Tag: Ann Coulter

More Than This

Wednesday morning and the midpoint of the week. Huzzah! Yes, I am back to wishing my life away, as my mother used to call it. But I can abide, you know? I wasn’t rested properly yesterday, I don’t think, or else it was the off-and-on rain/thunderstorms we had yesterday. That wet cold air inside the office just makes me want to curl up somewhere and go to sleep under my pile of blankets, which makes the workday a bit of a slog. Ah, well. It’s supposed to continue like this until the weekend or so, when it’ll just be hot and sunny and humid and miserable. Yay! And Monday is my next infusion (second of three). Soon I’ll be giving myself shots. Can’t wait…although everyone tells me it’s easy; it’s a pre-loaded pen-like device I just need to stick myself with. And it’s not like my job hasn’t gotten me used to sticking myself and other people over the years. Sigh. It’s hard for me, sometimes, to wrap my mind around the whole this is the rest of your life thing. But it could be worse–it can always be worse–so I will accept this and not let it bug me. I’m sure I’ll eventually get so used to it I won’t even give it a second thought. It’s always the first time, you know? Just like I was nervous about the infusion (when they tell you all the things to look out for during, it can be a bit scary: “if you can’t breathe or have shortness of breath”, you know, things like that) until I did it for the first time.

Definitely will be bringing my book with me on Monday.

I guess Ann Coulter got tired of not being a part of the ICE raids and so decided to glorify genocide on social media, suggesting that the European genocide of indigenous Americans didn’t go far enough? She wound up deleting the post, which is more shocking than the post, to be honest; she’s always been one of those “freedom of speech means I can say the most disgusting things without apology” advocates. Ann Coulter has always been hot sewage, and back in the day she used to compete with Rush Limbaugh to see who could say the most revolting, inhuman kind of shit. Back in the 1990s, as I saw my parents and family getting sucked in more and more by Fox News1, I used to actually read books by right-wingers, including Ann Coulter. (My primary takeaway was they needed to hire better ghostwriters.) Don’t ever forget that Coulter also wrote the introduction to Phyllis Schlafly’s autobiography, and Schlafly was a monster. Like attracts like, I suppose. But since she turned on Trump for not being racist enough in his first term (she probably orgasms with every news report about ICE and Alligator Auschwitz), she’s not as popular on the right as she used to be; how very dare she be critical of MAGA’s God Emperor? I mean, she can’t even get booked on her ex-lover Bill Maher’s show anymore. But she deleted the post. What the fuck, Fraulein Coulter? Outrage used to be what got you out of bed in the morning and paid your bills. I certainly don’t believe she grew a conscience in her sixties.

After the stolen election of 2000, I no longer needed to read right-winger’s books because I didn’t really know what I was gaining by reading them anymore–I used to think it was better to know what they were thinking and saying, but this century, they’ve pretty much started saying the private stuff out loud. It’s impossible to go on-line or watch any news or anything without knowing what the Right’s position on anything and everything is–but you can be sure it’s rooted in racism, misogyny, and homophobia…same as it ever was, same as it ever will be.

Plus, sharing what I learned from reading those books and proximity to right wing voters? I was never believed by anyone on the left, so I just wound up being Cassandra on the walls of Troy…and truly understood her madness. It’s horrible not being believed…but everything I warned about is coming true.

Sigh.

It rained off and on all day yesterday–we even got a flash flood advisory in the afternoon–and I wasn’t really fully and completely mentally functional yesterday. My brain was loopy and my body was fatigued; I felt all day like I could go back to bed without a problem. When I got home from work I did some chores (didn’t finish them, though–there’s a load of laundry that needs to be fluffed and folded, and I need to finish the dishes to load in the dishwasher), and then worked on editing for a while. It didn’t go well, but I made progress, and I do feel more awake and rested so far this morning, so maybe tonight will go super-well. Stranger things have occurred, after all. We also watched the second to last episode of We Were Liars after Paul got home (later than usual), and then I went to bed earlier than usual. I think I need to get back into the going to bed at nine thing again. I also didn’t read anything last night because by the time I sat in my chair my brain was misfiring again. Heavy sigh. Maybe tonight? I think I just need to get back into the writing habit again; everything is still rusty and the gears don’t shift accordingly. so I need to retrain my brain and my body and my creativity into productivity again.

I can do it, I know I can.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Hump Day, Constant Reader, and I will be back again tomorrow morning.

I really appreciate the fact that the majority of pro wrestlers today focus more on their fitness–and have much better bodies than the ones in my youth did. I can easily see this dude dancing shirtless at Oz during Southern Decadence.
  1. In fairness, they were always right-wing; Rush and Fox just confirmed what they thought. ↩︎

All I Really Want to Do

Ah, Sunday in the Lost Apartment and how are you doing, Constant Reader? I slept pretty well last night, didn’t want to get out of the comfortable bed this morning, but nevertheless, here I am, having already downed one piece of coffee cake and cup of coffee and about to make a second cup. I don’t feel completely awake just yet, but I am hoping by the time I finish writing this I’ll be all warmed up to get back to my writing. I did some yesterday, about a thousand words or so, and I need to get strapped in and back to work this morning. Yesterday was an okay day; I didn’t get as much written as I would have liked, but I got some writing done. I didn’t read much of my book yesterday. Paul was off getting another tattoo and brought home a pizza from Midway on Freret (which is amazingly good, for the record). He didn’t get home until late, so we watched the first two episodes of The Recruit (there are so many of these similar type shows we’ve watched that we aren’t really sure which one is which, and the plots all kind of blur together, but they’re entertaining enough to watch), and I was tired and went to bed. I did also run my errands yesterday as well, and was very tired when the second episode finished; I was dozing off during it, which was why I thought it best to just go ahead and go on to bed and be done with the day, which is always a good thing now that the timeline of my life is now in the “collapse of the country” final stage. Woo-hoo! Just what I always wanted and dreamed of.

