I was more startled than anything else, to be completely honest. I had an appointment at 11:30 at the CVS on the corner of Magazine and Louisiana (where the Blockbuster was when we used to rent movies and TV shows on video or DVD) to get my new COVID booster. I made another stop on the way there, to pick up a prescription, and then headed over to Louisiana Avenue for my shot. I had actually never been inside that particular CVS (the one on Prytania is only a few blocks from the mail service and thus more convenient for me to go to), and it’s actually a nice place. So, I checked in for my appointment, and when I was directed to the privacy screen for my shot, this incredibly lovely young man in his early twenties got in the Pharmacy line. Our eyes met, and tilted his head to one side as he smiled, and I thought, as I sat down and the pharmacist closed the screen, I thought, was he cruising me? As I sat there, I thought nah, way too young and besides, I look like shit. I got the shot, which I didn’t feel (shoulder was sore later on in the evening, though; still is a bit this morning), and as I rose to go, the guy was still in line and gave me the same look, only along with the eyes up and down first, and he was indeed cruising me. I kind of laughed to myself as I walked out to my car–I would have definitely pursued this when I was younger–and remembered again how oblivious I am to that sort of thing outside of gay bars. I always was. It never occurred to me that people might cruise me in public spaces that weren’t exclusively queer; friends had to tell me all the time, “That guy was cruising you!” It certainly isn’t anything I’ve even thought about for years, so it was definitely a compliment and I couldn’t help but laugh at myself as I shook my head and started the car, “you know, some younger men like older men, dumbass.”
So, if anyone is ageist, it’s me!
Yesterday, outside of the shot and some other errands I ran, was a lazy day for me. I didn’t do a whole lot of anything; I scribbled in my journal some but the book is beginning to take shape, which is lovely. I pretty much spent the entire day cuddling or playing with Sparky while watching college football games. It was delightful seeing Georgia humiliate Clemson and Miami annihilate Florida, and Texas A&M gave Notre Dame a scare last night. Tonight LSU plays USC in Las Vegas (GEAUX TIGERS!) and we’ll get a better sense of how good this year’s edition of the Tigers are. And Tulane won big, too! We haven’t won a season opener since Joe Burrow graduated (2019 season), so hopefully that will change this year. I think I am going to do a lot of nothing today, too–I’m going to clean the house and write for a while since the game isn’t until tonight–which feels good. I slept super late again this morning and have to think my body needed the rest. I feel good this morning, the coffee is hitting and I don’t feel tired or sore physically (other than the aching shoulder from the booster yesterday), and that way if I can get everything cleaned up, organized and filed today gives me tomorrow to run to the grocery store and write.
I did bite the bullet and renewed the digital version of the Times-Picayune, despite the paper’s descent into a MAGA propaganda machine. I need to be able to read the state and local news, and much as I love local independent reporting, they don’t have the capability to cover Louisiana/New Orleans like Louisiana Sedition can. And I am leaning, more and more, into the concept of writing environmental crime stories so outsides can see what is going on here in Project 2025 Land. I am absolutely fascinated now by the Devil’s Swamp Lake superfund site just north of Baton Rouge, and I’m also researching a short story called “The Haunted Bridge”1, which is over Bayou Tortue (sometimes referred to as “Bayou Torture” on some websites I’ve seen; which is also a good title), and has a ghost story about a young woman whose prom date raped and murdered her on the bridge and threw the body into the bayou; that could be fun to write. God, it’s so nice to be excited about writing again and being creatively engaged.
Oh, and congratulations to everyone who won awards for their crime writing this weekend at Bouchercon–Barrys, Anthonys, and Macavitys all! We didn’t win for School of Hard Knox, but the nomination in and of itself was a lovely thing. It was my eighth (!!!!) Anthony nomination, which is pretty amazing, I think. I’m definitely the most nominated queer at the Anthonys! And we did have a queer winner last night; Kristopher Zgorski shared the Best Short Story Anthony with co-writer Dru Ann Love, which is awesome. Yay for Dru and Kris! They do so much for crime writers, and it’s fun to see them getting started as crime writers themselves, and getting recognition of their own.
It does look like it’s going to rain today–we didn’t get hardly any yesterday, or maybe I’m confusing yesterday and Friday; it’s entirely possible. And this kitchen is an absolute disaster area this morning, so I’d best get going on getting things cleaned up around here so I can do some writing. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.
Screenshot
Yes, that’s a Nancy Drew title, and it fits two stories I want to write about–the one mentioned here and the Murder Bridge outside Emporia, Kansas. ↩︎
Friday morning and I am up way early for PT this morning. It feels warmer this morning–it’s in the fifties–but it’s not cold in the Lost Apartment, which is nice. I haven’t slept well now for about two nights running. My sleeping pills are missing–I couldn’t find them last night–which means they were probably left out on a counter and Sparky the Demon thought “toy!” and now I have to really spend some time trying to find them. I’ll make it through today relatively okay, I suppose, since it’s a work at home day, but after PT I have a couple of errands and after that I’ll be home for the day. I did chores last night when I got home, so the kitchen isn’t messy this morning and once I get back. here, it’ll be relatively easy to get the downstairs back under control and launch into the weekend. I have events all day tomorrow on ZOOM for the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon, too. Paul didn’t get home until after I went to bed last night, so I spent most of the evening (after doing some cleaning, which was wise and I am very grateful that I didn’t blow it off) playing with Sparky and watching some television. I watched the new episode of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which I enjoyed, and then watched some documentaries on Youtube about history–mostly Byzantine, with some French and Austrian thrown in for good measure before going to bed relatively early. I did rest–my body feels very relaxed–but my mind never really shut off completely or for long.
The Lefty and Edgar nominations came out this week, and I have so many friends nominated on either or both lists! It’s always such a pleasure to see friends nominated for awards. It’s also a great opportunity to pick out some more great books to add to the list. I am also delighted to see Rob Osler nominated for Best Short Story (a queer nominee with a queer story!) and there’s another queer story nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Award, a book I actually blurbed: The Body in the Back Garden by Mark Waddell from Crooked Lane, so yay for a gay cozy being nominated! It always does my heart good to see queer writers being recognized by the mainstream, which is the kind of progress we’ve been wanting to see for decades. The categories for both the Leftys and the Edgars are stacked this year, which just goes to show how deep the bench actually is in crime fiction–and so many great books that weren’t nominated for either.
I blurbed several books this past year that are coming out now, so I want to go back and reread those so I can blog about them–not only Mark’s book but the new Rob Osler, Cirque du Slay and the new Margot Douaihy, Blessed Water. I also haven’t started reading another book quite yet–I was dragging too hard every night when I got home, really, to do any reading or engage my brain as much as I would like.
I think I may need to read out of my genre next, perhaps some horror? Paul Tremblay? Elizabeth Hand? I have so many great books in my pile, which is a delightful problem to complain about, but the struggle is real. How do I decide what to read when there are so many great books waiting for me to escape into? Maybe I should try to read just the books currently nominated for awards? Heavy sigh. Decisions, decisions.
It looks like we are having yet another hard freeze this evening, so hurray for not leaving the house for the rest of the day once I get home this morning. Sheesh.
And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head to PT. Have a great Friday, Constant Reader!
I have really come to love Bouchercon, and it’s always a highlight of my year.
Things have seriously changed for the better.
Queer Crime Writers after a dinner out in San Diego, with Marco’s lovely husband Mark Gutkowski
Bouchercon last week was a marvelous, marvelous experience. I had such an amazing time, saw some people I’ve not seen in quite some time (and quickly remembered why I love them so much), and stayed up way later every night than I should have–one of my many neuroses is FOMO, of course; I still regret not going to Dallas in 2019–but I laughed a lot, had some great panels, and made some new friends, too. I ate great meals, had some marvelous cocktails, and I really liked the hotel (once I figured out the shortcuts to the meeting spaces). It also made me think about my own history with the event, how things have changed for the better, and how I hope it keeps changing for the better. There were so few of us queer writers who used to go back in the day; now we have enough of us to have a happy hour where we get together and drink and chat about writing and the business and oh, how we all laugh. It’s wonderful.
When I first got started in this business, publishing was different. I had to explain this recently to someone I am hiring to do the ebook for Jackson Square Jazz for me; why I didn’t have a pdf file, because back then there were no ebooks and you got your page proofs in the mail, as well as your marked up manuscript for the editing process. So all I have on hand is the unedited version of the book I turned in. But what also was nice back then was there was a support system for queer writers that we no longer have–there were queer newspapers, queer magazines, and queer bookstores. We had a queer book of the month club–Insightoutbooks–and their influence in shaping and developing my career cannot be underestimated. After Hurricane Katrina and the six months spent touring for Mardi Gras Mambo, I kind of withdrew back into myself. I don’t remember much of 2006-2008, to be perfectly honest; I just know that I went back to work full time in 2008 and after adjusting my writing/editing schedule to that, it was around 2009 or 2010 that I resurfaced and started thinking about promotion and marketing again.
And what I found was that during those lost years (I call it the Hibernation) everything had changed. The queer newspapers and bookstores were mostly gone. ISO shut down. And I realized, with a sinking heart, that I was going to have to start going to mainstream conferences to promote myself. After working so hard in the mid to late 1990’s ensuring I could exist in almost entirely queer or queer-friendly places, I found myself having to essentially start over. Queer writers never mattered to the mainstream crime organizations and conferences, and I braced myself, knowing I was going to encounter homophobia yet again.
It didn’t take very long–although in retrospect, I’m actually surprised it took as long as it did.
I joined Mystery Writers of America, and later, Sisters in Crime. I also went to Bouchercon in Indianapolis and San Francisco. I didn’t know more than a handful of people and tended to glom onto the people I did know (sorry about that, guys; social interactions at events where I don’t know anyone ramps up my anxiety, so I glom onto the people I know). Indianapolis I wasn’t in the host hotel, I was across the street–and it was cold. It was the weekend of the Ohio State-Purdue game, I can remember that because my hotel was full of OSU fans, so I found myself mostly hanging out in my hotel room and reading, while braving the cold to go across the street for my panels and events. It was nice, and decided to go to San Francisco for it the next year. There I was in the host hotel and realized oh you really need to stay in the host hotel in the future, because it made everything easier. I was starstruck most of that weekend–I rode in the elevator with S. J. Rozan once and another time with Laurie R. King, which was incredible. I only had one panel, at 4 pm on Friday afternoon that no one came to, but I had a really good time—and even decided to put together a bid to host it in New Orleans (and that is a whole other story), before yet another person decided that it was time for a Bouchercon programmer to put the fag back in his place, letting me know that I and my books weren’t important enough (the exact wording was “surely you have to understand that someone who’s edited a couple of anthologies doesn’t really deserve to be on panels”–despite the fact that my tenth novel had just been released…and of course, the greatest irony of this was that I went on to edit three of their anthologies) to grace any panel, and that any panel I’d been given in the previous two years should be considered a gift.
Should be considered a gift.
A fucking GIFT.
(For the record, Paul is an event planner by trade. He is executive director of both the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival as well as Saints & Sinner, a queer litfest. Just to be certain I wasn’t overreacting and being a diva-bitch, I let him read the email. His response? “If one of my staff, interns or volunteers wrote an email like that to an attending author I would fire them on the spot.” And before anyone starts up with the “programming a Bouchercon is hard” I will remind you that Margery Flax and I wrote over one half of the program for Dallas in three fucking days and contacted everyone with their assignments and then reorganized and redid the program to accommodate schedules and wrong panel assignments for about two weeks before it was done–with the local chair constantly throwing things at us that made us start pulling threads and weaving it back together again….nothing like “oh, sorry, I forgot that I promised these people a panel for this” after you’ve redone it for the fourth time. That happened a lot. And the entire time, we were incredibly polite and friendly and did whatever we could to accommodate people; apologizing and fixing it repeatedly. NOT ONE PERSON RECEIVED A FUCKING EMAIL TELLING THEM TO CONSIDER ANY PANEL THEY GOT AS A GIFT.
But then, I’m not an unprofessional piece of shit whose pathetic ego sees programming as power to abuse, either.
I wasn’t saying (and was very respectful) oh I am such a big deal how could you not give me an assignment, all I asked was hey, I know how hard your job is, but I don’t understand how you get on a panel and what can I do differently in the future to get one? What am I doing wrong? I approached them with kindness and respect for the work they were doing and got bitch-slapped, demeaned, and insulted in response. No author who is paying their own way to a conference and essentially providing the event with free entertainment for its audience should ever be treated so contemptuously by event organizers, period. The fact that when I expressed these concerns to the national board all I got back was mealy-mouthed excuses and “we’re sorry you’re offended” told me everything I needed to know about the organization and its board; the way they were treating me about the New Orleans bid (I had planned on having Susan Larsen–former chair of the National Books Critic Circle, chair of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, long time programmer for the TW Fest and a nationally respected book reviewer–help out along with Pat Brady, long time publications chair of the Historic New Orleans Collection, huge mystery fan, and also a long time programmer for TWFest only to be told their vast knowledge and experience wasn’t “good enough” and I needed to get the homophobic trash who told me I was nothing to program New Orleans–yeah, like that was ever going to happen) was also egregiously horrible, condescending, insulting, and unprofessional.
Needless to say I cancelled my trip to St. Louis and never considered attending Cleveland; I tend to not go where I am not welcome. I am not taking my hard-earned money from my “nothing career” and giving it to a homophobic organization, where I then get to beg for scraps and get treated like shit. I have better ways to spend my money, thank you. (And yes, I know who the programmers were and yes, I will carry that grudge to the grave.)
I withdrew my bid to host for New Orleans, and I washed my hands of the mainstream mystery community. Who needs it? They were never going to accept me or my work, they were never going to read my work, they didn’t give a shit about me, and it was pretty clear they never would. I was kind of at sea for a few years, there. There were no more queer newspapers, no more queer bookstores, no more gay Insightoutbooks.com book club, nothing. Outside of the TWFest and Saints & Sinners, I had no conference outlets to promote myself and my work. The mainstream mystery world clearly wanted no part of me, so what was I supposed to do? So, I just kept writing. I operated my social media pages as a promotional outlet for my work, and I kept writing this blog. I did finally return to Bouchercon when it went to Albany; friends convinced me to go, and one powerful friend requested me for a panel she assembled–and it came through. Having friends made a huge difference, really, and through my friends I met and made more friends, and Bouchercon slowly became a must-go event for me every year…eventually reaching the point where I never had to be concerned about getting on a panel, while at the same time no longer caring whether I did or not. It became more about seeing my friends and being around other writers than a work/promotional thing for me. Ironically, once I no longer cared or worried so much about being on things…I started getting put on more and more things, with bigger and increasingly more important co-panelists (I still can’t get over the fact that I was on a panel with ATTICA LOCKE in Minneapolis. I was too nervous to say anything to her; I spent that entire panel looking at my co-panelists and listening to them speak and wondering why the fuck I was on that panel).
And now, of course, we have a group: the Queer Crime Writers, and a core group of us have been showing up together at conferences ever since we bonded at Left Coast last year (and bonded even more with more of us at Bouchercon Minneapolis last year): John Copenhaver, Marco Carocari, Kelly J. Ford, and Robyn Gigl–who’ve all become very dear to me over the last year or so. Teresa Cain/Carsen Taite joined us in San Diego, and became my con-wife; what a great time we had!
