Tag: Paige

Down in the Boondocks

What exactly are boondocks, anyway?1

Monday morning and back to work with me today, which is fine. Yesterday was nice–despite the Saints losing; not a good weekend for Louisiana football outside of Tulane–and I feel rested and relaxed this morning, which is great. I have a lot to do today, and am really looking forward to having a good day. I did work on the book; I got the outlining of the first seven chapters done; I made a character list (a good start); and also recognized in the rereading what needs fixing and what needs adding and what needs redoing. I also outlined the rest of a short story I am working on, and figured out how to solve the problem of another one, too, which is very cool. I also read for a while, and really am enjoying House of Rain and Bone. I also figured out why it’s taking me so long to read, which I am puzzling over, and it hit me this morning–I am reading it slowly because I am savoring it, and because it’s making me think as I engage with it, and that’s not an easy thing for any writer to do with their work. The book is also a lot of things I generally don’t care for or like–lots of violence–but the language is very beautiful yet raw, the emotion is like an exposed nerve, but I am enjoying it very much, and it’s very intense…but takes me a while to process and digest what I read, so it’s not going very quickly. This is not a bad thing. Most readers will take this ride and not be able to put it down–it moves very quickly, the characters are remarkably likable, the main character is a relatable guy–but as a fellow author, I want to savor the language, the structure, the pacing, all the things that make the book so stunningly brilliant.

And that’s a good thing.

I feel pretty good this morning, actually. I slept really well last night, and feel rested and relaxed as I face the day. It’s my Admin day at work, so I have no pressures or stress and no interactions with clients, unless I see one by chance as I walk around doing other things this morning. I love my clients–I really do, and the long-termers are lovely to see every quarter–but interacting with people all day as someone who is, at heart, an introvert despite being a Leo (I like attention but it also makes me uncomfortable2), wears me out a bit.

I also worked on the Scotty Bible some this weekend. I marked up the final volume that wasn’t (Royal Street Reveillon) and then took down the notes from those pages, and will need to get that typed up. The last step of finishing the Bible includes reorganizing the notes into book order, before sorting them all into categories and so forth. I also need to do a synopsis of each book, detailing not only the case but developments in Scotty’s personal life, the family tree, and so on. Also going through the books to do this–even just pulling the notes out–has given me the opportunity (without the anxiety and all the little naysaying voices in my head, banished by my new medications) to reread (a bit) and reacquaint myself with the work with fresh eyes. As you probably already know, I am very hard of myself and was always dismissive of any achievements or recognition I may have received, and have forgotten a lot of the stories and what happened and why and where the idea came from and why I wanted to tell this story…but this revisitation without the usual Greg-crazy has made me appreciate the stories and the writing all the more, which is lovely and incredibly cool. I also realized yesterday while making the notes that while a Scotty Bible is needed and necessary, that an overall Greg Multiverse of New Orleans Bible is necessary; I’ve crossed over all my New Orleans writing (short stories and novels), using the same fictitious spaces and minor characters. (For example, Cooper Construction from A Streetcar Named Murder is also the construction company Scotty is using to renovate the building on Decatur Street.) So, yes, it needs to be more encompassing. I realized that Paige–Chanse’s best friend–whom I’ve also used in the Scotty series–most of her background is in the Chanse books, and yes, I should probably do one for him, too….sigh. It’s like pulling a string from something knit.

I’m kind of going to miss the Swifties, to be honest. We’re used to tourism here–non-stop conventions, the big events, and so on–but there was a marked difference between the Swifties and other big groups that take over New Orleans. For one thing, they were incredibly friendly and nice! So much good energy that I didn’t mind the crowds of them I had to pass through, and the outfits and everything. They were here to have a good time, of course, and the city welcomed them (and their wallets) with open arms so that it became almost a symbiotic pairing. Hospitality workers marveled at their kindness and their generous tipping; store owners and workers didn’t mind being busy because everyone was nice and polite and didn’t complain about anything. I loved the friendship bracelets adorning the Superdome. I loved the endless karaoke of Taylor’s songs that went on as they took over Bourbon Street. Every bar and every shop was playing her music. Her economic impact on the city was undeniable, and I can’t wait to hear about her local charity giving, which she always does–usually food banks and homeless shelters, bless her.

It’s no wonder MAGA hates her. They hate anyone who is kind and giving–they certainly do not recognize Jesus’ messages in her (which goes to show you how they would react to Jesus’ return, doesn’t it? I find it very interesting that his followers are the ones most likely to reject and crucify him). I won’t talk about the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday because what else is there to say, other than “we’ve not seen anything like this since the Nuremburg rallies” but we did have one in MSG back in 1939, didn’t we? (And it should come as no surprise that it was conservatives who were pro-Hitler in 1939 America, does it? They hated FDR with the same kind of passion Trump ignites in his acolytes, and since they smeared him as a socialist/communist, naturally they got into bed with Nazis.)

Everything old is new again.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back later or tomorrow, we’ll see!

  1. So, turns out it means “rough, isolated country”–and has come to mean, in slang, a remote place with little to no civilization. Interesting. ↩︎
  2. And yes, that is on the list of issues to unpack and make peace with. ↩︎

Memory

Ah, how I love cats.

I’ve been putting my cats into my books now for quite some time.

It’s kind of funny, because I never wanted to be one of those people–posting pictures of my pets, writing them into my books–until, of course, I actually acquired a pet. It never occurred to me to put Skittle into any of my books, until we lost him to a very rapidly advancing cancer when he was only seven.

Skittle was such a beautiful cat.

Skittle came to us when he was about six months old, when we were still living in the carriage house. (We’d gotten a mouse, and were advised by friends, neighbors and landlady to just get a cat…to which were both like “Really? We don’t want a cat and we know nothing about them” but after the third mouse sighting, it was, yeah, we need a cat. We got Skittle on Christmas Eve, 2003, as a bit of a Christmas present to ourselves. (We never saw the mouse again.) And cute and tiny as he was, we had no idea what a cat was like or what was normal behavior for them…and he had us completely charmed and under his thumb by the end of the day–head butts, making biscuits, cuddling and a non-stop purr machine. Skittle was beautiful, but was afraid of the outside for a while. He’d been found at about two weeks old in the middle of the road in a rainstorm, so the sound of cars scared him for a long time, and he was terrified of going outside for the first few years. Then one night I was coming home from a party–Paul was staying in the Quarter for the TW Fest, and I was home taking care of the cat–and the front door didn’t latch. When I got up the next morning the door was wide open, and Skittle was nowhere to be found. I called him a few times, and he came out from under the main house and sat down on the walk, nonchalantly cleaning himself as a very-relieved me ran and grabbed him.

After that, we had to watch and make sure the door closed because he’d dash out if he had the chance. He always let us catch him eventually, but he liked to explore and check for vermin and other live toys to torture. He was a great hunter, and could take a palmetto bug out of mid-air with a massive leap. He loved to play fetch, was very affectionate, and loved people, always winning them over by winding through their legs and rubbing against them, begging to be petted. He was also long-haired and I swear he shed that entire coat at least three or four times a year; his hair was everywhere. He also was smart–he trained me to know what four different noises he made were: food, water, litter box to be cleaned, and I either want to be petted and go to sleep on you in your chair. When I had a laptop as my primary computer (from 2003-2010), I had it sitting on a metal tray at eye level while I used a separate keyboard, and Skittle loved to go to sleep up there. When I got an actual desktop computer again, he lost his place to sleep while I worked, and he did. Not. Like. That. One. Bit.

He got sick first over Memorial Day that weekend, and he was dehydrated. The vet rehydrated him again and he was back to his normal self…but over Labor Day he was sick again. It was cancer, and from the first diagnosis that Tuesday after Labor Day and when we took him back a few weeks later….it had spread to all of his organs, and it became just a matter of time. Keeping him alive would require three months in the hospital, thousands of dollars, and no guarantee he would make it through.

We were both devastated when we brought him home that Wednesday night, and we made an appointment to send him over the Rainbow Bridge for Saturday. We spoiled him that Thursday and Friday–treats and tuna, as much as he wanted. Ironically, those last few days, he seemed like himself again to the point that I had to be the monster on Saturday morning and convince Paul it was better to let him go now, rather than watch him decline because he wasn’t getting any better; it was almost like he knew so he wanted us to remember him the way he always was. Paul spent that entire day after we got back in bed, while I was an empty shell of myself, removing all reminders–toys, food, etc. because every time I found one I’d start crying again, so I rounded them all up.

I wanted to get another cat, but Paul was so heartbroken, he wasn’t sure he could handle another so soon. (I was also heartbroken, but I also knew we had to rescue another one.)

Scooter was such a handsome fellow, too.

Thursday the vet called to let me know Skittle’s ashes were ready for us to pick up, so I went over there on my way to work in the morning and picked them up. They had some cats there for adoption from the SPCA, and there was a beautiful orange boy, named Texas, who was so sweet I wanted to take him home right then. But I didn’t know if Paul would be upset if I brought home a replacement cat, so I didn’t, but I remembered him and thought I’ll talk to Paul about it tonight.

