Tag: Game of Thrones

I’m Easy

So, I decided to try a trick yesterday and see how it turned out.

As you know, I had a lovely day the weekend before last in which I wrote over three thousand words–and then promptly ran into a wall. I tried writing the next chapter of the new book, and only managed about a thousand words or so. And for the life of me, I could not figure out how to finish the chapter. So, I decided over the weekend since the book was stalled I’d work on some short stories that need fixing. Pretty cool, right? And I had some ideas on how to fix the stories in question, that I also thought were really good ideas. Alas, as I started working on one of them, I realized that it was a great idea, but it didn’t work with this particular story. Yesterday, realizing that the days are again slipping through my fingers, I decided you know what? Rewrite this entire story in the present tense rather than the past, and see how that works out. 

And it did work out. Changing it to present, active tense changed the entire story, made me recognize again the idea I had for fixing the story was not the right idea for this particular story, and I also realized, while doing this, that the story would ultimately work best in the first person, present tense. That will be the next draft; changing it to the first person.

And when I finished doing that, I open the chapter, my writing muscles all flexed and ready to go, and banged it out. So, now I can happily move on to Chapter Twelve, and there you go.

I love tricking my brain into being creative.

One does what one has to, I suppose.

I slept well again last night–again choosing to go to bed earlier than normal, but it was harder to get up this morning than yesterday, but at the same time…I am not tired this morning, either. I am still a little drowsy–perhaps not fully awake yet–but I am not sleepy or tired, which is the improvement for this morning I was hoping for. I managed to get through the entire day yesterday without being exhausted or tired, which was a definite step in the right direction. I also managed to score Friday as a vacation day, so I can get a lovely four-day weekend this weekend. Huzzah! Maybe I can get everything done by the end of the month that I was looking forward to having done.

Stranger things and all that.

We’re now casting about, looking for a new show to watch to fill the hole left by Game of Thrones in our weekly television experience. I suppose we could start watching the second season of Killing Eve, but it’s just so weird that no one is talking about it, when everyone was talking about the first season. Maybe the novelty has worn off?

Who knows?

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

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Wake Up Everybody

Well, I finished reading Jamie Mason’s The Hidden Things yesterday (spoiler: it’s terrific and you should pre-order it, like right now; more on it later) and then started Rachel Howzell Hall’s They All Fall Down, which is also off to a terrific start.

You really can never go wrong with a crime novel written by a woman, frankly.

So, of course last night Game of Thrones ended, and I have to say I was satisfied, if not thrilled, by how it ended. Some of it was inevitable, and to be honest, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how it would all end; I absolutely hated the idea of Jon as king–he’s not the type, quite frankly, but will admit I was also all in for Sansa. So, in a way, I got what I wanted with Sansa being Queen in the North–but having a separate kingdom to the north will inevitably lead to problems with the Six Kingdoms; and what exactly ever happened to the cities Dany conquered in Essos? I was more sad to see the show end than I could ever be disappointed in how it ended; as I said to Paul, “You know, when we first started watching this show, we still had cable, didn’t stream anything, and we watched this on DVD’s that came in the mail from Netflix before giving in and paying for HBO again. We didn’t have Scooter yet, and we still  had our old television with a DVD player.”  Game of Thrones, no matter what you thought of it to begin with, whether you watched it or you didn’t, was a cultural event in this country (I am reluctant to say world, as that reeks of American exceptionalism, but I do believe the show was a world-wide phenomenon) that had everyone talking about it almost from the very beginning, and maybe was the last show of its kind–the kind where everyone waits patiently to watch, week after week, and everyone talks about and discusses and argues about. I don’t think we’ll see its like again; I doubt another show will ever take up as much room in the public discourse as Game of Thrones did.

And while everything was sort of tied up nicely with a ribbon last evening, as the credits rolled I turned to Paul and said, “What happened to the Dothraki? We know what happened to the Unsullied…but they never said what happened to the Dothraki.”

I guess they are just loose in Westeros?

I started working on one of my short stories yesterday; I couldn’t find the motivation to do much else of anything, to be honest. I did clean some and get some things organized, and of course, I was also busy reading, as I mentioned above, and I am kind of excited to be reading They All Fall Down, which is off to a really good start. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed this past weekend, if I am going to be completely honest, and while I am not feeling as overwhelmed this morning as I’ve been feeling, I am still in one of those “how am I going to get all of this done?” places this morning. But you know, it will all get done and I will handle everything that needs handling because I somehow always manage to do so.

As you might recall, I sold my story “Neighborhood Alert” to Mystery Tribune magazine; I am proud to say it appears in the quarterly issue that is now available as e-magazine or print editions; you can order it right here.

I like the story, and I hope you will like it, too.

I really need to get more stories out.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me.