I was thinking yesterday–I saw something somewhere on-line about people “needing to prepare to live in a dystopia”–and it hit me that I already lived in one; New Orleans after Katrina, with so much of the city in ruins and so much not open and so few people here. It was so eerily quiet in those days, a weird stillness that seemed so very wrong, and adapting to schedule my days around when things would be open because if you didn’t pay attention you could miss your window of opportunity to get groceries, of which there wasn’t much to choose from. Same with the gym, the post office, places to eat–there also was a shortage of workers, so that was another drawback to businesses opening. I considered getting a part time job on top of the ones I already had at the time, just to help out…I never did. That was also when I was probably in the best physical condition of my life, too–the only thing I had control over was my body, so I controlled it as much as possible. Good times, right? Sigh.

It’s also Black History Month, which isn’t being celebrated by the government this year since, you know, the country is being run by racists now–well, openly racist and proud of it trash–and are doing everything they can to take us back to the days when being queer was a crime, anyone racialized had no rights when it came to white people, and women were second-class citizens who were completely responsible for home and family (despite the fact that women have always been in the workplace as working professionals–but they were limited to what jobs they could have: secretary, teacher, librarian, waitress, flight attendant, etc.). I know it’s difficult for white people to read Black fiction because they aren’t used to not being the heroic center of the story1; but reading books by voices different than those that cater directly to you is necessary because you need to see other perspectives that are also valid. Works by Wanda Morris and Tananarive Due bring the reality of being Black during Jim Crow to vivid horrific life; I am still reeling from the horrific truth of both Due’s The Reformatory and Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys. I can’t encourage people enough to read Black authors, and not just for Black History Month, which is performative support as opposed to actual support–like your rainbows in June that disappear on the 30th, not to be seen again until June 1 of the next year. I appreciate even the performative support, honestly, but it doesn’t fool me that it goes very deep, either.

We all really just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace, you know?

But people who’ve never been oppressed will claim to be oppressed and play victim–how many times have we seen that play out? I’ve seen straight white women call gay men pedophiles (including me) publicly on social media, and then cry and make themselves the victim for the outraged reaction from the gay men. Yes, bitch, I’m the bad one for blocking you for calling me a pedophile. Drink bleach, bitch. I don’t forgive or forget homophobia; it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back every single time. There’s never any coming back from that–and microaggressions also add up until I can’t make excuses for people anymore–and another life lesson of the last five years have been that even a microaggression has to be called out. If it talks like a homophobe and acts like a homophobe…yeah, they are inevitably a homophobe…and yes, even people who think they are allies can be homophobes. I never wanted to be THAT gay, you know, the militant constantly pointing out how offensive people are being and so forth…but why protect the delicate feelings of snowflakes who clearly don’t give a flying fuck about how I–or any other queer–feel?

I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the schadenfreude of watching those racist white bitches who gleefully wouldn’t vote for the highly qualified Black woman finding out they are also DEI hires, that they were the primary beneficiary from equal opportunity laws, and now they can just put up with the sexist jokes and the not getting paid the same and not getting promoted that turned working women into feminists in the first place. What’s even more interesting, at least to me, is that the anti-feminist women (Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, and others of their ilk) who benefited from feminist activism worked to undermine their success–and undermined all other women in the process. I really wish someone would just say to Ann Coulter when she’s bloviating (hilariously, MAGA hates her and the Left will never go anywhere near her, so who precisely is her current audience? Racists who hate Trump? Huge audience there, Ann, well done.) “shut up, no one cares what you think, you’re just a woman who couldn’t get into an Ivy for law school.” (Which is why she hates the Ivys, right there. There’s a lot wrong with the Ivys and the public perception of their ‘greatness’–but not letting Coulter in is worthy of applause.) The hilarity that they also voted to preserve their abortion rights but voted for Trump–you just can imagine how fucking smug they felt in the voting booth–who might ban abortion nation-wide with an executive order made me roll my eyes at the mental gymnastics those smug racist misogynist skanks had to perform to rationalize their votes.

White women have always propped up white supremacy because they “believed” that it protected them. I would even go so far as to say it also afforded them a taste of power that they didn’t get to feel otherwise in their lives (Southern women really lean into that ‘steel magnolia’ thing, which has always bugged the shit out of me. Just say you’re proud to be trash and be done with it), because in antebellum times they had power over their enslaved (check out They Were Her Property sometime) and after emancipation, they were still “above” freed Blacks, even with the power of life or death over the men. (Louisiana’s bizarre inheritance laws, which I researched again for A Streetcar Named Murder, have everything to do with rich men down here having both white families and biracial ones; so they couldn’t disinherit the white family in favor of the biracial one…which was enough of a problem that it had to be legislated here.)

Ugh.

And on that somber sad note, I will head into the spice mines and get to work. Have a lovely Sunday, and I may be back later. One never can be sure.

  1. Precious delicate little snowflakes that they are. ↩︎

My Girl

Work-at-home Friday this morning, and Sparky let me sleep a little later this morning before getting insistent (the swipes at the face have claws out more). So here I sit, with my first cup of coffee and the weather is supposed to be cooler today; we’re having a cold front. Hilariously, the local weather source I use said today is “false fall” because it’s only going to be ninety…temperatures here are definitely skewed over what most of the rest of the country experiences. I also slept very well last night, deeply and restfully and through the night, which was lovely and kind of why I feel so good this morning. I have some things to get done around the house today in addition to my usual work-at-home duties, and some errands to get done later as well.

The DNC concluded last night, and while the evening had a different vibe than the rest of the week, it was lovely seeing the Exonerated Five calling out the demented Martyr of Mar-a-Lago did my heart very good (reminder to self: watch When They See Us) and the Vice-President’s acceptance speech was incredibly powerful. There were other speakers–the young Black congressional candidate from Alabama was amazing; as was Elizabeth Warren (and it was great seeing her get her flowers from the crowd)–and so were many of the others. I feel very hopeful about the future for the first time since November of 2016, and that’s saying something. It isn’t going to be what we hope, and the Republicans will fight her agenda every step of the way with their lies and smears and general awfulness; those of us who can remember the rise of the racist Tea Party will have to continually remind people of who and what they are. The MAGA movement has always been toxic and most Americans have always seen it that way. But like the Know-Nothings, the Whigs, and the Federalists, MAGA just needs to die, and can we but hope that this election will finish that anti-American racist movement once and for all.

