Tag: fantasy

Tragedy

Thursday, and it’s almost the weekend. Not a normal weekend, but one where I have to actually be presentable and lucid periodically…and have to leave the house for extended periods of time. I slept pretty well last night, for my first night as a Festival widow; Sparky actually slept in the bed with me, too. I didn’t get much done when I got home last night, because I was tired after I got off work and the errands didn’t help much. I did start a load of laundry and ran the dishwasher, so tat is something I got done. I also managed to get some writing done, but not very much, so hopefully tonight’s writing journey will be better. We shall see.

I did watch the season finale of a reality show I follow for some reason–habit more than anything else at this point (I’ve almost always been a completist, and I usually will only ditch a show before its series finale if it gets really bad and stupid and I get annoyed with myself for watching)–and I think I might be pulling the plug on it. I had come very close to stopping watching a few seasons back when the show took a turn I didn’t much care for, and it seems like the cast has decided to circle back around to the behaviors that had me almost stop watching in the first place. I may watch the reunion episodes, but most likely not. I’m not really interested in the bullying antics of a failed grifter, failed gold digger, and failed child star who are actually so bad at their jobs that they can’t even give me a meme-worthy moment or line. I do sometimes need a break from Bravo’s reality shows because the lack of consequence for any of these horrible women reminds me that horrible people often never have consequences in reality (cough Tulsi Gabbard cough Pete Hegseth cough), and that’s not messaging I can really get behind.

The immorality of rewarding amorality gets to me sometimes, you know? I guess that’s why so many people embrace religion and the whole “afterlife” thing–bad people go to hell, right, so their punishment is in the next world, but the concept of the “get out of hell free card” methodology and epistemology negates every bit of the punishment/reward structure of modern American Christianity. “Faith without works is dead,” remember that part?

I think the lack of consequences in the real world is why I started writing crime fiction in the first place, so the guilty are actually punished. A definite argument can be made that crime fiction’s roots are in conservative ideology; the restoration of order after disorder, the Apollonic v. Dionysian paradigms that lie at the root of all good crime fiction, whether we want to admit it or not. I first started thinking about this in the wake of the police murders of innocent Black people over the last decade (shameful that it took me that long to open my eyes), which made me reevaluated my own biases about the police (the mythology vs. the reality), while all the time knowing that as a gay man the police are most definitely not looking out for MY best interests in any way. I was conditioned as a child, by the Chicago public school system, to see the cops are protectors and friends. (Did anyone else have an “Officer Friendly” who came to talk to your class about safety? I remember distinctly being conditioned to trust the police…)

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Screenshot

Zero to Hero

I came to Disney later in life. You also have to remember that I grew up in a different world than the one everyone who grew up in the 1970’s or later did; we couldn’t rent movies, there were only three television networks plus PBS and whatever local independents there might be, and so the only chance to actually see classics of Disney’s past was if they were re-released, and that didn’t happen very often. My parents, despite their youth, weren’t going to spend the money to take us to see something they didn’t care about seeing, either; money was tight, and Mom used to take us to see movies when we were little in the summer to get out of the heat. I do vaguely remember seeing The Happiest Millionaire on the big screen–my only real memory of it was he owned an alligator–but for the most part, we never really saw many Disney movies, and especially not animated ones.

Yes, when I was a child I watched Disney’s Wonderful World of Color every Sunday night after Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom for years. But my childhood was also not a great time for Disney, either in animation or live action. Sure, some films were gems, but not in the same vein as the big classics, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Peter Pan and Cinderella. Disney was more focused on live animation movies (this was the period of The Love Bug movies and Kurt Russell’s college student movies (and beautiful Jan-Michael Vincent in The World’s Greatest Athlete.) at this time.

It was the Disney renaissance of my late twenties/early thirties, timed with my self-discovery journey about who I was and wanted to be and figuring out everything, really, that turned me into a Disney Queen. It was hard not to get up caught up in Disney’s beautiful visuals and songs about misunderstood outsiders who eventually find where they belong, from The Little Mermaid to Beauty and the Beast to so many others. All the films essentially had the same basic story beats: someone who doesn’t feel like they belong goes on an adventure, where they find themselves and what they were meant to be, and wind up with a great final reward of love and acceptance. How does that not resonate with gay men in the time of HIV/AIDS? The fact that songwriter Howard Ashman was a gay man dying of AIDS while working on The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast1 only made the films resonate with gay men all the more–and I went whole hog on the Disney Queen roleplay. (My favorite character of all Disney animation remains Malificent, of course.)

But I also always had a very soft spot for Hercules, even though it wasn’t one of the more popular animated Disney films. I’m always a little curious when Disney announces it’s making an animated film out of something that hardly seems kid-friendly; like The Little Mermaid, which is a horrible Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale. Likewise, when I heard they were making Hercules I arched an eyebrow. I loved Greek mythology and ancient Greece when I was a kid (my three favorite ancient civilizations were Greek, Roman, and of course Egyptian), and I was always interested in Hercules–although as a child I knew the correct Greek name was Heracles–because I kind of saw him as an ancient Greek Superman; the heavily muscled physique he was always depicted as having was just a bonus for little gay Greg, and I always wanted to write about him; discovering that in the original myths he had both male and female loves once I became an adult was just more fire to the flame. The Disney film, of course, altered a lot of the not-so-kid-friendly aspects of the myth, obviously; they made Hera his mother rather than his principle enemy, they cut the Muses down from nine to five, and eliminated his cruelty, his bouts of madness, and his insane all over the map sexuality to make him another Disney prince, who grows up an outsider and has to prove himself and that he not only belongs but is a hero.

The Muses were the narrators of the movie, and they were a delight. Their songs were all done in the style of old-time girl groups, and I thought they were a terrific narrative device. I loved the soundtrack, too.

Imagine my delight when I found out local New Orleans author Farrah Rochon, who is an highly acclaimed romance writer, was writing the backstory for the Muses in a young adult novel called Bemused.

And Reader, it was utterly charming.

I loved it.

Mnemosyne stood on the edge of the craggy cliff, listening to the whistle of the brisk windblowing through the barren tree branches below. The blanket of thick gray storm clouds that had shrouded the valley for the past few days had finally lifted. She took in a lungful of the clean mountain air. It was invigorating. And comforting.

And she was far enough away from the oppressive demands of Mount Olympus that she could finally feel a sense of calm. She had not experienced true peace in so long that even she, the Goddess of Memory, could barely recall what it was like.

Her fear had lessened with every moment that passed after she’d fled from Mount Olympus, the place where she’d spent so many onerous years. Now, she had a new destiny to fulfill. Had the time finally come?

A loud crack, followed by a harsh, high-pitched squawk, sent Mnenosyne scrambling for cover. She looked up just intime to see a bird swooping overhead, its wings extending out several feet on each side.

Mnenosyne, you see, was a Titan who didn’t fight Zeus and his siblings in their war to take over the heavens. She stayed on Olympus, and eventually developed relationships with several of the other goddesses in the pantheon, namely Athena and Artemis. But (this is the Disney universe, not the ancient Greek one) Hades spends a lot of time undermining her faith in capricious and fickle King of the Gods, Zeus, whom he resents for giving him the underworld to rule over and wants to overthrow (straight up from the film) him. He wants Mnenosyne on his side due to her control over memories; she can convince all the gods that Hades has always been the King of the Gods and Zeus the lord of the underworld, and so she is key to his plans. But she flees Olympus, making all of them forget she ever existed–but Hades kept a journal so she couldn’t do that to him as there was a written record. Hades is the big bad in this book, just as he was in the movie (which was probably the last time I’ve enjoyed James Woods in anything), and she creates her daughters, but keeps their gifts hidden as she keeps moving them around to avoid scrutiny and coming to the attention of the gods. But Hades finds her and kidnaps her, and her daughters now must use their powers to find her and save her from the clutches of Hades, so it’s also a very charming coming of age story as well as an interesting adventure.

This is an excellent read, and belongs on your shelves next to your Rick Riordan novels.

  1. Miss me with the “Stockholm syndrome” takes on Beauty and the Beast, thank you very much; the entire point of the film is that someone monstrous becomes capable of love and caring for someone besides himself, which finally breaks the curse on him. It’s actually a beautiful story, it makes me cry every time I watch it at least three times (when he loves her enough to let her go; when he dies; and when he transforms back), and at some point I am going to write about this masterpiece of a movie. ↩︎

Promises

Tuesday morning, and I hope all is well with you, Constant Reader. I slept deeply and well, didn’t want to get under the weight of the blankets, but did and now I am waking up. I just had a piece of King cake (the on I bought Sunday has mysteriously been almost completely eaten since yesterday morning) with my coffee this morning. It’s forty degrees again this morning, only getting into the mid-fifties later. I did pick up my copy of Bemused (and a few other books, Disclaimer plus two non-fiction tomes, one about Appalachia and another about the Satanic panic and the Go Ask Alice literary fraud), came home, and Paul and I started watching season two of The Rig, which is interesting; I remember nothing much about the first season, but the show has shifted from the smaller story of the workers trapped on an oil rig in the North Sea and weird shit happening to a much bigger story that was kind of jolting. I do like the cast (including Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek), and it’s interesting as it shifts from a horror story into The Abyss. Definitely an interesting choice, and one I did not see coming.

This year has turned into something, hasn’t it? Everyone was so glad to see 2024 usher itself out the door that we weren’t prepared for 2025 to be a disaster from day one. A terrorist attack on New Orleans to ring in the new year, and of course California is still burning. The very notion of putting conditions on federal aid, as well as “blaming” California for its own situation, is so not very Christian (looking at you, Mike Johnson–the fact that you consider yourself a modern Moses instead of a modern Jesus is telling) and an absolute joke when we open the federal wallet for hurricane relief without question every hurricane season (AS WE SHOULD)—when what we should be doing is figuring out way to make hurricane relief faster and more effective and efficient and to do better by victims of natural disasters–which are only going to keep increasing and with greater impact as we navigate the treacherous waters of the new regime. They come so fast and furious now that it’s easy to forget even the more recent ones. California is burning while North Carolina continues to recover from it’s unexpected hurricane disaster–does anyone even think about North Carolina now, in the winter? I do find it interesting that their state government is far more interested in overturning a free and fair election in their state while so many of their citizens don’t have shelter or power (or both). But we move on, like we always do, and assume that the recovery is completed once the story is out of the news. Angelenos are suffering a trauma right now, just as the North Carolinians still are, and the effects of those traumas are very long-lasting. Trust me, I know, and it will be years before either region is recovered, if they ever do.

Well, the New Yorker dropped its horrific article on the sexual abuse (re: rapes) perpetrated by Neil Gaiman on a LOT of women, and yes, I needed a Silkwood shower after reading it. It’s awful, and yes, it is terrible, but it doesn’t surprise me as much as it did the Gaiman fanboys and fangirls. I’ve never truly been that kind of a fan boy for anyone, really; there have been a few whose beliefs and values wound up not aligning with mine, but it wasn’t a trauma for me nor did it trigger an emotional meltdown because I don’t get that vested in artists as a general rule, so when they turn out to be awful in some way my reaction is generally well that’s a shame and I don’t read them anymore. Simple. Getting rid of Orson Scott Card from my shelves wasn’t a big deal, nor was never reading any further of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s1. I had read David Eddings’ The Belgariad2 in the 1980s when I went through my fantasy reading period, but didn’t know about his crimes (with his wife and co-writer) against their adopted children3 or that they did jail time until the piece on Gaiman dropped yesterday and the Internet lit up with angry former fans and friends denouncing his behavior. As for me, well, I’ll always be fond of The Sandman and sorry the Netflix series is ending after a wonderful first season, but I probably won’t be reading anything else of Gaiman’s, or revisiting The Sandman again. But I do think you can separate the art from the artist, to some degree; but that’s up to individuals and their own ick factors, I think. My mentality is I won’t ever get a chance to read everything I want to read, so why revisit the works of problematic, or read new works by them? I had no problem whatsoever cutting Dan Simmons out of my must-read list, and he was one of my favorite horror writers.

