Wednesday! Wasn’t sure I was going to make it this far, to be honest. But I’ve put in two full days at the office, have started pulling the house back together and making my life orderly again. I need to be orderly in order to feel settled enough to write, for one thing, and when my house is out of order I get antsy and uncomfortable and anxious. The house is filthy, so I am going to spend some time on Saturday cleaning and getting everything back into the kind of order it needs to be in, you know? It makes me feel more content somehow, and trust me, my workspace is an utter disaster area. Sigh. Sparky, of course, is no help.
I was going through my short story files last night, and I really do want to write another New Orleans Sherlock story–“The Adventure of the Voodoo Queen’s Necklace”–about the great hurricane of 1916. That will predate the one I’ve already published (“The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy”), so some things that come out in that story will still be unknown in the new one. I’m getting excited about writing again, which is a very good thing, methinks. I think maybe the illness was kind of the enforced slow down I needed? I was getting pretty burnt out as it was, and sometimes I just need to chill out and let the batteries recharge. I did manage to make it through another full day at work yesterday, but the fatigue level was plenty high by the time I got home from work. But I managed to get things done, which was lovely (again, Sparky was no help at all) and we then settled in to watch Andor–which is amazing. I wanted all of Kyril’s clothes. I’ll probably talk more about that sometime, how much I loved the show, that is.
I was very tired when I got home last night–so tired. I did manage to work on the kitchen and make dinner–always a plus–and yes, I’m fidgety and unable to keep still (I guess I had enough of that in the hospital), so am always getting up to do something. I wasn’t able to read last night, unfortunately, because I am getting back into Christa Faust’s amazing The Get Off (there really is no other creative force and voice in the world than hers), so maybe tonight when I get home. I have to get the mail, too, and was thinking about stopping at Yogurtland, which is near the post office; I love soft serve frozen yogurt and should stop there more often. My appetite is back (with a vengeance) so I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble getting the thirty pounds back on. My skin has also dehydrated and become ashy and flakey, so I am going to have to start using a moisturizer.
This morning’s coffee is tasting better–I was worried I had lost my taste for it this week as it’s been tasting terrible–but I also changed the filter in the Keurig and that probably has helped some on that score. I am feeling a lot better, if still weak and fatigued, which is a relief. I am eating normally again (although as I said, hungry all the time), which is great. I need to eat more healthily, but I’ll worry about that when I start gaining weight again. I’m still under 190, which feels weird and yes, I look very gaunt and skeletal. But there are worse things, and at least I am on the mend at last, right?
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.
David Florentine is a local photographer who takes incredible images of New Orleans. Follow him on social media!
Tuesday morning and back into the office with me. I slept really well last night, which was great, and even had some trouble getting out of bed this morning. It’s been cool lately, which makes it even harder for me to get up (the bed is so warm and comfortable), but this is my favorite time of year. I like the sunny warm days and the cool, chilly nights. Sparky was more himself yesterday than he has been since the vet visit–he got the zoomies and launched himself at me a couple of times, but without the Freddy Krueger claws it’s more cute and fun than painful and bloody. We’re enjoying the respite from having our skin slashed to ribbons, in all honesty. We watched some more American Horror Stories last night, which were interesting enough, and then I went to bed. I have some dishes in the sink, but that can handled when I get home this evening. Yesterday was Employee Development Day, and after learning about how our grants work, etc.–our team did an escape room in the CBD at Clue Carré. We failed–I would have never figured out that last clue at all, under any circumstance–but it was interesting because it was patterned around the swamp witch, Julie White, whom I have researched! That was kind of cool and interesting, although per the story of the escape room (not entirely based in the real story), she was murdered instead of dying of natural causes and being buried on the day of the Great Hurricane of 1915, which led to the destruction of her town, Freniere. I didn’t do much of anything, really, when I got home from that. I got myself caught up on the news (something I generally always regret), and then Paul came home from the gym and we wound up watching the news together.
