Tag: Survivor

Mickey

Friday morning work-at-home blog, and the weather is supposed to get more back to normal for this time of year—highs during the day anywhere from the lower 70s to the mid 80s, dropping to the 60’s at night. It makes it even harder to get out of bed in the chill of the morning–and my blankets are incredibly warm and comfortable, as is the bed. But li’l Tug expects to get fed every morning around six (and is more than happy to let me know six is nigh by leaping over Paul and landing on me, before curling up next to my head while waiting patiently for me to get up and feed him and give him fresh water), which is going to make the time change this weekend a bit irritating. I also hate going to work and coming home in the dark, which is also soul-destroying because you feel like you’ve lost the entire day at the office.

But I slept well last night and let myself go back to sleep after the daily six a.m. feed-me Tug attack, which felt great. There’s a mail run to do and Tug’s first vet visit to fit into the day, and we’re going to Costco after I finish my work at home chores later. The constant, on-going kitten-proofing of the apartment can also prove challenging because you never know what’s going to catch his inquisitive must-play-with-that eye, and he is very curious and adventurous about anything. Cabinets can’t be left open. He’ll climb into the dishwasher as I am loading it–but no curiosity about the dryer yet. He’s also fascinated by water, like Skittle was–but the shower was uninteresting to him; not the case with Tug. He’ll tightrope around the rim of the tub while I’m showering and also walk between the shower curtain and the liner. He’s adorable and completely in charge around here, if you haven’t figured that out yet.

And I love having a purring kitty donut sleeping in my lap while I watch television or read.

Last night we watched this week’s The Morning Show, which absolutely felt like a season finale; I’m not sure if it was or not but it felt like it. I wasn’t super-tired when I got home, but Tug was especially needy so I repaired to my easy chair where I watched this week’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–which was kind of dull; but the fun of watching these shows is watching and reading the reactions of the fans and the recaps and so forth. I was thinking yesterday that these shows create community within their fans, as people want to talk about the cast and what’s going on with them, happily judging their lives, their behavior, their clothes, their make-up, their hair, their homes and their families. I was thinking this was unique to reality shows–remembering how everyone used to talk about Survivor and The Bachelor and American Idol back in the day, similar to how soaps would have group watches on campus where everyone talked about the storylines and the characters and their interactions. But we also did that with Glee and Lost and Desperate Housewives and various other shows. I do wonder what is it about film and television that drives people with the urge and need to talk about it with other people?

Then again, I always wanted to talk about books with other people–so I guess I can get it.

I was realizing the other day that this year in December will mark nineteen years of this blog–first on Livejournal and then moved here when I’d finally had enough of the Russian propaganda and spam over there–which is a longer commitment than most straight relationships and marriages, which is an interesting way to look at it. I started keeping it around Christmas of 2004, while we were still living in the carriage house–we wouldn’t move into the main house until June or July 2005; only to be moved back into the carriage house by Hurricane Katrina later that year. It’s also hard to believe sometimes that Katrina–and the Incident with Paul–was so long ago now; just like the Virginia Incident was a long time ago. Time inevitably passes, and just going through your every day routine living your life as best you can one morning you realize a lot of time has passed. The pandemic shutdown was almost four years ago, for fuck’s sake. We are now in year three going on year four of the COVID-19 pandemic, although no one really talks about it anymore. I am going to write about that whole experience at some point–there are at least three more Scotty books I want and/or need to write, which will take New Orleans through the cursed Carnival of 2020 (and the Hard Rock hotel collapse) and the shutdown and then afterwards. I think that’s been part of the creative malaise lately; knowing that the Scotty series, about to debut its ninth volume, is finally winding down. There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to avoid with these books but with the series continually going, I don’t have a choice. Scotty’s grandparents are all in their nineties by now–so death is going to have to come to the family. On the page or off the page? I do think it might be interesting to explore the Bradley side of the family a bit more; perhaps the death of the Bradley grandparents and a struggle over the will or something could be the basis for a book; perhaps COVID-19 might claim them, I don’t know. But I know I’ve not written about the shutdown or the pandemic, and it feels kind of cowardly to not address it in fiction yet.

Maybe I should finish that pandemic short story I started, “The Flagellants.”

I’m also thinking about getting blinds for the kitchen windows at long last; a do-it-yourself project I think I can handle.

And on that note, I’m getting another cup of coffee and heading into the spice mines. Y’all have a great Friday, and I’ll be back later with more blatant self-promotion.

