Tag: Scotty

Shakin’

Holiday Monday, and I slept deeply and well again last night. I’d set the alarm, thinking it was probably better to start getting up early again, since it’s back to the office with me tomorrow but Sparky was being super cuddly and sweet in the bed this morning, and it was cold, and so I stayed in bed for another hour or so. I finished reading Tara Laskowski’s The Weekend Retreat, which I greatly enjoyed (more on that later). I made jambalaya, and did some dishes and started a load of laundry. I also reread some of my own unfinished work, trying to decide what to focus on next. I have to say I am regularly pleased with my work now when I go back and reread it; what can I say? I don’t know if that means I am getting rid of the self-deprecation and “not good enough” mentality I’ve struggled with my entire life, but it’s a welcome change to read some of my work and think this is pretty good.

I also worked on the house some more and it’s starting to look like it did before the acquisition of High Energy Kitten and my surgery–cluttered but at least neat. It’s almost there, you know, and maybe putting some finishing touches on it today before I go to my first STRENGTH PT appointment this afternoon. (I’ll be making groceries after that, I might add.) I’ve also decided that my next read with be R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface; I do enjoy a writer-behaving-badly story. I’ve written my own, too–“Quiet Desperation”, which was included in my collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, as well as a Kindle single–but I don’t think I ever want to write an entire novel about a writer behaving badly. I may write an entire novel with a writer as the main character–I keep circling back to my true crime writer, who’s now appeared in several of the Scotty books, as well as The Orion Mask–but I don’t think I’m quite there yet.

It is interesting to revisit unfinished projects and decide which of them to focus on and finish. I know that my next short story collection will be finished if I finish a novella and throw it in; but I’d kind of wanted to do a novella collection. One of the novellas–the longest one–will be rather easily turned into a novel, which I think is what I may do with it; there are three or four more that I can finish and turn in as a solitary book. “Festival of the Redeemer” is completed in first draft form, and rereading it yesterday made me realize that it’s next draft can be longer, of course, but I don’t think there’s enough story there to turn it into a novel; same with “Fireflies” and “Never Kiss a Stranger,” so maybe those three can be the novella collection (Festival of the Redeemer and Two More Tales–which I am choosing to call it so I can have a Venetian cover, a la du Maurier). “A Holler Full of Kudzu” might be the one I finish to complete the short story collection. There are also a lot of short stories I’d like to rework and/or finish for some calls that I’ve seen, which could always be fun. But the exciting thing here is I am feeling excited about writing again for the first time in I don’t know how long.

It’s also weird to think that the Scotty series is turning twenty-one this year; on May 1st, to be exact. I definitely should write another Scotty this year, and it does look like Hurricane Party Hustle is the one to do–it’ll also give me the opportunity to write about what it’s like to ride out a big storm and live without power, all the while having Katrina flashbacks. I also have the story for that already fleshed out, and yesterday I even figured out how the book opens, and how the mystery comes to Scotty’s attention in the first place, which is more than I usually have when I start, LOL. That one will be followed by the cursed Mardi Gras of 2019, French Quarter Flambeaux, which will be another fun story to write, and then Quarter Quarantine Quadrille, which will cover the shutdown and COVID madness. So, there are at least three more Scotty books for me to write, which will take the series to twelve books, and then I’ll think about it some more. Scotty’s family–parents and grandparents–are getting older, and will soon have to start dying off, which I really don’t want to deal with.

But it’s nice to feel excited about everything again, isn’t it? And normal, after so many years of abnormality?

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely holiday, everyone, and I’ll probably be back later.

Get Up and Go

Sunday morning and the temperature is falling in New Orleans. It’s forty-one right now, which is nothing compared to what people up north are dealing with today, but we are getting down into water-freezing temperatures later this week. I slept for eleven hours last night, which is insane, but…my guess is I needed the rest. I didn’t get up until nine this morning, which is almost as insane as the weather. It’s amazing what a difference the right medications make, isn’t it? Yesterday was actually pleasant. I did some things, ran some errands, and then settled in to watch the LSU Gymnastics meet, which was a quad competition against three of the best teams in the country–UCLA, Oklahoma, and Utah–and the LSU team actually had to count a fall and still managed to come in second. They also had a subpar vault and beam rotation, which makes it even more amazing. GEAUX TIGERS! I also spent some time reading–which I am going to go do some more of once I finish this–and even wrote a little bit yesterday (a very little bit). But tomorrow is a holiday, and I have more chores and things to do today, without anything really to watch on deck.

