Tag: Scotty

Glory Days

God, there’s nothing more depressing than paying the bills, is there?

Yesterday was a good writing day; I should be able to finish off Chapter Nine today, which is absolutely lovely. If I can get Chapter Ten done by the weekend–which I should be able to do, no problem–then I’ll be halfway finished with the first draft. Huzzah! All downhill from there, too. Although there’s an awful lot to cram into the last ten chapters…I may have to plan that out a little better. Heavy sigh. But I can also work on outlining it, to have a general idea of what direction I’m going in, which will be enormously helpful. I don’t ever stick to the outlines–ever–but it helps give me a general idea of what direction to go in.

I was also going over an editor’s note on one of my short stories, which were absolutely lovely, in all honesty. I want to get that done over this weekend–I’ve taken Monday as a vacation day, so I have a three day weekend this weekend, the intent to get as much cleaning and writing and editing done as I possibly can; Paul left yesterday morning to visit family for a week, and hey, why not use the time as effectively as possible?

I also read some more of The City of Falling Angels last night; I am really enjoying John Berendt’s views on Venice, and also kept thinking, wow, I’d love to take an apartment in Venice for a couple of months, how awesome would that be?

I intend to finish Bryan Camp’s debut novel this weekend as well, since it’s pub date is coming up, so I can get a review posted on here.

It never ends, really.

I read some short stories, too! First up was “Nighthawks” by Michael Connelly, from Lawrence Block’s seminal In Sunlight or in Shadow:

Bosch didn’t know how people in this place could stand it. It felt like the wind off the lake was freezing his eyeballs in their sockets. He had come totally unprepared for the surveillance. He had layers on but his top layer was an L. A. trench coat with a thin zip-in liner that wouldn’t keep a Siberian husky warm in the Chicago winter. Bosch wasn’t a man who gave much credit to cliches but he found himself thinking: I’m too old for this.

The subject of his surveillance had come down Wabash and turned east toward Michigan and the park. Bosch knew where she was going because she had headed this way on her lunch break at the bookstore the day before as well. When she got to the museum she showed her member pass and was quickly admitted entrance. Bosch had to wait in line to buy a day pass. But he wasn’t worried about losing her. He knew where she would be. He didn’t bother to check his coat because he was cold to the bone, and he didn’t expect to be in the museum much more than an hour–the girl would have to get back to the bookstore.

I’ve not read a lot of Connelly, but I remember meeting him many years ago at the Virginia Book Festival and liking him a lot. I read the first Bosch novel sometime in the last seven or eight years and greatly enjoyed it; I’ve not watched the Amazon series but probably will at some point. There are just so many Connelly novels to get caught up on, it just overwhelms me to even consider reading them all. But this is a Bosch short story, and a good one. In this story, Bosch has retired (or quit) the police force and has become a private eye; which is cool. The story is terrific; he was hired to find a Hollywood bigshot’s daughter, he finds her–and then finds out why she disappeared in the first place…and then faces a moral dilemma. Truly a terrific story!

The next story was “The Incident of 10 November” by Jeffery Deaver, also from In Sunlight or in Shadow:

December 2, 1954

General Mikhail Tasarich, First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Kremlin Senate, Moscow

Comrade General Tasarich:

I, Colonel Mikhail Sergeyivich Sidorov, of recent attached to the GRU, Directorate for Military Intelligence, am writing this report regarding the incident of 10 November, fof this year, and the death associated therewith.

I am way behind on my Deaver reading as well; I greatly enjoyed the Lincoln Rhyme series, but as I said, I fell behind and now am SO far behind on him that I despair of ever catching up; same with Lee Child. This is the second story of Deaver’s I’ve read that has dealt with the Cold War Soviet Union, from the point of  view of one of their agents; the other was in the MWA anthology Ice Cold. I don’t know if this is an interest of Deaver’s, or if one story begot the other, or if he’s written novels around this subject, but my interest was piqued. It’s a great story, flows really well, and has to do with a German scientist who was absorbed into the Soviet Union after the end of the Great Patriotic War…and I really enjoyed.

Now, I best get back to the spice mines.

28467762_1815115152116053_4842812587806162278_n

Run to You

Yesterday I wrote 2700 words, which was lovely. Two more chapters and I will be at the midway point of the first draft of the Scotty book! Huzzah! I do feel like most of those words were crap, but I advanced the plot, I advanced the story, and we’re percolating right along, which was truly, well and indeed, lovely. I hope to reach the midway point of the book by the weekend, which is when I am hoping to finish revising “Don’t Look Down” and “My Brother’s Keeper,” and maybe even “The Problem with Autofill.” Huzzah! I love that I am working again, and I am trying to keep my confidence in my work up. It’s so easy to get distracted, it’s fucking easy to hit that downward spiral, and I WILL NOT HAVE THAT THIS YEAR.

Ain’t gonna happen, bitches.

I finished reading Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed this week, and I really enjoyed it. It really made me think about a lot of things, not the least of which are the on-line social media lynch mobs. I mean, there are so many truly terrible people on Twitter, trolls and bots and so forth, that it’s easy to forget that some of the people we see posting vile things, or things we totally disagree with, are people, just like we are; even though we may not agree with anything they do. I know it surprises people that I have conservative friends, but I do; and as long as they aren’t nasty and trollish, I like having them around on my social media. They do sometimes help me see things in ways that I’ve never thought about before, that may not ever have occurred to me, and I do appreciate that insight. The fact that I can see their posts and comments means that they haven’t blocked me; they may have hidden me–and to be fair, the shirtless men that get me banned all-too-frequently on Facebook might be a bit much for my conservative friends–but I also never see them saying anything homophobic or anything that makes me think they buy into the homophobic bullshit that is so frequent on their side of the spectrum; whether knowing me has anything to do with that, I don’t know. I’d like to think so, at any rate.

My next non-fiction is John Berendt’s The City of Fallen Angels. I’d forgotten I even had the book, to be honest; I was rearranging and reorganizing bookshelves the other day and there it was. VENICE!!! How could I resist? So, it’s on the nightstand for my before-I-go-to-sleep reading. I’m also itching to get back to Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes. Seriously, pre-order the hell out of this one. You won’t be sorry.

I also read some short stories. First up is “The Misfits” by Naomi Rand, from Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli:

Where would you have been without me, go on, tell me that why don’t you, you ungrateful bitch. I made you.

That was his parting shot to me. Johnny O believed that until the minute he cast his eyes upon you, you didn’t actually exist. My ex-manager thought I was some piece of clay he breathed that lousy cigarette breath into to coax to life.

I believed otherwise. My version is that when we met, I  had already been alive and well and living in Calabasas for seventeen years. I, Julie Weston, was a senior at Calabasas High. I’d already been accepted to my first choice school, UCLA. And why not? I had a 4.0 average. Plus, I was captain of the girl’s swimteam, lynchpin of the debate team, and to top it off, I was dating the boy most likely to be crowned prom king. So really I did exist before. Not only did I exist, I was well on my way to making my doting parents proud. But you be the judge.

I fucking loved this story; it was amazing. A chance encounter in Tower Records, and Julie joins an all-girl band called the Misfits, which begins a quick rise to stardom in the late 1970’s. It kind of reminded me of the true story about the Runaways–the all girl rock band which launched Joan Jett and Lita Ford–and some of the horrible allegations that have come out in recent years about their manager, how the girls were manipulated and/or sexually/emotionally/physically abused; I couldn’t get that out of my head as I read the story. It’s absolutely terrific, with a great ending. I have to say, I am loving reading my way through Crime Plus Music.

Next was “Rooms by the Sea” by Nicholas Christopher, from In Sunlight or in Shadow and editor Lawrence Block:

There were two doors into this house. The first, in a small unfurnished room, opened directly onto the sea. It could only be entered from the water. When it was left wide open on a sunny day, the light slanting into the room illuminated half of the near wall on a diagonal. As the sun descended to the horizon, the wall could be read like a sundial: its illuminated half shrinking until the entire wall had darkened.

The second door, in a foyer on the other side of the house, opened onto a rough path that wound through a forest and ended in an obscure park at the city limits. The fountain in that park, centered by stone mermaids that spout water, had been dry for months. The buildings that lines the city streets were red and brown. The sun ate into their brick, sending up puffs of dust. At dusk their blue windows turned amber. On the fire escapes women were smoking and reading, gazing up occasionally at the river of bruised clouds that flowed to the sea. One of them, a redhead, was reading a slim memoir entitled Rooms by the Sea, written a century ago. The author, Claudine Rementeria, was married to a Basque shipping magnate who had immigrated to America. She herself was Basque, and shortly before her untimely death at thirty, she wrote the book in her native language, Euskera, in order to please her husband. Aside from a small private printing at the time–of which only a few copies have survived–her book hadn’t been translated and published in English until recently. The redhead, Carmen Ronson, the thirty-year-old great-granddaughter of Claudine Rementeria, owned both the English translation and one of the extant Euskera copies.

This story read more as a fable; a literary story rather than a crime story, with a haunting tone to it;  Christopher did a great job creating a mood that carried through the whole story with the rhythm of the words. It’s more of a magical realism story; a fable, if you will, relating the Basques back to Atlantis and…it’s hard to describe. It’s quite good.

And now, back to the spice mines.

29594408_10211616758243041_8636825159989588484_n

All Through the Night

Well, I finished an incredibly difficult chapter of the Scotty book last night, and can now move on to the rest of the story. I despise transitional chapters, and this one was particularly painfully hard; it’s why I initially set the manuscript aside to begin with all those weeks ago. But now I am full on into the investigation, and things can really start happening now; the red herrings and the incredible confusion. This book is going to probably wind up having a plot as convulated and confusing as Mardi Gras Mambo was, and I do consider that to be, in fact, a very good thing. I am feeling very ambitious as I return to tackling this manuscript, and it’s been quite a while since I have felt that way.

And, now that I reflect on it, to not feel ambitious as one embarks on a search for a possible agent is quite possibly the stupidest mentality one can have for such a thing; if for no other reason that one is already defeated in spirit. It is so easy to give up, it is so incredibly easy to be defeated in spirit as one pursues a career in writing, that one has to grasp onto ambition with both hands and squeeze the very life out of it. I’m not sure when or where or why I allowed my ambition to fall to the wayside, but not only was it gone but I didn’t miss it. Which is a very strange thing to admit to; but ultimately not surprising. Ambition is one of those traits I was raised to believe was unseemly, unpleasant, and unattractive. I still struggle, to this day, with taking pride in achievements; to accepting compliments without prevaricating or being self-deprecatory in response. Sometimes I hear myself responding to a compliment and hear a tiny, desperate voice wailing from deep within the recesses of my own mind, just accept the fucking compliment.

And how many times has this self-doubt, this insecurity, this self-defeating mentality stopped me from reaching for something I wanted? Stopped me from attempting to write something outside of my comfort zone, something I want desperately to try? Far too many times, I have to admit, much as it pains me to do so.

Confidence is such a funny thing, isn’t it? Even the word–which I use to mean belief in yourself–had another meaning; con comes from confidence… a con man is a confidence man; likewise,  a con artist is a confidence artist.

So is confidence, self-confidence, the art of deluding yourself, conning yourself into a belief that you have more value than you actually do, perhaps?

Although I must say, wrestling that chapter into submission–no matter how bad the writing may be, no matter how bad the chapter might be–has certainly made me feel a lot more confidence in myself; because of course there was the fear that I’d never be able to get this chapter done, that the book would stall out, that I would fail.

But I did it. I worked through it, and I already know how the next chapter is going to go.

And that’s a good thing.

I also read some short stories. First up is “Serial Benefactor” by Jon L. Breen, from Manhattan Mayhem, a Mystery Writers of America anthology edited by Mary Higgins Clark.

To start with, I’m a centenarian, Sebastian Grady by name, and still fully marbled. My current address is Plantain Point, a retirement home on the California coast with a lot of residents from the entertainment world. To give you an idea, the president of our association is called the Top Banana, though most of the vaudevillians have died off.

As you can imagine, I’ve seen many younger generations come of age, and the current lot don’t seem too anxious to make the transition to adulthood. Don’t ask me if I blame them.

Evan is my favorite great-granddaughter.

This story is very clever, and I enjoyed it very much. It concerns a series of murders back in the post-war era; with all the victims being associated with the theater in some way, and all being pains in the ass to everyone who’s ever had to deal with them. There is a conversation at a cocktail/dinner party, and shortly thereafter people start dying. Clues are planted in the newspaper–lines from songs from musicals–and the killer is never caught. Sebastian poses the story to his great-granddaughter Evan to see if she can figure out the clues and how they relate to the murder victims. Sebastian has his own theory about the murders…and while we never are certain who the killer is, we do get a pretty good idea. And there’s a LOVELY twist at the end.

Next up was  “The Blackbird” by Peter Robinson, from Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli:

It ended with a head floating down the river. Or is that where it began? You could never be certain with the Blackbird. I should know. I’ve known him for years, and I was with him until the end. Well, almost.

His real name was Tony Foster, and once, quite early in our relationship, I asked him how he had acquired his nickname. Tony drew on his cigarette in that way of his, cupping it in his palm like a soldier in the trenches, as if he believed it would be bad luck to let anyone see the glow. He turned his blue eyes towards me, a hint of a smile lighting them for a moment, then he looked away and told me it came about when he was a teenager growing up in a rundown council estate in the mid-sixties.

This isn’t necessarily a crime story, although there is a crime in it; the crime is how the story ends, but the story isn’t about the commission of the crime or the solving of the crime, but I suppose it is sort of about how the crime effects the narrator of the story. It’s really a sad, bleak tale that leaves the reader full of melancholy when it’s finished; it’s beautifully written and terribly sad. Well done, Mr. Robinson, well done.

IMG_1095

Head over Heels

Hey hey hey, it’s sort of my Friday! Good Friday is a holiday in New Orleans, and so I get a three day weekend this weekend. Huzzah! Huzzah! It’s a little gloomy out there outside my windows this morning, but I don’t have to be at the office until one, so I am going to try to get the laundry and dishes finished this morning before heading out. I may even get some writing done; you never know. MADNESS.

Last night, after stopping to make groceries and making dinner, I started looking over the first six chapters of the Scotty book. I am going to revise it yet again; something horrifically dark was going to happen in the book, and I don’t think I want to include that after all. While sometimes dark things happen in that series, I don’t think it’s the right place to explore the subject I was going to explore there; and the reality is that once it’s done, once it’s happened, there’s no turning it back for the character. So, I am going to edit that out and make it almost happen. You can call me a coward for this if you like; I don’t give a shit. If not having something horrible and life-changing to a character I love makes me a bad writer or not a good one, so be it. I didn’t, when I was originally planning it, think it was necessarily the right choice in the first place; it was more about shaking things up more than anything else, and that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do for a series book: contriving something merely to shake things up a little.

When the book is released, we’ll find out if I made the right choice or not.

I also tried to work a bit on “Don’t Look Down”; I have reached a place in the story where I have to write a transition, and we all know how much I hate writing transitions. But I do think I can not only get it finished over this weekend, but I also think I can get the Chanse story revised and finished this weekend (I’ve titled it “My Brother’s Keeper”), and I may even go back and finish another short story that’s still in process; plus I have to put in the edits to a short story for an anthology that was accepted.

But I am easing back into writing the novel, which I am hoping to get back into for April. I’d love to have a workable draft finished by the end of the month, but…yeah, you know how that always goes.

Sigh.

Okay, the dryer has stopped, so it’s back to the spice mines.

IMG_4157

Freeway of Love

Tuesday morning. My body is still adjusting to the stupid time change, which I’ve come to loathe with every fiber of my being as I get older. I mean, seriously, does it serve any purpose any more? Can’t it just be done away with once and for all? I was so tired the last two days I could barely function–and functionality is not something I can afford to do without for a couple of days. Sure, I managed to work on some short stories yesterday; but maybe I wrote a thousand words total if I was lucky. I did, however, have a breakthrough on one that I’ve been struggling with, and now I know how to revise it to make it (hopefully) publishable; although it is still incredibly dark–if not darker now.

But I kind of like that.

I finished reading The Black Prince of Florence the other night, and have started reading The Republic of Pirates. I am very excited about reading my pirate book (thank you, Black Sails) and think that my next non-fiction will also be pirate-related; Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is just sitting there giving me side-eye from my TBR pile.

I also got some good news which I will share when I get the go-ahead.

The goal for this week is to get several Scotty chapters finished, get back to the WIP by editing what I’ve done in this current draft so far, and finish two stories I’ve started and try to edit/revise a couple more to get out there. Heavy sigh. I also have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, and so hopefully I can get to the gym on Thursday morning. I am averaging only twice a week, which isn’t optimal; I need to get to three, but twice is better than once and certainly better than no visits. This next trip is going to involve an increase in weight, which is well overdue. I also tried the elliptical rather than the treadmill on Saturday; it did not go well. I only managed eight minutes rather than the twenty I usually get on the treadmill; but the good news is that I managed to burn the same amount of calories. I am going to try to get ten minutes on the elliptical on the next visit, and then move to the treadmill for ten more. Cardio is clearly the bane of my existence.

I also managed to read two short stories. First up was “Non Sung Smoke” by Sue Grafton, from her collection Kinsey and Me.

The day was an odd one, brooding and chill, sunlight alternating with an erratic wind that was being pushed toward California in advance of a tropical storm called Bo. It was late September in Santa Teresa. Instead of the usual Indian summer, we were caught up in vague presentiments of the long, gray winter to come. I found myself pulling sweaters out of my bottom drawer and I went to the office smelling of mothballs and last year’s cologne.

I spent the morning caught up in routine paperwork, which usually leaves me feeling productive, but this was the end of a dull week and I was so bored I would have taken on just about anything. The young woman showed up just before lunch, announcing herself with a tentative tap on my office door. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, with a sultry, pornographic face and a tumble of long dark hair. She was wearing an outfit that suggested she hadn’t gone home the night before unless, of course, she simply favored lo-cut sequined cocktail dresses at noon. Her spike heels were a dyed-to-match green and her legs were bare. She moved over to my desk with an air of uncertainty, like someone just learning to roller-skate.

I really like how Grafton starts her short stories; they are very similar to the way she starts the novels, and so that Kinsey’s voice is always consistent; slightly snarky, blunt, and definitely cynical. This story, in which a young girl hires Kinsey to find the guy she hooked up with last night, isn’t one of Grafton’s stronger stories, but there’s something about it that hooks the reader and keeps you reading. And like the other stories, nothing is the way it appears at the beginning, and the end…well, it’s more sad than anything else.

Next, I took down my copy of The  Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and reread her “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”.

She flicked her wrist neatly out of Doctor Harry’s pudgy careful fingers and pulled the sheet up to her chin. The brat ought to be in knee breeches. Doctoring around the country with spectacles on his nose! “Get along now, take your schoolbooks and go. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Doctor Harry spread a warm paw like a cushion on her forehead where the spiked green vein danced and made her eyelids twitch. “Now, now, be a good girl, and we’ll have you up in no time.”

“That’s no way to speak to a woman nearly eighty years old just because she’s down. I’ll have you respect your elders, young man.”

This is another story I was required to read in college that I didn’t get when I was nineteen; I thought it was kind of boring, and listening to a professor go on and on about it was even more tiresome than reading it. This collection won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; I bought it about ten years ago because I was trying to find a story I loved, and the only thing about I knew for sure was the author’s first name was Katherine (that story turned out to be by Katherine Mansfield, and the story was “Miss Brill”). I plowed through this entire collection, and it was literally like pulling teeth; I skipped this story because I’d already read and disliked it.

But on this reread, this tale of a woman on her deathbed, and how her mind jumps around about the past as she’s dying, resonated a bit more with me. She is reflecting on how happy her life is, and how she wouldn’t have changed anything about it; her happy marriage, the children she bore, the life she created for herself–yet she can’t stop remembering the humiliation of being jilted, of having been left at the altar on her wedding day, by her first love. I could understand it better now–I still remember every humiliation of my life, and never was I so horribly, publicly humiliated in such a way as Granny Weatherall–and can appreciate the poignant sadness of the tale. I also think that a decent professor could have made college students, particularly me, appreciate this story all the more than we actually did.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk.

IMG_1094

Things Can Only Get Better

It’s Friday, and I have the morning off in order to once again have an eye appointment. Here’s hoping nothing goes wrong with that one, right? Oy. But…it’s also Friday. Hooray!

I managed to finish the first draft of my story “The Carriage House,” clocking in another 2500 words or so; the story in first draft now sits at about 5350 words, most of them written over the last two days. I had hoped to finish my Italy story yesterday as well, and get started on another Scotty chapter, but alas, that was not to be. It also occurred to me last night that I’ve written a lot of short stories so far this year; certainly more this year than I have in any previous year, and it’s early March only. Three were written to submit to anthologies, and the others were simply written because I wanted, felt the need, to write them. I’ve written a Chanse short story, which is also a first; and that’s kind of cool. I know how to fix it; I actually know how to fix all of the stories that now sit in a first draft form, which is also a first. Usually I have nary a clue on what to do with these stories once the draft is written. I also know how to fix another story that’s just been sitting in my files for years; mayhap I shall work on fixing it this weekend, who knows? I also can’t help but think that all these short stories are happening now because of the Short Story Project.

So, today it’s off to Metairie for the eye doctor, then it’s to the office for testing, and then it’s time to come home (it’s my short day) and hopefully to the gym for a workout. I’d like to spend the evening cleaning the Lost Apartment as well, so I can spend the weekend writing (other than the errands that must be run tomorrow).

Well, I never finished that, did I? Nope; my bad. Before I finished it was time to go, and off I went. I am now home, it’s later on in the day, and I’m a bit tired.

I’ll finish in the morning; sorry, Constant Reader!

I didn’t want to get up this Saturday morning, but I did–I have things to do today, errands and such, and must go to the gym–so I’ll sleep in tomorrow, which is when we lose an hour of sleep anyway. It’s not light out; it’s cloudy. I am not sure if that means it’s going to rain or something, but whatever it means…I’ll be out there dealing with it soon enough.

I also have some chores around here that I have to complete before heading out to face the day.

I am going to take today off from writing, despite being behind. I am very pleased with “The Carriage House,” as I said earlier in this missive, and I am relatively pleased with the Chanse story. It needs some more work, of course–there’s at least one scene missing that I need to put into it, as well as some more layers–but overall, I am quite well pleased with it, as well. I am more pleased, I think, that I’ve written a private eye story; I may write more now that I know I can actually do it. I doubt if I’ll do Scotty stories–there’s just way too much backstory necessary–but I have an idea for another Chanse story, this time set on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. Oh! The title just came to me! “Once a Tiger.” I kind of like that. (The Chanse story needs not only revision but a new title; “Glory Days” doesn’t work with the story as it wound up. I originally set it at a reunion of sorts, but wrote that out of the story.) I do want to finish my Italy story, and perhaps work on a revision of either “The Weight of a Feather” or “The Problem with Autofill.” I also would like to get another Scotty chapter finished. We’ll see.

I’ve done quite a few short stories this year, as I mentioned earlier; even more than I originally thought I had done. I am thinking more about placement for said stories; I worry that some of the better paying markets–there aren’t many of those any more–won’t want a story with a gay male lead, even if the story itself isn’t particularly gay; “The Carriage House,” while not having anything particularly gay about it’s story line, also has gay character and involved murders of gay men. And you know, that’s really the thing about writing gay stories and novels; when you get rejected, when you don’t get reviewed or recognized–you always wonder. Was it really not good enough to get published/reviewed/recognized, and was it because of the gay factor? If I assume it’s the gay thing, am I not being honest with myself as a writer and rather than accepting that it needed more work or wasn’t good enough, am I using that as a crutch/excuse?

Heavy sigh.

All right, back to my chores. Here’s a Saturday hunk for you.

pec9-335x600

 

Neutron Dance

Hey there, peeps! Welcome to Tuesday. Last night was a restless night for one Gregalicious; I was awakened at some point during the night when a thunderstorm rolled into the parish. It’s still gray and chilly and raining this morning; the kind where you’d rather stay in bed under a blanket with a nice warm cup of coffee and a book. But alas and alack, I must away to the office this morning. It’s Tuesday and thus my long day.

I finished the first draft of the Chanse short story yesterday morning; it’s very rough but on the other hand, I am rather pleased with it. I’ve never written a private eye short story before, and as I said, it’s incredibly rough; but on the other hand, I’ve now written a private eye short story. Jon Michaelson very graciously asked me about it on Facebook when I mentioned it the other day; there’s no publisher for it as of yet, because that’s how short stories work. You can write a novel under contract and you can write a novel without a contract, but in either case I write them with a particular publisher in mind, or at least I have some sort of idea what the next step is going to be. With short stories, it’s not quite the same; there are limited markets for short stories that pay, and those that pay well are even scarcer. I’d love to get this story into somewhere like Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, but as one of the few well-paying markets that every crime writer is trying to get into, the competition is nothing if not quite fierce. There’s also not a rush; I can take my time and get back to it whenever I choose or whenever the inspiration hits me; I may submit it to an anthology, who knows? The Bouchercon anthology next year will be Texas-themed, if not Dallas-themed; and since this story is set in Texas maybe I can hold onto it and prepare it for that. Who knows? We shall see.

I also muddled through a transitional chapter in the Scotty book; it needs a bit more before it’s finished, and then the book should start flowing more smoothly. Huzzah!

Also, we went public with the table of contents for the Bouchercon anthology yesterday (alphabetically; the order hasn’t been decided on as of yet):

PATRICIA ABBOTT, “When Agnes Left Her House”
J. D. ALLEN, “The Unidentifieds”
JACK BATES, “The Fakahatchee Goonch”
LAWRENCE BLOCK, untitled as yet
SUSANNA CALKINS, “Postcard for the Dead”
REED FARREL COLEMAN, “The Ending”
ANGEL LUIS COLON,    “Muscle Memory”
HILARY  DAVIDSON, “Mr. Bones”
BRENDAN DUBOIS, “Breakdown”
JOHN FLOYD, “Frontier Justice”
BARB GOFFMAN, “The Case of the Missing Pot Roast”
GREG HERREN, “Cold Beer No Flies”
ELEANOR CAWOOD JONES, “All Accounted for at the Hurray for Hollywood Motel”
JOHN D. MACDONALD, “The Hangover”
PAUL D. MARKS “There’s an Alligator in My Purse”
CRAIG PITTMAN, “How to Handle a Shovel”
NEIL PLAKCY, “Southernmost Point”
ALEX SEGURA, “Quarters for the Meter”
DEBRA LATTANZI SHUTIKA, “Frozen Iguana”
HOLLY WEST, “The Best Laid Plans”
MICHAEL WILEY, “Winner”
It was such an embarrassment of riches to choose from; seriously.  I am grateful to everyone who served as an advance reader for the blind readings.
And now, back to the spice mines.
28235249_101812530652079_7100043236405953654_o

 

Miami Vice

This wasn’t one of my better weeks, to be frank. I had issues with sleep and motivation; being tired had something to do with that. I didn’t get up Wednesday morning and go to the gym like I should have; I am hoping to go tonight, Sunday, and Monday, so as to get back on track. I did get a horrific transitional chapter on the Scotty book finished, though–and I also did some major brainstorming about the plot and how to make it work. It’s probably going to be longer than Scotty books usually are; it may come in somewhere between 90 and 100k. I am also being rather ambitious with this plot, too. It’s going to be complicated, and I am also going to take on some issues, which I generally do not do in the Scotty books. Here’s hoping it plays out the way I want it to.

I also have some deadlines coming up this coming week, which has me petrified with fear. I have several short stories in process…no, I’m not going to think about it. That will just paralyze me some more. Instead, I am going to think good thoughts about how wonderful the stuff I am working on is, rather than freaking the fuck out about everything I have to get done. Tomorrow night we are going to the ballet; I am very excited about this as I’ve never seen one live before. This was one of my Christmas presents from Paul, and I can’t wait…although it is probably going to make me want to write about the ballet and push everything else to the side.

Because the stuff I need to work on is never the stuff I want to work on.

I did read a lot of short stories yesterday, after several fallow days of not reading any. I had to do testing at Nicholls State University yesterday afternoon, which is about an hour and a half drive from the office. I didn’t drive; I rode in the backseat and read stories on my way to and from there, and then last night as I watched the Olympics I read some more. That’s the beauty of short stories; you can read a lot of them in a very short period of time. I think I may have read six or seven yesterday, so I’ve got them stockpiled for the Short Story Project. Huzzah!

And sorry to be so brief this morning; but I’ve got to get to the office.

Here’s a hunk for you as I head back into the spice mines.

s-l1000

 

 

Shout

It doesn’t seem like Thursday; this short post-Mardi Gras week has messed up my inner clock and pretty much everything else you can think of; Carnival messed up my sleep and workout schedules as well. I was going to go to the gym this morning, but I am worn out still and have little to no energy; so I am going to wait and get back on track this weekend.

I did manage to start writing a short story yesterday (2800 words of it) and finish a chapter of the new Scotty (1800 words) for a grand total of 4600 words written yesterday, which is pretty freaking awesome, and I am going to count that as a major win. The writing muscles were, frankly, rusty, but I’m hoping I was able to shake the rust out some. I’d say I managed to do just that; it was difficult at first, but then the words started coming so I took it and ran with it.

I was also commenting yesterday to a friend and fellow writer yesterday about how crazy this business is; we are so constantly beaten down by not only the industry but by readers and reviewers that even little things like an email I found yesterday–I am still digging out from under–rejecting a story I’d submitted but read You’re too good of a writer to get a standard form rejection letter; this story was too slow for us, but please send more of your work–can make your day.  Heavy sigh.

I also saw a lot of chatter on social media–before the mass shooting–about charity anthologies and writers needing to be paid for their work. I have some thoughts about that as well, but I’ve not had enough coffee yet this morning to coherently put them together; although I found it interesting that one of the people talking about not writing for free and needing to be paid said I hate writing, so…

Wow. That one caught me off guard. Maybe he/she was simply being flippant in the moment, but no matter how hard it is sometimes, how stressful, and how much I loathe doing it, I never really hate writing, and would never say that I do. I love writing. I have a love/hate relationship with the publishing industry, but the writing itself? I love doing it. I enjoy it. It gives me pleasure. I wouldn’t do it if I hated it because I don’t have to do it. I miss it when I’m not doing it; and not writing definitely affects my moods; not for the better. To each their own, I suppose.

Over the weekend, between parades, I read a shit ton of short stories for The Short Story Project. It really is amazing how many anthologies and single-author collections I have here on hand.

For example, I have Flannery O’Connor’s National Book Award winner The Complete Stories. I read the first story in the book, “The Geranium,” Monday afternoon, I think it was.

Old Dudley folded into the chair he was gradually molding to his own shape and looked out the window fifteen feet away into another window framed by blackened red brick. He was waiting for the geranium. They put it out every morning about ten and they took it in at five-thirty. Mrs. Carson back home had a geranium in her window. There were plenty of geraniums at home, better-looking geraniums. Ours are sho-nuff geraniums, Old Dudley thought, not any er this pale pink business with green, paper bows. The geranium they would put in the window reminded him of the Grisby boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink. Lutisha could have taken that geranium and stuck it in the ground and had something worth looking at in a few weeks. Those people across the alley had no business with one. They set it out and let the hot sun bake it all day and they put it so near the ledge the wind could almost knock it over. They had no business with it, no business with it. It shouldn’t have been there. Old Dudley felt his throat knotting up. Lutish could root anything. Rabie too. His throat was drawn taut. He laid his head back and tried to clear his mind. There wasn’t much he could think of to think about that didn’t do his throat that way.

Many authors whom I respect often speak reverently of Flannery O’Connor. Many years ago, I read A Good Man Is Hard to Find and wasn’t overly impressed with it, to be honest. I bought this collection after reading a list of great Southern Gothic classics. I honestly think back when I first tried to O’Connor I was not in the kind of place where I could appreciate her work–similar to reading Carson McCullers and not getting the big deal and recently reading Reflections in a Golden Eye and getting it–because “The Geranium” is a really great story; and a very Southern one, at that, about family responsibility. The story is basically about old Dudley, whose family has now judged him too old to live by himself or to take care of himself, even in a boarding house, so he has to move in with one of his children. The daughter who takes him in lives in New York, and she doesn’t take him in out of love and wanting to help out; it’s done out of responsibility and a desire to show her siblings that she’s a better daughter than they are. That responsibility clearly chafes at her (Southern child martyr syndrome; I’ve seen it in my own family), and he is very unhappy to be there as well. He focuses on two things–the geranium across the alley in the window, and the fact that a man of color has moved into the apartment next door. The daughter and her family think nothing of it; he, as a Southern man, is horrified by it (he doesn’t say ‘man of color,’ either, FYI) and the two obsessions juxtapose against each other. It’s more an in-depth character study than anything else; one that you can’t stop thinking about after it’s over, and it’s kind of awful and true and sad all at the same time.

I definitely wasn’t in a place to appreciate O’Connor when I tried before.

I then went back to Alive in Shape and Color, Lawrence Block’s second anthology of stories inspired by paintings, and read Michael Connelly’s “The Third Panel.”

Detective Nicholas Zelinsky was with the first body when the captain called for him to come outside the house. He stepped out and pulled the breathing mask down under his chin. Captain Dale Henry was under the canopy tent, trying to protect himself from the desert sun.  He gestured toward the horizon, and Zelinsky saw the black helicopter coming in low under the sun and over the open scrubland. It banked and he could see FBI in white letters on the side door. The craft circled the house as if looking for a place to land in tight circumstances. But the house stood alone in a grid-work of dirt streets where the planned housing development was never built after the big bust a decade earlier. They were in the middle of nowhere seven miles out of Lancaster, which in turn was seventy miles out of LA.

“I thought you said they were driving out,” Zelinsky called above the sound of the chopper.

Michael Connelly is one of the most successful and prolific crime writers of our time. I read his first Bosch novel several years ago and absolutely loved it; but as much as I loved it the thought of even trying to get caught up on his canon is overwhelming–so many books! It would almost be like a year-long project, a la the Short Story Project, to read the entire Connelly oeuvre. But this story–which is quite short, actually–is taut and suspenseful and well-written; a team of detectives and crime scene techs are investigating a meth-lab murder when the FBI agents show up, with a rolled up copy of a Heironymous Bosch painting, and reveals that there’s a group going around killing ‘sinners’ in ways based from images from the painting. Very clever, and the twist at the end is also really well done.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a Throwback Thursday hunk for you, actor and physique model Gordon Scott:

20728242_10212670337849946_4851579278645951324_n

Sister Christian

It’s cold, gray, and damp in New Orleans this morning. I would guess it’s probably less than sixty degrees inside the Lost Apartment–I am wearing a wool cap and my hands are cold as I type this–but I also have a short day of work today, and I intend to use this time wisely this morning–writing, cleaning, etc. Paul returns home tomorrow everning late; so I am going to need to finish cleaning the upstairs. I bought our advance tickets for Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi yesterday; Sunday of opening weekend so I won’t have to avoid spoilers on-line as long as I did for The Force Awakens. Woo-hoo!

I’m about halfway through Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, and marveling at how bleak her world view is, to be honest. Highsmith writes in a very distant third person point of view, and her voice is terribly matter-of-fact, which makes the reality of the story she is telling much worse. Highsmith is a master of the wrong-place-wrong-time suspense tale; which is something I absolutely love. These kinds of stories build suspense naturally; the reader and the main character know they’re innocent of any wrong-doing, but no one else believes them, which also tends to make them paranoid and the pacing picks up the more paranoid the main character becomes. I sort of did this in Bourbon Street Blues, only Scotty’s only crime was to be the unwitting recipient of something both the villains and the FBI wanted to get their hands on. You can’t, of course, turn that type of a tale into a series, although part of the problem I’ve always had with writing Scotty books is I’ve always tried to turn each new book into a traditional mystery series tale, and Scotty books aren’t, and should never be, a traditional mystery tale. I always run into trouble when I try to make them out to be that way.

Heavy sigh.

I managed to get some work done on a short story yesterday as well; I’d love to get that first draft finished sooner rather than later, so I can polish it and get it into submission-ready shape.

Lord, it’s cold in the kitchen this morning. I may have to go get a blanket in a moment.

Christmas looms on the horizon, and I have yet to shop for anything. I will finish the Christmas cards this weekend–yes, I actually started addressing them and signing them and putting them into envelopes; I may even get them in the mail so people can receive them before the holiday, look at ME adulting–and I also probably should do some shopping this weekend. I need to make up my mind whether I want to simply shop on-line or if I want to actually brave a mall. I used to abhor malls, but over the years as I spend less time in them the rare occasions I actually go to them turn out to be kind of enjoyable. Lakeside Mall has both an Apple Store and a Macys, and that’s usually all I need to do at a mall, besides the Food Court–I always treat myself to something at the Food Court whenever I go to one; and yes, I am aware how weird it is that fast food is something I consider a treat. But I never eat fast food; there’s really not anything conveniently accessible, which made moving into this neighborhood a genius move for that reason alone.

And on that note, I think it’s time for me to head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a Calvin Klein ad for your delectation; Marky Mark from the 1990’s for Throwback Thursday.

mtTyV-e_KgCwzELoBXyhSkg