Tag: Never Kiss a Stranger

The Tinderbox of a Heart

Yesterday I was very tired. I’ve not been sleeping well this week, but at least on Tuesday I felt rested; yesterday I just felt tired, physically and intellectually. I did get some work done last night on the book, and today I feel very rested; I slept wonderfully last night, which was absolutely marvelous, quite frankly, and am very glad for it. Today is the last day in the office for me until a week from Monday–this is the weekend I’m going north to see Dad (I may not be around on here at all once I leave on Sunday) which is yet another reason why I need to get this revision finished. I feel confident that I can get it done before I go on this trip; I keep thinking that I’m almost done…

I haven’t started reading the new Megan Abbott; I’d hoped to spend some time with her new book last night but I was fried when I finished working on the book and just collapsed into my chair to provide a cat bed for Scooter. It was very cool yesterday morning when I left for the office, but the inferno had returned by the time I got off work. A small but welcome respite from the summer’s heat (Facebook memories reminded me that we’d been in a heat advisory at this time of year several times over the past few years–proving yet again the long COVID of last year did affect my memory. I saw an article I meant to read yesterday that said even mild cases of COVID caused a type of brain damage, or brain rewiring of a sort, which needs to be studied. I know my memory changed during the pandemic, but I also turned sixty during it, too. Was it the long COVID experience I had that rewired/altered my brain, or was that an after-effect of the trauma imposed by the shutdown and everything that followed in its wake? I can’t remember if I was having memory issues before I got sick last summer; but if that was indeed the case, it got much worse after I recovered…and was really bad while I was sick. It’s so hard to tell, so hard to remember, you know?

A case in point about my memory has been these last two manuscripts I’ve been working on since last fall. For one thing, it took me a lot longer than usual to write and revise both of them (I must also provide the caveat that the end of the last year and the beginning of this one was a very difficult time, all things considered) but as I am revising this manuscript I am continually amazed at how little I remember of it, let alone remember writing it. Again, this is very alarming, but at the same time I can also honestly say I’ve never stacked books like this before while writing them; going from one to another and then back and forth again repeatedly; I don’t remember much of the Scotty book, to be honest, either–but I remember more of it than I do this one. It’s a good manuscript, though; I like the characters and I like the story, and it seems like they want me to write a sequel to it, which is also kind of cool; I already have a title for the next one and an idea, amorphous yet still an idea, for what the story would be. After I get back from Kentucky, I’ll tell you a bit more about this project; I realize I’ve been very mysterious about it, but there’s not any reason for it other than my own superstition and fear of jinxing things by talking about them–which is just another symptom of my own neuroses, of course.

There are two tropical systems trying to form in the Atlantic right now. One looks like it’s going to head up the Atlantic coast, or will never come near land and just head north before dissipating; the other looks like it’s heading for the Caribbean Sea and the Yucatan. Yay for hurricane season, he typed sarcastically. I was also thinking last night about future Scotty books; I think I am going to cap that series at ten. I think Mississippi River Mischief is the ninth Scotty, which would only give me one more title for the series. No, scratch that; I will make no promises or any commitments regarding the future of that series, and will leave it the way I always have in the past: if I get an idea for one, I will write another one.

What I have been thinking about lately is that I want to write books I feel passionate about; I want to tell stories and write books that will have some kind of impact, or require a lot of emotional and intellectual work on my part, if that makes any sense. Last night Scott Heim tweeted an excerpt from the opening of Jim Grimsley’s beautiful novel Winter Birds, and I remembered again how much I love Jim Grimsley’s writing and his authorial voice (I inevitably default, when it comes to Jim, to Comfort and Joy, which is one of my favorite Christmas stories of all time; but his other work is also lyrical and poetic and beautiful, too). It also made me think about my own writing and my own authorial voice. Do I have a distinctive authorial voice? Can someone read my work without knowing its mine and be able to tell that it’s mine? I know that I can write beautifully and poetically when it suits the story; I know I can do a voice that can sound haunting and sad. I try to always do different things when I write out of series; I want to write different types of stories and use different kinds of authorial voices and write in different styles. I think my best work inevitably tends to be Gothic in voice and style; those are certainly the favorites of my own works that I’ve written (Timothy, Bury Me in Shadows, Lake Thirteen, Sorceress, The Orion Mask), and whenever I write about Alabama, I seem to lapse into this very lovely, literate-sounding voice. I’m not quite sure why that is, but it’s been mostly in short stories; I do want to write more about Alabama and my complicated relationship with my home state. I am passionate about writing both Chlorine and Muscles, which are on deck for me; I am wavering about whether to leave “Never Kiss a Stranger” as a novella or whether to expand it out into a novel; I can see it working either way. I don’t want any of the novellas to turn into novels, frankly; I don’t have the time necessary left to me to write everything that I want to write in the first place. But am I trying to force novels into novellas because that’s how I decided to write them, or are they better off as novellas? These are the things that make you want to load your pockets with heavy stones and walk into the river.

And LSU did beat Wake Forest yesterday, forcing a third game to determine who plays Florida in the finals of the College World Series. GEAUX TIGERS!

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

YMCA

Ah, the Young Men’s Christian Association.

