Tag: documentaries

Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing

And in one of those weird things, today is Wednesday but it’s also my Friday. What the hell, right? It’s also Pay the Bills Day, and tomorrow is a holiday and a four day weekend starts and I am feeling a bit groggy this morning. I slept well last night, and haven’t completely woken up yet.

I did manage to go to the gym on the way home from work; and all afternoon I was trying to talk myself out of going. I was tired, I wanted to just go home, and so on and on and on. Even after I picked up the mail in my workout attire, I was talking myself out of it all the way there, and finally just went and got it over with. It felt great, as exercise always does, and I was still energized when I got home (thank you, endorphins) so I got started on laundry and the dishes and made some progress on the book, too. But this morning I have muscle fatigue from the gym, which is what I was mistaking as not being completely awake yet. I am , but the muscles are tired and that’s what I am experiencing this morning. But I feel better physically this morning than I have in a long time. I am going to go tomorrow and do some other, non-rehab exercises for other body parts (although anything to do with the upper body involves the left biceps and shoulder), and then go back to rehab on Saturday. Also, the working out helps me sleep better, too. Now that my mind has been aroused by my morning coffee, I feel terrific–rested and alert and everything. Maybe today will be a really good day; one never knows, does one?

I am going to stop on the way home from work to get some things to cookout tomorrow–it is the 4th, after all; barbecuing is practically de rigeur at this point–and maybe pick up some cheesecake or some kind of “treat” for us this weekend. I do think tomorrow will be my “don’t write” day; in which I just read and clean all day and not worry about getting any writing done. I’ll do some planning, of course–I sort of finished Chapter Three yesterday, but I am going to go over it again because I was skipping things that need to be there because I actually wasn’t in the mood to write them (including a sex scene). The book will need a significant revision when this first draft is finished, but I am not going to worry about that now (although future Greg will be shaking his fist and threatening past Greg, I am sure). I also need to work on some short stories, too; I finally realized over this past weekend how to fix one that’s been turned down by everyone–the story I wrote for the Minneapolis Bouchercon anthology, “The Sound of Snow Falling”– because it doesn’t work; the trigger for the murder isn’t really there. So I need to do another revision of that and make it even nastier than it was; and then I can throw it into my short story collection. Sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Tree BASTARDS!

We’re watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on Netflix, and we really got sucked into it again. Years and years ago, somehow we discovered Making the Team, a reality series about going from try outs to the first performance of the year. It was so insane and crazy and wild, and we were just fascinated to see these beautiful young women with these extraordinary bodies getting body shamed or told they need a makeover and so on and so forth. The documentary is very similar to the old series (maybe this is Netflix’s way of relaunching the show, who knows?) but it’s a little more in-depth than the show was. The whole thing–being a part of the “team”–is very beauty pageant/sorority like; this is not a reality show where you’re going to see women fighting and arguing and throwing drinks at each other (that would be unseemly for a DCC team member) so if you’re looking for conflict, it’s going to come from watching these women not achieve their dream–which isn’t fun because you do feel sorry for them…while wondering “wow.” Some of them have been dreaming of this since they were little girls…I guess it’s the same as having a professional sports dream? It does make me think whenever I watch–the really interesting ones are the ones whose mothers were also DCC, so it’s a “family legacy.”

My friend Laura says there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure as one should never feel guilt about something you enjoy, but I do always feel a bit guilty watching these girls because they are really very sweet, and I think it’s great they are chasing their dreams. I guess the real guilt is that I feel like this is a very low bar as far as goals would go, but who am I to decide whose dreams are good and whose are bad? Just because I cannot imagine having that be my life goal doesn’t mean I should diminish or demean those who do.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines and get this day a going. I may be back later–you never can be entirely sure what I am up to these days! Have a lovely 3rd, everyone!

Country Roads (Take Me Home)

I’ll be driving back to New Orleans in a little bit, and I am exhausted. I went to bed last night ridiculously early–so early that I don’t want to admit to it publicly. I was very tired when I got here Friday afternoon. I made very good time despite some highway construction stupidity in Mississippi (which is always) but for the most part it was a nice drive and I got up here relatively easily. I stopped to get gas and eat in Toomsuba, which I’ve not done in a long time, and as I feared, once I slowed down and sat down to eat lunch, fatigue set in. I did have PT yesterday morning and left afterwards (and a few errands for good measure) and so, like always, was worn out by the time I got here.

