Tag: Malice anthology

Half-Gifts

Thursday morning and the last day of in-office work for me. July is coming to a close, and we are slowly inching our way to the end of the dog days, when a sweat-bath is no longer included with any venture outside. For those who wonder how we can stand to live with the heat of summer, it’s primarily because, with the rare occasional cold spell, it’s beautiful here from mid-September to mid-May. It wasn’t so bad yesterday, in all honesty. When I got in my car in the morning to go to work I thought this isn’t so bad and checked my phone. The heat index said it felt like 97 degrees and I thought it was cool.

Ah, summer in New Orleans. Even when I came home, it was still high–but was a “feels like” in the low 100s, so I was actually okay with it. I was tired, though, when I got home from work. I had a ZOOM meeting but it was canceled, and I hadn’t slept well again last night. I’ve not had a good, deep sleep since around Saturday night, I think. It’s no wonder I’m feeling a bit tired. I collapsed in my chair and watched some informative Youtube history videos on the Apostolic Majesty channel; a particularly good one about Charles V’s failure of his primary goal–the creation of a unified Burgundy under his control. I love this shit, seriously. Then I got up, put on some classic dance music from the “dance all night days” (seriously, Jonathan Peters’ remix of Whitney Houston’s “My Love is Your Love” is one of the greatest dance recordings of all time) which gave me some nostalgia from the years I spent the weekends haunting the bars in the Quarter, listening to great music and dancing and just enjoying myself thoroughly. I did some dishes while listening (and dancing, and performing–I always perform) and some laundry. The dance music picked up my lagging spirits and put me in a good mood. (I was a little bummed by some things I found out yesterday, which made my spirits sink to the bottoms of my feet; I’ll talk about them both at some point, but it was a rather dispiriting day with bad energy.

But without a purring kitty sleeping my lap, I couldn’t just sit in my easy chair all evening and wallow in misery and disappointment–not when there’s fun gay dance music to dance to while I clean and do chores and so forth. Lesson learned and note taken: there’s nothing gay dance remixes can’t make better. Looking around this morning, I realize I am heading into the office for the last time this week, and I am going into the weekend with the laundry and dishes caught up, but the kitchen organized and yes, there’s still some clean-up and filing necessary to be done–but without having to worry about doing laundry and dishes and so forth? Easy-peasy. I’d like to get some writing done this weekend; some short stories need work, I need to write another one from scratch, and I want to keep working on this new work-in-progress which I’m not quite ready to talk about just yet; I want to get these first four already written chapters edited and revised and see how easy the next few chapters come before I am going to talk about it publicly yet. I do like the story, and I do like the concept behind it; I like the main character who’s a good guy but kind of a loser–well, maybe not necessarily so much a loser but someone who can never really catch a break of any kind; just one would have completely changed and transformed his life and who he is into something completely different. He’s had a hard life, been burned by lovers, and now just is kind of coasting into whatever happens next. This is more hardboiled noir than what I usually do, but I am trying not to replicate someone else’s style this time so much as to kind of create my own, if that makes sense? A friend, a fellow writer far more successful than I could ever dare hope to be, once told me, your blessing and your curse is that you can write anything and everything. It was probably the most penetrating insight anyone has ever give me about anything in my life, and I think about that all the time. Do I have a distinct authorial voice? Am I not more successful because I write all over the place, without a structured and detailed plan of what to do next and where to go and so forth.

But I also don’t know if that’s me. It was me, before the Time of Troubles when everything derailed, and since then I’ve not really just ever taken the time to sit back and really put some thought into what I want out of my writing career. Since I started writing again after the Time of Troubles, I’ve just kind of bounced from this sounds interesting to oh I think I’ll write about this next rather than, what kind of books do I really want to write and what kind of career do I want to have in the time that’s left to me, and what do I need to do to get there? I do think somehow my work has matured to another level over the last six or seven books, and I know my short stories are getting better as I write more of them. I am so fucking proud of “Solace in a Dying Hour” and “The Ditch” (forthcoming in that terrific anthology School of Hard Knox that I posted the TOC from the other day) I could just burst. I really want to write something for the Malice anthology, and there’s a couple of deadlines looming on open calls I am sort of interested in.

A rather ambitious program for the weekend, methinks. But definitely do-able.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

Seekers Who Are Lovers

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment again, and I am looking forward to a lovely and productive day here. We had a rather marvelous thunderstorm last night–although there was potential street flooding, so hopefully the car is okay–which was nice. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a thorough cleansing rain like that, which is part of why the heat index has been so miserable lately. The temperature has been hot, and the humidity about what it usually is–not humid enough to rain, but so close it’s miserable. I had planned to barbecue last night, despite the heat, but when I was getting ready to start putting everything together was when I realized it was not only raining but pouring. There was also magnificent, long lasting rolling thunder claps that lasted for seconds; the kind where it sounds like the sky is splitting apart. So, I made pizza instead for dinner, and hopefully will be able to cook out this afternoon. The power also went out overnight–I slept well again last night, to wake up to blinking clocks everywhere. It was out for maybe about twenty minutes, based on the emails from Entergy letting me know an outage had occurred (how does one check one’s email without power? A mystery for the ages) and the follow up announcing the restoration of power was sent about twenty minutes later.

I ran my errands yesterday, including making groceries and dropping off boxes of books at the library sale. I cleaned and organized and filed most of the rest of the day, finally getting the office area whipped into some semblance of order that’s not only workable but close enough to being finished that it won’t take long to do so that I can finish it over my coffee this morning and while taking breaks from writing this–although these things generally tend to be fairly stream of consciousness. Today I am going to make a to-do list for the week, update the bills list and make sure everything is current, and I’d like to make some progress on the rugs in the kitchen. The living room looks much more bearable now that those boxes of books are gone, and I think I need to thin out the beads next as well as do some additional book pruning. I cleaned out some drawers yesterday, getting that project under way, and I also need to go through my last few journals to mark the places where I made notes on the things I am thinking about writing now. I’m also trying to decide what the point of whatever it is I want to write next will be. I’d like to write something for the Malice anthology, but the deadline looms and I don’t think I really have anything I can whip into shape in merely one day, which means I am going to need to write a draft and figure this story out as I go–the idea is very amorphous, and I’ve not been feeling terribly creative yesterday, which could prove to be a most frustrating writing experience. There’s another one I’d like to revise and work on–I am feeling connected to it, and to its voice, but again I am trying to figure out what I am trying to say in the story. I need to reread all of these things, of course. I need to reread lots of things so that I can get a grasp of them again so I can find my way into writing them. I actually started two books this past week, can you believe that? Like I don’t already have enough things in progress already that I need to start two more? I wrote the first sentence of each book, and stopped there. I know what I want to say in both of them, and where I want those opening chapters of each to go, but I’m not sure precisely how to say it.

I also got deeper into Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, taking it slowly and savoring the experience as the rare treat and pleasure reading anything written by Abbott always winds up being. Each book is different in content, yet variations on a theme; I think future literary scholars will look book on her canon and study it as the incisive social commentary it is, about what it is to be a woman as well as how it is to be one, the strictures and compromises, the struggles between expectations and reality, all wrapped up in a lovely bow of beautifully constructed sentences that are complex in their very simplicity, and razor-sharp observations and insights into the strange tangle of emotions and contradictions that make us all so tenderly and sadly human.

We watched a tragic gay romance movie last night, Firebird, which was based on a true story from the days of the Soviet Union and its homophobia (still a thing in Russia to this very day, never forget). It was very well done, but it was also sad as such stories always are, with the kind of bittersweet ending where the truly conflicted one ends up dead and the one who isn’t moving on with his life stronger for the experience. So, no, not the feel-good gay movie of any year, by any means, so after that a few episodes of Awkwafina is Nora from Queens was just the ticket back from that downer.

Also, when I was dropping off books at the library sale, since I had cash on me (which is a rare thing) I checked the children’s section for series books I collect (I do this periodically, but only when I have cash on me) and I scored today with four books at two dollars apiece, and I had exactly eight dollars on me. I got three yellow-spined revised text (important) Nancy Drews (The Secret of Read Gate Farm, The Sign of the Twisted Candles, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher) which was the style when I started reading them so those are the ones I want. I already had copies, but the ones I already had on hand have been damaged over the years, and these were in excellent condition. I also got a tweed original text Hardy Boys The Mark on the Door, which I’ve never had a copy of (I only ever had the blue spine revised text) and have never actually read. There was no dust jacket, but it’s in really good condition. It’ll be fun to read it; per the fan groups, this was one of the books written during the time the original writer had left and the new ghost writers weren’t as good; and the plots tended to be a bit on the insane side sometimes. I am rather intrigued to read it–since they were all revised to get rid of offensive ethnic and racist stereotypes and language, it could be eye-opening.

I’ve also been reading Matt Baume’s marvelous Hi Honey I’m Homo, and am now up to the chapter on Dinosaurs, which I never watched. It’s really a fun book about how queer representation began and evolved over the years, as well as documenting the pushback against that representation (newsflash shocker: evangelicals have been coming for us every step of the way), and it’s written in an easy and accessible style that flows well. I’ve enjoyed his Youtube content, and I’m delighted to see that the book is in the same vein and just as well done. Highly recommended, and definitely more to come on that when I’ve finished reading the entire thing.

And now to my easy chair, to spend more time with Megan Abbott. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I will check in on you again tomorrow.