Tag: Crescent City Charade

Puttin’ on the Ritz

Sunshine and blue skies out there this morning, which is lovely, particularly since we are on the eve of Southern Decadence. Revellers will, of course, begin to arrive today, building to peak gayness on Friday night. I will be out on the corner at St. Ann and Bourbon tomorrow from 430-9 pm, passing out condom packs (four condoms, free lube!) with my co-workers. If you’re around, come say hey. It will be hot and humid, of course, but it’s always fun to stand out there and watch the crowd while trying to convince people to have safer sex.

The LSU-BYU tickets went on sale yesterday for the game relocated to the Superdome this Saturday night, and yes, I did set my phone alarm for 4 (when tickets went on sale to the general public) so I could get us tickets. And I was successful! Woo-hoo! It’s going to be so much fun; LSU playing a name opponent in the Dome; the season opener, and we can walk. Yes, I am in walking distance of the Superdome–although we’ll most likely take the streetcar and get off at the Girod Street stop. I am so excited! And I can’t believe it’s football season again already. August certainly flew right past, didn’t it? I’m not sure how good LSU will be this year–first full season under a new coach, lots of starters gone to graduation–but LSU football is always fun to watch.

I also got some great work done on Scotty yesterday. It started flowing, and I think I’ve found his voice again–it usually takes me a couple of chapters on a new Scotty to get there–and seriously, opening Chapter Four with this sentence: There really is no family bonding experience like rolling up a dead body in a carpet made me laugh out loud as I wrote it (it just sprang into my head) and then the next few paragraphs literally just flew out from my fingers. Chapter Four is a transitional chapter, which I hope to get finished today (those always take longer to write) but after coming up with that opening for the chapter, the rest should be relatively easy–because once I came up with that sentence, the rest of the chapter opened up in my mind, and I figured out how to flow Chapter Four into Chapter Five.

Huzzah!

So, I am now going to head back into the spice mines on this fine day before I head into the office.

Here’s your Throwback Thursday hunk, actor Glenn Corbett, from his early physique model days.

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Back on the Chain Gang

Saturday morning, with Fleetwood Mac blaring through the stereo, a load of laundry going in the washer, another in the dishwasher, and I’m about to do the floors. This week was so insane–both personally and at work–that I’m glad that it’s the weekend; last week just needed to end. I woke up with a lot of energy this morning; hopefully it will see me through the cleaning and the errand I need to do today. Last night I was glued to the Weather Channel until I couldn’t watch anymore; I alternated between that and reading Star Island by Carl Hiaasen before retiring to bed relatively early. Paul’s going to spend the day doing errands and running around with a friend; I hope to get the line edit finished as well as Chapter Four (I hate transitional chapters); tomorrow I intend to edit some short stories and possibly get started on Chapter Five. Crescent City Charade isn’t coming along as quickly as I might have hoped; I think I’ll brainstorm the next few chapters this evening, as that should help.

Next weekend is Southern Decadence. Wow, this summer has just flown by, hasn’t it? The humidity should break in the weeks after Labor Day and then it’s the fall. Football season also starts (for LSU) this Saturday; the Tigers are supposed to play BYU in Houston; not sure how that’s going to work given Harvey and what it’s doing to southeastern Texas. Best as I can tell, Houston is getting hammered this morning, but at least it’s down to a Category 1–which, while not ideal, with it’s heavy rains and so forth–is better than the Category 4 that came ashore last night. Hurricane season sucks, y’all. As a friend said last night, hurricane season makes you into a bad person, as you’re always hoping and praying it will go somewhere else, which means wishing it on other people.

So fucking true, and so fucking sad.

I read the first two digital issues of Starman this week; it’s not quite as good as I remembered, but on the other hand, I originally started reading it about seven or eight issues in. The first issues of a new superhero comic are always, like a television show, a bit wobbly as they try to find their legs and get on firm footing–notable exceptions being Ozark and Game of Thrones, but usually I’ll try to give a TV show a couple of episodes to find its way and gel. This iteration of Starman is about Will Payton, a recent college graduate, raised by a single mother with a younger sister. The mom sacrificed a lot to help put Will through college; he got a degree in Advertising and landed a great job with a major firm in Phoenix. But he hated the job, hated what he was doing, and much to his mother’s dismay and anger, he quit and tried to find something else. He went on a camping/hiking trip, and while on it, something happened that he doesn’t quite understand. He wakes up after thirty-two days in the morgue; he’s confused the authorities who found his dead body in the woods, and basically scares the crap out of them when he sits up and starts talking. He also has powers he doesn’t understand, and so he comes back home, confides in his sister…and has to face the wrath of his mother who demands that he find a job…all the while he’s trying to figure out what’s happened to him. He can fly, generate heat, withstand bullets…and can change his appearance by just thinking about it. His sister convinces him that he’s a superhero, and he needs to start fighting crime and helping people.

What Will doesn’t know is the proverbial mad scientist was conducting experiments in a lab, trying to create super-powered beings. But when he was ready to tap into power from a satellite, it was pushed off course by space debris—and rather than beaming back into his lab and into the bodies of his human volunteers–the energy was beamed into Will, where he was sleeping in the woods. The first two issues set this up, and set the stage for a coming conflict with the mad scientist and his creations.

That’s a lot to cram into two issues, so there’s that.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Down Under

So, I started writing a new Scotty book yesterday.

It was, I have to confess, simply so I wouldn’t feel guilty about not working on the line edit, but it also felt good to be back in familiar waters again. There’s something comforting, at least to me as a writer, to going back to a series; I know this world intimately, the characters and the relationships and, of course, the city. And of course, this Scotty isn’t completely new; it’s a reboot of something I’d already written, published, and then withdrawn from sale: the second Paige novel, Dead Housewives of New Orleans. I never felt like that book did what I wanted it to do; I wrote it very quickly, and never believed afterwards that I’d had the time to say what I wanted to about reality television and the types of people that are drawn to appearing on it. I thought, at first, when I decided to reboot it as a Scotty novel that I’d be able to just switch the point of view and add some more things to it…but a reread of the original quickly made me realize the best thing to do was keep the original framework–the reality show itself, and the characters I’d created for it–and just completely start over from scratch. So, it’s not the same book.

I am pretty confident that it will be, actually, a much better one.

The good news is I woke up this morning without any back pain. It’s still a bit stiff–I’m aware something went wrong back there–but it’s clearly muscular, not spinal, which is an enormous relief. My hips–which also ached yesterday–also seem to be fine this morning. Of course, I am staring down a long day of office and then bar testing; twelve hours, woo-hoo! So I imagine tomorrow I will also be waking up sore and achy and tired. Yay! Can’t wait.

I also worked on the line edit yesterday; I guilted myself into it. I actually was enjoying writing the Scotty book, frankly, and I thought, see, writing is fun, remember? and then realized that I really need to stop procrastinating on the line edit. And this morning, waking up feeling rested and not in pain? I am going to tear through that bitch as much as I can today, and  see how much Scotty progress I can make at the same time. Huzzah! Maybe I can even get a first draft of Scotty finished in a month. Stranger things have happened.

I did not, unfortunately, have time for any reading of the brilliant Gods of Gotham. It is, without question, one of the best historical novels I’ve ever read. Clever and sly, witty, with some incredibly strong social commentary that certainly can be applied to today’s world, it is also strongly written and the main character, Timothy Wilde–well, it’s kind of hard not to love him; he’s such a good guy, and even his character flaws only serve to enhance his character. Lyndsay Faye is a towering talent–and she has at least another six books for me to read! HUZZAH!