And somehow, I am getting nominated for mainstream awards, an outcome I could have never predicted. I won the Anthony for Best Anthology for editing Blood on the Bayou, and was nominated for Best Short Story at the Dallas event for “Cold Beer No Flies” (I lost to S. A. Cosby, no disgrace there). Last year Bury Me in Shadows was nominated for Best Paperback Original (losing to Jess Lourey) and Best Children’s/Young Adult (losing to Alan Orloff); neither of those losses were devastating because Jess and Alan are also friends of mine, and I couldn’t have been happier for them both. This year I had three nominations in three categories for three different books–Best Anthology for Land of 10000 Thrills (losing to S. J. Rozan for MWA’s Crime Hits Home); Best Children’s/Young Adult (losing to Nancy Springer for the latest Enola Holmes, hello, no disgrace there); and Best Humorous for A Streetcar Named Murder (losing to Catriona McPherson for Scot in a Trap)–again, with the exception of Springer, I lost to very talented friends I like very much (I’ve not met Springer). That’s seven Anthony nominations in total, to go along with the Macavity, the Agatha, the Lefty, and the Shirley Jackson nominations. Not bad for a queer writer, wouldn’t you say? Ten mainstream award nominations? I certainly never would have dreamed all those years ago when I was told “any panel you get should be considered a gift” by Bouchercon programming.
That doesn’t mean the community is free from homophobia; it’s still there. I have mentioned before the mainstream cisgender male author who is clearly afraid to acknowledge my existence and always beats a hasty retreat whenever I walk up; I find his homophobia amusing. You’re not hurting me, bro, because I don’t want to know you, either. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be sitting in a booth in the hotel bar with a bunch of friends only to have a straight man look at me, smirk and say “faggy” in a sentence, as though daring me to call his ass out because he’s so much more important than I am; no worries, asshole, I don’t even have to repeat the story to anyone because since then you’ve shown all the big names you’re buddies with that you’re actually a piece of shit, and yes, I’ve watched it all with the same fucking smirk you had on your face when you thought you’d pull out your micro-penis and slap it down on the booth table in Toronto, and when I hear stories about you, I am delighted to pull out “Well, I’ve known he was trash since he said faggy in front of me, looking me in the face and smirking as he said it”.
Assholes will always out themselves, at least in my experience–and I’m very patient. I store the receipts and pull them out to corroborate horrific behavior when the timing is right.
I’ll save the racism, sexual harassment, and homophobia I faced in Albuquerque at Left Coast for another time.
I’m very pleased with the progress that has been made in our community over the last five or six years–I mean, the Rainbow Diversity panel about queer crime writing in Toronto was packed, when such panels in the past only drew maybe four or five audience members. Codes of conduct have been implemented to protect attendees from sexual harassment and pervy conduct, as well as racism and homophobia.
Progress is often slow, and it is easy to get impatient. I don’t know if my involvement with Bouchercon has made things better for queer writers there, but I do know the award nominations show other queer writers that such things are possible for them. Nothing says you’re welcome here than seeing members of your community nominated for the awards. The more of us that attend also means that more of us will get nominated, be on panels, and be able to talk about our work to readers who might open their minds and read our books. Being visible at these events is crucial and important.
And like water wearing down a stone, we have to keep relentlessly pushing.
(John, Marco, Kelly, and Rob Osler have all been nominated for mainstream awards over the last year, along with me. Edwin Hill and PJ Vernon have also been recognized for their brilliant work, too. This is so wonderful to see–I’d be delighted even if I weren’t with them in this grouping. And if you’ve not read any of us, there’s not a single person I’ve mentioned by name you can go wrong with. It’s also exciting seeing the new queer talent rising in writers like Margot Douaihy.)
I was torn about going to Nashville next year; their anti-trans and anti-queer laws have me not really wanting to spend my queer money there. But the point was made that going and being very present was an act of defiance…and Lord knows I love defying homophobes, so I guess I am probably going to go. I can visit Dad either before or after, so it actually makes sense for me to go. I’ve decided to write a very gay story to submit to their anthology (which means I need to get back to work on it), and so yeah…I think defiance is the way to go.
Plus….I love my Queer Crime Writers. I can’t imagine not being around them next year, and I would absolutely go nuts from FOMO.
So, in closing, thank you, Queer Crime Writers. I love you all, and thank you for letting me into your group. Let’s keep making a difference, shall we?
Well, this would normally be a work-at-home Friday blog, but we have a staff meeting that I have to go in for this morning, so there’s that. But we made it through another week, Constant Reader, and lived to tell the tale, which is marvelous, of course. I got to sleep an extra hour later this morning, which is lovely, and I am now having a quite delicious cup of coffee. The doctor doesn’t think I have gout; rather, he thinks it’s an infection of sorts, and prescribed an antibiotic cream. I am also supposed to keep the foot elevated as much as possible, as well as to soak it in hot water and epsom salts several times a day as well as taking Advil three times per day to get the rest of the swelling down. I’m glad it’s not gout, of course, but I’m also not certain that it isn’t. But we’ll see how it goes this weekend; if it’s all better by Monday I guess he was right.
I’m actually rather excited that it’s the weekend almost; I am looking forward to diving headfirst into the manuscript and making excellent progress. I feel good this morning, too–not like low energy, or like it’s not going to be a good day on any level–so that’s a good thing. I think my body has adapted to the time change and to getting up in the morning again, which is always helpful. I think the time change is why I had such a shitty sleep Sunday night which made Monday kind of a lost day for me. I was tired after going to the doctor and had things to do when I got home–putting away dishes, laundry, etc.–and by the time I was finished I was a bit fatigued, and of course once Scooter crawled into my lap it was over. I watched a documentary about how the Kansas State football team–once one of the worst in the sport–rebranded and rebuilt itself into a winning team, something no one ever thought would ever happen. (I love when traditionally terrible football teams turn it around; I kind of have a soft spot for both Kentucky and Vanderbilt, for example, in the SEC because they rarely, if ever, succeed. I have a thing for underdogs–and no one should ever think a traditionally bad team can’t be turned around; not when you have the New Orleans Saints example right in front of you, either.)
I’m not sure how much Paul is going to be around as the countdown to the festivals continue. I know the SEC Gymnastics meet is this weekend and he’ll want to watch that, so maybe he’ll be around on Saturday. *shrugs* Who knows? But I have a lot of work to get caught up on, and of course all the chores around the apartment that I am behind on need to be done. Groceries shouldn’t be a need this weekend since Paul will be out of the house starting on Wednesday, and I am not sure when or how much time I am going to be down in the Quarter that weekend, either. I can always go hole up in Paul’s suite to write and edit, if need be, but there’s also the possibility–a very high one–of overstimulation; I’m still not used to being around large groups of people. I was never great in those situations to begin with; after the pandemic I’m not even remotely as close to being decent in those situations. I know at Bouchercon I would get overwhelmed in the bar so always tried to stay out the outer fringes of that enormous crowd. So, we’ll see how all this goes with my flagging energy and my inability to remember things.
This was also a big week for awards shortlists; the Hammett Prize, the Lambdas, and the Thriller Award finalists were all announced this week. Lots of friends, as always, nominated for awards, but my joy for Barb Goffman, who landed a Thriller nomination for Best Short Story for her contribution to Land of 10000 Thrills, “The Gift” knows no bounds. It’s always lovely when people who’ve contributed stories to one of my anthologies gets recognized for their work; primarily because it reflects well on my editorial choices and I can also take a tiniest little piece of credit for publishing the story in the first place. (Like how I am always excited when something I’ve contributed a piece to gets a nomination or a win; How to Write a Mystery‘s almost complete sweep of everything it qualified for was a bit of a thrill since I had a piece in it.) The Lefty Awards will be presented on Saturday, but I have zero chance of winning since I am not there–since attendees vote over the weekend, not being there is a hindrance (not that I would have run around begging people to vote for me anyway) to winning. (I probably would still have zero chance of winning even were I there; there are some juggernauts in the category with a strong track record of winning awards.) I do miss being there and seeing everyone, but with the Festivals coming up this next weekend and me going to Malice next month…there’s no way I could have squeezed a trip to Left Coast in this month without a complete physical, mental and emotional collapse.