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Fox on the Run

It is Sunday morning. I slept like the dead last night, which was quite marvelous, and now am awake and feeling rested (if slightly groggy; not mentally but I feel like my body hasn’t woken up completely yet, which is weird, I know) and sitting here at my desk swilling coffee. The day looks kind of dark outside–I just got a weather alert that Orleans Parish is in a tornado watch (along with about nine other parishes in the area) until eleven; which explains the gloom. I am going to do some things this morning–like write this blog, try to answer emails to send tomorrow morning, straighten up the kitchen a bit–and then I am going to get cleaned up and write for a while. I have a board call this afternoon as well; I assume after that is over I’ll get some reading done and start preparing for the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones tonight.

I figured out, as I mentioned yesterday, the perfect way to finally make my story “And The Walls Came Down” work, which is rather exciting, and something I definitely want to get to work on; I also figured out how to make “The Snow Globe” work; and I’d like to add some words to “Never Kiss a Stranger,” which is turning into a novella, but that’s fine; I don’t mind overwriting the story in order to trim it down to size at some point later. I also want to get Chapter Eleven finished; a rather ambitious morning I have planned here, but it should still work. I was also thinking about stopping at the grocery today to get some more Creole tomatoes, but that can really wait until tomorrow; if the weather is going to be shitty today I certainly don’t want to go out into it under any circumstances. I also need to make chicken salad for Paul’s lunches this week at some point, and I am going to make meatballs in the crockpot today for dinner, in order to have some things for lunch for the week myself (and making a crockpot meal makes it so much easier to clean up; I can get everything clean other than the crockpot itself long before the meal is done).

And of course this week ends in a three-day weekend, which is beyond lovely. I love me some three-day weekends, particularly since I will be sliding into it with two half-days before hand. Huzzah!

It’s going to be bittersweet seeing Game of Thrones come to a conclusion tonight. I’ve actually rewatched last weeks episode, “The Bells”, a couple of times–skipping over the parts I don’t care about (the so-called Clegane Bowl and the Euron-Jaime duel don’t need to be seen more than once, quite frankly) and I have to say, the more I watch the more impressed with the episode I am. I’ve also seen a lot of the fan reactions and read a lot of think-pieces about the episode–more so than I have about anything I watch on television or in a movie, other than my favorite Real Housewives franchises; and I do this a lot with Game of Thrones–and I’ve not really understood so much of the criticism. Game of Thrones has always been a show about the shades of gray rather than black-and-white; no one is truly good, no one is all bad. Good people can do bad things; bad people can do heroic things. Episode 4  (“The Last of the Starks”) is the episode everyone should have been angry with; that was the episode that ended with me shaking my head and thinking what the fuck just happened? People are disappointed that Jaime went back to Cersei, because that essentially ruined his redemption arc; but Martin has given us few redemption arcs that were seen all the way through. Maybe it’s because the redemption stories that actually were fulfilled were so powerful (Theon redeeming himself for his betrayal of the Starks and later his sister; Ser Jorah redeeming himself for the sin of slaving in his youth; etc) that we were bound to be disappointed with the ones that didn’t finish. But Jaime realizing that a happy ending with Brienne or whomever wasn’t simply in the cards for him and that he had to go back to Cersei in the end because they were bound together made total sense to me–and the payoff scene of their mutual deaths was powerful enough for me.

Did I want to see Cersei suffer more? Sure I did–I’ve been wanting to see her suffer since she demanded Jaime shove Bran out the window and Sansa’s direwolf killed–but there were also moments when I was rooting for her–the shame walk through the streets of King’s Landing, her victory over her enemies by destroying the Sept of Baelor, for two examples–and her death resulted in what I call “Darth Vader syndrome”; no villain ever dies in a way I find satisfactorily awful enough. (I waited three movies, six years, and almost seven hours to see Darth Vader finally get his; only to see him redeem himself before dying so I was cheated out of the grisly, painful death I’d been wanting to see for him for all that time.)

As for Daenarys turning Drogon loose on the city and destroying it while Cersei watched it all unfold in front of her (which was brilliant, and some brilliant, non-vocal acting by Lena Headey), I thought that was a brilliant way to torture Cersei and get some payback, and for the record, Dany has always been a bit of a ruthless tyrant. Her story has also been about her suffering and growing into the Queen she was mean to be; it is always her friends and advisors who held her back from unleashing the dragons of war on her foes. The show also did an excellent job of making us think that anything could happen with the siege/sack of King’s Landing; but the very points I made about the episode two weeks ago–why doesn’t she fly up high and come in behind the Iron Fleet–was the actual strategy she used last week to destroy the Iron Fleet and the defenses of King’s Landing–with the end result she and Drogon basically defeated Cersei and conquered the city almost entirely on their own.

As Paul said as Arya rode the horse through the ruins and the credits rolled, “Now imagine if she had all three dragons and her entire army.” She certainly wouldn’t have needed the Northern Army.

And as the bells rang and she sat on Drogon, both Paul and I were rooting for her to burn it all to the ground, frankly.

And really, the sleight-of-hand the writers have played with the viewers over the years has been quite expertly done: if Dany is indeed the villain, we have seen her go from a wide-eyed, meek and innocent girl who was merely a pawn in the great game to a great conquerer; we have seen the creation of a tyrannical Queen from the very beginning while we have also seen the development of Sansa into the smartest woman in the Seven Kingdoms playing the game better than anyone, the development of Arya from a young tomboy into the best assassin in the realm, and the growth of Jon Snow from belittled bastard of Winterfell into the true heir to the Iron Throne.

