Another wretched and vile Monday morning has yet to dawn as I sit here swilling my morning cappuccino.
The day did not get off to a great start, with me putting my glasses down while I washed my face and brushed my teeth and then spent ten minutes looking for them–think Velma on Scooby Doo Where Are You?–but I did finally find them, and all was again right in my world–at least for then. I feel a bit out of sorts this morning–misplacing my glasses is not an auspicious start to the day, ever, on any level–but feel relatively confident this day will sort itself out accordingly as it continues.
We didn’t watch the Academy Awards last night, choosing instead to finish the second season of Line of Duty, which is one of the best-plotted crime series I’ve seen in quite a while; full of twists and turns and constant surprises as it follows the Anti-corruption division of a police department in Wales. The firsts season was amazing, the second was even better than the first (a stunning performance by Keeley Hawes of It’s a Sin has a lot to do with that), and I do recommend this if you have Acorn. We’re looking forward to diving into season three tonight.
Yesterday was a lovely kind of day, really. I spent the morning getting the kitchen under control, and then went to the gym, which was a lovely feeling. It was a simply gorgeous day yesterday in New Orleans; the weather has been rather marvelous since that five day stretch of non-stop rain we had week before last, so the walk to and from the gym was rather nice. I then worked on getting even more organized–it’s really a non-stop process, actually–and while I didn’t get everything finished the way I had hoped (didn’t tackle the inbox, which is still stacked high with mail and folders and loose paper), it was a nice start. We get paid again on Wednesday–this is the paycheck when almost everything is due, so the money will go into the account and go right back out again–and then it’s May. YIKES. I need to start working on inputting the edits and corrections and changes to this manuscript tonight when I get home from work; with an eye to getting it all finished by Saturday so it can go back to my editor. I need to focus most of my energies on getting this done, obviously; but that doesn’t mean I can’t actually plan out Chlorine or scribble notes down in my journal.
I also started reading Thomas Perry’s Edgar winning debut from 1982, The Butcher’s Boy, yesterday afternoon. After writing about how I tend to not read a lot of crime fiction (or fiction in general) from straight white men, I started feeling a bit, well, guilty about making such a bald statement. There are, as a matter of fact, any number of straight white male crime writers whose work I really enjoy: Ace Atkins, Michael Koryta, Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Chris Holm, Lou Berney…it’s actually quite an extensive list. I will say, though, that a lot of the stuff published between the 1950’s and 1980’s I didn’t care much for, with some notable exceptions. But I had gotten a copy of the Perry after reading about it on one of those Crimereads list articles; I don’t remember what the list was about, and how this tied in with the other books on the list, but it’s been sitting on my TBR pile for quite some time and I thought, in my guilt-ridden state yesterday, why not give it a try? It did, after all, win an Edgar. And I am enjoying it–it appears to be about the investigation into a paid assassin/hit man; so far the point of view characters are a woman agent for the Department of Justice, for whom this is her first field gig, and the unnamed hitman. The book opens with a successful hit in Ventura, California; there is also a powerful senator who most likely is the next target. Am really looking forward to getting further into this one.
Saturday morning and feeling…maybe not fine, but not bad.
Edits are on my horizon today, lots and lots of edits. That’s fine; I need to get this done and I’ve been turning the manuscript and story and so forth over and over in my head all week, and think I am finally ready to get this accomplished. Huzzah? Huzzah!
We were supposed to get a thunderstorm last night, but I don’t know if it ever came through; the sidewalk is wet outside so obviously at some point it rained; but I apparently slept through it. I slept pretty decently last night; I woke up around 4 this morning, and then did that in-and-out-of-a-half-sleep thing until I got up around seven thirty. I am a bit foggy this morning, which the coffee should help with, and I intend to spend some time this morning with my Laurie R. King novel, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, which I am enjoying the hell out of; it will be hard to tear myself away from it to go to work, but that is indeed what I must do today, and I am sure when the time to go to work rolls around I will have to force myself to tear myself away from Sherlock and Mary; but I can also spend some time with them again tomorrow.
My April plans seem to have swirled around the drain, haven’t they? Perhaps I was feeling a bit ambitious as we headed into this month, and yes, this month there were a lot of outside distractions–issues with the apartment, the flooding of the laundry room/kitchen, etc.–plus issues with sleeping; it’s no wonder I didn’t get a whole hell of a lot done this past month. I did get some good research done on Chlorine, and even get some background preparatory work done that was necessary before I start writing it, so that’s something, at any rate; I’ve not had as much luck with writing and/or creating new short stories this month–or even revising/finishing ones I’ve already started.
I probably shouldn’t be so hard on myself.
While making condom packs yesterday I watched Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert film on Netflix, and after it dove directly into Miss Americana, also on Netflix (I told you, I’m turning into a Swiftie). I enjoyed both tremendously, in all honesty; I’m not quite sure why she appeals so much to an almost-sixty year old gay man, but there you have it. Last night we also finished off the first season of Line of Duty, which was quite good, and are now going to move onto the second season; there are at least four that I am aware of, and we’re really looking forward to this second season. It’s quite good–I’m not sure if the second season is going to continue examining the corruption within the police department the first season focused on, or if it’s going to jump around to different stations; and the end of the first season wasn’t exactly a great example of justice being meted out…but it was a lot more realistic than most shows with the ending they chose–it’s easy to see and understand how that would be exactly how “justice” would play out when it comes to corruption within the police department.
Sad, but true.
And on that note, I am heading to my easy chair to read and swill coffee for a bit–Scooter is whining, which means he needs a warm lap to nap in–and I hope you all have a simply marvelous and productive (or relaxing) Saturday; whichever you choose, Constant Reader.
I slept better last night than I have the last two nights, but it still left something to be desired. I woke up regularly throughout the night, but managed to relax enough somehow to always feel like I was resting, which was lovely and nice and helped; I certainly hope I am not going to be as fucking tired today as I was all day yesterday–which was miserable. Tonight I should go to the gym after I get off work, but we’ll have to see how I am feeling. I can always, in a worst case scenario, push it off till Wednesday night if I am too tired this evening.
Heavy sigh.
But it’s Tuesday and the week is progressing; time and tide wait for no one, and especially not for me. It occurred to me last night as I sat in my chair watching another episode of The Capture (which is really well done and interesting; here’s hoping they don’t blow the great premise over the final four episodes) that I am turning sixty this year in August and what I really need to do, really should do, is come up with a five-year-plan that will carry me into retirement from the day job. I know I shouldn’t really retire that early because of the benefit increases to seniors if I wait until seventy; but I honestly don’t know that I can do another ten years, honestly. So, if I want to retire at sixty-five, I need a plan to increase my income to compensate for the loss of my salary. (And yes, I know retiring at 65 means I won’t get my full benefits, but I can’t see waiting another almost two years. I can barely handle it now, let alone almost another seven years.) So, I am going to try to figure out a five-year plan for me, both personally and professionally.
I have to say, rereading the manuscript on Sunday (it’s not a good sign that I fell asleep reading it; but I was tired from the gym and not sleeping well Saturday night) but I was kind of embarrassed by how bad some of my sentences were and how paragraphs were constructed, to the point I was beginning to question my ability to write anything; I’m not going to lie, since the pandemic struck I’ve been having a lot of issues writing, and what little confidence I may have had at one time (not entirely sure I ever had any, honestly) is completely gone now. That’s something I really need to work on. Several years ago, in another fallow/low-confidence period, I came up with some things to say every morning, going with the old theory that saying something out loud every day will make it come true because I will start believing in it. Needless to say, at some point I stopped saying the affirmations aloud every morning–not sure when that happened, or why it happened; but I just did, and I think I may need to start doing it again. I’ve never had much self-confidence about anything, to be completely honest, and it’s very easy for me to go down the dark path of self-doubt and self-castigation.
The joys of the mood swings, seriously.
But today is much better than yesterday–and Sunday for that matter; being tired clearly affects my moods–and so I am probably going to try to dive back into the manuscript tonight when I get home from work. Here’s hoping I have the energy to not only do so but to make dinner as well. Fingers crossed, right?
But I do need to snap the fuck out of whatever this whatever it is, is, and get back to work on everything.
Heavy sigh.
I also need to get back to reading for pleasure. I have so many amazing books on hand that I want to read, and yet somehow I just am always so worn out in the evenings I can’t focus on reading anything other than things I am reading for research, and I also need to jump back into writing new stuff–Chlorine is just sitting there, and there are any number of other stories I want and need to write or revise or finish. I’ve already allowed so much time to go past that I am going to miss a submission deadline for a story I wanted to get out there–partly the current computer nonsense, mostly; an annoyance I am not going to get into right here–but the older I get the more of a Luddite I appear to be.
And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.
It’s gray again this morning in New Orleans, and I have about six boxes of books to take to the library sale today. I also have five or six boxes of condom packs that will have to go back to the office on Monday; which, I suppose, is the easiest way to say that my living room currently looks incredibly cluttered and desperately in need of organizing and cleaning and so forth. I also have a lot of errands to do–the mail, groceries, etc. and need together to the gym today as well. I would also like to get some writing done today–at least a revision of a short story or something–so tomorrow I can primarily focus on the edits of Bury Me in Shadows….and maybe do a bit on Chlorine as well.
I was ridiculously productive yesterday–as mentioned before, I really did a great job of paring down the books last night while laundering the bed linens; Paul was out having dinner with a roommate for college (who was indirectly responsible for our meeting, actually) and so while I watched Smithsonian documentaries on World War II (The Battle of Midway, The Battle of Okinawa, The Fall of Japan, Normandy: 85 Days After D-Day) Started going through the boxes of books I have cleverly concealed beneath blankets so they sort of look like tables, in way, with more books and decor on top of them (we have far too much bric-a-brac in this house, seriously), and when Paul got home we watched the second part of the Aaron Hernandez documentary. (I think perhaps the saddest thing–other than the victims, of course–was how exploited he was for his ability; he was clearly trouble at the University of Florida, so they covered for him for three years and once they’d gotten their use out of him, told him he wasn’t welcome back on the team for his senior year and to enter the draft early; as soon as he was arrested and charged the Patriots–and their fans–turned their backs on him immediately as did their fans…which tells me everything I needed to know about how his coaching staff and teammates felt about him–that was an almost lightning like 180, and considering how many other players have committed crimes and not been abandoned….and while murder is pretty extreme, of course, they clearly knew there were issues there and yet no one did anything.)
I also watched two movies yesterday while making condom packs, and both were kind of terrible. The first, The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, was so unbelievably bad I came very close to turning it off numerous times, but figured you finished Carnal Knowledge, you can finish this. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, known for his violent and bloody films, and based on the novel by Jim Thompson (whom I’ve never read, and I need to correct that at some point), it basically is a dark story about a criminal whose wife gets him paroled by appealing to a corrupt businessman (with her body), so that they can commit a bank robbery and share the money with the businessman. Of course, there are all kinds of double crosses, and the bad guys are after them, as are the cops as well as one of their other accomplices they assumed was dead; there’s a weird subplot with him taking a veterinarian and his wife along with him on the chase for no reason (other than he’s banging the wife); interestingly enough, the vet is played by Howard fro The Andy Griffith Show and the wife/girlfriend (never clear) by Sally Struthers. It’s a mess, really; its only saving grace the chemistry between McQueen and MacGraw (who became involved) and that they are both ridiculously good looking; neither can act their way out of a paper bag (if they can. there’s no evidence of it here), and the score is also terrible and jarring. I know it was remade in the 90’s, I think; but as a noir film, or Neo-noir, it fails. I didn’t care about any of the characters and breathed a sigh of relief when the credits rolled. It’s a definite Cynical 70’s Film Festival entry; that was the time of the anti-hero and anti-establishment thinking…but I couldn’t help but think how much better the film would have been had it starred, say, Paul Newman and Ellen Burstyn, or Clint Eastwood and Natalie Wood, or even Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.
In fairness, they were done no favors by the script.
The second part of my double feature was John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, based on the Carson McCullers novel and boasting a cast including Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Julie Harris and Brian Keith. I read the book several years ago and didn’t much care for it, to be honest–again, maybe I simply missed the point, but I didn’t care about any of the characters and that also translated into the film. There’s never any sense of why they do the things they do, and it’s kind of just a story about sexual hang-ups and frustrations, set around a military base somewhere in the South. Both Taylor and Brando sport really bad Southern accents, and Julie Harris is the only one who really pulls off her role–that of a sad woman who never got over the death of a child and has formed an unnatural attachment to her (incredibly racist and homophobic depiction of a) Filipino houseboy. She also apparently cut off her nipples with garden shears; she’s clearly not well, and yet all around her no one, especially her husband (Brian Keith), who’s sleeping with Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor is married to Brando, who chews the scenery at every opportunity (as I watched I couldn’t stop thinking considered the greatest actor of his generation, wow) who is an extremely repressed gay man who becomes obsessed with a young enlisted man who likes to ride horseback in the nude as well as lay out in the sun in the nude. The enlisted man is obsessed, in his turn, with Taylor, breaking into their house at night and watching her sleep while he paws through her underwear and nightgowns, sniffing them but never touching her. Brando becomes convinced the young man feels the same attraction to him, and at the end, sees the young man sneaking up to the house in the dark out a window. Thinking the young man is coming to him, he becomes enraged when he sees the young man–Elgee–sneak into his wife’s room, so he gets a gun and shoots him dead. The credits roll as Elizabeth Taylor screams. The movie is pretty true to the book, which kind of goes to show how not every book needs to be made into a movie. Most of the book is internal, which doesn’t translate to film very well–and I didn’t much care for the book. The movie could have been good–great cast after all–but overall, it fall flat for much the same reasons The Getaway did; I couldn’t muster up even a little bit of investment in any of the characters, other than Julie Harris, who is the only one who comes across well in the film. It did make me want to revisit the novel again, though, so that’s something. And while this is from 1968 or 1969, I do include it in the Cynical 70’s Film Festival–as there were many films in the late 1960’s that actually began what I consider the cynical period in American film, where the heroes were now who would have been the villains under the old Hays Code–neither Bonnie and Clyde nor The Graduate (both from 1967) could have been made under the code; certainly Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) couldn’t have been.
I may have to take a break from the Cynical 70’s Film Festival for a bit. The last three films were terrible, and while I am kind of glad I saw them–always wanted to–I don’t know if I can stand watching another dated bad movie.
Maybe it’s time to go back to the Halloween Horror Film Festival.
And since I finished The Man with the Candy, now it’s time to pick something new to read. I came across a copy of Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough, of all things, while pruning the books. I read it when I was a teenager, along with Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty, which are two completely different books about the same subject: pro football. Semi-Tough is comic; North Dallas Forty (which I preferred) is dark and almost noirish; the two books came up in conversation on Twitter recently; someone tweeted asking for people’s favorite sports film. I responded with Brian’s Song, and Laura Lippman professed her love for North Dallas Forty. I would really like to revisit the Gent novel and was also thinking I should reread the Jenkins; so having it turn up while pruning the books seemed to me like a sign. I’ll probably hate it–just looking at the first page there are some racial slurs already, and there’s nothing I hate more than the contract sumbitch, which was prevalent in the 1970’s; in theory, it’s how Southern people say “son of a bitch” with their accent. It annoyed me because everyone in my family, excepting my sister (and her children and grandchildren) and I, has a very thick accent…and not one of them ever says sumbitch. It became extremely popular in the 1970’s because Jackie Gleason, playing a corrupt Southern sheriff, says it all the time in Smoky and the Bandit…and I’ve always hated it, and never minded that it went gently into that dark night and no one bothers with it anymore. Being reminded of it sets my teeth on edge, frankly.
I may not, in fact, be able to get through the book. I know it’s meant to be funny and satirical, but….I just opened it at random and the narrator was talking about how it’s very important that we understand that he’s white because most running backs aren’t and….
Yeah.
I can only imagine the misogyny. Sigh.
All right, I need to get this mess under control so I can get everything done. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader.
Day three of heavy weather in New Orleans; there was a marvelous downpour around six this morning or so that lasted over an hour, complete with lightning and thunder. It’s still gray outside, not currently raining–but there’s a thunderstorm somewhere nearby, as there’s still lightning flashing but with a nice little break before the thunderclap, the kind that lasts for several seconds or more. I didn’t go to the gym last night because the rain was so heavy and had planned to go today–perhaps when I am done with my work-at-home duties today there will be enough of a break in storm bands for me to get over there. I could drive, of course, but that just really seems kind of silly to me since it’s so close. Why yes, I drove the four or five blocks to the gym to work out my body. Granted, rain changes everything, especially New Orleans’ kind of drenching rain, and since we are going into day three of it, the ground is already saturated and can’t absorb it so there’s more standing water than there usually is–and there’s inevitably a lot of standing water any time it rains here.
It just started raining again.
I came home last night fully intending to get a lot done, since the rain precluded the walk to the gym, and while I did do some piecework on Chlorine, I didn’t really do a lot. I was feeling tired, the way I usually do on Wednesday nights anyway, and I also didn’t even bother to unpack my backpack last night, which is not a good sign. I read some more of The Man with the Candy, which is so well-written! I’m really enjoying the book–it reminds me a lot, in how well it’s written, of my favorite true crime books of all time, Blood and Money, and not just because they are both set in Houston–it’s about how well the two different writers wrote about Houston itself, turning the city into a character in the books. This is what I always try to do when writing about New Orleans–giving the reader a strong enough sense of place that the city itself is almost a character in and of itself in my books. This is also triggering the memory that Blood and Money was part of the reason (besides living there) I wanted to set the Chanse series there originally–don’t get me wrong, I am not in the least bit regretful that the Chanse series exists in my own personal New Orleans fictional universe, but there’s always a bit of a pang for me that I have never written about Houston and probably never will, other than as an aside or something in a book. I have several ideas that begin with the character either living in, or being from, Houston; but nothing actually set there.
We also finished the second season of Very Scary People, with the two episodes on Dr. Swango, aka Dr. Death; I’d actually never heard of him before, so he was obviously new to me. We skipped the Bobby Durst episodes–after watching all six or so episodes of The Jinx I didn’t see any real need to spend another hour and a half with Bobby Durst–who, while interesting enough, doesn’t really deserve any more of my attention than he’s already had, frankly. There’s also a new limited series on Netflix, The Serpent (it may be HBO; it’s hard for me to keep track of whichever streaming service these days since there are so many), which is about Charles Sobhraj, a criminal and murderer who operated in Southeast Asia mostly. I read a book about him many years ago called Serpentine, which was also written by Thomas Thompson, who also wrote Blood and Money. It was interesting, and clearly I’ve never completely forgotten it–as soon as I saw The Serpent‘s trailer and its lead actor, I knew exactly who and what it was about–which we may be diving into tonight. There’s also a new mini-series on HBO with Kate Winslet that looks interesting, so there are a lot of options for us to choose from….maybe too many, really.
I’m not really sure why I am having so much trouble getting started on my day–although I suspect the weather has a lot to do with it. When it’s like this I really would much prefer being under a blanket and reading–there’s no better reading weather than rain, is there? It’s just so comforting to be inside and warm and dry while the house is being battered with rain and wind and the sky is rent with lightning and loud thunder….and even though it sometimes means flash flooding and so forth, one of the many things I love about living in New Orleans is the rain (Houston also has marvelous thunderstorms, as did Tampa). I lived for eight years in San Joaquin Valley in California, where it rarely, if ever rained–and we certainly never had this kind of amazing thunderstorm there.
All right, I’ve procrastinated quite long enough. Onward and upward into the spice mines, Constant Reader!
Wednesday morning and it’s pay the bills day–which I actually keep forgetting about. Yesterday the weather took a turn; it started raining around eleven and we went into a flash flood alert/high wind advisory that is lasting until Thursday morning (!!!)–at least that was the case; I’ve not checked the weather yet this morning. It didn’t seem to rain all that hard, all things considered, at any one point but it was pretty consistent for most of the day, at any rate, and it was pouring when poor Paul got home from work last night. It doesn’t appear to be raining currently–but everything outside looks wet in the gray light prior to the sun coming up. But it seems like it’s not going to rain anytime soon, which is cool–hopefully it won’t be raining when I get off work so I can head to the gym.
I am sleeping well now that most of my stress has been lifted–it’s amazing how much deadline pressure gets to me these days, not to mention having so many things going wrong in the Lost Apartment at the same time. But since the house has been sort of put back together again, and I am not on deadline anymore, I am sleeping well; my evenings are nice and relaxing, and I can work on other things without that sense of impending doom and time running out on me.
I have to say I am having the most lovely time writing Chlorine, or rather, working on it. This is the fun part of writing a book, before the drudgery sets in and you have to do the tedious chore of taking what’s in your head and typing it into a document, editing it and fixing it and correcting it. (Actually, not true–I do like revisions and editing. It’s the deadlines involved that I dislike…but the typing out the first draft is the worst part, yes.) I do love coming up with the story and the characters and the scenes, the setting and what their homes look like and their interior lives and their pasts….I live for that shit. So, last night I was working on character bios and making adjustments (with name changes and background changes) to a first draft of the first chapter I wrote sometime (last year? two years ago?) to see if I could get the feel of the story down. It went well for a first draft–in fact, I was able to get about 2500 words (give or take) down in a little over half an hour; always a good sign. I even have the next three chapters already written in my head…of course I still need to transcribe them, but I also want to revise and rework that first chapter before I move on to the next ones.
I also really need to get back to the short stories. That deadline for submission is looming kind of large.
Paul and I watched the second part of the Ed Kemper/Coed Killer episodes on Very Scary People last night after he got home (soaking wet from the storm); Kemper was a main player in the Netflix series Mindhunter, and of course, they talked about how cooperative Kemper was after he turned himself in and how he helped the FBI develop serial killer profiling by articulating his motivations, how he felt, why he was the way he was, and etc. It’s also very weird to think of him working recording books for the blind–imagine listening to an audio book and then finding out the Coed Killer was the voice you’d been listening to–and the part that was so chilling about him in MIndhunter–how reasonable, smart, and actually helpful he seemed, was apparently the case in real life as well.
Yikes.
I also read some more of The Man with the Candy last night; the idea for the book loosely inspired by that true story is also nagging away at the core of my brain, and with the more I read about those mass murders, the more I want to write that story. I wanted to do another Scotty book this year–this isn’t a Scotty story, alas–so I may just go ahead and put off this particular story until I have the Scotty done; I’d really like to have another Scotty come out next year, and I think Twelfth Night Knavery is a good, strong story that I would really like to write, but this Corll-inspired story just won’t let me be…
Sigh. And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me!
Last night I made it to the gym for the first time in forever, and it felt marvelous. Since it had been a few weeks, an my muscles are old (everything is old, frankly), I only did one set of everything at the weight I was doing the last time I went to the gym. (Never go full tilt when you go back after a break; that results in the kind of muscle fatigue and soreness no one wants, and isn’t good for you, either) Tomorrow night I’ll do two sets, and Friday I’ll be back to three, with Sunday beginning a new week of full workouts. Huzzah!
I actually did some work on Chlorine last night as well; and I am feeling pretty good about the whole thing. For once I know how a book is going to end when I started writing it; it’s the middle and how to get to that desired end that is going to be the problem here. But I love my not-so-heroic hero already, and and it’s really coming together remarkably well. I am also trying to edit and pull together my story “Death and the Handmaidens” for an anthology call that ends in the middle of next month; it’s been through so many iterations already and I really do think my original version–all the rewrites were to try to get it to a place where it would fit the submission call I was sending it to–and so today at some point I am going to read the original and most recent versions and figure out how to make it work. (I used the basic structure of the story, and its original opening, for “The Silky Veils of Ardor.”) I watched some videos on YouTube last night about old Hollywood (and the closet), while I scribbled in my journal while Scooter slept in my lap. I also did a load of dishes and a load of laundry last night–I was pretty motivated and efficient last night; obviously, I wasn’t tired when I got home from work the way I usually am on Mondays, meaning I slept well and am over-all well rested.
Hell, I feel well rested again this morning. Go figure. I woke up before my alarm (4:30, to be exact, just like yesterday) but stayed in bed until it was time to rise. My muscles and body feel relaxed, stretched, and worked, which is a lovely feeling–the stretching before the workout always feels so fucking good–and I am looking forward to a relatively pleasant day. The sun is rising outside as I swill my first of two cappuccinos this morning–the new machine is most excellent, as is my new washing machine (although it’s much more complicated and fancy than it needs to be, which of course makes me nervous), and I continue to make progress on cleaning up and out the apartment. I think tonight–after putting away the laundry and the dishes–I may start breaking into some of the living room boxes to shed more books. The primary reason I’ve not already done this is because it will require disassembling a lot of the living room, but having taken the laundry room apart and put it back together lately, I don’t really see that as the enormous challenge I was seeing it as being, and if it gets more books out of the house that are superfluous, more power to the disassembly. Paul was working on a grant last night, which is why we didn’t continue our viewing of Very Scary People (we are probably going to skip the Bobby Durst episodes, having watched the HBO mini-series on him and his “alleged” crimes already, The Jinx), and perhaps if Paul is working on the grant again tonight I can get caught up on Superman and Lois. There’s also those marvelous Marvel superhero series on Disney Plus we haven’t watched–WandaVision and the new Falcon and the Winter Soldier–and Loki is also coming, which should be a lot of fun; there’s really so much content nowadays it’s more of I can’t decide WHAT to watch rather than there being nothing to watch. I also want to watch that new Kate Winslet crime series on HBO, too.
The weather was absolutely lovely yesterday, too–but we are going into a lengthy period of flash flood warning, beginning this afternoon and running through Thursday, so getting home this afternoon after work should be a good time. Yay? Heavy sigh.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Sorry to be so short and dull, today, Constant Reader–but it’s Tuesday. Perhaps tomorrow I can be more entertaining.
Ugh, Monday morning. I slept really well again last night–woke up before the alarm, in fact–and feel relatively well rested, if not completely mentally awake yet. I am sort of feeling like myself again; like my batteries have finally recharged, even if it meant putting some things off for a few days and just allowing myself to relax completely. The Lost Apartment is all pulled back together again; I’ve made some terrific progress with my writing, and my creativity is firing on almost all of its cylinders again, which is more than I ever thought would happen for me again. I finished reading The Russia House yesterday–it’s quite good, if unexciting; the writing itself is so marvelous the coldness of the story itself doesn’t matter, really–and we started watching season two of Very Scary People, getting through the Son of Sam and Night Stalker cases, and then part one of the Coed Killer (honest takeaway from this series: California sure has a lot of mass murderers and serial killers/rapists) before retiring for the evening. I also started reading Jack Olsen’s The Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders (interesting title, because the term “serial killer” hadn’t really been coined yet), which is extremely well written, and also paints an interesting picture of Houston; coupled with Thomas Thompson’s Blood and Money–I’ve always wanted to write about Houston. I lived there for two years, and then six months again a few years later, and it’s an interesting, complicated city that no crime writer, at least that I am aware of, has set a crime series in, or written a crime novel set there….which is something I find interesting. I think it’s also true of Dallas.
Interesting trivia Greg fact: the Chanse series was originally set in Houston, and the first book was called The Body in the Bayou. I later, when I started writing it seriously (and got beyond two chapters) I moved the series to New Orleans and the story evolved into Murder in the Rue Dauphine, which is the real reason why Chanse was from Texas: he was originally supposed to have lived in Houston, playing for the (at the time) Oilers after attending Texas A&M before getting injured and becoming a private eye. (In the published series, Chanse went to LSU instead of A&M, and was injured in his final college game, which kept him from playing in the pros.)
I still think someone should write a cop or private eye series set in Houston. As wild and crazy as these true crime books set there make Houston seem, I doubt very seriously that the city isn’t wild and crazy still. I remember going to see the stage version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS) there, the very first time it was publicly performed (little known Greg fact), and the audience was interesting….I loved the guys in their formal jackets, ties, Wranglers and boots escorting women in evening gowns and furs and dripping with diamonds ( needless to say, I was wearing a nice pair of slacks and a dress shirt, but I spent the intermissions and the pre-performance time in the lobby literally just staring at the fascinating fashion choices for Houston’s moneyed class).
Oddly enough, there were not many children there; considering it was the stage production of a Disney animated film, you’d think there would be more kids there…but it was a world premiere, and more about Houston’s higher class showing off jewels, furs, and gowns more than anything else.
I also had fun brainstorming the background work for Chlorine over the weekend; naming characters and loosely sketching out bios for them, as well as trying to figure out how to pull off the plot and how to make it work. This is the really fun part of a book–figuring out everything–before the drudgery of actually writing it starts. I am very excited about writing this book, though, and it’s been a hot minute since I was excited about writing a book–in fact, so long that I can’t remember the last time I was actually excited to write a book–it may have been Lake Thirteen, all those years ago–which is different than being happy to write a book. I also have to be careful not to worry about expectations of other people, too–Chlorine began its life as just a vague idea I had one morning while writing my blog, which somehow caught on with some of my friends on Twitter who started tweeting at me (some of them still, periodically, will bring up Chlorine on social media, wondering where it is and when I am going to write it), excited about the idea.
I also spent some time yesterday coming up with a to-do list, which I always enjoy doing when I’m not stressed and worn out. When I am stressed and worn out (hello, first three months of this year), to-do lists simply make things worse more than anything else; emphasizing how far behind I am and how much I have to get done and sometimes–not always, just sometimes–the to-do list defeats me once it’s written. Just looking at it causes me stress. I’m not sure how long I am going to be able to hold off stress at the moment–it’s always just lurking there, in my peripheral vision, waiting to pounce on my like a tiger and hold me down–but I am hoping that having the apartment back together and having the two deadlines in my rearview mirror will help stave off it’s inevitable return for a little while, at least.
Tonight I am planning–we’ll see how that goes–to return to the gym for the first time in a couple of weeks, which means basically starting over with one set of everything, which means I won’t be there for terribly long, which for a Monday night is a good thing, most likely. Here’s hoping this will also help me fall asleep tonight; insomnia so frequently derails me. The office is also on track to going back to full staffing and regular open hours, possibly as early as May; I am curious to see how that winds up going. I’ve gotten used to the tumbleweeds blowing through our mostly empty department, and it will seem weird having other people around when they actually starts to happen.
And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Monday, all, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow morning.
Sunday morning, and I am swilling coffee and eating coffee cake and trying to wake up. I slept very well again last night, and am starting to feel more…normal, whatever that means for me, since I am anything but normal. I have things to get done today, but the apartment is starting to feel like home again for the first time in a while (since everything went haywire week before last). The laundry room is mostly reassembled, and the book shelves in there look neat and tidy and organized, which rather pleases me. The living room is….well, the living room. I am always going to have too many books in my house (even typing that a voice inside my head was shrieking you can never have too many books what are you talking about?); but I am developing a certain heartlessness as I continue to fill boxes with books for the library sale. At some point, I am going to have to start going through the boxes of books on top of the kitchen cabinets and the ones in the storage attic, and my goal is to have cleaned out not only the attic but the storage unit I’ve rented for far too long.
We finished the first season of Very Scary People on HBO last night, concluding with the two-parter on Jim Jones (we skipped Gacy–have seen enough of him lately already–and Aileen Wuornos, because we watched one on her already recently) and will be moving on to season two probably this evening. I am way behind on Superman and Lois–mainly because it’s something I started watching without Paul and so, rather than trying to get him caught up, I am just going to continue watching without him (I always, inevitably, have to fill him in on super-hero backstory and so forth anyway in most cases, though I think he knows enough Superman lore–doesn’t everyone, really–that he wouldn’t need explanations in this case).
I’ve started–sort of–working on Chlorine this weekend, mostly free hand and mostly in my journal, mapping out backstory and so forth for the main character, and I’ve also started working on the backstory for the body in the surf, and the plot–which was kind of amorphously planned in my head, but yesterday I started nailing down specifics in the plot. It’s going to be kind of fun to write, I think–I always think that going into a manuscript; ever the optimist–and while it’s very tempting to use real people as characters, I think I will make the ones who actually are on the page and participating in the story fictional, but mention others–Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, etc.–in passing. I know the studio is going to be fictional–tempted as I am to use Fox or MGM–and I also know I need to sprinkle in some of the conservatism that reigned then, as everyone was afraid of Communists and having to testify in front of HUAC in Washington; it was the time of ‘the lavender scare” (also the title of a terrific history of the period and this very thing, by David Johnson; I highly recommend it) and so homosexuality was also driven even further underground because we were seen as security risks, particularly if we worked in government since it put us at risk for blackmail by Communists (I touched on this briefly in my story “The Weight of a Feather”, collected in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories).
I also worked on getting organized yesterday. I did a lot of filing, and took a lot of books off my desk and replaced them with ones I’ll be using for research and background for this book. I kind of feel like I already know my main character (even though I couldn’t remember his name yesterday as I wrote notes in my journal); he grew up in Kansas, was caught by his father in a “compromising position” with his high school basketball coach in the tiny little town he grew up in and was forced to enter the military at age 17–going into the Navy and serving in the South Pacific, where he found other men like himself, and thus became familiar with the underground gay community within the military, as well as in Honolulu and Los Angeles (on leaves). After mustering out in 1946 he comes to LA to become a movie star, is discovered by a Henry Willson type agent, and at the start of the story his seven year control with Pacific Pictures is coming to an end, they aren’t going to renew his contract, and he is in fact being sacrificed to a tabloid in order to protect another client, a rising star the tabloid was going to out–loosely based on how Henry Willson sold out Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter to Confidential to save Rock Hudson; but unlike them, my character’s agent has a plan for him: a long-term contract to work with an Italian film company making sword-and-sandal epics.
It’s a great set-up, and one that I hope to not let down…right now I am feeling confident that I can write this and it will be amazing; of course, once I start the doubts and imposter syndrome will start creeping in and I will spend most of my time wondering what the hell I was thinking to try to write such a thing in the first place.
I couldn’t have picked a better career path for a neurotic, could I?
I also lined up all the potential short story calls I am interested in submitting to, matched them up with an in-progress story that fits their call (or at least what does in my mind; I am really not that great a judge of these things, in all honesty) and need to plan out when to reread and when to rewrite. It’s very strange; now that I am coming out of the exhaustion from the writing of the two books back to back I am amazed at how light I feel; I don’t feel that oppressive burden nor the stress that comes from carrying it. I know both manuscripts need work and I need to revise and rework and edit one last time with each, and there’s a deadline for the first for sure–but I am going to put that off until next weekend, when I have the time to sit and go through Bury Me in Shadows from beginning to end, making notes, making corrections, and so on and so forth to get it polished into a diamond…or as close to one as I can get one of my books.
So, I am going to spend the rest of this morning swilling coffee and trying to finish reading The Russia House. I love LeCarré; he is such a terrific writer I can get lost in his sentences and paragraphs forever–but I find myself not loving the plot or the characters in this one, which is why it’s taking me so long to get through this one, I think. He also does an excellent job of taking me back into that 1980’s world/mentality of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union–that halcyon time when the fear of nuclear annihilation began to fade somewhat but at the same time the worry of what would fill the vacuum created by that collapse was almost nearly as intense (it didn’t take long for conservatives to replace Communists with Muslims as the scary other from another part of the world determined to destroy us); not to mention the wondering if glasnost and perestroika weren’t real or sincerely meant; LeCarré does an absolutely amazing job with that cold intelligence paranoia.
And then, for something similar yet completely different, I am going to reread Dorothy Gilman’s The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax.
I also would like to get back to the gym today; it looks absolutely lovely outside, and the walk will be lovely.
Until tomorrow, Constant Reader. Have a lovely Sunday!
Friday morning, and I slept well again last night. The washing machine arrives this morning (between 9:15 and 11:15) so I am up earlier than I would be ordinarily, but despite using an alarm to get up (I need to be sufficiently caffeinated when they get here to remove the old one and install the new one) and then it will be “catch up on the laundry day” while I do my home data entry today–which means the new one will be getting quite a workout today. I also had to remove the doors to the laundry room last night–it’s going to take some serious maneuvering to get the old one out and the new one in, and I figured the doors would be in the way–which made me feel quite butch and masculine. The feeling didn’t last.
The electricians came and replaced the fuse yesterday as well–so now I can use my dishwasher and the coffee maker can be on the proper counter where it belongs again. Slowly returning to a sense of normality here at long last, and starting to not feel quite so fried and exhausted, which is actually lovely.
I also have to do a conference tomorrow, which I need to prepare for, and honestly–my brain is so fried I keep forgetting that it’s happening and that I agreed to do it. I cannot remember being this discombobulated and fried before when I finished writing a book–but then again, it’s also been quite a while since the last time I finished two books in such quick succession without a break in between. Having everything around the apartment go on the fritz almost immediately thereafter was also not much of a help in that regard, and of course, that created more stress and insomnia…I’m really surprised I was able to sleep so well the last two nights, to be completely honest; but that was probably a result of exhaustion from the stress of things.
And of course, I also had to take down one of the laundry room shelves, just in case, and will have to put that back together once the washing machine is installed again.
So yeah, pretty big day around the lost apartment this morning….hopefully I can get going on my data entry before they come, and it’s probably what I am going to be doing for most of the day today. I make condom packs for hours yesterday–and ran out of condoms, so I don’t have that to do today, unless I run by the office to take these others and drop them off, and pick up some more…but I don’t really see that happening today…although….hmmm. Something to ponder before the washing machine gets here. (Of course, it would also depend on when the washing machine gets here as well…if they get here early I could run over to pick up my prescription, then head to the office, drop off the finished condom packs and pick up at least one more box….never mind, I shouldn’t think out loud on here. Suffice to say I have options.)
I actually don’t remember what all I watched yesterday while I was making the condom packs, but I am proud and happy to say that I broke the streak of serial killer documentaries at long last. I know I watched some interesting documentaries about queer horror movies, or why horror appeals to gay men (I honestly have no memory of Nightmare on Elm Street 2, which apparently is the gayest non-gay horror movie ever made?) as well as some documentaries about apocryphal books on the Bible, including Enoch–which led me down a rabbit hole into videos about the nephilim and pre-Flood Biblical history, as well as some interesting discussion about how things get mis-translated from the original archaic Hebrew into other languages over the years and then became stuc–like how “Lucifer” wasn’t really a reference to the devil (or Satan, or whatever) but a literal mistranslation of a verse probably referring to the recent fall of the Assyrian kind and his empire, rather than a reference to angels being cast own from heaven and sent to Hell to have dominion. I’ve always found that sort of thing to be interesting–potentially lost books of the Bible and prophecy, etc.–have always wanted to write a book about a missing or secret book of the Bible that was smuggled out of Constantinople before it fell to the Crusaders in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, to keep it out of the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, only to disappear for centuries; a lost book that would revolutionize and change Christianity forever (not really an original thought–this sort of thing has been done before, most notably–for me, anyway–in Irving Wallace’s The Word); I’ve always seen it–since 2001, anyway, as a Colin novel (yes, the Colin stand alone novel I’ve been thinking about for twenty years; I’ve always kind of wanted to spin him off into his own espionage thriller series–think gay Dirk Pitt/Indiana Jones/James Bond hybrid), but again–when will I ever have the time to write such a book?
So, in a moment I am going to start doing my data entry for the day; while I wait for the washer to arrive and be installed. When I am done working for the day I intend to get down my Henry Willson biography and start mapping out Chlorine–yes, world, I am finally ready to start writing Chlorine, or at least work on it, anyway–and I also am going to start figuring out what to do with these short stories and so forth that I want to get out for submission. So, the goals for this weekend–after getting my work done and the laundry room reassembled–is to finish reading The Russia House, get some work on short stories done, and fill up another box to donate to the library sale (maybe two), and get the outline/character bios for Chlorine started. (I’m very excited about this….although I am getting a little more excited about the next book I want to write, Where the Boys Die.)
And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines for the day. Have yourself a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.
Queer and Loathing in America 