I don’t know if all writers have the same fears that I do, but chief amongst them for me is that the words will stop coming one day. I know, I often will have fallow periods where I don’t feel like writing anything, or that the well needs to be replenished before I can draw from it again. Since the surgery I’ve been trying to write, and not succeeding. The brace was a problem, the loopiness of my brain was another problem, and of course the correct medications at long last also relieved me of the stress/anxiety, which naturally I worried my anxiety might be the seed and root from which my writing sprang. But last night when I got home from work I was determined, and I sat down and started writing. I had been trying to work on this short story for quite some time, and over the last few weeks the form of the story began taking shape in my head. I decided, once I got home from running errands, I was going to sit down and work on the story. The most I’ve ever been able to do at a time since the surgery is a couple of hundred words here and there, and a great day was getting more than three hundred. I had started the story last week, got about five hundred or so words in, and then….not much. But last night, I sat down and added almost twenty-five hundred words to it in one sitting. And it felt amazing. I’m sure they aren’t great words and more story and editing is definitely required on the story, but I hadn’t had a writing day like that in a very long time–so long I’d also reached a point where I was worried that the words weren’t going to come anymore.
It’s so nice to know that isn’t the case, and that the magic is still there.
And it feels even better this morning. I just needed one day of that, apparently, to get my confidence back. Hopefully, tonight I’ll finish that story and tomorrow night after work and PT I can start another.
I was a Festival widow again last night–Paul not getting home until well after I went to bed–but last night was, of course, the final episode of the three-part reunion for The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which was kind of disappointing, given all that had been promised. Ironically, reality television (or at least the kind I prefer to watch) has become so scripted and produced that surprises–like the ones this show delivered–are very rare (and you also have to wonder, still, how much of it was produced and created), and so they get a lot of attention and publicity and are all over the zeitgeist (Vanderpump Rules and Scandoval, anyone?), and of course, ratings are the most important thing. Anyway, I did spend almost two hours watching that and even the Watch What Happens Live that follows, which I never watch (I loathe Andy Cohen), but that was it for me; once the credits rolled I went to bed and had another lovely night’s sleep.
It feels, in some ways, like my life is starting to come back together and fall back into what it was before 2023 again, which is kind of nice. I’ve felt like my life has been out of my control for a very long time now (and yes, I’ve accepted finally that such control is actually an illusion; we have so little control over what happens to us and in our lives, really), but I kind of feel like I’m starting to get a grasp on everything again, and that’s nice. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when I actually am writing something, isn’t it? I feel so much better and at peace with the world and centered. Life provides enough drama as it is, so why seek it out? I find myself checking Twitter less and less now; I do miss the people I used to engage with there, who are now scattered over numerous other platforms, and having to check more than one and try to be active on more than one (and let’s face it, both Twitter and Facebook were more than enough for me) is more than I have the bandwidth for, let alone any such desire to maintain all these different social media accounts. I do seem to spend most of my time on social media blocking people more than anything else, and I don’t know that that is a productive use of my time on social media? Looking for people to block rather than to interact with? Really no, and it’s just more negativity.
Because that’s what I need more of in my life: negativity. Please.
And on that note, I think I’ll go ahead and head into the spice mines. I may be back later or it may be tomorrow; who can say for sure? But whatever happens, have a lovely middle of the week Wednesday, Constant Reader.
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 don’t remember when and where I first met Tara Laskowski; my memory has become a sieve over the years and the bout of long COVID in the summer of 2022 didn’t help much, nor did any of the things that have gone on for the last three or four years. But I’ve liked her from the very first–I love that she loves Halloween and centered one of her books arounnd it–and when I read her debut novel, I became a big fan. She, along with Carol Goodman, are killing the Gothic suspense novel genre, which has always been one of my favorites ever since I was a kid and discovered Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and that Phyllis A. Whitney also wrote books for adults. She followed up her sensational debut One Night Gone with the Halloween book, The Mother Next Door, and it was also magnificent.
So I really was looking forward to her third novel, and Constant Reader, it did not disappoint.
Ever since Zack told me about The Weekend, it’s all I’ve been able to focus on. Most people would naturally be at least a little nervous to meet their significant other’s family for the first time.
But most people aren’t dating a Van Ness.
“Earth to Lauren.” Zach snaps his fingers, grinning over at me. He left work early to get on the road sooner and didn’t have time to change, so he’s still wearing his suit, purple tie slightly askew but knotted even after hours of driving.
“Sorry,” I say, tugging the ends of my hair. “Zoning out.”
“You look like I’m driving you to your death,” he says, then grabs my hand and squeezes. “Don’t worry. I promises it’ll be fun. Even if my family’s there.”
This is a great opening, and it sets up the story perfectly. Our sympathies are immediately with Lauren. Laskoswki has put her into a situation we can all relate to: the terror of meeting your partner’s family and the discomfort that comes with it, the self-doubt, the need to be liked and accepted. Zach is a Van Ness, too, and while we aren’t really certain what that means yet, it’s important and stressful enough so that Lauren, in communicating her thoughts and feelings, thinks it bears mentioning and we should understand how she feels. It works, and that outsider feeling (and haven’t we all felt like an outsider at some time? See Saltburn) keeps the reader’s sympathies with Lauren completely.
But there are three more point of view characters–two other women, one a Van Ness by blood and the other by marriage–which is always a difficult feat for an author to pull off, but making those voices distinct and clearly different from each other is what makes the book work. Harper, Zack’s sister, is harsh, tough, cold and vindictive. She runs her own beauty company and blog, VNity, which is struggling. Elle is married to Harper’s twin brother Richard, who oversees the vast Van Ness holdings, and like Lauren, has some serious “pick me” energy too; she joined the Van Ness family and has wiggled her way into the family by asserting herself as well as trying to take over the role of family matriarch, as their mother is dead. Their mother, Katrina, was a tough woman who was hard on her children, but babied the youngest, Zack–which the twins have always resented. The retreat, this Weekend, is a celebration of the twins’ birthdays, with a huge party being thrown the Saturday night of that weekend, spent up at the Van Ness Winery, in the Finger Lakes section of New York.
So yes, that Gothic feeling is there almost from the start. The wide-eyed young innocent, coming to the big family estate in a remote part of the country (see also, Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott) into a situation where she’s not sure she can entirely trust her boyfriend. The house is filled with secrets, too–hidden rooms, secret staircases and passage ways–and a lot of sibling resentment, bitterness, and anger begins bubbling up to the surface almost immediately.
There’s also a fourth POV character, known only as the Weekend Guest, who hates the Van Ness siblings and is trying to bring the entire family down as a brutal winter storm bears down on Van Ness Winery…
What a terrific read! Get a copy–you can thank me later.
Holiday Monday, and I slept deeply and well again last night. I’d set the alarm, thinking it was probably better to start getting up early again, since it’s back to the office with me tomorrow but Sparky was being super cuddly and sweet in the bed this morning, and it was cold, and so I stayed in bed for another hour or so. I finished reading Tara Laskowski’s The Weekend Retreat, which I greatly enjoyed (more on that later). I made jambalaya, and did some dishes and started a load of laundry. I also reread some of my own unfinished work, trying to decide what to focus on next. I have to say I am regularly pleased with my work now when I go back and reread it; what can I say? I don’t know if that means I am getting rid of the self-deprecation and “not good enough” mentality I’ve struggled with my entire life, but it’s a welcome change to read some of my work and think this is pretty good.
I also worked on the house some more and it’s starting to look like it did before the acquisition of High Energy Kitten and my surgery–cluttered but at least neat. It’s almost there, you know, and maybe putting some finishing touches on it today before I go to my first STRENGTH PT appointment this afternoon. (I’ll be making groceries after that, I might add.) I’ve also decided that my next read with be R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface; I do enjoy a writer-behaving-badly story. I’ve written my own, too–“Quiet Desperation”, which was included in my collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, as well as a Kindle single–but I don’t think I ever want to write an entire novel about a writer behaving badly. I may write an entire novel with a writer as the main character–I keep circling back to my true crime writer, who’s now appeared in several of the Scotty books, as well as The Orion Mask–but I don’t think I’m quite there yet.
It is interesting to revisit unfinished projects and decide which of them to focus on and finish. I know that my next short story collection will be finished if I finish a novella and throw it in; but I’d kind of wanted to do a novella collection. One of the novellas–the longest one–will be rather easily turned into a novel, which I think is what I may do with it; there are three or four more that I can finish and turn in as a solitary book. “Festival of the Redeemer” is completed in first draft form, and rereading it yesterday made me realize that it’s next draft can be longer, of course, but I don’t think there’s enough story there to turn it into a novel; same with “Fireflies” and “Never Kiss a Stranger,” so maybe those three can be the novella collection (Festival of the Redeemer and Two More Tales–which I am choosing to call it so I can have a Venetian cover, a la du Maurier). “A Holler Full of Kudzu” might be the one I finish to complete the short story collection. There are also a lot of short stories I’d like to rework and/or finish for some calls that I’ve seen, which could always be fun. But the exciting thing here is I am feeling excited about writing again for the first time in I don’t know how long.
It’s also weird to think that the Scotty series is turning twenty-one this year; on May 1st, to be exact. I definitely should write another Scotty this year, and it does look like Hurricane Party Hustle is the one to do–it’ll also give me the opportunity to write about what it’s like to ride out a big storm and live without power, all the while having Katrina flashbacks. I also have the story for that already fleshed out, and yesterday I even figured out how the book opens, and how the mystery comes to Scotty’s attention in the first place, which is more than I usually have when I start, LOL. That one will be followed by the cursed Mardi Gras of 2019, French Quarter Flambeaux, which will be another fun story to write, and then Quarter Quarantine Quadrille, which will cover the shutdown and COVID madness. So, there are at least three more Scotty books for me to write, which will take the series to twelve books, and then I’ll think about it some more. Scotty’s family–parents and grandparents–are getting older, and will soon have to start dying off, which I really don’t want to deal with.
But it’s nice to feel excited about everything again, isn’t it? And normal, after so many years of abnormality?
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely holiday, everyone, and I’ll probably be back later.
Sunday morning and the temperature is falling in New Orleans. It’s forty-one right now, which is nothing compared to what people up north are dealing with today, but we are getting down into water-freezing temperatures later this week. I slept for eleven hours last night, which is insane, but…my guess is I needed the rest. I didn’t get up until nine this morning, which is almost as insane as the weather. It’s amazing what a difference the right medications make, isn’t it? Yesterday was actually pleasant. I did some things, ran some errands, and then settled in to watch the LSU Gymnastics meet, which was a quad competition against three of the best teams in the country–UCLA, Oklahoma, and Utah–and the LSU team actually had to count a fall and still managed to come in second. They also had a subpar vault and beam rotation, which makes it even more amazing. GEAUX TIGERS! I also spent some time reading–which I am going to go do some more of once I finish this–and even wrote a little bit yesterday (a very little bit). But tomorrow is a holiday, and I have more chores and things to do today, without anything really to watch on deck.
It’s very nice to get up and feel rested, which happens more frequently these days.
I did a reading for the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon yesterday, with some other mystery writers from Bold Strokes, which was kind of nice. Mary Burns, who moderated the reading, also asked us all how we plan our books–essentially the plotter/pantser question–and it did make me think a bit about my process, how I do things. I write Scotty books differently than I write other books, fo one thing. I always think up three or four things that I want to address in a Scotty book, and from there I try to figure out how to weave them together into a story. This started with Baton Rouge Bingo–prior to it, I pretty much just pantsed the whole thing and figured it out as I went. I was asked on a panel at Saints and Sinners after Who Dat Whodunnit if I planned on writing another Scotty book, and I flippantly replied “if I can figure out a way to make the book about Huey Long’s deduct box, Mike the Tiger (the live LSU animal mascot), and the state’s ban on gay marriage, I will”, figuring as I said it there was no way anyone could write a book with all three elements in it. Three days later it all came to me how to make that actually work, and so I started writing it. For Mississippi River Mischief, there were several separate things; I wanted a family values politician hypocrite who had a thing for teenager boys, a tie in to The Haunted Showboat, and something from Scotty’s own past that he’s never really reexamined before, but has to because of the events in the book. It took me a while to figure out how to deal with the characters’ response to the events of Royal Street Reveillon–I could hardly pretend those things didn’t happen, after all–but eventually it all began to fall into place. I ended up with a book I was very pleased with, and probably one of the best books in the series. I’m not sure what Scotty is next, but I know it’s going to take place while the building on Decatur is renovated and redone as a single family residence, the boys will be living in the dower house–Taylor will be living in the Diderot mansion because there’s not enough space in the old dower house for all four of them. I think this is going to be the hurricane party book, which I am kind of reluctant to write because the last time I decided to write that story was right before Katrina. But I am going to start figuring that one out a bit, see where we can go with it. I do think a crime story set during an evacuation, with the city emptied, is an interesting idea, so I’ll probably write some free form brainstorming the way I always do. I’m kind of excited about writing another Scotty book this year.
There are also some short stories I want to get under control and finished and submitted.