It’s truly been an enjoyable ride.

I’m going to miss Game of Thrones. I am going to miss the pop culture the show has spawned, and I am going to miss the shared experience. I don’t know that I could handle watching the show from beginning to end ever again, as I did with The West Wing a few years ago–part of the fun of Game of Thrones was the constant surprises the writers kept throwing at us. Love it, hate it, be indifferent to it–but there’s no question Game of Thrones was event television in a way few other shows have ever been, and I don’t know what will replace the hole it’s going to leave in the Zeitgeist.

Will I be disappointed with the finale? I don’t know, but I am going into it expecting nothing and with absolutely NO fucking idea what’s going to happen–and that was always the appeal of the show for me; nothing was too extreme or brutal for the show, and it always, always surprised me….and there were so many great moments over the years–the Red Wedding; the Purple Wedding; the battles of Meereen, Blackwater Bay, Winterfell, Hardhome, the Loot Train, the Bastards; the horrible but well-deserved death of Ramsey Bolton; the eradication of House Frey; Lady Olenna’s last moments (“Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me” may well be the best final words ever); the execution of Ned Stark; the execution of Littlefinger; the death of the Khals; Dany emerging from the funeral pyre with her baby dragons–the list goes on and on and on.

It is incredible how much time I’ve spent thinking about this show–which says something about it, doesn’t it? I do look forward to finishing my read of the books, as well.

So, I should bring this to a close and get started on my own day; there is a lot of spice to mine, and I actually feel as though I have the energy to actually get it done today.

Happy Sunday, Constant Reader!

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Let’s Do It Again

Well, I got the article done yesterday and I think I did a good job on it. I don’t really do much article-writing anymore–it’s been years, other than my quarterly column for Sisters in Crime–and so it’s a skill set that is rather rusty for me; just like Saturday’s breakthrough in getting a lot written in a very short period of time felt like an enormous breakthrough; as though my writing was given a much-needed and sorely overdue tune-up. With the article is finished, and also being all caught up on the WIP–which means it’s time to start writing the new material–I chose to take Sunday off to recharge, recalibrate, and start thinking things through.

And I refuse to feel guilty for taking a day off after getting everything caught up.

Bite me.

This morning I don’t feel as well rested as I did yesterday; I didn’t sleep deeply and it felt like I was awake most of the night but I must have slept some, it just doesn’t feel like it was enough. This doesn’t, by the way, bode well for writing tonight after work, but…there is it.

We binged Fosse Verdon yesterday in the lead-up to Game of Thrones, and it’s a stellar, absolutely stellar show. Michelle Williams is simply extraordinary as Gwen Verdon; Sam Rockwell is equally terrific as Fosse himself. One thing I couldn’t help thinking as I watched was how he is given so much of the credit for his own success/genius, but couldn’t have done any of it without Gwen Verdon. And it seems like Gwen put her own career on halt to help push him to his own success, and was rewarded with what, precisely? Being cheated on? And the horrifying concomitant realization that this kind of relationship–borderline abusive, so horribly one-sided–was what so many women had to put up with in the time before feminism…yeah, not really the good old days, as so many would have us believe.

As for Game of Thrones…spoilers after the cut, because I am just kind that way. Continue reading “Let’s Do It Again” →

Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel

It started raining last night as I retired to bed. Lovely, I thought, the sound of rain always helps me sleep better. There’s just something about being warm and dry underneath blankets while it’s pouring rain outside that, I don’t know, that makes me feel comfortable and relax, which is, quite naturally, rather lovely. It rained pretty heavily all night, actually; thunder woke me a couple of times, but I was able to easily go back to sleep, which was quite marvelous. I woke up this morning a little later than usual, and after seeing articles like this one, popping up on my notifications when I sat down at my computer, I might not have known how bad the raining–and subsequent flooding–actually was. My street generally doesn’t flood–it might take on an inch or so or water, but the entire neighborhood basically drains to Coliseum Square–but I did go out and check. I didn’t see any telltale leaves or dirt on the sides of any of the cars parked out there, so I am going to assume my car is okay this morning.

One can hope, at any rate.

So, yesterday I managed to write quite a bit in a very short period of time; over three thousand words on chapters nine and ten, finishing them off and bringing me back to the point where I have to start writing new chapters. Revising these first ten chapters has, as intended, brought me back into the story again, so today I am going to try to write Chapter Eleven as well as map out the rest of the middle of the book. This pleases me inordinately; I should be able to get the rest of this first draft finished by the end of the month; there’s also a three day weekend to look forward to, which is also kind of awesome. It felt great doing all that writing yesterday, and when I was finished for the day I was amazed at how great I felt. It was also a bit of a relief; whenever writing becomes hard, you always begin to question whether or not the well has run dry and your glory days are behind you.

