Tag: The Dead Zone

Street Angel

It’s cold this morning–in the forties–so I’ll probably wear an extra layer to work today. It’s never going to be warmer than the mid-fifties. We are also in a red flag warning, which means we’ve not had rain in a while so there’s a chance of fires again, in and around the city. I think last year there was a wildfire in one of the swamps east of town and ugh, did the air smell bad. I am rested this morning, but the ankles are still sore and need to be iced tonight when I get home. I didn’t get much of anything done this weekend other than finishing the cabinet/pantry project, but that’s okay, you know? Sparky needed some bonding time, apparently–I was trapped (cat owners understand this) in my chair for almost five hours yesterday because he was a little ball of fur in my lap, in a sleep that was so deep he didn’t react to anything in that entire time. I did get up a few times, but he would yawn and stretch and follow me into the kitchen to ask for treats and then followed me right back to the chair and into the lap he’d go. He was snuggled up with me in the bed this morning–I had a fitful night’s sleep, honestly, the worst night’s sleep I’ve had in months. Today is the date for my every-eight-weeks injection; I could tell yesterday that it was coming up because I had some discomfort yesterday and was a bit concerned and then thought oh yes, I bet the injection is tomorrow and sure enough, it is. Like clockwork, right?

Unfortunately, with Sparky needing a lap and bonding time, instead of reading I turned on the television and watched some news, some replays of the Olympics skating (I”m so proud of our figure skaters!) and was stunned to see that US men’s hockey team captured gold by beating Canada–just like the US women. I think I saw our Olympic team was the most medaled US team in winter Olympic history, which is very cool. It’s very lovely to take pride in our young athletes rather than the constant embarrassment on the world stage that this administration is–and I am thankful to the world for not booing our athletes, which is something I was afraid of, and then realized, projection–US Americans are the type, not people from other countries. I hate that Canada lost the golds in their national sport to us, especially after our government has been non-stop bullying (or trying to, anyway) theirs.

The LA Olympics in 2028–should they happen–will probably rival the 1936 Berlin Games for xenophobia and the triumph of the will…if they aren’t boycotted by every country on the planet. The thought of all the banners to himself he’s going to hang everywhere in sight, lording over the Olympic Games like a syphilitic Nero. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t try to award the medals himself–or steal the golds. The constant need for adoration and to be awarded prizes he doesn’t deserve is truly pathetic, and I could even feel some empathy or sympathy for that constant reassurance that he is indeed a Very Special Boy that he never got from his revolting parents, if he weren’t so fucking dangerous. It’s all very The Dead Zone, and I’ve thought that since the day he rode down that tacky as fuck escalator to announce he intended to loot and destroy the country while bringing back the 1950s.

No, I will never forgive the people who supported, financed, and voted for him–even if it was only once. How much strychnine can the country take, after all? One good thing about him–the only good thing–is that he has completely exposed the Right and their voters as liars, cheats, and hypocrites whose only gods are money and power and racism. Their Christianity is a heresy, their patriotism is white nationalism, and their love for the country is conditional.

Patriots, my ass. (And today’s picture is of a nice ass, for the record.)

I also refuse to berate myself for resting this entire weekend and not doing much of anything other than chores–I even managed to talk myself out of doing my errands! Although the one thing I will berate myself for is how easily it is to talk myself out of doing everything and anything, but that’s also the negative road and I am choosing not to take it. But I do need to get my ass in gear and get my shit together.

And on that morose note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning (it’s going to be cold again, yay).

Yikes! That’s a rather intense wedgie, isn’t it?

Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me

Thursday last day in the office for me for the week blog, and I am glad it’s nearing the end of this week. I got tired yesterday afternoon at work–the big tired; not fatigue but just super-tired from getting up and working so much already. The book continues to go well, and I got more work done on it last night, too. Huzzah! I am also having dinner tonight in the Marigny with a good friend, which I am also looking forward to. We’re having a bit of a thunderstorm this morning–thunder woke me up before either the alarm or the alarm kitty–but I remained snug in my bed under my pile of blankets and wishing I didn’t have to get up at all. I love rain so much. I am also a little bit on the tired side this morning, par for the course for a rainy Thursday morning. I hope the fatigue doesn’t set in, else I’ll be a drag at dinner.

And that won’t be much fun, will it?

Probably not.

Gloom and rain all day, though, should pick me right up, right? LOL. I do hope, though, that it rains through the night.

I did come straight home from work yesterday, and the groceries were delivered shortly after I got home. We caught up on the news (Paul worked at home, so was here when I got home), and watched this week’s episode of The Morning Show before we went to bed early. Exciting, isn’t it? I also worked on the book last night and I am very pleased with how it is all coming together. It’s been so long, you know, since I’ve finished a book. Did I just go two years without a book being released? Yep, it looks that way, and so much has happened since the last time I finished a book that I don’t really remember much of writing or finishing it, and frankly, I’m not even sure what my last book published was, in all honesty. My memory issues are becoming a little bit on the scary side…but it’s probably all related to trauma and surgeries and getting older. It also started getting worse when I changed medications…but trading my memory for no anxiety was well worth it, frankly. I sleep better, I don’t freak out, my moods don’t swing…it’s really lovely.

Although the frequent memory lapses get concerning occasionally.

I’m also very glad I am back into the right writing headspace. I am enjoying doing the work again–memory lapses mean I don’t remember the last time I enjoyed the work and didn’t view it as drudgery, in all honesty. The book is becoming much better as I work through it, and yes, I do have some chapters to write still, of course; but I am confident I can get all of it done by the revised deadline, which is next week. I will be watching football games on Saturday, but will most likely work on the book in the morning before the games start. I can also copy edit with the manuscript in my lap, too. I also need to finish reading The Hunting Wives so I can officially move into Halloween Horror Month, kicking it off with the annual reread and discussion of The Haunting of Hill House, which I consider a perfect novel. I may reread The Dead Zone by Stephen King as well; it has seemed very timely since 2015 to me, and I’ve wanted to reread it again ever since the bloated monster’s escalator ride. (Et tu, UN escalator?) I am also going to work on short stories during October, methinks, because I don’t want to immerse myself in another book while working with my editor on making this new Scotty an excellent read. Huzzah! I’m kind of excited about it, to be honest.

I can’t wait to get my box o’books.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines on this gloomy and rainy day. Hope you have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will commune with you again tomorrow morning!

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

God, how I hate that fucking song. Maybe it was okay the first two or three hundred times I heard it, but now? It sets my teeth on edge and I kind of root for the devil now.

Sparky got me up early this morning, which is fine. I feel a little tired and sore from standing out on the parade route for a couple of hours yesterday (three or so, to be exact) for the Iris parade. Iris is my favorite of all the parades, and always has been. I fell in love with the ladies of Iris that first time I came here for Carnival back in 1995, and that has never changed. It was a beautiful day for parades, too. It was sunny, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature hovering the mid 70s. I also forget how much fun the parades are from year to year. It is fun out there. Everyone is in a good, festive mood; everyone is friendly; and you meet lots of people out there on the route. The parades always create this incredible feeling of community that’s kind of hard to describe. No one is completely wasted, everyone is just buzzed and vibing and having fun. We got buried in beads like we always do at Iris, and then we came inside and skipped Tucks. My legs feel fatigued this morning, so I don’t know if I’ll be going out today (there are four: Okeanos, Mid-city, Thoth, and Bacchus. Bacchus and Thoth are extremely popular, so it will be madness down at the corner too. I may wander out there, I may not, it depends on how I feel. I took tomorrow off so as not to have to deal with traffic and parking (I’d have to leave the office at two anyway, at the very least), and we’ll be going out for Orpheus tomorrow night. Today I really need to be more active–I need to clean and I need to write and I need to get my act together.

A running theme on this blog, methinks. Some things never change.