But once I finish this, I am going to my chair with my journal and Tara’s book, so I can hopefully get that done today. I also have chores to get done–the kitchen is sliding again–and here’s hoping for a productive Sunday, okay? Have a great one–I may be back later.
It is very bright and sunny this morning; it was in the seventies yesterday but took an alarming dip over night. It is currently forty-three degrees outside, with a forecast of a high of merely fifty-six. The weather? She is bipolar in New Orleans in the winter, and we never really know what to expect from day to day. I’ve also realized that my mom also became obsessed with the weather when she was older, and I now check it every morning when I never really did before.
I had thought I had more to do today with the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon; but I was wrong–it’s next weekend that I have three panels on Saturday. Today is just a reading, and I’ll be reading from Mississippi River Mischief, of course, since it’s my most recent release from them. Other than that, I’ll be spending the day cleaning up and writing and doing things around here. I did get a lot accomplished yesterday–not as much as I had hoped or wanted, of course, that never happens–but I feel better about things around here now than I did before. I think I still haven’t gotten my stamina back yet, which is going to probably take a hot minute anyway right? I start strength PT on Monday, which should be exhausting. I did sleep really well last night, which was terrific; I really cannot get used to sleeping so well every night. I mean, I can, but feeling so rested when I get up every day rather than tired and groggy has been marvelous.
I spent some time with Tara Laskowski’s marvelous The Weekend Retreat last night and will definitely try to finish it today, if I can. It’s quite excellent, and is kind of a master class in both point of view and how to structure a novel. There are three point of view characters (four, if you count someone who is merely identified as “the weekend guest”), and the three women she uses are very different and the voices she’s created for them are distinct and unique. It’s very well done, and it also follows the structure of four that I’ve often noticed in novels–three that are in the same generation and whose lives are entwined, along with another who is not (Valley of the Dolls, Peyton Place, The Best of Everything, Class Reunion)–the list of books that follow that plot structure are countless, and something I’ve always wanted to write about. Anyway, Tara’s book is terrific and I am looking forward to spending more time with it this weekend.
We also watched this week’s Reacher last night, and we’re both a bit amazed at how different this season is from the first; but the books often were very different from each other. Sometimes they were intimate stories, sometimes they were action-adventure romps with very high stakes. Alan Ritchson is simply perfect as Reacher, and he has a very strong supporting cast in the season, but the dialogue is a bit hackneyed, cheesy, and clichéd at times. The action sequences are fantastically shot and choreographed, though, and the story is pretty good.
I also started watching the original BBC miniseries of Brideshead Revisted, which I’ve never seen, and I also got a copy of the book, which I’ve never read…but have become more interested in them both since watching Saltburn and seeing it compared to Brideshead. I’ve been sorting my thoughts on Saltburn since watching and enjoying it, which means it obviously had an impact on me and stimulated me intellectually. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film that has engaged my mind and my knowledge of film and novels so thoroughly.
Sparky also wreaked havoc on the kitchen again last night while I slumbered, so there’s some picking up that needs to be done, and since the kitchen will again be the background for my reading, I should probably work on clearing the counters and the dishes and all that; of course, I imagine Sparky will make an appearance during the reading, too, since he is very determined and doesn’t take no for an answer (at least for the first five or six times he is told no).
I also need to run a couple of errands today so I won’t really have to leave the house again other than PT until Tuesday morning. I love when I don’t have to leave the house, seriously. To me, that’s the real appeal of retiring–not having to leave the house every day.
Hmmm.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and check out the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon if you have time!
Wednesday morning in the Lost Apartment, where it is a staggering 39 degrees outside. Brrr! But I slept pretty well (even if I didn’t want to get up), and my mind is slowly but surely coming back to life. Yesterday wasn’t a bad day at all, but I was out of sorts and off-track for pretty much the entire day, because my routine was disrupted when I got to work and so…yeah. I did run my errands on the way home from work last night and got home to a needy Sparky, so I had to spend some time playing with him and then transformed my lap into a cat bed for a little while. Tomorrow morning I have to get up super-early for PT–which I am not looking forward to, and of course there’s a department meeting on Friday morning, that I think I’ll go into the office for despite it being my at-home day and having the ability to call in for it. I have some on-line events Saturday for the January Bold Strokes bookathon, which I should post more about, and then the rest of the weekend is mine.
I did some more research into a story I am writing last night, and yes, I actually started writing the story. I’m writing about Julia Brown, the “witch” of Manchac Swamp who worked as the healer in a small town inside the swamp and along the lake shore, which was only accessible by railroad. Frenier was a small community, and it was completely destroyed by the 1915 hurricane; all that is left of it is the cemetery and it’s only accessible by boat now. I’ve always wanted to write about the 1915 hurricane since I first learned of it–it came up when I was down a rabbit-hole about the Filipino settlements on Lake Borgne, which were also destroyed in the 1915 hurricane, which led me to reading about Frenier, and the so-called curse of Aunt Julia Brown. (I do wish I’d known about all this before I wrote a Sherlock story set in 1916; no mention of the previous year’s destruction in that story is odd but maybe unnecessary; it didn’t impact the plot of the story at all, but…if I set another Sherlock story in that same time period I need to address that elephant in the room.)
I also went down another research wormhole last night, too–inspired by Mary & George–about George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and his close relationship not only with James I but with his son, Charles I…although the relationship between Villiers and Charles I wasn’t quite the same kind of erotic friendship as Villiers enjoyed with the senior Stuart. Buckingham was also one of the real historical figures that appeared in Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, which I still want to retell one day from the point of view of Milady deWinter. It’s such a fascinating period, really, and the clothes! MonDieu, the clothes! I’ve always been fascinated by Cardinal Richelieu, and really need to get over my fear of writing about a historical period and just buckle down and write that damned book, don’t I? Sigh. I also need to get back to both Chlorine and Muscles, too.
Heavy heaving sigh.
But I am also starting to feel like I am settling back into my normal, every day life, and I feel better than I have in years. That cloudy feeling in my brain seems to be gone, and I am adapting to getting back up early in the morning without much hassle; I suspect the sleeping pills are working their magic and sending me into a deep healthy sleep every night, which pays off in being both awake and lucid in the morning. I’ve also got some blog entries to finish writing–my thoughts on Saltburn, because I know everyone is just waiting to hear what I have to say about it, and some analysis of the most recent chapter of the graphic novel Heartstopper, both of which are destined to be queer cultural artifacts.
And I hope to finish reading Tara Laskowski’s The Weekend Retreat before the weekend, too. I should have spent some time with it last night, but it was after six when I got home and by the time I was finished with putting stuff away and quality Sparky time and writing, it was later and so I just went down the Villiers wormhole. I also watched the final episode of season 2 of War of the Worlds, and am officially tapping out now. Not only was the shark jumped, the story became preposterous. I thought it might be a bit more interesting and intriguing once I realized the direction they were going in, but no. I also forgot part one of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City was airing last night, so I’ll be catching up on that tonight after reading. I get to go straight home from the office tonight, so fingers crossed that I’ll get some good reading time in before I shut my mind off and dig into some reality television.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and who knows? I may be back later.
One of the things I’ve always lamented is the shortage of Black Louisiana crime writers.
There have been Black characters who were the main characters in Louisiana crime series, but they were always written by white people and while I did enjoy some of the books, I always felt a little uncomfortable with reading them. Can a white person really do a Black main character in a Louisiana crime series justice? I am sure if I went back and reread them now I’d find them more problematic than I did in the first place.
So, when my friend Ellen Byron recommended that I should read Danielle Arseneaux’ debut novel, Glory Be, I couldn’t wait to get a copy and read it.
And I am so grateful that I did, because it’s an absolute joy.
Glory Broussard was tired of waiting. She figured this barista was new, and she would know since she was a regular at CC’s Coffee House. With each drink order, he nodded and flipped through the pages of a thick manual, going back and forth between the espresso machine and the book.
It didn’t help that he was grinning like a goddamn fool at that white woman. She was wearing a pink ribbed tank top, and as far as Glory could tell, no bra.Her jean shorts were so scant that you could see the bottom curve of her ass. Glory had seen enough of this recently at the Acadiana Mall to know it was not an accident but a trend, and a disgraceful one at that. Wet hair crept down to her waist, making her look like a creature that had crawled out of the Atchafalaya Swamp.
Glory edges up to the counter, closely behind the braless woman. “Excuse me,” she said to the barista. “Are you the only one working behind the counter? Y’all should be better staffed for the after-church crowd.”
“I’m not sure. I’m new here.”
“Clearly.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead, a useless gesture in Louisiana this time of year.
What made this even more exciting to me was the book wasn’t set in New Orleans–as so many inevitably are–but in Lafayette, which was also refreshing. Lafayette is a more Cajun city than New Orleans, and is the heart of what we call Acadiana here. I really like Lafayette; I went up there with some friends who were touring Louisiana and had a great time and some truly great food. It’s also a gorgeous little city, too, with lots of charm and its own Carnival, and very different than New Orleans.