Today I need to figure out when I am going to Kentucky, whether it’ll be this coming week or the week after. I have to take Thursday this week off for a personal day for some doctor appointments, and if I go next week I’ll need to reschedule a doctor’s appointment, which makes things a little bit easier. Complicated, complicated, complicated, but that’s really the easiest thing for me to do, as well as try to see if I can get that appointment rescheduled to another week.
I didn’t work on that short story over the weekend, so I missed the deadline, but of course yesterday I realized how I could finish the story, what kind of revision and so forth that it needed for this final time around, so I am going to go ahead and revise it that once last time so it’s kind of available should something come along. I don’t think that last story I sent out got selected–I don’t even remember what I submitted the story to, but I feel like it’s safe to assume now. It was really a long shot in the first place, and I doubt that I’ll get anything done for the Bouchercon anthology by the end of the month, especially if I am going to be out of town when the deadline hits. (This often happens; I’ll want to write something for an open call, but never get around to it and feel no sense of urgency about writing said story, before just shrugging once the deadline has passed–this is not how you do it, Constant Reader, which should be self-evident.)
Tonight after work I am going to have to clean and write this evening before repairing to my easy chair for a quiet yet lovely evening around here. Taylor Swift is playing the Superdome for three nights of the Eras tour over Halloween weekend, and the city is preparing for it. (Which could be another good reason to go out of town that week–avoiding the hassles of a major event at the Superdome. The Dome is on my way to and from work, there’s no avoiding it, so why mess with it at all? On the other hand, it’s kind of fun to have Taylor Swift and the Swiftie crowds in town. I do approve of her and her fans, and I am a not a HUGE fan, I do enjoy her music and I love how much she appreciates her fanbase. It would probably make the most sense to go the week after next; leaving on that Sunday and back the following Friday. I do have a doctor’s appointment that would need to be rescheduled, but it would be easy enough to do on the app without having to call. Hmmm, that might be the smart way to go with this stuff. Heavy heaving sigh.
Yes, that makes the most sense to me, so let me go ahead and get that all set in motion already. Take this Thursday off for appointments, reschedule my one doctor to another date, and request more time off and let Dad know I am coming up. Decision made, thank you baby Jesus, and now I can safely head into the spice mines for the day. *Whew*. Have a great Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later…one never knows.
Eight or so years ago at this time Paul and I were in Italy. Sigh, Italy. God, how I love that country. I would love to live there in a village in Tuscany–well, really, anywhere in Italy would work just fine, really. I do so hope we’ll be able to go back someday. I’d love to see Pompeii, Milan, and Rome. And both Corfu and Capri–especially after reading (listening) to Carol Goodman’s wonderful The Night Villa. (One of the real life incidents she mentioned in the book from Capri’s history fascinated me, and took me down a wormhole and now I want to write about that historical incident, of course.) I have since written a short novella (or long short story) set in Italy called “Don’t Look Down,” which was included in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, and I have another novella-in-progress set in Venice called “Festival of the Redeemer,” which I hope to polish and edit at some point before the end of the year. Sigh, Italy. What a beautiful country, with lovely friendly people and the most amazing food and….so beautiful. You can see why the Renaissance flourished there.
I got the final edits on “Solace in a Dying Hour”–two questions (one in which I had made a mistake) and the rest was copy edits and the deletion of a paragraph. So that’s a wrap, methinks, and I am really fond of the story, too. It was my first venture into Louisiana urban legends and myth; well, really the second, because I did write “Rougarou” about a decade ago, but it’s been a while since I’ve turned to Louisiana legend and folklore to write a story, and writing about le feu follet was a lot of fun. I want to do more of these, of course; as Constant Reader may remember, I’ve become fascinated by the story of Julia Brown and the Great Hurricane of 1915, when her town, Freniere, was wiped off the map. Freniere was located on that narrow strip of land running between Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain; if you’re driving west out of New Orleans on I-10, and then take the Hammond exit north on I-55, that’s the land the bridge is built on (when you’re actually driving over dry land, that is). I’ve always called that swamp the Manchac Swamp, but I don’t think that’s it’s real name (and I’ve called it that in books, too. Yikes!). You cannot get to the location where either Freniere or Ruddock (the other town in that area that was wiped away by the Great Hurricane of 1915) any way except by boat; apparently some of the swamp tours will swing by the old location where the graveyards still are, but the wreckage and remains of the towns are long gone. Both towns were only reachable by train or boat when they actually existed; there were no roads in or out of town, which always makes me think why would anyone want to live in such a remote and isolated place? But yes, you can bet the witch Julia Brown will appear someday in something I write.
I also got a rejection for a story yesterday, but it was one that I expected so it didn’t sting. I knew it was a long shot to begin with, so that’s fine, and I can certainly send it to another market, which I will most likely do after reading it again to make sure it’s actually quite terrible and I was in a complete state of denial about it being publishable in the first place. Rejection is just part of the game, of course, and there are any number of reasons your story doesn’t get accepted that have nothing to do with the story’s quality itself. I like my story and I think it’s clever, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be looked over another time, you know?
I feel rested this morning. I was very tired when I got off work yesterday afternoon, which is fine; I’d rather be tired after work then during it, you know? I didn’t get much of anything done once I got home, either–I had to pick up the mail and a prescription on my way home; today I can just come straight home–and I have some things I need to get taken care of when I get home from work tonight. Which is cool, I think I can spend a bit of time preparing (I have to make a promotional video–which clearly I’ve been putting off as it is due to be turned in tomorrow) and of course, I have to make the kitchen in the background behind me look–well, not embarrassing for me, at the very least. (Although I don’t know how much more embarrassed I can get filming myself. I hate the sound of my voice and I hate the way I look on video recordings–mainly because the actuality of how I look does not come close to the way I see myself in my head–pictures, recordings and the mirror often provide deeply disturbing shocks for me.)
And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines this morning. Y’all have a marvelous day, and I’ll be back tomorrow for another entry. See you then!
Thursday! Somehow we have managed to make it to Thursday, Constant Reader, which is definitely something to cheer about. Huzzah! This week has been a bit challenging, but I feel pretty good today (yesterday was one of those I slept well but never seemed to completely wake up days, which are getting harder and harder to deal with); I slept decently and I feel like I’m awake this morning, which is better than yesterday at any rate. I ran some errands on my way home from work last night, and then was tired. Paul was working on a grant so I just sat in my easy chair with my journal, trying to outline some projects that are currently in progress and get a stronger idea on where to go with the stories.
I’m not going to try to write that story whose deadline is the end of this month. As deep a wormhole as I’ve gotten into for the lost town of Freniere in the Manchac Swamp and Julia Brown the witch–which I am definitely going to write about at some time–I still don’t have an idea for a story, and I have another anthology I want to write something for by the end of the year that’s going to need some serious thought and consideration. The other contributors are very impressive names–it’s going to be another one of those one of these things is not like the other or why am I up here with these people? I was thinking about this same thing last night as I was telling Paul about my Bouchercon panels–in almost every case, I was thinking, what am I doing on these panels with these incredibly smart and talented people? Oh, well, the audience will be there for the other people and I’ll just be sitting up there, afraid to say anything for fear of proving that I don’t belong up there.
Ah, Imposter Syndrome. Such a delight at all times. Woo-hoo!
But as this month continues to slip through my fingers and everything I have to do continues to pile up with more and more things for me that I need to do–triage triage triage–and I am making a to-do list to try to make sure nothing gets overlooked or slips through the cracks. That’s always my fear; not that I won’t get everything done in a timely manner, but that I’ll forget something if I don’t write it down. That terrifies me. But I am pretty happy that I got a rough start to the Scotty book, have gotten some other things done, and am really hopeful that I’ll get to finish reading my book this weekend.