I did get a chance to speak to my sister yesterday as well, and found out that I was correct–we had both had the measles when we were kids (“freedom freckles,” as someone said on Threads yesterday), which confers immunity so I don’t need to get a booster. I thought we had, but wasn’t sure. (She currently has shingles, despite the vaccine, but it’s a much milder case than had she not.) We had the mumps and the measles at the same time (and I just realized how terrified our parents must have been back then, since measles could kill or do even worse damage; I can’t even fathom 1/10th of how much worry they had when we were small kids), and chicken pox by itself at a later date (hence immunity from all poxes). I also remember getting the polio vaccine and rubella; I remember lining up in second grade to get them. So, fuck you, anti-vaxxers, your kids aren’t going to give me anything that could potentially kill me. Can’t say the same for your kids, though. The recent rubella outbreak in Texas? Hey anti-vaxxer trash: why don’t you go ahead and google what happens when a pregnant woman gets rubella, you fucking self-absorbed bitches? Isn’t it bad enough that you’re entire thesis is “I’d rather have a dead child than an autistic one”? All those tombstones for children in those old Alabama cemeteries…interesting how few recent graves there are for children. So, just go ahead and miss me with your Dr. Google research on vaccines, trash. If you want your kids to die, have at it. But why should other people’s children have to die to satisfy your egocentric narcissism?

And miss me with your “pro-life” stance and your Christianity. Suffer the little children wasn’t a directive.

Honestly.

We got caught up on our shows last night, and started watching this new Robert De Niro show on Netflix called Zero Day. It was entertaining enough and has an incredible cast–Joan Allen, Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, De Niro himself–and the writing seems pretty top notch. It’s a political thriller about the aftermath of a massive cyber attack on the United States, and De Niro is a retired president (Bassett is the current), asked to head up a new agency to find out who did it and how to stop them from doing it again. It’s not an action show–De Niro isn’t getting into fistfights and gun battles with bad guys–but more cerebral with twists and turns. (Seriously, the fistfights and gun battles all start to seem the same after awhile, and some of the shows–The Recruit, The Night Agent, Prime Target–also start running together, too. Reacher remains fantastic, though.) Political thrillers are kind of hard to watch now for me–the insanity running the country currently kind of makes them quaint in a way–but here we are, you know? I also saw that Fletcher Knebel’s old thriller about an insane president–Night of Camp David–is making the rounds again (I read it the first time around with this bullshit), but not even Knebel, who wrote a lot of political thrillers, could have imagined a United States where a political party would rally around a sociopathic narcissist, with the media working hand in glove with them to present this as normal and sane. Not even John LeCarré or Robert Ludlum could have come up with this kind of story. (Stephen King foresaw it also with The Dead Zone–a book that I don’t think gets enough appreciation for its brilliance– but even he couldn’t see it winning in the end.)

We’ve taken our country for granted for so long that none of us could ever believe it could come to an end…kind of like the Trojans and the Carthaginians and Rome itself. Everything ends. I had hoped it would last until I no longer had to worry about it, but I guess I lived longer than I should have.

And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will talk to you later.

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…

Steppin’ Out

Wednesday morning and it’s cold outside this morning. It’s currently in the forties, and I turned on the heat once I came downstairs. This isn’t going to last long–I believe it’ll be back in the eighties for the weekend–but this morning going outside is going to be more than just a little painful, methinks.

I got off work yesterday and swung uptown to pick up the mail–the pothole at the end of the street finally resurfaced, and so my street is being resurfaced at the St. Charles end and is closed to access from that way, which makes getting home a bit more challenging than usual. I have to go uptown on the way home again today–long story short, I ordered a new lunchbox because Tug broke the strap on the old one, and it was overdue anyway; I should have ordered a new one long ago, and the new one is being delivered today in theory. It’s also the first of November, which kind of feels weird. This year has lasted an eternity already and yet here it is almost the end of the year already. I kind of feel in some ways like I’ve frittered the year away–and let’s be brutally honest, most of this year was spent working on things that were supposed to have been finished last year, and somehow nothing since those were both completed. Blame it on what? The heat, a difficult year, the injury, and everything else that seemed to go off the rails for me this year. Paul was working last night so I didn’t get a chance to do much of anything last night. I was too tired to read, and I also had an operating system upgrade to finish on the computer. It’s working in a most lovely fashion this morning, which is super awesome; upgrades have always worried me since the Great Data Disaster of 2018.

Which reminds me, I need to back up the back-up, as it has been a moment.

I honestly don’t know why I was so off last night, or how I managed to waste most of the evening. I started reading the new Lou Berney (Dark Ride) yesterday morning at the dentist’s office (oh wait, that explains the entire day being off, doesn’t it? I hate being so immured in my ruts of routine) and it’s quite good, although I didn’t get very far into it before it was my turn to get in the chair for the dentist. It was the final fitting for my new dentures, which fit snugly and tightly and look marvelous in my mouth. The next time they call me, I will come out of their office with my new teeth, which is very exciting. I am quite delighted at the thought of eating solid foods again. I also had to go out to the UNO campus to record “My Reading Life” with Susan Larson, who is always a delight and is one of the few promotional things I actually enjoy doing. And duh, that is why I was tired and off all day long; the usual daily routine was disrupted. I had to drive out to Jefferson Highway almost to Harahan for the dentist appointment, drove back into the city for work, then had to go out to the lakefront to UNO and back. That’s a serious disruption to my routine, and as I am learning, that’s the sort of thing that drains my batteries now.

But I greatly enjoyed this year’s Halloween Horror Month, even if the bad quality of the videos of Friday the 13th the Series on Youtube caused me to abandon the rewatch of that show for the month. We’ve been watching The Fall of the House of Usher, which has been a lot of fun and very well done, too–hopefully we can get that finished tonight or by the weekend. It was fun revisiting The Dead Zone, and the other reading I did this month was pretty awesome too. I am going back to crime fiction reading again, because the horror reading has been making my brain go into the horror direction, and I’m not really a good horror writer.

Yesterday Death Drop launched into the world–I’m going to do some more promotional posts about the book as well as some for Mississippi River Mischief, which is also dropping next week (this is what happens when you don’t make your deadlines, people–don’t be a Greg)–and it’s always nice when that happens. It sometimes feels a bit anticlimactic, and I am terrible about promotion anyway (doing it always makes me feel very self-conscious, which is something else i need to work on, because it’s also rooted in my anxiety). My anxiety has also been off the charts lately, and I don’t know why that is. The lack of an LSU game last weekend, perhaps, which served as another disruption to routine? I’ve also been studiously not answering my emails since last week sometime, as well, which is also not like me and another sign that the brain chemistry isn’t working properly again. But now that I know what the problem is with my brain chemistry (better late than never, right?) we are going to change my medications because I’ve been on the wrong ones, and come up with a different coping plan. I feel like I’m in the middle of yet another reboot of my life–new teeth, surgery on my arm, writing cozies, thinking about exercise and eating right again–which might be needed. It just feels like everything has been a slog for so long now; I do think it goes back to the Great Data Disaster of 2018, which started the whole mess. Or maybe it was the expense of buying a new car and having a car payment every month, which kind of did me in financially for a while (starting to see daylight again)–there’s no stress like financial stress, after all. Anyway, I’ve not really felt centered or in any semblance of control over my life for quite some time now, and I’m kind of tired of letting my life happen to me–which was where I was at when I was thirty-three and did the first hard reboot of my life.

I feel good this morning, rested and awake and alert and energetic and ambitious, and it’s been awhile since I felt that way. I may run out of steam at some point today–it does happen, after all–but I am starting to feel good again about a lot of things and when I can look at positives rather than be overwhelmed by the negatives…I’ll take that as a win gladly and keep going.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous mid-week, and I will check in with you again later.

Johnny Be Good

I love Stephen King, and have since I first read Carrie when I was thirteen.

I will also go out on a limb and say that while he has written some amazing fiction and novels in the last forty years, the run of novels between (and including) Carrie and Misery in the 1970s and 1980’s was probably one of the greatest runs of incomparable work ever accomplished by any writer in any sub-genre or genre of fiction, period. There wasn’t a single stinker in that run, and even the one I personally dislike ( Pet Sematary) isn’t bad–it’s actually a testament to King’s skill that I’ve refused to reread it since that first time; it made me incredibly uncomfortable in so many ways viscerally that I’ve really never wanted to read it again.

And isn’t that the real point behind horror?