A fine example of how awful they are is their reaction to, and treatment of, Gus Walz; whose emotions overcame him during his father’s acceptance speech, burst into tears as he jumped to his feet with love and pride and shouted “that’s my Dad!” on camera. Anyone who saw that and wasn’t moved and touched touched by this testament to the strength of their family love (and what amazing parents the governor and his wife are) is a soulless, craven monster. The same people who’ve been screaming that “Barron is off limits!” (as were the Bush twins) but then went after a seventeen-year-old? You’re trash, and Barron is no longer off-limits, as far as I am concerned; these are the same people who called Amy Carter ugly and Chelsea Clinton the White House dog…not to mention all the racist hate they threw at the Obama girls. Imagine being raised in the Trump family; what choice did the kid have to be anything other than a sociopath like his tragic older half-siblings?1

But we’re supposed to ignore the Right’s children and leave them alone, like the sociopathic Palin children, or Lauren Boebert’s felon son “because the kids are off-limits” until a new Democratic candidate comes around with kids and the story about politicians’ kids change.I am tired of Republicans and the media holding the Democrats and the left to a standard of behavior that is never applied to the Right. They are literally the biggest hypocrites of all time, and it’s past time they get dragged for the filth they are. Ann Coulter’s attack (now deleted) on Twitter about Gus Walz was about what one can expect from the talking heads on the Right. MAGA already hates her for turning on Trump, the Left hates her because she’s always been a horrible woman, so who exactly is listening to her nowadays anyway? She never is on television any more because no one wants to watch, and she’s no better than the irrelevant TERF bitch in Scotland. I can only imagine the kind of toxic environment/household she grew up in. I had started writing a book a while back where I killed off a Ann Coulter-type character; I’ve hated that woman for years. Maybe I should find that manuscript…

This weekend my goal is to do some reading and writing. I can’t believe it’s almost Labor Day already. I’m not sorry to see this brutally hot summer come to a close (I never am) and of course, I love the fall, with the cooler weather and it being football season. Plus, I can no longer use the heat as an excuse to not get things done!

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines to get my work-at-home duties completed. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later.

  1. And for the record, I am also tired of people making victims out of Republican wives. They are exactly where they want to be. Melania could have left at anytime, and so could Usha Vance. But they are craven grifters just like the men they married. They deserve no consideration from us. None. They are not women like Hilary Clinton or Michelle Obama or Rosalynn Carter. They are the modern-day equivalent of Klan wives who falsely accused young Black men and got them lynched. Save your sympathies for the women he assaulted. ↩︎

(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I

Wednesday and Pay the Bills Day has rolled around yet again, which is fine. I was tired when I got home from work (I also picked up the mail), so just was kind of blah. I got about 1800 words done yesterday, which was good. They were not good words, but they were words, and I am counting that as a win and progress. Paul is still not feeling quite up to snuff yet, so it was a rather quiet evening at home. We’re watching Palm Royale, and I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m still not really sure what it is, to be honest, but it’s okay, I guess? Maybe another episode, and I’ll see if I want to continue. The cast is really quite good, but I’m not really sure what the show is all about, or what it’s supposed to be, if that makes any sense? I mean, I know I should feel some sympathy for the main character, but what she wants and needs is inexplicable to me so far. Ah, well.

I slept really well last night and feel pretty rested this morning. Whether that means I’ll make it through the day feeling that way is another question, of course. But I feel like I’m back into my normal groove, whatever that may be now, and like I said, I did get some writing done last night, so hopefully tonight I’ll be able to do more. I also need to get into the gym one night this week, probably not tonight, but potentially tomorrow will work as well.

It’s kind of nice to realize that, stamina issues aside, I am healed and whole for the first time since January 2023. And now I need to figure out a lot of stuff, as always. But it’s nice to feel clear-headed for a change, and rested, and relaxed. I had literally no idea how much I’d accepted my high anxiety as normal, and how lovely it is to have that constant inner voice silenced. I’m doing good work when writing, too–the first drafts are of course horrible, but I am very pleased with the revisions. I also need to update my to-do list, so I have a better idea of everything I want to submit to and try to time out my work going forward. I know I need to get this last short story I wrote revised by Sunday, and I’d like to finish the one I started last week. I need to finish “When I Die” and another one for the collection and then it is finished; praise Jesus and pass the ammunition. I also think I’ll be able to get this other y/a revised this year and submitted as well. And I want to write a story for an anthology about Hollywood crime; and I think I can actually revise the first chapter of Chlorine and use it for this–not that I won’t use it for Chlorine, either; I am a writer so I can do whatever I want with my words whenever I want, can’t I?