I think that becomes worse the older you get, too–because things you’ve become used to over the course of your life begin to go away the older you get, you know? Things like teeth and hair and firm skin…the ability to write.

I watched the first episode of Fosse Verdon last night, and greatly enjoyed it. I was sort of familiar already with the story–I watched All That Jazz a very long time ago, and that film sort of spelled out the Fosse story, while of course centering Fosse and shoving Verdon’s importance to his career to the side (as always); I’m glad to see this series making this very clear. Michelle Williams and Sam Rockwell are incredible; I don’t know who the actress playing young Liza Minnelli is, but she also knocked it out of the part, turning what could very easily have been your standard caricature into an actual performance. It also didn’t hurt that the first episode primarily focused on the filming of Cabaret, a film I first saw when I was very young and didn’t much care for, but as an older adult have grown to appreciate all the more–and watching this episode actually made me want to see it yet again. It’s a very good show; I hope people are watching.

I am also still thinking about Dead to Me, which is absolutely superb. Seriously, Constant Reader, you need to watch this show.

So, yesterday, as you can tell, was a good day for the most part–the overnight street flooding aside–and I also managed to get some filing and organizing and cleaning done, which was also pretty marvelous. The Lost Apartment looks better than it has in quite some time–I was managing the cleaning/writing balance pretty well–and when I was finished (quite early, actually) with the writing I was able to focus on the cleaning/filing/organizing, and it all went well. I did some backing up of computer files–the computer is getting wonky again–and did all the dishes and so forth, which was also quite lovely. I also did some note-taking in my journal.

Go, Gregalicious!

I am also really loving my Spotify subscription; I am truly sorry I didn’t discover it and its magic long ago. I’m listening to a lot of albums I used to love and reacquainting myself with how much I love them–the Cars, the Go-Go’s, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Aretha Franklin, Pat Benatar, the Pointer Sisters, Josie Cotton, Tina Turner, ’til Tuesday–the list goes on forever, really. I’ve saved tons of albums to my library, and have been having the best time listening to them and–as music always does–being swept back in time to when I used to listen to them originally; I guess revisiting my youth?

It’s also daunting to realize how old some of these records actually are; I mean, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is about forty-two years old now…which again adds to the horror of how old I am. AIEEEEE! But so many of them still hold up today, you know, and don’t sound dated at all, and I’m really enjoying rediscovering how great some of the records I owned in the past were and had just forgotten about. I mean, I’d absolutely forgotten how amazing the Cars were, or how terrific the Pointer Sisters’ Break Out album actually was–and still is.

So, today, I intend to write Chapter Eleven, map out some future chapters, and get some other things done before Game of Thrones tonight.

And then the entire week starts all over again, lather, rinse, repeat.

But I do have high hopes for getting things done today. Fingers crossed, Constant Reader, fingers crossed!

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Show Me the Way

Saturday morning and I slept in, as I always seem to do on Saturday mornings. But really, things have truly come to a sorry pass when getting out of bed at nine is considered sleeping in. But that’s when I got up and I feel good and rested this morning, which bodes well for the things I’d like to get done today.

I spent yesterday afternoon getting caught up on laundry (there’s a load going in the dryer now), and doing a surface clean of the apartment. After Paul got home last evening we finished watching Dead to Me, which is really fantastic–if Christina Applegate doesn’t at LEAST get an Emmy nomination, it’s a travesty. The show is fantastically written, has two amazingly great roles for the two lead actresses (Linda Cardellini, of Freaks and Geeks/Mad Men fame, is the secondary female lead and is heartbreakingly terrific as well; I’d be hard pressed as an Emmy voter to chose one over the other), and the writing is also award-worthy; the premise is in and of itself exceptional, thematically exploring the grief of two women who’ve suffered recent great losses; but it is ever so much more than that. It’s smart, angry, funny, and oh-so-twisted, oh-so-clever. Bravo to Netflix; this is up there with Ozark for dark comedy with a crime twist. I cannot recommend Dead to Me highly enough, Constant Reader.

I also, before Paul came home, rather than falling into a Youtube vortex of LSU or Saints highlights or Game of Thrones fan theory videos or whatever might strike my fancy at the moment (music videos or Dynasty clips or whatever), switched on Starz and started watching The Spanish Princess, which is the latest Starz mini-series based on a Philippa Gregory book. We’d watched and liked The White Queen, but gave up on The White Princess relatively quickly. I’ve not read Gregory, and I’ve seen all sorts of mockery of her on-line as to her changing history to fit the needs of her narrative, but that isn’t why I’ve not read her work; I’m just not that interested in fictional biographies of royalty anymore, certainly not the way I was as a teenager. As a teenager I would have read everything Gregory wrote, anxiously awaiting the next. But I’ve read Jean Plaidy and Norah Lofts, and of course others like Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain, so Gregory’s work has never held much appeal for me; I am more apt to read an actual biography now rather than fictionalized versions (although I do want to read Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books). The Spanish Princess is, of course, about Catherine of Aragon, who has gotten mostly favorable press throughout history as Henry VIII’s poor, abandoned first wife; I’ve always viewed that with an arched eyebrow, primarily because she had a great PR machine in the Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, and of course she had the entire PR machine of the Hapsburg empire behind her as well–whereas Anne Boleyn, her replacement and the cause of her misery, soon enough had Henry’s PR machine blackening her name. At least this production had the wisdom and sense to ignore modern sensibilities; this is the first time I’ve ever seen Catherine portrayed on film (since the 1970s BBC The Six Wives of Henry VIII) to have the actual coloring she had in real life; she is usually shown as dark when she was actually fair; like her husband, she had reddish-gold hair; and she also had Plantagenet blood as a descendant of Edward III–her grandmother was Blanche of Lancaster, a daughter of John of Gaunt, and as such had her own legitimate but unrecognized claim to the English crown herself (since no illegitimacy was involved, she actually had a better claim than her own husband–his claim was based on his grandmother’s descent from John of Gaunt, but she was descended from his liaison with long-time mistress Katherine Swynford–whom he later married and legitimized their offspring–but Catherine’s descent was not marred by the bar sinister).

However, they did depict Catherine’s mother, Isabella, as being dark–which she wasn’t, either. Isabella of Castile was blonde and blue-eyed, but she’s a minor character we’ll never see again, so I will overlook it. (Isabella is one of my favorite historical queens; she was kind of a bad-ass but at the same time her bigotry planted the seeds for the eventual downfall of Spain from the great power she turned it into; but more on her at another time.) Anyway, I enjoyed the first episode; which also has laid the groundwork for Catherine as stubborn, proud, and arrogant–qualities that eventually led to the upheaval that changed world history forever. I’ll keep watching, of course–but at the same time, it’s not “must watch”; it was okay and can serve as a time-filler when I need to relax and when Paul’s not home and I don’t feel like actually wasting my time on Youtube.

I also want to watch the Zac Efron as Ted Bundy movie on Netflix.

So many riches, so many choices! It’s kind of like my TBR pile.

The plan for today and tomorrow is to work on the WIP and work on the article a bit, maybe even work on a short story. Given I have the attention span of a squirrel lately, I am not sure how much work I am actually going to get done today, but I have good intentions. I also have a Bouchercon subcommittee conference call later on this afternoon as well, so I should be able to bounce back and forth between cleaning, writing and reading until such time as the conference call; after which time I can call it a day and relax for the rest of the evening.

Ah, to have the energy and ambition I have in the morning after a good night’s sleep and two cups of coffee, right?

And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me.

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Say You Love Me

Good morning, Monday, and a happy start of the work week to you, Constant Reader. I am awake this morning and not groggy; not sure how that bodes for the rest of the day thus far; that remains to be seen. But I survived another weekend, managed to get some writing done, and feel better than I seem to recall feeling on a Monday morning. We’ll see how this all plays out in the end, won’t we?

I do feel better about the WIP this morning; I suspect all the Imposter Syndrome feelings of the weekend had to do with how much trouble I seem to be having getting going on it and working on it every day. Which, to be fair to myself, isn’t really all that surprising–anytime something is more difficult than it should be, one tends to question one’s self–but I am not sure if I have gotten to the root of the entire problem; why is it so difficult for me to get to work on this book? Why is it taking me so long to get it written? Does that mean I shouldn’t be writing it, and should be working on something else? Mayhap, but that also doesn’t help in any way. I don’t feel like I should abandon this book until at least I have a first draft finished, and I was planning on abandoning it for a while after getting the first draft done in the first place, in order to do a final draft of another manuscript that has been languishing in a drawer for several years now (there’s another, even older, one in the same drawer). But if I devote May to getting this finished, then I can spend June and July working on the other and hopefully–hopefully–will get to start my next one before I have to take two months off for another project.

There are also some other things I am working on; half-heartedly and when I have the time and am not in the mood to do anything else–which means they aren’t getting done.

C’est la vie, and all of that.

I’ve got to stop procrastinating, and using my long days at work every week as an excuse to not do anything at all. Everyone is tired, everyone works, everyone has an excuse not to do anything, and not doing my writing isn’t helping make things better, you know? I have goals that I set that I want to accomplish this year, and not doing anything isn’t getting me any closer to achieving those goals. I may not be as driven as I was when I had more energy, but that doesn’t mean I want to just keep spinning my wheels. Taking the time away from writing was lovely, as is not having that horrible pressure of deadlines. But deadlines also kind of drive me, and setting personal ones doesn’t seem to be doing the trick…not sure, I guess I am going to need to see where the rest of this year goes to see if the experiment in pressure-release has actually worked or is actually working.

As for Game of Thrones last night…I am reserving judgment on this season until it’s over. I’ve been disappointed by the show before only to be proven wrong before, but yeah, last night’s episode…it’s hard to continue rooting for people who behave so stupidly, over and over again. At one point, as Dany and Jon were professing their (incestuous) love for each other and she was pleading with him to keep his true identity a secret…it was all very General Hospital, frankly, and when the scene was over Paul and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and said at the same time, “Team Cersei.”

