Tag: ‘Nathan Burgoine

Bye Bye Love

Saturday! Sparky let me sleep a little later this morning, but I still have some physical fatigue this morning. I seem to be mentally alert, but the physical shit is weighing me down. We did run errands after work yesterday, including Costco (I got a new vacuum cleaner for my birthday next week), and when we got home from everything and everything had been brought in and put away, I was done for the day. I spent most of the evening being a cat bed and watching documentaries on Youtube about history. Paul eventually finished his work duties and we watched the most recent Platonic, which I love.

Today I have an errand to run and groceries to order for delivery. I want to spend some more time with The Hunting Wives, which I started Thursday night, and my other current books. I need to clean the apartment, too–it’s a slovenly mess–and would again like to get some writing done today as well. I have to say getting groceries delivered might be the best thing to come out of the illness–now I never want to set foot in a grocery store for an extended period of time; I don’t mind dashing in for a few things every now and then. It’s much better that way and I can always swing by the one in the CBD on the way home from the office. I also need to assemble the new vacuum cleaner, so I will probably spend some time getting the floors taken care of, and it’s long overdue.

I certainly am enjoying my coffee and breakfast this morning. It’s already bright and sunny outside, which is lovely and probably means yet another heat advisory. August is flying by, and I really need to buckle down and get my act together. The fatigue and lethargy has been brutal this summer, and I have to understand that I will probably never go back to the way I was before I got sick. Which is also fine; I have nothing to prove to anyone anymore, and certainly not to myself, do I?

I picked up some new books Thursday on my way home from the office: the new Chuck Tingle (Lucky Day); She Didn’t Stand a Chance by Stacie Grey; and Dogs Don’t Break Hearts by ‘Nathan Burgoine. I also need to prune the books again, don’t I? It’s been a hot minute since I dropped off a donation box at the library. Part and parcel of the cleaning/organizing process, isn’t it? I still am a book hoarder, but I’m getting better. I certainly am not buying as many books as I did before. I really do need to make progress on the TBR stacks and piles all over this messy, overly dusty place.

And when the heat and humidity break, I am going to clean my filthy filthy windows.

I also have another newsletter to write this weekend.

And on that note, I am going to head over to my easy chair to read more of my current reads before running my errands and getting cleaned up and starting on the house. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back, most likely tomorrow morning.

The goddess Isis guarding the Canopic Shrine of Pharaoh Tutankhamen

When We Make Love

Tuesday morning, which oddly is my halfway point of going into the office this week. It’s bizarre and will be mentally disruptive, but Thursday is a holiday and Friday my remote day, so when I leave the office tomorrow night I’ll be heading home for the weekend and not returning until Monday. Very weird, am I right?

Well, the first infusion went well. I was early (of course) but the slightly more than two hours wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad; the chair I was in while getting it was a massage chair that also heated, so I had some nice heat into my back muscles to go with the vibrating. I didn’t have any negative reaction to it, but alas and alack, there was a crisis at work and I was trying to figure out how to fix everything for everyone by communicating through the Teams app, which also helped pass the time and also counted as work; I mean, I was having a medical procedure and was working remotely, you bet your ass I am counting that as work time! I was a bit tired when it was over and throughout the rest of the day, but if that is the only side effect I feel from this, I can live with it. I also treated myself to Sonic on the way back to the office, and it was pouring rain on me from the moment I left the hospital until I got back to the office–which was the cue for every stupid New Orleans driver who can’t drive in the rain to get on the highway. The way people drive, you’d think it never rained here. (Narrator voice: It does, in fact, rain frequently in New Orleans.)

Despite having to deal with a work crisis, I was also able to spend some time reading Summerhouse, which I’m enjoying and is also making me think. It’s a very interesting take on long-term queer couples and relationships1, and the cultural differences between Turkey and the United States–they are discreetly and deeply closeted, but even that aspect of the story makes me think, and there’s also some interesting thoughts bubbling up about gender roles and gay couples that might make for an interesting essay in and of itself; the book is definitely engaging my mind. Thanks again to Kristopher Zgorski, whose review of the book brought it to my attention; I’d have probably missed it otherwise. (He is such a good source for great books!)

I also got to write a guest post over at Christa Faust’s newsletter, and the topic was Sex Workers in Crime Fiction. I wish I had done a better job, but she asked me to do it before I got sick–and then came the sickness, followed by the recovery process (still in it) and my writer brain might not have been engaged enough? I suppose I am not doing a good job convincing you to go read it, am I? But I definitely have strong opinions about sex, sexuality, and sex workers, and I do get some of those across in the guest post. Also, big thanks to Christa for inviting me–and if you’ve not read her work, what the FUCK are you waiting for? Seriously, get thee hither to your local bookseller and if they don’t have them in stock, order them and DEMAND they stock them from now on.

I also got a lovely shout out for Pride from ‘Nathan Burgoine. It’s so hard for me to register that Bourbon Street Blues came out twenty-one years ago…both Scotty and Chanse can legally drink now. Yikes, indeed. I guess I have been around long enough to be considered a sage? Ha ha ha ha, as if.

Also, I don’t know if you subscribe to Matthew Rettenmund’s Boy Crazy newsletter, but he recently wrote a great piece about Soloflex and their first model, Scott Madsen. Matthew does an excellent job of talking about celebrity culture of gay interest, and he also talks about things of gay interest from over the last four decades (he wrote an amazing piece for Esquire about Playgirl that is an absolute must-read). I may write about Madsen and Soloflex at some point myself, but more from a Gregalicious point of view rather than an overarching cultural one the way Matthew does.

Lots of links this morning, no?

The only effect to the infusion that I could tell was fatigue, which was one of the side-effects they mentioned, but not one of the serious ones. Fatigue is to be expected, so after I made groceries on the way home I was pretty wiped out. We watched some more Coyotl, which is becoming more and more fun as we go–although when our hero is the beast, he looks more silly than intimidating, which kind of spoils it a little bit. I do feel a bit tired and worn out this morning and didn’t want to get up, but my coffee seems to be kicking in right now so I am going to ride that wave, hopefully through the rest of the day. The LSU game was also rain-delayed (which is why we were able to watch Coyotl) until this morning with the Tigers up 5-3 in the fourth.

And it’s into the spice mines I go this morning! Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

I’m not sure what it says about me as an almost 64 year old gay men but my first thought every time I see this image is “Sure, he’s hot but no one is going to be fucking on that sofa because those stains will never come out.”
  1. Long term relationships are often missing from queer lit, as are gay men in their sixties as the focal point of the story. ↩︎

Hello

When I was cleaning out/working in my storage unit a few weeks ago, I uncovered the only surviving copies of two anthologies I edited pre-Katrina: Shadows of the Night (horror) and Upon a Midnight Clear (gay Christmas tales). I picked them up Saturday night during the Alabama-LSU game and paged through them, and laughed as I realized I’d published a story of my own in each anthology, but being afraid of being accused of ‘self-publishing’, I used a pseudonym. The pseudonym was one I was going to use for writing horror, and the name I chose makes me laugh really hard: Quentin Harrington. Quentin came from the old show Dark Shadows, and “Harrington” was a variation of my last name that, sometimes but not very often, people used to actually think was my name (along with Harris, Herron, Heron, Huron, Aaron, etc.).

The stories, which I’d completely forgotten about, were “The Troll in the Basement” and “The Snow Queen.”

The books have been out of print for about ten years now, and Shadows was actually a Lambda Literary Award finalist (the first time I was nominated twice in the same year; I was also nominated in the Men’s Mystery category that year for Jackson Square Jazz, and was also the first time for me to lose twice in the same year). Shadows was inspired by two thoughts: one, how much I enjoyed Michael Rowe’s two Queer Fear anthologies, and by knowing how many writer friends I had who enjoyed horror but didn’t write it. I thought it would be interesting to get a group of writers who didn’t write horror, and see what they could come up with. I can’t believe I’d forgotten about my own story; which isn’t bad, but isn’t great, either. It had one of those 1950’s EC Comics endings–something I still tend to do, even with crime stories, and is something I need to get away from.

Upon a Midnight Clear was an anthology I’d been wanting to do for a very long time before it came to fruition. I’d always wanted to do an anthology reclaiming Christmas for LGBTQ people; there is so much out there–TV shows, movies, specials, books, etc.–for Christmas but none of it exploring it from the queer outsider’s point of view. I’d gotten a story submitted for another anthology that was Christmas-themed, and didn’t really fit that particular anthology; but it also triggered the why not do a queer Christmas anthology? It could be a perennial seller at Christmas time. And that’s how the anthology was born. I got some terrific stories (of particular note: Jim Grimsley’s “Comfort and Joy,”  David McConnell’s “Christmas 1989,” and “Our Family’s Things” by Jay Quinn–but they were all lovely stories in one way or another) and the book sold a fair amount of copies. My own story was a twist on Han Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” not an exact rewrite or retelling, but something I took and twisted and made my own. I liked the story a lot, but had completely forgotten I’d written it.

Alas, I only have one author copy of each anthology; someone on Twitter was looking for queer Christmas stories and ‘Nathan Burgoine recommended Midnight Clear,  and if I had even one spare copy I would have sent it to the person looking. But I don’t, and so I can’t part with my copy.

I also was invited to write a story for an anthology yesterday, which was thrilling (it’s always nice to be asked) and the story itself is going to be a challenge to write, which is also thrilling. I do love me a challenge.

I spent most of yesterday cleaning and finishing reading Laura Lippman’s astonishing Sunburn, and started reading Alafair Burke’s The Wife last night. I have a lot of thoughts about the Lippman, just as I do about the Alison Gaylin I finished Saturday night, but will review them and talk more in depth about both books closer to their release dates. I am enjoying Alafair’s book, too, by the way.

And now, back to the spice mines.