Paul was asleep on the couch when I got home from work that night, and so I turned on the television and thought, “I’ll ask him about Texas when he wakes up.” I read while something was on television–a Real Housewives marathon, I think–and about an hour later, Paul sat up on the couch, completely freaked out that he’d just seen a mouse looking at him from the top of the recycling bin. I hadn’t seen anything. He was just dreaming–and his subconscious was letting him know it was okay to get another cat. Thirteen years later, he still insists there was a mouse. So I told him about Texas, told him to go by and look at home and if he wanted him, to make all the arrangements and I’d pick him up after work. Paul fell in love with Texas, and nothing would do except that I pick HIM up from work and we’d go together to get him.

Scooter jumped out of the crate and hid under the coffee table, which was a bit concerning. But after about an hour of us leaving him alone, he came out, crawled onto the couch and onto Paul, laid down on his chest and started purring and headbutting him, and then he came over to me and did the same. We renamed him Scooter that first night, and for thirteen years, we had this incredibly sweet ginger boy.

Such a sweet boy. Around this time was when I realized that if I started putting MY cats into my work meant they would live forever. So I gave Chanse’s friend Paige (who hadn’t yet appeared in a Scotty book an orange and white cat named Skittle. I gave Scotty a cat named Scooter, and I can’t remember which cat I gave to Valerie in my cozy series; it was either Skittle or Scooter. Jem also has a black cat in Death Drop, but he is fictional–what else but Shade?

We had Scooter for thirteen years. He had a bout with diabetes, but insulin shots cleared that up (thank God; I hated giving him those shots) and he was mostly healthy. One morning last summer before I went to work I noticed Scooter was huffing–and having trouble breathing. I tried to soothe him, but I could tell he was terrified…and thought, Oh no, this is probably it for him, how am I going to break it to Paul? Later that morning he called me at work to tell me we needed to take Scooter in, and we were probably going to lose him. We took him over that morning, and they called us later to let us know it was congestive, and he wasn’t going to make it. They had him comfortable, but whenever they took him out of the oxygen thing he’d start huffing again. It was, alas, fatal, so I walked over there and held him while they put him to sleep and he crossed the rainbow bridge. I sobbed all the way home, and still can’t think about him without tearing up.

The house felt so empty without a cat. But finally we steeled ourselves and headed to the SPCA to pick out a new rescue.

Sparky!

And we brought Sparky home, and I’ve been entertaining you all with tales of the kitten here ever since. He’s a darling, and he’s getting so much bigger than the little kitten with a big voice and adorable energy. He picked us out–just as Skittle did–and I love that he’s got orange coloring, as you can see above.

And I guess I’ll have to start another series so I can immortalize Sparky, too.

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.

A Place in This World

Here we are on Wednesday, halfway through the week and a storm is barreling down on us yet again. 2020 is just gonna keep on 2020’ing, y’all. The intensity of the storm–and how strong it will be when it comes ashore–keeps being increased, but everyone keeps insisting that it will slow down and de-intensify before it comes ashore, which is most likely going to be somewhere in Louisiana. Heavy heaving sigh.

But such is life on the Gulf Coast–even though we technically aren’t on the Gulf Coast.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately–always a dangerous thing–and a lot of it has to do with my seeing myself, and defining myself, as a crime writer. I am best known for two series featuring gay private eyes set in New Orleans: Chanse MacLeod and Scotty Bradley. (And while characters and places crossover from one series to the other–Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague are the police detectives in both series; Paige from the Chanse series has shown up in the last two Scotty books; the disreputable gay strip club the Brass Rail in the upper Quarter; etc. etc etc etc. I have to this date resisted the urge to have the two characters cross over; and I do think that was a wise choice.) It isn’t all I’ve written of course; the two series total about fifteen or so novels out of thirty-three or so I’ve done overall. I’ve dipped my toes into young adult and new adult; romantic suspense and domestic suspense. I’ve done erotica, of course. But the two books I just signed contracts for are stand-alone novels; one will undoubtedly be called new adult and the other young adult, and while crime is in both books and affects the characters and helps shape the stories, they aren’t traditional type crime novels in which a mystery or a crime is solved. (The young adult is more of one of those than the young adult.)

I’m more curious now about criminals, or people who do bad things, and why they actually do them. I have always been drawn to noir–desperate people doing desperate things to get what they want (or feel they deserve)–and I’ve been exploring those interests primarily in short stories. I love what I’ve been doing in my short fiction lately (note to self: must revise short story this week), and I’m starting to think I want to explore those interests on a bigger canvas than a short story can or might provide for me.

A friend recently wrote me about my story “The Carriage House,” recently published in Mystery Tribune, and said, “You know there’s a novel in there, don’t you?” I kind of laughed to myself, because of course I originally envisioned the story as a novel first; before realizing yet again that I only have so much time left in my life to write all the books I want to write (I will go to my grave wishing I had written more books), and a while back I finally came to the conclusion that if some book ideas can be adapted and edited down to a smaller story, something shorter, that was probably the smart thing to do–even though short stories are much harder for me to write than a novel, weird as that sounds. And it’s not always possible–I also suspect some of the in-progress unfinished stories are unfinished because they really don’t work as a short story. But then again, I could be wrong and just haven’t figured out how to write the story yet.

We watched a few more episodes of Utopia last night, and it’s really quite something. Lots of violence and lots of action as the onion gets peeled back and the story of what is really going on in the show becomes more clear, it’s really creepy and terrifying, because it really isn’t that difficult to see it happening in the real world–it also doesn’t help that the show is centered around a lethal pandemic.

The weather outside my windows is solemnly gray this morning, lots of clouds. Yesterday the light was also strange; we’re in that weird pre-storm time. The storm seems to be shifting slowly west, which puts New Orleans on the wet side of the storm, and we’ll be feeling it beginning sometime tomorrow late in the day, and then most of the day Friday with some residual on Saturday. They’ve moved the LSU-Missouri game to Missouri’s home stadium officially this morning–I won’t say anything about the Florida-LSU game that was postponed years ago because of a hurricane because Florida refused to move the game day to Baton Rouge instead–and it’s also now a day game rather than a night game. I hope we still have power so we can watch; at least if we do lose power it won’t be completely unbearable in the Lost Apartment since the weather has shifted into fall.

The loss of morning coffee, on the other hand, will be horrific.

I also found some time to read a short story last night, and I chose “You Go Where It Takes You” by Nathan Ballingrud from North American Lake Monsters: Stories. This was the story that was adapted for the first episode of Monsterworld–which we will undoubtedly go back to once we’ve finished Utopia–and while there are significant differences between the show and the story, both are done really really well.

He did not look like a man who would change her life. He was big, roped with muscles from working on off-shore oil rigs, and tending to fat. His face was broad and inoffensively ugly, as though he had spent a lifetime taking blows and delivering them. He wore a brown raincoat against the light morning drizzle and against the threat of something more powerful held in abeyance. He breathe heavily, moved slowly, found a booth by the window overlooking the water, and collapsed into it. He picked up a syrup-smeared menu and studied it with his whole attention, like a student deciphering Middle English. He was like every man who ever walked into that diner. He did not look like a beginning or an end.

That day, the Gulf of Mexico and all the earth was blue and still. The little town of Port Fourchon clung like a barnacle to Louisiana’s southern coast, and behind it the water stretched into the distance for as many miles as the eye could hold. Hidden by distance were the oil rigs and the workers who supplied the town with its economy. At night she could see their lights, ringing the horizon like candles in a vestibule. Toni’s morning shift was nearing its end; the dining area was nearly empty. She liked to spend those slow hours out on the diner’s balcony, overlooking the water.

As you can see, Ballingrud has a beautiful writing style; easy and uncomplicated, but complex in its simplicity. The story, about a working single mother in a small Louisiana coastal town whose life changes when she meets a mysterious stranger at the diner one morning, paints an exceptional portrait of desperation. Toni, short for Antoinette, is only twenty three and has a young daughter still of daycare age; the child’s father walked out on her years earlier and left for New Orleans–no child support, little to no contact, nothing. Toni is desperate, trapped in a rut, and there’s something wrong with her daughter mentally–she needs specialized help that Toni is unable to afford to provide for her, so she is basically simply coasting along through her life, one day at a time, some days better than others, occasionally dreaming about a better life. The stranger is someone who has the ability to wear other people’s skins and transform into them; metaphorically changing lives with every transformation, and this experience convinces Toni to do something terrible herself, in order to free herself–shedding an old skin and acquiring a new one, starting over with a new life somewhere else, free of the child she cannot take care of properly, in the way the child needs. Ballingrud conveys that sense of desperation and the numbing acceptance of defeat–that undoubtedly any number of people feel–and by using a paranormal/supernatural experience to snap her out of it, shows convincingly how the medium of horror can be used, in the hands of a masterful writer, to say something deeply poignant and meaningful about the human condition.

I’m really looking forward to diving into more of his stories.

And on that note, that spice ain’t gonna mine itself.

Space Oddity

So, the eighth Scotty book drops in exactly one week. Those of you who preordered (and thank you!) might even already have Royal Street Reveillon in your hot little hands. Yay, for preorders, and thank you again if you did preorder.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a long time, or follow me on social media, or do any of those lovely things that make me feel better about myself, are probably aware of one of my primary mantras of writing: never throw anything away because nothing you write is waste. It can, after all, always come in handy later. I’ve repurposed work before; Murder in the Rue Ursulines, the fourth Chanse novel, began life as the fourth Scotty, Hurricane Party Hustle. My short story “Survivor’s Guilt,” nominated for a Macavity Award, began life as a short story called “Blues in the Night,” and so on, and so on, and so on. Fragments removed from a novel have ended up in a short story; short story pieces have wound up inside novels. That’s why I always save everything, including drafts and partials–I never know when that writing might come in handy for something later, and it inevitably always does.

Many years ago, the publishing of fiction as ebooks only exploded with the development, and sales, of Amazon’s Kindle device, as well as those from competitors–I chose to go the iPad route, and use the apps for book reading; Kobo and Kindle and iBooks. A friend had started her own e-publishing company, and was encouraging me to develop a long-dormant idea for a series–the idea I had, almost from the earliest days of the Chanse series, of spinning off his reporter best bud, Paige Tourneur, into her own series. I am always willing to give new things, and new technology, a spin, and so I produced two lengthy novellas with Paige as a main character, out of a proposed five: Fashion Victim and Dead Housewives of New Orleans. The former was originally a short story I sat on for years; the latter an idea born of my interest/borderline obsession with reality television, primarily Bravo’s Real Housewives franchises. It was born of a joke between Paul and I, while he suffered in silence through my watching of these shows (mostly the New York and Beverly Hills editions; I never got into the others quite as much, although Atlanta and now Potomac I”m more hit and miss with) in which we picked women we thought would make interesting choices for a New Orleans franchise, and then would simply laugh and laugh, saying “Can you imagine?” The novellas, however, were on a very tight turn around time, and I was writing them between other novels I had contracted. They were good, but I was never completely satisfied with them, and Paige was, frankly, not as popular with readers as I thought she might be. People either loved the character or hated her; and of course, some Amazon reviewers disliked Paige’s feminist politics and her habit of using foul language.

Also, as it turned out, ebook marketing is a lot of work–work I didn’t have the time or knowledge to put in, and ultimately the return on the investment was simply not worth it. My friend and I agreed to cancel the series and the contracts, and shortly thereafter both novellas were pulled from Amazon.

And that, I thought, was the end of the great Paige experiment of mainstream crime fiction writing for me.

But I still believed, and still do, that the Dead Housewives idea was a good one, and deserved better than it got as an e-novella for Paige.

So…I decided to reboot and repurpose the idea, and develop it into a Scotty novel; and so a forty thousand word novella turned into a Scotty novel of closer to a hundred thousand words; it’s the longest Scotty book since Jackson Square Jazz. If you are an avid Greg reader, and you read Dead Housewives (thank you for that, by the way), some of Royal Street Reveillon might seem familiar; the opening party for the show, some of the characters and their relationships to each other, and so on. But the outcome of the story is different, and there’s a lot more going on in this book than in the original. Royal Street Reveillon is much closer to what I always wanted the story to be, and really, it works much better as a Scotty story than it ever would did as a Paige story. The “Grande Dames of New Orleans” are all the same women; I introduced Serena Castlemaine in Garden District Gothic, and also previewed the filming of the reality show in that book. Margery, Megan, Rebecca, Fidelis, and Chloe are the same women from the original, but their stories and relationships to each other (and in some cases, to their spouses and the men in their lives) are dramatically different. The first murder is different, and there are several more story threads in this final version of the story than there were before. And there is a lot more of Scotty’s personal story, and that of those he loves, in this book than in the original (obviously, as Scotty wasn’t in the original story).

And, for the record, the resolution of the mysteries (yes, plural) are markedly different than what it originally was.

Also for the record;  I am much more pleased with this book than I was with the original story. I hope you’ll like it, too.

I spent my entire Labor Day, well, laboring over a volunteer project; it’s still not quite finished despite the eight or so hours I dedicated to it yesterday, but I feel very confident that it will be finished tonight. So, while I didn’t really get to spend my long weekend relaxing as much as I would have liked, I was able to get some things done, including the draft of Bury Me in Shadows, this volunteer project, and I did sign the contract for that short story, which was lovely.

And so now on to a short week. I don’t have a short day this week until Friday, as I am covering for someone tomorrow evening, but that’s fine. I seem to have my sleep back under control again as well, which is a major plus and very satisfying.

So it’s off to the spice mines with me for the day. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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