Tag: ‘salem’ Lot

It’s Raining Again

Wednesday and it’s Pay-the-Bills Day again, hurray.

Last night’s sleep wasn’t as good as previous nights, but I do feel awake and rested this morning so that’s a good thing. I am also incredibly excited about my wagon, which i know is weird. I had a straight male co-worker look at it*, and sure enough, he was able to get the wheels attached properly. I stopped on my way home from the office to get the mail and thought, hey I had packages and my hands will be full, so let me use the wagon and it was marvelous. Clearly, I should have bought a wagon a long time ago–and it’s the right size to fit along the narrow walkway alongside the house. It’s actually going to make life so much easier for me now it’s almost scary, and it makes the most sense to actually keep it in the car–it’s out of the way, will always be there when I need it, and if I need it for anything else, well, the car is parked usually out in front of the house so it would be easy to get to. I am most pleased with the wagon, I have to say.

I’m also trying–not always successfully–to stay in control over my anxiety. I have all my pre-surgery appointments on Monday, so that’s when I am going to find out what the recovery is going to look like. I am taking unpaid leave from work (I don’t have near enough sick or vacation time to cover the time I need to be out, so here we are) which is going to be an issue I will deal with when it rolls around; but I do have the process started and I can get the documentation I need for Admin from those visits and turn everything in the following day when I go back to the office.

I wasn’t tired when I got home yesterday, but Tug was feeling lonely and needy, so I had to go give him a lap to sleep in for a while, and after watching another episode of Moonlighting and a documentary about Greek fire and the Byzantine Imperial Navy, I’d lost all motivation and was feeling tired and sleepy. I did nothing for the rest of the evening–nothing. I did go to bed around nine-thirty, and of course woke up just before five again this morning, but I think the body is beginning to adjust somewhat to the time change.

I got an unexpected royalty check (small, but I’ll take it gladly) in the mail yesterday along with my copy of David Valdes’ new Finding My Elf, which looks absolutely adorable, and I can’t wait to give it a read after the surgery. I am two books behind on my Donna Andrews reading, I need to read the new Lou Berney and Angie Kim novels, and there are any number of others I want to get to. I am assuming after the drugged haze of painkillers and so forth dies down afterwards, I’ll have lots of down time to read. I am going to have a rigid cast to keep the arm immobile for at least three weeks, and I am assuming that means limited options for doing things other than reading. I imagine typing one-handed is going to be incredibly frustrating, but it can be done. And during the drug fogs of those early post-surgery days, I can just reread things–like histories or true crime favorites or some Stephen King favorites (it’s been a hot minute since I reread Firestarter, for one, and ‘salem’s Lot and The Stand are always fun to revisit), or some of the other great favorites lying around the house.

I was also very happy to see that Ohio added abortion rights protections to the state Constitution as well as legalizing recreational marijuana–well done, Ohio!–and that Kentucky reelected their Democratic governor. There were some right-wing wins, but the great Blue Wave momentum from 2020 has continued, as well as the reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe–congratulations, Federalist Society, your hand-picked Supreme Court majority has effectively destroyed the conservative movement’s electability for a generation. The Democrats needs to hit hard on abortion and the illegitimate Supreme Court–Mitch McConnell’s legacy, by the way, have fun being hated for the rest of American history, douchebag–going forward, and frankly, they need to put Howard Dean–who engineered the historic gains of the 2008 election cycle–back in fucking charge of the DNC.

I always said that abortion rights should be put on the ballot. This is the wedge issue that trumps (couldn’t resist) the Right’s religious zealotry and transphobia and racism.

But of course, they won’t learn the lesson that they’re unpopular and so are their policies and values–they’ll just see this in a paternal way: “clearly the voting public can’t be trusted, so we need to install authoritarianism for their own good.“

Yes, this is the same party that thinks they’ve successfully branded themselves as “true American patriots.” Fucking garbage is what they are.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back to check on you with more blatant self-promotion later.

*ah, stereotypes. Alas, we have a lack of butch lesbians in the department now, so had to make do with a straight guy. C’est la vie.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something

Well, I finished the tragic mess that is currently known as Chapter Seven’s first draft yesterday. And it is a mess; this is easily one of the sloppiest first drafts of a novel I’ve ever written. In fact, I feel so bad about how shitty it is I may even go back and rewrite the entire first half once I finish Chapter Ten. This book is so bad, I can’t even believe how badly I can write a Scotty novel. Oh, well, that’s what rewrites and revisions and future drafts are for.

I also finished rereading It yesterday. Wow, you are undoubtedly saying, that’s a lot of reading. But truth be told, much like the Losers Club when they return to Derry twenty-seven years later, the more I read the more I remembered. And yes, I skimmed some sections, and skipped some entirely. It’s a perfectly fine novel, and I would recommend it..but there are problematic sections, and yes, I do feel like I’m committing treason by saying anything negative about Stephen King and his work, because he is my writing idol, and he has been since I was a teenager. What works in this book works extremely well; no one writes about the lives of children, how they relate to other children, and what it’s like to be a loser as a child (or feel like one) the way he does. I identify with every one of those kids, I feel for them, I desperately want them to succeed and have great lives and live happily ever after. Their return as adults doesn’t work quite as well as the parts that are set in the past; the characters are still richly defined, and their relationships still work–but I still didn’t like the resolution of the story, either when they were kids or when they were adults; I didn’t like the way the book ended (but for the life of me, I couldn’t write such a book nor could I think of a way to end such a book), and it reminded me a lot of Floating Dragon by Peter Straub in many ways (or vice versa; I think I read the King first and then the Straub originally and was struck by the similarities; I do love both books and think of them fondly). I’m not sorry I took the time to reread It and reacquaint myself with Derry and the Losers Club; there are some genuinely good scares in the book, and it’s one of the best books about a small city I’ve read–King really does a great job of depicting life in these smallish towns/cities and how the social dynamics work in them, whether it’s Derry, Castle Rock, or Jerusalem’s Lot. (That was one of the best parts of Needful Things for me; how the town dynamics worked and how the characters and their lives and their petty foibles and feuds all were entwined so intricately together.)

One of the other interesting things I found in rereading It was there was an LSU connection in it; in the town Ben has moved to and currently lives in there was a local kid who was a star athlete and went to LSU, only to party too hard and flunk out, and wound up coming back to the small town as an alcoholic. The town is Hemingford Home, where of course Miss Abigail lived in The Stand; also in that same book when Nick Andros is jumped, one of the assailants was wearing his fraternity ring from LSU–he was the sheriff’s brother-in-law, and he partied too hard and flunked out of LSU as well. Methinks Mr. King knows someone who went to LSU and flunked out for partying too hard. Those are the only two references to LSU in King’s work that I know of; would that Rocky Wood was alive so I could email and ask him.

Maybe someday I’ll get to ask Mr. King.

And of course, It is very reminiscent of the novella “The Body.” which is probably my favorite work of King’s, if pressed to name a favorite–the Losers Club, like the smaller group of friends in “The Body”, has the fat kid, the kid whose brother died and parents haven’t gotten over it, the poor kid (only switched from male to female in It), and the kid who gets beaten up a lot because of his smart mouth.

And there’s also the writer character–King often throws a writer in his work (Ben in ‘salem’s Lot, Jack in The Shining), but this was the first book where he really went all-in on  writer character with Bill Denbrough–and of course, his next novel was Misery, which of course took the writer character, and the dangers of fame, to a whole new level.

But yeah, the gang bang scene has a whole different vibe about in 2017. It didn’t phase me thirty-one years ago, but now it’s just kind of…icky.

As I said, I’m not sorry I reread it; most of it still stands up, and I still think it’s a terrific, if flawed, novel.

Today I need to get this kitchen in order, and I want to work some more on both the WIP and the new Scotty, maybe even a short story. Next up for my reading is Michael MacDowell’s The Elementals.

And now, back to the spice mines. Here’s a hunk to get your week off to a nice start.

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