I continue to be endlessly fascinated by the Great Hurricane of 1915–in no small part because I wrote a New Orleans story set in 1916 (“The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy”) that makes no mention of it at all. This is one of the pitfalls of writing historical fiction–I am not an expert on New Orleans history and it never occurred to me to check to see what the hurricane situation in the preceding years was. On the other hand, I have read some New Orleans history for that period and NO ONE mentions the Great Hurricane of 1915. NO ONE. And considering it wiped some towns off the map (Ruddock and Freniere, in the Manchac Swamp), you’d think it would have merited a mention in some of these Storyville/French Quarter histories? It was a Category 3 or 4, so it had to have done some serious damage in New Orleans, and in the fall of 1916 the city would have still been rebuilding, one would think. Anyway, I picked a book on the hurricane from the library yesterday which I will also peruse this weekend to try to figure out how I want to write my story “When We Die” (yes, I already have a title for the story, I just don’t know how it’s going to go or what it’s going to be about or if it will even ever turn into anything…but now I also want to write a Sherlock Holmes story involving a hurricane….this is why, in case you were wondering, it’s so hard for me to get shit done because other ideas are always crowding their way into the front of my brain which is really annoying….)
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Happy Friday Eve, Constant Reader!
Monday morning, and the shopping days left till my birthday are slowly but surely getting crossed off my calendar. Yesterday was a lovely relaxing day at home; I did some on-line shopping (ordered a new pair of glasses from Zenni; we’ll see how they work out once they arrive; I may order a few other pairs to be more color-conscious; and yes, I know how weird that is for me–I didn’t get the fashion gene that most gay men seem to be born with, and so I’ve never really cared much about clothes other than their function–especially glasses
) and then spent some time doing the fun part of writing: thinking about the book(s).
I love that part. I actually realized yesterday that I was flying without a navigator (as usual), which is probably a mistake. I hadn’t spent any time really thinking about the story of Mississippi River Mischief and how it would impact the characters and how they interact with each other, etc. I had some basics down; I knew how I was going to start the story and open the book, and what I was going to include in it–I also recognized that another subplot is too big a story to be included in this book, and so I had to put it to the side for now, for use at a later date in a different book. But beyond that I hadn’t really thought much about it, and that was problematic for me and would inevitably cause problems for me down the line as I struggled to write a strong first draft. I also realized that a lot of what I was writing was going to take place outside of New Orleans, and yes, I know it’s anal of me, but my fictional Louisiana was far too amorphous. My work has always centered New Orleans and I’ve always been a stickler about getting that correct–I know I’ve made mistakes, I got Orleans and St. Louis Streets reversed in one book, or example– but over the course of forty-odd books, inevitably parts of some of them had to take place outside New Orleans. (I had, oddly enough, no qualms about completely fictionalizing the entire state of Louisiana for the most part outside of the metro area.) And being anal, I realized I had no real “map” or idea of what fictional parish or city or plantation was where and what names I’d used where and so on and so forth. And yes, I know it probably doesn’t matter–no reader would ever take the time to go through all of my books and try to piece Greg’s fictional Louisiana together and point out contradictions and errors, but it would bother me knowing that it was a mess outside Orleans and Jefferson parishes.
Something clearly had to be done.
So, I spent yesterday afternoon doing Scotty research–namely, checking every book I’ve ever written with scenes that take place outside of the metro area and try to assemble all of those places into a coherent and cogent “world” of Louisiana, strictly of my own making. I did allow myself to get sidetracked a few times with research into other projects, current or upcoming (the Great Hurricane of 1915, and the legend of Julia White were Internet wormholes I happily went down yesterday; I think a story I am going to write for an anthology call will be based in these two events), which is always a delight; Louisiana and New Orleans history are literal treasure troves for thoughts and ideas and so forth (another wormhole: the German Coast of the Mississippi River) and also humbling at the same time, because these wormholes always remind me how little I actually do know and understand about New Orleans and Louisiana.
