Tag: Andor

Tango in the Night

Thursday morning and it’s cold in New Orleans (well, for New Orleans). We have a low of 49 today–it will eventually get back up into the low seventies, and by the weekend we’ll be back up in the 80’s again). One good thing is I sleep better when it’s cold like this, but the bad thing is I don’t want to get out of my warm bed into the cold apartment in the mornings, when it’s also dark outside. When the time change comes I think I’ll be coming to work in the dark and going home in the dark, too? This is really why I dislike winter, to be honest; I hate the short days and the long hours of night.

I managed to get some work on the book done yesterday and for the record it wasn’t completely crap, either. I need to finish that chapter this evening–about another thousand or so words should do the trick–and then move on to the next. Yesterday it really felt like a dam of some sort had finally broken and whatever block I had about writing this book was gone or smaller or something, I don’t know. And I didn’t hate completely what I did write, either, which is a significant change from the usual. I felt good about it, which is a pleasant change from the way it’s been feeling lately, if I am going to be completely honest. I was, as ever, beginning to fear that I’d finally drained the batteries so much that they’d never recharge and the well had gone, at long last, dry. I go through this even now and again (far more often than I would prefer, if I am being completely honest); that period of terror where I can’t write anything or if I do it’s incredibly difficult and I am afraid that I’ve somehow lost the ability to create and suddenly the career is over. (I started to type such as it is after “the career” and stopped myself; progress on the road to ending the self-deprecation self-criticism neurosis, so progress in my head is being made, albeit slowly–see, I did it again!)

Anyway, the book is starting to flow out of me again, which is always a lovely experience. I love writing, much as I complain about doing it, and am always happiest when I am actually doing it, or in the process of doing it. It gives me great pleasure to tell stories, really; I like everything about it besides getting stuck or being lazy–and as my default is always to be lazy, sometimes (many times) it can be hard to make myself do it. The gym is the same, really; I haven’t been to the gym in months and I really do need to start going again. I know I’ve put some of the weight I lost back on–I’ve been too fearful to actually get on the scale–and while I don’t eat the healthiest diet in the world, it’s not like I’m eating fast food or pizza every meal or anything (which is what I used to do, seriously), and yes, I should probably cut back on cheese and bacon and so forth…but at the same time I’m like I’m old and do I really want to spend my last years eating stuff that doesn’t bring me joy?

We watched this week’s episode of Andor, and I really like this show. Diego Luna is marvelous in the role, and the story itself it pretty good. I think I saw somewhere yesterday that it’s the lowest rated Star Wars show so far? Given the fact that The Book of Boba Fett exists–which we couldn’t make it to the third episode–I find that rather hard to believe. (I do keep thinking we should give Boba Fett another chance, but then think why? There are a lot of good shows and only so much time in which to watch them. (I also watched the second part of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion, which left me shaking with rage and disgust. I may write an entry after the final episode of the reunion airs, but all I will say for now is there are at least four disgusting pieces of shit on that show; five if you count Andy Cohen, whom I have never seen the appeal of, to be honest. I will probably stop watching this show and others of its ilk, as they aren’t fun to watch anymore.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

Empire State

Friday has arrived, Constant Reader, and it’s glorious (although I keep thinking it’s Saturday because I’d gotten used to going into the office on Fridays). After all the week’s insomnia, I slept gloriously last night–when I first went to bed Scooter joined me, cuddled up to me and started the purr machine, which draws sleep like a moth to a flame. Paul got home later than expected, so we watched Andor and an episode of Chucky, which we are about to give up on. It’s campy and funny, but it literally makes so little sense–which is admittedly also a part of its charm, and I do love that two of the three main characters are a young teen gay couple–we might be giving it up fairly soon. I also have some errands to run today–I have to get my flu shot and pick up a prescription–and I am also debating whether to make a Five Guys run while I’m out there. It’s been a while since I’ve experienced the glory that is Five Guys…but on the other hand, I could look at it as look how well I’ve done not eating any fast food for so long and not go, too. Decisions, decisions.

Then again it is Halloween season–we’ll probably stream Halloween Ends tonight–so it doesn’t seem right to not be watching horror, you know? I hope to finish my revisit of Interview with the Vampire today and move on to a reread of salem’s Lot; I also have Paul Tremblay’s short story collection and Joe Hill’s so perhaps I should consider diving into some short stories for a while as well. I think I only got one story into each–and I also want to read Shirley Jackson’s Edgar Award-winning short story at some point as well as part of another long term project I am working on (because how many things can I be working on at the same time? Let’s find out!), and I also got both the new Donna Andrews and the new Raquel V. Reyes novels (Dashing Through the Snowbirds and Calypso, Cooking and Corpses, respectively). Lots of good reading in my future, really–but there always is; my TBR stack is a who’s who of brilliant writers, really.

And when I am finished with my work for the day, I think I am going to start planning out the rest of the Scotty book (after finishing the chapter I am currently struggling with). It certainly can’t make writing it any harder, right?

A few weekends ago I talked to Ricky Grove, the host of The Paperback Show podcast about Daphne du Maurier and My Cousin Rachel (you can listen here if you’d like), which was a lot of fun–any excuse, really, to talk about Daphne du Maurier will be leapt at here in the Lost Apartment, for future reference–and Ricky is always fun to talk to; I can’t believe how long I’ve known Ricky now, where does the goddamned time go, anyway?

It has been quite a long time since I got into this business–as I said the other day, I’ve been doing this a third of my life now, which is simply insane, really, to think about–and it’s been quite a ride, to be certain. I’m a totally different person than I was twenty years ago, and there’s no way in hell twenty years ago I could have foreseen what those two decades held in store, just waiting for the time to be right to pounce on me. But it’s cool, you know; I’m pretty happy with the life I have and the direction it’s heading, even if I am more aware of the ticking down of the clock than I was before, to be sure. I’m behind on everything as always but progress was made this past week, and now that I have the schedule back that I prefer for the day job, I am hoping I will adapt to it rather quickly again and so I won’t have the insomnia or the “tired all day” feel that brings with it. There’s a short story deadline tomorrow that I wanted to make, so I thought last night about potential stories I have on hand that I could possibly polish tomorrow and try to get turned in–if they say no, they say no, and you can’t be accepted if you don’t turn anything in at all–so that’s a potential thing for me to do tomorrow. I also want to drop some books off at the library sale, and maybe wash and clean out the car. LSU plays a night game tomorrow, so I have the entire day free (I’ll probably have the Alabama-Tennessee game on in the background, ROLL TIDE!) to get things done and write and read and clean and…I guess we’ll just have to see how it all goes, won’t we?

And on that note, I am. heading into the spice mines before i head over to the office to get my flu shot. Have a happy and productive day, Constant Reader.

Never Forget

And now it’s Thursday, which always sort of feels like we’re on a greased slide heading into the weekend. Hurray! I slept really well last night, which was really nice, and was awake (as usual) before the alarm went off. Yesterday wasn’t a complete waste–the primary thing when I am mentally fatigued, as I was yesterday, is that it’s very hard for me to focus and incredibly easy for me to get distracted.

Not that it’s ever difficult to distract me from anything. I should have been voted most distracted when I was in high school.