I also saw something recently about how people who suffer from anxiety often rewatch movies/television shows and reread books when they are anxious because there’s comfort in knowing how something ends. It had never occurred to me that this was a thing, but I used to reread books all the time when I was younger, often picking one up and just opening it at random and diving into the story again. I reread most of the earlier Stephen King novels countless times, as I have also reread books like Gone with the Wind and kids’ series books and other particular favorites. I still reread some periodically, like Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House. When I picked up The Dead Zone to reread it–I realized that I don’t really reread the way I used to when I was younger. On the rare occasions when I thought about it, I figured it was because I don’t have the time and there are so many unread books around the house that I shouldn’t revisit something when I have unread books collecting dust and moldering on the shelves. But reading that about people with anxiety made me recognize myself and I also realized that I don’t reread as much as I used to (or rewatch) because I don’t have as much anxiety as I did when I was younger. (Don’t get me wrong, I still have too much of it for me to be comfortable going forward without doing something for it, you know.)

I’d thought about rereading The Dead Zone in the wake of the 2016 election; I had posted on social media early on during that campaign season, “Is anyone else reminded of Greg Stillson?” But I couldn’t, just as I couldn’t go back and revisit Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here or The Handmaid’s Tale or any of the other great collapse of American democracy novels. But this reread…made me truly appreciate all over again what a literary genius Stephen King actually is–and an American treasure.

By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.

They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals/ The little kids were just farting around the way little kids had done since time immemorial–their ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile ws still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.

Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung over his shoulder. AT six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids’ hockey games yet, but able to skate rings around most of the other first-graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.

Now he skated slowly aruond the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he could go backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and crackle mysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts of the hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridges on its way to U. S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He was very glad to be alive on this fair, winter day. Nothing was wrong with him, nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing…except to be able to skate backward, like Timmy Benedix.

So begins the prologue to The Dead Zone, a King classic that doesn’t get nearly the respect it probably should–especially in wake of the 2016 election. Johnny does, in fact, learn how to skate backwards, but is so excited about it he doesn’t notice he is heading right into the hockey game, where he gets hit broadside by a teenager and sent sprawling, hitting his head on the ice and knocking himself out. As he slowly comes back to consciousness, he starts muttering things that make no sense to the worried kids and adults gathered around him, including saying to “stop charging it’ll blow up”. But then he wakes up, is fine, goes home and doesn’t even tell his parents what happened (imagine a child knocking himself out and the parents not even being told today–never happen). A few days later one of the men’s car battery is dead, he jumps it–and it blows up in his face; only no one remembers the things Johnny was muttering; everyone’s forgotten about it.

The second part of the prologue introduces us to the other main character of the book, or the person who is fated to have the biggest impact on John’s existence, which also begs the question of fate and destiny; these two men’s lives are going to intersect, and the rest of the book follows their lives–primarily focused on Johnny’s, with the occasional swing over to see what’s going on with Greg Stillson and his climb to power and success. That prologue introduction to the traveling Bible salesman in Oklahoma who kicks a dog to death lets us know who he is right from the very start–he’s the bad guy, the reason all these things are happening to Johnny so their lives will cross.

Johnny’s story has three acts: first, the car accident that leaves him in a coma for five years (and introduces us to him, his love interest Sarah, and his parents) and inevitably ends with him catching the Castle Rock Strangler, using the abilities that he woke up from the coma with; the second, which concludes with the vision about the graduation party ending in fire and mass death; and the third, where he realizes he is the only person who can stop Stillson’s political rise, the country’s descent into fascism and a final cataclysmic nuclear war (which was an every day reality for us all back when this book was written, by the way).

The most interesting character to me, always, from the story of The Trojan War (I loved mythology and ancient history as a child) was Cassandra, the princess who was given the gift of prophecy accidentally (her ears were licked by one of Apollo’s temple snakes; he cursed her by having no one believe her and this frustration drove her mad); I always wanted to write from her perspective. John Smith is a modern-day Cassandra, a young man who unwillingly was given the gift to see the future as well as have psychic visions, and his story plays out very similarly to Cassandra’s, and asks the big question: if you had the knowledge and foresight to stop Hitler in 1932, even if it meant killing him, would you do it? The personal good vs. the collective good?

I thoroughly enjoyed this reread, and it definitely holds up, even if it is a time capsule of the 1970s, which also made it a big more fun.

(Oh, and that fall he took as a child? While it is never really explained where his abilities come from, King implies that that first head injury awakened the talent in him; the later head injury and coma woke it up again and gave it more power.)

