Tag: Michael Koryta

Here Comes Peter Cottontail

Easter, which really should be the highest holy day of Christianity–but it’s not. That would be Christmas, which again–really doesn’t make sense. But at least the date of Jesus’ birth is fixed–as opposed to how the day of his death floats.

I overslept again this morning and I suspect my exhaustion–which carried me through yesterday as well–has everything to do with the situation on Friday. Yes, I know I am being vague, but I also never am sure about crossing a privacy line for someone else. Essentially, I lost the entire day, and let’s just say that I am glad I am on anxiety medication because my mind would have exploded this past week, probably. But it was exhausting and draining, both emotionally and physically, and that all kind of caught up with me yesterday. I did get some things done–laundry and I did run an errand–but was completely worn out yesterday and had excessive fatigue. I feel better this morning than I did yesterday, but I also have a lot to do today and hope that I can manage somehow. I feel motivated today, which I didn’t have the energy for yesterday, and as soon as I finish this I am going to get cleaned up and finish cleaning the kitchen and dive into my day.

Sounds good, anyway.

It’s also a very bright and cheery day out there–it’s been cold since around the festivals–and I am hoping to cook out today, too. We spent most of the day relaxing with the television on. I did read some of Last Summer, too, which I am really getting into, and I think my next read will be an old Michael Koryta, The Cypress House. He really is one of my favorite writers, and I need to read more of his backlist as well as get caught up on recent releases. I pruned the books a very little yesterday, and we did watch some great stuff yesterday. We watched Quiet on Set Friday night, which was grim and creepy and horrifying, and then yesterday we watched Thanksgiving and moved onto Will Trent, which we’d been meaning to get around to but kept forgetting–it’s quite good. Thanksgiving was another holiday slasher movie, kind of clever and didn’t take itself too seriously (always a plus in a slasher movie) and I enjoyed–but it didn’t say anything new or do anything wildly clever or original. Quiet on Set, on the other hand, was deeply disturbing–which brings me to another point about the falsity of the right and it’s anti-queer lies about grooming and pedophilia. Every day I see pieces posted on social media about another male (sometimes with a female accomplice) convicted of raping and/or sexually abusing children…and getting off with thirty days in prison, or three months, or suspended sentences.

Where is all the outrage about THAT? Judges and juries giving light sentences for raping children? That’s how I know the right is all smoke and mirrors when it comes to these issues. They chose to attack a small minority and accuse them of not being safe around children, but where is there concern about all these religious figures, church leaders, your counselors, and COPS who are getting away with destroying children? Watching Quiet on Set made me aware just how hypocritical they are. If they really cared about children and keeping them safe, they’d go after actual people who, you know, commit the crimes and the disgusting sentences they get for said crimes. It’s hard to take any country seriously who doesn’t punish actual perpetrators of crimes against children, but instead accuses innocent parties while looking the other way when the criminals don’t fit their narrative.

I’m tired of liars using children as a bait-and-switch to come for queer people.

Sigh. It’s easy to get frustrated and fearful these days with the world in the state it is currently in; I take no pleasure in seeing my predictions about the rise of modern American fascism, made in the early 1990s, coming true in my twilight years. You see, I recognized the rhetoric of the right, and how they were using queer people as scapegoats for everything, in the decade as the same language and dialogues that Germans used on Jews and queers in the 1930’s, and I also saw, with the rise of Fox News, the further decline of the American system and way of life. We’ve never really achieved, as a country, the democratic utopia the founders strove for–but it seems like a significant portion of the country no longer sees patriotism as country over party anymore. The Divine Right of Republicans to run the country was part of the unholy marriage of conservatives and evangelicals that Reagan fostered as a Machiavellian scheme to retain power. The right has been smearing the left as communists since the fall of the Tsar in 1917–it’s still a slur they sneer today (communist, commies, socialists) while painting themselves, quite offensively, as the real patriotic Americans.

Sometimes I think I am thinking overly optimistic and that more and more Americans are beginning to see the tin god as precisely that; a golden calf they worship despite their Holy Book’s continued warnings about false gods, false witness, and liars.

And for the record, I have always believed that faith in religion should be shown by works, not words. Anyone can say they are a Christian and they love Jesus–it’s their behavior and what they do that truly matters.

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

Tishbite

And suddenly it’s Sunday, and I go back to the office tomorrow. Paul leaves on Wednesday for ten days, so Wednesday night is going to feel really weird and off when I get home from work. No cat, no Paul, and that has the potential to be incredibly sad and lonely, if I allow it to go that way. I don’t think I’ll be able to manage just goofing off when I get home from work while he’s gone; not to mention the time we usually spend together every night. I will most likely finish watching My Adventures with Superman while he’s gone, and I’ll probably watch Heels on Starz, with Stephen Amell; obviously, it’s a drama series built around a local wrestling promotion–and since my current WIP does the same (it’s not about the promotion, but the promotion plays a part in the book), it couldn’t hurt to watch, right? I just have to be careful not to steal, er “borrow”, anything from the show. (I doubt I will; the promotion is really back story more than anything else.)

But yeah, next weekend is going to be weird as shit around here. I’ll have to get used to sleeping alone–always an issue for me; changes to sleeping situations never are particularly easy for me to adapt to, ever–and without Scooter to cuddle up next to me in the bed, it’ll be particularly lonely. Ah, well.

I started reading Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt yesterday, and I have to say wow. From the very first page she pulls you into the story, and the authorial voice! Magnificent. I still haven’t read Real Bad Things, her previous novel, yet; I don’t want to not have another book by her to read (my usual author-fan neurosis kicking into gear) but I am also thinking I may read it on the plane to Bouchercon, depending on how far along I am with my TBR pile by then–I have, after all, books by Eli Cranor, S. A. Cosby, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman, and Michael Koryta to get through yet as well–but with Paul gone, I will either be reading or writing every night when I get home from the office, so maybe I can get a lot of this reading caught up on. I also want to read this original text version of The Mark on the Door (The Hardy Boys) so I can write about it, too. I was also thinking it might not be a bad idea to take some of these really old blog posts I never finished and copy them into Word documents…because they really are longer form personal essays that require more work than just what I think off the top of my head–I actually have to look things up and do research to be effective, and I can save them in a folder called blog essays so I know where they are when and if I decide to ever look at them or try to finish them because it bothers me that I have all these unfinished drafts saved on the blog–many of which I tend to forget about until I’m reminded when I see the draft, which isn’t exactly conducive to finishing it. There’s one particularly old one where I wanted to read and talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, probably one of the most famous books ever published in this country and one that actually effected societal change…but it’s undoubtedly, from the modern lens, incredibly problematic, which is why I wanted to read it. I also have an electronic copy of The Clansman, which is the book Birth of a Nation was based upon, which clearly is a problematical text; perhaps someday I can do a lengthy personal essay about both of those books, along with Gone with the Wind, in the context of the Lost Cause mythology I was raised to believe (never really did because I could never get past the evil that was chattel slavery, no matter how much any of the latter two authors tried to convince their readers that it was benevolent and better for the enslaved than freedom…even typing that, I can’t wrap my mind around the fact people believe that bullshit, or even more insanely, some still clearly do).

I also spent some time doing research into Filipino immigration to Louisiana (because I am looking into writing about them) in the eighteenth century as escapees from enslavement on Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana truly is the melting pot I was taught growing up as a part of American exceptionalism; Louisiana had immigrants from all over the world and from every imaginable “race” (which is not biology but a social construct, and no one will ever convince me otherwise), from the Isleños from the Canary Islands to the Filipinos who settled at St. Malo just off the coast-line on the opposite shore of Lake Borgne from New Orleans–I am also interested in the idea that there was also a settlement of escaped formerly enslaved people in the East called “maroons”–not to mention the enslaved people brought here unwillingly from west Africa as well as the Caribbean islands. Europeans were well represented here by French, English, and Spanish; Jews also came over in the eighteenth century, as well as Germans (There’s a town called Des Allemandes–the Germans–on the west bank of the Mississippi, and an entire stretch of the river called the German Coast), and of course there are Cajuns, Armenians, Greeks and Americans, too. There is a quite large Vietnamese immigrant community in New Orleans East, too. I’ve always felt New Orleans had a darkness to her; the slave trade flourished here (New Orleans was what they meant by being “sold south” or “sold down the river”–and it was so bad those words and phrases were considered threats)…which also reminds me I should revisit Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, which I always recommend to people interested in reading about New Orleans and its history. All of the former slave states have a darkness to them, which is what I am exploring in my Alabama and Louisiana researches on now; how to incorporate that theme, of the suffering embedded in the blood-soaked soil and how so many souls cannot possibly be at rest.

That’s kind of what my revision of this nearly forty year old short story is becoming, and that’s kind of why I am stuck in the part I am at now; when the two boys are told the Civil War legend about the ghost of the cemetery. The original story was one that has since turned out to be apocryphal, a story my grandmother told me as truth when I was a child. I have found an equally bloody and horrifying legend based in the actual grisly history of the region from whence I sprang, and I am trying to get the tone right. I think the man telling the story to the boys would not have been a Union sympathizer but a Lost Cause believer, which makes telling the story and getting the tone right much more difficult. I think I’ve figured out the way to do it right–I don’t really care if Lost Cause sympathizers are ever offended by my writings about the South, to be perfectly clear if it wasn’t already–but I am of course worried that I’ll blow it so had to rest my brain and think about it some more yesterday. I also scribbled some backstory on my main character for the book I just started writing in my journal, which was very cool. After getting the mail and the groceries yesterday I was just drained–the heat really can suck the life right out of you–and so I just sheltered in the apartment and did some cleaning and organizing and thinking, really.

We watched two movies, Renfield and They Cloned Tyrone, both of which were quite enjoyable but completely different. I wasn’t so sure about Renfield, which I assumed was simply a modern take on the Dracula story from Renfield’s point of view, which I thought was a clever idea–but I didn’t realize it was intended to be a comedy. The female lead is Awkwafina–which I did not know and didn’t see her once in any preview of the movie I ever saw, which was some peculiar marketing. I wouldn’t have even thought twice about watching the film had I known she was in it–and she was amazing, as always. I am really becoming a fan. They Cloned Tyrone was a tech horror movie, filmed like a 70’s blaxploitation film, and it was interesting and clever and really smart (although part of it reminded me very much of an Edgar award winning novel from a few years ago that I loved) and we really enjoyed it before watching some more Nora from Queens before turning it in for the evening.

Today I am going to get cleaned up a bit, get ready for the week and do some writing. I want to get this short story revision completed as well as taking another shot at revising the third chapter of the WIP. I do need to do some more straightening and organizing–as always–and there’s a load of dishes in the dishwasher that need putting away. I am feeling better rested, which is lovely, and I am hoping to carry that energy, along with some positivity, into this new week. I do have some errands that will need to be run this week, alas, but I think most nights I’m probably just going to come straight home from work and either read or write or clean and organize. There will of course be nights when I am horribly lazy and won’t do a thing, but I am getting bored with being lazy and am feeling like I need to be producing in one way or another–making myself useful in my spare time. That of course is a neurosis in and of itself; the refusal to accept and allow myself to have down time where I am not doing something or anything or even thinking; sometimes I just need to mindlessly go down Youtube wormholes for the evening, and sometimes I even learn something when I do.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday however you choose to spend it, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

Rilkean Heart

Wednesday morning and all is well in the Lost Apartment. We’ve reached mid-week successfully, which is always a plus, and have survived thus far. Yesterday was another good day, in which I got things done. I finished revising the first two chapters of the new work-in-progress, adding about 1500 words in total; the end result both chapters now clock in at a total of eight thousand words combined. I don’t know many words I deleted, though, so I am going to just round it up to 2000 words written over the last two days, which isn’t stellar but isn’t bad, either. I didn’t sleep well again Monday night, but it was better than Sunday’s sleep, so I was dragging by the time I got off work and had to head uptown to get the mail (the new Laura Lippman and Michael Koryta were waiting for me there) and then made some groceries before heading home. I feel very good about this book.

I also am feeling good about writing again. Go figure. I’m kind of enjoying this lessening of my anxiety, too. Being able to breathe, being able to not have to rush through things because there’s so much else to do always, but the truly tragic part is that it took loss for me to slow down and step back away from everything. I know I am in a weird place right now, with the grief, with the acceptance of the realities I’d prefer not to face, but I also don’t think it’s ever a bad thing to be introspective and really think about, well, everything. The work I’ve been doing on the new project is very good, don’t get me wrong; the writing itself is kind of satisfying me in some way it either hasn’t before, or that I simply don’t remember (yay for memory loss!) from before, which is also lovely. In a way, it almost feels like I am discovering a new way to think and process and write? I don’t know what it might be, but I know I am enjoying myself writing in a way I feel like I haven’t in a while.

On the other hand, I could also be completely insane and not remembering anything.

But the absence of anxiety could be what is making the difference. I am anxious about everything–driving, paying the bills, cleaning the house–and it’s also interesting to dissect how being anxious about everything somehow translated into a kind of rigid stance to keep from having anxiety about being an author–not reading reviews, never looking at the reviews posted on Amazon or Goodreads, staying away from things I know will make me feel beaten and utterly defeated. It’s also like finally recognizing and realizing that most of my neuroses are based in anxiety I inherited from my mother has also somehow loosened the power of the anxiety to control and run my life? I was a bit tired yesterday when I got home from work–I am not sleeping as deeply this week as I usually do, but it’s not insomnia so I am not complaining–but I still got the writing done, and did some more dishes, and was going to do more laundry but stopped myself since there wasn’t a full load. Paul was late getting home last night so we didn’t watch much television. Instead, we talked about his trip home to visit his mom (he booked the ticket and will be gone for ten days), the refrigerator issue, and about getting a new cat. We need to get a new refrigerator–ours never fully recovered from the power outage during Ike (or was it Isaac?) in 2008…so we’ve been living with a not fully operational refrigerator for quite some time. (It’s not that bad, only over the last year has it really started having ‘we need to replace this thing’ vibes.) The problem is the kitchen cabinets run above the refrigerator, so there’s only so much room for the height–and of course, I can’t find one anywhere on line that will fit and that I want. I want the freezer on the bottom, since I don’t go into as much I wouldn’t have to bend down as much (aging issue), but those are inevitably an inch or two too tall; I can’t even find one with a freezer on the top that will fit. So, we either have to keep looking, or we need to have those cabinets taken down. I am all about taking the cabinet down–it’s above the refrigerator so it’s impossible to use anyway, and anything in there hasn’t been needed for years so can be tossed out–but I don’t know how easy that would be or what kind of pain in the ass it could be to remove. All I need is a single inch more clearance, and we’d already have a new one. I also managed to get a couple of extra entries done yesterday; one about Nancy Drew and another about writing my book Need.

Tonight I’ll be coming straight home from work, and maybe tomorrow night the same. I’ve a ZOOM meeting tonight, so when I get home I’ll need to put the dishes in the dishwasher away as well as do another load (they’re soaking in the sink now), and then can probably relax for a bit before the call, maybe get my words in for the day as well. Maybe I’ll start another blog essay about another teen sleuth character. Maybe I’ll finish some of these others I’ve already started and have yet to finish. I’m feeling super-productive, and of course once Paul leaves on his trip I’ll have nothing but time on my hands when I am not at the office, so there’s no reason why I can’t get a lot of things done while he’s gone other than pure laziness, which is always a possibility. I’ll also not have a cat to keep me company, which is deeply unfortunate. But I have chores and books to read and things to write, so that I have no excuse other than pure laziness for not getting anything done while he’s gone.

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

Treasure Hiding

Monday and back to the office with me this morning, woo-hoo! Yesterday was kind of nice. It rained overnight and we had a couple of amazing thunderstorms in the morning which cooled everything off (for a quick moment) so I was able to cuddle up under my blankets with a cup of coffee and finished reading Megan Abbott’s amazing Beware the Woman (get a copy now and you can thank me later–I prefer cash), before doing some chores around the house and getting a handle on the kitchen/office mess situation. Yesterday afternoon around one I checked the temperature and it was a mere 78 degrees here. In July, in the afternoon. Madness, am I right? But it gradually started climbing again, as always, but it was a lovely respite from the brutality that has been this summer.

I also read a short story from one of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Lady’s Man” by Ruth Chatterton, which I found interesting as it was nothing more than a little ghost story, set at a country home of none other than Noel Coward! I’m sure this must be the same Ruth Chatterton who’d been a film star in the 20s and 30s; a quick Google search answers the question that yes, the film star also was a writer! How delightful. The tale was told in a conversational style, as though Ms. Chatterton was making interesting conversation at a formal dinner, which made it really fun to read, even though the chills weren’t quite as pronounced as they were in some of the other stories I’ve read in these books. I do love revisiting these old anthologies and stories from another time.

I also spent some time going through my recent journals and marking pages with sticky notes that are applicable to things I am currently working on or thinking about going to work on. I usually brainstorm and think in my journals. It used to be just the act of writing something down was necessary for me to remember it later–which is why I never needed to really consult my notes in the Olden Days–but that is clearly no longer the case. Even writing stuff here in blog posts is no guarantee I will remember it later. It was also interesting because so much of my journal is just me scribbling, free associating names and titles then who the people are who got with both, quotes I like with attribution, and then the most bizarre things that literally make no sense at all; where did this thought come from? Is it original or did I see it somewhere and wrote it down? It’s always fun to see just how schizophrenic my creativity is when I don’t try to harness it. I actually wrote longhand in my journal last night while watching a documentary–I sometimes takes notes in case I want to blog about it later–and wound up writing several pages of a personal essay about my own experience going to Boys’ State in Kansas the summer I turned sixteen. (Yes, I was watching Boys’ State on Apple Plus, which was filmed at the Texas Boys’ State, which was interesting and well done, and a lot like I remembered it being all those years ago in a different state.) That evolved into me writing about always feeling like an outsider, observing from a slight remove, and went on for quite some time, rather indulgently, and I kind of was amused. There I was, feeling like I was creatively stifled and not able to write, yet writing in longhand in a journal, no less. It wasn’t fiction, of course, but it was still a creative expression, a free form exercise in stream of consciousness writing to see where my mind went–and inevitably, as always, I had to take the piss out of myself.

And that led to another page about my difficulties in taking myself seriously, and thus self-sabotaging myself and my career.

It truly is a wonder I have a career, or for that matter, even had one to begin with.

One thing that did come from that free form writing was a reiteration of something I think I may have posted here recently, that I should take just as much pride in my novels as I do in my published short stories. Sounds bizarre, doesn’t it, but my inner editor always wants to find and fix things in the novels, which inevitably leads to me wishing I could have another pass at it, and the reality is I will always feel like I should have taken another pass at a novel manuscript before it went to print. I need to get over that, or to at least keep it to myself and my journals rather than dragging my own work on my blog. I AM proud of my books, every single one of them, and every single one of them was the best book I was capable of writing at the time I wrote it. As I believe I continue to learn and grow as a writer the more I write, I will always think of my past work as something done when I wasn’t as mature a writer and was still learning because I am always learning. And hope to always continue learning and get better, not just as an author but as a person.

The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know, and how much I will never know. It’s kind of humbling, really.

I did decide what the next book I am going to write is going to be, and that’s a good thing. I was pretty sure of what it was going to be, because it’s in my head and needs to come out more than anything else at the moment–but there’s always something else nagging at the back of my mind saying write me write me! It has the potential to be very good, but I still need to figure some things out. I know how it starts and I know how it ends and I know the back story; I just don’t know the middle and how to get from Act One to the start of Act Three; I always struggle with the second act. I started writing it for a friend who was an acquiring editor, it was something I had been wanting to do for a while and he was interested in acquiring it once it was finished, or at least a first draft completed. So, while I was working on two other books at the same time, I was also taking one day every week and writing a three thousand word chapter and emailing it to him. I had completed Chapter Four and needed a transitional chapter that wasn’t boring or expository, so I had to put more thought into it than I had the previous four. This was last fall, when things started to get out of control in my personal life and with everything else, when I started falling behind on everything and my anxiety was out of control and I just didn’t have the headspace or creative energy to spare to figure out that chapter, so I stopped working on it.

But I never stopped thinking about it.

So, now I have to write it. I may continue to send it to him although he is no longer an acquiring editor, but he’s also a friend and I respect his opinion (he is remaining unnamed because I cannot say kind things about him publicly), so maybe I will. He was very encouraging, and sometimes I need a little bit of a push every now and then. I’ve also mentally worked out some of the kinks in those first chapters, too. I think it will be fun to write; I know I was enjoying it when I was working on it before, and it wasn’t like fuck, I don’t want to work on the structure and plot and meaning of this fucking thing, it was yeah, let’s figure this shit out.

That’s a good sign, methinks.

I’ve also decided my next read is going to be Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt. I love Kelly and I love Kelly’s work, so I can’t wait to see what this is about. She has a truly masterful grasp of the rural South, and that voice! Oh, that authorial voice! She takes me back to my childhood summers in rural Alabama, shows those folks with a clear and unblinking eye, and then writes with language so beautifully and magnificently constructed that it makes me feel seen, home, and alive. I have some more fabulous books coming–what a summer for releases! New books to come from Laura Lippman and Angie Kim and Michael Koryta on top of all the treasures that have already been released this year? I’ve got Eryk Pruitt’s latest and Scott Von Doviak’s latest on their way, with a new Donna Andrews right on their heels. I need to stop slacking and get back to reading on top of everything else! Mon Dieu, how am I ever supposed to keep up?

There simply isn’t enough time in every day, is there?

There were also short stories in my journals–either the idea or the openings or an outline–that I’ve never transferred out or transcribed, which also needs to be done. God, there are so many short stories in progress…it’s daunting just thinking about it.

But it was a good weekend. I got some rest and I accomplished some things. I got better organized, with a short way to go, and am proceeding with plans to get everything back together again and start writing again, clearly and clear-headedly moving forward on something I’m really interested in writing, something I’ve wanted to write for a very long time–and it’s enormously satisfying knowing I am finally going to be working on it for real.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. I tend to turn up like a bad penny here and there, now and again.

Bad Boy

Masculinity is something I’ve always felt I viewed from the outside.

It’s very strange; for someone who doesn’t look back very often and has a rather healthy disdain for nostalgia, for some reason since the pandemic started, I’ve been revisiting my past a lot. I don’t know, perhaps it was triggered by having dinner with an old friend from high school a while back (which also inspired me to write a horribly dark short story); or perhaps it’s because of short stories or novel ideas I’ve been toying with, but lately, I’ve been thinking about my past much more so than I usually do, and what it was like for me growing up. I wrote a Sisters in Crime quarterly column several years ago about the first time I realized, once and for all, that I was indeed different from everyone else–it centered the first time I heard the word fairy used towards me as a pejorative, as well as the first time I was called a faggot. I’ve also been examining and turning over issues of masculinity inside my head for quite some time (most of my life). #shedeservedit was itself an examination of toxic masculinity and how it reverberates through a small community when it’s allowed to run rampant and unchecked: boys will be boys. Some short stories I’ve published have also examined the same subject.

What can I say? My not being the American masculine ideal has played a very major part in shaping my life and who I am; how could it not? I used to, when I was a kid, pray that I’d wake up the next morning and magically be turned into the kind of boy I was supposed to be, the kind that every other boy I knew–from classmates to cousins to everything I watched on television and at the movies.

Society and culture have changed in many ways since I was a little boy who didn’t fit so easily into the conformist role for little boys; roles for male and female were very narrowly defined when I was a child, and children were forced into conforming to those roles almost from birth. Boys were supposed to be rough and tumble and play sports and get dirty and like bugs and frogs and so forth; girls were supposed to be feminine and play with dolls or play house, wear dresses and mother their baby dolls. Boys weren’t supposed to read or enjoy reading (but I was also supposed to get good grades and be smart), and that was all I wanted to do when I was a kid. I used to love Saturdays, when my mother would go to the grocery store and drop me off at the library on her way. I loved looking at the books on the shelves, looking at the cover art and reading the descriptions on the back. I loved getting the Scholastic Book Club catalog and picking out a few books; the excitement of the day when the books I’d ordered arrived and I could go out on the back porch when I got home and read them cover to cover. I was constantly, endlessly, pushed to do more “boyish” things; I played Pee-wee baseball (very much against my will), and later was pushed into playing football in high school–which I hated at first but eventually came to love…which just goes to show, don’t automatically hate something without trying it. But yeah, I never loved playing baseball. I was enormously happy when we moved to Kansas and I discovered, to my great joy, that my new high school didn’t have a team.

One less traditionally masculine thing for me to participate in was always a bonus.

The things that I really wanted to do weren’t considered masculine pursuits, and as a general rule I was denied them as much as possible. My parents forbade me from reading books about girls–Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, Trixie Belden–which, quite naturally, made me want them more (my entire life the best way to get me to do something is to tell me either not to do it or tell me I can’t do it…either always makes me want to do it). Oddly enough, when my reading tastes became more adult–when I moved from children’s books to reading fiction for adults–they didn’t seem to care that I was reading books by women about women quite so much as they did when I was younger; either that, or they gave up trying as they finally saw me as a lost cause–one or the other; I don’t know which was the actual case. Maybe my embrace of football in high school overrode everything else suspect about me. It’s possible. My family has always worshipped at the goalposts…and I kind of still do. GEAUX TIGERS!

I spent a lot of my early life trying to understand masculinity and how it worked; what it was and why it was something I should aspire to–and never could quite wrap my mind around it. The role models for men always pointed out to me–John Wayne, etc.–never resonated with me; I always thought they were kind of dicks, to be honest. The whole “boys don’t cry, men never show emotions, men make the money and the entire household revolves around their wants and needs” shtick never took with me, and of course, as I never had any real sexual interest in women…the whole “locker room talk” thing was always kind of revolting to me, because I always saw girls as people. It probably had something to do with the fact that I was more likely to be able to trust girls than boys; I had so many boys decide they couldn’t be friends with me anymore because at some point other kids calling me a fairy began having an negative impact on their own lives all through junior and senior high school (to this day, I’ve never understood this; why were we friends before, and what changed? It wasn’t me…I didn’t suddenly switch gears from butch boy to effeminate overnight) it’s little wonder I have difficulty ever trusting straight men…but in fairness, I have trouble trusting everyone. But I never quite understood the entire “boys are studs girls are sluts” thing, but I also never truly understood the dynamics of male/female attraction. Yes, I dated in high school; I dated women in college before I finally stopped entirely. And yes, I also have had sex with women, back then–but never really enjoyed it much.

In all honesty, I still don’t understand masculinity, at least not as it was defined in my earlier decades of life. I’ve never understood the cavemen-like mentality of responding with violence (no matter how angry I get, I never get violent); I’ve never understood the refusal to recognize that women are human beings rather than life support systems for vaginas and wombs and breasts; I’ve never understood the mentality that a man’s desires should trump (see what I did there?) bodily autonomy for women. No man has a right to a woman’s body, nor does any man have a right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. Maybe always being an outsider looking in and observing has something to do with my mindset, maybe my difference and always having mostly female friends most of my life is what shaped me into understanding these things.

I also mostly only read women’s books, to be honest. There are some straight male writers I read and admire (Ace Atkins, Bill Loefhelm, Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Chris Holm, Stephen King, Jeff Abbott and Paul Tremblay, just to name a few) but I really have no desire to read straight male fantasies that reduce women to caricatures and gay men, if they do appear, as stereotypes; but after I recently read I the Jury by Mickey Spillane, a comment someone left on my post gave me a whole new perspective on how to read such books from the 40’s 50’s, and 60’s; the perspective of reading these books as examples of post-war PTSD…and that opened my eyes to all kinds of questions and potential critical analyses; that the horrors of World War II and what the veterans saw and experienced shaped the development of the culture of toxic masculinity that arose after the war (not that toxic masculinity didn’t exist before the war, of course, but the war experience certainly didn’t help any and it most definitely reshaped what “being a man” meant). I was thinking about doing a lengthier critical piece, on I the Jury, along with the first Travis McGee novel, and possibly including Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark and possibly Alistair MacLean. There’s certainly a wealth of material there to take a look at, evaluate, and deconstruct–and that’s not even getting into Ian Fleming and James Bond.

I’ve also always found it rather interesting that Mickey Spillane was Ayn Rand’s favorite writer. Make of that what you will.And on that note, I am off to bed. The last two days have been long ones, and tomorrow and Sunday will also be long days. I’m planning on driving back to New Orleans on Sunday–timing it so I get back after the parades are over so I can actually get home–regardless of what happens here. It’s not been an easy time here, and I am very tired.

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I’m Livin’ in Shame

As Constant Reader is aware, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with short stories.

I love them as a form. I love reading them–there are few pleasures greater than a biting short story with a sting at the end (I’m looking at you, Karin Slaughter’s “An Unremarkable Heart”)–and I love writing them…but I also hate writing them. I hate that there are fewer and fewer paying markets for them. Every writing class I took when I was younger always emphasized the short story and its importance (although I know any number of novelists who can’t or won’t or don’t write them), so it’s always a bit sad for me to see markets drying up and going away. I’ve had some great highs in my writing career thus far, and some of them have been thanks to short stories.

The thing about short stories is there are two ways to write them: you either get the idea for one and start working on it, or you’re asked to contribute one (or come across a call for submissions). I am not so great at writing for a submission call; I am inevitably on deadline for a novel (when am I not?) and the time frame inevitably for the calls never works out for me. I’ve had some luck with selling to markets with submission calls, but often I end up submitting a story I don’t feel is 100% there yet because it’s the day of the deadline and I’ve run out of time…so I will send it in, hoping I’m wrong and the story actually IS finished.

I am rarely wrong.

So, I generally just write stories when I get the idea. Sometimes I can get the first draft finished before the well runs dry or I have to put it aside to move on to something else I have to write; sometimes I just scribble down the title and the concept behind the story.

“This Thing of Darkness” was originally written for one of the MWA anthologies; I believe it was for the Michael Koryta When a Stranger Comes to Town. I didn’t think the story was actually ready to be read by anyone outside of my apartment, but it was the deadline and I thought why the hell not, nothing ventured nothing gained, and it’s an anonymous read so the judges won’t judge me PERSONALLY if it sucks. It was rejected–as I’d figured it would be, which was fine; those are such a long shot getting in through the hundreds of slush submissions is truly an accomplishment, kudos to those who have!–and so I tinkered with it here and there, now and then, over the years since that first submission. I didn’t think it was appropriate for most crime markets–it’s about a gay man to whom something horrible happened when he was a teenager, and I kind of went into detail about what happened to him–so I wasn’t surprised when I sent it to one and it was deemed “inappropriate” for their readers. So, I sat on it and figured it would be included in This Town and Other Stories.

Then Frank W. Butterfield contacted me for a story for his anthology of Valentine’s crime stories, and I thought, “You know, “This Thing of Darkness” is set during Halloween…you can change it from Halloween to Valentine’s Day” and so I did–and Frank graciously took the story.

Climbing the steps alongside the fenced in wooden deck, he couldn’t help but smile. He’d always loved that the place was named Tacos and Beer. So simple and unpretentious, in a world growing more complicated every day. The patio deck was crowded, filled with what he guessed were hipsters, with bare arms covered in vibrant multi-colored tattoos, the young men with their greasy-looking hair pulled back into manbuns, the women’s streaked with bright, vibrant colors and cut in a variety of styles. They seemed to all wear clunky boots and old, long out of style clothing stained and worn and riddled with holes. The sun glittered on their numerous piercings. He guessed their employers didn’t care about the artwork on their skin, or the posts and hoops bedazzling their faces.

He knew he was hopelessly, tragically, unhip. He’d never been one of the cool kids, and long since lost the desire to be one.

Although he would have thought they’d be too cool to celebrate Valentine’s Day? But many of them were obviously couples. Flowers wrapped in tissue paper adorned tabletops: carnations in various shades of pink, white and red; bullet-headed roses with baby’s breath; and arrangements of lilies and snapdragons and blooms he couldn’t identify. Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, still tightly wrapped in cellophane, sometimes caught the light of the dying sun while he glanced at them.

He sat down at a tall table-top for two inside, perching on a stool facing the door. The inside wasn’t nearly as crowded as the deck. It was the first sunny warm day in New Orleans in quite some time—Carnival had been cold and gray and damp and miserable– and what young person didn’t want to be outside basking in the sunshine while drinking their artisanal craft beers and munching their tacos, laughing, enjoying being young and in love? He watched through the window, imagining he could hear the youthful spirit in their voices.

Oh, to be young again.

Or to be in love, for that matter.

This is, even though it is set in one of my favorite (or used to be, anyway; I don’t know if it’s still there or not) places to eat in my neighborhood, Tacos and Beer on St. Charles Avenue, really not a New Orleans story; it’s one of my Kansas stories. Glenn, my main character, grew up in Kansas and now is a writer living in New Orleans. (Hmmm.) The premise of the story is that, years after he left Kansas never to return, he gets an email out of the blue from someone he went to high school with, someone he hasn’t seen since Graduation Night, David Zimmer. David was the first friend he made when he moved to rural Kansas and started up new as a junior at Kingston County High. David stayed his friend even as he moved on to hanging out with more popular kids and, having been the bullied gay kid at his old high school, Glenn gives in the allure of being a football player and being part of the “in” crowd, having friends and not being picked on, desperately afraid that the gay rumors and bullying will somehow catch up to him at Kingston County High. Sadly, it does…and then one night at an end of the school year party, Glenn gets deeply into trouble, and needs David’s help–David, the first friend, the one he left behind in his need to be a “cool kid,” is the only person to whom he can turn in his hour of need.

At Graduation, they both agreed it was best they never see or speak to each other again.

Until now, and David is coming to New Orleans and wants to meet.

The idea for this story originated in something that actually happened; I did hear from an old friend I went to high school with; whom I’d neither seen nor spoken to since we graduated from high school (he went away to school at MIT; I eventually left Kansas, never to return), and he was coming through New Orleans on his way to run a marathon or something in Mississippi, so we decided to have dinner together and catch up. We did indeed meet at Tacos and Beer–but the horrible thing that happened to Glenn in high school never happened to me at any rate, and I’d certainly not turned to him for help in a dire situation we’d kept secret for forty years. I did, as the character in the story did also, arrive early. In fact, while I was sitting there waiting for my friend, watching the people out on the deck, that the idea for the story came to me.

I think it went something like I should write a story about two high school friends meeting up for the first time in nearly forty years to but what would the story be about to ah, they covered up something when they were in high school, were never found out, and have avoided each other deliberately for all that time, so of course the email out of the blue has made my main character nervous–what could he want after all this time?

And the longer I waited, the more I delved into the story in my head (and yes, this is also a cautionary tale about knowing writers: literally everything is material for us, and we can find inspiration for a new story almost anywhere), the more I liked the idea behind it, and when I got home (I only drank iced tea so I could write the story down when I got home) I parked at the computer and started writing.

I am very happy with the story and how it wound up turning out; dark and twisted, yet all under the happy veneer of a busy restaurant on St. Charles Avenue.

And if you’re interested in a copy of Cupid Shot Me, order it here.

Take a Chance on Me

I got my boosters shot yesterday; other than some arm soreness, I seem to be okay–no gills have developed, no wings, and no scales–but the day is young. The weather here turned very cool yesterday, which was incredibly lovely; fall and spring are so divine here, it makes us forget the swampy hell of the summer every year. Yesterday wasn’t a bad day; I managed to get a lot of work-at-home duties done, while watching Foundation (I am all in on the show now) and then started, of all things, Peacock’s original series adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (more on that later). I have quite the busy day ahead of me now; lots of work at home duties and as always, the Lost Apartment is a disaster area. I am actually up much earlier than I have been getting up on my non-going-into-the office mornings, and it kind of feels good. The light outside is different than it has been–another indication that the world’s turning has shifted and daylight savings is looming on the horizon (next weekend)–and it’s a nice morning here with my coffee here in my kitchen-office.

The house was power-washed this week, and despite the fact we’ve been living here on this property since 2003, I had always thought under all the accumulated grime from the air here (our air quality is something I try not to think about very often, but it’s hard when you see how much of it gets on your car and windshield) the house was painted a pale blue; turns out it is pale coral. Who knew? They also power-washed the concrete sidewalks around the house; the difference is very startling. I am taking the power-washing as a hint that the apartment needs an even deeper dive cleaning. There’s no LSU game tomorrow (thank God, really; I am dreading the Alabama game next week), so I have the entire day free. There are some good games airing, but there’s no need for me to sit in my chair and spend the entire day watching college football, either. There is a Saints game on Sunday–Tampa Bay and Tom Brady–but that’s late enough for me to watch so I can get things done during the day; and a 3:25 start time is also a nice time to call it a day on everything else I am doing around here.

I haven’t started Scott Carson’s The Chill yet, either; ironically I got a copy of his new release. Where They Wait, this week (as well as a copy of Lucy Foley’s The Guest List), so I should probably crack the spine of The Chill at some point today. Scott Carson is the name Michael Koryta (one of my favorite authors) uses now to write horror (he used to write it under his own name. Not sure why the switch/rebrand, but probably has something to do with Koryta being branded for top notch crime fiction; seriously, check out his work if you haven’t. I recommend starting with The Prophet, and if you’ve not read Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, they pair together very nicely).

I also really, really need to write this weekend. I need to write a lot. I also have to do the page proofs for #shedeservedit, but they aren’t due until a week from Monday, and I think the more time I take away from that manuscript the better job of proofing I will do on it. I am a shitty shitty shitty proofreader, which is probably why there are more mistakes in my finished books than there should be in anyone’s printed books. But at least there’s time for me to let them sit and percolate before I jump on them; I am usually so heartily sick of any book at the proofreading stage that I don’t pay as close attention as I might. On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that I am being too hard on myself, which is something of which I am frequently guilty. No one is as hard on me as I am on myself. At some point in my life I pretty much decided if I was super-critical of myself, other people’s criticisms wouldn’t hurt me as much as they had before–and it became deeply engrained into my psyche, and it’s actually more damaging to me than accepting criticisms from others.

Many years ago I decided to stop being unkind to writers and their books on my blog. If I read a book I didn’t care for, I wasn’t going to dis it on the Internet–because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, primarily, and I am not always highly receptive to negative nastiness about my own work. (I tend to say “I’m not the right audience for this book” now.) I didn’t want to be become like those professional reviewers who hate everything, and make their reviews about how smart the reviewer is and how bad of a book they are destroying in print. At the time I made that decision, I also decided there were two exceptions to my rule: Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. What was my small voice, after all, in the chorus of critics and readers worldwide who loathe their writing? It did strike me as hypocritical from time to time, and so I stopped even doing that. They are, no matter how much success and money they have, still human beings with feelings, and there’s a sense that mocking and insulting their work, no matter how small my platform or voice, is just piling on.

Having said that, I will admit I greatly enjoyed The Da Vinci Code when it was released, enough so that I went back and read the first Robert Langdon novel, Angels and Demons (which I actually thought was better). It was a great ride, and I already had some familiarity with the idea of the Christ bloodline, having read Holy Blood Holy Grail at some point in the 1980’s, with its outlandish (if interesting) claims that were eventually turned out to have been based in a great fraud. It combined a lot of things that tick off boxes for me: treasure hunt based in history, actual historical events, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heresy, the Crusades, and of course, making the Catholic Church the great villain of the story (the only better villains are Nazis, really). Was it greatly written? I honestly can’t say now, it’s been so long since I read it. But I did read The Lost Symbol, his follow-up, when it was released and absolutely hated every word of it. I tried to read the next, Inferno, and gave up after the first chapter. I’ve never watched any of the films–although now I am thinking it might be interesting to do so. When I saw the Peacock was adapting The Lost Symbol, I actually (thank you, faulty memory) thought it was the Brown novel I hadn’t finished. After I got caught up on Foundation but still had at least another couple of hours’ worth of condom packing to do, I decided to try The Lost Symbol. Even as I watched the first episode, none of it seemed familiar to me, and it wasn’t until they mentioned the painting “The Apotheosis of George Washington” (that may not be the actual name; but it’s the painting in a government building ceiling where it looks like Washington is being greeted into heaven as a god) that I began to suspect that I had actually read the book; by the time they descended into the tunnels below the city and met the Architect of the Capital I thought, oh yes I did read this and didn’t much care for it. But the show itself held my attention–it’s an adventure story, after all, and Ashley Zukerman was very well cast as Langdon. I look forward to continuing watching it–at least while I wait for the new episodes of everything else we are currently watching to be loaded for streaming.

And on that note, it’s time for me to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader–I’ll come back tomorrow to check in.

Morning Rider on the Road

So, going back to the office wasn’t a terrible experience. We didn’t see any clients yesterday–we’re hoping to get the supplies we need delivered today, so we can get started again tomorrow–but I was able to go into the office and get some things done before coming home and doing some more work at home as well. I am going in again today–good to get the routine back on track again–and am hopeful that tomorrow will be another step forward in returning to normality.

It looks like we’re going to feel something from Hurricane Nicholas, which looks to be following a particularly strange path for a tropical disturbance, but the majority of whatever it may be won’t be until Thursday. It’s gray outside my windows this morning, but I think overall the weather should be fairly decent today? I suppose I should check.

Yes, it’s supposed to rain all day today, with the heaviest fall around eleven this morning. Yay. But I kind of like gloomy, rainy days, to be perfectly honest. My preference for them is to be at home under a blanket with a book, but you can’t always get what you want.

When I visited my parents a while back, one of the books I took with me was James Jones’ unabridged From Here to Eternity, which apparently included the scenes referencing gay bars and gay activity amongst the soldiers–and how some weren’t averse to making some extra money getting paid for sex. It’s always been one of my father’s favorite books (and movies), but I had never read it. I started it a few times when I was a teenager (I always enjoyed World War II stories) but with these scenes restored (they were cut from the original publication, for obvious reasons) I thought it might prove of interest–particularly since I have an idea (don’t I always?) for a book set on Oahu that opens on December 8, 1941. I got maybe three hundred pages into the book, and literally reading it was torture. I finally gave up and moved on to something else; I don’t remember what it was, but I certainly enjoyed it much much more than I was enjoying From Here to Eternity–and the primary reason I was hating the Jones novel was because all of the characters were, basically, assholes with few if any redeeming qualities. Last night as I sorted things for work at home, I decided to watch the film again–the original, from 1953–and…yeah, I’m not really certain it holds up after all this time either. My primary takeaway from the film was how ridiculously lean and fit the actors (Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra) playing the main leads were. It’s funny, because the book’s frank look at sexuality (Clift’s character falls in love with a prostitute; Lancaster has an affair with his superior officer’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr) is so ridiculously tame by our modern standards; crime series currently airing on network television are more risqué than this film–let alone soaps. (Kind of like Peyton Place–there’s more lurid content in an episode of The Young and the Restless than in the entire book!) I wasn’t overly impressed with the film, to be honest–and it was hardly a glowing depiction of the military. But it was interesting…and made me think about that book I mentioned earlier than I want to write someday.

But the gym is back to its normal hours, and so I’ll be able to get back there to workout after work today. Yay! I’ve actually missed going to the gym in these turbulent times; I did make it over there last week for a quick workout one day, and I am really looking forward to things going back to routine again. I like my routines, I like my patterns, I like my ruts, frankly; and again trying to remember what all was going on and what all I was working on before this disruption began has been challenging. Head down, nose to grindstone; get it all together, man!

We also watched a few more episodes of Only Murders in the Building, which we are really enjoying. I’m not really sure if this is a murder mystery, or about three true crime aficionados who’ve become convinced they are not only investigating a murder but making a podcast about it at the same time. I am really enjoying the show; the Martin Short character gets on my nerves periodically, but I really like the Steve Martin character, and those apartments! I can only imagine what those apartments are actually worth in today’s Manhattan rental climate.

I am also hoping to get back into Velvet was the Night soon. I read a chapter last night (or was it the night before?) and am really enjoying it thus far, and we haven’t really gotten into the story itself yet; Moreno-Garcia is letting us get to know our two main characters first; she really is a gifted talent, and am looking forward into delving more into her work in the future–perhaps either Mexican Gothic or Gods of Jade and Shadow will be up next. I love that she doesn’t limit herself to genre, which used to be a no-no in this business; you were supposed to pick a genre and if you wrote in another one, you used another name (Michael Koryta has written both crime and horror under his own name; lately he’s started publishing the horror as Scott Carson). God, how this business has changed in the years since I took my first tentative steps into it so long ago. Some of those changes are for the better–prime example being Moreno-Garcia slipping between genres effortlessly under the same name–and some not so much; I miss writing gay erotica from time to time…although I love that my erotica fell out of favor with “current” readers of gay male pornography because when I write it, it’s about lust and sweat and masculinity and control–as opposed to roses and music and love and fading to black and cuddling when fading back in.

And I need to get back to writing, which I am assuming will happen once I feel more settled, with the ground more stable beneath my feet again. Today is the 14th, which means I only have 16 days left in which to finish the first draft of Chlorine like I had wanted; I think I am going to continue working on it, while prepping for writing the next book and revising some of the other things I have on hand that aren’t finished or in early draft form; I need to make a list, don’t I?

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines with me. I will check in with you again tomorrow, Constant Reader, never fear!

Two To Make It Right

Thursday morning and I am slurping coffee and trying to get awake and ready for an exciting day of data entry and condom packing. I’ve not been terribly successful with my goal of cleaning out my inbox; I am going to try to work on that today after I finish working, after I go to the gym, and after I get today’s writing done.

I’ve identified a problem–a pattern, if you will–with my writing. I will get to a point in a short story where I am kind of stuck, and whereas what I do with a novel (write my way out of it) I won’t do that with the story, instead agonizing over it for a bit before consigning it to the oh well I’ll finish this later at some point folder. This is defeating, and why, ultimately, I have so many unfinished stories languishing around in my files. So, I am determined to solider on with the one I am currently working on, “The Sound of Snow Falling”, and try to get it finished. I am also determined to revise chapter one of Chlorine this weekend, and hopefully get into my next novella–either “Never Kiss a Stranger” or “A Holler Full of Kudzu”–and also get the Lost Apartment back under control at some point.

It’s amazing how little time it takes yet how easy it is for this place to look like a disaster area in need of FEMA assistance.

I also want to get back to reading–oh, how the books pile up!–and maybe it’s something I should do before I go to bed every night. I had tried for a brief while–after that less screen time before going to bed will help you sleep better thing circulated a few years ago–to read before bed every night; I have a non-fiction book on my nightstand that is now coated in dust that I would love to get back to reading–but it also wouldn’t hurt to do some fiction reading downstairs before I go up to bed, risking the getting caught up in the book and not wanting to put it down thing, which all too often happens to me with reading fiction. I am still greatly enjoying Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, by the way; Caro is an exceptional biographer. I also love how he weaves historical context into his biographies–I’ve only read the first volume of the Johnson biographies, and his description for how hard life was for poor rural women has never stopping haunting my mind–and always am blown away. I’ve never read the two biggest biographies of this century–Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton or McCullough’s John Adams, which I need to remedy–but then again my non-fiction reading (outside of necessary research for writing) has been woefully overshadowed this century by my fiction reading.

I also received copies of the MWA anthologies Deadly Anniversaries (edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini) and When a Stranger Comes to Town (edited by Michael Koryta), which reminded me of how much I’ve been languishing on the Short Story Project–while continuing to buy anthologies or single-author collections, which are also piling up around me. I also have a lot of short stories to read for my Bouchercon panel in August; I am on, of all things, a short story panel; which kind of caught me off-guard because I don’t consider myself a master of the form–or even half-way decent at it. But I have published quite a few of them, and my goal is to publish more (which means writing more of them) and I figure with the terrific panelists, maybe I can pick up a thing or two from some of them.

We started watching another Spanish language show last night, High Seas (Alta Mar in Spanish), which is a murder mystery set on a luxury liner sometime in the 1940’s, traveling from Spain to Rio de Janeiro. It’s gorgeously shot, the period costumes and decor are first rate, as is the acting. We’re on episode 4 now; there have already been two murders and some mysterious shenanigans, including a fire, and yes, we are completely sucked into it. (We’re taking The Underground Railroad slowly, because it’s not really something to be binged, since it raises so many philosophical and societal questions; you kind of need to absorb each episode. It’s really one of the most literate series I’ve ever watched, in part because the visuals are so incredible and poetic; I think it’s one that needs to be rewatched as well because it’s almost too cerebral–yet compelling–to absorb all at once for someone of such diminished intellectual capabilities as me–it’s also making me want to revisit the novel)

And on that note, I am heading into today’s spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you later.

On the Road Again

Yesterday was another awful, low energy day. I got something lovely in the mail–thank you again, Penni Jones, that was so incredibly kind and thoughtful of you–and I got caught out running errands in a wonderful thunderstorm; I eventually had to make a mad dash through the pouring rain to the apartment with bags of groceries and the mail. After getting into the house I was very tired and cranky and out of sorts, and looking at Bury Me in Shadows just made my stomach clench and my nerves fray. I wasted some time writing an entry about writing about vampires, which I will post at some point this morning (if I haven’t already) and looked through some of that writing. I was also enormously pleased, despite the frayed nerves and the stomach clenched in knots, to see that the writing of said vampire fiction was actually quite good, which was nice; I have such a tendency to avoid looking at my old work (for any number of reasons, none of which speak well to my self-confidence) that it was kind of a pleasant surprise to read it and think, hey, this was from really early in my career and this isn’t bad at all, well done, earlier-in-his-career Greg!

So, tired and with low energy, I decided to retire to my recliner with Blacktop Wasteland, figuring that finishing that book was one of my goals for the weekend, and that was probably the easiest goal to reach.

Nor do I regret one second of the time I spent with the book.

Beauregard thought the night sky looked like a painting

Laughter filled the air only to be drowned out by a cacophony of revving engines as the moon slid from behind the clouds. The bass from the sound system in a nearby Chevelle was hitting him in his chest so hard, it felt like someone was performing CPR on him. There were about a dozen other late-model cars parked haphazardly in front of the old convenience store. In addition to the Chevelle, there was a Maverick, two Impalas, a few Camaros and five or six more examples of the heyday of American muscle. Yhe air was cool and filled with the scent of gas and oil. The rich, acrid smell of exhaust fumes and burnt rubber. A choir of crickets and whippoorwills tried in vain to be heard. Beauregard closed his eyes and strained his ears. He could hear them but just barely. They were screaming for love. He thought a lot of people spent a large part of their life doing the same thing.

The wind caught the sign hanging above his head from the arm of a pole that extended twenty feet into the air. It creaked as the breeze moved it back and forth.

Laura Lippman describes noir as “dreamers become schemers,” and that’s always the closest description of what noir actually is that I’ve ever heard. Like all definitions of noir, it’s not quite everything, but nothing else anyone has written or said about noir comes as close to it, in my mind, as that. For me, noir is like pornography; I maybe can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it. I personally love noir; it’s probably one of my favorite things to read (or styles of film to watch). I try to bring a noir sensibility to almost everything I write, no matter what label it’s given as an important keyword on Amazon. (I still believe that Timothy is the most noir thing I’ve written to date; but I am looking forward to delving more deeply into it with future work.)

Blacktop Wasteland is called a ‘heist’ novel by people who know the genre probably better than I do; and they are not incorrect; it is a heist novel. But it’s also so much more that I feel calling it that is, in some ways, a disservice to it–and I don’t mean to imply by that statement that there is anything wrong with heist novels. I haven’t read many of them, and I haven’t seen many heist films. Rob Byrnes writes truly clever, intricately plotted ones with a wide variety of distinct and well-developed characters that are also witty and funny as well as smart. But Blacktop Wasteland is also noir of the purest sort, the kind that Cain and Thompson and the other greats wrote; about working class people who can’t quite catch the break they need to be upwardly mobile, who believe that in a society and culture where everything is stacked against them, the only answer is criminality–and knowing when to walk away from that life. It’s about wanting more for your kids and your family than you had; it’s about grabbing for the American Dream and the brass ring. It’s also about family, and the damage done by wrong decisions and believing mythology you’ve invented rather than facing harsh and painful truths.

The main character of Cosby’s novel, Beauregard Montage (more commonly known as Bug) has tried, throughout his adult life, to build a better life for his wife and kids, and the child he rarely sees he fathered when he was a young teenager with a white girl whose family keeps her away from him. He’s opened his own business–a garage doing car repair and oil changes, etc–but the opening of a franchise oil change place has eaten into his business and has put him in danger of losing it all. A complication with his mother’s Medicare has resulted in a vast amount of money due to the retirement home where she makes everyone’s life miserable. That oldest daughter needs money for college and is dating a guy who might not be good for her. The bills are all overdue and the mortgage on the garage is so overdue it could lead to foreclosure.

Is there anything more American or relatable in these troubled times than financial distress?

But what Bug is best at is driving; he was in the Life before he decided to walk away from it for the sake of a straight life for his wife and kids. His own father walked away from his family when Bug was a teenager–for their sake, since he couldn’t escape his own criminal past. And the carefully constructed life Bug has put together for his family is slowly coming apart at the seams; and he needs money, and fast. So when a driving job in the life comes available, he grits his teeth and agrees to it. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems, and this job leads to other bills that have to be paid–with blood and bone.

The story alone is riveting, but what makes this novel so strong and powerful is the voice and the development of Bug as a character. The struggle within him between the desire for a normal family life and to do right by his children versus the thrill he gets from being in the life; from getting to flex and use his driving skills to skirt the law and get away with it is what takes this book to another level–and then the realization, the coming to terms with his feelings for his own father and that abandonment, as well as coming to terms with his complicated relationship with his mother, as he tries to do the right thing by his own family was breathtaking in its complexity and how agonizingly real it all seemed.

And those actions scenes are masterfully crafted, and keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time. Even had I wanted to put the book down, to take my time with it and read it more slowly, to draw the pleasure out, I couldn’t have once the kicked into high gear.

The writing is also deceptively simple yet honed to a sharpness and beauty worthy of compare to the grand masters of crime writing.

And while it was an accident of my TBR pile, I am very glad I read Kelly J. Ford’s Cottonmouths and S. A Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland back to back, as both are surely writing some of the best contemporary rural noir of our time; they should be paired, really, and read back to back, much the same as how Megan Abbott’s Dare Me and Michael Koryta’s The Prophet should be paired together.

What a terrific time to be living in for a fan of crime fiction this is!