Well, I didn’t finish writing this entry before I had to leave for work; the time somehow slipped through my fingers and the next thing I knew, I was worried about being late and rushed on out of here, leaving this as a task to finish after work-at-home duties. I did manage to get the prescription for the medicated gel for my toe my doctor prescribed, and it seems to be working. I’ve only used one application and the ache/pain seems to be gone, and I can bend it again without agony running up to my brain, so I guess my doctor knows what he’s talking about. I hate doubting my doctor; I’d much rather believe everything he says without question. I don’t want to be one of those patients, but when you’re a natural-born worrier with a touch of obsessiveness, well, that’s a line that I am always afraid I am going to cross with my doctor. Maybe now I can just relax and believe everything he says.
As if.
Hilariously, it’s now even later on Friday evening and this still isn’t finished or posted. I started doing laundry and pruning books and cleaning/straightening/organizing, and got sidetracked from this yet again until I sat down, woke up the computer and saw the cursor blinking here on this page, and thought, whoops, if I don’t my streak of daily posts will come to an end and so here I am , trying to finish this while still leaving things to talk about on here tomorrow morning. (I did a quick reread of The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, the first time in decades, and was a bit surprised at what year his book finished in; I was like, wow, I was actually looking forward to hearing his thoughts on Priscilla and To Wong Foo…more on that tomorrow morning.) I have also continued to put the gel on my toe and I cannot believe the significant difference it has made already. Definitely saving whatever is leftover in case this ever happens the fuck again, right? Sheesh.
And on that note, I am finally going to bring this to its inevitable and long overdue close. It’s been a hot minute since it took me all day to write an entry. Be back in the morning, and have a lovely evening.
And here we are, on the final day of the year 2022. Happy New Year, I guess? It doesn’t feel like the year is turning, but everything has felt so totally out of whack since the 2020 Shutdown that it’s not a surprise, really. As I sit here bleary-eyed with my coffee trying to wake up for another thrilling day of writing and cleaning, it seems very weird to look back to a year ago at this time. I was on deadline then, too–and was way behind on that book, too (A Streetcar Named Murder, for the record), but other than that I don’t remember what my mood was like or what I was thinking about going into the new year. We were still in the midst of the pandemic (that hasn’t changed–what’s changed is it isn’t news anymore and everyone seems to be pretending it’s all over), and I know I wasn’t exactly going into 2022 thinking oh this is the year I’ll get the coronavirus! That did happen, and my ten-day experience with COVID-19 was bearable for the most part. I just had intense and severe exhaustion as well as the brain fog, which hasn’t entirely lifted. I still have no short term memory, and am struggling to remember things every day–which has made writing this book more difficult because I can’t remember small details and things that are kind of important. I also think being so scattered isn’t much help in that regard; I’ve never been able to handle getting a grip on things and have felt like I’ve been behind the eight-ball for the last three years, floundering and struggling to keep my head above water, and never confident that I had a handle on everything. It’s been unpleasant, really; I prefer to be better organized and to have things under some sort of manageable control, and this constant feeling that I am behind and will never catch up on everything has been overwhelming, depressing, and damaging.
I read a lot of great books this year–I was going to try to make a “favorite reads of the year” list, but as I went back through the blog for the last year looking at all the books I talked about on here, there’s no real way for me to quantify what were my avorite reads of the year. I managed to read both of Wanda M. Morris’ marvelous novels, All Her Little Secrets and Anywhere You Run; Marco Carocari’s marvelous Blackout; John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind; Carol Goodman’s The Night Villa, The Lake of Dead Languages, and The Disinvited Guest; Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway and The Woman in Cabin Ten; Raquel V. Reyes’ Mango, Mambo and Murder; Ellen Byron’s Bayou Book Thief; Rob Osler’s debut Devil’s Chew Toy; Mia P. Manansala’s Arsenic and Adobo; Kellye Garrett’s Like a Sister; Alex Segura Jr’s Secret Identity; Laurie R. King’s Back to the Garden; Tara Laskowski’s marvelous The Mother Next Door; James Kestrel’s Five Decembers (which would be a contender for favorite read of the year, if I did such things); and of course several Donna Andrews novels as well. I am forgetting some great reads I truly enjoyed this past year, I am sure–I will kick myself later for not remembering I Play One on TV by Alan Orloff, for one example–but it was a year of great reads for me. I know 2023 will also be a great year for reading.
I also watched a lot of great television this past year as well, and again, I won’t be remembering everything and will kick myself later. If nothing else, it was a year of some amazing queer representation on television; this was, after all, the year Netflix not only gave us the wonderful, amazing, adorable Heartstopper but the equally charming and adorable Smiley (which you should watch, absolutely). It was also the year where Elité continued, but the shine is starting to go off the show a bit. I was very vested in their Patrick/Ivan romance, which they ended in this last season with Manu Rios, who plays Patrick, leaving the show at the end of the season along with his two sisters (spoiler, sorry), which was dissatisfying. I am looking forward to seeing what else Manu Rios gets up to in the future…we also enjoyed 1899, Andor, Ted Lasso, Sex Lives of College Girls, Peacemaker, The Sandman, House of the Dragon, Ozark, and so many other shows I can’t possibly begin to remember them all this morning. But I have no problem saying that without question my favorite show of the year was Heartstopper. Even just looking at clips on Youtube, or those “Ten Cutest Moments on Heartstopper” videos, always makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I view them. The soundtrack for the show was also terrific, with some songs so firmly engrained in my head with scenes from the show (one in particular, Shura’s “What’s It Gonna Be” always makes me think of that scene where Charlie comes running after Nick in the rain to give him another kiss, which is what was playing in the background). Wednesday was another highlight, a surprising delight when I was prepared to have my hopes dashed, and The Serpent Queen was also a lot of fun. We also enjoyed The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, but it was cancelled after its first season, which was disappointing.
Professionally, it was a pretty good year in which I had three book releases: #shedeservedit in January and A Streetcar Named Murder in December, with the anthology Land of 10000 Thrills, thrown in for good measure in the fall. I sold some short stories that haven’t come out yet, as well as some that did this last year: “The Rosary of Broken Promises,” “A Whisper from the Graveyard,””The Snow Globe,” and “This Thing of Darkness” all came out in anthologies this year, with “Solace in a Dying Hour” sold and probably coming out sometime in the spring. I also sold another story to another anthology that will probably come out in the new year as well, and I still have one out on submission. In what was probably the biggest surprise of the year, last year’s Bury Me in Shadows was nominated for not one, but TWO Anthony Awards (Best Paperback Original and Best Children’s/Young Adult) which was one of the biggest shocks of maybe not just the year, but definitely one of the highlights of my career thus far. I lost both to friends and enormously talented writers Jess Lourey and Alan Orloff respectively, which was kind of lovely. I had been nominated for Anthonys before (winning Best Anthology for Blood on the Bayou and “Cold Beer No Flies” was nominated for Best Short Story), but being nominated for one of my queer novels was such a thrill–and to have it nominated in two different categories was fucking lit, as the kids would say. The response to A Streetcar Named Murder was an incredibly pleasant surprise; people seemed to genuinely love the book, which was very exciting and cool.
I traveled quite a bit this year as well–going to Murder in the Magic City/Murder on the Menu, Left Coast Crime, the Edgars, Sleuthfest, and Bouchercon. I went to Kentucky twice to see my family, which further fueled my love of audiobooks for long drives–on both trips I listened to Ruth Ware on the way up and Carol Goodman on the way back–and also did some wonderful podcasts and panels on-line, which was nice. We didn’t go to any games this season in Baton Rouge, but in all honesty I don’t know if I can hang with a game day anymore–the drive there and back, the walk to and from the stadium, the game itself–I would probably need a week’s vacation afterwards!
