Tag: That's Amore

Baby Now That I’ve Found You

Monday and back to the office with me this morning. I only have to go into the office today and tomorrow this week; the schedule is absurdly (almost ridiculously) light in the clinic for the next two days; somehow I’ll make it through to my lengthy holiday weekend. I feel good and rested this morning, too. It was a very lovely and peaceful weekend, and I managed to get a lot done (and I am not qualifying that anymore by decrying what I didn’t get done). Baby steps to a healthier me, which was one of the goals for 2025, wasn’t it? As a new year looms, it’s also time to start thinking about my goals for 2026…

Yesterday was rather nice and lovely. Sparky let me sleep in yesterday morning, and I did some chores throughout the course of the day. It was, as always, lovely to come down this morning to a mostly clean kitchen, with only a few things left to do tonight when I get home to reestablish order in the kitchen. Now that I’ve got the downstairs under control again, it should be a lot easier to maintain, which means I can spend time cleaning the stuff I never get around to–baseboards, windows, etc.–and I should probably take the car to the car wash at some point during the holiday weekend. I’ll have to still run errands, of course, but after I get Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve–we’re getting a deep dish pizza from That’s Amore out in Metairie–I should be able to spend Wednesday and Thursday without having to go anywhere. Huzzah, indeed! It was also gorgeous outside; it was in the high seventies when I ran yesterday morning’s errand. I think it’s going to be similar today, too.

The Saints won, which is three straight wins after a disastrous start to the season, which helped set the tone for a nice day. I also started reading yesterday, easing into reading Eli Cranor’s Mississippi Blue Forty-two and Bruce Campbell’s The Secret of Hangman’s Inn, the sixth Ken Holt mystery–both of which start very well. (The homoeroticism rampant I remember from the Ken Holt series is also on full display in the opening chapter, too.) I finally finished my newsletter about Laurie R. King’s O Jerusalem yesterday, too, and if you are so inclined, you can read it here. I have another one I want to do about General Hospital; I’d already started one months ago, but Anthony Geary’s death made it seem a bit more timely now than it was before (I hadn’t known they’d killed off Luke Spencer on the show, either, when he retired–in case he wanted to come back. Not that dying on camera on a soap means anything, of course.); I’d watched the show as a child with our babysitter, but got back into it when Mom started watching after we moved to Kansas–and I came back to the show when it was Number One rated and firing on all cylinders…which was before many people today were alive.

Another yikes, right?

Speaking of yikes, what the hell hath CBS wrought with the hiring of the ultimate mediocrity, Bari Weiss, to run their news department? That town hall with EriKa KirK was an absolute joke–and from everything I am seeing and hearing, their progress down the path to hell has no good intentions to pave their way. One thing that the last ten years has brought with it is the loss of any credibility that mainstream legacy media had; they’ve utterly abdicated and shat all over the legacy of good journalism and the First Amendment. They will never recover any credibility, and maybe that’s a good thing? I don’t know, but this all goes back to Reagan; today’s monster was conceived in his rotting brain, and that was where it began.

We did watch Murder in Monaco this weekend, which was quite interesting and fun; about the murder of Edouard Safra in Monaco in the late 1990s. I remember reading Dominick Dunne’s reporting on the case in Vanity Fair back in the day, and of course, Dunne suspected that the male nurse (arrested, tried, convicted) was being framed by the “black widow” Lily Safra, who had an earlier husband also die under very mysterious circumstances. This update on the case, with more revelations and more information on the aftermath that is very enlightening, is very interesting.

I also worked on some short stories yesterday, which was pretty awesome. I am trying to get some stories ready to submit by the end of the month, and so yesterday I worked on fleshing them out and making them stronger. The three I am working on, and hope to finish and submit, are “Even Katydids Dream,” “Come Sail Away,” and “No Security Provided.” I also have a historical story to polish for another anthology, and I think I am going to try to hit up both EQMM and AHMM in the new year with new stories. Very fun, indeed.

I also paged through Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, from LSU Press, edited by Sybil Kein. There’s so much about Louisiana and New Orleans history and culture that I don’t know, and if I am going to write stories (and/or novels) set in New Orleans history, I need to understand it and have more knowledge of it; and this collection of historical essays about the Free People of Color, and how old Louisiana/New Orleans society was structured, will help me with that. (Although paging through it yesterday made me see some seriously archaic and racist language, which I suppose should be expected when reading about the past down here.)

I am looking forward to the holiday vacation, in all honesty; even if I don’t get as much done as I would like (which is very likely, since it always happens), but it’s also nice to have an easy time of it during the holiday season. And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Enjoy your Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, on Christmas Eve Eve.

Remind me again, MAGA and Fox News, how Christmas is “under attack.”

Mama’s Pearl

Saturday morning in the Lost Apartment, and I have a rather lengthy weekend of work staring me down. Yesterday wasn’t a bad day, per se; I’ve certainly had much worse ones over the years. I didn’t have to be at the office at the usual time–Fridays I can go in later, which is so lovely–and I had slept really deeply and well the night before so the morning started off in a much better manner than usual. I ran some errands on the way home from the office, including making groceries (so I wouldn’t have to do it this weekend), and came home to a nice, lovely and sort of quiet-ish evening. The heat has been miserable here–and there’s already tropical systems forming in the Atlantic and in the Gulf, whee!–and I am already a bit concerned about the power bills to come this summer. It was ninety-five degrees yesterday when I left the office–which is high, even for June, if I recall correctly.

It’s usually the humidity that makes it so miserable here…it feels like August already, so i can only imagine how miserable August itself will actually be.

But I will worry about that when I have to. For now, I am just going to enjoy the cool loveliness of the climate controlled Lost Apartment and pretend I have money to (quite literally) burn.

I slept well last night. We finished watching The Little Drummer Girl and Beneath the Banner of Heaven–both of which I recommend–and I started reading Tara Laskowski’s Anthony nominated The Mother Next Door, and it’s excellent, y’all. I only read the first chapter, but I was immediately sucked in–which is a very good thing; that means I can use the book as a reward for working this weekend, aka if I get this far, I can spend two hours reading Tara’s book. I can see why it was so acclaimed and has gotten so much award recognition–it’s currently nominated for the Anthony for Best Paperbook/Ebook/Audiobook Original–and I am very excited that it’s finally worked its way up to the top of the TBR pile. I keep talking about the golden age of crime fiction we are currently living through–seriously, reading the first chapter of Tara’s book served as further confirmation of that theory.

Today is going to be spent mostly working on the edits, of course. Once I’ve swilled enough coffee for my mind to function–I am also getting the hang of Wordle, I’ve been getting it in two or three tries this past week–and some of this mess organized and cleaned up and put away–I will probably dive headlong into the edits. They went really well last night–I was very pleased with the progress I’ve made and how much better the book is becoming (an editor is really worth their weight in gold, and I am very privileged to be working with Terri Bischoff on this one) as I go. I hope to get really deep into it today, so I can finish it tomorrow and then have Monday to go over it one more time before turning it in, once and for all. I’ve also been seeing a lot of submission calls I find interesting and that I may have something for–there was one in particular that I’d like to submit for, since it was for novellas and those are indeed rare, rainbow and glitter unicorns, and since I have like four or five of them in progress…I should be able to get something together for it, don’t you think? And at the very least, it means I would have one of them finished.

My writing schedule has been so off and so fucked up this year. What a strange year this has been thus far: I am discovering that I am so unused to traveling now that whenever I do it, it takes a few days to recover, which I usually don’t have; the binge-writing thing hasn’t changed, but it’s getting harder and harder to do it now–and much more tiring; I’ve been off my gym/workout schedule for months now, and my body doesn’t like it even one little bit; and my goal to broaden my cooking skills has failed miserably. I have, in fact, traveled only three times thus far this year–Left Coast Crime, the Edgars, Kentucky–and I have only two more trips planned for this year, Fort Lauderdale in July for Sleuthfest and Minneapolis for Bouchercon. I’ll probably wind up going to Kentucky a few more times this year, but I will worry about that when the time comes. I will most likely take the rest of this coming week off from writing anything after I turn the edits in on Monday, and then try to dive back into the short stories and various other projects next weekend–although I do have to teach that workshop at the library on Saturday, which also means I will go to That’s Amore and order us a deep dish Chicago style pizza on my way home–as well as start working on cleaning out the attic preparatory to cleaning out my storage unit (I’d like to get that emptied out by the end of the month so I can close the account and stop spending that money every month; it’s ridiculous I’ve been paying that every month now for so many years), but if not, maybe by August 1 at least. I need to start pruning the books out of the apartment again, too. The only thing I really need to keep is research materials, if that–most of that can be found on-line or as ebooks–and it would really be nice to get rid of some of this stuff, you know?

Clean like you’re moving, Gregalicious.

And of course, I need to get started on Mississippi River Mischief at some point. The story is starting to coalesce in my head, as more and more ideas and things to include come along…I’m actually kind of excited about it, to be honest, and even more excited to have to make some field trips to some of the bayou parishes to get a look around and take some pictures and get some background color for the book. It’s going to be a little bit weird to write more about a fictional parish outside of New Orleans than about New Orleans itself; and yes, I am inventing a fictional parish to go along with the other fictional parish I use for some of my paranormal stuff–St. Jeanne d’Arc and Redemption parishes–just as I have invented some things for the current project in edits. I never used to do that, but if people want to ding me for making some shit up so be it. I find myself not quite as tied to “can’t invent something that isn’t there in the city because I want to” as I used to be–but I will never write about basements or subterranean caverns beneath the city (although I do suppose there are underground drainage tunnels down there).

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a happy Saturday wherever you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll let you know tomorrow how things are going with the edits. I know–the suspense, right?