Tag: The Advocate

Calfskin Smack

Tuesday and we made it through Monday. I didn’t sleep great for some reason on Sunday night–restless and kept waking up–so I was dragging yesterday, as could be expected. I wasn’t mentally tired, but physically? Yeah, not great. I was also hungry all morning despite having had cereal, a banana, and peanut butter toast. Go figure. Then again, I also ate earlier than usual on Sunday, so that could have had a lot to do with the hunger issue. I am glad that I have finally identified that feeling as hunger, though. It’s very rare when I experience it, so am very glad to know what it actually is for those moments when I do have that dull empty stomach ache. The irony that I didn’t think it was hunger because hunger pains usually went away after a moment or two, so I thought it was something else. I guess my body has changed yet again.

I did start revising the first four chapters of the next book I am going to write. It was a bit slow going, primarily because I don’t think I’ve got the voice completely down again–I decided that it was silly not to reread the chapters again before working on the rewrite; that could be why it was slow going and hard for me to slip back into my character’s voice again. There’s a cynical, world-weariness to him that you’d think would be super easy for me to slip into again, but the difficulty with the revision stuff made me realize I don’t really know much about my character and his history/back story either, so I need to work on that a bit more before I can really dig into the story the way I really want to, so that’s something, right? But I took a break from it, folded clothes and washed dishes, and then came back to it and slid right into his head and his voice, knowing exactly where I was and who I was writing about and what was going on. It felt good, and while I only did about 800 words or so today in total gain (there was also subtraction going on), it felt really good and it also put me into a good mood. I do love writing–at least this part of it, before I’ve cursed myself out for not seeing this plot hole or for forgetting this subplot and never resolving it, when I am stuck in the middle and it feels like everything I am writing is just filler; you know, the emotional rollercoaster of a journey I undertake with every new book I write.

Yeah, this is the part I like.

We also watched the new episode of Last Call, which is a book I still need to read. It’s such an eerie and creepy story–one which American Horror Story: NYC essentially “ripped from the headlines” for a significant portion of its plot–but I mused about how I hadn’t heard anything about this case, despite being gay and out at the time. I was living in Tampa, and reading the local queer paper and I also used to subscribe to both Out and The Advocate because once I was out I was all about being gay in every aspect of my life, and what better way to learn about being gay than reading, which is what I always did? But I never read anything about these murders that I recall. I am definitely going to have to read this book, and there are a few other gay books I want to read this summer–but there are sooooo many great new crime novels dropping by amazing authors too! Bouchercon is also looming on the horizon. I am getting invited to meals and meetings, and of course there are my panels. I don’t know who all is going because it always seemed so far away that there was plenty of time to check in with everyone, but it’s like getting closer and closer by the day.

The lackadaisical almost malaise I’ve been staggering under for quite some time now seems to have lifted, or at least for a temporary lull, at any rate. This year hasn’t been an easy one, and neither was the last. Everyone seems to be struggling with more things than usual these days, so I am not really comfortable complaining or whining or even just commenting on what a shitty period the last few years have been. I’m glad Mom is no longer suffering or struggling, but I hate that the side effect of that is Dad’s unhappiness. I’m glad Scooter left us pretty quickly and painlessly with a minimum of suffering–when I got home from the office yesterday Paul had picked up his cremated remains, so had a moment of deep sadness and misery when I got home from work yesterday. It was nice to share the sadness, though, with Paul; I try not to be sad in front of him because I think it makes him feel worse–also because it’s even harder for me to see him sad, but we should share our griefs and burdens more because it does help not to do it alone. As I mentioned, it felt good to start digging into the new book last night, even if it was just revising and strengthening what was already there. I haven’t started reading the new Kelly Ford, but will probably do that today. I actually was sitting in my easy chair feeling sad last night and missing Scooter, when I snapped myself out of it and got up off my ass and did some things. I made myself write, and when I got stuck, instead of giving up I did some chores to shake things loose in my head and wrote some more. I slept better last night than I did the night before–still woke up a few times, but still was a much less restless night than Sunday night was–and am feeling pretty rested, if not completely awake, this morning, which is also nice. I am hoping to make it through the week without getting run down and/or exhausted. I got two books yesterday–the new Eryk Pruitt, Something Bad Wrong, and a reprint of a Scholastic Book Club mystery I really enjoyed as a kid, The Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost by Elizabeth Honess, which should be fun revisiting. I am still considering writing middle grade mysteries, and so I am trying to reread some of my favorites as well as some of the more modern offerings.

And on that note, I think I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

Long Train Runnin’

Ah, it’s the weekend. I went to bed relatively early last night, after watching the final episode of The Last Czars (which, of course, included the horrific massacre scene in the basement in Ekaterinburg; which is probably why everyone sees the monstrous, people-abusing, careless Romanovs as tragic figures–the way they died, as opposed to the way they lived; it’s impossible to hear the children screaming and the sound of the guns without feeling badly for them) and before that, I watched Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse, which was, without question, the absolute best superhero movie, bar none, that I’ve ever seen. Well-written, well-voiced, and extraordinarily animated, it was quite an achievement in film making, and definitely a high spot when it comes to superhero films The entire time I was watching I kept thinking imagine how incredible this must have looked on the big screen. It took me a moment to get used to the style of animation, but it was absolutely amazing, and should be used as a blueprint for origin stories for superheroes. I do hope they do another; I really loved the character of Miles Morales and his family.