College football was interesting this season, too. This season saw the reemergence of Tennessee, USC, and UCLA to some kind of relevance again; the slides of the programs at Texas A&M, Florida, Oklahoma, Auburn, and Texas continued; and LSU turned out to be the biggest surprise (for me) of the year. Going into the season I had hopes, as one always does, but after two years of consistent mediocrity (with some surprise wins both years) they weren’t very high. The opening loss to Florida State was a surprise and disappointment, but at least the Tigers came back and almost made it all the way to a win. The blowout loss to Tennessee at home was unpleasant, certainly, as was the loss at Texas A&M. But LSU beat Alabama this season! We also beat Mississippi, so LSU was 2-2 against Top Ten teams this season–and I would have thought it would be 0-4. And 9-4 is not a bad record for a transitional year, with a new coach rebuilding the program. And LSU beat Alabama. The Alabama game will undoubtedly go down as one of the greatest Saturday night games in Tiger Stadium. It was incredibly exciting, and I still can’t quite wrap my mind around it or how it happened. It certainly shouldn’t have; LSU was simply not an elite-level team this past season, but what a job Brian Kelly did coaching in his first season in Baton Rouge. Did I mention that LSU beat Alabama this year? (And one really has to feel for Alabama, in a way; they lost two games by a total of four points on the last play of each game. Four. Points. That would probably be what I would call this season for Alabama: Four Points from Greatness. The LSU-Alabama game this year is definitely one of those that gets a nickname from the fan base, I am just not sure what it would be. The Double Earthquake Game? (The cheers when LSU scored in overtime and then made the two point conversion registered on the campus Richter scale) The Conversion Game? I don’t know what it will be named for all eternity, but it was an amazing game. I do think it also bodes well for the future for LSU. Will both LSU and Tennessee (which also beat Alabama for the first time in like fifteen years) be able to consistently compete with Alabama now? Has Georgia taken over as the SEC behemoth? Has the Alabama run ended? I don’t think so–they have an off year where they lose two or three games periodically (2010, 2019, 2022)–and they could bounce right back. next year and win it all again. You can never count them out, even in their off years.
As for the Saints, they swept Atlanta again this year, and that is enough for me.
I did write a lot this year, even though it didn’t seem like I actually did while the year was passing. I also worked on Chlorine and another project I am working on throughout the year, as well as the novellas, and of course, I was writing short stories and essays for much of the year. I also read a lot more New Orleans and Louisiana history, and I had tons of ideas for things to write all year long. I did make it to the gym on a fairly regular basis at the beginning of the year, but then it became more and more sporadic and after my COVID-19 experience, never again. I also injured my arm a few weeks ago–when I flex the bicep it feels like I have a Charley horse, so not good, but it doesn’t impact my day to day activities. I also had my colonoscopy at last this past year–the prep was horrific, and I am really dreading doing it again at sixty-five, should I make it that far.
Yesterday was a nice day. I was exhausted, and after my work-at-home duties were completed I did some chores–laundry, dishes–and I also spent some time both reading (A Walk on the Wild Side) and writing. I also watched the Clemson-Tennessee Orange Bowl last night before Paul got home from his dinner engagement and we watched a few more episodes of Sex Lives of College Girls. Today I am going to read a bit this morning with my coffee before getting cleaned up and diving headfirst back into the book. Paul has his trainer today and usually either goes to the gym to ride the bike or to his office to work for the rest of the afternoon, so I should be able to have some uninterrupted writing time, which will be lovely. And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a happy and safe New Year’s Eve, Constant Reader, and I will check back in with you later.
Several years ago–I have no concept of how long ago; time and its passing literally have no meaning to me anymore–I started what I called “the Short Story Project.” I wanted to become a better short story writer; it’s a form I’ve always struggled with, and it always seemed to my hypercritical self that whenever I was successful in writing a short story, it was more of an accident than anything I had planned when I embarked on writing the story. I’ve also become a little bit easier on myself on that score–sometimes, not every idea will work as a short story, and writing isn’t something that can ever be forced without it showing to the reader–and I did have a wonderful period of productivity with short stories after setting course for the Project–which not only entailed writing them but reading as many of them as I could. After all, what better way to improve my own short story writing skills than by reading good stories? I have, over the years, collected any number of single-author collections as well as anthologies, and yet, with few notable exceptions prior to the start of the Project, had rarely ever cracked their spines. Lately, as I have struggled with time and focus while I’ve been working on this revision of the Kansas book (aka #shedeservedit) I find myself unable to focus much on reading novels; my mind inevitably wanders, or I will set it down and not get back to it for days. So, this morning I decided, before getting in my work on the book for the day, to read some short stories over my coffee this morning, and I wound up reading four of them; all of them marvelous in their own unique, distinctive ways. The stories I read this morning were, in order: “Better Days’ by Art Taylor, from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; “Mischief in Mesopotamia” by Dana Cameron, also from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; “Hop-frog” by Edgar Allan Poe; and finally, “To Build a Fire” by Jack London.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one on our stretch of the North Carolina coast who picked up the Washington Post on a regular basis, but I doubt anyone else it like I did–scanning the bylines, measuring the thickness of the paper and the heft of it, stifling the envy.
So begins Art Taylor’s “Better Days’, which won the Macavity Award for Best Short Story and was a finalist for both the Agatha and the Anthony Awards. Art is one of crime’s best short story writers (and one of my favorite people), and it’s easy to see why he has won every award under the sun for crime short stories. Art’s stories are always tightly written, with characters so real and honest and human that you can’t help but care about them, as well as having a bit of an edge to them. He manages to capture the resigned despair someone whose career path didn’t quite go the way he wanted perfectly; the former Washington Post journalist downsized and back in coastal North Carolina, working for the local paper while still thinking about his past with an uneasy regret. The story focuses on a love triangle between the main character, the local bar owner he’s been seeing, and a newly arrived tourist on a yacht with money to burn. This story tightly plotted, flows perfectly, and the characters are people I wouldn’t mind spending some more time with. In some ways it kind of reminded me of John D. Macdonald; maybe it’s the sea and boats and so forth that put me in mind of Travis McGee. Highly recommended.
I sat across from a row of decapitated kings, gods, and heroes waiting for them to speak to me. I didn’t know a word of their language, and they’d been dead–their monuments erected, sanctified, and decaying–long before anyone speaking my language was born. Still, I waited, if not as patiently as they did.
That’s the opening paragraph of Dana Cameron’s “Mischief in Mesopotamia,” originally published in the November 2012 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and it went on to win both the Agatha and Anthony awards for Best Short Story the following year. (I initially met Dana the weekend she won the Agatha; she’s been a constant source of joy for me ever since.) The story features her series character Emma Fielding, and reading the story is my first encounter with her–and now I am going to have to go back and read the entire series of novels with Emma (you may also know her from the television films made from some of the books in the series, with Melrose Place alumnus Courtney Thorne-Smith playing Emma). Set on a tour of museums and archaeological sites in southeast Turkey, Emma and her group happen to be on-site when a museum robbery occurs–and Emma solves the crime through her keen observations of her fellow tour group members. The voice is delightful, as is Emma–there’s a hint of my fiction goddess Amelia Peabody about her–and the story is enormously satisfying.
I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the King was. He seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kin, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened that his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers. They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men, as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people from fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a lean doer us a rare Avis in terris.
Yes, that first paragraph made me squirm a bit as I started reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-frog,” which I suppose can be held up as an example of how things don’t age well (the notion that overweight people are jolly, as evidenced here). The story itself, which is about a court jester who is also a little person (“dwarf”) and crippled at a royal court, mocked and laughed at and the butt of the jokes of the King and his advisors, along with another female who is also there for their entertainment–whom Hop-frog appears to love, eventually reaches his own breaking point when they mock him one time too many and when the female begs them to stop, the King throws wine in her face and humiliates her. There is a costume ball coming up, and Hop-frog chooses this for his revenge, convincing them all to dress up as “ourang-outangs”, which will require covering themselves with tar and pitch and fake fur….and they waltz right into his punishment, as they are set aflame and are burned alive. This is based in actual history–Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror details the “the dance of the burning fools,” where King Charles VI of France and some of his buddies costumed themselves in such a manner with the same outcome–some of them caught fire and were burned to death, although the King was not one of the victims. When I was rereading that book in the early pandemic days, I came across this true story and thought it might make for an interesting short story; doing further research, I discovered that Poe had written a story based on this actual event, and bookmarked it to read later. As with everything classic, my education in Poe is limited; but all the earmarks of a Poe’s story’s justice are here: justice is meted out to the foolish king and his cruel advisers…but it’s not one of his better efforts, which is why, undoubtedly, it’s not as well known.
Day had dawned cold and gray when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail. He climbed the high earth-bank where a little-traveled trail led east through the pine forest. It was a high ban, and he paused to breathe at the top. He excused the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock in the morning. There was no sun or promise of sun, although there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day. However, there seemed to be an indescribable darkness over the face of things. That was because the sun was absent from the sky. This fact did not worry the man. He was not alarmed by the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun.
I originally read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” in high school. It was assigned for us to read when we were studying short stories and fiction; it was assigned as an example of the theme “man v. nature.” I’ve never forgotten the story–I loathe the cold, as Constant Reader is aware, and London does an amazing job of getting that frigid climate across to the reader. The man is never given a name–his name doesn’t matter–and neither does the wolf-dog by his side have a name; their names don’t matter. This story is about human hubris–he isn’t worried about the cold, despite being warned about it, and he wants to get back to his camp. His job was to go upstream and see if its possible for logs to be floated downstream when the temperature is warmer and the waters of streams and rivers and creeks not frozen solid. His mission accomplished, he is heading back to his actual camp, with some food stored under his shirt next to his body and a pack of matches in case he needs to start a fire. The dread in this story builds slowly and smoothly as he begins to suspect he made an error in not respecting the cold for its ability to kill him; occasionally London goes into the perspective of the animal who is also beginning to sense the man–food and fire provider, nothing more–is out of his depth. Eventually he succumbs to the cold, after a series of misadventures that come about because he isn’t paying enough attention and is careless. Whether that is because the cold has affected his ability to think and reason clearly is never part of the story or his own consideration. Even now, after all these years, the story has the ability to make me wince and shiver and think yikes, there’s no fucking way I’d ever go outside when it was 75 degrees below zero, let alone make a trip of many miles through wilderness on foot.
And on that note, now I am finished with my morning and its back to the spice mines with me,
What’s so good about it? Well, if you live in a deeply Catholic state like Louisiana, that means it’s a paid holiday, which is certainly always welcomed in these parts. I never say no to a paid holiday–anything else would simply be madness.
Today I woke up after about ten hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep–I will usually wake up at least once or twice during the night–and my body feels almost completely back to normal now. Whatever that was that I had (and I am not convinced that my test result wasn’t a false negative, frankly–how bizarre that a usually healthy person came down with something–not once, but TWICE–that completely mirrored the majority of symptoms of COVID-19; regardless, I lived through it and it’s over now, thank you Baby Jesus on a Good Friday) seems to be gone now; I feel terrific, haven’t coughed in days, and the only reason I felt warm yesterday was because it was hot outside and it was daytime in New Orleans; air conditioning can only do so much in an old house in this climate–although rather than suffering through that down here this afternoon, maybe I’ll just go read in bed, and take the laptop with me just in case; for some reason it’s much cooler upstairs this year than downstairs, which makes absolutely no sense.
I finished reading Ammie, Come Home yesterday and you can read that entry here, if you missed it. I then moved on to Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic, and remembered just how magical Mary Stewart was as a story-teller. I read most of Mary Stewart’s works when I was a teenager, with The Ivy Tree and Airs Above the Ground as my two particular favorites; the ones I would always grab from the shelf when I wanted to reread one of her books. The others I don’t remember quite as much; primarily because I didn’t reread them as frequently, if at all, as the other two. I hadn’t much liked The Moon-spinners the first time; I loved it all the more on the reread. Likewise, my memory of This Rough Magic was similar; I enjoyed it but never went back to it. (In fact, my mind I’d mixed up plot elements of the two books; I thought all the stuff with the dolphin was in The Moon-spinners; it’s actually in This Rough Magic.) I also only have a copy of the ebook–which I never read, really, other than for short story collections or anthologies–but there I was yesterday afternoon, reading the ebook of a novel on my iPad for the first time with a purring kitty in my lap and music playing through my speakers in the kitchen. It was quite lovely, and quite relaxing. A breakthrough? Only the future will tell.
I also read Harlan Ellison’s Edgar Award winning short story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” yesterday; it was a part of his collection Deathbird Stories, which I had in hard copy but purchased the ebook on sale recently. I need to write a blog entry about it, and the other story from the same collection I’d read, “On the Downhill Side”, which was quite lovely and quite magical, particularly in the way he wrote about New Orleans, where the story was set; he did something that was absolutely genius–which is what everyone who writes about New Orleans but has never lived here should probably do when they decide to write about New Orleans. (There’s a snobbery all New Orleanians, and New Orleans writers, all have about people who aren’t from here but choose to set their fiction here; like everything, there’s good and bad elements to that snobbery. But even journalists doing features on New Orleans fuck it up, and fuck it up badly, so we’re always suspicious of outsiders writing about our beloved city.)
I need to get back to writing, now that I no longer have empty head from whatever it was I had these past two weeks; I have some things that are close to being due, I need to get that Sherlock story focused on and written, and I’ve also agreed to do an essay about my story “The Silky Veils of Ardor” for The First Two Pages blog. In order to get back on track with writing and everything that needs to be done around the Lost Apartment before I return to work (once I am cleared; I am certain I’ll be cleared to return on Monday) so I have a strong grasp on everything. I also need to prioritize things and not allow things to detract from my writing time and my writing career. I realized recently that I will not have a book out this year, which isn’t good, and if I’m not careful I won’t have a book out next year, either. So I need to get this other stuff finished and out of the way so I can get Bury Me in Shadows finished and turned in, then do the same with the Kansas book. I also have to get back to the Secret Project; so the goals for this month are to get all these loose odds and ends finished so I can focus on getting the books done. And if I focus, and don’t allow myself to get distracted, there’s absolutely no reason why I can’t get all that taken care of so I can focus on the novels this summer.
So, for today, I am going to work on my Sherlock story and my Venice story while trying to get everything around here cleaned and organized–cleaning and organizing may seem like me trying to procrastinate, but really, I can’t work when my office area is messy–and I will try to get as much done around here as I can until around four or five, when I’ll allow myself a few hours to read more of This Rough Magic. The books need work, too–it’s time to do another cull–and it’s been weeks since I’ve had the energy to take on the floors. Maybe even this weekend I’ll drag the ladder outside and do the windows around my desk–they are filthy, after all–so clearly I am starting to feel better because not only am I noticing these things, I’m paying attention to them, and they bother me; so I am definitely myself again.
And on that note, tis time to get back into the spice mines. It’s been awhile, and it’s going to feel pretty good, methinks.
So, daylight savings time means I didn’t sleep as late as I have the last few mornings–simply because the clocks were turned back an hour. I woke up yet again at ten this morning–I went to bed around ten last night–and slept like a stone yet another night. Sleep really is the best thing, isn’t it? These last few nights of good sleep have been absolutely heavenly, and I feel a million times better than I did before this staycation started. I also can’t help but feel that missing Bouchercon–much as I hated to do so–was probably the smartest thing I could have done; thank you, doctor, for forbidding my travel.
And a belated congratulations to all the Anthony Award winners! I didn’t win for Best Short Story, but couldn’t be happier that Shawn Cosby did! He’s a great guy, a terrific writer, and also supports other writers. His debut novel, My Darkest Prayer, was fantastic; he recently signed a two book contract with Flatiron Books and I can’t wait to see what he does next, quite frankly. The other nominees–Art Taylor, Barb Goffman, and Holly West–are also terrific writers and awesome people who support other writers as well. Being nominated for an Anthony for a short story was one of the biggest thrills of my career so far.