And on that note, ’tis back to the spice mines with me. Here’s a Tuesday hunk for you:

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Flashdance…What a Feeling

Tuesday! I finished the second draft of “For All Tomorrow’s Lies” yesterday; I think the ending still needs some work, so I am going to let it sit for a while longer; maybe look at it again next weekend. I also got started on the prologue for the next Scotty, Crescent City Charade, but I think that was merely procrastination to keep me away from line editing. This time, I am making the first paragraphs of the prologue a play on Nabokov’s opening for Lolita, but am not entirely sure that will not change; I was also thinking The Great Gatsby would be a good, maybe better, fit. I also spent some time reading Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, which is so fucking good I want to live inside its pages.

Which is pretty damned good, quite frankly.

I had severe back pain yesterday; last night I treated it with Ben-Gay and a heating pad, and that seemed to fix it. This morning there’s still some pain and tightness, so I am using the heating pad again as well as slathering my back with Ben-Gay. I’m not sure if I strained my back muscles during my Saturday workout, or if they’ve simply tightened up from being stretched before the workout; which is irritating. If they’ve simply tightened up, then I should stretch them again–but if they’re strained, I don’t want to make it worse.

Heavy heaving sigh.

Looks like I’ll be bringing the heating pad to the office with me. The only thing I truly hate about getting older is the aches and pains, along with the loss of energy. It is amazing what a difference heat can make to sore muscles, though. As I’ve sat here with the heating pad against my back while I type, my back feels better. So weird. So, so weird.

Which makes me tend to think it isn’t a strain…oy.

All right, I’m heading back into the spice mines.

Here’s a Tuesday hunk for you:

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(I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long

Saturday morning. After my morning coffee,  I’m going to run some errands, and then I am going to figure out what time to drive out to Elmwood to see Wonder Woman–shooting for late afternoon/early evening; that way I can get some cleaning and revising done. I’ve not done much revising this week–which is shameful (there is some harsh and ugly truths there about the need for actual contractual deadlines, isn’t there?), and so my goal is to get back on track with all of that for this weekend. I want to get another three or four chapters revised, as well as the second draft of “Quiet Desperation” finished this weekend, so I can move on to revising another short story. I’ve also started a new draft of the eighth Scotty novel, Crescent City Charade, which I am hoping to get finished by the end of the summer (Labor Day is the goal). I absolutely HAVE to get these revisions finished by the end of June, because I want to spend the summer querying agents. I honestly believe this WIP is my best work, and could be an important book.

Whether that proves to be the case or not remains to be seen, of course, but here’s hoping.

The Lost Apartment is a mess, and has been for quite some time. I can’t remember the last time I did the floors, quite frankly, and it’s getting kind of ugly down there, honestly. I mean, our kitchen floor needs to be redone–tiles have come up–which kind of makes it hard to make it look nice anyway, but that’s no excuse for not cleaning, you know? My mother would be so ashamed.

So ashamed.

So, I am going to, as soon as I finish this cup of coffee, start straightening and cleaning up down here. It looks like it’s going to rain all weekend, so I am not going to bother with the windows (which are also long overdue for a cleaning; although I could do the inside. Hmmmm, that could be a plan, actually) and definitely work on these floors. There’s some filing to do–isn’t there always–and some other organizing I need to do, but if I buckle down and stay focused (and make a fucking list) I should be able to get through everything before it’s time to go see Wonder Woman.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the movie. Wonder Woman was always one of my favorite comic book superheroes (although when I started reading DC Comics, she’d given up her powers somehow and was running a clothing boutique and dealing with social issues and was a modern feminist; in retrospect, it was one of the stupidest reboots in DC’s long history of rebooting their characters); I loved the historic Amazon character, and the rebooted non-powered Wonder Woman/Diana Prince character was more of a detective, solving crimes and trained in martial arts. Around the time the television series starring Lynda Carter started, the DC rebooted her again and made her an Amazon princess with her powers again. And the TV show was amazing. Rewatching it now shows it up for its low-budget special effects and bad writing, but Lynda Carter embodied the part so beautifully that she became iconic–and I’ve been a lifelong fan of Ms. Carter. Paul and I stopped watching Supergirl during its first season, before Lynda Carter joined the cast as the president, so I’m sure at some point I’ll go back and binge the series. (I’ve also always been a fan of Supergirl–who also went through an incredibly stupid reboot in the 1970’s; complete with new costumes and a loss of some of her powers–sometimes she had them, sometimes she didn’t; they came and went because of some kind of Kryptonite poisoned drink she was tricked into imbibing; then was killed off during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and then was brought back as something completely different after Superman was killed off in the early 1990’s. It’s really hard to keep track of all these shifts and changes in DC continuity/universes.)

Interestingly enough, now as I reflect on my fandom of both Wonder Woman and Supergirl, I realize how I’ve always been drawn to fictional depictions of strong women–from Nancy Drew to Trixie Belden to the Dana Girls to Cherry Ames to Vicki Barr to Wonder Woman to Supergirl to Lois Lane (who used to have her own comic book, detailing her adventures as an investigative reporter, which I also loved), to real life women who defied the traditional role of women in our society, like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I’ve certainly always enjoyed reading fiction by and about women; from Charlotte Armstrong to Phyllis Whitney to Victoria Holt to Mary Stewart to Judith Krantz and so on and so forth. Do people still read Rona Jaffe? She was another favorite of mine from the 1970’s. Taylor Caldwell, Evelyn Anthony, Jean Plaidy, Helen MacInnes, Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson–I’ve always read and enjoyed books written by women. (This is not to say I don’t enjoy books by men; I always have, but at the same time there is a certain style of testosterone driven male novel, complete with angst, that I simply cannot abide, and the crime genre is riddled with them. I recently joked that I wanted to write a noir set in the strip clubs in the Quarter and call it Girls Girls Girls…you get the idea.)

And there are so many wonderful women writers publishing today: Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman, Sue Grafton, Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, Alafair Burke, Alex Marwood, Lisa Unger, Jamie Mason, Wendy Corsi Staub, J. M. Redmann, Kristi Belcamino, Carrie Smith, Sara Henry, Ellen Hart, Donna Andrews, Dana Cameron, Toni Kelner (Leigh Perry), Carolyn Haines, Catriona McPherson, Lori Rader-Day, and Rebecca Chance–just off the top of my head; my TBR pile is filled with books by women, and there are so many wonderful women writers I’ve not gotten to yet, like Lisa Lutz and Shannon Baker and Jennifer MacMahon and Karin Slaughter–the list goes on and on forever and ever, amen. And this is just crime fiction/thrillers…I’ve not even touched on horror or scifi or fantasy or so-called ‘chick-lit.’ (Which reminds me, I really want to read some more Liane Moriarty, and I’ve not read any Jennifer Weiner…sigh.)

There’s just never enough time….and speaking of which, it’s time for me to head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a Saturday hunk for you:

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You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

Wednesday, and another late night of bar testing. But there is a three day weekend looming, which is an absolutely lovely thought. I do want to get quite a bit finished by Tuesday; I’ve been lazy and lethargic lately–I’ve been sleeping so deeply and well that I remain groggy throughout the next day, which is quite odd and is taking some adjusting. I am still reading The Sympathizer, which is extraordinary, and we are watching a rather frustrating true-crime documentary on Netflix, The Keepers. (It’s enjoyable, but I’m getting a very strong sense of documentarian manipulation; there are some fairly obvious questions no one is asking, and there are only two episodes left; which means it is either entirely possible those questions may not ever be asked–which is unforgivable in a criminal ‘investigation’–and if they are not asked until the last two episodes, well, it’s audience manipulation to stretch it out as long as possible. Either way, #epicfail.)

I am also enjoying American Gods. It’s been years since I read the book–which I remember enjoying, but none of the details; I do remember the over-all concept of the book, which the show is illustrating very nicely. I probably won’t reread the book–my TBR pile is still absolutely insane, and I feel completely defeated every time I see it, considering it’s most of the living room AND the laundry room–but I do want to reread Good Omens, which I think IS getting filmed as well. I read it a million years ago, and all I remember about it was that it was about the Apocalypse yet was hysterically funny. I am also enjoying my current non-fiction read, The Affair of the Poisons, which is giving me such a clear picture of what life was like at the French court in the seventeenth century that I may even be able to begin sketching out the plot/structure of a secret project I’ve been wanting to write for over twelve years.

I’m also getting a much clearer picture of how to write/restructure Crescent City Charade–walking away from it to work on the secret project was probably the smartest thing I could have ever done; the book is becoming much clearer in my head, and I think it’s going to be maybe one of the funniest and best Scottys ever. Once I get finished with the revision of the secret project, I am going to be able to dive head-first into the Scotty, and am betting I’ll be able to get through it rather quickly (always a plus). I have another book I want to write this year, so am thinking if I can get the secret project revised/rewritten by the end of June, I can spend the summer doing the Scotty and can spend the fall writing the other book, Muscles, which will be my first straight-up noir.

I am itching to get started on it…but time. Patience, Gregalicious, patience.

Okay, I need to get my errands done and some clean-up work around the house as well.

Here’s a Hump Day Hunk for you.

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Love Child

One more day till the three day weekend!

I realize it probably sounds like I hate my job, the way I crave days off, weekends, holidays and vacations–but I don’t. I actually like my day job, and it’s certainly one of the best–if not the best–day job I’ve ever had. My days off, on the other hand, are lovely because I don’t have any stress–I don’t have to rush about, be anywhere at a particular time, do anything at any particular time, and I don’t have to get up until I feel like it. That’s kind of nice. Even if I didn’t have a day job, and still worked from home the way I used to, I still looked forward to the weekends because Paul didn’t have to go to the office on the weekends. I am not working next Friday either, as that is the day I’ll be driving over to Montgomery for the Alabama Book Festival, where I am making my first ever appearance. (I’ve done more book events in Alabama this year than I’ve done anywhere else in years, which is more than slightly odd.)

Which, more than likely, is why Alabama is so much on my mind lately.

Since finishing “Quiet Desperation”, I’ve not really been writing anything other than this blog. (I have, however, been thinking about the second draft of that story, and already know how to make it much better the second time around; I do consider that to be writing, even though no words have gone on the page. SHUT UP THAT DOES TOO COUNT.) I am hoping, though, to get “The Terrortorium” finished this week, and maybe make some headway on “The Scent of Lilacs in the Rain.” I’ve also been brainstorming some on the new Scotty, and I need to get back to work on that as it’s just sitting there, glaring at me. And I have a shit load of editing to do of my own stuff; unfortunately, I loathe editing my own stuff and would rather drink bleach to do it, which means it piles up and it piles up and it piles up…I also get really stubborn and don’t want to throw things out, trying to fix things and make what was written work rather than removing it and writing something different.

I have so many bad writing habits. It’s almost sad.

I am getting back to reading The Nest this week, and am not sure what to read next, if I am being honest. It’ll probably go the way it usually does; I’ll go through the stacks and the book shelves and find something that strikes my fancy at the moment. I got another shipment of books yesterday, all of which look good, and of course, there’s all the stuff I had on hand already that I haven’t read and need to get to. Heavy heaving sigh. I am going to need to do a purge again soon, and what I really need to do is purge the storage spaces. But what a pain in the ass that would be. Maybe I should  take a couple of vacation days from work and do it….ugh, just the thought is too much for me, really. Heavy heaving sigh.

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

Here’s a Hump Day hunk to get you through the rest of this shortened week.

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Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)

Monday morning in New Orleans.

I’ve been awake for an hour, yet don’t feel awake yet. Second cup of coffee is helping, though; I can almost feel the caffeine moving through my body inside my veins. I have a short day today; only five and a half hours, and am having dinner with my friend Stuart this evening. Tomorrow and Wednesday are both twelve hour days at the office, complicated still further by meeting with Wacky Russian early on Wednesday morning. I don’t have to go in until late on Thursday, which will also be rather lovely; I am sure I am going to need the extra sleep to get over the preceding days. And of course, Friday is Good Friday, so—three day weekend! I am hoping that if I spend about three hours on each day of that weekend cleaning I can get the Lost Apartment back under control. It’s a horrifying mess, quite frankly, and it’s more than a little appalling. The ceiling fans, for example, are disgusting.

I’ve gotten further along in Underground Airlines, and I am really enjoying it. With the three day weekend coming, I hope to get it finished this week, finish The Nest over the weekend, and maybe move on to something else. I didn’t get any writing done this weekend, but I did do some brainstorming–which, to me, counts, and if you don’t think it does FUCK YOU–and came up with some new characters. The problem I am having with Chapter One of Crescent City Charade (which I really want to finish this week) is that already the chapter is too long and it’s not even finished yet. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, and rather than resisting how long the chapter is I should just make it as long as it needs to be to get to the transition into Chapter 2 and worry about editing it down–or splitting it into two chapters, if necessary–later, rather than worrying so much about it now; similar to how I have almost five thousand words of “Quiet Desperation” already written and haven’t even gotten to the meat of the story yet. (That story, obviously, is going to require a ridiculous amount of editing.)

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate editing myself? The only thing worse is rewriting. Heavy heaving sigh.

Friday night I finished watching a television show on Hulu; Faking It, which originally aired on MTV. It only lasted three seasons, and it’s actually kind of clever (the second season was twenty episodes; the third and final was only ten, which makes me wonder how that played out). MTV has long been a progressive force, yet we really no longer hear about MTV being controversial. MTV ran the first HIV/AIDS PSA’s to air, and continued to do so for years before other networks caught up. MTV also originated reality television–The Real World model is still copied and imitated to this day; any reality show where everyone has to share a living environment is copying it–and also put a face on HIV/AIDS with Pedro Zamora back in the early 1990’s. I often have held that a lot of the shift in public/social perceptions of the LGBTQ community had a lot to do with MTV’s influence on youth; I also think MTV has shifted public perceptions on many social issues by exposing young people to them and helping them to see the systemic unfairness in so much of American society. But that’s an essay for another time.

Faking It has a ridiculous premise, but it’s actually kind of clever at the same time: Hester High School, in Austin, Texas, is every conservative’s nightmare about political correctness raging out of control in public education. The show could have easily been called Politically Correct High; because Hester High School is just that: sensitivity to other races and cultures are foremost. The most popular kid at Hester is the openly gay kid, whose best friend is the high school lothario; but the primary focus of the show is the friendship of Karma and Amy, two best friends who accidentally get outed as a lesbian couple. Amy wants to correct the record, but Karma enjoys the corresponding rise in their popularity and she wants to ride that wave; plus, the school lothario–played by Gregg Sulkin–is now interested in her because he’s never had sex with a lesbian before. The show frankly and honestly takes on a lot of social issues–everything from intersex to transgender to sexual fluidity–and the catch to the ‘pretending to be lesbians’ schtick is that Amy actually is in love with her best friend Karma–who doesn’t return the feelings. The young cast is quite appealing, and while some of the adventures they have strain credulity, the show’s message of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding is handled very well.

Gregg  Sulkin also has achieved teen heartthrob status.

 

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Not hard to see why.

But young, out actor Michael J. Willett as Shane Harvey pretty much steals the show. Shane is depicted as a scheming. snarky, but funny kid with a lot of insecurities who really just wants to find a boyfriend, and Willett plays the part to perfection. He also played gay in the movie GBF, which was actually a lot better than I thought it would be (think a John Hughes teen comedy with a gay main character instead of Molly Ringwald), and the two characters couldn’t be any more different–showing that there are a range of gay characters; we aren’t this monolithic ‘all the same’ that some people seem to think we are–which goes along with the concept of inclusion: we’re not all finger-snapping sidekicks with a great sense of snark, fashion sense, and with our fingers on the pulse of pop culture. Just as it would be cool for books, TV shows, and movies to include gay characters for the sake of diversity; within the gay community there’s a huge range of diverse characters. The key to writing gay characters is to make them human.

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Here’s hoping Willett can find more work as an out gay actor.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Turn Around, Look At Me

Well, in perhaps the most exciting news (at least for me) of the week thus far, I actually wrote fiction yesterday.

Hurray!

I think writing that essay finally on Monday flexed the atrophying writing muscles, because yesterday I opened my document of “Quiet Desperation” and wrote well over fifteen hundred words in a very short period of time, until I was interrupted. Of course, once interrupted the flow stopped–which is why interruptions annoy me so very much. I might have even finished the story had I not gotten interrupted…but the great thing is that in writing so much on it today, I also was able to figure out how to finish it and what the core of the story is; what I am trying to say. Whether I will succeed or not remains to be seen–but it’s yet another one of those stories about a writer. I’m not sure why I keep writing these stories about writers, but it’s also what I suppose I know the best. But I like the direction “Quiet Desperation” is taking, and I’m also enjoying working on Scotty again–I also managed over a thousand words on the new book yesterday, which made me feel terrific. Even after all the writing I’ve done over the years, when you hit a fallow stretch or period, when you don’t feel like writing, or you do and you can’t, there’s always this terror that the well has, indeed, finally run dry; followed by constant self-reassurances that always ring hollow–because the only thing that can make that terror go away is actually writing something.

So, thank you, Sisters in Crime, for kicking me in the ass and getting me to write that overdue essay. I think I’m over the hump now–and I am really looking forward to writing today.

I am tired, though. Wacky Russian basically made me do legs today, the bitch, and so even though my legs are usually fried from the small leg workout I get every time, today they are particularly tired and sore, the bastard. That’s okay, though. I think I am going to go in on Saturday and do legs on my own, some cardio and maybe some stretching. I need to get in better physical condition.

And since it’s Wednesday, here’s a Hump Day Hunk for you as I head back into the spice mines.

Grazing in the Grass

Good morning, Friday! How are you doing? I slept late again; it’s lovely to be able to sleep again but I would so love a happy medium; somewhere between insomnia and oversleeping would be somewhat lovely.

But I’ll take oversleeping over insomnia any day of the week, thank you very much.

The cold snap of the past few days has come to a merciful end, thank you Jesus, and our temperatures are supposed to go back up into the 70’s today, which will make for a lovely weekend. I didn’t take the car into the car wash the way I’d intended because I overslept this morning, but it will be a lovely chore for the weekend, most likely Sunday while everyone’s at church.

I made some progress on the book yesterday, which was a lovely feeling. Not as much as I would have liked, but I’ll take 1200 words. My writing machine is a bit rusty, so I am still working out the rust and kinks and having to warm up and stretch the muscles. The thought also crossed my mind last night that maybe I should put it aside and write something else first…but that’s probably just crazy talk.

But getting good sleep has made me feel energized again, and I am looking forward to all the things I need to get done this weekend. I even started pulling together my expenses for my taxes yesterday (RIGHT?), and may even be able to get all of that finished by Monday (rather than sitting down and making myself do it all at once, I am going to go slowly and do some here, some there, etc. until it is all finished and I am emailing my accountant). I also want to get my story “The Terrortorium” finished this weekend, and I want to start editing a secret project I can’t talk about publicly yet.

Never a dull moment around the Lost Apartment.

Here’s a hunk to slip you into the weekend: