Tag: Edith Wharton

Let My Love Be Your Pillow

Saturday morning and Paul comes home today! Huzzah! Huzzah! I of course literally have no idea what time he will be arriving–he never tells me these things and I never think to ask–but it’s fine. Yesterday was a good work-at-home day. Sam the handyman came by in the morning to finish touching things up and clean everything up, which was marvelous, and now the apartment sort of looks like our apartment again. It’s great, and it makes me want to clean, which is something I’d forgotten that I enjoyed so much. I’ve really let the housework slide since the pandemic started (sure, let’s blame it on that, shall we?) but a lot of it had to do with the walls in the living room. tl;dr= we had some leaks, and water damage to the walls in the living room. The leaks were repaired, but the plaster and paint somehow never got finished and we’d been living with that for a while….and when you have places where the bare wall is showing…the apartment, even clean and sparkling from ceiling to floor, would look deranged and damaged and sloppy. I think I felt a little defeated, to be honest.

I’ve felt defeated a lot over the last few years, if I’m going to be honest. But I’ve been feeling oddly better lately about things lately, even optimistic at times. I know, right? It’s kind of scary. It’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore, but I have full faith in the universe to deliver yet another blow the way it always does when I start feeling like this again–a sense of contentment and peace. I’m sleeping better, getting better rest, and I am getting things done rather than sitting in my easy chair every night scrolling through social media while Youtube videos stream endlessly on continual play. Ironically, I remember feeling this way on another hot August Friday in New Orleans, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina. I had just finished Mardi Gras Mambo at long last and turned it in, and that Friday I had met with the Admissions office at UNO to see about finishing my degree in English and pursuing a master’s, and even potentially eventually a PhD. Yes, I had ambitions. The meeting had gone incredibly well. We scheduled a meeting with the chair of the English department, and it looked fortuitous and very good; I’d have to pay for the semester required to get the English degree, but it looked like I’d get the master’s not only without having to pay, but I’d also get an on-campus part-time job. I don’t reflect back very often, but sometimes I remember that last optimistic August before Katrina and wonder how different my life would look now had Katrina never happened…or at least had the levees held. I’ve always felt the lack of educational degree and study keenly; I was far too young when I started school and majored in English to really appreciate the in-depth examination of classic literature and other forms. None of what little I learned stuck, either. I have also always been made to feel that the books I actually did read and appreciate were lowbrow; on par for someone as uneducated and unserious like me. I’ve not read much of the classic writers, for example; I’ve never read Edith Wharton or Jane Austen or much of Henry James; I may give Hemingway another try at some point but I was unimpressed with both A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea. Fitzgerald wrote beautifully about horrible people I’m not interested in; I love Faulkner but he’s a lot of work to read (but I will go to my grave loving “A Rose for Emily” and wishing I had written one thing that perfect), so I’m not going to read Faulkner for pleasure–even though I take great pleasure in the voice and the rhythm of the words and so forth, I’m still looking for characterization and story.

Hell, there are any number of classic mystery writers I’ve never read, for that matter. I had never read Ross Macdonald until I was on a panel with Christopher Rice who sang his praises highly enough for me to get a couple of his books…and have always been delighted that I did. I think I’ve read one Rex Stout novel, but I can’t remember anything about it and I think I am thinking of a television adaptation with William Conrad and Timothy Hutton? Or did I imagine that, too? One of the things I am loving about reading the short stories in these marvelous old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies is getting to read authors I’ve heard of that I’ve not read. Yesterday night I read “Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond” by Nugent Barker, from Stories That Scared Even Me; “Four O’Clock” by Rice Day, “Of Missing Persons” by Jack Finney, and Paul Eiden’s “Too Many Coincidences”, from My Favorites in Suspense. I enjoyed them all, but the Barker was my least favorite of the four. It’s written in Ye Olde Timey Style, and it goes on for far too long, and it’s big twist I saw coming. I also didn’t much care for Mr. Bond. The Day story was one of those macabre little tales of irony with the kind of ending that Daphne du Maurier mastered and I’ve always loved–and aspire to write. (The trick is the ending has to be earned.) The Finney story was also one of those, but a bit more melancholic than macabre.