Thunder Island

As Constant Reader already is aware, I’ve been trying to diversify my reading this year. The Diversity Project, as I’ve been calling it, has been revelatory for me; I’ve been reading books and authors I should have been reading all along, but somehow, despite having bought the books, they’ve collected dust and cobwebs in my TBR pile as I somehow always manage to reach for something else when it’s time to read something new. But it has been, as I said, revelatory to me; and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the ride. My endgame, as it were, is that when I finish this “project”, any subconscious bias I might have in deciding on what to read will have been ripped out, root and stem, and it will simply fade away into something I won’t need to call attention to because I’ve bested the worst biases in my psyche–and aren’t the ones we aren’t aware of the worst?

Yes, they are.

So over the last week I read Rachel Howzell Hall’s wonderful They All Fall Down.

they all fall down

The Los Angeles International Airport was the worst place to lose your mind in post-9/11 America. Especially if you perspired like Kobe Bryant in Game 7 of the NBA finals. Especially if you popped Valium twice a day to combat anxiety. And there I was, standing in the TSA security clearance line at LAX, a sweaty, anxious black woman wearing sweaty green silk, sipping air and blinking away tears.

Miriam, keep it together. They’re gonna pull you out of line if you keep on. Calm down. But “calm” was slipping further away, an iceberg on a quick current being pushed by a pod of enthusiastic killer whales.

And so I closed my eyes and I prayed again. God, don’t let them kick me out of LAX today. Please help me stay calm.

“Next.”

In my mind, I said, “Amen,” then opened my eyes. I forced myself to smile at the gray-eyed TSA agent seated behind the little podium, and hoped that she thought I was a slow blinker and not a terrorist praying one last time before setting one off.

The agent flicked her hand at me and said, “ID and boarding pass, please.”

I’m not sure how I became aware of Rachel Howzell Hall, but I think it was while I was serving on the board of directors for Mystery Writers of America and I was chairing the committee to recruit new board members; we were determined to diversify the board and I think the wondrous Margery Flax suggested her to me as a possible, viable candidate. We had a lovely email exchange and I bought one of her books, Land of Shadows, which went into the TBR pile and never came out of it. I’d heard lots of good things about They All Fall Down, so I got a copy, and decided to read it next.

And am I glad I did!

Sometimes I talk about Agatha Christie, but it’s been years since I’ve read any of her books (I did reread a favorite, Endless Night, a few years back; it’s the most noir of Christie’s novels, which are all, frankly, much darker than she gets credit for) but one cannot deny Christie’s rightful place as the greatest mystery writer of all time; she did it all, and she did it first. One of my absolute favorites of hers is And Then There Were None, which was groundbreaking and highly original and has been copied numerous times: the set up of taking a group of people somewhere remote, stranding them without chance of rescue or escape, and setting a murderer loose amongst them. Margaret Millar, for example, used this set-up for Fire Will Freeze; and it’s been the basis for many slasher movies, etc. I thought about doing my own version of this a few years ago–because the set-up is so classic and enduring, I wanted to give it my own spin–but the problem was how to strand a group of people without cell phone service or the Internet or even satellite phones, without using Christie’s “send them to a remote island” trope.

Let’s face it, though–the remote island is the perfect set-up.

They All Fall Down has been compared to And Then There Were None, and it’s apparent, almost from the first: a group of people have been invited to Mictlan Island, a remote location somewhere in the Sea of Cortez; all with different understandings of why they’ve been invited. Miriam Macy, Hall’s main character, believes she’s been invited to join the cast of a Survivor type reality television show; she’s hoping to win and use the prize money to reboot her shattered life. Hall only doles out information about Miriam slowly, over the course of the novel, but it’s a testament to her skill as a writer that there are two mysteries going on at the same time–the mystery of Miriam’s past, and the mystery of who is killing people on the island. The book is full of surprises and twists, the cast of characters is diverse, and the themes Hall explores are original, or given enough of a new spin to make them seem fresh and new.

But the real revelation of the book is the character of Miriam Macy, and the way Hall breathes life into this complicated woman who has done something horrible and yet continues to justify what she did rather than accepting any culpability for it. You can’t help but root for Miriam, an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and the brilliance of Hall’s talent is that you keep rooting for Miriam as the story goes on, even after you find out the full story and her history, because her experience on the island is helping her to grow and see the darkness she has denied for years.

This book is an extraordinary accomplishment, and I can’t wait to read more of Hall’s work. Buy it, read it, and love it.