Tag: Greek mythology

Night Spots

Friday and I have to go into the office today. No, that’s the wrong attitude. I get to go into the office today! Huzzah! I am going to keep a positive attitude about this day, even if it kills me! (That’s kind of an odd thought, but so be it.) I got to sleep a little later this morning because I don’t have to be at the office until nine for Staff Development Day–which is the kind of thing I usually hate and consider a waste of my time. (I’ve been there for twenty years…) But I am trying to be more positive about things and life in general going forward–who needs to create more negativity in their life–and so I am going to enjoy myself today. After work I’ll probably come straight home and have a lovely evening hanging out with Paul and Sparky, while tomorrow I will get back to writing. I may read some tonight when I get home; we’ll have to see, I suppose. I also have some errands to run this weekend, too, but nothing terribly horrific or anything. I have to make some groceries at some point–not much of anything, mind you, just enough to get through the weekend, and I have to get the mail. I may wash the car and clean it out while out and about tomorrow. We’ll play things by ear.

The extra hour of sleep this morning certainly helped. It’s Friday and I don’t feel fatigued! That’s a win, methinks, and also a good sign going forward, too. Usually I am very tired on Friday morning, and the tedium of data entry and quality assurance inevitably makes my eyes cross by the time I am done for the day and other than laundering the bed linens, I don’t get much else done on Fridays. I do have a dishwasher to empty and a load of clothes in the dryer that need folding, but I can get that done tonight and out of the way for the weekend so I can focus on finishing the downstairs cleaning I began last weekend. I want to finish reading The Hunting Wives this weekend, too.

I saw yesterday that someone has tested positive for bubonic plague in South Lake Tahoe; woo-hoo! The plague isn’t eradicated, I don’t think, we just don’t hear about it that much (I do know there was an outbreak here in New Orleans before World War I) but I have every confidence in RFK Jr the “health genius” who has done his own research rather than having a medical or health science degree of any kind. (You know, if I believed in that sort of thing I’d say the country is being punished by God for its hubris–plagues, earthquakes, fires, floods…they’d be blaming this all on the Democrats if they could. God knows trash have always blamed that sort of thing on queer people…which brings me to yesterday’s good news.

Christofascist and false prophet James Dobson died, and I sincerely hope that it was deeply painful, while knowing nothing could be as painful as that piece of shit deserved. His hellspawn, who should probably be pitied more than reviled (they were brainwashed into heresy from birth), do carry on the family’s toxic faith/business, but they apparently aren’t all that interested in courting fame the way their unholy father did. (I also find it interesting that Dobson named his daughter Danae–which is from GREEK MYTHOLOGY. No Biblical name for his daughter!) As for anyone saying I am terrible for celebrating the death of a monster? I don’t give a shit. Maybe don’t be a monster before you die if you don’t want to be dragged for the filth you were when you go into the ground.

I may even make a pilgrimage to piss on his grave.

I’ve also been laughing my ass off at the morons so upset that the Minnesota Vikings added two men to their cheerleading team. That is going to be the subject of a newsletter at some point–as will the foul James Dobson.

And on that note, I need to get cleaned up and head in for my day at the office. May your Friday be marvelous, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow.

The moon over the temple at Luxor

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. ↩︎

Laugh, Laugh

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write here today when I first got up; I overslept, for one, and then was thinking more along the lines of just getting under my blanket in my easy chair and spending the entire day reading and ignoring everything going on in the world outside my bubble–where I suspect I’ll be spending an awful lot of time either for the next four years…or for the rest of my life. It’s thirty degrees here at the moment, and now we’re apparently expecting anywhere from three to six inches of snow (!!!!!) over the next few days, including sleet. It could get really bad here with the snow and ice and cold, and now they are saying we might have to stay home for two to three days! There’s been no word from work, of course–so I will have to get up at six tomorrow morning anyway to find out if they’ve closed the office or not. I love my job I love my job I love my job.1

Yesterday was pretty unremarkable, really. I ran out to make groceries and while it was sunny and nice, whenever the wind blew it felt miserably cold, the kind that goes right through you to the bone. That’s the kind of cold we get here, a wet cold, and that’s why I hate the cold weather here so much (when I can’t just stay cozy and warm at home and underneath blankets); it feels so much colder than it actually gets here. I really do have to write a snow-day Scotty book, don’t I? We watched a terrible thriller called Project Power, primarily because it starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom I love, and it was both set and filmed here. It was entertaining enough (as with anything filmed in New Orleans, the geography was hysterically funny–how does one ride a bike from the West Bank to uptown and then to Jazzland in New Orleans East?), but then we moved on to The Jetty, a crime drama about a cold case and a connection to a current one starring Jenna Coleman that is actually quite excellent, and examines age of consent v. maturity, which is stunningly well done. Highly recommended; we have one episode left which we will probably get to later on today and then we’ll start another.

I’ve pretty much blown off everything this weekend for the most part, and have little productivity to show for it, which means that today I need to try to get as caught up as possible before Paul gets up and comes down to join me in the living room this afternoon. I still need to write up my thoughts on Ode to Billy Joe, I have several things I need to be writing, and need to be done, so I think I won’t be turning on the television this morning or this afternoon and instead parking in either my chair to read or at my desk to be writing. When I finish this I am going to go read, and then most likely to shower and get back to work here at my desk,

I was very pleased to see that Jayden Daniels and the Commanders (sounds like a 60’s vocal band, doesn’t it?) won their playoff game (my condolences, Detroit Lions fans) and what a mark he’s making in the NFL! I told Paul yesterday, “ten years ago if someone would have told us that two of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time would be LSU graduates and Heisman Trophy winners, we would have laughed in their face.” It’s true. During the Les Miles era the LSU offense often sputtered and misfired, with talent being wasted on both sides of the ball; the defense was great but the offense could never be depended upon. Since Joe Burrow arrived in 2018, that has changed completely and flip-flopped; now we have a defense we can’t count on, but an impressive offense. I think LSU is going to be very good next year, and might be one of the few bright spots of the year in this household, for sure.

I am really enjoying Farrah Rochon’s Bemused, which will be fun to write about when I finish reading. I think Hercules is one of the more underrated Disney animated films, and my favorite part of the movie was the muses (and I live in the neighborhood of the muses, too)–so this book is absolutely perfect for me. I always loved ancient Greece when I was a child, and was an even bigger fan of the mythology. (Funny how it’s always Greek myths rather than the Roman versions, even as we call him Hercules–which is the Latin; in the Greek it’s Heracles.) I’ve also always wanted to write about a Greek myth, revised and updated and modernized, or even not; I’ve always wanted to tell the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Cassandra on the walls of Troy as her city burned. I love Madeline Miller’s reinterpretation of myth in The Song of Achilles and Circe, but she does it so well I can’t imagine being anything other than a very pale carbon imitation. (Does anyone remember carbon paper? Is it even used or made anymore?)

But if I don’t buckle down and start writing, I don’t know that I can actually go ahead and call myself a writer anymore.

And on that note, I am going to make another cup of coffee and head into the living room with Bemused. Have a lovely Martin Luther King Jr holiday, everyone, and I’ll give a snow report update tomorrow morning, either from here on a remote day or from the office.

  1. Okay, to be fair, I just checked my email and they will decide this afternoon whether we’ll be working “remotely” or not tomorrow. My apologies to upper management. ↩︎

Cast Your Fate To The Wind

Ah, and here we are, three day weekend in the rearview mirror as we coast headfirst into a Tuesday that is destined to feel like a Monday all day. I set the alarm and got up at seven-ish; an hour later than a work day and really, something completely sensible to do on days off. An extra hour still feels like a treat, and then I have the entire morning to get things done. I washed dishes, made breakfast, wrote two posts, and then dug into the book and cranked out over two thousand words before noon–with the entire day still ahead of me. I wish I could tell you that I worked on some other writing, but I didn’t. I was reading newsletters and magazines that have stacked up (another thing that is stupid–I let magazines pile up, collect dust, and just be clutter rather than simply reading them at first opportunity and then tossing them in the trash–or tearing out an article that may be of interest to me at a later date (can’t imagine how all that paper piled up on me over the years). I am pleased to say I have only three back issues of Texas Monthly (their true crime reporting is stellar) and the latest 64 Parishes to read now. I also watched some news clips on Youtube, fell into a wormhole about the history of the Cathars in southern France and the Albigensian Crusade that killed them all, and finally started reading about the Baptist War in Jamaica–there’ll be more on that at another time, trust me on that– before doing some filing and touching up around here. All in all, it was a lovely weekend, and I am so delighted to be back into the book again (I was worried about picking it back up again after the last few days not working on it), and knowing that my editorial and creative eye is coming back together, too. I still have to get used to my life as it is now, and I know there are going to be bad days that I just need to accept and roll with, and not beat myself up over those sorts of things. Being too tired to write or create is a valid reason for not doing so. It just is painful and the writing isn’t any good, anyway–and it’s not like I need to prove to myself that I can write a goddamn crime novel, do I?

I feel pretty rested and good this morning. We shall see how that develops for the rest of the day. I think we’re pretty busy today; or maybe not; maybe it was next week? We always get busy at the STI clinic after Southern Decadence…which kind of makes me a little proud, because we’ve trained our clients so well that they know about the window periods for the bacterial infections so they wait. (The schedule isn’t that busy; I just checked it–laptop came home with me on Thursday–so yes, it’s next week that is super-busy.) I have to make groceries on the way home from the office tonight; I may be too tired to work on the book tonight but…that’s okay.

Yesterday afternoon I was kind of at loose ends and dangerously close to being bored, when I remembered a conversation at work recently, in which one of my co-workers told me he loves to watch bad movies with a friend to laugh at them, so I asked, as is my wont, if they’d seen Voyage of the Rock Aliens–I have yet to find anyone else who has seen it (I saw it twice in the theater) and so that was in my mind. Right now I can’t remember the brain trail that led me to think of it yesterday, but I did, and the whole movie is up on Youtube…so yes, I rewatched it, and…it really can’t be watched alone to be laughed at properly. Anyway, it was the great Ruth Gordon’s final movie (what an epitaph!), starred Pia Zadora and an incredibly beautiful young Craig Sheffer. It’s a weird mash-up of the bad scifi and beach movies of the 50s and 60s, a lot of the humor is of the time (I’m sure kids today, or even viewers of any age for that matter, would get the Lake Eerie jokes, because the lake was cleaned up), and it’s even more godawful to rewatch after forty years or so. It may even be worth it’s own entry…

We also started watching Kaos, which is demented in a very fun way; a modern twist on Greek mythology. A reboot kind of, if you will. Jeff Goldblum is perfect as Zeus, as is Janet McTeer as Hera. Of course, since it involves Orpheus and Eurydice, it put me in mind of Hadestown, which I saw on Broadway in New York thanks to Mike Ford. I’m looking forward to watching more tonight, if I’m not too tired and Paul isn’t working on a grant the way he has been for the last week or so. Of course, I could unwind with my Alison Gaylin ARC, which I am doling out to myself as a reward for getting things done.

I am very glad that my brain has finally unlocked and I am not only writing again, but writing the way I did before the recent times of troubles. I’m enjoying it, and am having fun with it again. I don’t know if I am all the way there again yet, and I’m not all the way back to normal (or whatever passes for normal in my life) quite yet, but I don’t feel like there’s a dark cloud in my brain and just getting through the day is a triumph anymore. Now that it’s unlocked, I can also see that some of the stories I’ve written over the last four years and not been able to place (or finish)? Now that my mind is more clear than it’s been in a while, I can see what the problems are–the voice and tone of the story. They’re written kind of in a cheery, pleasant tone, and that doesn’t work with what the stories are about. What was I thinking? No, they need to be colder, and more desperate, unsentimental, which isn’t as easy for me as it should be. They need to be harder and colder and crueler, more desperate, in order for the stories to work, which is also pretty cool. I’m so glad I’ve figured this out at long last! I also think part of the reason I made the stories not as dark as they needed to be was because of the shitshow life had become for us all and I didn’t want to write anything dark. My brain was telling me something, wasn’t it?

I also walked to Walgreens to get treats for His Impious Majesty, listening to the My Dad Wrote a Porno podcast and rather enjoying it–it’s really hilarious, you should check it out–when the door opened in my brain and I finally figured out what podcasts actually are: they’re like radio shows of old only with a more modern delivery system. so we’ve kind of circled back around the entertainment my grandparents used to enjoy–radio/podcast, they are basically the same, with the primary difference how you get distributed to listeners, kind of like do-it-yourself radio. Yes, it only took me how many years to figure it out? Heavy sigh. But now that I finally get them, I can start looking for others that could be fun and informational. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around them–sometimes I have to connect newer technology to older so I can understand its purpose. Yes, I am well aware how obtuse I can be, which I think is a part of the wacky brain chemistry that I want to talk to my doctor about. I don’t need medication to control the wandering mind syndrome, as I’ve remembered how to write again, so that’s not an issue. But it would be nice to have a diagnosis rather than simply wondering and self-diagnosing from my reading.

I also started relearning German on Duolingo this weekend, which makes sense. There are crusty memories deep in the recesses of my brain, and doesn’t it make more sense to try triggering my memory rather than starting from scratch with a whole new language. So far, so good. I can order coffee and bread and wine in German now. So, when I am in a German coffee shop I can say, kaffee und brot, bitte.

I didn’t really have much FOMO about Bouchercon over the weekend–obviously, I know I would have had fun had I gone because now I know too many people not to have fun, if that makes any kind of sense to you. I did miss seeing everyone, but my primary regret in not going was not being able to participate in the voting down of removing the DEI (aka inclusion) from the Bouchercon operating by-laws…yes another attempt by a mediocre white man who used to be on the Board and was long associated with it (back in its misogynist, racist, homophobic days where that kind of shit was not only tolerated, but enjoyed) deciding that since he had a problem with inclusion the entire conference should just do away with it. Thanks, Al Abramson, I remember reporting being treated homophobically by programming years ago and you just patted me on the head and basically told me to get over it. Fuck you all the way to hell and back, and don’t think we aren’t fucking organized, you miserable piece of bigoted trash. Can’t imagine why queers felt uncomfortable and unsafe attending your fucking event, and the trash LOC couldn’t even be bothered reassuring us, and in fact, exposed how homophobic the LOC was. But thanks to the alert Board members and some others–CWoC, QCW–rallied the troops, but the Board also refused to consider it and the refusal of this last minute last ditch attempt to make it a Karen-and-Chad conference again. But this is also why we have to be forever vigilant, because there’s always some mediocrity trying to drive out the marginalized.

Must have been a real bitch-slap seeing how diverse the Anthony Awards were.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday that feels like Monday, and may be back later.

Let’s Spend the Night Together

Yesterday was quite a day.

As you will recall, That Bitch Ford got me to come down around eight for coffee, and then we started exploring and eating our way through Manhattan (I’ve now had Irish pub food, Chinese, and Cuban), and of course we saw Hadestown last night, which was FANTASTIC. I knew it was the Orpheus story, and as I said to TBF afterwards, “You know, I was thinking as the show started that writing a musical in which there has to be a song so amazing that it would enchant Hades–a god–and convince him to let Eurydice go is really setting the bar high for the guys writing the score” but you know, it worked. It’s a beautiful show, just gorgeous, and the cast was fantastically talented and the production was incredible–choreographing dancing and singing on a stage that is moving pretty quickly is not easy–but my favorites were Hades and Persephone. He was a hot silver fox daddy, and the voice on Persephone? I kept thinking to myself, how is this talent not a major recording star? They were all wonderful, and ironically the actors playing Orpheus and Eurydice were the understudies, and all I could think was these two weren’t talented enough to be MAIN CAST? WOW. It was a spectacular evening, and as TBF said in his Facebook post of the two of us sitting in the theater before the proverbial curtain going up (they didn’t have one), sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of what humans can create in this world. I also loved that the sets, the costumes, and the music all had a New Orleans/Storyville/jazz age feel to it, as well, and it was very easy for me to believe it was actually set in New Orleans because it works.

Seriously, if you come to New York and have a chance to see Hadestown, do it. You won’t regret it–and you can thank me later.

I generally don’t like movie musicals (there are some exceptions, but it is safe to assume going in that if it’s a musical movie I probably didn’t or won’t like it–Cabaret and Chicago are notable exceptions), but as I was greatly enjoying the show yesterday I realized that musicals really work best (at least in my mind) on stage, where they originated. In a theater, with live performances, it’s much easier to suspend the belief that people will suddenly break into song and everyone around will suddenly turn into a singing and dancing flash mob than it is in a movie–at least that’s the logic in my brain.

And yes, this is me, the one and only Gregalicious, raving about a musical. NOW I WANT TO SEE ALL THE MUSICALS CURRENTLY PLAYING ON BROADWAY. Gah. I guess the Broadway musical gene was always there, it just needed to be activated…

Regardless, when I dragged myself up to my room after walking back from the theater I was exhausted. I had insomnia on Wednesday night, which made yesterday seem even longer than it was. At one point my Fitbit actually went off to let me know I’d made my “step goal” for the day (I never make it, and it’s arbitrarily set for the goal it had when it was made rather than one I set, and I only wear one because it helps with the health insurance costs–having it and syncing it to its app, which feeds into the insurance company’s website, is all that’s necessary. It would make more sense to me if it were more performance based–which would get me to actually go for walks–but it’s not). I did manage to sleep much better last night that the night before, which is lovely. I just went down and had breakfast and a lot of coffee and have some down time. I am going to try to get some writing done before I have to do anything else–yay down time!–and get cleaned up for tonight. Although lying down sounds awfully appealing. Maybe I’ll just read a bit before hitting the shower…I don’t know; I’ve been so on the go since I got here it’s odd to actually have some free time. I definitely do not want to go anywhere or do any walking, so relaxing is probably the way to go here.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, everyone!

Kiss of Death

Wednesday, also pay the bills day. Heavy heaving sigh. I always despair when this time of the month rolls around; while it is always lovely to get paid again, almost everything is also due in the first half of the month, so watching my balance dwindle is never really much fun, to be perfectly honest. Oh, well, and so it goes, you know what I mean? Perhaps some extra cash will drop out of the sky or something, who knows what? Stranger things have happened, after all, and it isn’t every month that pay day falls so unfortunately the way this one has, alas.

Yesterday was kind of cool, as the first-ever openly gay person was confirmed by the Senate to sit in the President’s cabinet. The usual right-wing trash opposed his candidacy, of course–the Homophobic Confederate Caucus (HCC for short), as I prefer to call them–and voted against his confirmation; womp fucking womp, traitors.

It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day today; the sun is rising in the distance over the West Bank in a riot of colors that are quite spectacular to see, and it looks as though the sky is relatively clear. It’s cold and I have the space heater going, but that’s pretty much par for the course in early February….what’s disheartening is that this would ordinarily be the first weekend of our parades…and while I am glad I don’t have to plan my work schedule around the parade schedule this year–one less stressor, thank you, baby Jesus–it’s very weird and strange to not be having parades this year. Last year’s Carnival wasn’t a good one–when floats kill people, it’s not a good Carnival season–and it kind of sucks that is the most recent one in memory; but at the same time, because of the pandemic and the passage of time being so fucked with, it also seems like last year’s parade season was a million years ago.

I did make it to the gym last night, which felt terrific–it had been a week, and I am very happy my arm is no longer sore from the vaccination. I was, naturally, exhausted when I got home, but managed to get some work done on the book. As I get further into this revision, I am also realizing that the chapters I kept revising whenever I would go back to work on this were the first ones…so Chapter Five, which I worked on last night, was the first that hasn’t been completely revised in several drafts. While this made it a bit trickier to revise–it also was somewhat easier? I still think transitions within the chapter aren’t as smooth now as they need to be, but my plan is to get a chapter per day (minimum) done between now and the weekend; and then spending the weekend working ahead on print copies as well as going back and copy-editing what I have done–which should be the first ten chapters or so by the weekend. I also slept very well last night–wearing one’s self out at the gym is always an excellent way to ensure that you get good sleep, and of course, tomorrow and Friday are my work-at-home days….so I get to sleep a little more than I do on Monday thru Wednesday. I am getting used to this, though–I find myself having no trouble going to bed at ten (if not earlier) on these nights, and the extra hour or so on my work-at-home days is also rather marvelous. Paul was late getting home last night, so after I finished working on the book I went into a wormhole on Youtube and the Internet, looking up same-sex relationships in Greek mythology, and being bemused by how I learned none of this studying Greek mythology when I was a kid. I do enjoy Greek mythology–and I definitely enjoy modern novels based on and/or in Greek mythology–Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and Circe come to mind; there’s another one I’ve come across about the Trojan War I am interested in as well. I’ve also always wanted to write a book about Troy–it’s been languishing in my files for years now, about a gay prince of Troy during the War and called The Trojan Boy; I have this image of an opening scene in which my gay prince (not a son of Queen Hecuba, but rather a concubine from the harem) is standing on the walls of Troy and watching the fires of the Greek camp as the sun sets, thinking about how he has so few memories of the time before the Greeks came; all he knows is the war and the endless longing for it to be over.

But, then the Imposter Syndrome comes in and says things like yes, but Madeline Miller has a PhD in classic mythology and you couldn’t possibly know enough to write such a thing and so forth; I can always count on my Imposter Syndrome to curb whatever writing ambitions I may have, or aspire to. There are some historical thrillers I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time, too–and then comes the inevitable yeah, who do you think you are with your limited knowledge and laziness to do the proper research in order to write about another time correctly? I have written precisely two stories set in the past–one set during the gay government purges of the 1950’s (which is yet another reason Pete Buttigieg’s appointment to the cabinet is so important and historic) and of course, my Sherlock story in the 1910’s. But an entire book? I don’t know, I just don’t know…I wish I had more confidence and belief in myself and my abilities. But I am desperately hoping that Chlorine will give me the confidence to write other stories and books set in the past…

Ah, for the self-assurance of a mediocre straight white man!

I feel pretty good this morning; well-rested and all that, and of course my cappuccinos this morning taste fantastic. I am looking forward to getting home tonight and getting back into the writing of the book–so important–and figuring it all out. Rewriting and revising and editing can be a drag–it’s always disheartening to read something you’ve written only to see, in horror, how bad it actually is, and that you have to figure out a way to fix it; much as I had to fix Chapter Five last evening…and yet it is SO satisfying to figure it out, make it work, and sit back, warmed by the glow of succeeding, that I have once again put to rest that horrible fear that always lurks in my subconscious that someday the time will come when I not only no longer can think of anything to write but won’t be able to fix the things that I already have.

And on that note, tis time to head into the office for yet another day of STI testing. Talk to you tomorrow, Constant Reader!

Between Two Islands

One of the best parts of the Reread Project is reminding myself how much I truly love and appreciate certain writers.

Mary Stewart is certainly at the top of that list.

As I’ve mentioned before, I read most of Mary Stewart’s so-called “romantic suspense” novels when I was a teenager or in my early twenties, my favorites being The Ivy Tree and Airs Above the Ground.  Unfortunately, the mists of time and my faulty memory have robbed me of just how good the other books she wrote were; I recently reread The Moon-spinners and loved it more than I remembered loving it the first time; likewise, I started rereading This Rough Magic this week (finishing yesterday) and it, like The Moon-spinners, is fucking brilliant; far better than I remembered it being–and frankly, far better than it had any right being (says the incredibly jealous author).

Like most of Stewart’s novels, the book is set somewhere other than England–this one is Corfu, just off the coasts of Greece and Albania. (The Moon-spinners was set on Crete, and My Brother Michael was also set in Greece.) I’ve always wanted to visit Greece; it’s on my bucket list with Egypt, France, Germany and England. I loved Greek mythology and history when I was a kid, and of course I absolutely loved Mary Renault’s novels about ancient Greece. Lately I’ve become more and more interested in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire; aka the Byzantine empire, as well. Paul also would love to return to Greece–he spent a summer there as a teenager as an exchange student.

Stewart is often described, and counted amongst, romantic suspense novelists of the mid to late twentieth century, primarily because she was a female writing suspense novels about women in a time period where publishing didn’t know how to market women-driven suspense novels written by women. While there are slight elements of romance included in her novels, it’s often an afterthought, and rarely actually drives the plot–it’s more like a little lagniappe; something extra tossed in to appease editors and readers that she really had no interest in exploring. At first, you think, wow, her characters kind of fall in love awfully quickly with total strangers–and then you realize, oh, of course they did–women weren’t really allowed to be sexual beings in those days so it had to be masked as falling in love plus the “romance” elements were easily explained by the “trench warfare mentality”–in which soldiers become bonded to the guys they are serving with because they are responsible for each other’s lives; it’s not a stretch to see a romantic attachment grow between two people who are in a tough, difficult situation in which they could easily both wind up dead.

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“And if it’s a boy,” said Phyllida cheerfully, “we’ll call him Prospero.”

I laughed. “Poor little chap, why on earth? Oh, of course…Has someone been telling you that Corfu was Shakespeare’s magic island for The Tempest?“

“As a matter of face, yes, the other day, but for goodness’ sake don’t ask me about it now. Whatever you may be used to, I draw the line at Shakespeare for breakfast.” My sister yawned, stretched out a foot into the sunshine at the edge of the terrace, and admired the expensive beach sandal on it. “I didn’t mean that, anyway, I only meant that we’ve already got a Miranda here, and a Spiro, which may not be short for Prospero, but sounds very much like it.”

“Oh? It sounds highly romantic. Who are they?”

“A local boy and girl: they’re twins.”

Lucy Waring, a twenty-five year old British aspiring actress, finds herself on the island of Corfu visiting her very pregnant sister who married very well–to a wealthy Italian banker whose family owns an enormous property on Corfu, which includes an enormous castle-style main structure and two guest villas some distance away, all gathered together on the shoreline of a small, private bay. Lucy’s big break has just come and went in a play that closed after only two months, so she has gratefully accepted her sister Phyllida’s invitation to come stay for a while with her on Corfu. There’s a photographer staying in the other villa; the main castle is being rented to a retired British actor, Sir Julian Gale, best known for his performances in Shakespeare (The Tempest in particular) and his son Max, a composer–and trespassers are forbidden and frowned upon. That very first day Lucy decides to go down to the beach and sunbathe, and while she is down there she makes the acquaintance of a friendly dolphin, much to her delight–and the suspense begins when someone starts shooting, with a silenced gun, at the dolphin. She assumes the shots are coming from the castle, so she goes storming up there, and soon becomes entangled in the affairs of Sir Julian and his son Max.

Stewart’s mastery as a story-teller is so complete that she doesn’t waste a word or a scene; her economy of writing is astonishingly complex and clever. For example, that opening sequence, quoted above, seems like simply a lovely back-and-forth introduction to Lucy and her sister while establishing their affectionate closeness; but Stewart uses that dialogue to tell the readers things that are going to be important to the novel: they are on Corfu, references to The Tempest are scattered throughout the book and are incredibly important, not just to the story but for the atmosphere (Stewart was an incredibly literate writer; references to classic literature are scattered throughout her works, be it Shakespeare or Greek mythology or Tennyson, etc.), and even the throwaway line about the twins, Spiro and Miranda, isn’t a throwaway–the two are very important to the story.

And Lucy Waring is no shrinking violet, either–none of Stewart’s heroines are. Lucy courageously thinks nothing of putting herself in danger in order to help catch a monstrous, sociopathic killer:

He must have felt me watching him, for he flicked me a glance, and smiled, and I found myself smiling back quite spontaneously, and quite without guile. In spite of myself, in spire of Max, and Spiro’s story, I could not believe it. The thing was, as I had said to Max, impossible in daylight.

Which was just as well. If I was to spend the next few hours with him, I would have to shut my mind to all that I had learned, to blot out the scene in the cellar, drop Spiro out of existence as if he were indeed dead. And, harder than all, drop Max. There was a curiously strong and secret pleasure, I had found, of speaking of him as “Mr. Gale” in the off-hand tones that Godfrey and Phyllida commonly used, as one might of a stranger to whom one is under an obligation, but whom one hardly considers enough to like or dislike.

There’s also a few amazing chapters in which Lucy, having found the definitive evidence to convict the killer, is trapped with nowhere to go on his sailboat when he returns–she hides, but is spotted, and then reveals herself and in an astonishing display of bravado tries to play the entire thing off, but winds up going overboard herself and trying to make it to shore–only to be helped by the very dolphin she herself had helped rescue earlier in the book.

As I said, nothing happens or is done in a Stewart book that doesn’t have significance or come into play later.

I cannot tell you how much I loved rereading this book, and while I’d love to dive into another Stewart reread, I’m probably going to do another Phyllis Whitney–oh, and I buried the lede! I read the entire thing as an ebook on my iPad–so I have finally broken through that final barrier to reading books electronically, and may never pack a book to take with me when I travel again as long as I live!

Who says you can’t teach an old queen new tricks?

Escape

Friday and the first work “week” of the new year is coming to an end. This week has been kind of crazy from start to finish–a lot of stuff got crammed into the last three days, believe you me–and starting off-balance to begin with (result of the weird work weeks of the last two weeks with the extended weekends) wasn’t a good thing. I think I am getting everything back in balance, and I am really hoping I’ll be back on top of things and my usual Gregalicious self soon.

I’ve been off-balance now for quite some time; a lot of it has to do with the day job move and its aftermath and after-effects. Add in a trip to Kentucky, the holidays, and the Great Data Disaster of 2018; there’s your recipe for an off-balance Gregalicious. But I managed to get some things done, I managed to get some work done on the books, and now I am going to try to get myself settled back into the new normal.

So, of course last night was a shitty night’s sleep and this morning i feel like crap. My sinuses are also acting up (thank you, cool damp weather!), and I had gone to bed with high hopes of powering through today and getting caught up and getting a handle on the things I don’t feel like I have a handle on–which is everything. I need to get organized, make a list of what I need to get down with notes on how to get them done, and take control.

But I don’t feel good.

Ah, it’s only forty-eight degrees outside at the moment; which is why it feels so cold in the Lost Apartment and probably part of the reason why I don’t feel so hot. I’ve also had a toothache most of the week.

I’ve been watching this interesting series on Prime called Great Greek Myths, and every single episode I think this is not how I remember this myth! But of course, Greek mythology had to be sanitized in order to be taught to children! The gods of Olympus were always petty, even in the sanitized versions, but wow–the way the myths are told on this show–they are even more petty than I would have ever dreamed. Also, this show goes into more detail about homosexual relationships amongst the gods, particularly with beautiful human males, which makes it even more interesting for me.

But hopefully I can get everything done today that I need to get done by powering through it all, and maybe even get a good night’s sleep tonight. There’s a lot I want to get done on this first football-free weekend of the year…and without football to distract me from everything else I should be okay.

And on that note, I’m going to get some more coffee and head back down into the spice mines.

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How Do You Talk To An Angel

I’ve always loved Greek mythology.  Reading Greek myths is one of my earliest childhood reading memories (others include Scholastic book catalogues, The Children’s Bible, World Book Encyclopedia, etc.); and I have mentioned before that I would love to write a novel of the Trojan War. Mark Merlis’ brilliant An Arrow’s Flight is one of my favorite gay novels of all time. I also loved Mary Renault’s novels based on Greek myths (The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea) as much as I loved the ones based on Greek history. And of course, I love love LOVE Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and the sequel series, The Lost Hero.

But Madeline Miller’s Circe…it’s just amazing. Absolutely amazing.

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When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

My mother was one of them, a naiad, guardian of fountains and streams. She caught my father’s eye when he came to visit the halls of her own father, Oceanos. Helios and Oceanos were often at each other’s tables in those days. They were cousins, and equal in age, though they did not look it. My father glowed bright as just-forged bronze, while Oceanos has been born with rheumy eyes and a white beard to his lap. Yet they were both Titans, and preferred each other’s company to those new-squeaking gods upon Olympus who had not seen the making of the world.

Oceanos’ palace was a great wonder, set deep in the earth’s rock. Its high-arched halls were gilded, the stone floors smoothed by centuries of divine feet. Through every room ran the faint sound of Oceanos’ river, source of the world’s fresh waters, so dark you could not tell where it ended and the rock-bed began. On its banks grew grass and soft gray flowers, and also the unencumbered children of Oceanos, naiads and nymphs and river-gods. Otter-sleek, laughing, their faces bright against the dusky air, they passed golden goblets among themselves and wrestled, playing games of love. In their midst, outshining all that lily beauty, sat my mother.

The one upside to being sick is it gave me the chance to finish reading Circe. 

It’s…incredible, marvelous, a joy to read and truly exceptional.

It is just as good as The Song of Achilles, her first novel, as beautifully written and lovingly told, and like Achilles, the end of Circe also made me weepy.

Miller, who holds both a BA and MA in Classics from Brown, writes absolutely beautifully. Like Renault, she is able to capture the magical music of words, so that the prose reads like a poem, a song, something the bards would sing around the fire in the houses in Athens, Sparta, Corinth or Thebes. Like Circe herself, Miller weaves a magical spell over her readers, draws them into this stunningly beautiful world where gods sometimes appear to mortals and intervene in their lives.

An unliked, ignored daughter of the sun god, shunned by her fellow nymphs and siblings, Circe grows up an outsider. She doesn’t have the voice of an immortal; the others complain about her screeching voice–it isn’t until much later that she discovers that she actually has the voice of a mortal, which is why the gods cannot abide it. She soon discovers power in plants and in words; she falls in love with a mortal and uses her knowledge to turn him into a god. But once she does this, he spurns her for another nymph, and she goes out in search of more powerful plants, ones that were grown out of the blood of a dead titan. She then transforms her rival into the monstrous beast Scylla, and is punished by being put in exile on the island of Aiaia, where she lives alone and becomes even more powerful by practicing her witchcraft.

She is present when her sister Pasiphae gives birth to the Minotaur; she knows Daedalus and his son, Icarus. Jason and her niece Medea stop on her island for her help in escaping her brother, Medea’s father. Odysseus and his men eventually arrive, and Circe’s life and destiny are changed forever. I won’t go any further than that, for fear of spoiling the story.

Circe is a story about finding strength in yourself when you are despised; of learning to trust in your own strength and power, and that even the most despised is worthy of strength and character and, most of all, love.

It’s beautiful and powerful and moving.

I cannot wait for Madeline Miller’s next book. I do hope she writes about Medea next.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Tuesday and my second long day of the week; just like last week, Mondays and Tuesdays coming in as long days. When we move into our new building in October (I am still in denial about that) my schedule will probably be long days on Monday and Tuesday every week, so I am trying to get used to it ahead of time. I wasn’t tired at all yesterday; but remember, Sunday I was drained and worn out from the game Saturday night and went to bed relatively early that night. I’m not necessarily tired today, but more a little on the drained side. Hopefully, I won’t be too tired to finish editing/revising two Scotty chapters tonight when I get home from work.

If so, I’ll try to read some more of Circe. I hate that it’s taking me this long to read it! Not an indication of its quality, people! Buy it! Read it! Savor it!

I’ve always loved Greek mythology, ever since I was a kid and I read a library book, when I was about eight or nine, called The Windy Walls of Troy. I’ve also always wanted to write about the Trojan War; it’s a tale I’ve always loved, and one I have always wanted to try my hand at telling. (Which is why the Troy: Fall of a City series on Netflix was so disappointing; as was the Brad Pitt film Troy.)  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a y/a set during the last year of the war; the part that the Iliad primarily focuses on, from the point of view of one of Priam’s bastard sons, promised to the priesthood of Apollo and raised in the temple, but still a part of the royal family. (I’ve also tried tracking down a copy of The Windy Walls of Troy, to no avail.) Madeline Miller also covered the Trojan War with The Song of Achilles, one of my favorite novels of this century; it made me weep, and I kind of want to read it again, now that I am enjoying her Circe. She did a really interesting job of weaving the gods and demigods into her narrative; how does one write about the Trojan War without including the gods? My thought, of course, was to try to do it as real, without the gods actually appearing in the story, but rather things that happen being seen as their work. But how do you do the Judgment of Paris without the golden apple and the three vindictive, spiteful, jealous goddesses?

Something to think about, at any rate.

I’m also having a lot of fun doing some slight research into the history of both New Orleans and Louisiana; I had another book idea the other night as a result of a Twitter conversation with Clair Lamb and Rebecca Chance (so it’s THEIR fault), but I think it actually applies and will fit into a paranormal series I want to write set in rural Louisiana in the parish I invented, Redemption Parish–doesn’t that just sound like a perfect name for a parish where supernatural stuff happens? It’s a matter of tying in all the stories and things I’ve already written set there…it also occurred to me the other night that even the novels and stories I write that aren’t connected to others actually are–I realized that my character Jerry Channing, who appears in the Scotty series AND appeared in The Orion Mask, also writes for Street Talk magazine and that awful editor who Mouse worked for originally in Timothy, which ties Timothy to the Scotty series as well. I always thought Timothy was the one book that stood on its own…not so much, as it turns out.

And now back to the spice mines.

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