One of my favorite things about homophobic straight people is how clueless they are (the homophobia is really a tipoff) when it comes to queer stuff. (In fairness, if they don’t know any queer people why would they know anything about queer stuff?) Nothing amuses me more than watching crowds of straight people–whether it’s a sporting event, wedding, or a party– start doing the “YMCA” dance when the deejay puts it on. It’s particularly funny to me when it’s a sporting event, particularly something more on the unenlightened side with their fan base when it comes to queer equality, like NASCAR or hockey (although NASCAR had been doing rainbow stuff all month…). As I watch them all stand up and do the ‘YMCA dance”–always out of rhythm, never to the beat–I smirk to myself and think, you clearly don’t know that this song is about the sexual smorgasbord a YMCA was back in the day for gay men, do you? It’s about GAY SEX, homophobes! You’re singing along to a song about getting fucked at the Y!

It always makes me laugh. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

I’m sure the founders of the YMCA system would have been quite nonplussed to know that in some major cities, gay men turned YMCA’s into essentially bath houses. There were a couple in Manhattan that were notorious for hook-ups, but of course a YMCA would draw gay men. For a long time they were the only places for men to go and get exercise, unless they belonged to a men’s club, like the New Orleans Athletic Club (which used to be for men only), and since gay men, especially after Stonewall, liked to be fit and keep their bodies worked out and in good shape (to draw lovers, of course) they wound up at the Y. And when you get a bunch of gay men thrown together in an environment that includes pools, weights, saunas, steam rooms and showers, you’re going to get hook ups. YMCA’s also provided cheap rooming alternatives, too–and of course, that meant that you could get a room at the Y (just like you could at a bath house) which meant you could bring partners back to the room for sex.

When we first moved to New Orleans there was still a Y at Lee Circle (now Harmony Circle); the Lee Circle Y had been there forever and was actually kind of historic; one of the Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics was a Tulane student who worked out at the Y. I thought that should at least have some kind of commemorative memorial plaque–and had preservation-minded folk cared about the Lee Circle Y, it could have been declared a historic landmark, instead of closing and the land being sold for yet another hotel. Maybe a murdered Israeli athlete isn’t enough of a connection for historical landmark status. But I used to train people there, and also taught aerobics until it was closed permanently. They had redone the weight room and bought all new equipment a few years earlier, too. Some things–like the locker room and so forth–were musty and moldy smelling, with that distinct stench of decades of male sweat baked into the walls.

But yes, the Village People of “YMCA” fame–every one of them was dressed as a particular gay archetype (leather man, Indian chief, fireman, cop, etc.) and all of their songs were thinly veiled odes to the joys of being gay and having lots of no-strings-attached sex; “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” “YMCA,” “San Francisco”–and the village in their name was Greenwich Village, the gayborhood in Manhattan. (The promotional video for “YMCA”–taken mostly from the movie Can’t Stop the Music–which is a topic for another time, because yes, that movie needs discussion–really says it all.)

There were bath houses, of course (Bette Midler famously got her big break performing at the Continental Baths in Manhattan); New Orleans had two when we first moved here–the Club New Orleans in the Quarter on Toulouse Street and Midtown Spa on Baronne in the CBD, across from where the Rouse’s is now. Both are long gone now, ain’t dere no more as we say down here. We used to do testing in the bath houses, which was always a weird experience. Every room had a television with porn on a loop; the room they used to let us at CNO to test in also was the sling room. So I’d sit on the bed/cot, with porn playing on the television hanging from the ceiling in the corner, and a sling in the opposite corner from the television. I bet that sling could tell some tales….or could have before it was consigned to the dustbin of history.

I also remember the battle over closing bath houses during the height of HIV/AIDS. Rewatching It’s a Sin reminded me of a lot of the struggles back when the disease was new and we didn’t know much about it other than almost everyone who got infected died. It seems kind of counter-intuitive now, but there was an argument that could be made that restricting gay sexuality was also a repressive attempt to push gays back into the closet as well as further stigmatizing gay men. It seems silly now, of course, knowing what we know now, but the mask argument during the pandemic kind of took me back to the struggle to get gay men to wear condoms. (I’m so old I remember when herpes had everyone freaking out in the late 1970s.)

I keep thinking I should write about the Lee Circle Y, just to preserve that piece of New Orleans history. “Never Kiss a Stranger” originally started with my main character getting off a Greyhound bus and lugging his duffel bag down Howard Avenue to the Lee Circle Y, where he gets a room while looking for a place to live. (I later realized the story actually begins with him finding that place to live; the rest is just filler and not very interesting.)

Maybe someday.

Iceblink Luck

Well, we’ve made it to my last day in the office of the week, Constant Reader, and isn’t that simply marvelous?

I knocked out another chapter after work and running a couple of errands (mail, needed something from the grocery store), and am starting to feel a lot more relaxed about how this is turning out. I think I’m catching all the discrepancies and errors. At least one can hope at any rate. I’d like to make this as easy as possible for my (long-suffering) editor. But huzzah, there’s an end in sight. I also paid the bills yesterday and am not completely (or morally) bankrupt…but sheesh, I have a lot of bills. Ah, well. Such is life.

With the end of the book closing in–if I focus and work really hard, I could even finish it this weekend (gasp!), but at the same time I don’t want to kill myself, either. But as long as I can stay focused and not get distracted by any of the annoying hateful minutiae that always derails everything, I should be able to make some really good progress. I am also getting excited because finishing this means I can finally work on something else again for the first time in what feels like years. Don’t get me wrong; writing this Scotty book wasn’t as bad as writing some of them have been. It just feels like it’s taken forever, and there are times when it’s felt like my own personal invasion of Afghanistan. But I’m looking forward to spending the rest of June working on “Never Kiss a Stranger,” so I can focus on Chlorine for July. It would be so great to have a viable, working first draft of that completely by the end of July…and then I will try to find an agent. At last. Surely there’s someone out there interested in repping me, right?

So what if I haven’t found anyone in over twenty years? Optimism! That’s the key.

I slept super great last night and feel much better this morning than I have all week, and I didn’t think I’d not slept well. I don’t know what the deal is, quite frankly, but I am just going to roll with it today and see how everything goes. I may hit a wall and be exhausted by noon, who knows? But I do feel like this morning is showing the potential to be a great day. I will need to probably swing by the mail today–it could wait until tomorrow, in fairness; and I’ve ordered a prescription refill…so perhaps I should wait until I can pick up both on the same trip uptown? (My life is so endlessly fascinating, isn’t it?) I spent last evening (after I finished writing; Paul was working on a grant) watching the third part of the Vanderpump Rules reunion, during which I was constantly having to pick my jaw up off the ground. Now that it’s all over, I’m not really sure I want to do a deep dive into as much as I was thinking I might; I had started doing one after the last season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but maybe I could do a compare and contrast of the two together? One is a spin-off of the other, after all–it all comes back to Brandi Glanville, doesn’t it? Which only makes it all the more bizarre, not to mention how current day reality television owes to the OJ trial–without it, we’d have no Kardashians, no Faye Resnick, and that was actually how the Hiltons got involved with the former…and Paris Hilton was one of the original reality stars, let’s not forget that. Maybe once I am finished with this revision…I have so many blog draft entries to finish at some point!

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a terrific day Constant Reader, and I will check back in with you again tomorrow.

Fifty-Fifty Clown

Yesterday wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t pleasant. I slept well but didn’t feel completely rested, and we were in ozone advisory for most of the day. The air conditioning at work isn’t functioning properly–it was 76 degrees when I got there in my testing room; 82 when I left–and it was also muggy; it rained late in the afternoon. Muggy and warm are a toxic combination for my sinuses, so that was making me miserable for most of the day. I ran errands after work, and picked up my copy of Beware the Woman, the new Megan Abbott, which is now next on my TBR Pile. Then Ted Lasso dropped later than usual, so I couldn’t stay up late enough to watch it and thus will have to avoid social media all day…which isn’t really a bad thing. I did work some on the book as well, but I am not sure if it was good work or not because I was out of sorts with the day.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, as the T-shirts used to say. Do they still sell those in the tourist shops in the Quarter? I wrote about that in the first Scotty book, the French Quarter that used to be, just after the turn of the century. It had already changed and evolved from when we first moved here, some four or five years earlier; perhaps some of it was just me getting older and my own life situation changing. But I do remember how raggedy and dive bar-like Cafe Lafitte in Exile used to be, when that balcony wasn’t the safest place in the world to go out on while drinking. The 90’s were a different time entirely in the French Quarter, although I do wonder sometimes if I am doing the “rose-colored glasses” thing about New Orleans in the 90s. (Writing about that time period–Never Kiss a Stranger–does bring it all back to me in some ways, and I do hope that I’m not simply being nostalgic about the time because I’m writing about it.)

I’ve decided to cancel the cable appointment. The schedule at work this afternoon filled up quite a bit during the day yesterday, and it’s working for now. I know I’ll get irritated when and if the Internet proves to be an issue again, but here’s hoping it will happen when I can schedule them to come out when it won’t interfere with my job. I don’t think I slept very well again last night–surprise–but I can make it through the day. I can come home straight from work and watch Ted Lasso when I get home because Paul’s working from home today to write a grant anyway. (It did occur to me last night that I could just have Paul deal with it since he’d be home, but Paul has no idea how to talk to the cable people and it’s easier just to cancel, with a reschedule planned if needed.)

We also finished watching Chicago Party Aunt, which we really enjoyed. It was surprisingly funny–and the dynamic between the low-rent Chicago sports fan version of Auntie Mame and her gay nephew was surprisingly well done, and also hilarious.

Feeling rather dull this morning, so I am going to bring this to a close and head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

La Isla Bonita

Sliding into Tuesday like it’s nobody’s business and here we go!

I managed to start gathering everything to send to my accountant last night, which was nice. It wasn’t as difficult to calculate my expenses this past year as it has been in previous years; I don’t know what exactly that says about my writing career but there you have it. I felt pretty groggy for most of the day, like I never really woke up to begin with, but it wasn’t a bad day by any means; I just kind of felt like I was sleepwalking through most of it, to be honest. I ran errands when I got off from work, and then I came home and worked on the tax stuff. I”ll finish it this morning before I leave for work, will double check it all over lunch, and hopefully get it all sent in. Huzzah. Then I came home where we finished off The Last of Us, which we both really enjoyed. It was a bit colder yesterday than I was expecting–I was cold all day at the office, which means a long-sleeved sweater is in the offing today, because today is going to be colder than yesterday (well aware that cold is relative; the high today is forecast for 69 degrees, which is cold here for April, sue me). Because I was gathering the taxes, and went straight from that to The Last of Us, I didn’t get to spend any time with Scorched Grace last night, which was a pity. Perhaps tonight.