Heartlight

Saturday and no LSU game, so the day stretches out in front of me a yawning empty chasm. But I feel incredibly well rested after a very relaxing deep good night’s sleep, which is simply marvelous. I have things to do this weekend–out of the ordinary things, different from the usual to-do list–so I have to figure out when to get those things done. I’m going to need to make a grocery run at some point–I have to make a cheesecake for a work potluck this week, and I am thinking it’s probably smart to make some white bean chicken chili in the crockpot at some point (soft food, after all); regardless, I need more ice cream and microwave ramen. I really like that super-hot ramen, and am also very low on yogurt. Maybe I’ll get up tomorrow and head for a grocery run on the West Bank or to the Rouse’s on Carrollton–which I could also just do this afternoon, depending on how I feel. I want to really clean up the house and get stuff done–filing, organizing, and so forth–and I can always have the football games playing on my computer while I am in the kitchen, which desperately needs work. I also want to go for a walk around the neighborhood later on today, to get a look at how the neighborhood has dressed up for Halloween.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I managed to get my work-at-home duties taken care of and made it to my pain management appointment, which was unnecessary as I am not in pain–I think my surgeon thought I was in pain from the injury, which is cute–I wouldn’t have let it go this long had I been in actual constant pain from it. But it was one more box to check off on the list of things that need to be done before the surgery, so that makes it one step closer to when I am going to be rehabilitating the arm. I think having this hanging over my head isn’t helping much with my anxiety or getting things done; I can try to compartmentalize all I want, and try not to think about things, but the truth of the matter is I cannot control my subconscious–especially when I don’t know what’s going on with it. I think I’ve been more relaxed and rested this week because I’ve not been trying to get much done or worrying about anything; I just came home, sat in my chair with Tug sleeping in my lap (Paul is calling him Puma now, because his claws are so sharp), and read or watched television. I did watch another episode of Moonlighting yesterday while doing work-at-home chores (“My Fair David”) and then finished reading The Dead Zone but also Adam Cesare’s marvelous Clown in a Cornfield (more on both later), and am now trying to decide what horror to read next before Tuesday–which is the end of Halloween season as All Hallow’s Eve itself falls on Tuesday. I am leaning toward Mike Ford’s middle grade The Lonely Ghost, which has been in the TBR pile for far too long, and then maybe something by Chris Grabenstein if I get that done quickly–The Hanging Hill looks like it could be quite fun, or perhaps a reread of my favorite ghost story of all time, Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels. I also have a kids’ ghost story anthology–Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghosts and More Ghosts, actually edited and compiled by Robert Arthur, who created one of the best kids’ series of them all: The Three Investigators. After Paul got home from the gym we also watched this week’s The Morning Show.

And just looking at the college football television schedule, I am not seeing anything other than Georgia-Florida to watch with any degree of interest, and it’s tough–I despise Florida with every molecule of my existence, but I also kind of want Georgia to lose…but I just can’t root for Florida. (Georgia always winds up being my default team in the East because I hate Florida and Tennessee both with the white-hot intensity of a dozen burning suns, and pretty much everyone else is kind of irrelevant. Kentucky and Missouri never break through, nor does South Carolina, and Vanderbilt is…well, Vanderbilt.) I’m trying not to get overly worked up for the LSU-Alabama game, which is a must-win for both. I don’t get nearly as worked up over college football as I used to, which is a good thing–as I have slowly began to recognize that while they may be athletes, they’re also kids, and they shouldn’t be subjected to the scorn from fans. The coaching staffs and administrations, on the other hand, can have all the scorn, as can the conference hierarchy AND the NCAA. I’m not overly excited about all the conference expansion because I’m not so certain that the needs of the student-athletes are being taken into consideration as much as they should be in the pursuit of the almighty television deal dollar, and that NIL stuff isn’t something I quite understand other than that college athletes are now getting paid.

