Tag: Bold Strokes

Tulsa Time

Well, it’s the Day After Christmas, aka the second day of Christmas as we head into the arrival of Twelfth Night and the start of Carnival, which means I can start getting cream cheese filled King cakes again. Yay for king cakes! I feel good this morning, and am up earlier than I rose on the actual holidays. There’s a lot for me to do today: the kitchen is a mess yet again because I didn’t clean up after making dinner; today is also wash the bedding day; we’re going to Costco; and I have other errands as well–the mail, a prescription. I also want to continue my organizing–all that running around probably isn’t conducive to doing much writing, so it’s going to be a reading/cleaning/organizing day mostly. And I need to get the cleaning done before we go to Costco.

But turning my mind off for two days was lovely. We finished watching Down Cemetery Road, which we enjoyed, and started Welcome to Derry, which didn’t really grab me, but we’ll keep watching. I also want to watch Frankenstein this weekend, and possibly get started on my The Mummy rewatching. Sounds pretty ambitious, doesn’t it? We only have New Year’s Day off this coming week, so it won’t be as lovely as this week has been, but it’s still kind of nice to have an extra day off in the week. But it’s back to reality now, and I can’t pretend I don’t have anything I need to get done anymore. Heavy heaving sigh. But I actually enjoy getting things done–it’s making myself do them that’s the problem. Once I am underway with everything, though, I don’t mind it. I even find cleaning enormously satisfying. Yes, I know, it’s not normal. I’ve proudly never been normal!

Well, I am back; I took a breakfast, coffee, and news break. Sparky had also parked himself in my chair while I was doing something and I wasn’t in the mood to start fighting him for my chair. But just as I was about to connect the laptop to the television, I noticed he wasn’t in my chair anymore and must have gone upstairs without me noticing. I’ve already started clearing everything out of the sink and tumbled another load of laundry in the dryer. So, ambition is firing on all cylinders thus far, although we’ll have to see how long motivation lasts and I can get things going and finished and so forth. I do want to get some writing done today, even if it isn’t very much; anything is a start, after all, and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, doesn’t it?

How very zen of me this morning! It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore! But as 2025 slowly slides into 2026–hard to believe there’s only five days left in this year–I find myself becoming ever more introspective and reflective. It has been a dreadful decade for me (pretty much everyone else, too; it seems like everyone I know has had it rough for quite some time), and I did a lot of turning inward, as well as letting things go and learning how to say no and mean it; and stop worrying that people will think less of me for saying no. If I disappoint people, so be it; I’ve been disappointing people my entire life thus far so why should it change for the last few decades I hopefully have left? Worrying about disappointing people doesn’t make me not disappoint them, and the worrying, that horrific mind spiral, is exhausting.

And let’s face it–it’s not like other people worry about disappointing me, you know?

It’s seventy nine degrees this morning in New Orleans, with a bright sun and a clear blue sky; simply gorgeous. We’re also supposed to get a cold front next week, but it won’t be as horrible as it is everywhere north of here. Paul is also leaving to go see his mom and family on Tuesday (New Year’s Eve Eve) so I’ll be here alone on New Year’s, but that’s fine. Maybe that’s the day I’ll do my Mummy marathon rewatch?

Sounds like a good idea.

Also, Mississippi River Mischief is on sale for a mere $4.95 at the Bold Strokes website! In print! There’s also a lot of other great titles from BSB as well, for the same low price, through December 31! What are you waiting for! Follow that link!

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines and running my first errands of the day! But never fear, I shall be back tomorrow morning with a full report on my day!

I love the lighting in this, and how the out of picture streetlight fades into shadow…

Devils in the Canyon

More years ago than I care to remember, I returned to Palm Springs for the first time in years for a Bold Strokes authors weekend event. It was a lot of fun–I always enjoy visiting Palm Springs–and this time I rented a condo on Flipkey (this was before Air B-n-B became a thing), which was a short walk from Las Casitas, a women’s only resort place that hosting the event. It was a great trip. We made side trips to Joshua Tree National Monument (it was cold), I had my first In-n-Out Burger, and we also took an early morning expedition to Bombay Beach, a failed resort village on the shores of the Salton Sea. People still lived there, but most of the place was derelict and looked bombed-out, post-apocalyptic.

The place fascinated me, and in the years since I’ve occasionally, idly, when in between books and other research…looked it up on line to do vague informational research with an eye to eventually writing about it. It still fascinates me…sometimes stuff will come across a social media feed, or I don’t know, some reading material will be suggested to me by the algorithms. That whole area of California really is interesting to me–more so than Los Angeles or the other more, better known, better documented parts of the state–which is also why I enjoyed reading Ivy Pochoda’s Imperial Valley so much.

So when I heard about this short story collection–and the Salton Sea was mentioned, I thought, hey let me take a look at this.

Three hours out of the hospital, his left foot too swollen for a shoe, Shane’s car breaks down. It’s July, a trillion degrees outside, Interstate 10 a gray ribbon of shit unspooling east out of Palm Springs toward Arizona. Not exactly where he wanted to go, but who the fuck wants to go to Arizona? It’s what was on the other side of Arizona that mattered to Shane, the chance that there might be another life in that direction. He never liked being on the coast. The one time he ever tried to swim in the Pacific–during a vacation with his dad, so, over twenty years ago, half his lifetime now–he was gripped with the ungodly realization that unlike a pool, there were no sides. You were always in the deep end.

It was a feeling that stuck with him, even when he was in one of those towns in the San Fernando Valley that sounded like an escape route from an old Western: North Hills…West Hills…Hidden Hills…

The Honda was the one damn thing Shane thought he could depend on. But as soon as he pulled out of the parking lot at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the check-engine light flashed on. A hundred thousand miles he’d put on that fucking car and not a single problem and the one time he really needed it, it was telling him to fuck off. He didn’t have the time–or the money–to swing by the mechanic considering he’d left the hospital before the nurse had filled out the paperwork for the cops, which was a problem. Not as big a problem as staying would have been. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have the cops trawling the city for him, especially since the wound did look self-inflicted, since it was…someone else holding his fucking hand while he shot himself with his own damn gun.

And so begins the first story in the collection, “The Royal Californian,” and what a ride this story is!

This story reminded me of a story I read in college, in a writing class, by Barry Hannah–all nerves scratched raw and in-your-face. The voice is incredible, and the noir sensibility–really, what could be more noir than the desert of southeastern California?–is right there. We don’t really learn a whole lot about Shane, but just enough to understand who he is, why he behaves the way he does, and that weird sense of desperation that drives him. This low-end, low-rent motel he finds himself in, the Royal Californian, kept reminding of the Eagles’ classic hit, “Hotel California”–this was a place you check in, but you never leave. Everyone he encounters at this place–from the two-bit lawyer, the knowing bartender who’s seen too much and doesn’t care, and the mysterious clown at the motel bar–is kind of a lowlife, kind of a desperate character, and out for themselves. No one can be trusted at this hellish motel– least of all Shane. As the story unfolds we learn why he was on the road on his way out of California, and a little of his backstory…and while you kind of want him to get his shit together, everything he does indicates that he is not going to.

And there’s also a truly marvelous twist at the end, that gives this story that extra little sharpness in its edge that makes it truly memorable.

I was highly impressed with this story, and am looking forward to reading more of Tod Goldberg…I just wish I had before!