They have two episodes left now, in which they have to bring what has been an incredibly thrilling ride to a close. The inevitability of disappointment with the ending has been with us since the very beginning, of course, and people are bound to be disappointed. But I was also disappointed with “The Long Night” episode slightly, until I rewatched it again on Friday night. Maybe this last episode will work better on a rewatch; I don’t know.

And on that note, I have to get ready for work.

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Welcome Back

I managed fourteen hundred words today, and then came up blank. I hate when that happens, but I just can’t force the creativity, you know? And those fourteen hundred words were hard to do, frankly. But I printed out the next chapter (Chapter Seven, to be exact) and will reread that at some point before getting to work on it, perhaps later, before Game of Thrones airs. I am planning on making this weird combination Swedish meatball/beef stroganoff dish for dinner (I’ve made both, and then one time when I was making Swedish meatballs later I realized I’d used the stroganoff recipe, but you know what? I also liked it. A lot. And I’ve made it that way ever since) later, and the kitchen is relatively clean already (and my goal is to leave it clean when I finish cooking; the worst thing is to go into my two long days at work with a messy kitchen, knowing it will most likely stay that way, getting worse, until Thursday–unless I somehow have more energy during the week than I usually do). I’ve filed stuff, cleaned the floors, paid the bills, made groceries, mailed things that needed to be mailed, and I wrote fourteen hundred words on the WIP today before running out of steam. Perhaps someday I’ll work my way back up to those halcyon days of three thousand or more I used to do routinely, but having a nice, relaxing weekend where I am actually able to get started writing and get caught up on things and have a clean home is a lovely way to start, don’t you think?

I certainly do.

I’m going to miss Game of Thrones when it ends, and I doubt very seriously I will ever go back and watch the entire series again. It’s a tempting thought, to be honest, to devote several months to rewatching it in full, from episode one to its conclusion, in one massive binge and think about what I am watching, in terms of what I know is going to happen and watching for possible foreshadowing. I’ve always loved history, and that’s part of why I love Game of Thrones so much; it’s kind of like history where you don’t know how it all ends. When I was a kid I used to redraw maps of Europe and create countries and change the way wars ended and try to create my own Eurocentric history of the world; who knew that what I was actually doing wasn’t simply a waste of time but rather an incredibly creative experiment in world building via alternative history. Every so often, when I’ve been caught up in a science fiction or fantasy epic series, I wonder at the world building/universe building creativity of the author and think I could never do that. I’ve always wanted to, but never have; but perhaps that was simply a failing of my own. Of course I could do it, but whether I could do it well would be an entirely different thing.

I don’t read as much science fiction and fantasy as I would like–I’ve always geared more towards crime and horror–but I’ve certainly read and enjoyed the Dune series, The Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, The Shannara Chronicles, and Azimov’s science fiction novels about the robots and the empire and the Foundation, which wound up in the end all being one great big long series. There are writers out there now that I am looking forward to reading–I am not only diversifying the types of stories I read by race, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, and sexuality, but I am also trying to read more broadly across genres. Reading science fiction, fantasy, romance, even what is condescendingly called “chick lit”, and even some literary fiction will influence me and help make me a better writer in the long run. I read primarily for enjoyment, yes, but I also want to be a better writer, and reading different stories and different perspectives can only serve to make me a better writer.

I guess in reality when the show ends I won’t be saying goodbye completely to Game of Thrones; I still have the books to finish reading, and there will undoubtedly be spin-off shows–but seriously, is anyone at HBO listening? Your next big series should be Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern. Her dragon books would be fantastic television, and for that matter so would Naomi Norvik’s (which I need to read; I started reading one a long time ago and was completely enthralled; something came up and I never finished and I never got back to it, and I’ve always regretted that).

I am also, in case you haven’t noticed, not only in that stage of writing where I never want to do it, have to force myself to do it, but when I finally do I am not happy with what I have done. I am completely convinced this book isn’t going to be what I want it to be, what I envisioned it to be, and its entirely due to my own various shortcomings as an author. It’s all part and parcel of the same neurosis, really; the endless cycle of Imposter Syndome, where you think you’ve somehow managed to con people for years that you can write but eventually the gig will be up and the marks you’ve been conning all along will finally wise up. This all too frequently translates I need to work today into what’s the point of writing? This book is shit, anyway, and no one is going to want to read it which very easily becomes let me get watch Youtube videos of Game of Thrones fan theories and listicles or highlights of exciting LSU football games or really hot well built muscular professional wrestlers or old music videos or clips from old episodes of All My Children–yes, those downward Youtube spirals can be quite frightening sometimes.

But I did make myself get those fourteen hundred words done today, even though I didn’t want to do it, even though I thought I should do three thousand, even though I currently think the words I wrote are crap and the chapter is crap and the character is two dimensional and I don’t know what I am doing, I FUCKING WROTE THOSE GODDAMNED WORDS TODAY.

And that’s fourteen hundred more words than I did yesterday, or Friday, or Thursday.

And I bet tomorrow I can do more than fourteen hundred.

Watch closely now.

What do I say to the God of Imposter Syndrome? NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER, NOT TODAY.

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Shannon

Friday night, while dinner was in the oven and the laundry was finishing, I sat down in the easy chair, and rewatched last week’s episode of Game of Thrones. I wanted to watch “The Long Night” again; knowing how it ends, and what is coming, I could pay more attention to what was going on and view it from a story perspective, rather than riveted to the screen, barely able to breathe, watching in nervous apprehension and building tension as literally anything could have happened.

(Aside: While I get why they called it “The Long Night,” I kind of wish they’d called it “Not Today.”)

And I did notice several things, and appreciated the episode much more than I did on first viewing.

I didn’t, for instance, think it was too dark. There were a lot of complaints and commentary that it was shot too dark for anyone to see anything; and yes, there were times when I couldn’t see what was happening. But that was intentional, and it wasn’t all the time. I also thought it worked for the dramatic arc and helped amp up the tension for the viewer. I was aware of who was fighting every time the camera was on them; the action was also moving so quickly it was hard for the eye to ever focus. I did keep mixing up Gendry and Podrick, and am still not entirely certain I was correct every time I saw one or the other.

In some instances the cinematography was so beautiful it was like looking at a painting. Dany and Jon on the dragons, flying in place above the clouds watching for Viserion and the Night King–that was breathtakingly gorgeous. There were so many iconic images–the lighting of the Dothraki scimitars and watching the flames spread across the army in the darkness; the lighting of the fire moat surrounding Winterfell; the battle of the dragons in sight of the Godwood; Drogon surrounding Dany as she wept for Ser Jorah. And the opening three to four minutes are all one continuous shot following first Sam, then Tyrion, through the courtyard of Winterfell as it prepares for the battle. Visually, I thought the entire episode was an extraordinary achievement.

I also was a little disappointed, on first viewing–and actually, when I thought about the season and how the episodes were scheduled to play out, really, since it was announced very early on that the big battle between the living and the dead would air as Episode 3, leaving three episodes to go; it had always seemed as though this was battle, this war, was the actual point of the entire series. I thought the way everyone ignored the imminent danger while they squabbled amongst themselves for wealth and power and yes, the Iron Throne, was a metaphor for how these things occur in reality–the real danger is ignored as it grows until it is too late, or almost too late. But the name of the series is Game of Thrones, and while the book series they are based on is called A Song of Fire and Ice, the show didn’t take that title, rather taking the name of the first book in the series and sticking with it. This show has always been about the struggle for the Iron Throne; the Night King and the Army of the Dead were simply yet another threat, another obstacle, that had to be faced by our heroes before they could focus on the final struggle for the Seven Kingdoms. I’ve also gone back and forth many times while viewing the show about the title A Song of Fire and Ice–originally I assumed it meant the struggle between the dragons and the people of the south–fire–and the Night King and the Army of the Dead–ice. I then began to think Dany was fire and Jon was ice…only to discover, as I wondered deep down, that Jon is actually both fire and ice. The revelation that Jon Snow, the bastard of Winterfell, treated like a second class Stark for most of his life and held down for his illegitimacy, is actual Aegon Targaryen, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne–particularly since Robert’s Rebellion was also based on a lie in the first place–had me convinced that this was simply another retelling of the Arthur story; almost to the point where the world of Westeros was an easy stand in for the Britain of the Arthur tale (I’ve always thought Westeros was shaped like Great Britain; and of course Hadrian’s Wall is there as well), but Westeros is much bigger.

Now, though, after last week–is Game of Thrones Arya’s story?

But the thing about Game of Thrones, and what this latest episode has shown us, is that there is no one hero; Jon Snow would probably come the closest to what would be considered a traditional hero, but he has so many flaws…his sense of honor, and that nobility, often causes him to make bad decisions and get in trouble…rather like his uncle, Ned Stark. The main characters are clearly Jon, Daenarys, Arya, Sansa, Tyrion, Jaime, and Cersei; the question now is which of them will fall in the Last War, which is now coming.

The character arc of Theon Greyjoy also isn’t talked about enough in the aftermath of last week’s episode, and Alfie Allen has, over the years, given a stunning performance in the role. I cried when I originally watched, and did again on the second watch, when Bran grants Theon the absolution he so desperately wants before he tries to take out the Night King and dies.

And seriously, shouldn’t we have known all along that the obvious choices for killing the Night King–Jon and his sword, Dany and her dragons–wouldn’t be where the show went? The chills I got when Arya’s flying form appeared through the murk behind the Night King; the gasp as he grabbed her by the throat, the instant thought when she dropped the knife (no no no no!) and the sudden realization that the drop was deliberate as it fell into her right hand…on first watch the elimination of the threat seemed too sudden after all the misery and horror of the entire episode (as I said to a co-worker the next day, “Classic storytelling; make everything look as desperate and hopeless as possible and then at the very last second good triumphs–think the Death Star, Starkiller Base, etc.”) but on a rewatch–knowing it was coming–you can see how it was foreshadowed throughout the entire episode; so many things, so many small touches in an epic episode full of them that it’s easy to forget them as the action moves on; Melisandre looking up to the castle walls as she rides in at the beginning and locks eyes with Arya; Arya taking out a wight about to kill the Hound with an arrow fired from the wall and their eyes meeting; Jamie and Brienne fighting back to back like the true equals they’ve always been and finally are; Sam, shivering in fear as he lies on his back on a pile of the dead killing everything that comes near him despite his quite obvious terror; and finally, the amazing epic filming of the collapse of the Army of the Dead.

Simply extraordinary.

Tonight is the aftermath of the battle, and the beginning of the final arc of the show, and then it’s goodbye to a cultural event like few this country ever sees.

It’s going to be hard to wait until Thanksgiving week to read Book Two.

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Fooled Around and Fell in Love

It’s Sunday morning in New Orleans and I am already awake and swilling coffee. It looks kind of gray outside my windows this morning. The sun is trying to come out from behind the cloud cover so I don’t think today is going to be one of those rainy days like yesterday, but it’s kind of nice. The humidity has returned–Friday was miserable–and it’s only May. The true dog days are yet to be upon us. Heavy heaving sigh.

Yesterday I was moving stuff around, trying to lessen the appearance of clutter as well as to figure out where to put all the extra paper towels (thank you, Costco!) and put the things I was moving into places that I would remember when I discovered a copy of the first anthology I ever published a short story in, released way back in August of 2000: Men for All Seasons, edited by Jesse Grant, and from Alyson Books. It’s an erotic story, of course; my first two published short stories were erotica an d I don’t think I published a story that wasn’t erotica until “Smalltown Boy” in Rebel Yell 2, several years later. It was also interesting to look at the table of contents and see that my original by-line for fiction was Gregory Herren, not Greg; I do think I switched to Greg for the second story that was published that same month in Men magazine. Going through the list of contributors, I was struck by how many of those writers are no longer writing–or if they are, they aren’t using their “erotica” pen names anymore.

Back in the day, if you worked really hard you could make a lovely little income writing gay erotica. I was paid $300 for the story in Men; I published a second story there a few years later for the same pay. I think I got $75 for the story in Men for All Seasons. I started writing erotica primarily as a lark; Alyson’s publicist advised me to start writing short fiction for their anthologies, primarily for the publication credits and the money, as well as to make my name better known and more familiar to the Alyson editorial staff. He was right; Alyson wound up buying my first novel Murder in the Rue Dauphine, and I stayed with Alyson for the first five Chanse books, as well as several erotica anthologies I edited for them. I always called myself “an accidental pornographer” because it wasn’t anything I’d ever wanted to do, but the money was nice and the books actually did very well. But now…now there’s no market for actual gay erotica. Anthologies don’t sell and so no one is doing them anymore; the only market for erotica is novels, and reality is most of those are written now by straight women for other straight women, and that’s not the kind of erotica I write. (This is not to say straight women cannot write gay erotica geared toward gay men; in my editing days I worked with a lot of straight women who wrote horny, nasty, raunchy men on men erotica and you’d never know the author was a woman.) But the women who like to read the m/m stuff don’t like the erotica I write, and so I don’t really write it anymore.  I don’t miss it, to be honest–there are only so many ways to write about male on male sex originally, only so many words–and I even at one time wrote a column for the Erotica Writers Association on how to write good porn. I think my favorite column title was “Sometimes A Cock Is Just A Cock.”

I didn’t do much writing yesterday–actual physical writing–but I did do a lot of thinking and rehashing and going over my notes for the WIP. I doubt very seriously I will get as caught up as I had wanted to get this weekend, but you know, that’s just how it goes sometimes. Today is May the 5th, and I am going to dig into Chapter Six again in just a moment, with the hopes that Chapters 7, 8 and 9 will fall into place as I go…and then maybe I can start with Chapter Ten. I got so far off track with this WIP that I don’t really remember the story I was trying to tell in the first place, which is terrible–my memory, once so incredibly dependable I didn’t really need to take notes, in now completely unreliable. Part of the reason I decided to go back and redo the chapters I’d already written was to get myself immersed back into the story, get a feel for the characters, and maybe find the flaws and mistakes and holes in the plot. I’ve managed some of that, of course, which makes it all worthwhile, and I did find the outline for Chapter Ten in my journal (which I’d completely forgotten I’d written down), so yes, not actually spending time at the keyboard yesterday while actually simply reviewing notes and rereading things was a pretty smart thing to do.

Going through the current and previous journal also reminded me of some short story ideas I’d had that had somehow slipped, unbidden, from my memory. I also managed to page through The Gulf by Jack E. Davis yesterday, and I believe it will be a rich source of ideas and materials for me to write another book–my spring break murders novel, Where the Boys Die–and many others. Nonfiction is a great source of material for fiction, in case you were wondering.

And now I am going to sign off with this entry as I have another, Game of Thrones specific one I started yesterday that I would like to finish this morning.

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