I feel like I slept well last night, even though I kept waking up. I don’t feel groggy this morning, or that weird thing like yesterday where my body is groggy but my mind is alert. My coffee is good this chilly morning in my windows, but it’s fine. I need to get ink for my printer on my way home from the office tonight (hurray); I don’t understand how the colored ink has now run out twice before the black, when 90% of what I print is from Word documents…in black and white. But there you have it, you know. Tomorrow is pay-the-bills day, too; which means a morning spent trying to get all the bills paid. My financial fortunes are turning around–I still owe far too much money, though–but I am gradually, slowly and surely getting there. I’m hoping that by the end of the year I will be making significant progress in paying down my debt. That’s one of the goals for the year, and I am definitely hoping that it continues the way it’s going.

Tonight I am going to start tearing into the revision of Mississippi River Mischief. It definitely needs work, make no mistake about that, but I am not as overawed by it as I was originally–because of course I hate everything I write and am always convinced it’s a steaming pile of crap. It is–there’s a lot to be cleaned up, plot holes to fill, bad writing to clean up and try to make sing–a mess, to be sure, but it’s fixable; everything is always fixable. We also will probably get caught up on some of the other shows we watch–I like that we get Ted Lasso a day early–after I finish my work and do some more of the chores around the house that need doing (my kitchen is an utter disaster area, and I want to make chicken salad), and of course, there are always odds and ends around the kitchen that need filing or put away. I am going to have an insane writing schedule, because I want to get this finished before I leave for Malice Domestic on April 17th, which only gives me a couple of weeks to get this under control. But big pushes on the weekends should do the trick. I have a staff meeting this Friday morning, which means getting up earlier than I would prefer and being out among the rest of the living long before I probably should be, but such is life. I can also run errands after the meeting on my way home as well, which is pretty cool–getting them out of the way, at any rate–and here’s hoping for a super-productive weekend where I will make amazing and significant progress on the manuscript, will finish Scorched Grace and start reading whatever is next in the TBR pile, where there are an awful lot of good things waiting for me.

Which is lovely, of course. It’s always nice when you have a pile of lovely books to choose one from for your reading pleasure. And of course, I am volumes behind on some series I enjoy as well as some authors of whom I am a huge fan. (Looking at you, Mary Russell!) I am kind of looking forward to getting this book finished and being able to breathe without a deadline for a while; of course I’ll be working on something else, but there’s no need for killing myself to make a deadline, either. I was actually reflecting last night about my rereads of Never Kiss a Stranger and Festival of the Redeemer–both of which are closer to being finished than I actually had believed before diving into the reread. I could even use Festival of the Redeemer to close out my short story collection–it’s always nice to throw a 20k+ word count novella in at the end of a collection–but I think I would also rather wait and do the three-novellas-in-one thing my publisher had recommended. I do have four or five novellas on hand, so using one and then replacing it in the novella collection wouldn’t be an issue. I also have to edit Jackson Square Jazz at some point to get the ebook up and out.

Sigh. So much to do and so little time in which to do it all.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Y’all have a great Payday Eve (even if it isn’t your payday eve) and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Open Your Heart

Monday after Easter Sunday, and I hope everyone had the kind of Sunday/holiday they needed to prepare them to head into this week full bore ahead.

The good news is that I reread Mississippi River Mischief yesterday and it most definitely is not the shitty mess I originally thought it was. It needs work, to be sure, but not nearly as much as I had feared, thank you Jesus, pass the ammunition, amen. The work isn’t going to be easy, either, but the framework can remain primarily intact with some reorganization and changing. (It didn’t help that I was rereading my manuscript after spending some time with Margot Douaihy’s brilliant debut, Scorched Grace, which is so good I am making notes of some of the sentences because they are so fucking smart; but I also wasn’t thinking rank amateur God how bad you suck at writing when there are people like Margot turning out such amazing work, which is saying something for me.) I also reread Festival of the Redeemer and Never Kiss a Stranger yesterday, and they aren’t bad, either. Maybe I don’t completely suck at this writing thing, who knows?

We spent most of yesterday bingeing The Last of Us, which is a really good show. I was reluctant for a long time–I’ve kind of had my fill of dystopian tales, although my fellow Americans don’t seem to feel the same way. But one can never go wrong with Pedro Pascal, and there was an episode where I said out loud, “this show is basically the same as The Mandalorian” and felt really smart. It’s very well done, though, and we’re obviously sucked heavily into it. The gay couple episode almost broke us both–so beautifully written and acted; so heart-wrenching and beautiful at the same time, maybe one of the most well done gay romance/love stories I’ve seen on either film or television–and I was sad last night when we had to turn it off because I had to go to bed. There are, of course, similarities to other dystopian stories like The Walking Dead and The Stand, but that’s only to be expected. I also was reminded of my own ideas for a dystopia, and reminded somewhat of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (I have not read McCarthy, and felt a disclaimer was needed; but everyone knows the story of The Road).

I’ve always found it interesting that dystopic fiction is so popular, and have always wondered what precisely that says about our culture and society. I think my first dystopic fiction was the Planet of the Apes film series (I also read Pierre Boulle’s book, which the first film was very loosely based on), and the next was Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend and the movie loosely based on it, The Omega Man (interesting that the former and the latter both starred Charlton Heston). (I am a big fan of Matheson’s, who isn’t as known as he should be in my opinion; I feel the same way about Robert Bloch as well.) I myself have had ideas for dystopic fiction, as I mentioned before; I have several ideas about that I would love to try to write some time, but I am not so good at fantasy and science fiction (or at least it’s outside of my comfort zone because I don’t know anything much about science and especially not physics); which is why they were futuristic ones set in North America after the fall of the United States (which is the kind of alternative future story I love).

So. Many. Ideas.

But, basically I came away from the weekend feeling like I can get everything under control again; whether that is true or not remains to be seen. But I do know that I need to get back to work on the book, and work hard for a while. I need to get my taxes done and I need to get my emails answered. I’m looking forward to finishing Scorched Grace, which is absolutely amazing, and there’s still some cleaning that needs to be done around here. I managed to get most of the filing done so my desk area doesn’t look like a tornado zone, which is always a plus; just a few more things to file and put away and it’ll be almost completely under control. And the way things are going, I should even have a couple more completed manuscripts by the end of the summer! Woo-hoo!

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. You have a great day, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow.

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

Monday morning and back to the office with me! It was a pretty good weekend, overall; I got some work done on the book, made groceries, did all kinds of chores, finished reading my Wanda Morris book and started reading another, and somehow managed to get some rest around all of that as well. I was very pleased with the work I did on the book, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even somehow manage to get it turned in by the extended deadline. #madness

And now it’s Monday morning, and I am up earlier than I need to be. I really need to focus, as a lot of things have been slipping lately as I focus on the book and getting it finished, and there’s been a kind of malaise–the feeling that usually comes along when I’ve actually finished a book, and has never before come while I was writing one. These last few years haven’t been easy for writing, to be honest, and yet–I’ve also produced some of my best work somehow during this time. I think Bury Me in Shadows is one of my best works, and while I don’t think it’s as good, #shedeservedit was also one I was terribly pleased with. And all I’ve seen anywhere for A Streetcar Named Murder has been highly positive. Land of 10000 Thrills was also one of the better anthologies I’ve done, and some of the short stories I’ve been doing during these last few years have also been really good. I also think that some of the stuff I have in progress–“Never Kiss a Stranger,” “Festival of the Redeemer,” Chlorine, Muscles, etc.–are also really good stuff. Some of the work I did this weekend is pretty damned good. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this confident in my writing before in my entire life, to be honest, but as long as I keep confidence from bleeding over into ego, I should be okay.

We watched all four episodes of Three Pines last night, and i think it’s very well done. Alfred Molina is perfect as Inspector Gamache, and while I must confess to only have read the first Louise Penny novel, Still Life, I was very impressed with it and liked it a lot (not sure why I’ve not gone back and read more of them; I do have the first three or four, but it probably has more to do with time and the massive TBR pile than anything else). I thought the show didn’t have the same feel as the books, in some ways, but it’s also a different medium and there are always changes. When I was reading the book (and again, only the first in the series so I am hardly an expert on Penny’s writing or her series) I like the town, and enjoyed my visit there. It was a nice, quirky, small town–but translating that to the screen is an entirely different ball of wax. I think the producers and writers decided that because the show is about murder, it needed to be a little darker, and Three Pines comes across as a small town full of eccentrics in the show, more like Twin Peaks, Picket Fences, and Northern Exposure than Penny’s creation….but I think it was a smart direction to go with the show. Penny’s strength is offsetting the charm of the town against the darkness of the crimes committed there, and I don’t know how well Penny’s vision could have translated to the screen any better. We both really liked it. We also watched a true crime documentary about Charlie Cullen, the killer nurse–which was creepy as fuck.

I’m hoping against hope that this good feeling will last all week. I’m going to have to stop and make groceries on the way home from the office–heavy sigh–but no need to swing around uptown for the mail until tomorrow. I have to remember to buy a shipping envelope to mail a copy of Streetcar to the winner of the drawing from Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen–I should add that to my to-do list…which I need to make a new copy of it. The problem is I don’t remember everything I am supposed to be doing, and I need to get back into the habit of making a new list every weekend so things don’t get lost.

I also spent some more time with Nelson Algren’s (I was spelling it wrong in the last blog) bleak A Walk on the Wild Side, which I am enjoying but isn’t precisely a quick read by any chance. It reminds vaguely of another novel set in the same time period, A Garden of Sand by Earl Thompson, which I’ve started any number of times but have never managed to get very far into because it is also not an easy read. I am going to try to devote an hour to reading every night–an hour a day is far better than what I’ve been doing, which hasn’t been helping to budge the TBR pile at all–and I think tonight we are going to finally start watching Wednesday. I’ve been reluctant to jump into it, despite the great reviews, because the Christina Ricci version from the 90’s films was, at least for me, definitive. But we keep hearing good things about the show as well as Jenna Ortega’s performance in the lead, so I think tonight will be the night we take the plunge.

It rained all day yesterday–it was even raining when I went to pick up the groceries–and it seems a bit gray outside this morning as well. I have a lot of emails to write and a lot of emails to answer and all kinds of stuff to do today–one of the reasons I got up an hour earlier than I needed to this morning–so I am trying to be proactive and not laze in bed the way I usually do on the mornings when I don’t have to get up at six. I am getting used to getting up early for the first time ever in my life, and quite frankly, I don’t like it. But I also don’t see the clinic hours being changed any time soon, either; I fear my afternoon/early evening shifts are a thing of the remote past now.

And on that note, I have quite a bit to do today, so it’s perhaps best that I make another cup of coffee, some toast, and dive right in. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader.

The Irish Channel

Writing a cozy set in New Orleans seemed, at first, to be a little daunting.

One of the key tenets of a cozy is the sense of community one gets while reading it (see Donna Andrews’ Meg Langslow series for the perfect example; I love Caerphilly, Virginia, and enjoy revisiting twice a year to see how everyone is doing), and it took me a moment to readjust my thinking from “community means a small town” to “no, you moron, anything can be a community; and you can certainly find community in New Orleans.” And then I remembered Leslie Budewitz’ superlative Spice Shop series, which is set in Pike’s Market in Seattle. Seattle is a city, just as New Orleans is; and sure, it might be easier to just invent an entire new fictional small town to set a cozy series in, but if anything, there’s more sense of community in New Orleans than I’ve ever felt in other cities…and it was really about creating a community around my character, Valerie, and picking a neighborhood for her in which to live took me a while as I weighed pros and cons; the only thing that was definite was she was NOT going to live in the French Quarter (there’s a throwaway line where she thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the Quarter, and maybe she and her two best friends should arrange to have dinner at Galatoire’s or Antoine’s–yes, I used two of the better known restaurants in the city and the Quarter for the examples, but I also knew I could mention them without needing to explain them to the reader). I did go back and forth about the Marigny or Bywater, but finally decided to put her into a neighborhood that did not flood during Katrina, which narrowed the choices dramatically.

New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods used to be so distinct that knowing what part of the city someone lived would automatically create some assumptions–just as how the ever-popular question of where’d you go to high school used to be another way to connect with someone you’ve just met–there are any number of differences between those who went to Newman or Jesuit or Holy Cross or Ursulines or Ben Franklin or Warren Easton or McMain Magnet. New Orleans is a small enough city that chances were, you’d also know (or ar related to )someone else who’d gone to that high school at the same time, or you also knew other people who lived in their neighborhood. Obviously, the French Quarter is perhaps the most famous neighborhood in New Orleans, followed by the Garden District, working down through the Marigny, the Bywater, Mid-city, Gentilly, Lakeview, Broadmoor, etc. (With the gentrification of the city over the past sixteen or so years, realtors have also started creating new neighborhoods–which can be confusing. For example, they are trying to rebrand the Central Business District–the CBD–into SoMa, South of Market, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever as there is no market for the area to be south of; I often will have someone mention one of these new neighborhoods by name to me and I have no idea what they are talking about. They are also trying to rebrand the 7th Ward as the “new Marigny”…good luck with that.)

Scotty lives in the Quarter, and Chanse lives in the Lower Garden District–I’ve also written a lot of stories set in that neighborhood, which is also where I’ve always lived, and is quite distinct from the actual Garden District–I used to joke that we lived four blocks and three decimal points from the Garden District. So having done those neighborhoods already extensively, I wanted to pick a new place for Valerie to live and for me to write about.

I’ve always kind of been partial to the Irish Channel, although we’ve always lived in the Lower Garden District (distinct from the Garden District). I wrote one book about the Irish Channel already (aptly titled Murder in the Irish Channel), and of course, when I needed a place for Valerie to live, I decided the Channel would be the perfect place for her. Twenty years or so ago there will still blighted and crumbling houses in that neighborhood just waiting to be purchased, renovated and gentrified. The stretch of Magazine she lives near used to be one of my favorite parts of the city–I met any number of people for coffee at the Rue de la Course that used to be there, I used to really enjoy the Semolina’s restaurant as well as the Middle Eastern place whose name I can’t remember now (Byblos? it was the last restaurant meal in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina), and of course I sometimes shopped at the A&P or the Walgreens–before I realized Prytania and Tchoupitoulas were the easiest and quickest ways to get uptown; I wasted a lot of time stuck in Magazine Street traffic back in the day. Our friends Carrie and Lisa used to rent half of an enormous Victorian house near Third and Constance; I loved that enormous, drafty and dusty old house (it’s actually where my main character in my in-progress novella Never Kiss a Stranger lives), and was very sorry when they moved further uptown. Paul and I used to have a lot of fun looking for costumes and other home decor in the numerous thrift shops on Magazine; the one for St. Vincent de Paul (at the corner of Robert and Magazine, which eventually closed and became a Vitamin Shoppe; I don’t think the space is currently in use) was amazing. They used to sell handmade wooden tables and bookcases, made by monks in a monastery somewhere in northern Louisiana, and this furniture was not only solid, but it was inexpensive. We still have the bookcases and tables–one of them is my desk, the other is Paul’s–and I don’t think we spent much more than a hundred dollars on the two tables and the four bookcases. We must have bought that all after we moved back here after the year that should be forgotten; we didn’t move much furniture there or back.

But oh, how I would love to get some more of those bookcases. They are sooooo solid…

Plus, putting Valerie in the Irish Channel gives me the opportunity to write about St. Patrick’s Day–which I’ve never done with either of my other series–at some point in the future.

The Irish Channel obviously takes its name from the fact that many Irish immigrants settled there when they came to New Orleans. The Historic Landmarks Commission defines its boundaries as Jackson Avenue to Delachaise Street and Magazine Street to Tchoupitoulas. However, the New Orleans City Planning Commission defines the boundaries of the Irish Channel as these streets: Tchoupitoulas Street, Toledano Street, Magazine Street, First Street, the Mississippi River and Napoleon Avenue.

See what I mean about how confusing the city can be? We can even properly define the boundaries of our neighborhoods. I’ve always considered the Channel to start at Jackson (as does the Garden District proper) and end at Louisiana; with the other boundaries Magazine and Tchoupitoulas.

But I did think having her live so close to Louisiana Avenue–between Seventh and Harmony–would put her right smack dab into the heart of that neighborhood and in walking distance of practically anything she might need. I wanted her to be able to be able to do her errands most of the time on foot, because that also (in my mind) cemented the sense that it was a neighborhood and a community, if that makes sense? And once I’d picked where she lived, I was able to start building her community around her.

But that is a tale for another time.

I love these kinds of double houses!

Brown Eyes

Sunday morning and another lovely night’s sleep. I feel rested and relaxed this morning–yesterday I still felt like I wasn’t completely recharged yet–so I think today will be a good day of getting things done for me. One can hope, at any rate. Once I finish this I have to start getting ready for my podcast discussion on My Cousin Rachel this morning, which I am not certain I am prepared for. I also need to order that Costco delivery I never got around to yesterday–I felt tired after running my errands yesterday, and my brain wasn’t really functioning the way it needed to be to write, so I just sat in my chair and watched Tennessee beat Florida (the one time per year I root for Tennessee) and then LSU dismantle New Mexico 38-0 last night. I’ve not checked other scores, but I don’t think there were a lot of surprises other than Oklahoma’s almost-predictable almost-annual loss to Kansas State. I’ve not been giving college football much attention this season, but there were an awful lot of almost-upsets yesterday, which should make for an interesting season the further along we get into it.

Tropical Storm Ian continues to slightly move his track ever-so-slightly more west, so the Cone of Uncertainty keeps drawing nearer and nearer to New Orleans, but it looks as though landfall is going to be Wednesday–and ironically, being on the western side of the storm means we will get some lovely cooler weather as a result. I hate that about hurricane season, and obviously I worry about people in Florida (although if I were a right-winger, I’d say God isn’t clearly happy with the way Florida is being run) while at the same time being relieved we don’t have to worry about doing without power or having to leave for this one….but just because we’re getting closer to October doesn’t mean we’re done with the season just yet–it runs through December, after all. Hurray.

I got my contributor’s copy of Magic is Murder, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley yesterday, and what a lovely book it is, too. It’s always lovely to get a copy of your work in print, and as I am sure you’re been made aware by my endless self-promotion on this score, my story here is “The Snow Globe.” It’s another one of my New Orleans paranormal stories–I think there will be three of them seeing print this year (“The Rosary of Broken Promises” and “The Snow Globe” are already out; “A Whisper from the Graveyard” will be out soon) and I am in the process of writing yet another (“Parlor Tricks”) and developing still another (“When I Die”). It’s been a decent year for me and short stories, it appears, and I am hoping once I get this Scotty out of the way and finish the promo for Streetcar’s release that maybe I can focus on writing short stories again for awhile. I’d like to get those novellas finished and out of the way; there are three that are close to being finished and I think I can get them all published into one volume (those would be “Never Kiss a Stranger”, “Fireflies,” and “A Holler Full of Kudzu”–although sometimes I think the first and third might actually work as full-length novels ) and there are a couple of others I’d like to get finished in the new year (and how weird is it that I am already thinking about 2023?). I will probably also try to write another Scotty in the New Year (French Quarter Flambeaux is next up in that series) and I am thinking about maybe another Alabama book. And there’s also that romance I want to write, and the Leonardo mystery, and…

Yeah, I will never run out of ideas, I feel pretty confident in saying that.

We also finished Dahmer last night, which means we can move on to the new Star Wars show, Andor, which is cool because I absolutely loved the character in Rogue One and even though I know how he dies, I am glad they are giving him his own pre-Rogue One series. (I should watch Rogue One again at some point.) And a new episode of The Serpent Queen should drop tonight as well; so many riches to enjoy! And there are some other shows dropping soon that I can’t wait to see–both new shows and new seasons of old favorites (when will Ted Lasso be back? Anyone?)–and I’d also like to finish reading my Donna Andrews, so I can focus on reading horror for the month of October. October is also the month where A Streetcar Named Murder is set, so I should probably be doing some more promo this month to get ready for the release date in early December.

And of course, I need to get some writing done today around the Saints game.

On that note, I need to head into the spice mines so I can get the kitchen ready for the podcast. I am assuming that the podcast is merely an oral recording and not a visual broadcast, so I am not going to shave this morning…I may regret that decision in about an hour and a half. Have a terrific Sunday, y’all, and GEAUX SAINTS!!!

That’s All For Everyone

Yesterday I made a to-do list, and this odd sense of calm came down over all of my neuroses. Sure there’s a lot to be done and not much time to do it, but at least yesterday I felt like I could get it all done…now that I had made a list. I have a lot of writing to do, a lot of promotion to plan, and endless endless emails to send and reply to–and of course it’s football season and the heat is beginning to break a bit. I do like the fall, even though I don’t like it getting dark earlier.

I had to proof the galleys of an anthology I am in (just my story, fortunately) and it was quite an odd experience. I barely remembered anything about the story itself; I know how it came to be and how much money they offered me (seriously, y’all, I am very easy. Make me an offer) and I had a vague sense of what it was about, but I’d forgotten most of it, and I don’t really remember much of writing it, either. I know the anthology took a long time to come out, but the cover is lovely and they’ve done a really nice job of art on the interior of the book as well. It was interesting rereading the story, and weird–it’s very weird to not remember something you’ve written, but I guess I have finally reached that point in my life where I can’t remember everything I’ve written or said or done, for that matter–but it’s not bad. It was supposed to be a pulpy sort of story with a horror bent to it, and “A Whisper from the Graveyard” is what I came up with. They also had instructed us to “write something only a gay man can,” so I went back to 1994 or 1995 and had my big gay private eye hired to find a dead man the same day he finds out he is HIV positive. I’ve never written anything like that before; I’ve never written about HIV/AIDS, which is probably another one of those “I should write an essay about this so I can sort out all of my unresolved and long-buried traumas and fears and potential PTSD from those years” things–especially since I’ve worked as a sexual health counselor for the last fourteen years (my first four years I worked on research projects for NO/AIDS before becoming a counselor). I am also trying to address this in my novella “Never Kiss a Stranger,” which I hope to finish in the next year sometime.

I wasn’t terribly tired when I got home last night, and so I did the dishes and cooked dinner (so I would have something for lunch the rest of this week) before Paul and I settled in to watch Dahmer on Netflix (Paul came home all excited because “the new Star Wars show dropped!” and became even more excited when I replied, “And Dahmer dropped on Netflix”–Paul has long been fascinated by serial killers), which was really good and horribly disturbing; Evan Peters is fantastic as Dahmer, and Niecy Nash is golden in anything she does, but yeah–bleak and disturbing, and of course addicting. (When I get home tonight it’s this week’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills before Paul gets home.) I slept well again last night, and since I had a productive day yesterday (finished pulling on some loose ends, even started working on the book again–Chapter Three is a mess, and I need to fix it before I can move on to Chapter Four and the rest of the story) and made some progress on my to-do list as well. Tonight I can come straight home from the office, and tomorrow of course is “I don’t have to get up at six Friday”, which is marvelous; one good thing about these “get-up-at-six” mornings is that it makes getting up at seven or eight seem almost vacation-like.

Yesterday’s post about erotica writing and my “sordid” past as a gay porn writer also set me to thinking about a lot of things about my past and my career and the direction it has gone. There’s probably a lot more to be said about it, definitely more to unpack, but I also really need to think some more about it and also, reread some of my earlier erotica writing. Revisiting my past works, as I have done a bit over the past few months, has been much more reassuring than worrisome; I had been concerned that the writing wouldn’t hold up or I would be appalled by its amateurishness or something, I don’t know (I don’t need a logical reason to be concerned about my work, really, especially when it’s old, published long ago work) but was pleasantly surprised to see it’s nowhere near as bad as I had convinced myself it was (it’s really a twisted and strange place here inside my head) and there’s always the possibility that I may have written something that could be seen as problematic by today’s standards…and, for the record, I do not think that is a bad thing; it simply means that culture and society continue to evolve to a place where past prejudices and bigotries are being overcome, albeit slowly, and hopefully we’ll gradually get to a place where no one is ever made to feel less than or that they are not welcomed or embraced in society. If that means periodic corrections, and acknowledging mistakes made in the not-so-distant past so be it. We are all learning more and more every day, and I certainly hope that neither my heart nor my compassion will ever become ossified and stop learning, growing and trying to be better.

So, on this glorious and unusual Thursday morning (because I am not walking around in a coma this morning waiting for the coffee to kick in, and I can also tell it’s humid outside this morning, yay), I am looking at the positives and looking forward to getting things stricken from that to-do list I made yesterday afternoon. I am looking forward to getting some writing done this evening, and some reading this weekend–I need to reread My Cousin Rachel so I don’t sound like a fricking moron on that podcast recording on Sunday morning–and maybe, just maybe, I can get my email inbox down to something that doesn’t make my heart sink and my soul diminish just by looking at it.

Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again probably tomorrow morning.