Revisiting old books–especially Scotty ones–inevitably bring back memories of the time period in which the book was written, where the idea for it came from, what I was trying to do with it, and so on and so forth…not to mention how the character himself has changed and grown along with my writing styles and skills. It also reminds me of other things, too–plans I used to write the books, ideas and thought processes for the characters and their futures, and so on; things I had forgotten over the passage of time. I also sent the pdf of Jackson Square Jazz to my iPad; so I can slowly start copy-editing it so I can put up the ebook on Kindle at long last–there was also a part of that novel, part of Scotty’s long-forgotten past that only appears in this particular book that I want to circle around back to for this one. There are, I suspect, any number of sub-plots and character arcs that have been left hanging within the series over the years, and I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to reread the entire series again from start to finish since I am writing another book in the series. Obviously, I love Scotty and he is a part of me, and I don’t have a hard time slipping into his voice again (one of the things, I think, that makes writing a series a bit easier than writing a stand-alone–or starting a new series–is that ease of finding the character’s voice again. I’ve written eight Scotty books now, it should be easy to find his voice again), but there are a lot of other things I need to revisit and remember from the previous books in the series, so as to avoid continuity issues and things like that which plague me constantly.
For the record, the books I had to consult to map out my fictional Louisiana included not only Scotty books, but Murder in the Arts District (Chanse), The Orion Mask, a pseudonymous book or two, and some short stories. If A Streetcar Named Murder indeed becomes the launch of a new series for me, I’ll need that fictional map of Louisiana for that series as well–I’d already brought up one of my fictional parishes in the text of Streetcar, so…
I also reread the first four chapters of something else that is currently in progress to also kind of sort of make sense of it as well (and a good thing, too–I had two completely different sleazy gay dive hustler bars in the same neighborhood in two different chapters; easy enough to fix of course, and another continuity issue). This is going to sound weird–what else is new with one Gregalicious–but I am writing another book at the same time as this Scotty; I am sending a chapter a week to a friend, kind of like a serial novel, but I had not gone back and reread what I had already written on it (hence the two sleazy gay hustler bars in the same area of the fictional city) and so it went off the rails slightly (I suspected it was doing so and even remarked on it when I sent the email with the most recent chapter attached), and I am going to have to go back and clean that all up before proceeding–because it’s too big of a mistake to leave in the draft for correcting in another, later draft (plus, it will bother me to no end knowing those big mistakes are there), so I think I am going to have to make those fixes before I write Chapter 5–which is a good thing, because I am not really sure how to write chapter 5 or what to do in it; revisiting and fixing the first four chapters is always a good idea in these situations.
The problem with not outlining is because sometimes you get stuck.
We also binged a lot of The Sandman last night. What an extraordinary show–the visuals are absolutely stunning (I keep thinking how visually breathtaking it would be on the big screen), and the costumes, the art and set design, everything is just stunningly perfect, and the stories themselves (as well as the over-arcing storyline) are depicted and acted and written beautifully. This is the adaptation of the series I always wanted to see but never dared dream we would get; Paul and I are both just completely blown away by its brilliance (I also loved that Cain and Abel, from the old comics House of Mystery and House of Secrets, are a part of this universe; I loved those comics back when I was a kid–note to DC: make an anthology series of both of those comics, please.) We only have three episodes left, but by the time we finish this show–probably Wednesday, given how our weekday evenings seem to go–there should be some other amazing shows dropped for us to watch–I am particularly looking forward to The Serpent Queen; I’ve been asking for a Catherine de Medici series for years and now we are getting one that seems to embrace and encompass her manipulation and dedication to the acquisition of power, and of course House of the Dragon looks like it could be very fun, and other shows will be returning soon as well with new episodes.
So, overall it was a great weekend; I cannot complain. It was productive–perhaps not as productive as I would have liked, but I do feel like some seriously good work was done this weekend, and that’s all that matters. I have some work-at-home duties today–trying to decide whether to run errands today or on the way home from work tomorrow (on the way home is currently winning the debate in my head), and about the only real disappointment in the weekend was not being able to make time to read.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later or tomorrow; depends on when I finish writing these other blog posts that are more essay-driven than the norm.
Queer and Loathing in America 