Tag: Mean Girls

Season of the Witch

Happy All Saints Day! And welcome to November, I suppose. This year is slipping away like sands through the hour glass (hat tip: Days of Our Lives), but the terrorist attack of New Year’s seems like it was a million years ago, too. When I think about where we are now as opposed to where we were ten months ago, though…it seems like a decade has passed since my New Year’s blog, doesn’t it? I slept deeply and well last night, and Sparky let me sleep later (although he got his razor blades trimmed yesterday, so him smacking me in the face in the morning doesn’t have the same impact) than I usually do, so that was nice too. We have to run some errands today we didn’t get to yesterday, but that’s fine. LSU isn’t playing today so I don’t have a vested interest in watching games today, so I don’t really care to be home for them all day, either. I probably won’t get any writing or much reading done, but…I also am not going to worry about it. Yes, time is slipping away, but I also need to allow myself to get rest and be lazy without beating myself up about it all the damned time, too. Progress?

Perhaps. We shall see.

I also have to pay some bills this morning before we do anything, and probably get some of the chores done, too. I made good progress on chores yesterday; the bed linens all got laundered, the dishes are done and put away, the counters are cleaned and cleared, and all I really need to do is vacuum the rugs and mop the floors, and potentially prune more of the books down. I need to be more ruthless, too.

The backlash to governor Janky Jeff’s massive interference with LSU apparently taught the moron some sort of lesson, because he backed the fuck down after Scott Woodward (best of luck to you, sir, you worked wonders at LSU and I am sorry Janky Jeff decided to show his ass) was fired. To paraphrase Mean Girls, “he didn’t even go there.” He also got some pushback when he tried to force Loyola (a Jesuit Catholic private university in New Orleans) to charter a chapter of Turning Point USA after the student senate flatly rejected their application, mainly because they don’t share the same values as the Society of Jesus. Bitch slap! I was glad to see a Catholic university stand their ground against political interference from TEMU Huey Long. Don’t stand with the evangelicals, Catholics–they will come for you eventually as idolators and papists and pagans. They don’t think you’re real Christians in the first place, so less than what they see as “white.” Janky Jeff is not popular in Louisiana; only 19% of registered voters even voted in that gubernatorial election because we had no options. All the candidates were different degrees of MAGA, anyway. I don’t even remember who I voted for, but I have never cast a ballot for Jeff Landry and I never will.

I can only hope to be seated in the jury for his inevitable trial for corruption and malfeasance. No, they wouldn’t seat me, because no one could ever convince me he isn’t guilty.

Then again, Jindal was never charged with anything. And he definitely should have been; his wife was just as corrupt as Casey DeSantis, and the corrupt always corrupt. (Note to everyone: their women are just as bad as, if not worse, than their husbands. See: Usha Vance, Melania Trump, Lara Trump…the list is lengthy.)

Sigh.

My mind is still deeply entrenched in horror, by the way, which is something I don’t remember Halloween Horror Month doing to me before; maybe because I was always trying to finish a book before the end of the year? This entire decade has been mentally draining and fatiguing, frankly, and I’ve had a lot of brain fog and increasing loss of memory. I do wonder occasionally about how different my career would be had I gone into horror rather than crime; rather than just being a fan. I did want to write horror when I was in my twenties, and even tried. I laugh now when I remember thinking my personalized rejections with suggestions and tips and encouragement to keep writing and submitting to them, from horror magazine editors, was just them being nice. Editors are never nice like that, ever, as I have since learned. I guess I was so down on myself and had such a lack of self-esteem (as well as knowledge; there was no one to tell me differently) that I focused on the rejection rather than accepting the encouragement. Each rejection was further confirmation that I was a loser, and I was in such a spiral of misery in the 1980s there wasn’t any way I could have seriously pursued being a writer. I don’t have regrets–I never do–but sometimes I do wonder. I played the cards I was dealt and everything eventually turned out, didn’t it? But I am going to try to work on some things tomorrow, since I don’t have to leave the house at all and Paul is, I think, going to his office.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back here in the morning.

Please Don’t Go

It’s Thursday morning. I am pleased to announce that I have made it all the way to Chapter Seven in the revision. At this rate (one per day) I should have the entire thing revised in 18 more days, which would bring us to the 24th; which would give me another six days to revise and polish and all that jazz before turning it in.

Isn’t it lovely?

And the truth is, now that I am in the downward side of the mountain with this book, I don’t want to–and can’t–write anything else. Yesterday after I finished for the day, I tried working on a short story in progress (“Never Kiss a Stranger”, for those of you tracking Gregalicious arcana) and just couldn’t write a word. I was actually, in a very strange way that probably only makes sense to me, relieved this happened; it means I am so deep into writing the book that no matter how many thoughts and ideas I might have about other stories, I can actually only work on the Scotty from now until it’s finished. This is a strange quirk I’ve had for quite some time, but having not finished or published a novel since early 2017, you can imagine how worried I’ve been about the ability to finish this one. But old habits are, apparently, still so deeply ingrained in my system that they pop up automatically.

Which is a huge relief.

There is a sense I have, sometimes, that with the WIP that I’m, to quote Mean Girls, “trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.” I do think the story is an important one, and I think I went about writing it the wrong way: it’s set in Kansas, so I did what I always do when I write about Kansas–retreated to a world I’d already created. I noticed recently that the character names I used in the WIP are character names I’ve already used in Sara and some other books; I was trying to fit this story into a town and characters I’d already created back in the late 1970’s and refined a bit in the 1980’s rather than starting from scratch. I’d started writing a book set in this town in or around 2004 whose working titles included Sins of Omission, Against the Storm, Between Two Rivers, and The Past Doesn’t Sleep. I then tried to wrap a new story into the structure of what was once called “the Kansas book” rather than coming up with something new, and then being able to write almost a hundred thousand words in a month on the first draft made it seem like I had done, absolutely, the right thing in going this way with it. But it wasn’t, and while some of it can be salvaged and re-used, I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board and take it apart, piece by piece and decide what the story really is and who the characters really are. I’ve renamed the town, and now I am going to go back to rename the characters.

And hopefully, it will become the book I want it to be.

And now back to the spice mines.

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