started fixing it; reordering things, and finding the character’s voice in the process. Before I knew it several hours had passed and not only had I gotten the first chapter under control and whipped into shape, I’d managed to do the same with the second.

This was, as you can imagine, an enormous relief. I can’t speak for other authors, but I always fear it’s going to go away–the ability to construct decent stories and realistic characters and how to write something good, quite frankly. It’s why lovely feedback, like I got recently with the two short stories I sold, is so beneficial and helpful; it also always seems to come around when I need it the most.

It also helps that I wasn’t distracted, and could absolutely focus on what I was doing. Focus is so crucially important, and I have so little time where I can actually sit at my computer, ignore the cat’s whines for attention, and focus on what I’m doing; whenever I can I see everything so clearly and the work is so much better. The times, alas, this year when I have that ability, that clarity of focus, to write, seem to be few and far between.

I did also realize this morning as I lay in bed lazily waiting for the mood to get up to strike, that I am well on my way to having another collection of previous published short stories ready. Granted, some of them haven’t seen print yet–and might not until next year–but some of them have: “The Silky Veils of Ardor”, “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy”,”This Town”, “The Carriage House”, “Night Follows Night”, “The Dreadful Scott Decision”–and there are three more still out on submission, although one has already been accepted, but I have no idea when that will ever see print–“A Whisper from the Graveyard”–and the other two–“Moves in the Field” and “This Thing of Darkness” will inevitably and undoubtedly be rejected; those two were submitted to literary fiction markets and we’ve already ascertained , numerous times throughout my life, that I am not a literary writer. There may even be more that I am not even thinking about right now–I’m still on my first cappuccino, don’t you dare judge me–but that’s nearly ten stories, and I generally think of a collection being somewhere between sixteen to twenty; unless there’s a novella included. (I’ve decided that “Once a Tiger,” the Chanse short story, is really a novella, and if I ever do finish writing it–and the other novellas–I’ll probably just bind them all into one volume.)

Last night we finished watching Dark, which is superb (it’s so good it deserves its own entry) and then we watch Andy Samberg’s Palm Springs on Hulu, which was a cute little piece of fluff with some truly funny moments, and then moved onto another Mexican crime show, Dark Desire, which also stars Alejandro Spietzer, the gorgeous actor (pictured below) who was also the star of The Club–and is also dating Ester Exposito, who played Carla so superbly in Elite. It’s quite interesting so far–we’re two episodes in–and will continue with it. It’s so weird how we pay more attention to foreign language shows because of having to read the subtitles, while if whatever we are watching is in English, I’ll periodically reach for the iPad.

I’m also having dinner with a writer friend tonight who is in from out of town; so I need to make sure I get all the chores finished and get the rest of these chapters done on the Secret Project, so I can start writing the proposal and then it’s out of my damned hair.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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