I also spent some more time with Superman last night. First I watched a documentary called Look Up In The Sky! The Amazing Story of Superman, which I followed with this week’s episode of My Adventures with Superman. I was very pleased to see Jimmy Olsen talked about in the documentary, and the actor from the television series, Jack Larson, was openly gay and was in a very long term relationship that lasted until he died in 2015, as someone very kindly reminded me on Twitter the other day in response to my talking about Jimmy on here. I am really intrigued at the idea of writing a Jimmy Olsen story…although I’m not exactly sure what I would do with such a thing, and I’m equally sure publishing it would be a trademark/copyright violation of some sort. I’ll make a note and keep chewing on it, though.

I also worked on the book some last night (at last) which felt marvelous and overdue. It was so hot yesterday–even with the air conditioner on full blast and desperately trying to keep up, you could tell inside that everything outside was roasting. I am quite pleased to have gotten past the revision of Chapter Five at long last and I have to say, I am most happy with what I did. Of course, Chapter Six is from scratch, which is going to be an enormous pain in my ass, naturally; writing anything where nothing other than a thought exists at the moment is always harder than revising. Revising can be either tedious or a lot of fun; it’s when your making the book better written and deepening characters and cleaning up shit and building on the ideas you’ve already gotten down but didn’t express particularly well as you were just madly trying to get words on the page and the story advanced and all of that.

Whew. Breathe.

I also woke up to a marvelous email–I just checked–from my editor on Mississippi River Mischief letting me know when the edits would come and included…”This book is fabulous, btw.”

Whew,

And on that marvelous note, off to the spice mines with me!

Blue Monday

And Monday again; the work week is reborn and refreshed and ready to go again. Whether one Gregalicious can say the same about himself remains to be seen, but it is early yet and this is still my first cup of coffee, so the rest remains fairly unclear. I have high hopes for today and this week; I am hoping that I will have the energy, drive and will to finally get caught up on everything.

Then again, this week could also bitch-slap me back into place at any particular moment, so there’s that as well.

It turned out to be stunningly beautiful yesterday–mostly cloudy, but still managed to get up into the lower seventies. As I walked to and from the gym, I marveled at how lovely the weather was for late January…but stopped myself from the false hope the fake early spring we always seem to get in late January inevitably gives rise to; there’s always another cold front that seems to roll in, with rain and damp and cold winds, before March returns with the first hints of real spring. The workout was also nice; I always love that post-workout tired feeling, when your muscles are fatigued.

I also had a great morning reading yesterday. I read the opening chapter of Faulkner’s Sanctuary; three short stories (“Miss Bianca” by Sara Paretsky, originally published in MWA’s Ice Cold and reprinted in Paretsky’s own collection, Love and Other Crimes; “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” by Edith Wharton, from The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton–also my first time reading Ms. Wharton; and “Mermaids on the Golf Course” by Patricia Highsmith, from The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith. The Paretsky was my favorite of the three, but I do feel there will inevitably be a blog post about older ghost stories vs. modern); and then dove headfirst into Alyssa Cole’s When No One is Watching, which is particularly quite marvelous, and a solid entry into a new subgenre I hope we’ll see more of–gentrification noir. I had thought about doing a Scotty book about New Orleans gentrification–Bywater Bohemia Bougie–and I still might–it’s an awesome title, after all, but I am not sure of what the actual story would be; an unscrupulous developer is kind of a no-brainer, wouldn’t you say, though?

We only have one episode left of Flack, and I must say we are really enjoying it. I hate to see it end, but season 2 of Apple Plus’ chilling Servant has also dropped, so we have something interesting and disturbing to move onto.

Yesterday was kind of lovely; I felt rested, did a lot of reading and cleaning, and eventually did some more brainstorming on the book, which I am almost ready to start revising. Always a plus.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader!

Nothing but a Fool

Ah, it is Thursday and we have a new president. It was kind of nice to wake up without that sense of existential dread and worrying about what new horrors the day would bring–or what I may have missed while I was sleeping. I also slept deeply and well, and I am enjoying my first cup of coffee thus far this morning. I don’t have a full day of working at home, as I worked longer hours in the office so can shave some off my day today, which is lovely. I can spend the morning with my emails and blog and drinking coffee and waking up gradually–which is my actual preference–I suppose no one likes waking up to an alarm. It’s more along the lines of how used to it you can get. I personally hate the alarm, but there’s simply no way I would ever get up at six in the morning without one. I don’t think my body will ever adapt to that–it never has before, and I can’t imagine that changing as I rapidly approach the big 6-0 later this year.

And Twitter, wonder of wonders, has stopped–for the moment, at least–being the bleak horrific portal to hell it has been for such a long, long time. This, coming so soon after the horrific redesign of Facebook that seems designed and intended to drive all of its users away, has resulted in me spending more time there than I have been on Facebook lately, and frankly, this actually hasn’t been a bad thing. I have freed up a lot more time–Twitter has been fun, but ultimately I am not overly fond of it–and so I find myself taking the time I used to spend endlessly scrolling and commenting and sharing and liking things to do other things, like read or brainstorm or clean.

And is this really a bad thing? I don’t think so. The first and hopefully last social media presidency has shown us all the dangers inherent in unmoderated social media; how quickly it can be harnessed to undermine civility and societal norms and our democracy. The steadfast refusal of social media for years to not try to control the dangerous lies being spread and amplified on their platforms is something that will be studied for generations–and I suspect people like Mark Zuckerberg and their sociopathic desire for blood profits will not come off well in those histories.

Good.

So now I must buckle down and stop watching history unfold and get all the things done that I need to get done. There are some deadlines for short story submissions coming up, my deadline for the Kansas book also is hanging over my head in the near future, and there are any number of other things I need to get a handle on. I have yet to decide on what the next book I will read will be–it’s a toss-up between too many excellent titles, to be sure–and may cowardly delay the decision by delving back into short stories. It’s been a hot minute since I read any short stories, and I also got two wonderful single author collections of ghost stories–those of Edith Wharton and E. F. Benson. (The Benson volume is much thicker than the Wharton.) I have never read Edith Wharton–as I have often confessed, my education in the classics has been sadly lacking–and I am fond of ghost stories, particularly those from that period in literature. I love the formality of the writing with the touch of Gothic to them; I have a ghost story in progress called “The Weeping Nun” I would also like to write in that same kind of style, and perhaps even change it from a modern setting to the past, with the sound of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones and flickering gaslight through the fog in the French Quarter.

Ironically, I had started writing that story on my iPad in Pages; recently I discovered the trove of things written in that app I had completely forgotten about, and so I uploaded them all to the Cloud and converted them to Word documents; hilariously, the opening of “The Weeping Nun” is the scene–or at the very least inspired–the opening to “The Snow Globe.” I had started writing “The Weeping Nun” for an HWA anthology built around the theme of Halloween; and it opens with Satan not only had a six-pack but he also had one of the finest asses I’d seen in a while. The main character is up on the balcony at the Parade watching the street when a muscle boy in a Satan costume comes out of Oz, and that is the point where the story began. I never got more than a thousand words done on the story–I don’t recall why I was too busy or tied up or whatever to finish the story, but when I started “The Snow Globe” for the original anthology I sent it in to, I remembered that opening and changed it from Satan to Santa–and away I went with the story.

I’m still prepping for the final push on the Kansas book as well, the final draft. There will have to be some new scenes and chapters written; more than I’d prefer will have to come out of it; and so much cleaning up to do–the mind positively reels in horror from the amount of work this manuscript needs–which is really why I’ve been avoiding getting back into it, if I am going to be completely honest with myself. But it’s not going to revise or edit or rewrite itself, obviously, and the only way it’s going to get finished is if I stop procrastinating and fearing doing the work (which I inevitably end up enjoying doing anyway, which makes it all the more irritating and annoying that I have to make myself do it) but I’ve also decided that the thing to do is reward myself for getting work on it done; seems silly, but it works. So, for every three chapters I refine, revise and polish I am going to spend some time developing Chlorine, which is what I really want to be writing anyway. I have a lot of ideas and a loose sense of the plot/story floating around inside my head, and I probably need to start writing it all down and piecing it all together, as well as start building the characters and fleshing them out more. I like my amoral, do-whatever-it-takes-to-make-it himbo movie “star”; I think I can make his cynicism and hard-edged morality understandable and likable. I’m kind of excited to start working on it.

And on that note, it is time for me to answer some emails and then start today’s condom packing duties. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader!