Tag: Disco Witches of Fire Island

Don’t Cha Stop

It was supposed to rain this morning, but the sun is shining and the sky is bright blue. I slept well again last night until Sparky got me up this morning, wanting his breakfast. (He is such a sweet boy.) I had a lovely day yesterday, actually. I ran my errands in the morning, ordered groceries to be delivered last evening, and had a pretty nice day overall. I finished rereading my Jay Bennett and Barbara Michaels novels1, and hope to finish reading the Megan Abbott today. I also watched a lot of television while doing chores and reading before falling asleep in my chair last night after a nice, relaxing day. Here’s to having another today, right?

Netflix has a new show about the 2024 SEC football season called Any Given Saturday, and so I watched about four episodes of that while Paul slept on the couch. It’s very well done, and while I don’t feel it pays enough attention to LSU–and what there is focuses on games they lost (really? No coverage of the amazing upset of Top Ten-ranked Mississippi?)–it is nice to see the stories on the other teams and get a recap of the season. The show, of course, is hype for the upcoming season; the pro pre-season is already under way. I think LSU can be really good this year, but LSU always manages to find a way to LSU. There are only two episodes of the show left–we switched it off to watch Wednesday, which we also didn’t finish last night–that I may have on in the background this morning while I read.

I think I am going to go ahead and spend some time with the news and my coffee this morning before finishing this. I’ll be back momentarily, Constant Reader. (According to the weather, we should be having a thunderstorm in five minutes, which I don’t think is going to happen, given how it currently looks out there.)

It’s now noon, and it never rained here. It does look like the calm before a storm outside my windows at the moment, but I’ve already closed up my wagon and put it away (I’d left it out last night after the delivery) just in case. I got cleaned up–even shaving–and that woke me up and made me feel being productive for a while. I put Any Given Saturday back on to stream, getting through the last two episodes while reading more of El Dorado Drive and marveling at what a fucking MASTER Megan Abbott is; she may be the best writer publishing today, and is definitely in the top tier without question. I also picked out my next reads: the reread will be Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson2 and the juvenile/young adult will be The Secret of the Red Scarf, which belongs to a close-to-forgotten girls’ series featuring Nancy Drew rip-off Kay Tracey, and I won’t decide on the new new-to-me read until I finish the Abbott–I’m currently torn between Mia Manansala’s latest or Disco Witches of Fire Island or Lev AC Rosen’s Rough Pages; all queer authors, I might add.

But The Hunting Wives might win the race in a photo-finish.

As I finished off Any Given Saturday, I found myself very curious about the lack of coverage for Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Auburn, among others…and LSU and Alabama were only covered in reference to their games with South Carolina and Vanderbilt, period. Was it about getting some of these lesser-known programs more coverage? And it’s definitely difficult to cover 16 teams with any degree of depth and certainly every team had a story to tell this past year. But it definitely whetted my appetite for the return of college football, which was its intent, so mission accomplished, Netflix.

I’d forgotten we’d watched Towards Zero in between the SEC show and Wednesday; I’d seen bad reviews of it so was curious as to what we would think of it. I remembered the story as soon as I saw the geography of the setting, which is crucial to the crime, and yes, I was proven correct in the third episode. It was fine, if perhaps not really needing a third episode? It did feel like it was dragged out more than it needed to be, which is not a good sign for a murder mystery.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to do some picking up and organizing and cleaning, and I am also going to write for a while before probably returning to the Abbott. I doubt I will be back later; I may finish a newsletter today and I may not. If not, I will be here again in the morning before the infusion. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader!

  1. I will write newsletters about both authors at some point. ↩︎
  2. I’ve always wanted to write about this unique Jackson book; I usually reread The Haunting of Hill House every October. ↩︎

If You Could Read My Mind, Love

Work at home Friday, with a Costco trip after I get my work done! I also have to get some blood work done today (yay! my arms will continue looking hideous before all these bruises heal at long last; good thing I am far too old to be vain anymore), but c’est la vie. Que sera sera, and all of that. I also have to run by the office–I forgot some paperwork I need to work on, and I can’t find my wallet. It’s not in the house and it’s not in the car, so the only place it can be is at the office; although I looked for it there yesterday and couldn’t find it. Sigh.

You may have noticed lately that the images I’ve been adding to my blog so there’s a thumbnail image on social media have not been muscular men. Honestly? I’m kind of bored of them, to be honest. There’s a gradual sameness after a while, and I also recognize that sharing images of impossibly built young men whose entire lives revolve around maintaining that look (that most people can never achieve) may be contributing to some toxic body image issues for some men; I know I spent years trying to be physically perfect and always coming up short because of my own body image issues (there are some pictures of me from when I was really lean that I originally saw and thought, maybe another ten pounds? but now I look at them and scream eat something bitch!). So I thought I’d take a break and start using other images that I find interesting–and I have tons of pictures I’ve taken around New Orleans over the years. Maybe I’ll go back to hot guys again, but right now I’m just not feeling that.

In other exciting news, I’ve been looking for Chapter Ten of the new Scotty and not been finding it anywhere…to the point I was beginning to think maybe I hadn’t written it after all. I FOUND IT YESTERDAY MORNING! Huzzah! I was worried, since I’ve blown the deadline and the extended deadline…which is why I am having a ZOOM meeting with my editor on Sunday. I really need to get back on the writing horse sooner rather than later. But the enforced break caused by my illness again gave me lots of time to think about things, especially my writing career, and also allowed the stirrings of ambition to start rising again. Not a bad thing, really. I have to finish this Scotty and there are two others that I want to finish drafts of by the end of the year–possible, always possible–and I also want to get back into writing short stories.

And reading. I need to get back to reading, and the sooner the better. Saturday I am planning on reading my own manuscript while working on the house, and hopefully I can also dig further into Christa Faust’s The Get Off, which is superb. Some people very kindly sent me books while I was in the hospital and they all look good: Vertigo by Boileau-Jercerac (yes, the basis for the Hitchcock film); They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran; People of Means by Nancy Johnson; On Spine of Death by Tamera Berry; The Lilac People by Milo Todd; and Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell; all of which look interesting…so I must get back to reading very intensely!

I made myself a cappuccino this morning and it is very good; the taste for coffee clearly coming back–and if not, hey, I can just make a cappuccino every morning, can’t I? Yum! I feel a bit more rested this morning–Sparky let me sleep an extra hour before becoming obnoxious. But he’s also sleeping with me now, which he didn’t used to do–mainly, I think, to track my movements in case I get up to feed him–but hey, I’ll take it.

If you enjoyed Andor, I highly recommend watching Rogue One again; the series enhances the movie significantly, and makes it even more powerful. Paul and I both agreed, and I love how the TV show flows into the movie and then into Star Wars (I will never call the original anything else). When Star Wars clicks, it’s excellent; unfortunately, it doesn’t always click, alas.

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

Statue of Pharaoh Khafre, Egyptian Museum