I did pull some teeth, er, work on the book yesterday; it wasn’t easy and was incredibly difficult to get those words on the page, but that happens sometimes. It happened earlier this week and I wrote some shitty words and then turned around and revised them and finished the chapter, remarkably easily; I hope that will be the case when I get home tonight and sit down to the computer to start writing. I am still behind as ever on everything, but I am slowly starting to make some progress. I think Saturday this weekend is going to be a completely lost day for me–that eleven a.m. start time for the LSU-Tennessee game is perfectly timed to pretty much spoil the entire day; I may order groceries for pick-up after the game is over. I don’t know, I’ll probably play it by ear and see how the day goes, but I doubt very seriously I’ll get any writing done on Saturday–so maybe I can just sit in my chair and edit, I don’t know. The games stress me out so much; it’s insane that this is something I enjoy but I also need to remind myself, regularly: it’s just a game and it doesn’t really impact your life one way or the other; obviously it’s better to win than to lose, but in either case it doesn’t change anything in my day-to-day existence so why waste the energy getting so worked up over a game? There’s a reason that “fan” is derived from “fanatic”…which is something I remind myself every time I am watching a game and starting to get worked up. So incredibly crazy to get worked up over a college football game that really doesn’t matter in the overall scheme of things…

Which of course means I’ll be screaming at the television before the first quarter is half over.

I don’t think I am going to make the deadline for next year’s Bouchercon anthology; I have a story but I am not pleased with it nor am I sure what the right way to fix it could be–it’s been languishing in my files for quite some time, I think I originally got the idea for it watching the true crime docuseries I’ll Be Gone in the Dark–how the rapist/killer would access his victims, through drainage ditches and canals running behind properties (which is yet another reason my parents always wanted a fenced yard) made me start thinking about that very thing; what if a gay couple came home after a night at a gala fundraiser, arguing all the way home in the car, come home to find their adopted daughter tied up in the house and she says he’s still in the house…it’s the end I am, as always, having trouble sticking the landing with. I think maybe I should print it out again and reread it at some point over the weekend (because I have so little else to do), and maybe something will come to me. I like the ending but I don’t think it necessarily works, which is the primary problem; I think everything works right up until the end–and then it kind of falls apart. But if I clean up some of the earlier stuff…you never know.

And who knows? Maybe I am being overly critical, and should just submit the story and see what happens.

We watched some more of Your Honor last night, which keeps going even further and further astray, but I am also starting to understand the casting of Bryan Cranston even more (he’s a very charismatic and talented actor) because this series has a bit of a Breaking Bad, noir feeling to it: you do something wrong–bend a law, perhaps–and then it continues snowballing and you’ve already lost your moral compass and when do you say “enough” to lies and cover-ups and crimes? Do you keep digging your own grave? The fun part about it is there’s not really anyway to foresee how this is going to go, which makes watching it all the more fun. We also watched Andor, which I am loving. Seriously, I love what Disney is doing with the Star Wars universe with the television shows.

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader and remember–it’s Friday Eve!

Save Me a Place

Oddly enough, as I sat in my easy chair the other day watching college football games and letting my body and mind and creativity rest, I had an idea for either a stand alone book or a new series, one way or the other, and it’s something I find interesting enough that I might even consider it. It would be a difficult proposition, to be sure–given the decline in retail sales and everything going to an on-line and electronic model–but I was looking at a map of New Orleans on my iPad because it occurred to me that I didn’t know where Tulane’s not-so-new-anymore on-campus football stadium was; so I pulled up a map to look because I was thinking that was a great line for a Scotty book–I always forget there’s a football stadium in Uptown-so of course I had to go looking for it. The map also brought up businesses in the area and lo and behold, there’s a comic book shop uptown on the lake side of Claiborne and it hit me: no one has ever done a cozy series about a comic book shop and that opened up an entire world of possibilities for me: the main character is an aspiring comic book artist who works in the shop, and of course, you can get into the whole thing about who actually is into comics and the history of comic books and it would give me an excuse to actually learn more about comics and their history and…

You see how this ends up going, don’t you?

I know any number of comics geeks–Alex Segura Jr, author of this year’s brilliant Secret Identity, about the business side of producing comics, is one–and one of my best friends from college owns a comic book shop in central California, or did at some point–and of course my neighbor Michael is also heavily into comics, having gone to Comic Con in San Diego, even. And of course I’d get to make up shit, which is always a huge plus for me. I love making up shit! And of course, it would be fun to write from the point of view of a struggling artist.

I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t know anything about that…

The Saints played terribly yesterday and logged another “L” in the record book (how bad are the Falcons?) yesterday; I didn’t watch but rather followed on Twitter while I did things around the house. The Saints games sometimes cause me too much stress and then I am emotionally exhausted afterwards–too drained to be of much use, so sometimes I just follow it on Twitter or it’ll be on in the living room while I work in the kitchen. I did get the Costco delivery yesterday, and should probably run some errands at some point today, but it is Work-at-Home Monday and I have work I have to get done. I am behind still from the Bouchercon trip and the ensuing back injury, but am hopeful I will start getting caught up somewhat soon. Emails beget emails, though, and therefore that is a sisyphean task indeed.

We watched the new Star Wars show Andor last night, and I am so happy Deigo Luna’s character is getting an origin story. So far, the only show they’ve done I didn’t buy into completely was The Book of Boba Fett, and am thinking maybe we should give that another try at some point. After those three episodes we moved on to The Serpent Queen and American Gigolo, which I think we’re going to give up on. I love Jon Bernthal, but I’m just not buying this story for the character. It’s an interesting idea–and full props to them for turning it into a sequel series in which Julian actually goes to jail for the murder he was accused of committing in the film, but I’m just not really getting vested into the show, either, no matter how much I want to. The Serpent Queen remains fantastic, and gets better with each episode as Catherine explains to her new maid her philosophy of survival, illustrated with scenes from her past. Samantha Morton is fantastic as the older queen and the actress who plays her as a young woman is also equally good. But it’s a period of history I particularly love, and of course, Catherine de Medici is one of the most fascinatingly complex women to hold power in history. The reality of her life was dramatic enough to drive a series, and they’ve done a pretty decent job of following the actual history, with some adjustments here and there.

Also keeping an eye out for Hurricane Ian, which seems to have Florida’s Gulf Coast clearly in its sights. We are just outside the Cone of Uncertainty, which doesn’t mean we’re safe–there could always be another westward shift to the potential path–but I do concern myself with Florida and friends there. I don’t remember the last time Tampa took a direct hit; I don’t think they have in quite some time, and I can imagine a storm surge into the bay and into the rivers that drain into it would be enormously problematic for the city–as well as for Clearwater and St. Petersburg on the peninsula on the other side of the bay. Stay safe, people.

My podcast interview about Daphne du Maurier, with a particular emphasis on My Cousin Rachel, went really well. It was for my friend Ricky Grove, whom I know from my days in the Horror Writers Association and when I put on World Horror Con back in the day here in New Orleans (he is the author Lisa Morton’s partner–have you read Lisa? You should read Lisa). I can talk about du Maurier all day, and we did continue talking for at least another hour after we stopped recording; I do love to talk books and writing, after all, with the end result that I felt horribly drained when it was over. Ah, yes, the age-old problem of the introvert having to be an extrovert on a day when he usually doesn’t have to do anything of the kind. I retired to my easy chair, but found the draining of my energy to have been far too effective for me to focus clearly on anything. I did do another blog entry about my work–this time my Todd Gregory erotic novel Every Frat Boy Wants It, while starting others about Baton Rouge Bingo and the second Todd Gregory book (Games Frat Boys Play)–but when I tried to work on the book or anything else (including trying to read) I couldn’t get anything done so finally gave up and made myself useful around the house. Hopefully after an eyes-crossing day of data entry and quality assurance on testing logs, I’ll be able to dive back into the Scotty book. I know I am procrastinating with Chapter Three and should probably just stop worrying about it and move on, but that’s just not how my creativity works. Heavy heaving sigh. But that’s okay, the stress of being behind will come in handy as December 1 draws ever more near.

Or so I tell myself.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Hope you have a marvelous and lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Brown Eyes

Sunday morning and another lovely night’s sleep. I feel rested and relaxed this morning–yesterday I still felt like I wasn’t completely recharged yet–so I think today will be a good day of getting things done for me. One can hope, at any rate. Once I finish this I have to start getting ready for my podcast discussion on My Cousin Rachel this morning, which I am not certain I am prepared for. I also need to order that Costco delivery I never got around to yesterday–I felt tired after running my errands yesterday, and my brain wasn’t really functioning the way it needed to be to write, so I just sat in my chair and watched Tennessee beat Florida (the one time per year I root for Tennessee) and then LSU dismantle New Mexico 38-0 last night. I’ve not checked other scores, but I don’t think there were a lot of surprises other than Oklahoma’s almost-predictable almost-annual loss to Kansas State. I’ve not been giving college football much attention this season, but there were an awful lot of almost-upsets yesterday, which should make for an interesting season the further along we get into it.

Tropical Storm Ian continues to slightly move his track ever-so-slightly more west, so the Cone of Uncertainty keeps drawing nearer and nearer to New Orleans, but it looks as though landfall is going to be Wednesday–and ironically, being on the western side of the storm means we will get some lovely cooler weather as a result. I hate that about hurricane season, and obviously I worry about people in Florida (although if I were a right-winger, I’d say God isn’t clearly happy with the way Florida is being run) while at the same time being relieved we don’t have to worry about doing without power or having to leave for this one….but just because we’re getting closer to October doesn’t mean we’re done with the season just yet–it runs through December, after all. Hurray.

I got my contributor’s copy of Magic is Murder, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley yesterday, and what a lovely book it is, too. It’s always lovely to get a copy of your work in print, and as I am sure you’re been made aware by my endless self-promotion on this score, my story here is “The Snow Globe.” It’s another one of my New Orleans paranormal stories–I think there will be three of them seeing print this year (“The Rosary of Broken Promises” and “The Snow Globe” are already out; “A Whisper from the Graveyard” will be out soon) and I am in the process of writing yet another (“Parlor Tricks”) and developing still another (“When I Die”). It’s been a decent year for me and short stories, it appears, and I am hoping once I get this Scotty out of the way and finish the promo for Streetcar’s release that maybe I can focus on writing short stories again for awhile. I’d like to get those novellas finished and out of the way; there are three that are close to being finished and I think I can get them all published into one volume (those would be “Never Kiss a Stranger”, “Fireflies,” and “A Holler Full of Kudzu”–although sometimes I think the first and third might actually work as full-length novels ) and there are a couple of others I’d like to get finished in the new year (and how weird is it that I am already thinking about 2023?). I will probably also try to write another Scotty in the New Year (French Quarter Flambeaux is next up in that series) and I am thinking about maybe another Alabama book. And there’s also that romance I want to write, and the Leonardo mystery, and…

Yeah, I will never run out of ideas, I feel pretty confident in saying that.

We also finished Dahmer last night, which means we can move on to the new Star Wars show, Andor, which is cool because I absolutely loved the character in Rogue One and even though I know how he dies, I am glad they are giving him his own pre-Rogue One series. (I should watch Rogue One again at some point.) And a new episode of The Serpent Queen should drop tonight as well; so many riches to enjoy! And there are some other shows dropping soon that I can’t wait to see–both new shows and new seasons of old favorites (when will Ted Lasso be back? Anyone?)–and I’d also like to finish reading my Donna Andrews, so I can focus on reading horror for the month of October. October is also the month where A Streetcar Named Murder is set, so I should probably be doing some more promo this month to get ready for the release date in early December.

And of course, I need to get some writing done today around the Saints game.

On that note, I need to head into the spice mines so I can get the kitchen ready for the podcast. I am assuming that the podcast is merely an oral recording and not a visual broadcast, so I am not going to shave this morning…I may regret that decision in about an hour and a half. Have a terrific Sunday, y’all, and GEAUX SAINTS!!!