It’s also cold here, which is hard for me to get used to as I haven’t been here during the winter very often in my life, so I always think of home as being hot and humid and muggy and miserable (going to Murder in the Magic City and Murder on the Menu doesn’t count because that doesn’t involve my kin in any way). It was bitterly cold here today as we drove around with Dad showing me places from his and my childhood. We went down to the bottoms of the Sipsey River on what used to be my grandfather’s land, which I hadn’t been to since I was a kid, and the river was really high and rushing quickly because of all the rain. (It rained really hard on Friday night). I actually slept well–which should be an indication of how tired I was, as sleeping in a hotel isn’t usually easy for me. Maybe the new drugs have helped in that regard too? I was very calm as I drove and didn’t feel the pressure of the ticking clock or the need to get there as fast as I could and feeling frustrated and irritated by any delays en route. I do not miss my anxiety in the least.

But, oh the memories that came back to me as we drove past my grandmother’s house (now crumbling and in disrepair) which was an indelible part of my childhood. My grandfather’s house, where my dad was born and raised, is also gone. I was also getting all kinds of ideas, as I always do when I come to or through this part of the state, and started really getting into this idea of a sequel to Bury Me in Shadows, only with Beau Hackworth was the main character. I really do want to write more about Alabama, and several other ideas of stories that are either in progress or exist in a very rough draft. It even occurred to me that I could do an entire collection of short stories set in Alabama. I have already published a couple of them, and I have enough ideas for another collection just for those alone–but I suppose I should finish my next one first before I think about another one, right?

This place will always have a hold on me, and it does worry me a bit that once Dad goes, my last connection to the county and my childhood summers here. And yes, I am aware that I am looking back through the nostalgic rose-colored glasses of sentiment. But summers here–how to describe them? Hot and humid, dragonflies and dirt daubers and five o’clocks, fried baloney sandwiches and buttermilk, sweat tea and cobblers, mosquitoes and watermelon and fresh blackberries from the woods, trips to town to the Piggly Wiggly and the library, long rows of cotton and corn and watermelon vines, red dust and orange clay roads, heat shimmering up from blacktop roads and how everything was so still in the lazy heat of the mid-afternoon, ghost stories and Civil War legends and lost treasure.

I miss my mom. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea that she’s buried here, that her remains are there under the ground between the big HERREN headstone and the foot-stone with her name and the dates underneath. It was such a cruel twist of fate for her to go on Valentine’s Day, which was also the anniversary of their first date sixty-six years ago. But in this time since she died I’ve also spent a lot more time with Dad and have gotten closer to him, which is really nice. I’ve also spent more time with the rest of the family, too, which is even nicer.

I know I’ll be exhausted tomorrow and I am starting the day with PT, so I will be really tired when I get home tomorrow night. I guarantee when the weekend rolls around again, I am sleeping as late as I feel like on Saturday, period.

Well, I didn’t get to post this before Dad called my room to get me to come downstairs for breakfast, after which I helped him load up his truck, I loaded my car, and we said our goodbyes and I headed for New Orleans while he made a detour on his way to Kentucky to say goodbye to Mom again.

The drive back to New Orleans was easy, little traffic, and I made it in slightly under four and a half hours, which is excellent time. I was exhausted once I got home, and then Paul and I got caught up on Abbott Elementary, we watched an unsettling documentary (but really, aren’t they all?) and then I started watching Alexander. Paul went upstairs to work, and so I did some chores and then remembered I never posted this. Not really sure what I’ll write about tomorrow morning, if anything at all. It’s going to be a long, tiring day.

And on that note, I am going to go sit in my chair and finish watching Alexander on Netflix. Maybe I can talk about that tomorrow? Have a lovely evening.

Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got)

Sunday morning. I slept late again–it took me a while to fall asleep last night, but I finally did and slept like the dead, which was lovely.

I finished reading Steph Cha’s exceptional Your House Will Pay yesterday; I reviewed it in a different entry, but will re-emphasize that you should preorder it right now again. I really loved it; I love the way Cha writes, and I also look forward to getting back to her Juniper Song series. There are some extraordinary novels being published in the crime fiction community this year; I myself have read some pretty amazing books this year, and can’t wait to dive into my next one, S. A. Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer.

I also woke to the news this morning that the anthology I was talking about yesterday, the one to which I’d contributed my original story “A Whisper from the Graveyard” to, will be released this October, which is kind of exciting. The cover was designed by Joe Phillips, one of my favorite gay artists (check out right here on his website; the art on my walls in my old office on Frenchmen Street were his calendar illustrations; gorgeous works of art). The title of the anthology is Pink Triangle Rhapsody, and it’s all genre work by gay writers. I’m kind of looking forward to reading the whole thing, to be honest.

I managed to get some things done yesterday, around reading the Cha novel. I cleaned, I ran errands, and I organized; I also made some notes for things I am writing, and then last evening–Paul went out with a friend–I fell into an Amazon Prime docu-series about The Romanovs, actually Russian produced with English subtitles. It was interesting, but now that we’ve reached Catherine the Great I no longer need to continue watching. I’ve read enough about Catherine that I don’t need to watch a documentary about her; and the Romanovs who came after her aren’t particularly interesting other than Alexander I, and he’s only interesting because of 1) Napoleon and 2) he never seemed to have any real interest in women. As this is a Russian production, I imagine the chapter on Alexander I will focus on Napoleon rather than his private life. So, no need for me to continue. The nineteenth century Romanovs aren’t that interesting, and I’ve read and watched enough about Nicholas and Alexandra to last me a lifetime; although I would be curious to see how they handle the last of the Romanovs, to get an idea of how Russians see them now. But again, their sad tale of hemophiliac son, deep abiding love and passion, and Rasputin that ends in a massacre in a basement in Ekaterinburg I know well enough already.

Today I plan on writing, believe it or not; I am going to dive into Chapter 21 headfirst and see what shakes out. I also am going to try to reread the first twenty chapters as well to update the detailed outline I am doing as I go, which will help me restructure the novel when it’s time to go over it a second time and revise the hell out of it. I also want to work on “Never Kiss a Stranger” a little bit, perhaps even as a warm-up; deciding that it’s going to be a novella rather than a short story was a good first start on getting it finished. (I am, in fact, still reeling from yesterday’s realization of just how many books, stories, and essays I am currently in the midst of writing) I also need to work on a project today, and there’s definitely some organizing (isn’t there always?) that needs doing. I also need to clean out my email inbox. Heavy heaving sigh, isn’t that always the way?

I’m also still thinking about Steph Cha’s novel, and how good it actually is. One of the things I meant to talk about in my entry about her novel is how it’s about every day people, rather than exceptional ones. Her characters aren’t cops, aren’t professional investigators; just people like you and me and your friends and neighbors, who sadly get wrapped up into a horrible crime and trauma, and how they deal with it. Such a good book, really.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines for the day, Constant Reader. Hope your Sunday is a lovely and peaceful and relaxing one; I hope mine will be as well as a productive one as well. We shall see, shall we not?

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Heartache Tonight

Well, Constant Reader, it is mid-afternoon on Friday and I am home. I worked this morning, ran errands, put the groceries away, and am currently in the midst of laundering the bed linens. Scooter periodically howls at me because I clearly need to be sitting in my easy chair so he can nap on me, but I keep denying him…so he goes away for about ten minutes before returning to express his displeasure with me yet again. At some point–probably after emptying the dishwasher and washing the dishes currently in the sink, I will take a break. I will go into the living room with Devil in a Blue Dress, sit in my chair, and read for a little bit–giving Scooter what he wants. Then, after a chapter or two, I will get up again to do something–perhaps switching laundry loads from one appliance to another and to the empty basket–and he will curl up on the couch and sleep, sated, and forget that I’m even home.

Unless, of course, I vacuum. But I did that yesterday, so he’s in luck on that score.

Well, actually it was a noise outside that got Scooter up and out of my lap, and I am now back. I out-waited him; I heard the washer stop but continued reading. He has his glare face on now, but he won’t howl at me again since he was the one who got up.

I am really enjoying the book, though, and while I am deeply ashamed it’s taken me this long to read one of Mosley’s novels, I am enjoying it so much I won’t allow the shame to ruin it for me. And there’s such a backlist! I can savor his work for years to come without fear of running out of one I haven’t read–there’s nothing worse than having finished reading all the books an author has written and having to wait for a new one…unless of course they are no longer amongst the living. I keep putting off reading more of Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith for that very reason. It’s insane, I know, but it makes perfect logical sense to me.

I stand corrected! I am being howled at from the doorway by a cat that wants me right NOW. Back in a bit.

Well, now it’s Saturday morning. I slept in this morning–I only woke up a couple of times during the night, which was lovely–and now I sit at my computer. Paul’s still sleeping so I have no battle of wills with the cat this morning; although Paul is planning on going into the office today, which means Scooter will slip into needy mode the minute the front door closes behind him. Heavy heaving sigh. But I read a lot more of Devil in a Blue Dress last night, which is really picking up steam. It’s really the origin story of how Easy Rawlins became a private eye, and I am really loving the way Mosley writes and tells the story…it also kind of reminds me of what I had in mind when I started writing Murder in the Rue Dauphine back in 1997. (Not that I would ever classify my work as being in the same league as Mosley’s; I just wish I’d read this before I started writing mine, as it would have been enormously helpful.)

I also got very tired last night–having the purring cat sleeping in my lap always makes me sleepy, even when I’m not really tired–so when I’m tired, watch out. I ended up watching a documentary about George V and Mary of Teck, and how they modernized the British monarchy to adapt to the first world war, and their issues with their children (who knew the current Queen had a gay/bisexual uncle? I did not), and then managed to stagger upstairs and make the bed before falling into a fabulous deep sleep. And here I am this morning, having accomplished nothing much last night, wondering how I am going to get everything finished this day that I want to finish.

Heavy heaving sigh. Same song, different day. Like always. But I am also going to repeat my last weekend methodology of closing my browser and staying off the Internet for as much of the day as possible, with a goal of only looking at it from time to time on either the phone or the iPad until tomorrow morning.

It really worked last weekend, didn’t it?

So, I think after I work on my emails this morning I am going to go read for a bit, before getting cleaned up and working on the revision and my writing. I also brought the Air home from the office, so I can also write in my easy chair if Scooter becomes too insistent with his neediness (and I think we can all reasonably assume he’s going to be a howling bitch until he gets his way this afternoon). That’s the plan, at any rate. I may watch a movie at some point this evening; Paul claims that when he gets home from the office he doesn’t want to do any more work this weekend and just wants to hang out. We shall see if that is indeed the case, won’t we?

And now, back to the spice mines.

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People Everyday

Hulu is streaming a two-part true crime documentary about a string of unsolved murders of women in Jefferson Davis Parish, Murder in the Bayou. I have a copy of Ethan Brown’s book of the same title, released a few years ago, but haven’t read it yet (instead, it’s sits on a shelf in the mini-bookcase to the right of my desk, where I also keep other nonfiction–histories, true crime, cultural studies–about both New Orleans and Louisiana; books which I delve into periodically in order to come up with ideas for stories (novels and short stories and novellas, etc.), or background for the same. (One of the many reasons I laugh when people refer to me as ‘a New Orleans expert’ is because I am everything but an expert on the city; there are literally hundreds of volumes of reference books information about New Orleans I’ve not read and know nothing about)  Mr. Brown came to the Tennessee Williams Festival a few years ago, but I didn’t get to meet him or see any of his panels, but I did pick up his book that weekend.

So, you can imagine my surprise the other night when I opened the Hulu app on my television (ten years ago that sentence would have been as unintelligible to me as Latin) and I saw it listed as a show I might be interested in. “Huh,” I thought, clicking on it, “I wonder if this is the same story as the book I’ve not read?”

Sure enough, it was.

I finished watching the show yesterday afternoon, and then of course, got the book from the bookshelf and started reading it…and didn’t stop until I was finished. I hadn’t intended to do that; I actually started writing this post after I finished watching the documentary series and simply reached over to the bookcase and pulled it out–mainly to see if there were photographs in it–many true crime books do–and since it didn’t, I started reading…and then couldn’t stop. I’ll talk some more about both the documentary and the book in another entry; I want to think about it some more, and the issues that came to mind while watching/reading–but again, as I said earlier, it was yet another example of how little I know about not just New Orleans, but Louisiana in general. As I read more New Orleans history, and get to know my city better with each read, I find myself expanding my former-tunnel vision view focusing on New Orleans only to expand out into Louisiana as well. It’s a truly fascinating state, really–as someone said in the documentary, there are three Louisianas: New Orleans; north Louisiana; which is really part of the Protestant Bible Belt and could just as easily be part of Arkansas; and south Louisiana, which is overwhelmingly French and Catholic; heavily Cajun, in all honesty. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Atchafalaya basin, too; I sort of have an idea about writing about that area. Most of my Louisiana fiction has been confined to writing about New Orleans, or places on the I-10 corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and sometimes dabbling on the North Shore. I am sure every state has just as rich and diverse and colorful a history as Louisiana/New Orleans; but I also don’t live there, and Louisiana with its strange mix of Creoles, Cajuns, Spanish, and Americans, with the attendant cultures, brews up a strange and endlessly fascinating gumbo.

I realized also yesterday while going through my blog drafts that I have never published my blog entry about reading Gary Krist’s Empire of Sin, which was what sent me down the Louisiana/New Orleans history rabbit hole in the first place.

empire of sin

“The crime,” as detectives would later tell the newspapers, was “one of the most gruesome in the annals of the New Orleans police.”

At five a.m. on the sultry morning of May 23, 1918, the bodies of Joseph and Catherine Maggio, Italian immigrants who ran a small grocery store in a remote section of the city, were found sprawled across the disordered bedroom of the living quarters behind their store. Both had been savagely attacked, apparently while they slept. Joseph Maggio lay face-up on the blood-sodden bed, his skull split by a deep, jagged gash several inches long; Catherine Maggio, her own skull nearly hewn in two, was stretched out on the floor beneath him. Each victim’s throat had been slashed with a sharp instrument.

A blood-smeared ax and shaving razor–obviously the murder weapons–had been found on the floor nearby.

The book opens with an examination of the strange case of New Orleans’ most famous serial killer: the Axeman. Julie Smith wrote an entire novel  based in the story called The Axeman’s Jazz; it might be the second or third Skip Langdon novel. Poppy Z. Brite wrote a short story with the same name, and of course, American Horror Story: Coven also included the Axeman in its litany of past New Orleans horrors–in the Ryan Murphy version, he stumbled into the Robicheaux School for Girls (read: witches) and they killed him; his ghost haunting the house ever since. The mystery of the Axeman’s identity, of course, has never been solved–as well as the why.

Empire of Sin, however, isn’t about the Axeman entirely; it’s really a history of the Storyville district (again, another notorious part of New Orleans history, probably best known for its appearance in the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby, which probably, with its creepy pedophilia, wouldn’t hold up too well today), and really focuses on the man known as the mayor of Storyville, Tom Anderson, who rose to great wealth, notoriety, and political power through his successful bordellos there–even going so far as to providing the district with its own police force. It’s a story of immorality, the struggle between reformers trying to turn New Orleans into a city free from sin (they won small victories but New Orleans remains New Orleans to this day) and Anderson’s struggle against those “virtuous reforms.” He eventually failed, and Storyville was shut down, but Krist tells a fascinating story, extrapolating his tale of Storyville’s struggle to stay open and functioning (the money being made there brought with it the ability to, of course, buy off the police and politicians), along with the stories of corruption, murder, prostitution, violence and racism extant in the city at the time. It’s also a story of how Storyville also, surprisingly enough, gave birth to jazz music, and provided a way for musicians of color to make a successful living playing music. Storyville was the incubator that provided sustenance to the musicians playing this new form of popular music, enabling them to make a living while developing a wholly American form of music.

Reading Empire of Sin is what sent me down the road to reading history, as I said before, and as I love history, it also made me aware of just how little about New Orleans I actually do know. Discovering little throwaway bits in the book–that there were male prostitutes who serviced men with “more exotic tastes”–reminded me of how frequently, and almost completely, queer history has been successfully erased, and that made me start thinking about, well, doing something more about it. Reading this book inspired two short stories I’ve not finished–“The Blues before Dawn” and “A Little More Jazz for the Axeman”–and also inspired a potential series set during the time. It’s also what gave me the idea for my collection of noir/crime/horror stories that I want to write, Monsters of New Orleans.

I cannot recommend Empire of Sin highly enough.

Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)

Thursday! Yesterday was strange; I was enormously tired all day, it felt like I’d never woken up mentally the entire day. I wasn’t physically tired, I was mentally tired all day, and had little or no energy. I guess I didn’t get good rest on Tuesday night, despite sleeping fairly well. As such, I made little to no progress on anything yesterday.

The other night Paul and I watched the documentary Dancer, about Russian ballet dancer Sergei Polunin. (I guess that makes him a ballerino, which term has never really caught on; most male ballet dancers are just called ballet dancers, which is interesting.) The documentary was pretty amazing; particularly when it focused on showing him dance. I will be the first to admit that I have not watched nearly as much ballet as I would like to have; not as many ballets are recorded on film as perhaps we should wish. I have spent time on Youtube watching Nureyev and Baryshnikov and the gorgeous Italian Roberto Bolle, which is how I originally came across “Take Me to Church,” the video of Polunin dancing to the song and shot by Dave LaChappelle (if you haven’t seen it, you really need to; the things he can do–how high he can leap, how gracefully he can spin–just take your breath away). I really do want to write a noir about ballet; it’s on the list of things I want to write.

Sergei:

balletPolunin

Roberto Bolle:

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I will never, I fear, have the time to write all the books I want to write. This is one of the reasons I always beat myself up when I have either an unproductive day (yesterday) or a lazy one (say, last weekend, for example). But I somehow cannot write every day; no matter how much I try. I need to get focused on finishing my short story “A Whisper from the Graveyard,” and I need to start getting the Scotty rewritten as well as some work done on the WIP. July is slipping through my fingers, and with less than three full weeks left, time is running out. Which is how I then start berating myself and sliding into negativity, which usually correlates with self-flagellation, and a further downward spiral.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

But, as I said earlier in the week, I did have a massive breakthrough on both the WIP and the Scotty; both are going to take some serious work, but I feel confident that I can get them done. Just not so confident that I can get them done by the end of this month, but hey, focus is the key. I want to get the short story finished, or at least a draft of it, before I can focus totally on the Scotty; and I really need to reread the entire WIP from start to finish, to make notes and figure out what and where can be salvaged and what needs to be jettisoned.

But I do highly recommend Dancer. I think, even if you aren’t a ballet fan or don’t know anything about ballet, if you’re an artist of any sort you would enjoy it; it’s really about sacrifice in the name of art and success; Sergei was separated from his family at a very early age in order to pursue his talent for dancing–the sacrifices his own family made are extraordinary (his went to Portugal to work to pay for the training; his grandmother moved to Greece to do the same, and neither saw their family for years; his family never even had the opportunity to see him dance after he went away to London to train) and how the enormous early success, plus not having any family to ground him, caused him to crash and burn–not in a dramatic way, he just had an emotional breakdown and walked away from his career not once, but twice.

One of the things I found most interesting was his own take on things–basically, he reached the pinnacle of dance at an early age, and then, what was there left to achieve? Which is an interesting concept, an interesting question, for any artist: when you’ve reached the top of your field, or produced your best work, what do you do next?  I kind of crashed and burned early last year, which resulted in a desultory year where I not only didn’t write but didn’t really want to; it is incredibly easy to fall into that trap. I failed to see the point in it anymore, and I once heard myself saying to someone during that miserable year, well, I’ve published this many books, no one can ever take that away from me, I will always be an author no matter what, and as the words came out, as I heard them, they bothered me.

It took me a while to realize that they bothered me because I hadn’t accomplished everything I had set out to do when I decided to take writing seriously some twenty-odd years ago; and there was a hint of resignation and defeat in the words. But I do think last year was necessary, for my personal growth as well as my professional. It made me take stock of things, made me remember what I wanted, and even though it took me a long while to get to a point where I was ready to write again and felt invigorated and recharged enough to do so.

I do feel like the work I am doing now is some of the best of my career thus far; so there is also that. Maybe I’m fooling myself and maybe I am not; we shall see.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines.

 

Live to Tell

Well, yesterday was a complete wash as far writing is concerned. I did write about 200 words on the Scotty book, but it was one of those things where once I started trying I could tell I wasn’t going to get very far with it. I was not feeling it, as some might say, and there’s simply no point to forcing it on those days unless I particularly want to feel incredibly frustrated.

And I didn’t want to feel that way.  So, I didn’t try to force it.  Sometimes I can force it and, as Stephen King so aptly put it in Misery, the page will open and I will fall into it. Other days, not so much. Yesterday was definitely one of those days.

Not being able to, apparently, write yesterday led me to trying to be productive in some manner, so I started going through old stories and partial drafts of work-in-progress to see if there was anything that could provide a base for this short story I want to write for a market on my bucket-list (I don’t know why I’m being coy; it’s Cemetery Dance). I always forget that I hand-wrote and then manually typed about twenty or thirty short stories (or fragments of short stories) in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s; I paid someone to type them up as Word documents about ten years ago in case any of them might be usable, reworkable, etc. (They are all terrible…there’s nothing quite so humbling as going back and reading things you wrote years before you knew how to really write.) I printed out about five or six that had potential–based on my memory of them–and I intend to read them over this weekend and see if, indeed, there is anything worth salvaging in them.

I do need to say that one of these longer stories became my novel Sorceress, and some of the others were salvaged and turned into something else, so this is not without precedent….hell, I wrote three chapters of a horror novel back then called The Enchantress that eventually became the foundation of my novel Dark Tide. (In fact, I had turned one of those chapters into a short story, which is one of those I printed out last night.) I don’t think the short story adaptation works, but just remembering the story again made me remember that failed attempt at a novel, and also it was actually a pretty good idea, maybe now you should revisit it?

And this is how, Constant Reader, my creative ADD gets out of control. Last night I was watching documentaries–one was for curiosity; but it triggered a reminder of a book I wanted to write, so the entire time I was sitting there watching it I was also scribbling notes for the book idea. When that documentary finished, I started watching another one, and again, this documentary–I only got about twenty minutes into it–solved an issue with another book idea I had, and made that particular book idea–one I hope to write later this year–even better than it was originally.

This is, of course, kind of exciting…if you don’t take into consideration the fact that I am already writing two novels and have the next one planned as well.

Heavy heaving sigh.

I also want to finish reading this damned Roth novel. There are so many other things I want to read, but I am stubbornly determined to finish reading this damned book.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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This Town

It’s Friday morning in New Orleans, and I slept fitfully; but when I did sleep, it was terrific. I only have to work a half-day today, which is lovely, and tonight I am hoping to not only get a chance to read some more of Rebecca Chance’s lovely Killer Affair, but to get further in the line edit as well. This weekend my plan is to work on the line edit and clean, alternating between the two, which hopefully will do the trick. I’ve not gotten as far along this week on anything that I’d hoped; the weekly to-do list is a complete and utter disaster. The good news this week was that our renewed passports arrived (hurray!), I got some great books–everything from the new Michael Connelly to Eric Ambler to Chester Himes–to add to the TBR pile, and the latest short story is really taking a good shape, one with which I am really and truly pleased.

My short stories are much darker than my novels. The WIP, currently being line edited, has little to no humor in it; at least none that I’m aware of–but then again I am not the best judge of that. I love to tell the story of my New Orleans Noir story, “Annunciation Shotgun,” which I thought  was this dark, unsettling tale, and continued thinking so until at a reading for the anthology, Chris Wiltz, one of the other contributors (her story, “Night Taxi,” is quite chilling) said to me, “Oh, I loved your story! It’s so funny!”

I was a little taken aback, as I’d thought it was a dark story…and then when it was my turn to read to the gathered audience, there were times when I got laughs.

Okay, I remember thinking, I guess I can be funny even when I’m not trying to be.

This story I’m working on now is also grim and dark; but I think the primary reason I’m drawn to the genre I work in primarily is my interest in damaged people. The Great Gatsby  was about damaged people, and the damage people can leave in their wake; it didn’t try, however, to explain or get into how the people got damaged and why,  and that was its greatest disappointment to me. This current story was inspired by watching a documentary while Paul was at his mother’s; I always have to find things to watch when he’s gone that we wouldn’t want to watch together (in other words, things I want to watch that he doesn’t. He tired of the TV series Scream; so I finished watching it while he was gone. Likewise, you can never go wrong with documentaries). I watched one on either Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon–I don’t remember which–about a young man and his brothers, who’d escaped a religious cult. As I watched these damaged young men trying to make sense of their childhood and fit into a world and society they were woefully underprepared for, while the main point-of-view character was also trying to reestablish a relationship with his mother, still in the cult and distant to him–I couldn’t help but wonder about the young women refugees from the cult he interviewed, and the stories they shared about their sexual abuse and, basically, being brainwashed into thinking that was normal. (The boys were also apparently sexually abused as well as physically abused, but their sexual abuse was skipped over; mentioned but not gotten into in depth.) I had my notebook in my lap, and I scribbled down notes…and eventually started writing the story I thought up while watching the documentary. The story is dark–I am revising it now, making it even darker than the first draft–which also limits its saleability quotient, but hey, I am definitely going to put it out there.

Christ, I have so many works in progress. Nothing like creative ADD without a deadline to anchor you down.

I’ve also not decided what book to write next once this WIP is finished. I am thinking about getting back to Scotty with Crescent City Charade, but there’s another noir I’d love to tackle, and my “A Holler Full of Kudzu” could easily be explored as a novel.  Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me! Here’s a Friday hunk for you, to get your weekend started properly.

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Over and Over

My documentary binge continues. I was actually wrong–the series about castles in England was called Secrets of Great British Castles, and the presenter is a very attractive Brit named Dan Jones. The first episode was Dover; the second The Tower of London. The third episode was Warwick Castle, but I decided to skip that one. I’ll go back to the show eventually, but I wasn’t really in the mood to watch about Warwick Castle, so I went back to the documentary category on Netflix while waiting for Paul to get home (I wrote a lot yesterday) and found one called Shenandoah.

It was incredible, and I can’t get it out of my mind.

The documentary is about the death of an illegal immigrant from Mexico in the small town of Shenandoah Valley, Pennsylvania; a coal mining town which is dying a slow economic death. The town was made up of families descended primarily from European immigrants: Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish–but has also seen a recent influx of Mexican immigrants. Luis Ramirez was attacked and beaten by four stars of the high school football team (again, yet another town whose identity is wrapped up entirely in its high school football team) and later died of his injuries. Two of the four boys pled guilty and agreed to testify against their friends; an all-white jury in the town shockingly (sarcasm) found them all not guilty on every charge other than simple assault. The federal government then stepped in and charged the boys under federal hate crime statutes, along with four local cops accused of hindering the FBI investigation and conspiracy to cover up the crime. All six were convicted.

What was disturbing, for me, was the horrific racism exhibited by the townspeople during the investigations, and how they saw the original verdict as a triumph for “white America”; the horrific xenophobia and the blaming of Mexicans for all their troubles. I am glad some of these people are now on film; some day they will be as embarrassed, hopefully, by their behavior and conduct preserved for all time as the racists during the integration struggle in the south. Chanting “USA!” in response to the death of a Latino at the hands of four white teenagers? Calling them good boys?

Despicable, really. And for the record, these are the white working class voters of ‘real America’, of ‘small town America’, that are held up as paragons of everything that our country supposedly is at its best.

Not all of them, of course. The documentary showed several points of view that also showed there were people who aren’t racist and were appalled by what was going on in their town. The young boy who was involved and pled guilty initially, Brian Scully, was kicked off the football team and the documentary actually traces his growth as a person, and how the horror of that night and what he was involved in changed him. He actually found some salvation and solace from, of all things, musical theater; joining the cast of a school production of Into the Woods (which, ironically, opened the night before he had to testify against his friends in the initial trial).

It’s an incredibly powerful documentary that I recommend everyone watch; it’s on Netflix.

I also watched Ghosts of Ole Miss, which was about the integration of the campus in 1962 by James Chambers and the campus wide riot that resulted, with the students attacking the National Guard and the National Guard having to fight back, resulting in the US Military having to come to the campus to put down the riot and finish the integration process. The documentary also talked about the 1962 undefeated Ole Miss football team, which held the university together and gave the students something to be proud of after the Battle of Ole Miss; yet at the football games the students were all waving Confederate flags and their mascot was still Johnny Reb, and…

Sigh.

Both documentaries have given me a lot to think about, and even some ideas about things to write; which means both films did their jobs.

Today I am going to write some more (the goal is five thousand words; I achieved that yesterday but I don’t know if I can do it a second day in a row but you never know!) and continue reading Elizabeth Little’s Dear Daughter around doing some chores. I don’t have to leave the house again until Monday when I go back to work (sob), so there’s that. I also got another deep good night’s sleep last night, so….can’t complain!

And now back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for today: