Tag: Kansas

Star Collector

And now it’s Tuesday. It’s a bit gloomy outside, and we’ll be getting rain again today (it’s been a very hot wet summer thus far), but I am awake and ready to go while I am sipping my coffee this morning. It also tastes quite good, I might add. I slept decently last night, and feel pretty good this morning. We have a light clinic schedule today, so I hope to be able to get caught up on paperwork and things today around said schedule. Woo-hoo!

Yesterday was a pretty good day, over all. I had a nice day at work in which I got a lot done, and then came home to chill out and relax with Sparky. I went through the manuscript, and didn’t have to do anything to chapters one and two (they need a revision, of course, but that can wait until the whole draft is finished and I start working my way back through it again) after all; it was chapters three and four that needed restructuring and pulling apart. I did the pulling apart and slapping back together last night; I need to reread the two chapters and revise them and make them flow more smoothly before I move on to chapter 5, I think. We’ll take care of that tonight, methinks. I am excited to be writing again, which is always a lovely thing.

We did watch another episode of Those About to Die, which I am not loving, but it’s a light entertainment, and it has a pretty good cast. Like Spartacus and all its iterations, there’s a lot of muscular men and some homoeroticism with some gay characters–not loving the way they are depicted for sure, but my internal jury is still out on that. I am still having trouble focusing on reading, but am hopeful I can make a breakthrough on that this weekend. I just keep getting more and more books that I am dying to read, so having “reader’s block” isn’t helpful as far as that is concerned. The new Ellen Byron is out today, starting a new series set in the California mountains that I knew so well from living there in the Big Valley1 and being close to all the major mountain parks like Kings Canyon, Sierra, and Yosemite. In fact, both Sorceress and Sleeping Angel are set in those mountains, in a town I loosely based on both Oakhurst and Sonora, so in some ways I am going back to my roots by reading her new release. I’ve not written about living in California very much here; I am currently writing a very long entry about my love/hate relationship with Kansas, which briefly flared up over the last weekend. The thing about me is that, despite being crazy and unbalanced and all those lovely things that come with my chemical imbalances, that no matter how miserable I was in the macro sense, in the micro sense I always wanted to have fun so I wouldn’t have to think about how miserable I was until I got to the point where it was overwhelming and miserable, and the thought that that was how I was going to have to live for the rest of my life was unimaginable.

The closet is a horrible, strangling thing.

And yes, I will probably write about living in California at some point, unless I run out of time, which is always possible. I could get hit by a bus on my way home from work tonight–oh, last week, traffic driving home was absolutely miserable; it took me forty-five minutes to travel what is usually a fifteen minute drive last week, but last night I got home in slightly over ten minutes and there was no congestion anywhere, which was peculiar. Hoping that holds true for tonight.

I also have to say I am feeling a lot better about the world in general these last few days. I am actually feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time, and think we might be able to save this ship from sinking into fascism. I also am delighted the media has exposed itself for the craven opportunists they really are–the mask dropped forever–and it will be a long time before any of them will be forgiven by me. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

  1. Yes, the San Joaquin Valley is The Big Valley of Barbara Stanwyck television fame. ↩︎

Tune in Tomorrow

Ah, the wonderful world of daytime soaps. It’s so weird to me that there are only four (The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, and General Hospital) left on the air. At the height of my soap addiction, I watched more than four of them. I mean, you literally could spend the entire day from about eleven till three thirty watching them back then–four and a half hours solid of soaps. Usually there would be some kind of Good Morning America show on, followed by game shows, and then came the dramas. A lot of those game shows came and went, but ones like The Price is Right never seemed to go out of favor with audiences while the others waxed and waned.

Dark Shadows was the one I really loved when I was a kid, and to this day I still remember it fondly.

When we moved to Kansas in the mid 1970s, the town where we lived was only able to pick up one television station, a CBS affiliate out of Kansas City–less than half a year after we moved there we were able to get cable–but that first summer we lived there and I didn’t know anyone? All I did was read and watch television…and with only one channel, there really wasn’t much choice during the day so Mom and I started watching the CBS shows, and I am sure I am going to forget one here: Love of Life, The Young and the Restless, Search for Tomorrow, As the World Turns, Guiding Light and Edge of Night. (The latter was always one of my favorites, because there was a shit ton of crime. It was really a law-and-order soap, originally created to compete with Perry Mason on radio and had all the markings of a soap, with the usual love triangles, adultery and questionable parentage like all the others–but there was also always a very tangled and complicated murder mystery story running, usually connected to organized crime and sometimes not–but the main characters of the show were inevitably district attorneys and lawyers. Everyone on this show was eventually either murdered or went on trial for murder, which I thought was interesting.)

But the next summer, when I was at home all day, Mom still watched Y&R, but she’d moved on to shows I used to watch with my baby sitter in Chicago (General Hospital and One Life to Live) and a newer one I used to watch with my sister, All My Children, before switching back to CBS for Edge of Night. This was, of course, the beginnings of the General Hospital phenomenon of the late 1970s/early 1980s, primarily focused on Laura (and later, Luke and Laura) and while I did enjoy those stories…my favorites quickly became the Quartermaines, and Jane Elliott as Tracy, in particular. I became obsessed with the shows, watching them whenever I could, and then one day I found this book at a second hand store when I was about seventeen:

It was already out of date; at the time it was published the most popular show airing was NBC’s Another World (General Hospital was breaking all ratings records in the present day), so a lot of the book, when talking about modern times, focused on Another World, and its primary ratings driver, the love triangle between Steve, Alice and Rachel (George Reinholt, Jacqueline Courtney, first Robin Strasser and then Victoria Wyndham as Rachel; Reinholt and Courtney made the book’s cover). By the time I got to the book, Another World‘s ratings were already in free fall and ABC was in firm control of daytime’s ratings. It was also more of a puff piece rather than any in-depth reporting and digging. It was all about how talented and hard-working every one involved in daytime was, and conflicts and other off-camera issues were completely ignored. (It was updated several times, and the last edition I had a copy of, Soap World, was much better and not so “aren’t they all AMAZING?”)

But what was interesting to me about the book the most–and Soap Opera Digest–was that they both had summations/summaries of the soap’s plots from the beginning (not everything, obviously, but the main through plots and popular stories); that was how I actually learned how to write a synopsis. Interested in soaps and fascinated by these summaries, I started doing my own–inventing soap operas, coming up with the family relationships and marriages and so forth, and then would start writing the summaries. I also used to always have a bit of fun writing soap spoofs, generally casting my friends as “characters” and coming up with story lines and writing those summaries, even mini-episodes. I did several of these over the years, but the best was the one I wrote around my fraternity friends, The Young and the Pointless–and I have to say, I learned a lot writing that one. The others I’d done earlier didn’t last long and I’d get bored with it and stop; Y&P (as I called it) ended up being three “seasons” of twenty or so “episodes”, and I soon began understanding the struggles of soap writers–how do you top yourself with a story line? The need to constantly bring in new characters and subplots and balancing everything, until it became a bloated mess and I “canceled” it myself after the third season.

The first book I ever wrote, which I’ve mentioned before, was a sprawling soap opera about a small city in Kansas. Again, it was a learning experience and a difficult one at that; writing this book taught me about overwriting and filler; how bad dialogue can be if you don’t speak it aloud as you write it; and again, balancing characters and plots and subplots and story and keeping track of it all was insane. I’ve borrowed things from it over the years–plots, subplots, characters, locations, etc.–but always knew there was no point in trying to trim it down and use it as is. Murder in the Garden District’s case, in fact, was lifted fully from that manuscript; it was the main story. And I’ve used names from that manuscript repeatedly; they pop into my head unbidden and it isn’t until later that I realize where they came from and I change them.

I watched many soaps over the years; I’d often watch other soaps with friends who watched those shows and would get into them for a bit before going back to my solid three: All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. I wrote a paper in college for a graduate level course on American culture in the 20th century; the paper was called “How Storylines on Daytime Television Drama Series Reflected Changes in the Mainstream Culture.”1 It was over a hundred pages long, and traced how the soaps went from being primarily marriage and divorce drama to mining social issues for story. I got an A on the paper, of course (I always got A’s on anything I had to write), and I’ve always had some of that information left in my head; and of course as the 1980’s began, they began casting beautiful young men with exceptional bodies to play heroes and villains on the shows–John Wesley Shipp is one I’ve never forgotten, and he’s still a handsome older man today, and so I was also able to occasionally see beautiful men shirtless or in speedos. I approved of this trend 100%.

John Wesley Shipp also did these kinds of photo shoots. My God, that body.

I eventually stopped watching them in the mid-1990’s, when I realized I could keep up with them or use that time to write; I chose to write instead. But even though I no longer watched, I kept up with them some on line and so forth. The twenty-first century purge was horrible to watch, as shows that had once been a popular mainstay of daytime television were mercilessly canceled between 2001 and 2012. It’s hard to believe there are only four left airing, and there haven’t been many in prime time for decades–although the continuing nature of the soaps is now the nature of almost every television series–that cliffhanger shit really does get people to tune back in.

But I always remember them fondly. There were so many wonderful stories over the years–including some completely insane ones–and characters, too. Luke and Laura on General Hospital, Greg and Jenny on All My Children, Viki’s dissociative identity disorder on One Life to Live, and all the wonderful murder mysteries and insane courtroom dramas are all remembered fondly by me–and then of course there was Erica Kane.

It just doesn’t seem like daytime anymore, without Susan Lucci chewing everything in sight as Erica Kane every afternoon, does it?

  1. I really wish I had a copy of it, but it disappeared over the years and many cross-country moves. ↩︎

Science Fiction Double Feature

Lips! Lips! We want lips!

The first time I went to a midnight movie1 was when I was either eighteen or nineteen. I still lived in Kansas then, and the midnight movie was playing at the old movie theater on Sixth Street that was rarely open other than for some special occasion. They’d been doing midnight movies for a while before I went that first time, and I was going with a co-worker who promised me I was going to have an amazing time. I wasn’t so sure. The line outside the Granada Theater was a bizarre sight–many of them dressed up freakishly, and a lot of them were carrying paper bags full of stuff, which I also thought was odd.

I was about to watch, and experience, The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.

I had no idea what was to come.

At the late night, double feature, picture show…

The crowd started chanting for “lips” as the lights in the theater went down, and then I saw what they were chanting for, as two bright red lips appeared on the black screen and started singing as everyone cheered….and started shouting responses to the opening credits.

And I liked the song.

What followed was ninety-eight minutes of insanity. I had never heard of an “interactive” movie before, and it really caught me off guard. How did people know what to yell, and when to yell it? They sang along with the movies, and I soon was caught up in it; getting sprayed with water, ducking out of the way of flying pieces of toast and toilet paper and tampons, and it was all so delightfully subversive in terms of questioning gender and sexuality. You still couldn’t swear on prime time television shows, and you definitely couldn’t say “sex” (I always hated the coy and cheesy ways television writers came up with as a workaround).

And then of course, there was Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-n-furter.

I’d never seen anything like that before in my life…and I howled with laughter as he removed his robe to reveal what he was wearing beneath, and several people shouted in unison, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Liza Minnelli!”

And after ninety-eight minutes of madness and mayhem, I was a convert. I walked out of the theater with my head still reeling from all the subversion a still moralistic 1970’s American culture had taught me was wrong on every level, disgusting sin and decadent morality, and I wanted more.

I bought the soundtrack shortly thereafter, both vinyl and eight-track, and it didn’t take long for me to have the entire thing memorized. I don’t remember seeing it again while I lived in Kansas–we moved to California shortly thereafter–but I did discover the theater in Fresno that showed it, and I started going weekly. It was more of a production in Fresno–people dressed up and acted out the parts in front of the screen (they tried to recruit me once to play Brad, but I said no; it would be over another decade before I was comfortable enough to wear only underwear in public; I was really uptight). Eventually, after memorizing the film and soundtrack, learning everything there was to know about the movie and play, I finally stopped going to the midnight movies. HIV/AIDS ripped a lot of the joy out of life in the 1980s for me, and once I was out of the habit of the movie, I was out of the habit and looked back on it as a past experience with nostalgia and joy.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the perfect amount of subversion at precisely the right time for me. It opened a world of possibilities to me, but at the same time, it made me very aware that I needed, more than anything else, to get out of Kansas. Much as I loved the movie, those memories of seeing it that first time–and the self-actualization and realization that came in its wake–are also tied up with my growing misery and dissatisfaction with living in Kansas. It’s also tied to discovering actual queer people in Fresno, and recognizing that even this little bit of subversion, something I could go see with the straight friends without any questions or fears, kept me going through the early 1980s as everything started turning even darker than they had ever been in Kansas.

Watching it on television just isn’t the same, either.

But the movie always holds a special place in my heart–and I imagine it does with many other queers for whom it proved an awakening of their true freak selves–and I became a lifelong fan of all the stars, whose careers and successes I followed…but one is now dead to me forever, and Her Name Must Not Be Uttered….and her being in the film has also kind of tainted its legacy with me.

But seriously, what a great movie. I may write an essay about the movie someday, you never know!

  1. I’m not counting the night of the senior prom, when the school districts got together and got the Twin Theaters (I think that was the name) to show a midnight movie to keep us all out of trouble. It was Smokey and the Bandit, by the way. ↩︎

Ode to Billy Joe

Robby Benson. Swoon. I mean, LOOK at him.

Eat your heart out, David Cassidy!

I don’t know when I first became aware of one Mr. Robby Benson, but I do know he was a major crush of mine when I was a teenager–he and Jan-Michael Vincent–and I also think he’s another one of those who definitely helped create a type for me; dark hair and bright blue eyes, and that smile! Jesus Mary and Joseph!

ODE TO BILLY JOE, Robby Benson, 1976

I wasn’t alone in my teen years crushing on Robby; I think most teenaged girls of my generation all had a bit of a crush on him. For one, he was ridiculously beautiful; it kind of should be against the law to look that good. He was also photogenic and telegenic, and I loved his speaking voice. I know my teen years are also when I developed my love of jeans cut Daisy Duke short; and as you can see from the pictures above, Robby’s were cut so short they were basically speedo-sized. Years later, Daisy Dukes were my favorite shorts to wear, because all modesty aside, I’ve always had muscular legs; assets best displayed in shorts cut immodestly short.

But in looking up information on Robby Benson for this post, I realized I had never seen the movie Ode to Billy Joe, which was one of his best-known films. I knew about the movie, of course, but never saw it. It was released the summer we moved to Kansas and it never played in Emporia, and I never saw it on television, either. So, yesterday, I remedied that by watching it on Youtube, which has the entire movie uploaded for free.

The movie itself is simple. Based on the story song by Bobbie Gentry that is probably one of the biggest and best-known hits of all time, it’s ethereal and mysterious and unclear; and the lyrics themselves create an indelible image of a rural Southern lunch and the casual, unknown to anyone speaking, cruelty of the conversation. The narrator had a strong connection to Billy Joe, and his suicide affects her deeply, but nobody really notices. It’s genius in exposing that Southern mentality of “the girls don’t matter”–no one’s noticed that she is connected to him in some way, no one notices that she’s upset, and the way Gentry sings the lyrics is so matter-of-fact yet horrible as she recounts an emotionally troubling experience for herself, and paints such a powerful image of the invisible daughter, left to grieve on her own for the boy she loved, and does she know the reason he jumped? I’ve always liked the song, even if it doesn’t work for me musically (the lyrics don’t match the melody), because it tells so many truths about rural Southern girls that what actually happened isn’t the point–the point is the isolation and loneliness she feels, and the alienation from her own family.

The movie, screenplay and novelization by Herman Raucher of Summer of ’42 fame, fleshed out all those mysteries. It was from the movie and book that turned Ode to Billy Joe into a queer story and a tragedy; it’s also interesting that it wasn’t more of a scandal when the movie was released in 1976; maybe him having had a sexual encounter with another man and committing suicide took the sting and shock of the gay twist; after all, misery and suicide were the only possible outcomes for most queers in movies at the time. Watching the movie, but taking away my own quibbles about its depiction of southern rural life to talk about it as it stands as a queer film, it was really quite revolutionary. First of all, Robby Benson was a full-fledged teen heart throb with photo shoots in every magazine like 16 and Tiger Beat, and having someone who didn’t telegraph gay (or the societal images of what gay looked like then) who was also a heart throb playing the part was putting an acceptable face on a (at the very least) bisexual character. What was also interesting to me about the film was that it was produced by Max Baer (aka Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies), and the man Bobby Joe had the encounter with was played by James Best, who would go on to greater celebrity and fame as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard later on in the decade. Glynis O’Connor is fine as Billie Lee (seriously, Bobby Joe and Billie Lee? I have an army of relatives from the rural south, and out of all of them there is exactly ONE who has that stereotyped Southern two first names thing), but Benson’s appeal is clearly on display here–and I understand why girls loved him so much: he always played sensitive and vulnerable young men, which girls love.

And he is just stunningly beautiful in this movie.

Benson’s most successful role of all time was, ironically, from voice work: he voiced the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

I also found it interesting the Bobby Joe committed suicide in the Tallahatchee River, which was also where the white supremacists dumped Emmett Till’s body…so that river is kind of hexed, wouldn’t you think?

He also aged incredibly well–Benson is still quite beautiful.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Only when I’m dancing do I feel this free…

I love to dance.

Really, how was there ever any doubt about my sexuality?

Well, there probably wasn’t, but I still live with the illusion that people didn’t know. It makes me happy, okay? Allow me my delusions, thank you.

I think the first time I ever danced was at a school dance when I was a sophomore. I don’t remember what the dance was for, but that was it. A friend of mine asked me to dance, and I replied, “I don’t know how” (which was true), and she laughed at me, saying, “all you have to do is move” and showed me a basic back and forth step with swinging arms that was pretty simple. “Just stay on the beat,” she advised, and I found myself losing myself on the dance floor, getting into the music, and improvising…and for the first time in my life got compliments for something. This happened again when we moved to Kansas and at my first dance there–girls couldn’t believe what a good dancer I was, and they all wanted to dance with me.

Granted, most guys were not fun to dance with, usually doing some kind of weird shuffling kind of movement that was always off-beat and looked almost painful to do. But I basically figured out the trick–moving your hips and shoulders on different beats of the music instead of together. And the more I did it, the more I loved it. Guys were also not supposed to enjoy dancing, as it wasn’t ‘manly’ or something; I don’t know, there was a lot of idiotic bullshit like that for boys when I was one. My love of dancing continued on through my twenties–there weren’t any really good clubs for dancing, gay or straight, back then–and it really wasn’t until I moved to Tampa and started going to a gay bar in Ybor City called Tracks that I really found my place in the community.

Oh, not right away. I would dance when I’d go out, but not much; I was very self-conscious, and dancing made me sweat–a lot. My hair (what was left anyway) would plaster to my scalp with sweat, my socks and shirt would be soaked through, and I really really believed I was unattractive. But when I was out on the dance floor, I didn’t really care about how I looked or if anyone was looking at me or anything other than the driving beat and cutting loose on the dance floor. I never felt tired or sore the next morning either–I always felt good after dancing all night…

….and then I lost weight and discovered the gay bars in New Orleans.

I also discovered Ecstasy, but that’s probably best handled at a different time.

Oh, how I loved coming to New Orleans to dance the night away! That was the one thing I always hated, everywhere else that I lived or visited; the night always ended with last call, sometime after midnight and always no later than three. In New Orleans, the evening ended when you were too tired and sweaty and exhausted to dance any more. I used to go dancing at least three nights per week when I lived in Tampa (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), which also continued in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of evenings in gay neighborhood bars while in Tampa–didn’t really do much of that after moving here.

There’s something about being in an altered state (of whatever kind) out on the dance floor in a sea of shirtless gay men, all dancing and having a great time, while killer music plays through the speakers, the constant thumping of the bass getting into your nervous system. There would also be a light show during the dancing, and mist sprayed down into the crowd (in the older days before I lived here, I used to think they put poppers in the mist because you could smell it…although now I’m not sure that wasn’t just from how many people were using them on the dance floor), whistles and bells and there was always some older gay hippie, shirtless with long gray hair, shaking a tambourine out there. Everyone was friendly on the dance floor, smiling and grinning and flirting and grind-dancing, and the loud music just got into your soul, making it an almost out of body experience.

I always hated that the mixes you heard in clubs were so hard to find in record shops.

And the divas we sang along to–Deborah Cox and Madonna and Celine Dion and Martha Wash and Whitney Houston and Mariah Cary, among many nameless others–I was always lip syncing when I danced, really doing drag without the make-up and costumes and wigs–music I could just get lost in for hours. On the dance floor, everything was okay and everything was going to be better and this insular all-gay world was a place where I was at peace, where I was happy, and where nothing could ever bother me.

I miss dancing, but I also am older and can’t stay up late enough to go out dancing, let alone dance for even a few hours. But dancing has always been an integral part of my gay identity, even if I don’t do it anymore. I still listen to the music I can find on Spotify or Youtube, and believe me, there’s nothing like blasting gay dance music for cleaning the house. I used to have deejays make me tapes for my aerobics classes–and the attendees always loved the music.

Are gay bars still community hubs? I honestly don’t know–but all the young gay men I work with go out to clubs, so I guess so. Maybe not as integral as when going to one actually put you at risk of being arrested, but still important.

Since I Don’t Have You

Thursday morning last day in the office until Monday the 12th! GASP. But yes, I am meeting my dad in Alabama this weekend and then Monday the 5th we’re driving back up to Kentucky, from whence I shall drive back to New Orleans on Friday. I was very glad that I figured out that the trip hanging over my head was why I was a bit off this week, which was a very good thing to realize…I was getting worried about why I was off, you know? And at my age, sometimes (usually) it’s something. Sigh.

I went further down the Noah Presgrove mysterious death Internet wormhole, and the story just continues to gnaw at me. I also found a “Justice for Noah” Facebook group that is mostly people from the small town he was from (Comanche, Oklahoma) and the surrounding counties…and what a fucking gold mine that was, seriously. The town is only about 1300 people or so, and it’s a very rural area similar to the one where I grew up in Kansas. It was eye-opening, and a reminder of just how nasty small town/rural areas can be. The page is full of locals snapping and sniping at one another, accusing people of knowing more than they know, and when someone being called out responds to being called out, well, people go apeshit on them. One girl who was there telling people they had things wrong got buried with comments like “you were drunk so we can’t trust your memory” or “you’re in on the cover-up” and it’s wild how all these old hurts and resentments can come to the fore when something like this happens. I had been thinking about writing another book set in small-town Kansas (beyond the ones I’ve already talked about on here) called All Their Guilty Stains, but this story might be better than the one I dreamed up for that title.

That’s the “real America” for you, people. (Peyton Place and Stephen King’s Needful Things are excellent books about how stifling rural small towns can be, and they get the pettiness down perfectly. One of the reasons I love King so much is his ease at creating a realistic town with real people who basically harbor grudges and resentments until everything starts boiling over.)

But I definitely went down the wormhole with Noah’s murder/suspicious death last night; looking up podcasts and videos. And yes, I am well aware that I may not have even been interested in the story had the video that started the whole thing–a Banfield News report–not had a thumbnail of his senior picture and my first thought was that’s a very good-looking young man–he was possibly murdered? And then I went down the wormhole.

And of course, everything on the Facebook page I mentioned? You expect the family to of course talk about how marvelous and wonderful and kind he was, and that’s a lot of the posts on that page, too–basically, he’s been deified, and that American “don’t speak ill of the dead” custom often covers up all kinds of shit, and much as they like to believe they know everything about their kids, most parents don’t and are very surprised–as well as being in denial–about the deceased. I mean, no one is loved by everyone. And a good-looking star athlete in a small Oklahoma town? You can just bet there were kids with grudges and resentments built up over the years.

I felt good yesterday when I got up, as I do this morning, and I got a lot done at the office…but I started feeling tired and sleepy in the late afternoon. I had to also run errands on the way home (Sparky needs his treats!) and picked up my copy of The Dusk, a graphic novel co-written by my friends Elizabeth Little and the wonderful Alex Segura. I also had a royalty check waiting for me (huzzah!) and, of all things, a fan letter forwarded to me from Crooked Lane. I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect–the last time someone wrote me a letter it wasn’t exactly a fan letter, and I’d actually forgotten how nice that feels. I just glanced over it because I wanted to read it sometime when I could savor the ego-boast; which is something I’ve been needing, writing wise, for a long time. And you know what else it did? It kicked my fucking mind into gear. I’ve been struggling with this book I’m writing for a long time now, and it’s certainly taking me longer to write a draft than it usually does. Part of the problem was I couldn’t figure out the over-all point of the book, which I realized last night; there’s always got to be an underlying point to the story that I am trying to illustrate through the main character. It’s a satire of state-sponsored homophobia, and I of course created a homophobic group leading the armies against drag queens, transwomen, and queers. But that wasn’t personal, and that was why I wasn’t having as much fun writing it and why I was having so much trouble with this book. Last night, as I sat in my chair, digesting a gushing fan letter and Noah Presgrove’s murder/suspicious death, I started thinking about this some more and then it hit me: I need to know Jem’s personal story/growth through this book and it punched me right between the eyes–so much so that I scribbled it all down in my journal and hopefully, I can get back to work on this sooner rather than later.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for today. Have a great Thursday and I may be back later.

The Deck of Cards

Wednesday and we’ve made it to mid-week, Constant Reader. Huzzah? Huzzah indeed. The weird vibe of the week continued through yesterday–everyone at the office seemed to be a bit off-balance too, and I am not entirely sure what this week’s weirdness is actually all about. But I got some things taken care of–rescheduling my doctor’s appointment, picking up a delayed prescription, and some other annoyances (for the record, I hate having to make phone calls and yesterday required several of them). But day job duties will be all caught up today before I leave to come home, and so I won’t have a lot of catching up to do when I return from my trip. It also occurred to me last night that of course my own vibe is off this week–the trip is looming in my subconscious, but it’ll be nice, ultimately.

Last night I was okay when I got home from work. I did some laundry and worked on the neverending sink full of dishes, which has been particularly annoyingly Sisyphean lately. I did some more research last night, and also stumbled on a peculiar unsolved murder/accidental death of a nineteen year old named Noah Pesgrove, from last September in Oklahoma. It’s an interesting case, involving a four day birthday party (!!!), obviously lots of drugs and alcohol, and then his body was found about a mile away, naked other than a pair of mismatched shoes. It really sounds like a drunken accident, like he fell out of the back of a truck bed and landed on the back of his head. But the other injuries are strange, as is the fact the body was found curled into a fetal position and covered with a bloody tarp. This is the kind of thing that could have easily happened any number of times when I was in high school in Kansas (I never was invited to these kinds of parties, ever, at either high school–which was probably a good thing) which of course made me think some more. I’ve already written one horrific short story about a high school murder at a party, so is writing another simply repeating myself? And why do I always revert to young people when I have these ideas? Shouldn’t I be writing about older gay men now?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my career lately, and trying not to look at it in a mostly negative way, which is par for the course. I’ve never really had a plan for my career, with established ambitious goals and so forth to work towards. I did have a plan back in the early days, but Katrina’s floodwaters washed that all away, and so I’ve kind of been moving forward a little blindly, mostly focusing on what I wanted to write without any thoughts to any kind of cohesive career path forward, which is unfortunate. Then again, I rarely plan for the future in any meaningful kind of way, either–but that’s pretty fucking obvious, isn’t it? I’ve always pretty much, since Katrina, written what I wanted to or what I was asked to write (with a cash offer) without any thoughts about how that particular book might advance my career in a more-upward fashion. I never established myself firmly as any kind of writer–although I suppose I am mostly known as a crime writer, and I’ve pretty much always stuck to that kind of novel, even if some of them are a stretch. Some are borderline supernatural on top of the crime, but other than that and the occasional outright horror story, I’ve mostly focused on crime. I have any number of book and story ideas that are neither, but I never try to pursue writing those. Maybe I should? I always think that my short stories are really where I get to play with voice and pacing and style, and each one usually teaches me a little something more, gives me another insight on how to make my writing even stronger.

I also stumbled over some local assholes posting on social media about the Tulane protests, spearheaded by some trashy local bitch who claims to work for the Times-Picayune, so I started collecting screen shots for the formal complaint I intend to file with the paper’s management. Among her marvelous posts were demanding to know why no one is investigating the “protestors aren’t students” (um, you’re supposedly a journalist, ma’am, maybe put your fucking phone down and investigate) because she “knows what Tulane students look like (???1)” and “Tulane’s students are studying for finals so their parents can take them to Europe for the summer” and other horrific, bitchy commentary that was completely unworthy of any adult sentient adult who’s not a puppy-killer like Kristi Noem. Reading her and the approving responses to her bigoted bitchiness literally made me shake with rage…and then I realized bitch I write crime fiction–prepare to die in a book and I realized, Scotty’s nephew goes to Tulane…hmmm. And of course, our governor is very busy turning Louisiana into Gilead, and we have no recourse. Our Supreme Court is racist garbage and will rubberstamp anything Landry signs into law, and we certainly have no recourse with the US Supreme Court, which makes ours look positively progressive.

Maybe that’s my metier for the future; writing about how the Republican Party is taking Louisiana back to 1850. Come on, Landry, flame out like Jindal did.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day Constant Reader, and I may be back later.

  1. Typical Uptown white bitch shit right here, am I right? What exactly does a Tulane student look like, because I’ve worked with any number of Tulane graduates, and I can tell 1. their parents weren’t rich and 2. they did not fucking look alike in any way, shape of form, you miserable bitch. So, since she “knows” what a Tulane student looks like, let me share with you what an Uptown white bitch looks like: tennis skirt or yoga pants, a sleeveless blouse, bleached hair and bad lip fillers, make-up designed to repel from forty yards, driving an expensive white SUV with a diamond tennis bracelet at her wrist, holding her phone in one hand and a Starbucks cup in the other while she goes through lights and stop signs obliviously, with an overwhelming Karenish narcissism and a complete refusal to realize or recognize there are other drivers. ↩︎

Enchanted

Sunday morning! And LSU Gymnastics won the national championship yesterday! Woo-hoo! That accomplishment is worthy of its own post, so tune in later for that, okay? It was very exciting, I have to say, and the Lost Apartment was filled with excited cheers even as we held our breath as LSU clinched it all with a fantastic final rotation on balance beam. We kind of celebrated this throughout the night by watching replays and highlights before episode two of Sugar, which I am loving. Colin Ferrell, yum.

I was very tired Friday from running all those errands, and so was Paul. I was still fatigued yesterday, the physical and mental kind that I’ve not felt in a while–but sadly more evidence that my stamina is not back and needs to be worked on. The heat is also back; yesterday was pleasant, but Friday was eighty-eight degrees…in April. That doesn’t bode well for the summer, especially for one that’s going to be a more active hurricane season. But while I was so tired yesterday I managed to use what little nervous energy I had to clean and organize, and the apartment actually looks better this morning. It’s still not up to par–I need to do the floors to get there–but it’s nice to walk down to a neater first floor. I do need to run the dishwasher this morning, and finish filing before I read and write for the day. I do feel a little dragged out this morning, but hopefully getting caffeinated and cleaned up will take care of that problem.

I did do some things writing-related yesterday. I found the epigraphs for the next Scotty book, for one, and also wrote the opening of The Crooked Y in my head yesterday as I cleaned and organized. I created some working folders for projects that are forming in my head, and I did write notes down in my journal occasionally. I also did some electronic file cleaning up, which is proving to be an endless, endless process that may never be finished. But as long as I can still search for everything in a finder window, it should be okay. I also thought of how to open The Summer of Lost Boys, too. I’ve been listening to the Billboard Top 100’s for the years I am considering setting the book in, and I think I am settling into 1974, which was when I originally wanted it set in the first place, the summer (in my life) between junior high and high school. It’s kind of fun, if a little painful, to go back to that time and remember it for myself, but I think it’s going to be a really strong book once it’s underway. I also started getting the current book a bit better organized. I feel better about things, if that makes any sense? Hopefully I’ll be able to get a lot of writing done. I want to finish the rewrite of “Passenger to Franklin” and start the revision of “When I Die,” before diving into the book headfirst and trying to get the rest of it plotted.

I think I’ve been a bit overwhelmed lately, in all honesty, and I need to get calmed down and focused again. I need to remember how to harness my brain ADHD-driven creativity and focus on one thing the way I used to be able to do so. I have been very pleased with the (sparse) writing I’ve been doing, but I also think that might be partly due to the stamina issues I’ve been having since the surgery. I am trying to rush to get back to “normal” (or what passes for it around here) and getting ahead of myself, and I need to reign in my impatience and take things slower. It’s okay because it’s temporary, and this too shall pass. Take a breath, remember you had a rough go of things last year, and you have to build everything back to the point it was before the injury.

I’ve also been remiss in not congratulating award winners lately in my field; I am very pleased to report that J. M. Redmann won the Hansen Prize for queer crime fiction for Transitory, which is now also a Lambda finalist AND a two category Goldie finalist. Yay Jean! I’ve known Jean for almost twenty-five years now, she was my boss’s boss for about eighteen years, we’ve co-edited anthologies together, and now I am her book editor. Transitory is a terrific book, and being Jean’s editor is pretty easy, actually. Ivy Pochoda recently won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Crime Novel for Sing Her Down, and Ivy is pretty awesome, too. I am behind on her books (I’m behind on everyone’s books, really) but her Wonder Valley was fan-fucking-tastic. Way to go, Ivy! (That was a loaded category, too–other nominees were S. A. Cosby, Cheryl Head, Jordan Harper, and Lou Berney.)

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines, eat something and get cleaned up and ready to go for this glorious morning. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I will chat at you again later.

Drop Me Off In New Orleans

Ah, some more blatant self-promotion! I’ve done some on-line panels so far this year, which has been terrific. Here are the questions from one I did, turned into an interview so I can promote myself! I believe these questions were for a queer crime panel, and the credit for the questions goes to the one and only J. M. (Jean) Redmann; you can order her books here.

Why did you choose your characters and their professions? What drew you to them?

Hmmm. This is tough, because I have so many books and so many different main characters…I think I’ll stick to my two primary series to answer the question. I wanted to write about a gay private detective in New Orleans, and I wanted him to be a big man, a former college football player who may have been able to be a journeyman NFL player had he not been injured in his final college game. I wanted him to be uncomfortable in his gay skin, and the point of his journey throughout the series was to grow and learn until he was finally comfortable in that skin, and able to be loved and give it.

Scotty, on the other hand, was created as a stand-alone character and I wanted him to basically be the antithesis of Chanse; in which he had few if not hang-ups, was completely comfortable being a sexually active gay man with a snarky sense of humor covering an incredibly big and kind heart. He didn’t really need to grow much–he usually is the catalyst for other characters’ growth–but as he’s aged, I’ve really enjoyed his journey.

What attracted you to writing mysteries?

I always liked them. As long as I can remember, my two biggest reading passions were history and mystery, with horror/Gothics close behind. I would check anything out of the library with mystery, haunted, ghost, phantom, secret, or clue in the title. Then I discovered the series books–The Three Investigators, Trixie Belden, et al–and after that there was no turning back.

What does being queer/gay/lesbian bring to your story?

I think queer people have the outsider point of view down to an art form because that’s how we see the world–from the margins. The easiest way to critique society, the culture, and how people interact with each other is from a remove–and queer people see all of those things from a remove through no fault of their own. I didn’t have role models when I was growing up, at least to teach me how to be a decent adult gay human being, so I had to learn it all on my own for the most part. I’ve also been confused and mystified by American culture, philosophy, and society, because it wasn’t designed for people like me. When I came out, I was just at sea in the queer world as I always had been in the straight one, and I’ve never forgotten those experiences, either, and they also inform my work.

How do we deal with how the wider world deals with queer characters? Especially in these times?

It can be depressing, which is emotionally and psychologically dangerous. It’s bad enough experiencing homophobia, but then to immerse yourself in it in order to write about it? Even more horrific. Watching Pray Away this weekend made me furious with the ex-gay movement all over again; listening to queer people hating themselves and their desires in order to be at peace with God in some twisted way? But if God is infallible…this is the doctrine Christianity gets hung up on. They think we’re mistakes, but if their God is infallible, He had to have made us perfect and its willful sin or the devil whispering in our ears. This is their incredibly harmful and dangerous rhetoric. If God tests humans, perhaps he made queer people to test the faithful–and they are failing.

But they can never admit to that.

How do you deal with diversity? No author can be everything their characters need to be, how do you handle reflecting the wider world?

I write mostly about New Orleans, and beyond that, mostly the south with occasional forays into other areas of the country–upstate New York, Kansas, California–and you cannot write about a city like New Orleans realistically without having Black characters, period. New Orleans is a majority Black city. You also can’t write about the South without touching on the issues of race and a problematic history. I’ve always included diverse characters in my books. I don’t like to describe skin color, frankly, and most white writers do it in the form of food, which I find unsettling–do you want to eat them? Cinnamon skin, cocoa, cafe au lait, eggplant, dark chocolate, etc.–I’ve seen all of those used to describe skin color and it always makes me recoil because it’s so damned lazy. I don’t think I would ever write from the perspective of a Black character–there are plenty of Black authors who can do that more authentically, and given how most diversity pledges by major publishers also inevitably end up in quotas, I don’t want to take a spot from a Black creator. I do love reading work by racialized authors, but I would never try to write from that perspective.

How do you use setting? What does it bring to the story?

Setting is one of my strengths, I think, so I always use it to enhance my story. I am also very lucky in that I live in New Orleans, where anything can happen on any given day and you can never go too far over the top about anything–if anything, you have to tone things down to be believable. I think setting is important because it tells you so much about the characters–why do they live there, how has it shaped them, did they live somewhere else, how do they deal with the challenges, what annoys them, what do they love–and is an important foundation for your story.

How do your books start—not the book beginning, but the start of the process of writing the book. Where do the ideas come from and how does that coalesce into a book?

It usually is something I find interesting and I think I should write about that. Sometimes the ideas take years to coalesce and come together, sometimes they are immediate. The Scotty books inevitably begin with three disparate things I want to address in one book, and then I have to figure out how to combine them all into a story. The next Scotty’s prompts are evacuation, statute of limitations, and obsession. It’s coming together in my head enough that I think I’ll be able to write it this fall.

Once you’re writing, what’s your process? Outline? Write from start to finish?

I used to outline, but now I kind of have it in my head and then will only go back and outline when I am stuck, so I can see where I went wrong in the manuscript. I always write from beginning to end. I don’t know how people can write backwards! I’ve thought about trying it sometime, though.

What are the hard parts of writing for you? The parts you enjoy?

Definitely the middle. The middle is soul-destroying, and always triggers Imposter Syndrome. I also hate copy edits, but recognize them as a necessary evil.

I love the actual writing and revising and all of that. There’s nothing like putting down a good word count for the day, regardless of how bad those words might be. I think revising is magic: you take garbage and turn it into something terrific.

Which writers influenced you?

All of them, in one way or another. I especially love Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier, and John D. MacDonald. Currently? Alison Gaylin, Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Michael Koryta, Alex Segura, Michael Thomas Ford, S. A. Cosby, Kellye Garrett, and Alafair Burke–there really are so many. I always take something away from everything I read, whether good or bad.

What are you working on now?

Right now I am writing a sequel to Death Drop, in the Killer Queen series. I also have a ton of short stories and novellas in progress, and I already have ideas for the next three or four (or more) books.

Any advice for newer writers?

Keep writing and keep believing in yourself, and keep reading.

Last words of wisdom?

If you want to be a writer, read Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English and Stephen King’s On Writing.

Gotta Travel On

The Ides of April and Tax Day, huzzah. I’ve filed for an extension for mine because I just couldn’t deal with it before, which is kind of childish and more than a little immature; the key word here is avoidance. But I plan to get it all finished this week, God willing and the creek don’t rise. I am going into the office a little later than I usually do, because I have to swing by the Cat Practice to get Sparky’s food on the way to the office. It’s an Admin Day, so not a big deal for me to not be there as early as usual.

I feel rested and good this morning, which is a very pleasant change and surprise. I did go to bed a little early last night, but I spent most of the day writing in my journal, watching documentaries, and later on in the evening we watched more episodes of The Gentlemen. I also finally looked up the name of the star, Theo James, because it was bothering me that I recognized him and couldn’t place him. I am liking it a lot more than I would have thought, frankly; not being a big fan of producer/showrunner Guy Ritchie, but it’s actually quite fun. I also went down some rabbit holes of research yesterday, which is always a lot of fun for me. I also started reading Paul Tremblay’s The Pallbearer’s Club, which I had a little trouble getting into at first, but I remembered having this issue with A Head Full of Ghosts, too–like the latter, he’s playing with form and style and point of view in the former, which is a bit hard to get used to it, so it’s slow going (for me) at first, but as always, there’s such depth and compassion in his writing it’s easy to see why his career has taken off. I’ll try to read some more of it when I get home from work tonight, after I do the day’s writing. I am definitely planning on writing every day now, even if it’s just a little something. I made lots of notes yesterday in my journal, too, which was very cool.

I decided yesterday, when watching a lengthy documentary of LSU football highlights (I was doing this around chores, listening to the documentary while Sparky and Paul slept on the couch) that one of the problems I’ve been facing with writing lately, something I’ve talked about on here a lot, is how I’ve not really been able to focus all of my creative energies on anything that I am writing, but have any number of things in-progress that my mind keeps attention-deficiting between, skittering around between projects and ideas without really landing effectively on anything for long enough to get very far. Yesterday I decided, as I grabbed the journal and hit play on the documentary that I was going to free-form take notes and scribble out ideas as they came to me, regardless of what they were about or for, even if they were entirely new project notes. I did a lot of scribbling, and most of it focused on one project, which really needs to get done by the end of the year, as well as some others I was a bit surprised still were there and fresh in my mind. I also know now that if I rewrite at least three of these short stories drafts that I have on hand, that collection will be complete.

I also found the voice for a new project idea I’ve had in the front of my mind for a while, primarily because we watched those ‘troubled teen cure’ documentaries at the end of the previous week. I had an idea for one set in Kansas, based on a foster home where the kids went to my high school. I didn’t think much of it when I was in high school–other than how much harder those kids had it than the rest of us–and sometime in the years since high school I thought, I could write a crime novel around that story even though it would entirely be fictional and the real place was simply a starting point for my fictionalization. The title came to me this weekend–The Crooked Y–and so that’s definitely moving up the list of “what to write next.”

As you can tell, writing is becoming more important to me and it feels good for my mind to be creating again, even in this current ADHD way, which is so much better than the dry well experience I’ve been having since…well, since Mom died, really. 2023 was a lot of personal trauma; and relentless from January on, which makes it not surprising, I suppose, that my brain has been fallow for so long.

And on that note, I am going to start getting ready to head into the spice mines for the day. Have a great Monday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later.