Tag: Borders

You Can’t Change That

Here we are on a Thursday morning. Everyone is arriving in Denver for Left Coast Crime, but I don’t have any FOMO. Sure, there are people I would love to see and spend time with, and I always have fun at conferences, but…there are also other people there. I thought I would really miss not going to Bouchercon in Nashville last year, but…I didn’t. I’ve always been a FOMO person, scared that I was missing out on a good time, but I didn’t the entire time it was going on, or even after. And the local ones are next weekend, anyway.

I just saw that we are in the path of some massive storm system this weekend that’s going to throw up potential tornadoes in New Orleans, which means we may lose power, which will be incredibly annoying if it happens, but also means I can just light some candles and read in my easy chair. I do want to make some more reading progress this weekend in addition to everything else on the to-do list. We just can’t seem to catch a break down here this year, can we? Terrorism, blizzards, high winds, the Super Bowl, Carnival…sheesh. It’s like we can’t ever just breathe…and we are heading into stinging caterpillar season, with swarming termites not far behind.

We were busy at work yesterday again, with the end result that I was, as I suspected, exhausted when I got home from my post-work errands last night. I collapsed into my easy chair with a purring kitty and was down for the rest of the night. I caught up on my reality show, caught up on the latest news of the great American collapse (or whatever future historians will call the end of the Great American Experiment in Self-Rule), and then went to bed at a fairly early hour. I did run the dishwasher, as planned, but not the washing machine as planned. I am a bit fatigued today–synapses aren’t quite firing the way they should be–so I may not be able to write or read when I get home tonight. I guess we shall see. We’re also busy today, too. Sigh. It’s been a week at the office, has it not? But at least I only need to log four hours of remote work and then the day is mine.

Woo-hoo!

I was, naturally, saddened by the loss of a long-time friend this week, Felice Picano. It’s very strange to think I won’t ever see him again, or get that mischievous kid look on his face when he was about to say something absolutely terrible about someone to me. Felice was the first published writer I ever met. I went to a signing he did for the paperback release of Like People in History at the Borders in Minneapolis that used to be on the corner of Lake and Hennepin. Paul had bought me a hardcover copy as a gift the year before, and I’d loved the book. I was too shy and awestruck to do anything but put my book down for a signature…but when Paul went to work for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, they wanted to put together a queer panel and I suggested Felice for it, and I got to pick him up at the airport. That ride in from the airport was my first actual conversation with him, and the start of a friendship that lasted almost thirty years. We always tried to have coffee or lunch or something when he was in town for Saints & Sinners after that, I stayed in his house in the Hollywood Hills several times, and there was one amazing weekend when he gave me a lift to Palm Springs from LA, and oh, how hard we laughed in the car on the way there. I didn’t see or interact with him as much as I used to, but every time I saw him, it was like we’d just seen each other the day before. He meant a lot to me, and the fact that he always treated me as a peer from that first meeting at the airport on meant the world to me.

I just can’t believe I’ll never see him again. The worst thing about getting older is losing people.

And on that somber note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday Eve, everyone, and I’ll be back eventually.

Ballerinos have the most amazing bodies–and even more amazing is what they can DO with those bodies.

Whisper You Love Me Boy

I am so messed up this week. I literally had no idea what day of the week it was for most of the day and had to keep reminding myself it was Tuesday and not Monday. It was very annoying and terribly irritating, as I am sure you can imagine. And it kept messing with me the entire day. I kept thinking oh two more days in the office despite the fact that there was actually only one (I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday so have taken the day off) and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion of it being Tuesday all day. I certainly hope today isn’t going to another disorienting don’t know what day it is kind of day.

So far so good this morning, really. I feel more awake and a lot less discombobulated than I did yesterday, which is definitely a plus. It also doesn’t feel as cold today as it did yesterday, which I am also taking as a win; Friday is supposed to be miserably cold, but I’ll deal with that when that comes around (note to self: look for other space heaters this evening when you get home from work); hopefully it won’t cause the “cold paralysis” I sometimes experience–when it’s so cold I can’t do anything but huddle for warmth under blankets. Our heat isn’t working again; I turned it on last week and it came on…but then it turned off and hasn’t come back on again since. I really hate our new system because I cannot grasp how it works, and it seems to be so incredibly sensitive to everything that anything even just the tiniest bit incorrect will shut it down completely and we have to call the guys out again. I don’t even know if Paul has bothered mentioning it to our landlady this time, to be honest. It seems like having a working HVAC system is simply not in the cards for us.

Yesterday I got some lovely new editions of Joseph Hansen’s first four Dave Brandstetter mysteries in the mail, which is very exciting. It’s been decades since I read Hansen; and frankly, I am not entirely certain I read the entire series–but that’s lost in the murk of the past; I cannot imagine I didn’t if they were in print, and I do distinctly remember some lovely paperback editions I picked up at Tomes and Treasures in Tampa…but I don’t recall reading them all. So I have decided that I am going to reread Hansen’s novels again–it’ll be interesting to see what my take on them is now that I am also twenty years into a mystery-writing career as opposed to the mystery-writer-wannabe I was when I originally read them (I also seem to recall picking some up at the Borders in Minneapolis at the corner of Lake and Hennepin). Hansen isn’t nearly as remembered as he should be, frankly; I think it’s a disgrace he was never an Edgar finalist or named Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America.

I got the cover art and the proofs for an anthology I contributed a story over the last few days: Cupid Shot Me: Valentine Tales of Love, Mystery and Suspense, edited by Frank W. Butterfield. This is the place where I finally found a home for my nasty little story “This Thing of Darkness”, which was inspired by a visit to New Orleans a few years ago from someone I went to high school with–I met him at Tacos and Beer, which is just around the corner from my house, and of course while I waited for him and watched the crowd there, I started writing a nasty little story in my head that began precisely that way: the protagonist meeting a friend from high school he hasn’t seen in forty years for dinner in New Orleans at Tacos and Beer (which just goes to show–a writer will take inspiration from pretty much any-fucking-where), and as I wrote the story in my head while I waited it took a much darker turn. I was working on the Kansas book at the time (yet another draft of it) and here I was seeing someone from high school back in Kansas…so it really took a dark, nasty turn. I had been doing some research on, of all things, the nuclear missile bases scattered across Kansas (there was one near our high school) which led me into another Youtube wormhole about the TV movie The Day After…and also made me think about an entire book that could be built around one of the abandoned missile bases…anyway, after dinner I went home and started writing this story. It wasn’t originally called “This Thing of Darkness” (which is from Macbeth, by the way); I don’t remember what I originally called the story, but “This Thing of Darkness” was originally the title for the story in Unburied, “Night Follows Night”, but was too good of a title to not use, so I switched whatever the title of this was out for it.

I do like the story, twisted as it is, but it also got me to thinking about patterns in my short stories and how I write them–which I would talk about it here but the thought is still completely unformed, which has never stopped me before, of course, but it is so unformed that I would embarrass myself writing my way through exploring it, and I am not entirely sure that I actually regularly do what I think I do–following the same story structure in all of my stories–so I would need to reread more of them at once to determine whether that is something I actually do with my work…

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines.