Tag: Livejournal

Tell Her No

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, and all is well–at least so far, at any rate. I slept super well last night, and Sparky even let me sleep later, which is not his norm. But when he decided enough was enough, enough was enough. Yesterday turned out to be a very needed day of rest after I finished working; I ran my errands and was drained by the time I got home. I did some chores and the laundry, before settling in for some reading as my brain began misfiring again and the tiredness from the week settled in when I walked back into the apartment lugging groceries around four thirty. I settled into my easy chair and read for the rest of the evening, finishing The Demon of Unrest and starting another new non-fiction read (White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones; yes, I am studying the racist history of the country right now), and caught up on Real Housewives (SLC is lit this season, y’all) before going to bed.

Remember a few weeks ago how I finally talked about how sick and tired I was of every form of homophobia, and especially the passive-aggressive bullshit from so-called “friends” and “allies”? Yeah, got one of those comments on here. Fortunately, I have to approve comments (because I do get the occasional homophobic diatribe; I learned the lesson to approve comments with Livejournal over a decade ago), so you’ll never have to see it, but it’s always a jolt. My favorites are always the ones like this morning–couched in language that appeared friendly, but was actually insulting, demeaning, and invalidating me as a human being with lived (and learned) experience. I love when people think their own lived experience as a straight white man is more valid than my own–and their knowledge of my community and its history is vastly superior to mine, despite their never needing to know anything about it and I’ve studied it extensively over the last three decades, but then again–I’m just a faggot in need of a straight person to get my shit together.

It’s always lovely having that kind of shit drop into your inbox first thing in the morning, before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee. This is why I finally had enough a few weeks ago. I’m not putting up with this shit anymore. Sixty-three years of being excluded, made to feel less than, and putting up with all bullshit that comes with being a gay American man born in the second half of the twentieth century. It certainly got my blood pumping this morning, and made me wake up faster than my morning coffee. It’s almost as funny as the lead singer of the Village People claiming that “YMCA” isn’t a gay anthem. Oh, honey, all your songs are gay anthems, and no one needs your permission to say it. The gays made you, the gays made your songs, and the gays kept your songs alive long after their shelf-life had passed, but go ahead and kiss some mango ass, bitch. Don’t let me stop you, by any means.

And if “YMCA” isn’t a gay anthem, it’s only because the community ditched it after it started being played and danced to (by the way, the song is from 1979…) by mediocre, rhythm-less straight white people at sporting events and political rallies. It always amuses me to see your homophobic asses dancing (badly) to a song about cruising other men at the Y. Butt-fucking and blow-jobs, that’s what the song is about. Remember that the next time you decide to stand up and dance at your next sporting event, straight people. At least the MAGA dance to it works, since it looks like the dancer is giving out handjobs with both hands.

And yay, we get to experience another four years of this kind of shit. At least. I don’t know why my sex life–which is no one’s business but my own–bothers so many people; I certainly don’t hold other people’s sex lives against them. It’s also election day here in Louisiana–this is when we have the elections when someone or something didn’t pass outright in the general. I think it’s just amendments to the state constitution, which I am going to have to look up before I walk over and vote. I also suppose I should be grateful that I don’t get more homophobic abuse on here and on-line; which is one of the reasons I never check DM’s on social media and usually will just clear them out in one swoop without looking at them (words of advice: for this reason, direct messaging is literally the worst way to reach me, especially if you need an answer from me right away), but…as I said a few weeks ago, I am not taking it anymore.

This is why I am no longer attending conferences and conventions–this sort of thing, never knowing who you’re going to meet who is a homophobic piece of shit (and there are quite a few of them, spread out over all sub-genres–you know who you are). Until such time (ha ha ha ha) that these events stop allowing and condoning this kind of shit–or not caring that it happens–why would I support them with my money and my paid vacation time? I know, I know, visibility and all that–but I’ve been doing all that for almost fifteen years, and I am tired.

After all, I’ve not been back to Left Coast since that horrible woman was racist and homophobic to me.1

Heavy sigh. I think I am going to get another cup of coffee and will read for a bit. I do have to run errands today–wash the car, pick up the mail, a little bit of groceries–before coming home and getting back to work. I don’t really care about any of the football games today, so I may turn on the SEC title game, or I may not. I don’t really have an interest in who wins it, so why not read, clean, and work during the day rather than watching games? I’m going to barbecue a pork tenderloin later for dinner, which will be nice. It’s sunny outside, but it’s only 48 degrees outside, and the high for the day is fifty-nine. I’m also going to do a German lesson this morning, and try to get a grip on my inbox, and I am also going to try to finish a substack entry this weekend; I have sixteen started (seriously) and they aren’t going to write themselves. I need to get this editing job finished, and I need to get back to work on my Scotty book. I also had breakthroughs on several other books ideas, so I’d like to get some work done so as to lesson the Sisyphean tasks I always have before me.

  1. I can honestly say I never expected to hear the slur terms for biracial in casual conversation, let alone directed at me. Live and learn. And for the record, this is why racism is so insidious; no one is actually safe from it. That experience also made me wonder if sometimes when I am treated badly by service staff, it has to do with racism? Because they think I’m biracial? And for the record, my brain never jumps to bad treatment = homophobia; I just think the person is a dick. But now I have something else to wonder about. ↩︎

Wonderful World

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment and I don’t have to leave the house today if I choose that option. I did take the car in for the oil change (only to discover the car needs about another $1500 in maintenance–it is almost eight years old. The battery needs replacing, I need new tires, etc. etc.etc. Woo-hoo for more debt! I’ll take it back when I figure out how to pay for the rest), and then made groceries on the way home, which I’d originally planned to do this morning. Instead, I am going to stay here, maybe run to the gym a little later, and get some work done. I am going to write today if it kills me–I’ve not written any fiction since before I went to Kentucky, and that needs to stop–and I want to spend a few hours reading this morning, too. I am behind on writing, I am behind on reading, and definitely behind on cleaning the house. It’s been a time since the election, hasn’t it?

This blog is approaching it’s twentieth birthday; yes, I’ve been doing this since December of 2004, only I started on Livejournal, where I stayed for the first twelve years or so before finally ditching the site because of many reasons. I stayed longer than most people; I even got teased originally for still being on the site, which had become déclassé; I still use my AOL email address, too, for that matter–which often is the subject of occasional mockery there, too. I hate gmail, and AOL works for me, so I still use it. Anyway, while I was in Kentucky I realized/remembered, on election night, how old this blog is and how long I’ve been doing it–and how and why it first started. I started reflecting on that, and thinking about it, and when I started censoring the content on it to make it more palatable and less offensive to the people I thought might be reading it. I started writing the blog in the wake of what happened to Paul in the spring of 2004, which derailed everything in my life and started what I call the Time of Troubles. Over the course of more than a year–spanning from Memorial Day through August of 2005–it was literally one blow after another. Paul spent two weeks in the hospital after that Memorial Day, and my primary focus in life became taking care of him, and making sure he was okay. I postponed finishing Mardi Gras Mambo for over a year, and was too damaged and laser-focused on dealing with the aftermath and being there for him that I stopped writing entirely.

People were very kind to me during that time, to us both, actually, and extended book deadlines and so forth were enormously helpful. Paul and I didn’t really venture out much from our cocoon, other than going to work and the gym (me) and running errands. Paul focused on his job, and I focused mostly on my editorial work as I couldn’t write fiction. I wasn’t really in a place to write a funny Scotty book, and by December of that year I was already getting to the point where I was worried if I could continue writing. I had dinner and drinks with a writer friend in early December who actually had a great blog that I read every morning, and he recommended that I try writing a blog, just writing the things that I was thinking about or experiencing, to get back into the habit of writing every day. I scoffed, “who would ever read such a thing?” and he replied, “You’re not doing it for other people, you’re doing it for yourself” and that kind of became the blog mantra: it’s really just for me, to talk about things that are going on, my perspective on things no one would ever pay me to write about or have an opinion on but did want to write about and have an opinion on. It was kind of a diary for me at first, and I wrote about things I was interested in–like figure skating and football and New Orleans life–and it was something I enjoyed. I was really getting into the swing of it when the next “trouble” came along–what I call the “Virginia thing.” And of course, later that year, we had Hurricane Katrina, and I blogged about my anger; how cruel people could be (Republicans, it’s always Republicans) and I was defiant. We’d just gone through an election earlier that year in which the Republicans’ entire campaign centered the evils of same-sex marriage, with all the expected homophobia and cruelty they’ve perfected. (This is who they’ve always been, and the cruelty is nothing new.)

I started dialing back on talking about politics and homophobia and the world a lot after I started working full-time for a non-profit, and started volunteering and serving on others having to do with writers’ groups. I didn’t want anything I said to affect negatively on either where I was working or any place I was volunteering; the rules on what we could do or say or talk about at work were very strict, and while we were always allowed to have personal lives and opinions, I thought why take the chance? It‘s an HIV/AIDS non-profit, and we’re in Louisiana, and it won’t take much to set off some evangelical idiot outside of New Orleans and make them target our funding or our non-profit status so I stopped. I’m a gay man; everyone should know what my politics and values are and what political party comes closest to working for the world I want to live in.

But when I was in Kentucky, I started thinking about these things again. I no longer do volunteer work for writers’ organizations and/or events. My day job is no longer a red flag to Louisiana conservatives–we’re no longer the NO/AID Task Force, and we have an even more innocuous name now that sets off no alarms. We also no longer merely focus on gay men; we are open to everyone up on the third floor (my department primarily still works with my community–people at risk for HIV infection) and so I don’t think I need to concern myself about doing or saying anything that might trigger the Louisiana Fascist Party. I’m free to be myself again on here, and I am very opinionated. I know my blog and Substack have picked up a lot of new readers since I ran out of fucks. I don’t know if I am actually making people think, or if people are coming here to watch what they think is me having a very public mental breakdown so they can point and laugh. I’m not, for the record. I’m not even angry or hurt. I’m just fed up, and tired of letting people get away with this shit. You’re either an ally or not, but I don’t think most people know what that actually means. And when you make it clear to me that you’re not, that you actually think people like me are gross or repulsive or whatever demeaning default your privilege allows you to fall back on–why on earth would you think I like you and want to be around you? Someone dares to call out the entire community, so he’s clearly having some sort of mental break? Yeah, that’s it. That puts it on me so y’all can sleep better at night, right? Whatever.

And yes, I know when I write about these things I write passionately and emotionally. The hurt has long ago passed–I dealt with those feelings when the things actually happened, you know1? Sure, my anger and hurt comes out when I do, because I am reliving the experience in order to write it about it properly. If I wrote about it when it happened, it would be even more raw and painful and expletive filled than what you’ve been reading this past week. This is me, after the fact, recounting horrible experiences far more calmly now than I might have at the time. Think about it–this is me being calm and rational about being demeaned and dehumanized.

I also do want to thank everyone for not gaslighting me this past week, either–for not pulling some “#notallstraightmen #notallstraightwhitewomen” shit on me. I spoke in generalities despite knowing that nothing is a monolith. There are some good straight people out there, and there are some amazing straight white women. I do have friends in this community, people I love and would take a bullet for. My friends, the people I actually really know and love and trust? I would do anything for, and they also knew I wasn’t talking about them. One of my most dogged, OCD-like tendencies is absolute devotion to the people I love. I will always come to their defense, I will not allow anyone to treat them badly, and I will fucking come for you if you make the mistake of coming for them. They also know who they are. That devotion over the years has worn out in some cases–but I always remember people who were kind to me, helped me in any way, or ever did something for me without being asked.

I’ve primarily written about all of this to begin with for two reasons: so people won’t ask me about going to conferences any more, and to let everyone know about my experience so you won’t allow people to pull this shit with the other queer crime writers. The fact this stuff still happens–look at how surprised people are at these revelations I’ve been making–in this day and age has me concerned for the queer crime writers. They are all feeling despondent, betrayed, and more than a little scared about what MAGA has up their sleeves for queer people and their art, and their futures. Christian Germany murdered twelve million people for being different, after all, and set the world on fire.

And you wonder why we are so concerned about people who hate us in the name of religion being in control here? We see good little Germans everywhere, the news media capitulated in advance, and it looks like the entire government is falling into lockstep. Nazis now feel empowered to go out in public with swastika flags in progressive cities. Nazis targeted Communists–what have Republicans been calling Democrats since the 1930’s? Communists. We also know straight people will abandon us to save themselves 999 times out of 1000. Sad, but true and even a little understandable. Who is willing to put themselves and their families in danger for strangers? Not many.

That’s why we ironically celebrate heroes who take stands against inhumanity. Because they are rare.

Paul walked to Walgreens for a prescription yesterday, and then had to go to the corner liquor store at Jackson Avenue for cigarettes. I’ve gone there myself for things like bread and milk when I didn’t feel like driving anywhere. It was a nice store, owned and operated by a Pakistani family. Always clean, neat, and organized; the family members who worked there always fell over themselves to be polite, friendly, and courteous. I generally don’t like to go into liquor stores in New Orleans for any number of reasons, so I don’t. You can literally buy liquor at gas stations here, and the grocery stores (which used to have bars in them here); pretty much anywhere that sells anything sells liquor so you don’t need to go to a liquor store here. When he got back, he said, “Have you noticed that since the election bro culture is back on the rise? Loud, obnoxious bros, everywhere. I guess the Pakistani family sold the liquor store, because there was a bro working there–and you know he’s not checking anyone’s IDs. I guess they sold the business and got out. I hope they got good money because that’s a prime location.”

GREG: I hope they sold the business. We don’t know that for sure, do we?

We just looked at each other grimly for a few moments.

Over dramatic? Maybe. I’d certainly like to think so, but as my mother used to say, “You can never go wrong imagining the worst.”

I don’t speak for my entire community; I certainly don’t speak for Paul. My experiences are my experiences, and no demographic is a monolith. There are MAGA queers, for example, and they are even worse than the inbred mouth-breathers we usually think of when we think MAGA–who clearly have a humiliation fetish. I always wonder if the Log Cabins shoot a load into their shorts every time they are barred from some Republican/conservative conclave, or if straight men start dripping when they make queer jokes. I will never cease laughing at the arrogance of straight men who think every gay man is out here trying to get into their pants.

Louder, for those in the back: just because straight women settle, doesn’t mean gay men will. There’s always a hotter gay man than any straight man I’ve ever seen. The reason you straight men go to the gym now and get in better shape than straight men ever have been before in history is entirely because of gay men. Calvin Klein did more for male body culture with his advertisements than Charles Atlas ever did with the cartoon ads in comic books–remember those? “Hey, you kicked sand in my face!”

Funny how Charles Atlas advertised getting big and strong as a way to stand up to bullies, isn’t it? Male insecurity and not being manly enough?

And there is the opening to my essay about being a man. Well done, blog!

I also want to give a shout out to the Crime Writers of Color, who have always been amazing and supportive of this tired old white queen. Kellye Garrett is a national treasure who should be protected at all costs. You fuck with her at your own peril, do you hear me?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to make a to-do list, and I need to write and read and do chores.

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  1. And it doesn’t even hurt that much anymore in the moment, either. Ultimately, I am rarely surprised when those who should know better don’t. I do get caught off guard sometimes, but after the initial shock it’s more of a world-weary are you really surprised? ↩︎

You Are Everything

Tuesday morning and trying to get awake fully; my mind is awake and my body is, but I still feel a bit groggy. I slept well, which was absolutely lovely, and am sitting here swilling coffee and getting mentally prepared to face the day. I have to run errands tonight after work (prescriptions, mail, gym), and then I am going to come home and just chill for the evening, maybe do a little writing. I didn’t do any last night, because I wanted to watch the regional final (LSU lost in extra innings to the fourth ranked team in the country and could have won), after which I didn’t do much of anything just puttered around the kitchen doing chores until it was time for bed.

The LSU loss was disappointing, of course, but the Tigers made a helluva run in the post season. Just three weeks ago, no one thought they’d even make the post season, let alone get to a regional final. But then they had their amazing run in the SEC tournament, eliminating top ten teams left and right before giving Tennessee a run for their money in the final. So, well done, guys! Sure, another world series run would have been fun this year, but not having one does in no way diminish or undermine how magical last season was, or make it any less wonderful to remember. GEAUX TIGERS, and we’ll see you again next spring….and now it’s time to start gearing up for football season, which isn’t that far off. Woo-hoo!

I’ve been posting my Gay Moments in Greg’s Life entries, which has been kind of fun doing. Right now, I have several drafts in progress about dancing in gay bars, circuit parties, and body culture–which all will be interesting to write–and of course at some point I will probably write about HIV/AIDS. I enjoyed writing my Pride entry and the ones about The Other and Starsky and Hutch; probably will do Robby Benson, Playgirl, and Gordon Merrick at some point, too. I also will probably do some others, but right now I can’t think of what they might be. I’ve also started posting these longer form posts to Substack, too–if you’re reading them here, I don’t imagine there’s any need to read them there–but I think I need to start building up things; I don’t know if social media numbers or Substack followers or anything like that will matter in the long run in publishing. No one ever really knows what publishers are looking for or want; their criteria is ever changing but what isn’t is that the accountants also have their thumb on the scale. It is to my everlasting disappointment that my career started right when the industry began to substantially change from what it had been since the Depression to the disheveled mess it is now. At any rate, I think Substack is the place for me to post my personal essays, which is much easier than trying to find a place to publish any of them. Set a goal of perhaps one per week after the Great Moments in Greg’s Gay Life, or my pride celebratory posts are completed.

Something to consider, any way.

I know Substack is evil, but isn’t everything nowadays? The glory days of social media are, I think, finally past us; Twitter (fuck you, Musk) and Facebook aren’t nearly as much fun as they were over a decade ago, and kind of feel like some pointless obligation and reflex activity that really isn’t what’s cracked up to be anymore. It never really was, to be honest, and it was a horrible waste of time more than anything else, really. It also creates a bizarre illusory reality that bares no resemblance to real life. How many times have I been excited to meet someone because we’ve had a lot of fun interactions on-line, only for them to be like “who are you?” I noticed this early on, back in the days of Livejournal’s heyday when everyone blogged (and here I am, twenty years later–this blog will turn 20 on 12/26/24); you don’t really know someone from on-line social media interactions, and you’re certainly not friends. Needless to say, it was a learning experience (I never have really understood friendship, in all honesty; what I think it is clearly is not what other people think it is, and maybe that’s a me problem–which is why I always have so many walls I can withdraw behind, so many masks I can slip on; when you grow up queer in a homophobic society, you develop lots of coping mechanisms), and I always now just say “we know each other on-line” instead of “oh I love her! We’re friends”.

Now that social media has turned into what it is, I am not on it as much and…I don’t really miss it? And it’s very noticeable how much time I used to waste on it.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Hope you have a lovely Tuesday and who knows? I may be back later.

The All American Boy

I was a bit productive last night after work. I got off later than usual–after five–and we’d been busy all day as well, which was lovely. We’ve not seen that many people in a day in quite some time, and I’d forgotten what that felt like. I chose to take the highway home again after work, and it wasn’t terrible, to be honest. Yes, the ramp to 90/Westbank was backed up as always, and so was the twin spans over the river, but it was better than driving through the city and dealing with all the idiots and stupidity–which I was definitely not in the mood for. I came home, hung out with Sparky for a while, and then started working. I finished a load of laundry and started another. I emptied the dishwasher and refilled it. I cleaned off my desk and filed stuff (I really need to get the overall organization in this corner revamped, revised, and made more efficient and less clutter-prone). I have a meeting this morning on-line, after which I will do my work-at-home duties and do some writing. I was going to run some errands later, but I think they can keep until tomorrow, as I’d rather be around here all day and get things done. It’s a good plan, at any rate. We’ll see how well I obey those dictates.

I also slept well before Sparky decided it was time for me to get up and feed him. I went back to bed, and then of course that started his passive/aggressive ways of getting me up. I do like having a cat alarm–I’d missed that in our cat-free months last year. Sparky still has a lot of extra energy, but I like that about him, and I like that he has his own way of being affectionate. Such a completely different kind of cat personality than Scooter, but all cats are different and getting to know them is part of the joy of having one.

Mmmm, my coffee is quite marvelous tasting this morning.

I was checking my blog drafts page and was stunned to see how many drafts of entries I’ve started and not completed; several books, movies, and topics I wanted to write about, and of course, I need to either finish them or abandon and delete them. Some were kind of similar and started months (years) apart, so I need to get that figured out, and I really should finish writing about the things I started writing about. It was also startling to see that now my blog has become like everything else I write about–drafts and ideas and notes that aren’t completed. Heavy heaving sigh. In the olden days of live journal, I never did this; I always finished every entry I started (probably because I didn’t know whether you could save unfinished drafts there; I discovered the feature when I moved it over here). As a completionist, you can imagine how much this gets under my skin. I’m trying not to let it bother me, but it’s not working so far.

Sigh.

It’s been a weird week, really. I lost my respect for some people–looking at you, Dwayne Johnson, but I always preferred John Cena anyway, and turns out he’s an actual ally–and my concerns and worries about the decline in freedom for everyone (except straight white cisgender men) and the establishment of the 4th Reich in this country, depending on how the election turns out this fall. All of us who tried to warn you back in 2016 (and earlier, in my case) were 100% right about everything, so by all means don’t listen to us again now. I don’t understand the nihilistic mentality of voting third party to “teach us a lesson about progressive purity”–but it’s usually people too young to understand (and they don’t want to understand) how everything works. The irony that they think the Constitution and the system will protect them from a right-wing autocracy is so misinformed to the point of willful ignorance shows me, at any rate, why they shouldn’t be taken seriously or listened to. Back in 2016 I worked with two young cisgender white girls who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary because “she didn’t leave her husband for cheating on her” and “she’s corrupt and gross.” How does your loss of reproductive freedom feel, you willfully ignorant bitches? Thank God you proved your feminist and progressive purity! I, for one, will never forgive anyone who refused to see the danger we were facing in 2016, and I especially will never forgive people who mocked me for my concerns. Hope you need an abortion this year, bitches.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last decade or so about the art v. the artist; the first time I think I heard about this was the issue of H. P. Lovecraft’s deeply rooted racism in the speculative fiction community. I’ve not read much Lovecraft, if any, and that was something I felt I was missing in my education in speculative fiction, and probably why I never really have thought of myself as a specfic writer–I’d never read Lovecraft, and hadn’t reread or revisited Poe since high school. I still intend to at some point–thank you, Project Gutenberg, so I didn’t have to pay for them–but that will certainly effect my opinions whenever I can bring myself to read some of the stories. I used to read things all the time when I was growing up and throughout my adult life that don’t hold up now on rereads that went right past me on the first read because that was how things were in society and the culture at the time. I loved Gone with the Wind, both book and film, for decades before I began to realize how incredibly problematic both were. I keep meaning to go back and read it again now, but I don’t know that I can handle the idyllic portrait it paints of the old South, the war, and Reconstruction. (By the way, you know those white lady Trumpers? They are in this book as the ladies of Atlanta, and saintly Melanie was the worst of them…although a retelling as a Real Housewives of Reconstruction would be interesting. I know a Black writer retold the story from the perspective of a biracial half-sister of Scarlett’s, which I’ve always wanted to read.) Even Margaret Mitchell herself has some issues with the movie’s depiction of Tara because, in her words, it was a “working farm.”

The reason I am bringing this up is because the Chatelaine of Castle TERF showed her flat ass again this week. I did read the Harry Potter series and I did see all the movies, and I did enjoy them, even if I never had any desire to revisit them. The longer the series went on, the worse the books got, in my opinion, longer and more convoluted the stories got and she often never wrapped up anything; there were a lot of subplot false starts that looked promising that she abandoned. There was veiled anti-Semitism and fatphobia in the books that I marked as I read them as well as in the movies–straight from her hard drive. There were no queer people in her books until she retconned Dumbledore long after the fact–something all queer people should have been so fucking grateful for that we (in her mind) should have fallen on our knees in front of her and kissed the hems of her skirts for all eternity. She is the perfect example of how money corrupts weak minds. This week her TERFdom showed itself in announcing she would never accept apologies from Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe for daring not to agree with her hateful stance against transpeople, that she veils in worries about bathroom/changing room rapes…which basically comes from her assumption that all men want to do is rape women, to the point they’ll pretend they have gender dysmorphia merely to gain access to women only spaces for ease of rape/sexual assault. That’s kind of anti-male misogyny on top of the transphobia. All men are rapists, transwomen are actually men, and therefore all transwomen are rapists…and her wealth, like Elon Musk’s, have convinced her somehow that she is special and therefore her opinions have more value and weight than anyone else’s. Seriously TERF Queen, I am so sorry you had the entire world at your feet and your dark and twisted soul made you Housemaster of Slytherin and Voldermort’s mistress. I take a lot of pleasure in knowing how miserable your money and success have made you…and that you’ve decided the message of your Harry Potter series–everyone is equal, no one is better than anyone else and love is the key–was as phony as she is.

So, yes, it’s hard for me to enjoy art when I know the artist is a horrible person. And I don’t have to consume or pay for their art, just as I wouldn’t expect people who don’t like my values and beliefs to buy and consume mine.

Whew! I think I better get going on my day–this turned out longer than intended! Have a great Friday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. Stranger things have happened on a Friday!

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad

Ah, Third Chanse.

If you will recall from my last entry about the Chanse series, I had a new editor for the second book in the series. I had also written a proposal for the follow-up, Murder in the Rue St. Claude, which was going to be about a nursing home and an angel of death. The second book ended with a tragedy for Chanse, and the last scene of the book was Chanse saying goodbye to someone before their life-support was turned off. I did a trickery and was going to have the person be in the nursing home, still living, only a suspicious death happens there and one of the workers talks to Chanse about her fears. The editor wasn’t the most professional or organized person, and I had to send the proposal to her three times on request with no contract offer. I was very irritated by this, but there were also a lot of changes going on there–including moving the offices from LA to New York, which I thought was an incredibly stupid business decision…and I wound up with yet another new editor right before Katrina hit. I honestly wasn’t sure if I would go back to writing ever again–one of the lulls in my career–but things eventually settled down and I started house sitting for a friend in Hammond over on the north shore while I waited for the city to reopen so I could drive into the city and get some more things from the house. I did, my friends’ trip was cut short, and I was going to return to Kentucky to my parents’ after one more swing by the apartment to pick up things. Imagine my surprise that my mail service was open, my grocery store and bank were open, and so was my gym. We’d moved into the main house from the carriage house, which hadn’t been rented yet as it needed some work before the hurricane, and so….I just moved back into the carriage house and cleaned up around the property and kept an eye on the main house, as well as emptying out the water from the machines that were trying to keep the insides of the apartments dry (the roof was gone).

While I was in Hammond, my new editor got me to reluctantly co-edit an anthology about New Orleans called Love, Bourbon Street (a title I hate to this day), and he was trying to talk me into writing a Chanse book about Katrina. I didn’t really want to, but he kept insisting and finally, I gave in and agreed to write it. However, the nursing home I was researching was a place they left people to die in–wasn’t touching that with a ten foot pole–and it occurred to me that I could wrap the case around Hurricane Katrina. He was hired by the client the Friday before Katrina, and obviously he couldn’t do the job now.

And that was the seed from which Murder in the Rue Chartres (no title at the time of contract) grew.1

This is the original cover from Alyson Books.
This is the new cover for the Bold Strokes ebook

It was six weeks before I returned to my broken city.

Usually when I drove home from the west, as soon as I crossed onto dry land again in Kenner, excitement would bubble up inside and I’d start to smile. Almost home, I’d think, and let out a sigh of relief. New Orleans was home for me, and I hated leaving for any reason. I’d never regretted moving there after graduating from LSU. It was the first place I’d ever felt at home, like I belonged. I’d hated the little town in east Texas where I’d grown up. All I could think about was getting old enough to escape. Baton Rouge for college had been merely a way station—it never occurred to me to permanently settle there. New Orleans was where I belonged, and I’d known that the first time I’d ever set foot in the city. It was a crazy quilt of eccentricities, frivolities, and irritations sweltering in the damp heat, a city where you could buy a drink at any time of day, a place where you could easily believe in magic. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Any time I’d taken a trip before, within a few days I’d get homesick and started counting the hours until it was time to come home.

But this time wasn’t like the others. This time, I hadn’t been able to come home, and had no idea how long it would be before I could. Now, I was nervous, my stomach clenched into knots, my palms sweating on the steering wheel as I sang along to Vicki Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around” on the radio. It was everything I’d feared for the last few weeks when I thought about coming home, the anxiety building as the odometer clocked off another mile and I got closer to home.

It was different.

The most obvious thing was the lack of traffic. Even outside the airport, the traffic was usually heavy, sometimes slowing to a complete standstill. But other than a couple of military vehicles, a cement mixer, and a couple of dirty and tired looking sedans, I-10 was deserted. There was a film of dirt on everything as far as I could see, tinting my vision sepia. Huge trees lay toppled and debris was everywhere. Signs that used to advertise hotels, motels, restaurants, storage facilities, and pretty much any kind of business you could think of were now just poles, the signs gone except for the support skeleton. Buildings had been blown over, fences were wrecked and down, and almost everywhere I looked blue tarps hung on roofs, their edges lifting in the slight breeze. My breath started coming a little faster, my eyes filled, and I bit down on my lower lip as I focused back on the road.

No cars joined at the airport on-ramp, or the one at Williams Boulevard just beyond it. No planes were landing or taking off.

Most of the writing I did in the fall of 2005 was my blog, which at the time was on Livejournal. (The old stuff is still there, but I started making things private after a year because of plagiarism; I guess people thought they could steal my words if they were on a blog.) I documented as much of the experience as I could, so people outside of Louisiana could see that the city wasn’t fully recovered despite no longer being in the news. American attention had moved past New Orleans by the spring of 2006.

When I started writing the book, I was really glad I had done that with the blog, because more than anything else it reminded me of the emotions I was going through, that horrible depression and not remembering things from day to day, the need for medications, panic attacks, depression, and the way the entire city just seemed dead. I did repurpose a lot of stuff that was on the blog–rewritten and edited, of course–and I could tell, as I wrote the book, that I was either doing some of the best work of my life to that point or I was overwriting it mercilessly. You never can be sure.

But I also needed to flesh out the murder mystery I came up with, and I also wanted to write about a historical real life tragedy of the Quarter. The client who hired him that Friday before Katrina roared into the Gulf and came ashore was engaged, and she wanted Chanse to find her father, who’d disappeared from their lives when she and her brothers were very young. But what happened to her father? Who killed her, and why? Was her murder a reaction to her looking for him?

I had started using Tennessee Williams quotes to open my New Orleans novels with the third (Jackson Square Jazz: “A good looking boy like you is always wanted” from Orpheus Descending) and I liked the conceit so much I kept doing it. I knew someone who’d built a crime novel around the basic set up of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I thought, what if the person who knows all the answers has been in a mental hospital for decades? Then what if Mrs. Venable had succeeded in getting Catherine locked up with all of Sebastian’s secrets lobotomized out of her head?

I named the family Verlaine as a nod to the Venables, and aged Mrs. Venable as well as gender swapping her (this was also a bit influenced by The Big Sleep), and I was off to the races.

My editor wrote me when he finished reading the manuscript and told me it was one of the best mysteries he’d ever read. The reviews! My word, I still can’t believe the reviews, and how good they were. I got a rave in the Times-Picayune, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

And yes, it won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery.

  1. The irony that two books I wanted nothing to do with, let alone write or edit, ended up with each winning Lambda Literary Awards, does not escape me. ↩︎

Sweet Time

And it’s New Year’s Eve.

I slept well last night but my blankets were all tangled up this morning, indicating the sleep was more restless than it has been for weeks. I also wasn’t in the mood to write my blog when I first woke up, so I decided to read, drink my coffee, and maybe have some breakfast before getting cleaned up. I usually write this over my morning coffee, and since I don’t reread or re-edit once it’s written, that could explain the run-on sentences, word repetitions, and occasional poor grammar no one ever points out to me. This blog began nineteen years ago (!!!) on Livejournal (the anniversary was 12/26), migrated over here in about 2016 or so, and still somehow keeps chugging along. It always surprises me that people read it, to be honest. It was always meant mainly for me, and was originally intended as a daily exercise to get me writing again. I guess it worked. When I started I had published four novels, a few anthologies, and some short stories. Nineteen years later, I’ve way surpassed that total, despite some fallow years in which I produced nothing.

I did some more picking up around here yesterday while watching football games. It was fun watching Mississippi beat Penn State, and don’t even get me started on the Florida State-Georgia game. I get the disappointment at not making the play-offs, but you also knew you were scheduled to play Georgia, another team disappointed in not making the play-offs, but instead of showing everyone that the committee was wrong and showing up to beat Georgia…and Georgia also had star players injured and over a dozen opting out and even more entering the transfer portal. This would have been a play-off game had either Auburn or Georgia beaten Alabama this year, but that’s how things go. Auburn went 13-0 in 2004 and wasn’t invited to the BCS title game. You don’t always get what you want in life or sport, and the question is how you handle that. If this was going to be the case, don’t accept the damned bowl bid. Your fans spent a lot of money to go to that game, and it was incredibly disrespectful to the team, the fanbase, and the university to show up and get embarrassed like that. After Coach O was fired in 2021, LSU went to its bowl game with 39 scholarship players and got trounced by Kansas State….but how does it appear in the record books? KSU 42, LSU 21. Twenty years from now when people look back at the history of college football and bowl games, it will read Georgia 63, Florida State 3. It’s a program and culture problem, and all the FSU fans apologizing for this disgraceful beating–do you quit when you don’t get a raise or promotion you worked hard for and feel like you deserved? The word for that is quitter…and for the record, Georgia played it’s back-ups, walk-ons and so forth in the second half and still beat your ass 21-0.

And if LSU went 12-0 and didn’t get picked for the play-offs…and pulled the same shit? Sure, I’d be angry about the play-offs but I’d also call out the Tigers for embarrassing the state and the university that way.

I’m really enjoying Danielle Arsenault’s Glory Be, and am savoring every word. What a fresh and unique voice! I have to say I am so glad I realized I needed to be better about my reading choices and should read more diverse writers. It’s been a great education for me as a reader, a writer, a person and a citizen. I’m still learning how to be better about race and gender and gender identity and sexuality; and I strongly encourage other readers to do the same. Crime fiction is so much stronger and healthier when it represents everyone, I think, and while I don’t consider reading diverse writers to be the total education I need on any social issues facing the country–I need to read more non-fiction and theory.

I rewatched The Birds yesterday after the football games, and it was pretty much as I remembered it. I’d only seen it twice before; originally as a child edited for television, when it frightened me so badly that I had nightmares (I was prone to them growing up) and for years could never see crows on a jungle gym or a wire without feeling uneasy and then again as a rental in college after I’d read the short story again and wanted to see how faithful the film was to the story. I didn’t care as much for it the second time around–the acting is really terrible and so is the script–but the suspenseful parts still held up and were scary. This third time around confirmed my second viewing; and I noticed some other flaws in the picture. Rod Taylor’s mother isn’t much older than he is, and why is there about a thirty year age gap between him and his sister? I think the short story is better than the film, but I can also see why people like it. I do consider it one of Hitchcock’s lesser films.

Since tomorrow is a day for thinking ahead and coming up with some goals for the new year, I suppose today should be a recap of sorts of this past year. It was, as I mentioned in a previous entry, a rather up-and-down rollercoaster of highs and lows with very little level ground in the middle. The recognition of mainstream award nominations for my work–even queer work–was a delightful surprise this past year. But even more important than that is I think my work is getting better. I had felt, some years ago, that my writing was becoming stale and that I wasn’t growing as a writer anymore; I’d become stagnant and that was one of my biggest fears. I wound up deciding to take some time away from writing books on deadline and write things just for me, things that I wanted to write but also wanted to take the time to do correctly. It was during this time that I worked on both #shedeservedit and Bury Me in Shadows in early drafts, and also started the novellas and working more intently on my short stories. I accepted the challenge of writing stories to themed anthologies, and produced some terrific ones of which I am really proud. When I dove back into series work with Royal Street Reveillon, I wanted to write something non-formulaic for the Scotty series. I also wanted to shake things up with Scotty a bit, as the series was getting a bit too comfortable and safe for me. Royal Street Reveillon certainly was neither comfortable nor safe, and neither was Mississippi River Mischief.

Bury Me in Shadows was not easy for me to write. When I went back to the book after setting it aside for awhile, I realized several things: I couldn’t ignore race and racism, I had to address the Lost Cause narrative, and I also had realized while doing more reading and research that the stories my paternal grandmother used to tell me about the Civil War and Alabama and the family were apocryphal stories you can turn up about almost everywhere in the rural South. The book wasn’t working, in fact, because I was trying to elide those issues because I was afraid of doing it wrong…so it pushed me to do better. And actually addressing those issues made the book easier to write. The same thing was true of #shedeservedit; I’d been working on this book in one form or another since I actually lived in Kansas. But again, I realized when I went back to it that what I was doing didn’t work because I wasn’t going there with toxic masculinity and rape culture because it wasn’t personal enough for my main character, and so I bit the bullet and made it more personal for him. It dredged up a lot of memories, some of them painful, but it also made the book better and stronger. I had been wanting to write a cozy for the longest time, and decided to try it for something different and new–and that became A Streetcar Named Murder. I was also very pleased with it, even though the deadline and the turnaround on it was a bit insane…but I still managed to take my time and turned it into something I was proud of when I got the final author copies.

My two releases of this year–Death Drop and Mississippi River Mischief–are also books of which I feel proud. I also published three terrific short stories this year: “Solace in a Dying Hour” in This Fresh Hell; “The Ditch” in School of Hard Knox; and “The Rosary of Broken Promises” in Dancing in the Shadows.

I think I’m settling finally into an acceptance that I am pretty good at what I do. I may not have the master’s or PhD in creative writing or literature of any kind; but I’ve never really wanted to be an academic writer. I never wanted to be Faulkner, but Faulkner did inspire me to interconnect novels and stories in my own fictional world (also Stephen King). I would like to do some non-fiction studies of genre and writers I enjoy, but in an accessible rather than academic way. Academics used to make me feel stupid and uneducated, and I also used to envy those writers who had that kind of background because I felt it made their work stronger than mine, or gave them insights into writing and building a novel that I’d never had, which made me and my work somehow lesser. But that wasn’t on them; that was on me. I was the one who felt inferior and lesser, not talented or good enough. That chip was on my shoulder and I was the one who put it there. My peers actually consider me a peer, and newer writers look at my longevity and my CV and are impressed by the prodigious output, if nothing else. I used to think all the award nominations were kind of hollow because I so rarely won; which was incredibly ungracious because some writers are never nominated for anything…but it doesn’t mean their work isn’t good. Now, I just find myself grateful to make a short-list of five out of all the possibilities for that slot, you know? I’m lucky, and I’m blessed.

I’ve reflected a lot on my life and my career this past year–Mom’s death had something to do with that–and I’ve identified, in many cases, why I am the way am by remembering the event that triggered the response in my brain of “okay, never want to experience that again” which led to so many self-toxic and self-defeating behaviors. But the bottom line of it all is I’ve finally accepted myself for who I am, have determined to stop self-deprecating, and take some pride in myself and my career and my life. I know the most amazing people and have the most incredible friends. I have a day job where I make a difference in people’s lives. I have an awesome life-partner, an enviable writing career, and I get to live in New Orleans.

Not bad, right?

Mickey

Friday morning work-at-home blog, and the weather is supposed to get more back to normal for this time of year—highs during the day anywhere from the lower 70s to the mid 80s, dropping to the 60’s at night. It makes it even harder to get out of bed in the chill of the morning–and my blankets are incredibly warm and comfortable, as is the bed. But li’l Tug expects to get fed every morning around six (and is more than happy to let me know six is nigh by leaping over Paul and landing on me, before curling up next to my head while waiting patiently for me to get up and feed him and give him fresh water), which is going to make the time change this weekend a bit irritating. I also hate going to work and coming home in the dark, which is also soul-destroying because you feel like you’ve lost the entire day at the office.

But I slept well last night and let myself go back to sleep after the daily six a.m. feed-me Tug attack, which felt great. There’s a mail run to do and Tug’s first vet visit to fit into the day, and we’re going to Costco after I finish my work at home chores later. The constant, on-going kitten-proofing of the apartment can also prove challenging because you never know what’s going to catch his inquisitive must-play-with-that eye, and he is very curious and adventurous about anything. Cabinets can’t be left open. He’ll climb into the dishwasher as I am loading it–but no curiosity about the dryer yet. He’s also fascinated by water, like Skittle was–but the shower was uninteresting to him; not the case with Tug. He’ll tightrope around the rim of the tub while I’m showering and also walk between the shower curtain and the liner. He’s adorable and completely in charge around here, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

And I love having a purring kitty donut sleeping in my lap while I watch television or read.

Last night we watched this week’s The Morning Show, which absolutely felt like a season finale; I’m not sure if it was or not but it felt like it. I wasn’t super-tired when I got home, but Tug was especially needy so I repaired to my easy chair where I watched this week’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–which was kind of dull; but the fun of watching these shows is watching and reading the reactions of the fans and the recaps and so forth. I was thinking yesterday that these shows create community within their fans, as people want to talk about the cast and what’s going on with them, happily judging their lives, their behavior, their clothes, their make-up, their hair, their homes and their families. I was thinking this was unique to reality shows–remembering how everyone used to talk about Survivor and The Bachelor and American Idol back in the day, similar to how soaps would have group watches on campus where everyone talked about the storylines and the characters and their interactions. But we also did that with Glee and Lost and Desperate Housewives and various other shows. I do wonder what is it about film and television that drives people with the urge and need to talk about it with other people?

Then again, I always wanted to talk about books with other people–so I guess I can get it.

I was realizing the other day that this year in December will mark nineteen years of this blog–first on Livejournal and then moved here when I’d finally had enough of the Russian propaganda and spam over there–which is a longer commitment than most straight relationships and marriages, which is an interesting way to look at it. I started keeping it around Christmas of 2004, while we were still living in the carriage house–we wouldn’t move into the main house until June or July 2005; only to be moved back into the carriage house by Hurricane Katrina later that year. It’s also hard to believe sometimes that Katrina–and the Incident with Paul–was so long ago now; just like the Virginia Incident was a long time ago. Time inevitably passes, and just going through your every day routine living your life as best you can one morning you realize a lot of time has passed. The pandemic shutdown was almost four years ago, for fuck’s sake. We are now in year three going on year four of the COVID-19 pandemic, although no one really talks about it anymore. I am going to write about that whole experience at some point–there are at least three more Scotty books I want and/or need to write, which will take New Orleans through the cursed Carnival of 2020 (and the Hard Rock hotel collapse) and the shutdown and then afterwards. I think that’s been part of the creative malaise lately; knowing that the Scotty series, about to debut its ninth volume, is finally winding down. There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to avoid with these books but with the series continually going, I don’t have a choice. Scotty’s grandparents are all in their nineties by now–so death is going to have to come to the family. On the page or off the page? I do think it might be interesting to explore the Bradley side of the family a bit more; perhaps the death of the Bradley grandparents and a struggle over the will or something could be the basis for a book; perhaps COVID-19 might claim them, I don’t know. But I know I’ve not written about the shutdown or the pandemic, and it feels kind of cowardly to not address it in fiction yet.

Maybe I should finish that pandemic short story I started, “The Flagellants.”

I’m also thinking about getting blinds for the kitchen windows at long last; a do-it-yourself project I think I can handle.

And on that note, I’m getting another cup of coffee and heading into the spice mines. Y’all have a great Friday, and I’ll be back later with more blatant self-promotion.

Theft, and Wandering Around Lost

Work at home Friday!

Not that I mind going to the office, of course, but I love working at home on Fridays because I don’t have to get up early. Although that hasn’t been much of a problem this week, in all honesty; I’ve not had to force myself out of bed one morning this week, not have I dragged and been tired all morning. I’ve slept well every night this week (probably just jinxed it) which has made a significant difference. I think perhaps my theory yesterday–the release of stress and the absence of anything causing me anxiety because I finally caught up–has probably had a lot to do with why I was able to sleep so deeply and well this week. Now, hopefully this weekend I can start making progress on a deep clean of the apartment, prune out some more books, and perhaps get some other things started. I’ve kept up for those most with the daily shit I always let pile up–laundry, dishes, filing–so I won’t have to spend much time this weekend getting that shit caught up, which is kind of nice; I am not behind going into the weekend.

I really need to do something about the cabinets, to be honest, and perhaps it IS time to reorganize the counters. And maybe we can order our new refrigerator this weekend. One can but dream, I suppose. I slept late this morning, which felt great, but we’re both a little concerned about Scooter. He’s not himself these last few days, and so we are thinking about taking him into the vet to get him checked out. He also hasn’t been howly-bitchy lately, either. He gave me a rather weak attempt at a fill my bowl you cretin this morning, but it was more sad than demanding. He is about fourteen, which I’ve been thinking about lately (sorry, death of loved ones is much on my mind this year, sue me) but I was dreading having to have the conversation about “we may be losing him” this soon. Last night when I got home from work he slept in my lap briefly but then gave up and went to lay on the floor in front of the dryer in the laundry room–he always likes it in there were one of the appliances (whether dishwasher, dryer, or washer) are in operation, I think the vibrations on the floor appeal to him and soothe in some mysterious cat-fashion–but I was doing chores and not paying attention to anything, then realized oh you should play Spotify through the computer and that was when I noticed that I had my iMessages app open on the computer and Paul had texted me around three to call him. I finally did when I saw the text around eight last night, and that was when he told me his concerns about Scooter, which while it saddened me that it wasn’t just my imagination, I was also glad that I didn’t have to be the one to bring it to his attention and talk him through it. He does seem better this morning, but I think we still need to take him to the vet to be checked out. Who knows? It may not be something fatal, but something that medications can clear up. It’s just that he’s so old; we’ve had him for almost thirteen years and they said he was two when we adopted him, which would make him fifteen. He’s such a sweet thing. And no matter how many times I tell myself well if we lose him we can rescue another cat from a grim existence inside a cage , and give him a great life, but that doesn’t help all that much, really.

The trade-off for the great joy a pet can bring you is the sorrow of losing them. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to outlive a pet, either; stories about pets whose owners/parents died on them always break my heart. I still mourn Skittle and my childhood dog, Sandy–and Sandy crossed the Rainbow Bridge when I was nineteen, so over forty years ago.

I’m going to try to keep my sadness at bay–Mom always said worrying was just borrowing trouble–and focus so I can be productive today and not get behind on things the way I was before. And work makes for a marvelous way of escaping sorrow, when it isn’t paralyzing.

I did get started last night on the pile of dishes and some laundry last night, which I need to finish this morning, I have work at home duties to do and a couple (how lovely that sounds!) of emails to answer. I want to finish writing some more drafted blog entries that have been there in my drafts forever–or delete them, accepting the fact that I will either never write the entry or it needs to be a longer form personal essay or its no longer topical. Clean the drafts out, Gregalicious! I was also a little pleased with myself for finishing two other draft entries yesterday–one about writing Games Frat Boys Play and one about my story “Solace in a Dying Hour”–the anthology This Fresh Hell, in which it appears, dropped yesterday and you can click on the title link there to order a copy–isn’t it lovely how I try to make things easier for you, Constant Reader?–so I am making progress on that front. At one point I was trying to write entries about each and every one of my books; I got away from that when life got out of my control yet again, and it’s not a bad idea to go back to this stuff. I think I had also stopped with both Need and Timothy on deck; I am going to try to get back on track with that. Hell, the older entries about Scotty and Chanse books might even be on Livejournal, of all places. (Ye olde blog is still up and findable over there; I used to take the entries private after a few months because the blog had been plagiarized a few times; but I think the last year or so are still up.) I’ll have to check to see. But I’ve been keeping Queer and Loathing in America since December of 2004; next year I’ll reach my twentieth anniversary of blogging. (!!!)

I also worked on organizing and cleaning up electronic files, which is much more time-consuming than one might think–as much as I love being organized, that sadly doesn’t carry over to my computer files, the cloud or the back-up hard drive. Ever since I discovered I can do file-searches for when I need one, I allowed it to get completely out of control, which was an enormous mistake that I regret to this day. There’s a lot of treasure in my files somewhere–ideas, thoughts, inspirational images as well as images from history that may be of use at some point with some book or story. The problem is I keep finding more things every day that I think well this will come in handy when I write X and so it goes into the files. I hoard books, paper, and electronic files, apparently.

I also realized yesterday that the new short story collection–which now sits at over seventy-seven thousand words–was missing a published short story, which, when added to the document, will take it over eighty thousand, which to me is the bare minimum for such a collection; so I could actually go ahead and add it in and send the collection off to my publisher to see if they want it or not. I’d want it to be at least ninety thousand, though, so I’d need at least two more completed stories for it out of the files. Something to ponder.

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

Spotlight

And here we are on Friday at long last. This week seemed to last forever, didn’t it? It did to me. I remember thinking with a groan on Tuesday night that it was only Tuesday somehow, and the same thought on Wednesday. But we did it, we made it, and it was marvelous in our eyes.

I somehow managed to get everything to my amazing accountant, who got my taxes done in record time–she is so worth every penny I pay her, seriously–so here’s hoping that I get my cash before the trip to Malice, how marvelous would that be? My financial situation is improving month to month, but the progress is always so much slower than I would prefer it to be, you know? There will be another big shift at the end of the year, too, when the loan I took against my retirement to pay off my car (figured it was better to pay myself interest than paying it to the bank) so that automatic deduction from my check will stop in either November or December, which will be splendid. I’ve already dramatically cut back on my book purchasing–certain authors and books are exempted, but I am trying not to buy more books until I’ve made some serious progress into my TBR pile, which is enormous. I think when the revision of this book is finished, I am going to take a month and simply work on short stories to recharge and recalibrate my brain, while getting some serious reading taken care of in the meantime. My gym membership will be taken off the inactive list in May as well, and I think I’ll probably start listening to audiobooks when I go the gym and take walks and so forth. Sure, it may take me longer to get it listened to than when I am in a car on a long highway drive, but there are also shorts. I have four shorts by Lisa Unger downloaded to my Audible app, and those will probably do the trick.

So, I went down a wormhole that started the other day and now I have a substack. Did I want one? I don’t really think so, but I’d seen that they’ve added something similar to Twitter, and I wanted to keep seeing a friend’s tweets (they were trying out the new Substack function), and one thing led to another and now I have a Substack page. I’m not really sure what it’s for, to be honest; I archived my newer blog to it and tried to archive the old one to it, but it didn’t work. I think I know how to do it now, but am also not terribly sure I need to move that over there as a back-up or not. I’d like to have it archived somewhere besides Livejournal, but it’s like twelve years of entries and what an enormous pass in the ass it would be to do it manually (which I will not be doing; I can’t even keep up with my computer files, for fuck’s sake, let alone downloading twelve years of almost daily entries, one by one. Just the thought chilled my blood, frankly. So, I have a substack now, not sure why or what it’s for or what I will use it for (maybe I’ll come up with a plan so that it promotes me, which this blog has never really done–it really is a wonder I have a career, seriously).

I slept really well last night. LSU’s women’s gymnastics team qualified for Nationals by winning their semi-final yesterday afternoon; the “Four on the Floor” are LSU, Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma. I would love it if they won, but I don’t know how good their chances are. Both Utah and Oklahoma were over 198 with their scores; LSU had slightly less than that. They also didn’t perform as well as they were capable of; the question is can they pull it all together this weekend and pull off the upset? LSU is also down one of their biggest stars as well as some of their other top athletes, and yet made the finals anyway. I suspect LSU is going to be a major power in the future (they’ve come close but have never quite gotten the brass ring), which is exciting for all of us down here in southeastern Louisiana. We watched the replay of the semi-finals last night after we both got home, and then I went to bed shortly thereafter. Today is work-at-home Friday, but I have a department meeting and a health fair (attendance required by our insurance) so I have to go into the office anyway for a little while anyway. I’ll run a couple of errands on my way home, and then may be in for the weekend, other than perhaps a grocery run on Sunday morning. This weekend’s primary focus is getting work done on the Scotty manuscript as well as other chores around the house, and maybe working on some odds and ends and getting those things quite caught up. It’s hard to believe that two weeks from today I will be waking up in Bethesda, Maryland, where I am attending Malice Domestic as an Agatha nominee (!!!!), which I still can’t believe. My peers have been very very lovely to me over the past year, which makes me incredibly grateful and is a little humbling at the same time. I don’t think I will win, but it’s still a big thrill and an honor; I certainly never thought I would ever be nominated for an Agatha Award.

And since I had done such a lovely job last weekend and during this past week of organizing and filing, I don’t have to spend a lot of time this weekend working on that. I am behind on the dishes, of course, and I need to go through the refrigerator again–and the floors need doing yet again–but I don’t think I have to spend as much time on chores this weekend as I usually do, and if I do spend some time on them, I will be that much closer to getting my house cleaned and under control at long last. I also need to make another sweep through the books again this weekend, and I do need to start working on clearing out the storage attic by bringing down a box of books and getting going (I may have to leave the house tomorrow, to drop off books at the library sale, if I am thorough) on that project. Financially, it makes more sense for me to clean out the attic and then start slowly emptying and cleaning out the storage unit–moving the stuff I want to keep out of it (my kids’ mystery series books and copies of my own books) and donating the rest to a library sale. Closing the storage unit will also be a financial boon for me, and bring me yet another step closer to solvency.

And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Mother’s Little Helper

Well, I guess it’s been a hot minute since my last bout of insomnia, so I guess I was due. Sigh.

It’s also Wednesday Pay the Bills Day, so yay? And one week from today I’ll be heading to the airport to fly into New York for the weekend. Yikes! Time certainly does fly. I feel okay this morning, despite the insomnia–we’ll see how this plays out in the long run, won’t we?–but I was very tired yesterday. I had felt really good upon finishing Mississippi River Mischief and turning it in; and felt great most of Monday, so I figured the emotional/physical exhaustion from finishing a book must have somehow been bypassed, maybe by remaining calm over that last week? I was wrong. I slept well Monday night and felt good yesterday morning, but by the afternoon was dragging and drained and tired and had trouble focusing. Paul and I continued watching Sherwood, which has really picked up and is quite good–I love that the entire mystery is focused on fallout and unresolved issues from the miners’ strike back in the 1980’s–and then I retired relatively early as I was barely able to keep my eyes open–and then of course never fell deeply asleep last night. I am having dinner with a friend in from out of town tonight, so hopefully I’ll be on my game tonight. I think another shower and clean-up after work is probably in order, and will work for the best.

Sigh, so, so much to do and get done, seriously.

Hilariously, the other day I got an email that someone had commented on my old Livejournal blog, the original Queen and Loathing in America, which was kind of odd, so I went and had a look. It was on my New Year’s post of goals for 2012, and I had to laugh as I scrolled through them and saw these last two:

6. Work on my motivation. I would like to be less lazy in 2012, and be better about staying on tops of things-no more putting off till tomorrow because I don’t feel like doing it today. This can certainly help with everything above, that’s for fricking sure.

7. Always stay focused on the positive. It’s very easy to get distracted as well as discouraged by on-line idiots hiding behind the security of their keyboards and saying things they would never have the courage to say to someone’s face. It’s also easy to get sidetracked by the on-line viciousness of the bitter, the jealous, and the nasty. I’ve gotten much better about this, but could be better still. I pledge that in 2012 that said people and their vitriol will continue to be viewed with contemptuous amusement by me, and I will continue to laugh at their bitter nastiness–and despite all the petty jealous attacks disguised as ‘book reviews’–I will continue to write and publish and have a career. And you know who you are. Just know that I truly pity you–because your talent is just as small as you are as a person.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. One of the goals I did see on that list that I think I’ve managed was to diversify and expand my writing to try new things and explore new styles, not only of writing but of genres. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that–my books are all varied to a degree–which reminded me of another question I was asked, by John at Murder by the Book for my event there–you’ve written so many different styles of book, is there anything you haven’t tried yet but you want to? The answer was, of course, romance; I’ve been wanting to write an actual queer romance novel for a very long time, and even had various ideas for them over the years–but I have one idea now that I really want to try to write. I don’t know that I will write on in 2023, but it’s definitely moved up a lot higher on my “to-write” list. I have a couple of projects in progress that I do want to finish before adding something else to the list of unfinished things; I guess the point of 2023 is to make this the year of finishing things. But I need to snap out of this malaise because January is speeding past, and I need to make use of this month especially since I’ll be in New York for a long weekend next week, and I rarely, if ever, get any writing done when I am not at home. (I used to be able to do this and I am not really sure what has changed here, but there it is.)

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will talk to you again later.