It’s also weird that it’s a Sunday morning and there’s no Saints game today. It’s weird that both the Saints AND LSU have bye weeks the same weekend; but next weekend is going to be tough–LSU at Alabama for all the marbles; the Saints playing the hated Atlanta Falcons.
I imagine by the end of that weekend I am going to be quite worn out from emotion and adrenaline.
Angela Crider Neary, who moderated the Anthony Short Story nominees panel yesterday, very graciously sent me the questions she intended to ask me on the panel, so I thought I’d go ahead and answer them today–even though I’ve already lost. 😉
You’ve written in an impressive array of genres – over 50 short stories, two different private eye novel series, young adult novels (some with supernatural elements), and even some erotica as well as some horror and suspense. Do you like one of these genres or formats (short or long) better than others, and tell us what you enjoy or find rewarding about writing each of them. Are there any other genres you have written or would like to write?
I’ve also written some romance! I like all the genres I write in pretty equally; I just wish I was better at writing horror than I am. I’ve always had a strong passion for history, so I think historicals is something I’d like to try at some point–it surprises me that I haven’t already. I find writing short to be a lot more difficult than writing long; I always think of ideas in terms of books rather than short stories, and sometimes have to modify the idea down, as I can certainly never write all my ideas as novels unless I have an exceptionally long life. I’ve been experimenting with writing novellas lately–I’m in the process of writing two right now. Of course, there’s little to no market for novellas. I guess I’ll wind up self-publishing them or something.
I love the title of your current Anthony-nominated story, “Cold Beer No Flies.” Is there a story behind this particular title, and how important do you think titles are for stories or novels?
Thank you, I’m rather partial to that title myself! When I was a teenager in Kansas, there was a bar in the county seat that was very similar to the bar in my story. It was simply called My Place and they had a reader board out on the side of the road and one day it said COLD BEER NO FLIES. That tickled me for some reason, and I never forgot it. About ten years later I wrote the first draft of the story with that title. It sat in my files for a very long time, and about ten years ago I revised it for the first time, shifted the setting from Kansas to the Florida panhandle, and changed the main character from a young woman to a young man. When Florida Happens came about, I revised it one last time and submitted it to the blind read process, and was delighted to have the judges score it highly enough for inclusion. (My story in the Blood on the Bayou anthology also went through the blind read, and was picked.)
You have two PI novel series set in New Orleans. How would you describe these two series, how they differ from each other, and how you’re able to slip into the separate moods and characters of each of them?
The Chanse series is more hard-boiled than the Scotty series, which is more light and fun. Chanse is a completely different kind of gay man than Scotty; he was raised working class, his family lived in a trailer park and were evangelical Christians in a small working class town in east Texas. He used football and a scholarship to LSU to get out, and finally came out officially after graduating from college. He’s more scarred emotionally, more bitter and cynical, and has a very low opinion of humanity. Scotty is the polar opposite of Chanse: from a wealthy society family on both sides, he grew up in New Orleans with extremely liberal, progressive parents who never had any issue with his sexuality, and was kind of a fuck-up in some ways, though–flunked out of college, worked as a stripper and a personal trainer, etc. But he has a very positive outlook on life, and has no baggage about his sexuality whatsoever; in fact, he revels in being gay. I’d never read a character like that before, and I felt like there needed to be one. Scotty is much more fun to write than Chanse–I kind of just make up the story as I go, because that’s kind of how Scotty lives his life, up for anything and everything–whereas Chanse is more rigid, more unhappy, and more of a tight-ass, so I have to plan his stories out from the very beginning.
You’re the co-founder of the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, which takes place in New Orleans every spring. Tell us about it.
Well, way back in 2002 my partner, myself, and Jean Redmann went out for dinner and drinks one night, and over the course of conversation the subject of writer’s conferences came up–and how queer writers were often not included, and if they were, were put on what we call a “zoo panel”–a panel where all the non-straight writers are gathered together which, no matter the good intentions, always felt like we were zoo animals people came to see and point at, and those panels inevitably devolved into “let’s teach the nice straight people about homophobia.” We thought it would be lovely to have an event of our own–open and welcoming all who wanted to participate–where being queer wasn’t the topic of discussion. We also thought it would be good to stress the importance of queer literature and its importance in its response to the AIDS epidemic, and try to honor the many writers we lost to the plague years. We figured we might be able to pull it off maybe once or twice before interest died down…and here we are, seventeen/eighteen years later, still going strong. I have less to do with the organizing now than I did in the beginning–most of it is my partner and his team–but I still get credit for it.
Your Lambda Literary Award winning Murder in the Rue Chartres was described by the New Orleans Times-Picayune as “the most honest depiction of life in post-Katrina New Orleans published thus far.” There was such overwhelming personal and community devastation after the hurricane and flooding. Why did you choose to write about the hurricane and what was that like for you?
It’s so weird to me that it’s been over fourteen years now. But even now, it’s impossible to describe, or talk about, everything that happened because of Katrina. 90% of the city was rendered uninhabitable, and for awhile we weren’t even sure if the city was going to come back–or if we would ever be able to come home. We were lucky, we were able to evacuate when so many couldn’t–and that guilt lasted a really long time. It took me a long time to forgive myself for leaving New Orleans to die. It’s very difficult to describe how New Orleanians feel about New Orleans, that deep love that runs through, and colors, everything. The entire time I was gone I felt unmoored, unanchored, unsure about the future. I also knew I was going to have to write about Katrina, and I didn’t really want to. I was one of the first to come back–I returned to New Orleans on October 11th, about six weeks or so after it happened. I had been blogging at that time for not quite a year–but I was blogging extensively throughout that time, describing what I was feeling and what I was seeing. (I only wish technology had advanced to the point where phones had cameras–I didn’t have a digital camera at the time and so was unable to document everything with pictures; all I have is memories and the blog.) Katrina was such an enormous event, that the entire world was aware of–I didn’t see how I could possibly continue to write fiction about New Orleans without acknowledging Katrina, but at the same time I didn’t want to write about it, either. The Scotty series–I’d finished and turned in the third book in that series, Mardi Gras Mambo, about three weeks before the storm and I’d intended to start writing the fourth almost immediately, after taking about a month off to rest and regroup. Ironically, the idea was called Hurricane Party Hustle and I wanted to write a book set in the city during an evacuation with another near-miss hurricane–which I’d already experienced three or four times at that point. Needless to say that idea was scrapped. I also didn’t see how I could write a light, funny book about New Orleans when we were still in the midst of everything.* I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write a Chanse book. My editor at Alyson Books, Joseph Pittman, kept after me, telling me I was the perfect person to write such a book, and so on and so on, and I finally agreed to write it–but only on the condition that Chanse, like me, had evacuated and returned on the same day I did. I didn’t think survival stories from Katrina were mine to tell.** Writing the book itself was incredibly difficult, and I found myself drinking a lot whenever I finished for the day. But in the end, it was incredibly cathartic to write the book and I am very grateful, to this day, that Joe wore me down and convinced me to write it.
*Of course, now, all these years later, I can actually see how a funny book could be written about New Orleans in the aftermath–particularly in the way New Orleanians who were here reacted. The ruined refrigerators, for example, that everyone dragged out to the curb for disposal and sealed with duct tape–people decorated their refrigerators or wrote slogans on them; some of them were enormously funny. New Orleans has always had a sort of gallows sense of humor about itself; we always laugh, no matter what, and I do regret that I wasn’t in a place where I could examine that.
**I did eventually write a survival story, “Survivor’s Guilt” (my story in Blood on the Bayou, it was nominated for a Macavity Award a few years ago), and while I still didn’t think I had the right to tell a survival story–I kept questioning myself the entire time I was writing it–I based a lot of it on survival stories I’d been told, and given the response to the story, I think I got it right. I have another idea for a noir story set in the aftermath as well–it came to me on a panel at Raleigh Bouchercon several years ago Katrina Niidas Holm was moderating, and she keeps pushing me to write it–and I think I’ll someday get to it.