And I am really leaning into turning that unfinished Paige manuscript from all those years ago into a Scotty book, and it will be lovely killing off (a fictionalized) Ann Coulter. It’s funny when I think about how politicized I became after the stolen election of 2000 (you want to deny the 2020 results, well, I can deny the 2000 one as well. I will never believe Bush won that election; the Supreme Court interfered and disenfranchised God only knows how many Floridians, and look where that horrible decision got us); I started my political reeducation in the 1990’s. I’d been brought up to be a conservative Republican, but I also stopped hating myself when I walked away from that “value” system. But the Reagan/Republican/Evangelical response to HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s showed me how meaningless and empty those values were, and contraindicated by my religious upbringing. Jesus did not come as a destroyer, He came as a peacemaker with a message of God’s love and forgiveness. The entire concept that He would return to oversee the end of the world and the final battle between good and evil is some pagan-style nonsense. In the 1990s, as my parents got sucked into Fox News (it really was the perfect news station for them), I began questioning everything. I couldn’t vote Republican because they think I’m a second-class citizen (if even that high), and were perfectly content to treat me that way with no discount on my taxes. But I’d also been raised to believe that Democrats were evil and Communist and America-haters–but when I started delving more into it, and actually following the news and reading books (on both sides), I began to see something strange. Democrats, and books by and about them, were generally about helping people and policies to make people’s lives better; Republicans seemed to only be interested in power, consolidating that power, and gaming the Democrats. The 2000 election was a slap in the face–and I was furious that Democrats rolled over so easily (see how Republicans tried to subvert an election loss in 2020? I am also not convinced 2016 was legitimate, either; two can play that game). I don’t bother to trying to understand both sides anymore; the explosion of idiocy, lunacy, and racism that Obama’s election in 2008 unleased was probably one of the most disgusting things I’ve had the misfortune to bear witness to in my lifetime. I don’t need to find common ground with people who want to strip me of my rights as an American–that my books shouldn’t be published, call me a groomer and a pedophile. Those people want me dead, and no one should ever have to explain to other humans why they are deserving of the same treatment as everyone else. Sorry, they are and always have been my enemy, have spent most of my life trying to destroy me, and won’t be happy until the world is free of the scourge of queer people.

They want me gone? I want THEM gone–because I also don’t see them making life anything but miserable for people who are not like them, whether it’s sexuality or gender identity or the amount of melanin in their skin.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

It’s Just a Matter of Time

Sunday morning and the last day of Saints & Sinners. It’s been a lot of fun, if tiring. I headed down there yesterday afternoon in a Lyft, hung out in our suite for a bit and practiced for my reading–I read my story “The Ditch” from School of Hard Knox, and I think it went very well. It was a terrific reading session; Rob Byrnes, Jean Redmann, Marco Carocari, David Slayton, David Pederson and one other person whose name I can’t recall off the top of my head; my apologies because I really enjoyed what he read.I then went back up to our suite and came back down for the anthology launch with Paul. Those readings were also fantastic–and I am looking forward to reading the book more than I already was. I am also the judge for next year, so I’ll be reading a lot of stories in the fall. That will suffice as my volunteer work for 2024, so don’t bother to ask; the answer will be no.

I started reading an old Evan Hunter novel yesterday, Last Summer. It was a book I’d always wanted to read when I was younger, and I was reminded of it sometime during the pandemic, so I got a copy of it and its sequel, Come Winter, from eBay and so I started reading it at long last yesterday. I’ve never seen the film, either; but I do remember Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas (aka John-Boy Walton) starred in it. It also put me in mind of another trope from that era of publishing; books with teenagers as protagonists (and/or antagonists) were almost always set during the summer, and so many were set on coastal islands–this one, Summer of ’42, A Summer Place, etc. It of course makes sense; teenagers had a lot of free time to get into shenanigans during the summer, especially when they were on a vacation somewhere. I’ve actually fallen into that trope a couple of times myself–Dark Tide, Lake Thirteen–and numerous other stories I would like to tell at some point. I do like the idea of gradually getting rid of all this paper around here by digitizing or disposing of things that I’ll never get around to writing. I don’t want to start writing fast in a frenzied attempt to write everything I want to before I die–and there’s always new ideas, too. But i know I’d really like to eventually get back to that novel where I based the victim on Ann Coulter…hmmm, maybe that could be the next Scotty. That’s actually a very good idea. Hmmmm.

It’s so nice to be around writers. It really is a balm for my soul. I did write some yesterday morning, but I am not going to even try today. I am very tired–I’ve done a lot of walking this weekend–and of course having to be “on” is tiring. The truth is I am not at 100% yet, much as I want to believe that I am, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One exciting development of the weekend is that I experienced no stress, anxiety or stage fright for my reading yesterday. Not only was I calm and not sweating buckets, I was actually able to relax and enjoy the experience. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before? It was wild. I’ve actually been relaxed the entire weekend; I don’t believe I understood before how much my anxiety impacted me at events like this. Having a calm and quiet head is a lovely thing, and now that the creativity has come back, I might actually start enjoying my life again.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time reminiscing about past S&S weekends, too; remembering how it all started, how much of it was done on a fraying shoestring because there was no money for it, and held in donated spaces at gay bars. It also used to be in May, so the weather was a LOT hotter. Paul and I used to always get the pool suite at the Olivier House for our home base, and people always used to wind up in our room later in the evening to drink and socialize and have a lot of fun. I couldn’t do that now–as it is, i stayed up past my usual bedtime Friday night and paid for it all day yesterday (legs are tired today, too). I also came up with a title for my memoir should I ever try to write one: Unreliable Narrator.

And LSU won the SEC women’s gymnastics championships last night in very dominant style. They weren’t as on as they usually are, and still set an incredibly high score and really have the potential to win the national title this year, too. And the US had a great outcome at the World Figure Skating Championships, winning two golds (men’s and ice dance) and a silver (women’s).

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll most likely see you tomorrow.

Together We’re Better

Yesterday actually turned out to be quite lovely.

I was a little bleary when I got up yesterday morning (my Fitbit advises me I only slept deeply for 3 hours, 48 minutes; the rest was “light sleep” and I woke up three times), but for whatever reason, I decided to start getting to work on things. I started answering emails (I am very careful with email. I refuse to let it control my life, which it easily can; so I answer emails over the weekends and in the mornings, save my responses as drafts, and send them all after lunch. I do not send emails after five pm CST; I do not read them, either. Email at one point took over my life, which made getting anything done impossible and raised my stress levels to unbelievable heights. I realized anyone who absolutely, positively needs to reach me has my cell phone number…and if I don’t trust you with my cell phone number…you don’t really need an answer right away. And guess what? The world didn’t end, I didn’t miss out on anything, and nothing became harder) while reading coverage of the LSU debacle from Saturday night (one thing I did mean to mention and didn’t yesterday; I try not to be overly critical of college athletes because they are basically kids. It’s easy to forget that when you’re watching on television, but when you see them on the sidelines with their helmets off, or while walking down Victory Hill to the stadium in their suits and ties…you see a bunch of teenagers and young men in their early twenties. They are kids—and those baby faces on those big muscular bodies is a very strange juxtaposition sometimes). I decided on the way home from Baton Rouge that while I do, indeed, love football, I really shouldn’t give up my weekends to it all fall. Now that LSU is definitely out of the running for anything, I’ll probably not watch as much football as I would if they were still in contention for anything. I’ll still watch LSU, and occasionally I may spend an afternoon watching a big game—the SEC title game, the play-offs—I am not going to spend every Saturday pretty much glued to the television all day, flipping between games all day. And I also rarely enjoy watching the Saints—I love them, they’re my guys, my team, my heart—but their games are so damned stressful it’s hard to enjoy them, and when the games is over I am always, win or lose, emotionally and physically and mentally exhausted. So, I decided it made more sense to get things done, check in on the score periodically, and not sweat it too much. (Good thing. Like LSU, the Saints led the entire game, folded like a newspaper in the fourth quarter and wound up losing.) I made groceries, filled the car’s gas tank, and before going, I started weeding shit out of my iCloud and saving it all to my back-up hard drive.  I wound up freeing up over four hundred and seven gigabytes in my flash storage, and suddenly my computer was running very quickly again.

And yes, it’s my fault.* I have a gazillion pictures files, going back to digital camera days. I used to back up my hard drive and my flash drives regularly to the cloud—and those folders are enormous. I don’t probably need all of it—I was weeding through bits here and there as I moved the files over to the back-up hard drive (eventually planning on copying them up to Dropbox), and started finding all kinds of interesting things. Story fragments I’d forgotten, book ideas and anthology ideas and essays I’d started; some of these things are in very rough, first draft form—and got left behind as my addled, AHDH-like brain moved on to the next thirty or forty ideas for all of the above. I also was kind of amused to see how I often I plagiarize myself; I had a completely different idea for the book I wanted to call A Streetcar Named Murder fifteen years ago—which I can still use at some point, just have to come up with a new title. I’d forgotten that all the way through the process Need was called A Vampire’s Heart; my editor suggested changing it after I turned the book it. It was a wise choice; my title was very romance sounding and Need was hardly that. It was also interesting seeing, over the years, how many different ideas I’ve had for a gay noir set in the world of ballet (damn you, Megan Abbott!). I discovered that Murder in the Garden District actually began as Murder on the Avenue (a title I can repurpose for an idea I had last week); I found the original files for Hollywood South Hustle, the Scotty book that turned into a Chanse MacLeod, Murder in the Rue Ursulines; I found the files for the Colin book that tells us what he was doing and where he was between Mardi Gras Mambo and Vieux Carré Voodoo; I found the original Paige novel I started writing in 2004, in which an Ann Coulter-like pundit from New Orleans is murdered; I found the first three chapters of the Scotty Katrina book, Hurricane Party High,  in which they don’t evacuate during a fictional hurricane, and the chapters where I rewrote it, had the, evacuate to Frank’s sister’s in rural Alabama (and we meet Frank’s nephew Taylor for the first time—and I also remembered that they belonged to some weird kind of religious cult and that Taylor was going to come to New Orleans in the future to visit during their version of rumspringa, but eventually abandoned the idea completely and never did a Scotty/Katrina book; was reminded that Dark Tide began as Mermaid Inn; that I wrote the first chapter of Timothy during the summer of 2003; and if I even tried to list all the iterations that wound up being #shedeservedit, we would be here all day (Sins of Omission, I think, was my favorite earlier title; again, a completely different book with some slight similarities…I may have to take a longer look at some of those iterations because being reminded of them all, I also remembered that I really liked all the versions).

I also found many, many nonfiction pieces I’ve written over the years—many of which I’d long since forgotten about—so maybe that essay collection won’t take quite as long to pull together as I had originally thought. Huzzah!

And I also discovered something else that I knew but had slipped out of my consciousness: that Bury Me in Shadows was called, for the first and second drafts, Bury Me in Satin—which gives off an entirely different vibe, doesn’t it? I wrote a very early version of it as a short story while in college, called it “Ruins,” but never wrote a second draft because I knew it wasn’t a short story; it needed to be a book, and one day I would write it. I was never completely comfortable with the story, to be honest; I wasn’t sure how I could write a modern novel built around a Civil War legend in rural Alabama. I absolutely didn’t want to write a fucking Lost Cause narrative—which is what this easily could have become, and people might come to it thinking it is, and are going to be very angry when they find out it is not that—but I really wasn’t sure how to tell the story…and in my mind, I thought of it as Ruins—which I freely admit is not a great title, and has been over-used.

As luck would have it, I was watching some awards show—I can’t begin to try to remember what year—and one of the nominated groups performed. I’d never heard of The Band Perry before; and the song they performed, “If I Die Young,” absolutely blew me away. (I just remembered, I kind of used the title as guidance when writing Need—always trying to remember he became undead very young) The first two lines of the chorus are this:

If I die young,

Bury me in satin

And I thought to myself, Bury Me in Satin is a perfect title for the Civil War ghost story! Melancholy and sort of romantic; I’ve always thought of hauntings as more about loss than being terrifying (you do not have to go full out jump scare, use gore or blood or violence to scare the reader, and if you doubt me, read Barbara Michaels’ Ammie Come Home), which is why I’ve always loved the Barbara Michaels novels that were ghost stories. That was the feeling I wanted to convey, that sad creepiness, and longing—I wanted a Gothic feel to the book, and I felt that line captured what I wanted perfectly. But as I wrote it, it didn’t quite feel as right as it did in that moment (I still love the song—and the video is interesting and kind of Gothic, doing a Tennyson Lady of Shalott thing), and then one day it hit me: changed ‘satin’ to ‘shadows’, and there’s your perfect title.

And so it was.

Oh dear, look at the time. Till tomorrow, Constant Reader! I am off to the spice mines! Have a lovely Monday!

*I will add the caveat to this that anything stored in the Cloud should not affect the flash storage in the actual computer and its operating system, and yes, I am prepared and more than willing to die on that hill.

Dress

And it’s Thanksgiving, and a holiday! Huzzah for holidays! Thanksgiving isn’t really one of my favorites (other than the obligatory four day weekend that results; I wonder who had the brilliant idea to have the holiday fall on a Thursday instead of Friday in the first place? Give that person a Nobel Prize, please, even if it’s posthumous), but I’m really not much of a holiday person now, nor have I ever really been.

For me, it was always about time off–from school, from work, from responsibility–and now as an adult? I just appreciate paid time off from work, which is always welcomed.

I actually slept late this morning, too–almost all the way to nine thirty, without waking up once and looking at the clock and thinking oh go back to sleep for a bit. This is, obviously, unusual; I must have needed the rest, frankly, so I am not going to question it at all. I am taking the day off from everything guilt-free–it’s a goddamned holiday, so my guilt can just fuck right off–and in a moment, once this is finished, I am going to take my cappuccino into the living room and embrace The Hot Rock and some short stories.

I am making a turkey breast roast (that sounds just wrong) in the slow cooker today in a nod to the holiday–it’s a very simple recipe and then when it’s done I shred the meat with a fork, so it’s really pulled turkey–and yes, I make boxed stuffing because a) it’s perfectly edible and fine and b) if you use chicken broth instead of water, it’s even better. Plus, it’s easy. And the older I get, the more I embrace easy. (I still, however, will make a cheesecake from scratch because it’s so much better.)

I try not to engage much on Twitter–tempting as it may be, the amount of trolls there is truly amazing, and I certainly don’t have the time to bother with keyboard warrior trash– but at the same time, Twitter can be highly entertaining. (My standard rule of thumb for engagement is this: if I start writing an angry and/or snarky response to something someone has tweeted, I either report the original or block the person. It’s enormously cathartic.) I remember being riveted last Christmas, for example, by the massive meltdown of RWA (hard to believe we haven’t reached the one year anniversary of that, isn’t it?).

One of the most enjoyable things I’ve watched/read/scrolled through was the conservative reaction, led by Grifter Supreme Candace Owens, to Harry Styles appearing on the cover of Vogue in a dress. Harry, obviously, doesn’t have a fuck to give about pearl-clutching trash like Owens and her audience; it’s actually lovely to see such a handsome young man with a big career secure enough in his own masculinity to don a dress on a major fashion magazine cover–and it’s also historic, as he is the first male to ever grace a Vogue cover (something Owens herself will never do, but the thirst for it is fucking real). As RuPaul has famously said, “we’re all born naked and everything else is drag.” Fashion and styles change all the time–and it really wasn’t all that long ago that men wore make-up, wigs, heels, and tights. So, apparently, Owens doesn’t believe the Founding Fathers were masculine enough for her?

Anyway, it was thoroughly enjoyable watching her get dragged for the filth she is on Twitter. Like so many on the right (and let’s be honest–there are some on the left as well) she’s in it for the grift; being the go-to female black voice for the right is apparently lucrative enough for her–married to a white male whose own “masculinity”, as defined by the right, is questionable–to continue being a sideshow barker trying to stay relevant and keep the cash coming in.

And speaking of grifts, Ann Coulter certainly has become irrelevant, hasn’t she? (I am NOT complaining. Back in the day, I used to read her books–I used to read a lot of right wing polemics passing as non-fiction political tomes because I thought it was important to not only see what they were actually selling and saying, but to try to understand their position. All it did was convince me that they were sideshow hucksters hawking snake oil and grievance, so I abandoned that around 2003. And trust me, if you’ve read one Ann Coulter pack of lies from cover to cover, you don’t need to read any others.)

There’s only so much toxicity one brain can handle, frankly.

We started watching an Australian series on Acorn last night, Mystery Road, which stars Judy Davis and a lot of indigenous Australians (which is awesome); it’s interesting and entertaining, and I would imagine is going to have a lot to say about Australian racism and how the indigenous there are treated. Judy Davis is always marvelous in everything (I can never watch the Renee Zellweger Judy Garland film because I’ve already seen a definitive Judy Garland, and that was Judy Davis’), and the rest of the cast are quite good as well. The premise is very simply that two young man vanish in the middle of a wasteland–taken from their vehicle, with the doors left open and the motor running–and it also is taking a look at the community itself; I suspect the show is a slow burn. They also bring in police detective from elsewhere who is indigenous himself (played by Aaron Pederson). The two boys who disappear are a white backpacker and a local indigenous soccer hero; it’ll be interesting to see where the show goes. (I had to look up the actor, and apparently the second season is set elsewhere, with Pederson working with a new local cop in a different location)

I’m not sure how we’ll spend today, but whatever we do, it will be relaxing and chill.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Cold As You

Politics has rarely interested me when it comes to fiction; the reality all too often reads like unbelievable fiction, and it’s also there to read in all its horror in history. I stopped reading political non-fiction back in the day, probably some time around or after Katrina–and when I became involved with the National Stonewall Democrats, I was actually living in that world part time, and had no desire to read about it any longer. Paul and I avoided The West Wing for years for this very reason–only to become completely addicted to it when Bravo was running reruns, eventually renting the back seasons from Netflix and bingeing through its entire run, while watching the final seasons as they aired. It remains one of my favorite television programs of all time; sometimes I think it would be lovely to go back and rewatch it, but it was a balm for us during the Bush administration.

I used to, as I said, read political non-fiction from both sides of the aisle as well as from theoretically unbiased journalists; I used to read, believe it or not, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Peggy Noonan, along with Al Franken and Matt Taibbi and others. I always felt it was important to read not only those who were in theory unbiased, but also to read the extremes of both sides–it’s always important, I thought, to know what both sides are saying and thinking to rev up their own extreme bases. While I always paid attention to politics I always considered myself more apolitical than anything else; my primary concerns were initially to stop people from dying from HIV and then to get some sort of legal recognition that my sexuality was not grounds for inequal treatment in the eyes of the law. The 2000 election debacle energized me; the country seemed to be veering off course and the results of that election changed the country and not for the better, which meant it was time to get to work.

I never read Allen Drury’s Washington novels; as I said, I was never all that interested in fiction based in politics. Robert Ludlum was the closest I ever came to reading political thrillers, and I was a huge fan of his throughout the late 1980’s and 1990’s. But political thrillers can be terrific reads; my question is are they crime novels? Thrillers are a subgenre of crime fiction, but do political thrillers actually count as crime novels? I suppose, in theory, they are; this is the question I’ve been grappling with since I finished reading The Coyotes of Carthage yesterday.

Andre marvels, watching a kid, a stranger of maybe sixteen, pinch another wallet. This lift makes the kid’s fifth, at least that Andre’s seen this morning–two on the train, two on the underground platform, and now this one on the jam-packed escalator that climbs toward the surface. The kid’s got skills, mad skills. He makes his lift and keeps on moving. There. Right there. The kid picks up another, his sixth, with the practiced grace of a ballerino, this time the mark, some corporate chump, probably a lobbyist, with slicked-back hair and a shit-eating grin. No one suspects a thing, and why should they? This kid blends in, looks like a prep-school student–and , who knows, perhaps he is–his aesthetic complete with a bookbag, khakis, and a dog-ered copy of de Tocqueville tucked beneath his arm. The kid reminds Andre of himself at that age–lean, hungry, steel eyes with smooth skin–but Andre concedes that he never possessed this kid’s talent.

Aboveground the kid disappears into the big-city bustle, and Andre thinks, Good for you, li’l man. Go in peace. For sure, the kid has plenty of places to hide. Northwest this morning is a mess: snowy, busy, noisy, the perfect urban jungle in which to flee. Andre works around the corner, and a lifetime ago, his family made a home inside a boarded-up rathole six blocks over. Andre has, in fact, loved in the District his entire life, thirty-five years save a stint across the river, two years in juvie for a grift gone bad on a nearby street. Seventeen years ago, when he left kiddie correctional, he never imagined he’d work on K Street, or that he’d own a walk-in closet full of three-piece suits, and the sudden realization, that he might lose it all, cuts like shards of glass crushed into the lining of his stomach.

Dre, our main character in this exceptionally fine debut novel by Steven Wright, isn’t necessarily likable, but he is understandable, and really, that’s the key with unlikable and unpleasant characters: as long as the reader can understand and empathize with an unlikable character, they will come along for the ride and may even root for that character. (As I like to say, the best note on character I was ever given by an editor when I was writing an unlikable character: even Hitler loved his dogs. ) The key is to find their humanity, and even when the character is doing unlikable things, you won’t lose the reader. It’s a skill set to be sure, but Steven Wright does this extremely well in a debut novel, and that’s really saying something.

Dre is a Black man who works for a political consulting firm in Washington, and one who is very good at what he does. He went overboard on his last assignment and almost blew a slam-dunk election, so his job is in jeopardy and if he weren’t being mentored by one of the founding partners of the firm, he would definitely be out already. Instead, he is given a punishment assignment: to get an initiative passed in a rural backwoods South Carolina county that really isn’t in the best interests of the local electorate but rather that of a large corporation who will poison everything in the county but will inevitably suck it dry of its resources and then leave behind nothing but wreckage. Dre comes from a broken home and has a brother who was also an addict; as teens they were small-scale dealers in order to survive and a deal gone horribly wrong put Dre into juvie. But he came out of juvie determined to go on the straight and narrow and build a life for himself…so politics seemed like a natural place for him to go.

But now in his mid-thirties, his life is crumbling around him: he has self-destructed his career; his fiancee has just dumped him for another man; his brother has ALS and he’s having to pay for his care as well as support his brother’s caregiver/girlfriend; and he’s questioning the decisions he’s made throughout his life to bring him to this place where he is now stuck in a backwoods redneck part of South Carolina running a campaign with no staff other than a rather sweet young intern–who turns out to be his mentor’s grandson. This election is a microcosm of everything that is currently wrong with our political system, and its deep cynicism; and Dre is having to face all of that, along with questioning what he is doing with his life for money, while his world continues to crumble around him.

All of the characters, while seen through Dre’s cynical eyes, are well-developed and well-rounded and completely believable; he sees very clearly their worth and their value and yet is incapable, because of who he has become through this cynical work, of connecting with any of them because of his own loss of humanity. This ballot initiative, so important for him to win if he wants to keep his job, is symbolic of his life; what do you do when you realize that not only have your sold your soul, but it may be too late to buy it back?

I greatly enjoyed this book from start to finish, and it’s a very powerful debut. It says a lot about humanity, the state of politics in this country, and the influence of dark money and how that has further corrupted an already corrupt system. But Dre’s search for his own humanity, his dark night of the soul, is what drives this strongly written story, and through Dre, requires the reader to do the same. The book offers no answers, of course; because those answers have to come from us.

What cost freedom?

Born This Way

Monday and we survived Weekend One of Carnival Parades. *whew*. I am exhausted, though, which is never a good thing for a Monday morning of a new work week. Heavy heaving sigh.

Now I know what ‘bone tired’ means. And speaking of ‘bone tired’….

As Constant Reader knows, I taught a session on writing LGBTQ characters at the SinC into Great Writing workshop at Bouchercon this past September in New Orleans. It was an amazing experience, and it was enormously flattering to be asked to do so in the first place. I was also asked to write something for the Sisters newsletter, pretty much given carte blanche to write whatever I wanted to, and since I had an essay about being a gay writer on the backburner (I’ve been toying with it for almost a year) which I was calling “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” I said sure. As I was wrapping up deadlines and looking ahead to the glory days of NOT HAVING ANY DEADLINES, I started writing the essay again, whittling away things from the original unfinished draft that no longer fit my thesis and…I got about halfway through and stopped.

The reason why I stopped? Because it is next to impossible to write about the challenges of being a gay crime writer writing about gay characters without sounding like the biggest whiner in the world, and I don’t want to be that guy.

Then, a question posted on a list-serve I belong to for crime writers triggered some answers that were so horrific, so thoughtless, and so ignorant that I suddenly knew how to write the essay–or at least how to address it with a starting place.

One of the current ‘boiling points’, if you will, in our current society is the question of ‘cultural appropriation’ as well as ‘cultural insensitivity’, and how these questions apply in a broader sense with the American guarantee of First Amendment rights under the Constitution (without getting into the reality–which most people either don’t understand, or chose to ignore– that ‘freedom of speech’ is actually only guaranteed as a protection from persecution and prosecution from the state; not from other people, and certainly not from consequences. The example I always use is, “Well, when I worked at the ticket counter I couldn’t tell a passenger to go fuck himself, could I, without getting fired?”) Recently–I don’t remember where I saw this, but it was on Facebook; I don’t know if it was from an industry publication or a newspaper or something–I read a piece about the major publishers hiring what were called ‘sensitivity readers’ to read manuscripts dealing with characters who were out of the author’s experience to make sure the characters weren’t offensive. I am of two minds about this, and I can certainly understand why people would find this alarming/concerning; how much control/power would these ‘sensitivity readers’ have over the author’s work? Not to mention the fact that no one can speak for an entire community; what one gay man finds offensive the next three you ask may not.

So, yes, I do have a bit of a problem with the concept of sensitivity readers. However, if I were writing a character from a culture not my own; say, a New Orleanian of Vietnamese descent, wouldn’t I want to talk to a New Orleanian or two of Vietnamese descent? Wouldn’t I want my character to be as authentic and realistic as I can possibly make him or her? I’ve talked to cops, private eyes, and FBI agents to make my characters are grounded in reality as I can. So, why wouldn’t a heterosexual writer creating a gay character want to get some insight from a gay person? And so on, and so on, and so on. I don’t see a problem here, but again, that is the work that should be done before the manuscript is turned into the editor and publisher, and I’m not sure how comfortable I would be with that for myself.

Of course, there are those who, because of this, have pulled out the ‘censorship’ battleflag, thoroughly missing the point. The First Amendment does not guarantee anyone a publishing contract, nor does it guarantee a platform; if it does I’d like to be booked on both The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert when my next book comes out, thank you very much. Oh, wait, it doesn’t mean that, after all?

Blimey.

Which is my roundabout way of getting to the latest provocateur, Milo. People were rightly outraged when the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster gave him a book deal; people were rightly outraged when he started getting invitations to speak at colleges and universities; people were outraged when he got invited to go on Real Time with Bill Maher (whom I also have problems with, but we’re talking about Milo now). As loathsome as the things he says are, I will defend his right to say them against any attempt by the state to silence him. Simon & Schuster is a business; they have a right to give a book deal to anyone they think will make them money (although I seriously doubt this book will make them any money; I see it going onto the remainder table pretty damned quickly, and not even being released in paperback; unless, of course, conservative clubs and organizations buy it in bulk at a deep discount as giveaways for fundraising drives and so forth–which is often how people like Ann Coulter wind up on the bestseller lists), and likewise, college/university groups have a right to invite anyone they want to come speak to them…but rescinding those invitations (and promise of payments and expenses) when said invitations blow up in their faces is not censorship as defined by the law and the Constitution. The same law that gives Milo the right to say what he does also applies to those who oppose the things he says.

That’s um, kind of how our country works.

Being utterly uninterested in anything he has to say (I’ve never enjoyed listening to transphobia or racism), I didn’t watch Real Time with Bill Maher, only watching the clips of Larry Wilmore telling him to go fuck himself, which I will also admit to enjoying immensely. (Of course, now that clips of him talking approvingly of sex between children and adults have turned up–and really, who didn’t think something like this was going to come up; it was just a matter of time–he won’t be getting invited to speak anywhere anymore, and I suspect S&S will be cancelling their book contract.) But Milo–like Ann Coulter before him–fascinates me. (And for the record, I use ‘fascinate’ with the old meaning of like how a snake fascinates its prey; I do think he is kind of dangerous, and snake-like.) I always wonder how people like him come to be. I wrote eighty pages of a Paige novel in which the victim was a Coulter-like character, attempting to peel back the layers and see what could create someone like her/him (that manuscript is in a drawer, as no one had the slightest interest in publishing it). Coulter apparently sees herself as a comedian/performance artist; I sadly know people who know her, and they state she doesn’t really believe what she says but it makes her money; I suspect Milo is kind of similar to her in that regard, yet at the same time…

Take, for example, his appearance on Bill Maher. Milo is precisely the kind of gay stereotype that triggers homophobic reactions from the right, and even from some gay men: he isn’t particularly masculine, and wore enormous faux pearls around his neck on the show, which he played with as he spoke (damn it, I am going to have to watch); he is an effeminate gay man (think a conservative Jack from Will & Grace, or Emmett from Queer as Folk: the kind of gay man that ‘straight-acting’ gay men loathe and despise). The loathing of homophobes for effeminate gay men (and, let’s be honest, a number of GAY MEN as well) has everything to do with the culture of masculinity and the fear of ‘not being a man’; which, really, is where homophobia and sexism and transphobia comes from.

I just saw on Twitter that Milo may lose his job at Breitbart over the pedophilia comments; I am not holding my breath, nor will I hold my breath about losing the contract with S&S. He has, always, positioned himself as a spokesperson for the First Amendment; all of this should give him more material to work with, and of course, I am sure it’s the fault of the ‘politically correct’ who ‘want to silence him.’

So, I doubt he will go gently into that good night, and he will undoubtedly continue to fascinate me the way cobras fascinate their prey before they kill and eat them.

I always am curious at to what made these types of people what they are.