Tag: need

Evangeline

One of the great joys of my life has always been history. One of the many reasons I love New Orleans so much is because the city has never completely paved over and replaced its history; on a foggy night in the French Quarter, the sound of mules pulling tour carriage clopping on the streets can make you feel like you’ve somehow stepped through a window into the past, and I love that. I’ve never known much beyond some basics of New Orleans and Louisiana history; and I’ve been going down rabbit holes since right around the start of the pandemic, learning more and more about the history here. It’s humbling to realize how little I actually did know. I knew when the French arrived; I know how English Turn got its name and when Louisiana was turned over to Spain (1763, to be exact) and when it became American (1803). I also know Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans before he succeeded in forcing the Spanish to return it to France….so he could sell it to the Americans. I know New Orleans fell to the Union in 1862 during the Civil War; I know a little bit about Storyville and Huey Long; and I know that the landing boats used for the Normandy invasion in World War II in 1944 were built here. I know a smattering of things post-war about New Orleans–but the gaps in my knowledge are staggering, and I know even less about the rest of the state’s history.

I know that the Cajuns are actually Acadians, from French Nova Scotia, kicked out after the French and Indian War and forced to resettle elsewhere–many of them, after a long and mostly horrific journey, arrived in the swampy wetlands of Louisiana and made their home here. I know that Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline”, about two lovers tragically separated during what is called le grande derangement–the Great Expulsion–who promise to find each other once they reach Louisiana. It’s a tragic poem, and of course the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinsville is supposedly the”place” that the fictional lovers finally found each other after so many years, but their pairing was simply not meant to be–the story is a tragedy, after all–but that was how the “Cajuns” came to be Louisianans, and even after they arrived it wasn’t easy for them here. The Creoles of New Orleans looked down their aristocratic noses at the lower class farmers, and so they settled in the part of Louisiana still known as Acadiana to this day.

I have a copy of Evangeline somewhere. I really should read it.

One of these years, I am going to explore my state more. I’ve lived in Louisiana now for almost twenty-seven years, and I’ve never done much in terms of exploration, sight-seeing, and research. The Atchafalaya Basin fascinates me, as does Acadiana. The more I read about the history of both New Orleans and Louisiana, the more I realize how little I know (I always laughed off being called a “New Orleans expert,” because there’s literally a library filled with information about the past of both the city and the state to completely humble me and make me realize I know actually very little about either, and definitely do not qualify to be called expert on anything Louisiana.

I’ve slowly started writing about the rest of Louisiana, but I often fictionalize the places I write about; they are loosely based on the reality but I get to play around with that sort of thing and that’s better for me than trying to write about the real places and making it all up. My first time outside of New Orleans writing about Louisiana was really Bourbon Street Blues, when Scotty is kidnapped by the bad guys and winds up deep in a swamp. “Rougarou” was when I came up with a fictional town and parish outside of New Orleans, which I’ve used since then again. Need had portions that were set in the rural parishes outside of the New Orleans metropolitan area. The Orion Mask and Murder in the Arts District also were heavily reliant on being set (at least partially) in a fictional parish between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. “Solace in a Dying Hour” is another one of these stories. Oh, and Baton Rouge Bingo also had a lot of action outside of New Orleans as well.

I probably should have majored in History for college, but what would I have done with that kind of degree other than teach? Ah, the paths not taken, since I never had any desire to be a teacher, probably my subconscious saying um, you cannot be a teacher because of who you really are which was probably smart. Besides, I wouldn’t have ever been able to pick a period to specialize in; I would have had to be like Barbara Tuchman, interested in everything and picking certain periods that intrigued me for study. How could I ever choose between the Wars of Religion and seventeenth century France, or the Hapsburgs in Spain and Austria? Although I suppose I could have specialize entirely in the sixteenth century, primarily because it was such a tumultuous transitional century. I wish I was a trained researcher, but I suppose I could still learn how to do research properly despite my great age; the problem is time. Fall Saturdays are given over to college football (and I am not giving up one of the great joys of my life) and of course Sunday I watch the Saints. But if I am going to write historical fiction set in New Orleans or Louisiana, why wouldn’t I avail myself of all of the magnificent research facilities here in the city? UNO, Tulane, Loyola and I’m sure Xavier all have archives in their libraries documenting the past here; there’s the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Williams Research Center and really, so so very much. I also need to explore the bayou parishes and the river parishes, and make my way further north to explore Acadiana…and if I ever want to write a book based on the Jeff Davis Eight, I would need to go visit that parish and look around, get a grasp for how it feels and looks there.

So much to do, so little time…and one of the great problems about Louisiana and New Orleans history is trying to decipher what is fact and what is fiction; as so many “historians” and “writers” (looking at you, Robert Tallant and Harnett Kane) often wrote legends and lore as historical fact. I’m not sure how much of Gumbo Ya-Ya is actually true or not, but for writing fiction…perhaps it doesn’t matter as much how right it is? I have this idea for a story, predicated on something I recently discovered again–I have a tendency to forget things–but there was a community just outside of New Orleans called St. Malo, which was settled by Filipinos who’d escaped bondage on Spanish sailing ships. Filipinos in Louisiana in the eighteenth century? But it’s true; and the community was mostly houses and buildings built over the water; the 1915 hurricane destroyed it completely and it was never resettled, with those who survived moving into the city proper. I have an idea for a story called “Prayers to St. Malo” that would be built around that, but the story is still taking shape. There is always more to learn about regional history here…and since I am doing such a deep dive into Alabama history, why not continue diving in regional here?

Louisiana is unique and special and different–which is why I think I felt at home here that fateful thirty-third birthday when I came to New Orleans to celebrate it. New Orleans was the first place I ever felt like I belonged, and I’ve never regretted moving here. I just wish I’d started diving into the local history sooner.

Need

Ah, vampires.

I never really meant to write a vampire story. For one thing, Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice had already done the New Orleans vampire story and set the bar super-high for anyone else wishing to write about vampires in New Orleans; Charlaine Harris also kind of cornered the market on Louisiana supernatural novels, too. It really seemed cliché to do New Orleans vampires, and I never would have, had I not been asked, and offered a lot of money, to do so. I make no bones about writing for money; if that renders me an unreadable hack, so be it.

I was initially asked to write a New Orleans vampire novella for a collection of four to be called Midnight Thirsts, which Kensington was publishing. Once I signed the contract and got paid half the advance, I decided to adapt a vampire short story I’d written, probably in or around 1997 or 1998, called “The Nightwatchers”; the main character was a young wannabe actress with a lot of talent but a lot of insecurity, who discovers that the reason she hasn’t been getting good roles in her theater company is because the woman who does is fucking the director. The story wasn’t good–she is easy prey for a vampire looking for a companion, who kills the director and the competition actress before turning her–but there was some lovely stuff about the French Quarter in the fog and her crumbling apartment–this was when you could still get a decent enough apartment in a crumbling old building in the Quarter for a price that seems unbelievable and unrealistic today–that I thought I could use. I also like the title, and as is my wont, when I started world-building and creating, I went overboard on back story. There were two point of view characters; the main, Philip Rutledge, who works as an escort, and his best friend Rachel, an aspiring singer who works in a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street, as well as a third; an older man who is a “nightwatcher,” member of an ancient society that reins in supernatural threats to humanity all the while keeping them in the dark about the reality of supernatural creatures and beings in the world. He has followed a rogue vampire to New Orleans, who has set his sights on Philip. I left the ending open, because I thought there was more story–if not a book, if not an entire series–in this idea. I decided I was going to write the vampire novel after finishing Mardi Gras Mambo…which wound up being delayed over a year. Then Katrina happened, and by the time I was ready to write about vampires again, too much time had gone by, alas. But they were doing another collection of vampire novellas, and asked me to do a Todd Gregory story for them (they had started publishing the Todd Gregory fraternity novels by this time), and that story became the novella “Blood on the Moon.” But rather than starting fresh, I used the same structure and world I’d created with “The Nightwatchers”–and tied it into the fraternity novel world as well, making the main character a member of the fraternity’s University of Mississippi chapter, visiting New Orleans for Carnival and winding up getting turned (it’s a longer, more complicated story than that, but that’s the bottom line). I brought Rachel and the old man from “The Nightwatchers” back–and when I was doing the anthology Blood Sacraments, I wrote a short story “Bloodletting”, that basically picked up where “Blood on the Moon” left off.

So, when Kensington asked for an erotic vampire novel rather than another fraternity book, I decided to use “Bloodletting” as the first chapter and build on the story from there, also using “Blood on the Moon” as the foundational story and the supernatural world I’d created for “The Nightwatchers.” This was to serve as an introductory work to a new supernatural Todd Gregory series.

It’s working title was A Vampire’s Heart. The powers that be didn’t like that title, thinking it sounded more like a romance novel title (which wasn’t wrong), and suggested Need, which was a recurring theme in the book.

And I really loved the cover.

The damp air was thick with the scent of blood.

It had been days since I had last fed, and the desire was gnawing at my insides. I stood up, and my eyes focused on a young man walking a bicycle in front of the cathedral. He was talking on a cell phone, his face animated and agitated. He was wearing a T-shirt that read Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Dem Saints? and a pair of ratty old paint-spattered jeans cut off at the knees. There was a tattoo of Tweetybird on his right calf, and another indistinguishable one on his left forearm. His hair was dark, combed to a peak in the center of his head, and his face was flushed. He stopped walking, his voice getting louder and louder as his face got darker.

I could smell his blood. I could almost hear his beating heart.

I could see the pulsing vein in his neck, beckoning me forward.

The sun was setting, and the lights around Jackson Square were starting to come on. The tarot card readers were folding up their tables, ready to disappear into the night. The band playing in front of the cathedral was putting their instruments away. The artists who hung their work on the iron fence around the park were long gone, as were the living statues. The square, so teeming with life just a short hour earlier, was emptying of people, and the setting sun was taking the warmth with it as it slowly disappeared in the west. The cold breeze coming from the river ruffled my hair a bit as I watched the young man with the bicycle. He started wheeling the bicycle forward again, still talking on the phone. He reached the concrete ramp leading up to Chartres Street. He stopped just as he reached the street, and I focused my hearing as he became more agitated. What do you want me to say? You’re just being a bitch, and anything I say you’re just going to turn around on me.

I felt the burning inside.

Desire was turning into need.

I knew it was best to satisfy the desire before it became need. I could feel the knots of pain from deprivation forming behind each of my temples and knew it was almost too late. I shouldn’t have let it go this long, but I wanted to test my limits, see how long I could put off the hunger. I’d been taught to feed daily, which would keep the hunger under control and keep me out of danger.

Need was dangerous. Need led a vampire to take risks he wouldn’t take ordinarily. And risks could lead to exposure, to a painful death.

You see why they suggested we rename it Need? That opening pretty much says it all.

I had never really put a lot of thought into writing about vampires, in all honesty. To date, I have only published two novellas, one short story, and the novel, of course, but while I was writing Need that world began to expand and grow in my head as I worked on the story. I wanted to tie both “The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon” together, with Need as the continuation, so I brought back both Rachel and Nigel from the former, while keeping Cord from the latter as the main character. Cord Logan (how is that for a gay porn star name) was, despite being young in terms of being a vampire, quite powerful and growing in his power exponentially by the day. Headstrong, he’d broken away from the coven of vampires that turned him during Carnival, without learning everything he needed to learn first. What he didn’t know–and his former coven also didn’t–was that because of the circumstances involved in his own turning–when a male witch also tried to steal his power from him, he inadvertently wound up transferring his own power to Cord, who was then turned into a vampire to save his own life. This combination of witch/vampire is actually quite dangerous–as are any vampires Cord himself might create, which was the entire problem he faced in the story “Bloodletting” and didn’t understand.

The Supreme Council wants Cord summarily executed, but Nigel wants to keep him alive, to study and learn from, as well as to try teaching him how to control his powers. For me, Need was the introductory tale to a much longer story, where I’d be able to bring in vampires and shifters and witches and faeries and pretty much every kind of supernatural being. The next book was going to be called Desire, and every book was going to have a one-word title. I had a lot of fun with writing Need, and was really getting excited and writing lots of note for Desire…but the book didn’t do very well. It did okay, but not in the kind of numbers that would make a sequel a no-brained, and by then I had already moved on to writing the young adult books. The reviews weren’t great, either–but I never really care or pay much attention to them. The real problem is that there were sex scenes, and I don’t write the kind of gay sex scenes people want to read anymore. Mine are physical, lots of sweats and smells and experiencing how it feels and so on…most people want the sex scenes to be more esoteric and romantic and sweet.

I don’t think I’ve ever had sweet, romantic sex. I’ve certainly never written it.

Every once in a while, when I am writing something more along the lines of horror or with a supernatural tones, I remember my vampires and the world I created for them with a slight ping of sadness.

Maybe someday I’ll write Desire, but it’s highly unlikely at this point.