It’s very nice to get up and feel rested, which happens more frequently these days.

I did a reading for the Bold Strokes Book-a-thon yesterday, with some other mystery writers from Bold Strokes, which was kind of nice. Mary Burns, who moderated the reading, also asked us all how we plan our books–essentially the plotter/pantser question–and it did make me think a bit about my process, how I do things. I write Scotty books differently than I write other books, fo one thing. I always think up three or four things that I want to address in a Scotty book, and from there I try to figure out how to weave them together into a story. This started with Baton Rouge Bingo–prior to it, I pretty much just pantsed the whole thing and figured it out as I went. I was asked on a panel at Saints and Sinners after Who Dat Whodunnit if I planned on writing another Scotty book, and I flippantly replied “if I can figure out a way to make the book about Huey Long’s deduct box, Mike the Tiger (the live LSU animal mascot), and the state’s ban on gay marriage, I will”, figuring as I said it there was no way anyone could write a book with all three elements in it. Three days later it all came to me how to make that actually work, and so I started writing it. For Mississippi River Mischief, there were several separate things; I wanted a family values politician hypocrite who had a thing for teenager boys, a tie in to The Haunted Showboat, and something from Scotty’s own past that he’s never really reexamined before, but has to because of the events in the book. It took me a while to figure out how to deal with the characters’ response to the events of Royal Street Reveillon–I could hardly pretend those things didn’t happen, after all–but eventually it all began to fall into place. I ended up with a book I was very pleased with, and probably one of the best books in the series. I’m not sure what Scotty is next, but I know it’s going to take place while the building on Decatur is renovated and redone as a single family residence, the boys will be living in the dower house–Taylor will be living in the Diderot mansion because there’s not enough space in the old dower house for all four of them. I think this is going to be the hurricane party book, which I am kind of reluctant to write because the last time I decided to write that story was right before Katrina. But I am going to start figuring that one out a bit, see where we can go with it. I do think a crime story set during an evacuation, with the city emptied, is an interesting idea, so I’ll probably write some free form brainstorming the way I always do. I’m kind of excited about writing another Scotty book this year.

There are also some short stories I want to get under control and finished and submitted.

But once I finish this, I am going to my chair with my journal and Tara’s book, so I can hopefully get that done today. I also have chores to get done–the kitchen is sliding again–and here’s hoping for a productive Sunday, okay? Have a great one–I may be back later.

Stand or Fall

Twelfth Night, and I just added a king cake to my grocery list. Huzzah!

In a moment, I’ll be getting cleaned up and going to see my surgeon to get my stitches removed and hopefully losing the brace for good. After that, I am making a grocery run before returning to the safety of the Lost Apartment for the rest of the weekend. I didn’t ger as much done yesterday as I would have liked; after completing my work-at-home duties yesterday and the laundry I kind of repaired to the easy chair and just kind of sat there watching television until it was time for bed. I was tired from PT yesterday morning, and I kind of needed the rest. I did watch LSU Gymnastics triumph over Ohio State, which was a lovely opening to the season, and then was just kind of a cat bed for the rest of the evening before I finally went to bed. I slept well, too. Paul had an appointment yesterday afternoon in Uptown, and brought home a pizza from The Midway on Freret, and it was probably one of the best pizzas I’ve had in years. A very pleasant surprise treat, as it were. Plus, it’s really nice to be able to eat pizza again. I always forget about the plethora of good places to eat that has developed on Freret Street uptown, past Napoleon; and I really do need to be better about experiencing the city and writing about it. I’m already thinking about the next Scotty, with him and the boys temporarily housed in the Diderot carriage house in the Garden District.

I’m not sure what my plans are for after I get home this morning. I do have a to-do list that I need to work through as well as update, and if I do nothing other than organize and file, well, that will be a huge improvement. I know I’ll be able to start reading the new Tara Laskowski, which is exciting–big fan here–and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to get some writing done as well. Stranger things have happened, after all.

It rained pretty hard yesterday, starting in the afternoon and continuing to just come down like a waterfall through the evening. It was a street flooding kind of rain, which is probably the best way to describe it, and of course, coupled with the cold it made me lethargic. It’s sunny but cold this morning, and soon I’ll have to start getting cleaned up and ready to head out for my appointment. I do feel good and rested this morning and awake, which is always a good sign. I do know I am going to make something in the slow cooker either today or tomorrow; it will depend I suppose on how I feel when I get home from everything and put the groceries away. But the kitchen/workspace definitely needs some work before I do anything this morning. There’s dishes to clean and a dishwasher to empty, and I need to clean out the refrigerator and maybe organize it a little better. Heavy sigh. I never have seemed able to get caught up on everything that needs catching up on, you know? Maybe this weekend will be the time…

You have no idea how badly I want to ditch this brace, Constant Reader.

And on that note, I should start getting ready for the appointment. I may be back later, one never knows, and if not, have a lovely Saturday.

You’ve Got Another Thing Coming

And now it’s Thursday, the last day in the office for me this week, and I somehow made it through the entire week of going into the office without being tired by the end. The jury of course is still out about today–I’ll have to see how I feel at the end of the day, or mid-afternoon, of course–but I am very pleased to be awake and feeling rested this morning. I took it easy when I got home from work yesterday, spending some quality playtime with Sparky and watching some Real Housewives–my God, the Salt Lake City finale was some epic reality television–and couldn’t decide what to read next. I am leaning towards R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface (because I love me some publishing noir about authors behaving badly), but there are others in the running as well (most notably Tara Laskowski’s The Weekend Retreat). Tonight when I get home from work I will decide; I am coming home straight from work again; no need to run errands on the cusp of the weekend. I also need to get back to writing, and the sooner the better. I have high hopes for this weekend because it appears as though I won’t be tired going into the weekend, and the kitchen isn’t nearly as big a mess as it usually is on Thursdays–so if I can get the dishes handled tonight, I’ll be way ahead of things when I get home from PT tomorrow morning. I am seeing Dr. O’Brien at last on Saturday, so I am hoping to kiss the brace goodbye once and for all. LSU Gymnastics also has their first meet on Friday night, which is always fun to follow. The team is really loaded this year, too. GEAUX TIGERS!

I also want to get to the library sale this weekend to donate some books, too. Maybe I can spend some time tonight and tomorrow night pruning out more books. The laundry room is nearly under control again, but there are still even more books that can go.

And I should really started copy-editing Jackson Square Jazz so I can finally get that ebook up and available for readers. I am losing money every day that book isn’t available, and I might be able to run a promo when it becomes available (I am thinking of offering Bourbon Street Blues for free and Jackson Square Jazz for $1.99 for about a month or so). I mean, it makes sense: Scotty turns 21 this year, so I should be promoting the hell out of the Scotty series this year–and should really write another to get out this year, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’ve always focused more on writing the books than promoting them; I only have so much bandwidth, and writing/editing generally uses up the megabytes in my brain that have to do with writing/publishing. I’ve also been very shy about promo, too–which was the anxiety bedeviling me. Maybe now that I am on the right medications, that won’t be a problem going forward. It’s already helped me with some aspects of doing public stuff; so maybe my nervous aversion to doing things in public has become a thing of the past? Worth a try, at any rate, right?

I also need to work on the procrastination thing I’ve been dealing with for the majority of my life. Why do I always feel the need to wait until the last minute for everything? Why will I always goof off now instead of doing the things I need to do so I can goof off later? This would always immediately play into my anxiety, and always made my stress levels go off the charts. Was that what drove me to get so much done? Stress and anxiety and the pressure I used to put on myself? Will I be able to get as much done in the future now that the anxiety is medically handled? It does make me a bit worried, but I am sure I’ll get back on that horse when I need to.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in again later, most likely.

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.

Break It To Me Gently

It’s cold this morning in the Lost Apartment, and I didn’t want to get out of bed. The new meds are marvelous for sleeping–I can’t remember the last time I went to bed and was so damned comfortable and relaxed that it was a real struggle to force myself up out of the depths of Morpheus and into the world of the living again. I only have to go into the office twice this week–tomorrow I have PT first, which means waking up even earlier–but there’s another three-day weekend on the horizon and I really like the idea of all the rest and relaxation I’ll be able to get this weekend.

I did manage to get the apartment back into some semblance of order yesterday, with Sparky being absolutely zero help in that regard. He’s a bit rambunctious, to say the least, and still has that Big Kitten Energy thing going for him. The neighbors dropped off some toys for him for Christmas, and these were the first toys he’s actually shown any interest in for longer than a few moments. We watched some more War of the Worlds last night, which is a really interesting take on the old H. G. Wells novel; I don’t really remember the book anymore, which I read as a teen. I know the 1950’s version of the story was shown to me in elementary school; it terrified me and gave me nightmares for weeks. In retrospect, with all the fuss about education and all the right-wing bullshit attempts to take down and out public education, why the hell were elementary school children shown War of the Worlds in our classroom?

I couldn’t decide what to read next yesterday as I worked on the apartment, so I still haven’t started my next book. I’d intended to just read cozies for the rest of the year, but I am rethinking that, and thinking I need to mix it up more. I have a first novel by a Lafayette writer, who is a Black woman–I know, right? A Louisiana crime novel by a Black woman? I’ve been waiting for this forever–now if only we could find a gay Black crime writer in New Orleans….the book is Glory Be by Danielle Arsenault, and it comes highly recommended…and I’ve not read an “Own Voices” book in a while, which is entirely on me. Outside of James Lee Burke, there aren’t many crime writers who write about Louisiana but not New Orleans, and the book is highly recommended by a couple of friends, so I am really looking forward to breaking into it tonight or this weekend. I do have to run by the post office on my way home, and there are definitely chores that need doing around the house, so I’m pretty sure that’s how my evening will go. I also have PT at seven tomorrow, so I’ll be getting up early, too. Yay.

I’ve also been thinking about goals for the new year, and what I need to do in order to achieve those goals, and come up with a plan. I’m trying to remember what my favorite reads and watches of the year were–I did read a lot, somehow–and think about a writting schedule for the year. I’d like to do another Scotty book this year, a short story collection, and maybe something with those damned novellas-in-progress that I never seem to be able to finish. I definitely want to be better organized in the new year, and hopefully getting into that position before the new year rolls around, too. Maybe I can get all these “drafts” finished and posted at some point as well; wouldn’t that be nice?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Not a great Wednesday blog–I’ve really not been doing a great job with these entries, lately, have I? Ah, well, maybe tomorrow’s will be better. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and will check in with you again later.

Shock the Monkey

Saturday morning, and feeling okay. I ran some errands yesterday–mail, prescription, grocery shopping–and instead of going to Five Guys I stopped and got a very healthy turkey-avocado sandwich for lunch instead, on wheat bread, and it was delicious. I used the wagon to bring everything back from the car to the apartment, but after putting the groceries away was very exhausted. I started reading my next book (Lisa Unger’s Christmas Presents) but didn’t get very far into it. I wound up watching the Oregon-Washington game (to see how their quarterbacks matched up against Jayden Daniels for the Heisman; I am biased but was utterly unimpressed with either of them) for a while, and then just kind of zoned out and watched documentaries on Youtube for a few hours till the game started. I am feeling better, but my energy levels still deplete quickly–probably why my surgeon didn’t want me to return to work just yet.

Last night I slept through–didn’t wake up at five like I inevitably always do and then go back to sleep–and woke up at eight, deciding to go ahead and get up rather than loll about in the bed. I figured I could write my blog entry, drink some coffee, and then head over to the easy chair to read the new book for a few hours before trying to get back into writing MY new book. I also need to do some self-promotional entries today to get back on track on promoting my two new releases, and I also kind of need to figure out where I am at with all of my in-progress projects and make a plan to proceed with everything. I think I am going to go back to trying to plan out my year and so forth, because this scattershot method I’ve been using for so long hasn’t really worked out the way I would have liked; but scattershot tends to do that. I have any number of short stories I’d like to get finished, and there are also the novellas; and I have at least two novels in progress that are up to five chapters but have gone no further than that. I also need to get better organized with everything else in my life, too–my desk area looks better than it has in years as far as clutter is concerned, but it needs to be cleaned and straightened up a bit, and there are other things in my desk–the stack of Scotty books, for example–that don’t need to be here. I rearranged the work space before the surgery specifically to free up space on the desktop, and it did work; this arrangement looks better than the way that it used to look. I want to write today–I think I am going to work on some things for the new book too, so I can really dive in headfirst; I don’t have much of a plan for the book other than I know what one of the driving forces behind the plot is going to be; who the villain is; and who is going to die. It’s all mapped out in my journal, but I need to write it all up into a word document so I can easily reference it. Plus, typing shit makes it seem more real to me, which makes no sense to anything other than my twisted brain.

Sparky has discovered the great joy of knocking over the recycling to look for bottle caps, which are his favorite toy and means I don’t need to waste any money buying him anything; why spend more money when every bottle comes with a plastic cap toy for the little darling? He’s inquisitive and he’s smart–he now scales the drawers like a ladder to get up on the counter when the drawers are closed; if he can’t get up there the usual way. He showed off this new trick to us yesterday when we were putting away the groceries; so there wasn’t a clear space for him to jump up, so instead he pulled himself up by climbing the drawers. This tells me there’s really no point to putting things out of reach because he’ll just figure out a way to get there. Scooter wasn’t especially smart, nor was he terribly interested in toys or playing or anything, but Skittle was smart–and I suspect Sparky is even smarter than Skittle, and he’s getting so big! I think he might even wind up bigger than Skittle. Do I want to have a big, incredibly smart cat? It scares me just a little bit, to be honest. But now he seems to have calmed down a bit, and is a sleeping kitten donut on my desk. He really is a beautiful cat.

We had a lot of rain overnight–flash flood warnings, tornado watches all around us in neighboring parishes, the usual–I slept through it all. I didn’t even notice it was raining last night–without my hearing aids, I can’t hear anything other than thunder–but I am sure the rain helped me sleep. I didn’t sleep for a full ten hours; it was only nine. I was thinking yesterday that I need to start getting used to getting up early again before I have to return to work on the 12th, so it won’t be as horrible as it might be. I had finally gotten used to getting up early, and now I have to start getting used to it all over again, which isn’t going to be very much fun at all. But this is a relatively easy month to ease my way back into work again, with the holidays and extra time off at the end, so there’s that. And then again, it’s Carnival shortly thereafter, which I think is late again? I haven’t looked, but I think we have a late Fat Tuesday again this next year.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the morning. Have a fabulous Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in again later.

Dark Lady

The fortune queen of New Orleans, stroking her cat in her black limousine…

Ah, Cher’s 1970’s musical career. This one was always a big hit at Tea Dance at both Cafe Lafitte in Exile and the Pub on Sundays; there’s really nothing like a gay sing-along, is there?

I suppose being a fan of Cher as a child was kind of a sign? What is it about performers like Cher and Bette Midler and Liza Minnelli that draws young boys into their fandom who are going to wind up gay? Why was I drawn to actresses like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katherine Hepburn, and Doris Day before I knew I was gay? It’s something I’ve often wondered about–what is it about those women that draw us in like Formosan termites to a lit chandelier on a Monday night after Mother’s Day?

Ah, Formosan termites. That brings me around to today’s blatant self-promotional post for Mississippi River Mischief.

Isn’t this a cool, spooky looking shot? I took this out one of my kitchen windows one Sunday afternoon during a mighty New Orleans-style thunderstorm, and love how spectral and haunted-looking it turned out.

I still can’t believe that it took me this long to write about the swarming termites.

No one warned Paul and I about them, for the record. We had no idea that first May we lived here on Camp Street that the city was infested with swarming Formosan termites whose breeding season was the few weeks past Mother’s Day every May, and they are a scourge. We were swarmed, and had no idea what to do with them or how to handle the situation, or anything. We were running around the apartment spraying Raid everywhere, swinging at them with brooms, and they were everywhere. When the swarm finally passed, the apartment was filled with wings and corpses. It was horrible. We talked to the property manager, who apologized for forgetting to warn us–and the primary problem with the apartment on Camp Street (which was where Chanse also lived) was we had a very bright security light mounted on the front corner of the building–which drew them, and our apartment was right there. We learned to turn off everything that gave off light–including the television–when the first scout flew into the apartment, the mad dash around turning off everything, and then sitting there in the dark with maybe a couple of candles lit, waiting for the fury of the swarms to die down.

But that damned outside security light…ugh.

They are quite literally like one of the Biblical plagues of Egypt, and you see why the Egyptians constantly cried to Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.

But now that we live in the back of the house, we’ve been pretty insulated from dealing with them. Sometimes when I walk the garbage out in May, I can see a small swarm around one of the street lamps, but all the lights in the front of the house are off. We usually turn everything off if and when a scout flies into the television screen and immediately light candles and sit in the dark until we feel the coast is clear.

So when I started writing Mississippi River Mischief, I thought the best way to open the book was with the line It was the Monday after Mother’s Day and the termites were swarming. I posted this on Twitter, and local meteorological icon Margaret Orr replied “what a great opening line!” which kind of made my week (I am a big Margaret Orr fanboy) and helped me realize I was on the right track in writing something about New Orleans that rarely makes it into fiction. (Author’s note: That isn’t the opening line anymore; I added Scotty asking the guys a question about the renovation, and then after he talks, that’s where the line is. I just couldn’t get the prose to work with that as the first sentence; it read awkwardly, so I moved Scotty speaking up.)

Nature, and the natural world, is all around us here in New Orleans; the occasional alligator will sometimes lumber into the city limits; snakes and nutria and squirrels are all over the place, and of course there are the insects–the flying cockroaches (aka palmetto bugs), the swarming Formosan termites, the stinging caterpillars–peculiar to here. The tropical climate makes everything over-bloom and grow and expand and try to reclaim the natural balance of the region before it was settled. This is NOT the place for you if you have pollen allergies or have sinuses sensitive to the air pressure (I do); and I swear by Claritin-D for allergy and/or sinus relief (not the over-the -counter kind, but the kind you have to ask for at the pharmacy because you can make meth with it). OH–and the gecko lizards, always darting around and running up the side of buildings or fences or trees.

So, yes, since Scotty had finally bought the building he’s lived in all these years, I thought it was time to talk about termite swarms, as they would be an enormous headache for a property owner, and what better way to start a book where Scotty is now a landowner than with swarming termites?

And I remembered the buy link! Maybe I’m getting better at this.

Lady Marmalade

He met Marmalade down in old New Or-leenz, strutting her stuff on the street, she said “hello, hey Joe, you want to give it a go?“

That classic song by Labelle came out while I was in high school, during the early to mid-1970’s, and there was a lot of prurient young teenager thrill in knowing that the French lyrics translated to “do you wanna have sex with me tonight?” But the song–essentially about a hooker in New Orleans and a man’s experience with her–was an introduction to another side of New Orleans–one you wouldn’t find in the World Book Encyclopedia.

It was very important to me, for a variety of reasons, to make Scotty someone who embraced his sexual orientation and sexuality. I wanted to write someone who LOVED having sex, loved beautiful men, and felt no Puritan-American based shame about enjoying sex. Those kinds of characters were few and far between in gay fiction, let alone in gay crime fiction. After writing the typical miserable cynical bitter gay man with Chanse, I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted Scotty was to be the obverse of Chanse in everything, except their mutual love of New Orleans.

(This was, in part, in response to being briefly dropped by Alyson when I signed the Scotty series with Kensington, being told “two mystery series set in New Orleans would be too alike.” I took that personally, as an insult to my talent, ambition, creativity, and abilities…and I think I proved my point. Once Murder in the Rue Dauphine and Bourbon Street Blues were released–and Rue Dauphine sold super well for them and was nominated for a Lammy–Alyson changed their minds. I’m still mad at myself for not asking for more money.)

But while Scotty was highly sexually active, he never got paid for it. He also never did porn–although I did consider that at one point as an option; I thought a murder mystery built around a porn shoot would be interesting and kind of fun. And of course, in this book he mentions that he and the guys have recorded themselves having sex, and have sexted each other.

Scotty always preferred to keep his status amateur–but he was a go-go boy (stripper, exotic dancer, dick dancer, whatever you prefer to call the guys who dance for dollars in gay bars wearing various kinds of male undergarments), and he was certainly someone who was not averse to having a sexual encounter with a handsome stranger. (There’s a joke about this in Mississippi River Mischief where Frank comments after they’ve met someone, “I’ve been with you for almost twenty years. If you think I can’t tell by now that you’ve recognized someone but you’re not sure from where, which means you’ve probably slept with them, think again”–a paraphrase, but you get the gist; Scotty is often running into men who look vaguely familiar, and that usually does mean he slept with them a long time ago.)

New Orleans, despite it’s rather prim-and-proper high society set (on the surface, anyway), with the Pickwick Club and the Boston Club and the mysterious Mystick Krewes of Rex and Comus and so on, has always been a city of loose morals and freewheeling attitudes towards sex and sexuality. We had a zone where prostitution was legal for three decades or so (Storyville) and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several bordellos operating within the city limits as we speak. There was the arrest of the Canal Street madam; and of course local author Chris Wiltz wrote The Last Madam, a biography of notorious Norma Wallace–the last well-known madam in the city. (Which I need to reread…) Bourbon Street was known for its strippers and vice for decades; there are still strip clubs on the infamous strip running from Canal downtown to Esplanade–and there are usually men in bikinis or something equally scanty on the bars of the gay clubs down down around the St. Ann/Bourbon queer nexus of the Quarter. When I was starting my deep dive into New Orleans/Quarter history, I wasn’t surprised to find out there were “stag” bars down along the riverfront along the levee; and if someone at one of the fancy houses in Storyville had a predilection for the Greek vice that needed scratching, the madam would send one of her bouncers down there to find someone willing to turn a trick, with a fair share going to the house, of course.

I think that’s fascinating, really; and something I want to explore in a story. I’ve started the story (it’s “The Blues Before Dawn” which I’ve mentioned from time to time) but can’t quite nail down the crime part of it. The set-up is great, though, he typed modestly.

I didn’t intend for Scotty to wind up in what is now known as a throuple–a three way couple, or a relationship of three people–on purpose. I wanted to create the dynamic of two men being interested in him at the same time, and have some fun with that in the first book. I absolutely did, and when I sent Colin away at the end of the first one, that was deliberate. I couldn’t decide who Scotty should wind up with, and I wanted Frank to be really who he logically should end up with–but this bad boy with a mysterious background who was so hot and sexy? I couldn’t NOT bring him back, and so I decided I had three books to wrap up the romantic dilemma. I wasn’t certain what the backstory of the dilemma would be, or how it would turn out, or how it would go–but when I was writing Jackson Square Jazz I found the perfect place and perfect way to bring Colin back. That book ended with them deciding to try a throuple to see how it works out. It was going pretty well until Mardi Gras Mambo–and I tried really hard with that book to not end the romantic story the way it ended in that book…and finally decided, since the series was actually turning out to be popular, that I would finish it by the end of the fourth book.

I’ve also not talked about it in the books or on this blog at all, but….they also have an open relationship. (Someone asked me about this at some point after the last book came out.) Nothing else would work for Scotty–he may not take advantage of the opportunities that pop up now the way he used to, but that’s because he has the freedom to make that choice. If he was forbidden from outside sexual relationships, he would cheat–and he doesn’t want to do that because that’s hurtful and wrong. He never wants to hurt Frank or Colin–but both of them are also away from New Orleans for long periods of time; Colin off doing his international agent stuff, while Frank is on the wrestling tour doing shows and promo events; so they are on their own a lot and temptation is always there–after all, all three of them are gorgeous–so while it is unspoken on the page, it’s an open throuple. And usually, Scotty finds outside sex to be kind of dull, unemotional, and not nearly as much fun as it is with one or both of the guys. That’s a character development arc. I also don’t show Scotty going out to clubs or waking up with hangovers with a stranger in his bed anymore, either. He does still go out–he loves dancing–but the gay bar scene has changed since he was younger and he doesn’t find it to be nearly as much fun as he used to.

Though he won’t say no to a hit of Ecstasy during Carnival or Decadence.

How subtle are the changes in Scotty as he has grown, aged and evolved? I think they are miniscule, but a revisit of the first two books in the series has shown a lot of change and growth over the years for him. He is definitely not that same flighty twenty-nine year old who booked a gig dancing at Southern Decadence all those years ago to make rent and wound up kidnapped by neo-Nazis deep in a swamp–I think he’s a little less flighty and a lot more responsible than he used to be…though he’s not as responsible as most people his age. Turning him into a property owner in the Quarter from a renter–and letting Millie and Velma ride off into the sunset in Florida as retirees–has also made him grow up, as now taking care of the property is his responsibility.

I will always be fond of my Scotty, though, and hope to keep writing him till I can no longer type into a computer or speak into a word-to-text app.

my neighborhood is so beautiful at night, isn’t it?

Louisiana Moon

As if you weren’t sick of my self-promotion already, now I get to start promoting Mississippi River Mischief!

It’s hard to believe that this is Scotty’s ninth adventure. Not bad for someone who was just supposed to be a one-off, a stand-alone comic madcap adventure that took place during Southern Decadence. The idea for it came to me at Southern Decadence in 1999; on Saturday afternoon I somehow managed to get a prime spot on the balcony at the Parade to watch the massive crowd of sweating shirtless men partying down below at the intersection of Bourbon and St. Ann. I noticed a really hot guy wearing sweats and carrying a gym bag fighting his way through the crowd to get to the Pub downstairs, and I recognized him as one of the dancers for the weekend. In that instant, I had a mental flash of a dancer being chased through a crowd of shirtless sweating men at the corner by bad guys with guns and the dancer only wearing a lime-green thong. I held that idea in my head, and sometime later that weekend Paul said to me, “you know, you should write a book set during Decadence,” and I grinned and replied, “I already have the idea.” I had started writing a short story called “Bourbon Street Blues” a year or so before this; but realized that would make a better title for the stripper crime caper during Southern Decadence, so I made a folder for it and kept it in my files and in the back of my mind. Several years later, when talking with an editor about something else when I worked at Lambda Book Report, I asked if that might be something he’d be interested in. He said send him a proposal, which I did–having no clue what I was doing–and they offered me a two book deal, turning my stand-alone into a series. Having no idea how to write the second book in such a series, the money was too good for me to say no or to quibble, figuring I’ll figure it out when I need to–which is really the motto of my career.

The Scotty series has always had a bit of a “pantser” feel to it for me because I’ve always pantsed it. I knew that the first adventure–Bourbon Street Blues–was going to be that Southern Decadence story, and I also knew I was going to fictionalize a governor race, basing it on a senate race that occurred when we first moved here and we couldn’t believe that one of the candidates was actually a serious candidate (sadly, he was just a harbinger of what was to come in Louisiana; now he’d seem like one of the fucking sane ones), and I kind of borrowed, a bit unconsciously, from the Stephen King character of Greg Stillson from The Dead Zone. Bourbon Street Blues was a prescient novel in so many ways–and I had no idea of that at the time, seriously. There’s a scene where the Goddess shows Scotty the potential flooding of New Orleans after a levee failure (in the book it was deliberate though) and of course I predicted the Right’s move into full-bore hardcore neo-Nazism as well in that book…never dreaming it would become a reality.

Scotty has always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants series; I’ve never really outlined or planned the books or the series in any way, other than an amorphous idea that the love triangle situation I created in the first book would take three books to resolve. During the course of the third book I realized I needed at least one more book to resolve that story, and so it went from stand-alone to trilogy to quartet…and then Katrina happened. Katrina created an unplanned gap in the series, and I never really knew how to do Katrina from a Scotty perspective. It struck me that they wouldn’t have evacuated, but Scotty wouldn’t have ridden the storm out in his apartment, nor would his parents have done so at their place; they would have all gone to the Garden District where Papa and Maman Diderot have a generator. I just didn’t see how I could write a funny Scotty book about the levee failure and the city’s destruction. Also, we learned something about Scotty in the second book (Jackson Square Jazz) that I meant to deal with in the fourth book. By the time I was ready and able and willing to write that fourth book in the series…well, I forgot that I’d planned on dealing with that issue from Scotty’s past in it, and never did ever circle back around to that resolution of something from his youth.

I did remember when I decided to write Mississippi River Mischief, though. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with Royal Street Reveillon, in which something happened in Scotty’s personal life that was tied into the case, but I couldn’t write another book and pretend that never happened, even though it would be hard to deal with in the text of the book and story. But then, as I was trying to work it out in my head, I realized now you can circle around back to that issue from Scotty’s teen years because this is the right place and time for him to be reminded of it because of what happened to Taylor.

And you know what? I think it made for a better story now than it would have almost fourteen years ago.

Scotty has grown a lot over the twenty or so years (!!!) I’ve been writing him, but who he is at his core has never changed. Scotty is a good person, with a genuine sense of kindness, and is pretty level-headed and never really lets things get to him the way I let things get to me–and God knows, he’s dealt with a lot more shit than I have in life. I like his sense of humor, I like his spirituality, and I like his untrained, he-doesn’t-know-how-it-works psychic abilities, and of course, I love his family. His parents are amazing, his older brother and sister are also pretty cool characters, and of course Frank and Colin are also fun to write. I also never knew how subversive I was being by creating a throuple long before anyone ever talked about these kinds of relationships within the queer community–and it’s lasted all these years. There have been ups and downs, of course, but they always wind up coming back together again no matter what happens–and a lot has happened. Both Scotty and Frank have been shot a few times, not to mention all those car accidents–and he’s also helped cover up a crime (no spoilers here, no worries!).

You can order it here, if you were so inclined…