The above is the opening sequence in which Arsenault introduces us to Glory Broussard, a deftly drawn, deeply complex character who worked as the produce manager at a grocery store for years until she got custody of her ex’s betting book in the divorce and took over for him, spending every Sunday after church at CC’s and taking bets. Glory is prickly and proud, and never takes any slight lightly. By the end of the first chapter her best friend, a nun she grew up with named Sister Amity Gay, has committed suicide. Glory doesn’t believe it for a minute and is furious when the police write it off as a suicide, even though she is certain Amity would have never committed suicide…so she decides to take it upon herself to investigate for them.
The investigation itself is worthy enough for reading, but the way the book is structured, the way Arsenault slowly plays out her cards letting us get to know Glory better by revealing why she is the way she is at the opening of the book truly kicks into gear where her lawyer daughter Delphine shows up, ostensibly to help her fight the condemnation of her house the city is processing because of complaints–and by showing the house through Delphine’s eyes, as well as her mother, gives us an entirely new perspective on Glory herself, as she also recruits Delphine to help her look into Amity’s death…and oddly enough, there are any number of motives for someone to want Amity out of the way–including the corruption behind a new petrochemical plant’s approval that Amity is fighting–as well as a connection to the drug kingpin of Acadiana.
I loved getting to know Glory, I loved seeing her take charge of her own life again after several years of depression, and the pages simply flew past. Arsenault has an amazing gift for a turn of phrase, all of them purely Louisiana, and a masterful authorial voice.
2024, to be exact. LSU plays at eleven this morning, and I’ve let a lot of things slide these last few days. Yesterday was a lazy day; I read for awhile, watched the Saints game (they won!), and then we started watching movies. First up was a gay horror film, Midnight Kiss, which was much better than I expected it to be; followed by The Holdovers, which I also enjoyed; and the evening was capped off with The Exorcist: Believers which was so fucking terrible I cannot imagine how much money they had to throw at Ellen Burstyn to reprise her role of Chris MacNeil. (I mean, the movie seemed to have listened to my observation that any religion that ever gets drawn into a horror story inevitably postulates that Catholicism is real, and therefore the only true Christianity, as it expounded exorcism out and beyond Catholicism into other faiths, which was the only nice thing about the movie.)
Sometimes sequels are nothing more than money grabs that demean the original. Just saying.
Today is going to be mostly about college football with some chores tossed in for good measure. I have early morning physical therapy tomorrow, so won’t be able to see the end of the Washington-Texas game, but I’ll check the score when I rise.
So here we are on the first morning of 2024, and as usual, I am thinking about the new year yawning before me like an open blank book and I want to set some attainable goals for it as well as roll over the ones that didn’t get done last year.
I suppose the first and most important goal for me as far as 2024 is concerned is to continue my physical therapy and recovery from my surgery, and to carry that through to eating better and a regular workout routine of some sort, whether it’s simply stretching, walking, or weight training. I want to stay strong and have energy, and being in better physical condition will help me stay injury-free and healthy. I need to eat better, and I’d like to get down to maybe somewhere between 190 and 200 by the end of this year. I had let this slide for a very long time, and it’s going to be hard to get back into the swing of things again at over sixty, but it can be done.
I’m not going to add “get an agent” for this year, as it’s been a goal for longer than this blog has existed and so making it a goal doesn’t mean it’ll happen or get done. I am going to put “finish designing my website” on this list, though. I’ve not had the best luck with that over the years, and I really didn’t/don’t have the time to do it myself, or teach myself how to do it. I did get started on a simple site, but have completely forgotten everything I learned doing it and will essentially have to start over; and probably won’t finish and will end up forgetting everything I learned all over again. But if I steal some time every Saturday or Sunday morning now that football season is almost over…it could be do-able.
I do want to continue working on myself and becoming a better person overall; a lot of that requires self-reflection as well as remembering the past and situations that triggered future behavioral responses in me and hopefully putting that anxiety-ridden trauma to rest once and for all. The self-work includes better educating myself about the world, and viewing history with a more jaundiced eye–and my eye was already more jaundiced than most.
I also would like to read more, and read more for pleasure rather than quite so analytically. It took me a long time to shake over reading as a reviewer, and the easiest way for me to shake that was switching to reading as an editor–which I have also struggled to stop doing. But I think I am there, at last–and so I want to get back into reading a lot more–especially if all I am doing is scrolling on my phone. I do want to spend less time on social media for sure.
I also want to be better about marketing. My issues with promotion and marketing and public appearances were always anxiety-related, and I have finally learned how to control that…plus the new medications should go a long way to making me loosen up and relax a lot more when it comes to those sorts of things. The panel I stepped in to moderate at the last minute at Bouchercon was actually one of the best experiences I’ve had with and on a panel. I hope that there will be more of those experiences, and I am not going to let myself get worked up into knots before hand anymore.
I’m also letting go of a lot of hard feelings. I don’t know if anyone was actually trying to genuinely damage or hurt me, so most of the pettiness is being let go of; I don’t want anyone like that having space in my head or draining any of my energy anymore. I won’t forget or forgive, of course–I just won’t care anymore.
And I want to continue to push myself and grow as a writer. I think I want to try writing a romance.
I slept well last night but my blankets were all tangled up this morning, indicating the sleep was more restless than it has been for weeks. I also wasn’t in the mood to write my blog when I first woke up, so I decided to read, drink my coffee, and maybe have some breakfast before getting cleaned up. I usually write this over my morning coffee, and since I don’t reread or re-edit once it’s written, that could explain the run-on sentences, word repetitions, and occasional poor grammar no one ever points out to me. This blog began nineteen years ago (!!!) on Livejournal (the anniversary was 12/26), migrated over here in about 2016 or so, and still somehow keeps chugging along. It always surprises me that people read it, to be honest. It was always meant mainly for me, and was originally intended as a daily exercise to get me writing again. I guess it worked. When I started I had published four novels, a few anthologies, and some short stories. Nineteen years later, I’ve way surpassed that total, despite some fallow years in which I produced nothing.
I did some more picking up around here yesterday while watching football games. It was fun watching Mississippi beat Penn State, and don’t even get me started on the Florida State-Georgia game. I get the disappointment at not making the play-offs, but you also knew you were scheduled to play Georgia, another team disappointed in not making the play-offs, but instead of showing everyone that the committee was wrong and showing up to beat Georgia…and Georgia also had star players injured and over a dozen opting out and even more entering the transfer portal. This would have been a play-off game had either Auburn or Georgia beaten Alabama this year, but that’s how things go. Auburn went 13-0 in 2004 and wasn’t invited to the BCS title game. You don’t always get what you want in life or sport, and the question is how you handle that. If this was going to be the case, don’t accept the damned bowl bid. Your fans spent a lot of money to go to that game, and it was incredibly disrespectful to the team, the fanbase, and the university to show up and get embarrassed like that. After Coach O was fired in 2021, LSU went to its bowl game with 39 scholarship players and got trounced by Kansas State….but how does it appear in the record books? KSU 42, LSU 21. Twenty years from now when people look back at the history of college football and bowl games, it will read Georgia 63, Florida State 3. It’s a program and culture problem, and all the FSU fans apologizing for this disgraceful beating–do you quit when you don’t get a raise or promotion you worked hard for and feel like you deserved? The word for that is quitter…and for the record, Georgia played it’s back-ups, walk-ons and so forth in the second half and still beat your ass 21-0.
And if LSU went 12-0 and didn’t get picked for the play-offs…and pulled the same shit? Sure, I’d be angry about the play-offs but I’d also call out the Tigers for embarrassing the state and the university that way.
I’m really enjoying Danielle Arsenault’s Glory Be, and am savoring every word. What a fresh and unique voice! I have to say I am so glad I realized I needed to be better about my reading choices and should read more diverse writers. It’s been a great education for me as a reader, a writer, a person and a citizen. I’m still learning how to be better about race and gender and gender identity and sexuality; and I strongly encourage other readers to do the same. Crime fiction is so much stronger and healthier when it represents everyone, I think, and while I don’t consider reading diverse writers to be the total education I need on any social issues facing the country–I need to read more non-fiction and theory.
I rewatched The Birds yesterday after the football games, and it was pretty much as I remembered it. I’d only seen it twice before; originally as a child edited for television, when it frightened me so badly that I had nightmares (I was prone to them growing up) and for years could never see crows on a jungle gym or a wire without feeling uneasy and then again as a rental in college after I’d read the short story again and wanted to see how faithful the film was to the story. I didn’t care as much for it the second time around–the acting is really terrible and so is the script–but the suspenseful parts still held up and were scary. This third time around confirmed my second viewing; and I noticed some other flaws in the picture. Rod Taylor’s mother isn’t much older than he is, and why is there about a thirty year age gap between him and his sister? I think the short story is better than the film, but I can also see why people like it. I do consider it one of Hitchcock’s lesser films.
Since tomorrow is a day for thinking ahead and coming up with some goals for the new year, I suppose today should be a recap of sorts of this past year. It was, as I mentioned in a previous entry, a rather up-and-down rollercoaster of highs and lows with very little level ground in the middle. The recognition of mainstream award nominations for my work–even queer work–was a delightful surprise this past year. But even more important than that is I think my work is getting better. I had felt, some years ago, that my writing was becoming stale and that I wasn’t growing as a writer anymore; I’d become stagnant and that was one of my biggest fears. I wound up deciding to take some time away from writing books on deadline and write things just for me, things that I wanted to write but also wanted to take the time to do correctly. It was during this time that I worked on both #shedeservedit and Bury Me in Shadows in early drafts, and also started the novellas and working more intently on my short stories. I accepted the challenge of writing stories to themed anthologies, and produced some terrific ones of which I am really proud. When I dove back into series work with Royal Street Reveillon, I wanted to write something non-formulaic for the Scotty series. I also wanted to shake things up with Scotty a bit, as the series was getting a bit too comfortable and safe for me. Royal Street Reveillon certainly was neither comfortable nor safe, and neither was Mississippi River Mischief.
Bury Me in Shadows was not easy for me to write. When I went back to the book after setting it aside for awhile, I realized several things: I couldn’t ignore race and racism, I had to address the Lost Cause narrative, and I also had realized while doing more reading and research that the stories my paternal grandmother used to tell me about the Civil War and Alabama and the family were apocryphal stories you can turn up about almost everywhere in the rural South. The book wasn’t working, in fact, because I was trying to elide those issues because I was afraid of doing it wrong…so it pushed me to do better. And actually addressing those issues made the book easier to write. The same thing was true of #shedeservedit; I’d been working on this book in one form or another since I actually lived in Kansas. But again, I realized when I went back to it that what I was doing didn’t work because I wasn’t going there with toxic masculinity and rape culture because it wasn’t personal enough for my main character, and so I bit the bullet and made it more personal for him. It dredged up a lot of memories, some of them painful, but it also made the book better and stronger. I had been wanting to write a cozy for the longest time, and decided to try it for something different and new–and that became A Streetcar Named Murder. I was also very pleased with it, even though the deadline and the turnaround on it was a bit insane…but I still managed to take my time and turned it into something I was proud of when I got the final author copies.
My two releases of this year–Death Drop and Mississippi River Mischief–are also books of which I feel proud. I also published three terrific short stories this year: “Solace in a Dying Hour” in This Fresh Hell; “The Ditch” in School of Hard Knox; and “The Rosary of Broken Promises” in Dancing in the Shadows.
I think I’m settling finally into an acceptance that I am pretty good at what I do. I may not have the master’s or PhD in creative writing or literature of any kind; but I’ve never really wanted to be an academic writer. I never wanted to be Faulkner, but Faulkner did inspire me to interconnect novels and stories in my own fictional world (also Stephen King). I would like to do some non-fiction studies of genre and writers I enjoy, but in an accessible rather than academic way. Academics used to make me feel stupid and uneducated, and I also used to envy those writers who had that kind of background because I felt it made their work stronger than mine, or gave them insights into writing and building a novel that I’d never had, which made me and my work somehow lesser. But that wasn’t on them; that was on me. I was the one who felt inferior and lesser, not talented or good enough. That chip was on my shoulder and I was the one who put it there. My peers actually consider me a peer, and newer writers look at my longevity and my CV and are impressed by the prodigious output, if nothing else. I used to think all the award nominations were kind of hollow because I so rarely won; which was incredibly ungracious because some writers are never nominated for anything…but it doesn’t mean their work isn’t good. Now, I just find myself grateful to make a short-list of five out of all the possibilities for that slot, you know? I’m lucky, and I’m blessed.
I’ve reflected a lot on my life and my career this past year–Mom’s death had something to do with that–and I’ve identified, in many cases, why I am the way am by remembering the event that triggered the response in my brain of “okay, never want to experience that again” which led to so many self-toxic and self-defeating behaviors. But the bottom line of it all is I’ve finally accepted myself for who I am, have determined to stop self-deprecating, and take some pride in myself and my career and my life. I know the most amazing people and have the most incredible friends. I have a day job where I make a difference in people’s lives. I have an awesome life-partner, an enviable writing career, and I get to live in New Orleans.