This morning I woke up well rested with a shit ton of work to get done today. Yesterday I was lazy; I got home from work around one and just cleaned the house. I never manage to seem to finish getting my office in order, because there simply isn’t enough space for me to put things, and I am always afraid to put thing into my inbox because they tend to get buried once they are there. I try to put things into it in ways that they can still be seen; but I don’t always have the best luck with that, and out of sight, out of mind if I don’t have it on the to-write list (speaking of which, I don’t see it anywhere, damn it to hell), which is also ridiculous when you consider how much I have to get written, or hoped to have written, by the end of this month.

One thing at a time, cross them off the list, and be done with it.

I’m also looking forward to spending some time with Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay over the course of the weekend; after which I am going to read S. A Cosby’s My Darkest Prayer. I’d also like to get started reading the other Anthony nominees for Best Short Story (Cosby is one of my fellow nominees, along with Holly West, Barb Goffman, and Art Taylor–three of my favorite colleagues)–I still can’t believe I’m an Anthony finalist. I am very proud of my story, and its genesis; I originally wrote the first draft when I was in my early twenties or late teens, while I was still living in Kansas–close to forty years ago, and here it is, nominated for an Anthony Award.

How fucking cool is that? I had no idea when I wrote that story in long hand on notebook paper that forty years into the future it would be nominated for an award I’d not yet heard of, to be presented at a fan conference I knew nothing about, and that my life would be something I didn’t even dare dream of at that age.

I was thinking about my self-appreciation project last night, the one in which I work on stopping belittling my achievements, learn how to accept compliments, and take some pride in myself and my writing and everything I’ve done thus far in my life. Because I should be proud of myself. I’ve managed to sustain an almost twenty year career in a niche sub-genre of a genre, and not only that, I’ve accomplished quite a bit not even counting the writing itself. I was also thinking last night back to the days when I was editor of Lambda Book Report, which kind of set the stage for my publishing career. I reinvented myself, you know; I went from being a highly knowledgeable industry insider, basically running a magazine that was sort of a cross between a queer Publisher’s Weekly and a queer The Writer; for nearly two years I read a lot of queer fiction, and if I didn’t actually read a queer book, I knew a lot about it. I had already sold Murder in the Rue Dauphine to Alyson Books when I took the assistant editor job at Lambda Book Report, and that was actually the first job I ever had where I kind of flourished. It was the first job that allowed me to be creative in what I did, and where all the lessons I’d learned at various dead-end jobs along the way could be applied in a very positive way. I’d also learned how to treat writers, from being treated myself in very shitty ways by magazines and editors and papers I’d written for by this point–something I continue to do today as an editor (one of my proudest moments of my career thus far was being told by one of the contributors to Florida Happens–Hilary Davidson, a very talented writer whose works you should check out–that working with me was one of the best editorial experiences she’d had in her career thus far). Lambda Book Report seems like it was a million years ago; I actually officially resigned from the job in November 2001, three months before Rue Dauphine was published finally. I resigned because of the conflict of interest involved in running a review magazine while publishing my own novels; there was a strong sense, at least for me, that I couldn’t allow my own books to be reviewed in my own magazine, and as it was the only real game in town nationally (the odds of being reviewed in any of the national gay magazines–Out, The Advocate, Genre–were slim to none; on the rare occasions when those magazines chose to review books, it was either a straight celebrity ally’s (so they could do a feature and put straight celebrity ally’s picture on the cover), or if it was an actual queer book by a queer writer, it was never a genre work. They sniffed disdainfully at queer genre writers; kind of how Lambda Book Report did before I came along, and, all due respect, kind of how the Lambda Literary Foundation (which was always the parent apparatus of the magazine, and now runs a review website) still does. I’ve rarely been reviewed there–either in the magazine I left behind, when it was still being done as a print magazine–or on their website.

But I did a great job running that magazine, if I do say so myself, and I am very proud of everything i accomplished while working there. I met a lot of people, a lot of writers, and made some lifelong friends out of the experience.

I have also been nominated for the Lambda Literary Award, in various categories and under various names, quite frequently. I don’t know how many times I’ve been nominated, to be honest; it’s something like thirteen or fourteen times. I think the only people nominated more times than me are Ellen Hart, Michael Thomas Ford, and Lawrence Schimel. I won twice, once for Anthology for Love Bourbon Street, and once for Men’s Mystery for Murder in the Rue Chartres. The statues are somewhere around here; my Moonbeam Award medals hang from a nail right next to my desk, and my Anthony Award for Blood on the Bayou sits on one of the shelves in the bookcase where I keep copies of my books, but I’m not quite sure where my Lambda Awards are. My Shirley Jackson Award nominee’s rock is in my desk drawer, and even though it just represents a nomination (I didn’t win the award), it’s my favorite out of all the awards I’ve won. I don’t get nominated for Lambda Literary Awards anymore–I think the last time I was nominated was for Night Shadows, which should tell you how long it’s been–and I don’t really care about that anymore, to be honest. After thirteen or fourteen times…yeah, it’s just not quite the thrill it was back when I was nominated the first time. Getting nominated for things like the Shirley Jackson, or the Anthonys, or the Macavitys–those are thrilling because they come from out of nowhere, and are completely unexpected.

And let’s face it, being nominated for Best Short Story awards, for the kid who was told by his first writing instructor that he would never be published, would never have a career as a writer, and had no writing ability whatsoever–opinions all formed by reading a short story written by a kid who’d just turned eighteen–are very thrilling and satisfying. My lack of confidence in my short story writing abilities is pretty extreme, and so whenever one gets published or one gets nominated for an award or I get some great feedback from readers for one, it’s quite reassuring and quite lovely.

All right then–Steph Cha’s novel is calling my name, and I want to get some things written as well before I run my errands later this morning.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

IMG_1829