The Internet blew up at Carrie Underwood yesterday for agreeing to perform at the coronation of the anti-Christ Monday. Hey, if she wants to lick his boots, go for it, bitch. I’m not the one who’ll have to answer for it to God someday. Have at it, but remember no gay will ever listen to, download or buy anything you ever record from now on. Everything he touches dies, and why do you think you’ll be exempt from that? I imagine you lost any non-MAGA listener you had, but hey–you’ve got that Aryan Master Race thing working for you, so have fun performing for the glory of the Fascists. How did that work out for Leni Reifenstahl?

I was also a little saddened to read about the death of one of my favorite soap stars, Leslie Charleson, recently. She was the second actress to play Dr. Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital, and she lasted decades longer than the original. I always liked Monica, and absolutely loved the way Charleson played her. Sure, I enjoyed the whole Luke-and-Laura stuff, but I primarily watched General Hospital for the Quartermaines, who were conniving and backstabbing and fucking hilarious. (Jane Elliott’s Tracy remains my favorite soap character ever; scenes between the two were great television.) I always thought they should have their own show, and the way they kept killing off Quartermaines willy-nilly over the years was really aggravating; I wanted more Quartermaines, not fewer, and they never deserved to be on the back burner.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again tomorrow.

  1. I was a fan of her gay romance, The Catch Trap, and had always meant to read her Arthurian novels…I can live without reading The Mists of Avalon, after all. ↩︎
  2. I’d actually considered revisiting that series, because of my fond memories of it, but now? Ick ick ick. ↩︎
  3. It’s pretty horrible to adopt children so you have victims at your mercy. ↩︎

She Called Me Baby

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, with a trip to Metairie looming for an eye appointment. Yesterday was a bit more hectic than I would have liked, beginning with having to go in to the office on what is usually my remote day (meetings, mostly, and some catch up on work I didn’t get to on Thursday), and then I had errands to run all afternoon. It was a gloomy, off and on raining kind of day, so when I got home I was very happy to be safely back into the Lost Apartment so I could do my chores and do some work. I was very tired last night when I was finished with everything, so just kind of zonked out in my chair. We spent the last few nights getting caught up on our shows (we’re now watching Agatha All Along, Bad Monkey, Only Murders in the Building, Grotesquerie, English Teacher, and American Sports Story), and I am hoping to get to watch the new ‘salem’s Lot movie aat some point this weekend, and I’d like to watch Fall Guy, too.

And I need to write this weekend, big time.

Thursday night, when I was working on the Scotty Bible and was marking pages in Mississippi River Mischief, I realized the murder victim in the book was a corrupt politician who goes by JD; prescience, perhaps? It also reminded me of something from a book I had read a very long time ago–Sarah Schulman’s Stagestruck. The thesis of the book was about the similarities between a very popular Broadway musical (Rent) and her nove, People in Trouble. Sarah had actually attended and reviewed Rent, and while it seemed familiar to her, she just dismissed it as being inspired by the struggling artist scene in lower Manhattan in the 1980s and thought it played very false, given her own experience; it wasn’t until later when a friend told her “you must be so mad about Rent”–and she went back and reread her book. (In all honesty, I went on to read People in Trouble and also watched the film of Rent and I also saw the similarities; she wasn’t inventing anything.) But the point of this particular story is that at the time, as an unpublished aspiring novelist, I found it a bit of a reach that she didn’t remember her own book…but doing the Scotty Bible–and talking with other authors–I realized that not remembering your own book isn’t that much of a stretch, and it does get harder the more book you have; the exponential possibility that you won’t remember your own books grows with each new book you write. that the piece of art basically ripped off her piece of art–and she couldn’t remember much I have been routinely shocked about how much of the Scotty series had slipped from my memory banks as I enter the information from each book into the master document; the huge plot points that are the most memorable things about them…but gone completely. I’d forgotten my villainous politician JD, and I only wrote that book last year. I’d forgotten a lot of the stuff in most of the books. I thought the one I’d really be able to temember was Bourbon Street Blues, and nope. I’d forgotten about the entire sequence in the swamp, the fire, and who the first victim was…and I also was able to remember, while going through it, what I was trying to do with him as a character as more time passed and he gained more experience with criminality and human behavior.

And given all those experiences, it was very important to me to ensure he remained a positive person who prefers to expect the best of people, not the worst, and never become cynical. Cynicism was one of the most powerful traits I wrote into Chanse, and I didn’t want to do that over again.

It was also rainy and dreary all day yesterday, and much as I love rain, it can damper your spirits a little especially when you’re already a bit fatigued. But I am feeling good today (I slept really late this morning) and like I can get a lot accomplished. I am going to make groceries on the way home from my eye appointment. I am going to run an errand in my neighborhood on foot when I get back from that, and I am going to try to get the house cleaned up and do some writing this afternoon while football games play in the living room. I also want to read some more of Gabino’s book and get more into it. Tomorrow morning I will run another errand that I don’t want to do much today–Fresh Market is close so it’s an easy thing to do…maybe I can run it later today and get it over with, but I suspect after getting home from the errands today I won’t want to leave the house so much.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up so I can get moving on the errands and the other things to get done around the house. Have a lovely Saturday, best of luck to your favorite team, and I am heading into the spice mines. I might be back later; I am itching to finish my review of Monsters, and the Menendez Brothers in general.

I Need You

Friday morning and I am up way early for PT this morning. It feels warmer this morning–it’s in the fifties–but it’s not cold in the Lost Apartment, which is nice. I haven’t slept well now for about two nights running. My sleeping pills are missing–I couldn’t find them last night–which means they were probably left out on a counter and Sparky the Demon thought “toy!” and now I have to really spend some time trying to find them. I’ll make it through today relatively okay, I suppose, since it’s a work at home day, but after PT I have a couple of errands and after that I’ll be home for the day. I did chores last night when I got home, so the kitchen isn’t messy this morning and once I get back. here, it’ll be relatively easy to get the downstairs back under control and launch into the weekend. I have events all day tomorrow on ZOOM for the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon, too. Paul didn’t get home until after I went to bed last night, so I spent most of the evening (after doing some cleaning, which was wise and I am very grateful that I didn’t blow it off) playing with Sparky and watching some television. I watched the new episode of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which I enjoyed, and then watched some documentaries on Youtube about history–mostly Byzantine, with some French and Austrian thrown in for good measure before going to bed relatively early. I did rest–my body feels very relaxed–but my mind never really shut off completely or for long.

The Lefty and Edgar nominations came out this week, and I have so many friends nominated on either or both lists! It’s always such a pleasure to see friends nominated for awards. It’s also a great opportunity to pick out some more great books to add to the list. I am also delighted to see Rob Osler nominated for Best Short Story (a queer nominee with a queer story!) and there’s another queer story nominated for the Lillian Jackson Braun Award, a book I actually blurbed: The Body in the Back Garden by Mark Waddell from Crooked Lane, so yay for a gay cozy being nominated! It always does my heart good to see queer writers being recognized by the mainstream, which is the kind of progress we’ve been wanting to see for decades. The categories for both the Leftys and the Edgars are stacked this year, which just goes to show how deep the bench actually is in crime fiction–and so many great books that weren’t nominated for either.

I blurbed several books this past year that are coming out now, so I want to go back and reread those so I can blog about them–not only Mark’s book but the new Rob Osler, Cirque du Slay and the new Margot Douaihy, Blessed Water. I also haven’t started reading another book quite yet–I was dragging too hard every night when I got home, really, to do any reading or engage my brain as much as I would like.

I think I may need to read out of my genre next, perhaps some horror? Paul Tremblay? Elizabeth Hand? I have so many great books in my pile, which is a delightful problem to complain about, but the struggle is real. How do I decide what to read when there are so many great books waiting for me to escape into? Maybe I should try to read just the books currently nominated for awards? Heavy sigh. Decisions, decisions.

It looks like we are having yet another hard freeze this evening, so hurray for not leaving the house for the rest of the day once I get home this morning. Sheesh.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head to PT. Have a great Friday, Constant Reader!

Shakin’

Holiday Monday, and I slept deeply and well again last night. I’d set the alarm, thinking it was probably better to start getting up early again, since it’s back to the office with me tomorrow but Sparky was being super cuddly and sweet in the bed this morning, and it was cold, and so I stayed in bed for another hour or so. I finished reading Tara Laskowski’s The Weekend Retreat, which I greatly enjoyed (more on that later). I made jambalaya, and did some dishes and started a load of laundry. I also reread some of my own unfinished work, trying to decide what to focus on next. I have to say I am regularly pleased with my work now when I go back and reread it; what can I say? I don’t know if that means I am getting rid of the self-deprecation and “not good enough” mentality I’ve struggled with my entire life, but it’s a welcome change to read some of my work and think this is pretty good.

I also worked on the house some more and it’s starting to look like it did before the acquisition of High Energy Kitten and my surgery–cluttered but at least neat. It’s almost there, you know, and maybe putting some finishing touches on it today before I go to my first STRENGTH PT appointment this afternoon. (I’ll be making groceries after that, I might add.) I’ve also decided that my next read with be R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface; I do enjoy a writer-behaving-badly story. I’ve written my own, too–“Quiet Desperation”, which was included in my collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, as well as a Kindle single–but I don’t think I ever want to write an entire novel about a writer behaving badly. I may write an entire novel with a writer as the main character–I keep circling back to my true crime writer, who’s now appeared in several of the Scotty books, as well as The Orion Mask–but I don’t think I’m quite there yet.

It is interesting to revisit unfinished projects and decide which of them to focus on and finish. I know that my next short story collection will be finished if I finish a novella and throw it in; but I’d kind of wanted to do a novella collection. One of the novellas–the longest one–will be rather easily turned into a novel, which I think is what I may do with it; there are three or four more that I can finish and turn in as a solitary book. “Festival of the Redeemer” is completed in first draft form, and rereading it yesterday made me realize that it’s next draft can be longer, of course, but I don’t think there’s enough story there to turn it into a novel; same with “Fireflies” and “Never Kiss a Stranger,” so maybe those three can be the novella collection (Festival of the Redeemer and Two More Tales–which I am choosing to call it so I can have a Venetian cover, a la du Maurier). “A Holler Full of Kudzu” might be the one I finish to complete the short story collection. There are also a lot of short stories I’d like to rework and/or finish for some calls that I’ve seen, which could always be fun. But the exciting thing here is I am feeling excited about writing again for the first time in I don’t know how long.

It’s also weird to think that the Scotty series is turning twenty-one this year; on May 1st, to be exact. I definitely should write another Scotty this year, and it does look like Hurricane Party Hustle is the one to do–it’ll also give me the opportunity to write about what it’s like to ride out a big storm and live without power, all the while having Katrina flashbacks. I also have the story for that already fleshed out, and yesterday I even figured out how the book opens, and how the mystery comes to Scotty’s attention in the first place, which is more than I usually have when I start, LOL. That one will be followed by the cursed Mardi Gras of 2019, French Quarter Flambeaux, which will be another fun story to write, and then Quarter Quarantine Quadrille, which will cover the shutdown and COVID madness. So, there are at least three more Scotty books for me to write, which will take the series to twelve books, and then I’ll think about it some more. Scotty’s family–parents and grandparents–are getting older, and will soon have to start dying off, which I really don’t want to deal with.

But it’s nice to feel excited about everything again, isn’t it? And normal, after so many years of abnormality?

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely holiday, everyone, and I’ll probably be back later.

Pledge Pin

It is very bright and sunny this morning; it was in the seventies yesterday but took an alarming dip over night. It is currently forty-three degrees outside, with a forecast of a high of merely fifty-six. The weather? She is bipolar in New Orleans in the winter, and we never really know what to expect from day to day. I’ve also realized that my mom also became obsessed with the weather when she was older, and I now check it every morning when I never really did before.

I had thought I had more to do today with the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon; but I was wrong–it’s next weekend that I have three panels on Saturday. Today is just a reading, and I’ll be reading from Mississippi River Mischief, of course, since it’s my most recent release from them. Other than that, I’ll be spending the day cleaning up and writing and doing things around here. I did get a lot accomplished yesterday–not as much as I had hoped or wanted, of course, that never happens–but I feel better about things around here now than I did before. I think I still haven’t gotten my stamina back yet, which is going to probably take a hot minute anyway right? I start strength PT on Monday, which should be exhausting. I did sleep really well last night, which was terrific; I really cannot get used to sleeping so well every night. I mean, I can, but feeling so rested when I get up every day rather than tired and groggy has been marvelous.

I spent some time with Tara Laskowski’s marvelous The Weekend Retreat last night and will definitely try to finish it today, if I can. It’s quite excellent, and is kind of a master class in both point of view and how to structure a novel. There are three point of view characters (four, if you count someone who is merely identified as “the weekend guest”), and the three women she uses are very different and the voices she’s created for them are distinct and unique. It’s very well done, and it also follows the structure of four that I’ve often noticed in novels–three that are in the same generation and whose lives are entwined, along with another who is not (Valley of the Dolls, Peyton Place, The Best of Everything, Class Reunion)–the list of books that follow that plot structure are countless, and something I’ve always wanted to write about. Anyway, Tara’s book is terrific and I am looking forward to spending more time with it this weekend.

We also watched this week’s Reacher last night, and we’re both a bit amazed at how different this season is from the first; but the books often were very different from each other. Sometimes they were intimate stories, sometimes they were action-adventure romps with very high stakes. Alan Ritchson is simply perfect as Reacher, and he has a very strong supporting cast in the season, but the dialogue is a bit hackneyed, cheesy, and clichéd at times. The action sequences are fantastically shot and choreographed, though, and the story is pretty good.

I also started watching the original BBC miniseries of Brideshead Revisted, which I’ve never seen, and I also got a copy of the book, which I’ve never read…but have become more interested in them both since watching Saltburn and seeing it compared to Brideshead. I’ve been sorting my thoughts on Saltburn since watching and enjoying it, which means it obviously had an impact on me and stimulated me intellectually. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film that has engaged my mind and my knowledge of film and novels so thoroughly.

Sparky also wreaked havoc on the kitchen again last night while I slumbered, so there’s some picking up that needs to be done, and since the kitchen will again be the background for my reading, I should probably work on clearing the counters and the dishes and all that; of course, I imagine Sparky will make an appearance during the reading, too, since he is very determined and doesn’t take no for an answer (at least for the first five or six times he is told no).

I also need to run a couple of errands today so I won’t really have to leave the house again other than PT until Tuesday morning. I love when I don’t have to leave the house, seriously. To me, that’s the real appeal of retiring–not having to leave the house every day.

Hmmm.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and check out the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon if you have time!