Theft, and Wandering Around Lost

Work at home Friday!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highway to Hell

I realized the other night that, of all things, I take more pride in my short stories than I do in my novels. Isn’t that strange? Novels are, in theory, much more difficult to write than a short story–even at its barest minimum, a novel should be at least fifty thousand words while short stories generally cut off around a thousand. I think it’s because I still carry the scars from that asshole writing professor in college. I always struggle with short stories, and always have; I used to say that if I wrote a successful short story it was completely and entirely by accident. But writing erotica was an excellent tutorial in short story writing; in what other type of short story is “beginning, middle, end” so clearly delineated?

My first short story that got published outside of the realm of erotica was “Smalltown Boy,” which was published in 2003, I think. It’s still one of my favorite stories of my own; it’s an Alabama story and I am still very proud of it. I used to think I’d never get a short story published anywhere that wasn’t erotica, so when my stories started getting acceptances and published in non-erotica markets, it was very cool.

I like writing short stories because I can encapsulate an idea in that short form rather than writing an entire novel. I can also experiment with voice, style, theme, setting and story. I have any number of stories that don’t work but are completed; I have a lot more than were started and stalled because I didn’t know how to finish them. I think I have around a hundred short stories or so in progress; I actually counted a few years ago because someone asked and I didn’t know the answer.\

Several years ago, an Australian crime writer I’ve known for decades reached out and asked me if I would contribute a story to an anthology her publishing company was producing, The Only One in the World, which was a Sherlock Holmes collection–but the only rule was you couldn’t set the stories in London, period; I had never written anything close to a Holmes story and have never really been much of a Holmesian (I do love Laurie King’s Mary Russell series), but it was a challenge so I said yes–because for me, I love writing challenges because they push me out of my comfort zone and make me try things I might not ordinarily try. That story became “The Affair of the Purloined Rentboy” (still one of my favorite titles of all time) and it was a lot of fun to write, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself writing it…to the point I’ve considered revisiting my Holmes and Watson in 1916 New Orleans, several times.

Last year, the Sherlock editor, Narrelle Harris, reached out to me to see if I’d write something for a new anthology, The Fresh Hell, and there was a list of horror tropes we were given to chose from. Being from Louisiana, how could I not pick “haunted bayou”?

And so I started writing a story that became “Solace in a Dying Hour.”

Madeleine Chaisson opened her eyes and knew that the next time she shut them would be the last.

She cocked her head to listen. Even amongst those few (some say blessed, others cursed) who could hear them, most would describe the strange sounds they made as they danced about the dark, still waters as whistling. But Madeleine was special, different, not like the others.

She heard them clearly. She knew they weren’t whistling. They were singing.

But the sound she heard now was just the gulls over Bayou St Ferdinand shrieking as they swooped and flapped their wings looking for morsels of food. 

Dirty scavengers, she thought with a scowl. She hated the gulls; had since she was a little girl growing up in this very house.

How much gull shit had she cleaned off the dock during her long lifetime? Papa would backhand her if he saw any of the dried white splotches with black pellets on the dock when he brought the boat back in from a day shrimping out in the Gulf.

‘It rots the wood, you lazy cochon,’ he’d say in his sing-song southeast Louisiana Cajun accent while she rubbed her stinging cheek. ‘And who will have to rebuild the damned thing when it collapses? Don’t I already work hard to keep you clothed and fed?’

Even with him years in his grave, after she began wondering if that was even true, she’d still take the bucket out and scrub the gull shit from the weathered old wood.

If I were a witch like they always said, I could have snapped my fingers and cleaned it, she thought with a snort.

The new anthology debuted today, and it is available on Amazon and other sellers here in the United States; here is the link to Bookshop.org : here. This link is to the trade paper; there’s also a much more expensive hardcover edition as well if you disdain paperbacks.

“Solace in a Dying Hour” is another one of my south Louisiana stories. It took me a long while to get to the point where I was comfortable writing about Louisiana outside of New Orleans (don’t ever ask me about the colossal error in geography I made in Bourbon Street Blues…I SAID DON’T ASK!); I think my first was “Rougarou.” I also wrote and published “A Whisper from the Graveyard” since that one, and this is my third. I’ve started building a fictional world of Louisiana outside of the city over the last seven or eight years or so; it could be longer since I no longer have any sense of time anymore. I have revisited rural Louisiana in books like Need, The Orion Mask, and A Streetcar Named Murder; I have more stories and books I am going to write about my fictional rural Louisiana; I’ve also fictionalized the north shore several times already.

“Solace” is an homage of sorts to two other stories I really loved, “Do the Dead Sing?” by Stephen King and “An Unremarkable Heart” by Karin Slaughter. Both involve someone lying in bed dying, and reliving some pretty horrible things that happened over the course of their lives. I had been studying Louisiana folklore and legends for quite some time, but it was around 2017 or 2018 that I started really doing a deep dive into Louisiana history and culture. A co-worker had moved to Houma, which is deep in the bayou country, and she was doing the same. She was who suggested I write about le feu follet, the swamp lights some see. There are numerous definitions and descriptions of who and what le feu follet actually are; I decided I wanted to use the lights and the whistling aspects of their legend, and I wanted the story to focus on a woman who’s lived a very hard life and been through some things…but who could not only see le feu follet for what they actually are and appear, but could tell that they weren’t whistling, but singing. I also kind of based her on my maternal grandmother, a very quiet woman who never showed emotion and never complained about anything; things were what they were and you just dealt with them, period. I wanted to get that sense of quiet strength that you can usually only find in rural Southern women, that practical pragmatism that has gotten them through hard lives and a lot of tragedy.

My maternal grandmother was pretty amazing, really.

I am very proud of the story and how it turned out; the anthology itself is amazing, and the cover is gorgeous. I hope you enjoy it should you choose to check it out.

Spooning Good Singing Gum

Saturday morning, and at some point I need to walk to Office Depot and get ink for my printer. I suppose I should really let go of this obsessive need to have everything printed on paper just in case. It’s terrible for the planet, for one, and I am sick of spending the money on ink. Who will win here, the neuroses or the economist?

Yesterday wasn’t a good day. I didn’t feel good still throughout most of the day, and I even took the horrifying step of getting Pepto Bismal at the grocery store. Shudder, wretched stuff. But it also occurred to me that maybe I was just hungry–another neuroses there–because I keep forgetting to eat or don’t eat enough when I am not in the office. So I ate something and did feel significantly better. And whenever that feeling started up again, I had something else. It worked. (Part of my food/eating thing is that I don’t ever get hungry and will forget to eat until I feel sick. That, sadly, is nothing new that can be blamed on the long COVID or anything.) But I was also very tired and feeling a bit burnt out from not sleeping well. Paul and I watched the first two episodes of the Ashley Madison documentary series–there will definitely be more about THAT later–and then I went to bed for the night. I did get some things done yesterday but the primary problem for the day really was not feeling good. Today I feel rested, hydrated, and not hungry, so we’re off to a very good start. I want to catch up on some correspondence this morning, and I need to write a first chapter of a book that I was asked to write this week. I intend to relax for the most part today; I have some cleaning up to do around here, which is fine–I am going to start listening to Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree while I clean and organize the kitchen–and I think I’m going to barbecue burgers for dinner later. Can you stand the excitement? I barely can.

I just got the official notice in the mail yesterday that our health insurance provider at work is no longer going to be our health care provider come January 1. I have literally no idea what that means for the future–will I have to buy my own and be reimbursed by the agency? Will we have to take on worse insurance than we already have out of desperation? I’ll be sixty two next month, do I really need to have this kind of stress and aggravation now that I’m getting older and am more in need of medical attention? Thank God I’m getting my teeth fixed in September because who knows what January will bring? Yay. I suppose I should start looking into Medicare and how that all works so I am not blind-sided in a couple of years. Who knows, maybe Medicare is the solution to this pending issue and then I just need supplemental insurance. It makes me head ache just to think about it all, truly. This is the part of being an adult that I really do not like.

But yes, the kitchen is a mess and I need to reorganize myself, which is the goal for today once I get this chapter written. I also will have the cover of the first book I did for this new publisher today soon, and when I share that cover is when I’ll talk more about the book, Constant Reader. I know this vagueness is troublesome, and it may read as coy (I hate coy), but it just makes sense to me to not talk about the book until I have a cover to share. I also think I am going to try to finish some of the entries I have in draft form, or delete them. (Some are over three years old and let’s face it, I’m probably never going to finish those. I can cut and paste what was written and save them as potential personal essays, which is probably the best way to do it.) I do want to go back to doing entries about my own books and why I wrote them–as best as I can remember; the two post drafts I have on here are Need and Timothy–which was kind of fun. I don’t obviously remember everything about those books, the ideas for them and how they came to be, but it’s always fun to try to remember these things.

I am also going to try to get started on Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman once I’ve finished everything today that I need to get done around here (I suppose I should make a list, shouldn’t I?). I have too many great books on top of the TBR pile–books by Eli Cranor, Kelly J. Ford, Megan, Alison Gaylin, Jordan Harper, Christopher Bollen, and S. A. Cosby, a new true crime anthology by Sarah Weinman, and I’ll be getting the new Laura Lippman once it drops–that not reading every day is truly criminal. I also want to read more of these classic short stories from the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies I’ve been getting from eBay. It’s funny, so many retired people tell me how much I am going to miss going to work and how bored I’m going to be once I retire, which is endlessly amusing to me. I will never be bored, as long as there are books to read and books to write. As long as I can function and think and type and read…I’ll never get bored and miss my job. I suspect I will find that time management will be the big problem for me once I retire–allowing time to slip through my fingers since I no longer have to be focused because I don’t have to plan my life and writing around my job anymore–which means I’ll need to make a to-do list for every week as well as one for every day. This is what I did when I used to have to do before I went back to work full-time, and I did still waste a lot of time. The key is structure; I need structure to be productive. And I think–between the tiredness, the hunger, and not feeling well–this last week wasn’t meant to be anything other than a slow and painful transition back to reality. It wasn’t really a work week, since the holiday fell on Tuesday…this coming week is my first full week back to work in three weeks. Next week I have to take a day off for a doctor’s appointment, so there’s that, too. And then it will be August, my power bill will peak for the year and start going back down again, and at the end of the month I will be flying all the way across country to San Diego for Bouchercon.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. That chapter won’t write itself, and the apartment won’t clean and organize itself, either. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow or later. It’ll be a SURPRISE.

Blood on the Moon

Quite a number of years passed between the time when I wrote my first vampire novella, The Nightwatchers, and the time I was asked to write another.

I also hadn’t intended to use Todd Gregory, but that was the name I was publishing under with Kensington at the time, and so they wanted me to use it for the novella–and you know me: they were paying me well so I didn’t care. The fraternity books I was writing for them under that name were doing well, and so they wanted some kind of tie into the fraternity stuff. I didn’t want to write a vampire story set in fictional Polk, California; I wanted to write about New Orleans–I’m sorry, I know it’s a cliche, but vampires and New Orleans just go together in my head. What I actually wanted to do was go back to the mythology I’d created for The Nightwatchers, and at first worried that using my “other” name precluded me doing just that…but then I reminded myself you’re both the same person, dumbass and so that’s precisely what I did. For the fraternity connection, I decided to bring four college students from the University of Mississippi to visit New Orleans for Carnival (one of them was from New Orleans), and have them all be brothers from the same fictitious fraternity I used for the fraternity stories: Beta Kappa. (I first used Beta Kappa in Murder in the Rue Dauphine; it’s the same fraternity Chanse belonged to at LSU, so whenever I need a fraternity that’s my go-to; I even used it in my story “This Town” for the anthology Murder-a-Go-Go’s), and of course, one of the boys gets turned over the course of the weekend.

After all, shouldn’t everyone be afraid of coming to big, bad, dangerous New Orleans?

“Happy Mardi Gras!”

The woman was obviously drunk as she threw her arms around Cord Logan and pulled him close and tight to her soft breasts. She pressed her mouth on his before he had time to react and push her away. His entire body stiffened and he winced. Her mouth had the nauseating taste of sour rum and stale cigarettes. He pushed her arms away from him.  Repulsed, he pulled his head backward and took a step back, almost bumping into a weaving guy in an LSU sweatshirt carrying a huge cup of beer. She stood there in the middle of Bourbon Street, grinning at him. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and heavy strands of beads hung around her neck dipping down into her cleavage. Her lipstick was smeared, making her look kind of like a drunken clown.  Her hair was bleached blonde with about three inches of dark roots growing out of her scalp, and was disheveled and messy—her hairspray had given up on it hours ago. Her bloodshot eyes were half-shut, and she tilted her head to one side as she looked at him, her sloppy smile fading. She was wearing a low-rise denim mini-skirt over stout legs and teetering heels. Her red half-shirt with Throw me something mister written on it in gold glitter revealed a roll of flab around her middle, and a fading sunburst tattoo around her pierced navel. She tried to grab his head and kiss him again, but he deflected her arms.

She narrowed her eyes, going from ‘happy drunk’ to ‘mean bitch’ in a quarter second. “What’s a matter? Don’t you like girls?” she jeered at him, weaving a bit on her heels. She put one hand on her hip, replacing the smile with a sneer.

What? He stared at her, and froze for a moment as horror filled him.

For that instant, everything seemed to stand still. The dull roar of marching bands in the distance, the rock music blaring out into the street from the bars lining Bourbon Street, the shouting and yelling of the revelers, all faded away as he stood staring at her squinting eyes.

Don’t be stupid, Cord, no one can tell just by looking at you.

The spell was broken when a strand of purple bands flew between them, hitting the pavement with a clatter. Cord involuntarily took another step back. The woman squealed with excitement and bent over, her T-shirt falling open  at the neck to reveal a cavernous blue-veined cleavage. She stood up clutching the beads in her fist, a look of triumph on her face. She turned around, Cord forgotten, and lifted her shirt, showing her bare breasts to the crowd of men holding beads on the balcony. She shook her shoulders, making the large breasts sway from side to side, and she started yelling up at the men on the balcony. They all began whistling and cat-calling. The beads began to fly—Cord grabbed a strand of gold ones just before they hit him in the face. He slipped them over his head and moved on down the street before she remembered him and tried to kiss him again.

Something like this actually happened to me at my first ever Carnival, when I flew in from Tampa for it in 1995. I was walking with a friend up Bourbon Street to the gay bars (“running the straight gauntlet” is what we used to call it) when this woman stepped directly in front of me and went through this entire song-and-dance that I later adapted into the opening of Blood on the Moon.

I don’t remember if I’d ever written about a young gay man slowly beginning to take baby steps out of the closet before, or i Cord was the first–I think he may not have been the first; Jeff in Every Frat Boy Wants It I think was probably the first–but I really liked the idea of him coming to New Orleans for Carnival with some of his fraternity brothers, and that his best friend in the fraternity is the only other person who knows about his true sexuality–and suggests, in fact, that Cord lose the group during a parade and head to the gay end of the Quarter to explore and be free. Unfortunately for Cord, he runs into Jean-Paul, an incredibly hot older man and his group of really hot older gay men…but the next morning, Cord has some issues with the sun and other things. That evening Cord heads back down to the Quarter to see if he can find Jean-Paul, and instead runs into a Creole named Sebastian; and Sebastian is a male witch with an ulterior motive: he wants to drink from Cord’s blood–Cord is infected, but hasn’t completely succumbed to transitioning into a vampire yet, and Sebastian thinks vampiric-infected blood will make his own witchcraft powers even stronger.

I liked the character of Cord a lot, and I liked that he didn’t really transition into becoming a young gay vampire by any choice–Jean-Paul selected him as a plaything for the night, that’s all, and had no intentions of turning him, until Sebastian got involved–and while this story ended with a definite resolution–I also saw not only how the story could continue, but how I could also weave The Nightwatchers and the mythology I created for that novella into this new story. I eventually wrote another short story about Cord–“Bloodletting”, which was in Blood Sacraments, and when my editor asked me to write an actual vampire novel, I made “Bloodletting” the first chapter and continued it from there…and that became the novel Need–which is a tale for another time.

Only Over You

I do love researching Louisiana, even if and when it leads me down a rabbit hole as it always does. I’ve been trying–and it really isn’t necessary–to find out of you can actually leave the New Orleans metropolitan area without crossing a bridge; I-10 east and west require bridges (west is the wetlands/swamp alongside Lake Pontchartrain, going east you cross the lake) and of course the Causeway to the North Shore is also a bridge across the lake. Obviously you need a bridge to cross the river (there are two, the Crescent City Connection and the Huey P. Long Bridge), which leaves the old River Road, which for years was the only way into or out of New Orleans without crossing a bridge as it follows the levees up the river to Baton Rouge. I’ve never actually taken the River Road so I can’t swear that there are no bridges on its path alongside the river going north; I’ve been trying to get the answer by using Google Maps and Earth rather than taking the time to drive all the way out there and see for myself. The trick is, of course, the Bonne Carré Spillway; according to the maps the road is inside the spillway, so if the spillway is opened I believe New Orleans would have no dry land exits in any direction. I want to include this in my book, but…I also don’t want to have to take the drive to find out for sure, either.

And if I get it wrong, of course I’ll hear about it.

I am back into the office on a Monday for the first time in a very long time; I feel good this morning. I woke up long before the alarm and stayed in bed until the alarm went off, but I do feel remarkably rested all the same. We’ll see how this shift in work days feels later in the week, won’t we? But so far it feels good.

The Saints did win yesterday; for some reason I thought the game was last night instead of in the afternoon so I was reading in my chair when Paul came downstairs and mentioned that the game was on and it seemed like an exciting one–so I tuned in just in time to see the closing two minutes of the Saints’ second win on the season. I’m glad, though, I didn’t watch–from all reports it sounded like the kind of exciting and thrilling game that is inevitably an emotional rollercoaster, and after the disastrous LSU game on Saturday I don’t think I could have handled a close, exciting Saints game on top of it anyway, so it was just as well. I did get some writing done yesterday–nowhere near as much as was necessary and needed, so yay, still behind! Woo-hoo!–and then we watched our shows last evening. I enjoyed the new episodes of The Serpent Queen (now deviating from the actual historical story), House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, and an episode of The Midnight Club (which, interestingly enough, is turning the stories the terminally ill teens tell each other into adaptations of other Christopher Pike stories, which is really clever) before retiring to bed relatively early last evening.

Ugh, just looking at my inbox is giving me the vapors. Hopefully I’ll make some good progress on that as well as my to-do list; which I made last week and nothing is crossed off of it, which doesn’t bode well for me or anyone or anything for that matter. But here’s hoping I can start making progress tonight or tomorrow.

Watching Interview with the Vampire, as well as rereading the book, has sent me down some mental wormholes as well. I actually wound up digging up copies of my vampire writings from the past (for teh record: the novellas “The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon,” and my novel Need), which aren’t terrible (I really need to stop defaulting to all my old work is terrible because it’s not); I had in fact forgotten a lot about them, to be honest. I just read the beginnings of all three to get some sort of idea of what I had done and was like, oh, wow, I didn’t remember this character or I’d forgotten this was set during Carnival and so on. So I am hoping that rereading them won’t be painful and will remind me of some other things that I wanted to work on; I was always disappointed that I never got to do a follow-up to Need–I’d created what I thought was an interesting paranormal mythology that I really wanted to explore more, but never got the chance.

Maybe when I retire?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines.

Sometimes

Tuesday morning and so far so good. Yesterday was a relatively easy day at the office, really; a lovely way to start off the week, actually. I felt rested for most of the day, and had a relatively easy time getting home as well, which I wasn’t expecting; traffic lights in the Central Business District are still out or blinking, including the one at Poydras, which is the main artery of the district–which makes the drive a bit challenging. There wasn’t much traffic yesterday on my way home, so that intersection where I cross Poydras (Loyola) wasn’t as horrific as it has been in the past.

And tomorrow is payday; I had quite literally forgotten! Paying off the car has changed my life so dramatically for the better, Constant Reader, you have no idea. Before paying off the car, I would have been counting down the days to pay day, wondering how much I’d have left to buy food with, wondering if I would have enough to pay for everything. Not having that kind of extreme financial stress, like I’ve been experiencing for the last four years plus, has been literally absolutely lovely for me. I don’t know how people do it–and then buy another car right on top of paying off the old one, or trading one in before its completely paid for and…yeah, I will never understand the joys of having all that extra debt hanging over my head. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never wanted to buy a house or a condo or anything; the thought of being saddled with debt for the rest of my life like that absolutely curdles my blood.

And yes, I am quite aware that I still have to pay for housing anyway, that I am essentially throwing the rent money away every month that I could be “investing” in property, and all the rest of those financial security memes I’ve been told since I was a child. But I am not a fan of debt of any kind, quite frankly. I hate debt, hate it hate it hate it, and my next financial goal is to pay off the rest of the debt I am still carrying, which has become a bit easier since the car has been paid for. I don’t regret buying the car–I still love the car, and will for a long time, no doubt–but I am not sorry the debt is gone.

I didn’t think I slept very well last night–it seemed to take forever for me to fall asleep–and yet I still feel rested this morning. My Fitbit tells me that the majority of my sleep last night was “light” sleep, and I didn’t get the correct percentages of “REM sleep” or “deep sleep”. I imagine what this means is this afternoon I will run out of steam and get tired; that seems to be the case once the caffeine wears off. Ah, caffeine; such a harsh mistress you are.

Today is the official release day for Bury Me in Shadows (or it was yesterday; I’m really not sure how I still have a career, honestly) so there’s one more Blatant Self-Promotion post to come; I’ve been working on it since the weekend, and I hope to get it right and posted today. Tomorrow night I have the launch event at Murder by the Book in Houston (virtual), and I am doing a diversity panel for a library through Sisters in Crime (chessie chapter) this coming Monday. I know, two virtual events in less than a week, who am I? I also realized yesterday I had never posted the BSP post I’d written Sunday morning, so it went up yesterday instead.

I’m really not very good at this blatant self-promotion thing, and sometimes I wonder if it’s a mental thing; defeating myself before I have a chance to be defeated by the rest of the world. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?

I rewatched Scream 2 last night while I was waiting for Paul to finish working and come downstairs, and rather than switching to something else when he came down about halfway through the movie he was fine with just watching it through to the end–we’re both big Scream fans–and oddly enough, no matter how many times I’ve seen these movies they still work and are enjoyable. Greater horror minds than mine have dissected these films, how meta they are, and so forth to death; nothing I could say could possibly lend anything to the discourse already. But I do enjoy them more than most slasher/horror movies, it seemed fairly appropriate for Halloween, and since I have Peacock, which has all the Halloween movies streaming available, I may spend the rest of the month watching every Halloween movie; there are actually some I’ve not seen. And what better films for the Halloween Horror Film Festival than the Halloween series? (And if I can squeeze in a Scream or two, why not?) I didn’t write very much of anything yesterday and am not terribly happy about that, to be honest. I felt a bit tired when I came home from work yesterday–I stopped to pick up a few things on the way home–and tonight I have to go to the gym, since I can’t tomorrow. I did pull up Never Kiss a Stranger and started revising and re-ordering the story somewhat–beginning with the removal of about 2000 words at the beginning that might not be as necessary as I had originally thought; they can go further back in the manuscript than where they were originally placed, if used at all–so that was something, but I was tired and Scooter really wanted to nap in my lap in the easy chair and it was all so much easier to just give into the tired and relax with a purring kitty in my lap…yeah, it’s a wonder I get anything done around here at all.

And yesterday the current Superman–Jonathon Kent, son of Clark and Lois–came OUT. Superman is gay! * (That sound you just heard was any number of homophobes screaming about their childhoods being ruined.) I didn’t see it yesterday–I just saw the piece in the New York Times shared on Twitter–and will read it later this morning between clients. But this is quite thrilling, and that they timed the announcement for National Coming Out Day? Thank you thank you thank you, DC Comics.

Yesterday I also got a PDF file from an anthology I contributed a reprint story to; I had literally completely forgotten about it (my memory is completely worthless these days) and I never recorded it on my “out for submission” spreadsheet either; so my system completely failed. It happens, of course, and more regularly than I would prefer, to be completely honest. Anyway, it’s a gay erotic vampire anthology from Lethe Press called Blood on His Hands, and the story I gave them to reprint is my old “Bloodletting” story; which was originally written as a sequel story to my novella Blood on the Moon, and eventually became the first chapter of my Todd Gregory novel Need. I’ve not reread any of my vampire stuff over the years, and so last night, while I was trying to figure out to watch before settling on Scream 2 I spent some time revisiting this story. It isn’t bad, actually; I was very pleasantly surprised. (I often am pleasantly surprised to read something old of mine and see that it’s not terrible, or a steaming pile of shit…I really do need to stop being so hard on myself when it comes to writing; even as I started moving bits and pieces of Never Kiss a Stranger around last night I found myself thinking, “oh, this is good” or “this needs to be punched up some”–but “this is good” thoughts far outnumbered “fix this”, which was most pleasing to me. I have another story in another anthology coming out later this year–the story is “A Whisper from the Graveyard,” but I cannot think of the name of the anthology; I think it’s Pink Triangle Rhapsody? It really is a wonder I have a career of any kind in this business….

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will see you tomorrow on Pay-the-Bills-Day.

*Well, bisexual anyway, but he has sex with men and that’s more than enough for me. It’s a huge step for DC Comics and super-heroes in general; it’s fucking Superman, not some supporting cast super-hero most people have never heard of who only appears in some team-up books; it’s SUPERMAN!

Together We’re Better

Yesterday actually turned out to be quite lovely.

I was a little bleary when I got up yesterday morning (my Fitbit advises me I only slept deeply for 3 hours, 48 minutes; the rest was “light sleep” and I woke up three times), but for whatever reason, I decided to start getting to work on things. I started answering emails (I am very careful with email. I refuse to let it control my life, which it easily can; so I answer emails over the weekends and in the mornings, save my responses as drafts, and send them all after lunch. I do not send emails after five pm CST; I do not read them, either. Email at one point took over my life, which made getting anything done impossible and raised my stress levels to unbelievable heights. I realized anyone who absolutely, positively needs to reach me has my cell phone number…and if I don’t trust you with my cell phone number…you don’t really need an answer right away. And guess what? The world didn’t end, I didn’t miss out on anything, and nothing became harder) while reading coverage of the LSU debacle from Saturday night (one thing I did mean to mention and didn’t yesterday; I try not to be overly critical of college athletes because they are basically kids. It’s easy to forget that when you’re watching on television, but when you see them on the sidelines with their helmets off, or while walking down Victory Hill to the stadium in their suits and ties…you see a bunch of teenagers and young men in their early twenties. They are kids—and those baby faces on those big muscular bodies is a very strange juxtaposition sometimes). I decided on the way home from Baton Rouge that while I do, indeed, love football, I really shouldn’t give up my weekends to it all fall. Now that LSU is definitely out of the running for anything, I’ll probably not watch as much football as I would if they were still in contention for anything. I’ll still watch LSU, and occasionally I may spend an afternoon watching a big game—the SEC title game, the play-offs—I am not going to spend every Saturday pretty much glued to the television all day, flipping between games all day. And I also rarely enjoy watching the Saints—I love them, they’re my guys, my team, my heart—but their games are so damned stressful it’s hard to enjoy them, and when the games is over I am always, win or lose, emotionally and physically and mentally exhausted. So, I decided it made more sense to get things done, check in on the score periodically, and not sweat it too much. (Good thing. Like LSU, the Saints led the entire game, folded like a newspaper in the fourth quarter and wound up losing.) I made groceries, filled the car’s gas tank, and before going, I started weeding shit out of my iCloud and saving it all to my back-up hard drive.  I wound up freeing up over four hundred and seven gigabytes in my flash storage, and suddenly my computer was running very quickly again.

And yes, it’s my fault.* I have a gazillion pictures files, going back to digital camera days. I used to back up my hard drive and my flash drives regularly to the cloud—and those folders are enormous. I don’t probably need all of it—I was weeding through bits here and there as I moved the files over to the back-up hard drive (eventually planning on copying them up to Dropbox), and started finding all kinds of interesting things. Story fragments I’d forgotten, book ideas and anthology ideas and essays I’d started; some of these things are in very rough, first draft form—and got left behind as my addled, AHDH-like brain moved on to the next thirty or forty ideas for all of the above. I also was kind of amused to see how I often I plagiarize myself; I had a completely different idea for the book I wanted to call A Streetcar Named Murder fifteen years ago—which I can still use at some point, just have to come up with a new title. I’d forgotten that all the way through the process Need was called A Vampire’s Heart; my editor suggested changing it after I turned the book it. It was a wise choice; my title was very romance sounding and Need was hardly that. It was also interesting seeing, over the years, how many different ideas I’ve had for a gay noir set in the world of ballet (damn you, Megan Abbott!). I discovered that Murder in the Garden District actually began as Murder on the Avenue (a title I can repurpose for an idea I had last week); I found the original files for Hollywood South Hustle, the Scotty book that turned into a Chanse MacLeod, Murder in the Rue Ursulines; I found the files for the Colin book that tells us what he was doing and where he was between Mardi Gras Mambo and Vieux Carré Voodoo; I found the original Paige novel I started writing in 2004, in which an Ann Coulter-like pundit from New Orleans is murdered; I found the first three chapters of the Scotty Katrina book, Hurricane Party High,  in which they don’t evacuate during a fictional hurricane, and the chapters where I rewrote it, had the, evacuate to Frank’s sister’s in rural Alabama (and we meet Frank’s nephew Taylor for the first time—and I also remembered that they belonged to some weird kind of religious cult and that Taylor was going to come to New Orleans in the future to visit during their version of rumspringa, but eventually abandoned the idea completely and never did a Scotty/Katrina book; was reminded that Dark Tide began as Mermaid Inn; that I wrote the first chapter of Timothy during the summer of 2003; and if I even tried to list all the iterations that wound up being #shedeservedit, we would be here all day (Sins of Omission, I think, was my favorite earlier title; again, a completely different book with some slight similarities…I may have to take a longer look at some of those iterations because being reminded of them all, I also remembered that I really liked all the versions).

I also found many, many nonfiction pieces I’ve written over the years—many of which I’d long since forgotten about—so maybe that essay collection won’t take quite as long to pull together as I had originally thought. Huzzah!

And I also discovered something else that I knew but had slipped out of my consciousness: that Bury Me in Shadows was called, for the first and second drafts, Bury Me in Satin—which gives off an entirely different vibe, doesn’t it? I wrote a very early version of it as a short story while in college, called it “Ruins,” but never wrote a second draft because I knew it wasn’t a short story; it needed to be a book, and one day I would write it. I was never completely comfortable with the story, to be honest; I wasn’t sure how I could write a modern novel built around a Civil War legend in rural Alabama. I absolutely didn’t want to write a fucking Lost Cause narrative—which is what this easily could have become, and people might come to it thinking it is, and are going to be very angry when they find out it is not that—but I really wasn’t sure how to tell the story…and in my mind, I thought of it as Ruins—which I freely admit is not a great title, and has been over-used.

As luck would have it, I was watching some awards show—I can’t begin to try to remember what year—and one of the nominated groups performed. I’d never heard of The Band Perry before; and the song they performed, “If I Die Young,” absolutely blew me away. (I just remembered, I kind of used the title as guidance when writing Need—always trying to remember he became undead very young) The first two lines of the chorus are this:

If I die young,

Bury me in satin

And I thought to myself, Bury Me in Satin is a perfect title for the Civil War ghost story! Melancholy and sort of romantic; I’ve always thought of hauntings as more about loss than being terrifying (you do not have to go full out jump scare, use gore or blood or violence to scare the reader, and if you doubt me, read Barbara Michaels’ Ammie Come Home), which is why I’ve always loved the Barbara Michaels novels that were ghost stories. That was the feeling I wanted to convey, that sad creepiness, and longing—I wanted a Gothic feel to the book, and I felt that line captured what I wanted perfectly. But as I wrote it, it didn’t quite feel as right as it did in that moment (I still love the song—and the video is interesting and kind of Gothic, doing a Tennyson Lady of Shalott thing), and then one day it hit me: changed ‘satin’ to ‘shadows’, and there’s your perfect title.

And so it was.

Oh dear, look at the time. Till tomorrow, Constant Reader! I am off to the spice mines! Have a lovely Monday!

*I will add the caveat to this that anything stored in the Cloud should not affect the flash storage in the actual computer and its operating system, and yes, I am prepared and more than willing to die on that hill.

All You Had to Do Was Stay

Ironically, yesterday when I was talking about vampires, I buried my own lede; I actually have done some vampire fiction myself. (Clearly, I am terrible at this self-promotion/marketing thing.)

When I first moved to New Orleans, the city was somehow synonymous in my mind with vampires, which was primarily due to Anne Rice’s novels. This doesn’t, on its face, make that much sense; the novels are, for the most part, set in various other places around the world more so than in New Orleans. Louis, the main character of Interview with the Vampire, is from Louisiana, and he encounters Lestat and is turned originally in New Orleans–and while there are passages in the book set here and in Louisiana, the story itself is being told to the reporter in San Francisco. The Vampire Chronicles themselves occasionally return to New Orleans; but for the most part the stories themselves rarely take place here. (It would actually make more sense for me to have had that association from Anne Rice’s work made between New Orleans and witches; as most of The Witching Hour takes place in New Orleans.) After moving here I also discovered local author Poppy Z. Brite; his novel Lost Souls might actually be the definitive New Orleans vampire story. Since that well–New Orleans vampires–had been drawn from so often, so well, and so memorably by other authors already, I never really thought about writing vampire stories set in New Orleans. How could I compete with either Rice (with her legions of adoring fans) or Brite (with his smaller but equally adoring fan base)?

I was writing the Scotty series for Kensington when my editor there suggested I write a vampire novella for a collection they were doing called Midnight Thirsts; they had already done one volume of gay-themed erotic vampire stories that did very well for them, and I was enormously flattered to be asked to write one. As is my wont, when I started writing “The Nightwatchers” I began to slowly create an entire universe of supernatural beings, with rules; it actually grew from an original story I had written several years earlier with a female main character that was set in a theater group; more talented than the woman who always got the lead roles, she and her other actors believed that the woman getting the leads was sleeping with the director; one night at rehearsal a mysterious man shows up in the back of the theater, later approaches the main character and somehow–I don’t remember this part–shows her that her suspicions are true, and promises her eternity; she accepts his gift and then uses her new power to kill the director and the lead actress. It wasn’t a very good story, frankly, and was poorly thought out and poorly written, but it contained a structure that I wanted to use for “The Nightwatchers.” Several thousand words into the rewrite/adaptation I realized it didn’t work, so I got rid of the theater company and turned my gay male lead into a hustler who lived in one of those wonderful old decaying buildings in the Quarter, where you used to be able to get cheap rent if you didn’t mind rotting and tilted floors, insects, poor insulation, cracks in the walls, gaps around the windows, and staircases on the verge of collapse. His best friend, Rachel, lived in the same building in the apartment across the landing from his; she worked at a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny. One night while Rachel is working–one of those wonderful foggy winter nights in the city–an older man with a foreign accent is in the shop and she’s waiting for him to leave so she can close. Philip, meantime, is off to a regular client in Uptown New Orleans. Philip is, unbeknownst to him, being stalked by a vampire; the old man is a “Nightwatcher,” who is aware the vampire is after Philip and is enlisting Rachel’s help to save him.

It’s actually not a bad story, really; (I was rereading it because I couldn’t remember many of the details, like character names and so forth) I had even considered writing an entire novel based on the premise, in which this would serve as the introduction..but I never got around to it. Life has a habit of interrupting my plans.

A few years later, when I was asked to write another novella, this time using the Todd Gregory name, for Midnight Hunger, I wrote “Blood on the Moon,” and used a lot of the same concepts I had originally used for “The Nightwatchers.” (I had originally planned on having Philip, who was turned in “The Nightwatchers,” be the vampire my main character encountered in the Quarter during Carnival; but since I was using a different name, didn’t see any point in trying to link them other than using that same universe.) And since I was writing the “fratboy” books as Todd Gregory, I made the guys down in New Orleans for Carnival fratboys from my fictional fraternity’s Ole Miss chapter. Cord Logan was the main character, and he falls in with a fraternity of vampires when he “gets separated” from his buddies and explores the gay end of Bourbon Street. He also winds up getting targeted by a male witch, having to be rescued, etc etc etc, and the story ended with Cord being completely turned, and joining his new brotherhood. I brought Cord and his best buddy from the actual fraternity back in the story, “Bloodletting,” which eventually became the first chapter of my one and only vampire novel, Need–which I’d hoped to be the first in a series of supernatural erotic gay novels; the next was going to be Desire, and I was going to get deeper into the mythology I had created with that one, as well as bring in the rest of the characters from “The Nightwatchers” (Rachel and the old man were a part of Need).

Cord was a special breed of vampire because he not only had become a vampire but had also drank the blood of the male witch–which to some of the other vampires made him an abomination; and he certainly was one to the witches, which meant the Council of Thirteen, which oversees all the supernatural creatures of the world, wanted him dead–as well as his fraternity brother, whom he’d had to turn. That was going to be the primary plot thread of Desire, which alas never came to be.

Here’s how “The Nightwatchers” opened:

Go home, old man, Rachel thought, tapping her black fingernails on the counter.

It was quarter till nine, fifteen minutes before she could lock the doors. Everything was clean, and the cash register was already counted down. All she really had left to do was dump the remains of the day’s coffee down the sink, lock the cash drawer in the safe, and turn everything off. She’d be gone by ten minutes after at the latest.

She glanced out the big windows fronting the coffee shop. The streetlight just outside cast a yellowish glow in the thick mist pressing against the glass. She shivered and looked back at the old man. He was sitting in one of the tables in the far corner, with the same cup of coffee he’d ordered when he came in around seven thirty. He hadn’t touched it. It was still as full as when she’d filled the cup, only no steam was coming off the black surface now. He didn’t seem to be watching for anyone, or waiting. He never glanced at his watch, which she’d spotted as a platinum Tag Heuer, nor did he ever look out the window. Every once in a while he would look up from his newspaper and catch her staring. He’d smile and nod, then go back to his reading.

Apparently, he was determined to read every word.

She stood up, bending backwards so her back cracked. The night had been really slow. The Jazz Café, even on weeknights, usually was good for at least thirty to forty dollars in tips. Tonight, when she’d counted out the tip jar, yielded less than seven dollars. Just enough to get her a pack of cigarettes and a twenty ounce diet Coke at Quartermaster Deli on her way back to her apartment. It wasn’t, she thought, wiping down the counter down yet again, even worth coming in for.

See what I mean? Not bad.

Although talking about this stuff has made me intrigued by it again; it really is amazing how many book ideas went nowhere for me. Maybe someday I will write Desire.

And now you see why I never get anything done. I call it creative ADHD.

And on that note..let me get back to work.