I also think sometimes I might go ahead sometime and write Hurricane Party Hustle–probably enough time has passed to write a story about an evacuation and near-miss , and sometimes I think I might go back and write a Scotty book set during that time as well…maybe.
And on that note, back to the spice mines. Thanks to everyone who voted for my story for the Anthonys so it made the short-list; that meant a lot, and I appreciate it.
And here’s hoping I won’t miss Sacramento next year.
Yesterday was a lovely mail day. I received my contributor’s copy of Detecting the South In Fiction, Film & Television, edited by Theresa Starkey and Deborah E. Barker. It’s from LSU Press, and I think this might be (I could be wrong, my memory is a sieve) my first appearance in an academic-type tome. I can’t wait to start reading the other essaysm, but especially the ones by Ace Atkins and Megan Abbott, two of my favorite writers as well as two of my favorite people on the planet. My essay is titled “Down These Mean Streets (Whose Names No One Can Pronounce)”, and I’ll also have to reread it–I don’t remember a damned thing about it (see: sieve-like memory). Theresa, one of the co-editors, is also the person who invited me up to Ole Miss to speak at the Radical South event either last year or the year before; when I was completely charmed by Oxford.
I still might set a book there. The campus and town are gorgeous–although I would, obviously, have to fictionalize both.
I slept fairly well last night. I had dinner with a friend, and after a pre-dinner glass of prosecco followed by another glass of Chardonnay with dinner–apparently that was enough to send me off into the arms of Morpheus to my best night of sleep of the week thus far. Dinner was lovely–we went to Saba, a Middle-Eastern place on Magazine Street in Uptown, and the hummus was magnificent, as was the lamb kebob. Conversation was lovely–gossip as always, and catching up, and lots of laughter. It was quite lovely, and then I came home to watch this week’s American Horror Story: 1984, to see how far off the rails it was going this week. The answer: pretty far. It no longer makes the slightest bit of sense, and I’m not even sure what it now has to do with anything that happened earlier in the season. I’ll keep watching, primarily out of curiosity more than anything else–to see where it winds up going finally.
And wonder why I ever worry about my plots not making sense.
I’ve not written anything fictional this week, which is, frankly, disgraceful. But between this annoying low-level whatever it is that is still wrong with me–my throat is still sore, my sinuses are completely in revolt, my nose is rubbed raw again, and I’ve been achy most of the week–and being so tired and distracted the majority of the week, yeah, it’s no wonder I fell behind yet again on my goals. But I did get some of my other writing finished, including a short interview with Crime Reads (again about being an Anthony short story finalist, for which I am getting a lot of attention and more traction than I did as an anthology finalist two years ago–not complaining, just an observation…writing versus editing are pretty different), and I got my Sisters column finished. Also, as I said to my friend at dinner last night, I’ve been getting some positive reinforcement about my writing lately–lovely reviews and compliments, emails about the most recent book, compliments on my nominated short story–and that’s been really lovely. I actually sat down and skimmed through Royal Street Reveillon the other night as well–Paul got home late from the office that night, and while I waited I started reading it over again. As I always do when I reread published work I questioned decisions I made with both language/sentence choices, as well as plot decisions, but overall, I was pretty pleased with it when I finally set it aside. Someone did direct message me while they were reading it a few weeks ago, asking me how many car accidents has Scotty been in?, to which I replied, why do you think he hates driving so much? Scotty of course not only gets into a lot of car accidents, he also gets kidnapped or taken prisoner pretty frequently as well, to the point that it’s almost an in-joke between me and the reader.
But hopefully I’ll be able to get back to writing this morning, and tonight after work; so I can get back on track and get things back under control–some sort of it, at any rate. And hopefully, around the LSU and Saints games this weekend I can get almost completely caught up.
One can hope, at any rate.
And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!
Well, I got up early this morning–with an assist from Needy Kitty, who has apparently decided this week that after getting fed really early in the morning two days in a row, that this should become a regular thing. It’s okay, actually, I was already awake when he climbed on me in bed and laid down. And it doesn’t kill me to get up early anyway, now does it? Today is my half day, Wednesday, which means running by the mail on the way to the office and I get off early enough to meet a friend for dinner. Huzzah!
I’m getting things done this week, even if it feels like I’m just treading water. I always have so much to do, you know, that it sometimes feels like I never make any progress; it seems like every time I cross something off the to-do list, something else rears its ugly head, you know? Or two something elses, sometimes three. Heavy heaving sigh. But I suppose it’s better than having nothing to do, or being bored, or something. One thing I never have to worry about is being bored–unless I am watching something boring, or am bored by whatever I’m reading.
As Bouchercon looms on the horizon, I should probably start doing some planning, or at least figuring out what I’m going to be doing, and when I’m going to be doing it. I also should talk some more about the Anthony nominees for Best Short Story, of which I am one, for “Cold Beer No Flies.” It’s lovely to be nominated for awards–it really is, no humility about this, folks, I fucking love making short-lists–and it’s a real joy to be nominated with writers like my fellow nominees: Holly West, S. A. Cosby, Barb Goffman, and Art Taylor. Not only are they talented writers but they are also really awesome people. That’s one of the things I love about being a part of the publishing community, really–the vast majority of people in it are pretty awesome. Sure, there’s the occasional dirtbag asshole, but for the most part? A fun group of people. Can’t wait to see them all next week!
My email inbox is ridiculously full again; I feel sometimes like Sisyphus pushing that rock every time I look at it. Heavy heaving sigh. But all I can do is put my head down and keep clicking them open and responding to them, hoping against hope that each one I answer won’t engender yet another response to answer. Oh, well, it could be worse: I could get no emails except junk. Or ones from political campaigns. I wish I had a dollar for every email I get asking for money for a political campaign–I could leave the spice mines behind for good and relax in my hammock on the white sand beach while sipping a margarita.
I finally finished reading Norah Lofts’ short story collection Hauntings: Is There Anybody There? I really enjoyed them; they were more Gothic than straight up horror, and (breakthrough alert) I realized after finishing the book that perhaps the reason I am so bad at writing horror (I’m more of a fan than a horror writer) is because I like Gothic-style horror more than anything else. Oh, sure, I read all different styles of horror (I’m really enjoying Certain Dark Things), but when it comes to writing it, I tend to go more along the line of Gothic, which is more creepy and unsettling than scary. Bury Me in Shadows is a Gothic-style novel; I’d love to have a parody Gothic style cover with my cute teenaged gay boy running away from a big creepy house with one light on in a window, looking back over his shoulder…which is, now that I think about it, a really good idea.
I read a lot of Norah Lofts when I was a teenager; primarily her fictional biographies of royal women. She wrote about Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eleanor the Queen), Katherine of Aragon (The King’s Pleasure), Anne Boleyn (The Concubine), Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais (A Rose for Virtue), George III’s sister Caroline-Matilda (The Lost Queen), and Isabella of Castile (Crown of Aloes). She also wrote Biblical fiction, with Queen Esther and How Far to Bethlehem?, and a lot of what was classified, marketed and sold as historical romances–but they weren’t really romances. They were dark stories about lost love and hopelessness and her women rarely had happy endings; Nethergate was one of those. She was an excellent writer with a good eye for details and character, that made her creations come to life–but she also wrote some Gothic horror, which included this collection of ghost stories. I don’t remember how it came to my attention or who reminded me of Lofts, but I ordered a copy of the Hauntings from a second-hand bookseller, and as I said, I really enjoyed it. I’d love to revisit some of her other work that I enjoyed, to see how it holds up and if my evolving and maturing tastes have altered how I read them, but again–my TBR pile continues to grow every day and I am never going to read everything I need and want to read.
And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me.
Queer and Loathing in America 