I can’t get over how good I feel this morning, and how good I felt all week, frankly. I’ve got to get all this filing under control and work on the kitchen, too–the living room and the laundry room are complete disasters; although I did start working on the laundry room shelves a bit yesterday. I do get to go for the final fitting for my dentures on Tuesday morning (the same day I am taping Susan Larson’s “My Reading Life” at UNO), so I am hoping to get back to solid food in a couple of weeks–and I am definitely going to reboot my eating habits once I have teeth again. I now am down to somewhere between 205-209 pounds, depending on the day and what is in my pockets, and I’d like to get down to 200 again; but until I am able to exercise again I am going to have to do that by changing the way I eat. I’ve frankly enjoyed the ramen (and the Velveeta shells and cheddar) and may continue to eat it going forward–same with the yogurt–but the calories from Haagen-Däzs will need to be replaced by something healthy. It wouldn’t hurt me to go back to having turkey sandwiches and salads for lunch occasionally. It’s the heavy steady diet of red meat I need to dial back on, mostly; and some of the other fatty stuff I eat far more regularly than I should–and go back to looking at Five Guys as an occasional treat for good behavior.

I can but do better in the future.

And on that note, I think I am going to indulge myself in some self-care this morning and get cleaned up before taking on the rest of the day. Have a great Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back soon enough, no worries–I have blog posts on “Don’t Look Now”, The Dead Zone, and Clown in a Cornfield to finish writing, too.

Heart Attack

Work-at-home Friday and here we are. Tug is still snoozing upstairs, and I have to go to my appointment at the pain management clinic later this morning during a break from work-at-home duties. I managed to somehow make it through the entire week without being completely worn out and exhausted by last night–a first–and I’m not entirely sure what that means? Am I getting used to this schedule? Was going in at eight on Monday better than going in at seven thirty? Maybe, but it may have been the evenings spent with a kitten donut sleeping in my lap while I watch an episode of Moonlighting and reread The Dead Zone. It’s actually been kind of a lovely week, honestly, one of the better ones in recent memory.

Last night’s episode of Moonlighting was “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” one of the more legendary episodes and one that really made everyone stand up and pay attention to what they were doing. (I’d be curious to know if the guy who created The West Wing was influenced by it as well; while the shows were vastly different they also had a lot of similarities–the rapid fire overlapping dialogue, for one.) It’s a very simple premise; in the course of a job Maddie and David hear a story about an old LA club where a very noirish type murder grew out of a love triangle, in which the band’s singer and the horn player have an affair and eventually her husband is murdered. Naturally, David and Maddie put their own spin on it–Maddie convinced she loved the man who killed her husband and it was all for love, while David is convinced the woman was a Phyllis-type from Double Indemnity type femme fatale who suckered her lover into killing her husband and taking the fall. They argue, go home, and both fall asleep–to dream their own versions of the story. The episode was also introduced by Orson Welles–which I’d forgotten–and this is probably one of the best episodes of television ever produced. (I also realized, while watching “The Lady in the Iron Mask” episode, that the entire plot of my aborted fourth Scotty book, Hurricane Party Hustle, was directly lifted from this episode.)

I have to say, I am enjoying the hell out of my rewatch of this show, which is exceeding my wildest hopes and memories that it was as good and classic as it was when I originally watched and fell in love with it back in the 1980’s when it aired. It’s definitely one of the three most influential television shows on me and my writing–along with Dark Shadows and Scooby Doo Where Are You?–and I am so delighted that it’s streaming at long last.

I also read more of The Dead Zone last night and have reached the third and final act, in which almost all of the storylines introduced throughout the course of the book have wrapped up to set up the final denouement between Johnny Smith and Gregory Stillson, the monstrous populist politician. It’s really remarkable, you know, that King was so amazingly gifted and able to structure a novel so brilliantly so early in his career. I also remember that King wasn’t taken very seriously either by critics or the Academy in the those earlier days of his career; he got roasted pretty regularly by critics even as he was selling books in the millions; horror not being taken seriously as a genre, for one, and the enormous popularity he enjoyed naturally meant “well, he can’t actually be any good, can he?” But he was. Yes, there are some problematic stuff in his earlier work (the depictions of queer people aren’t great–but are there; he seriously has an issue with overweight people; and he does have a tendency to only use people of color as “magical” characters), but the world-building, the character building, the internal monologues of the characters, and the completely realistic way he develops and reveals the characters to the readers all the while telling a very compelling and fast moving story you cannot put down is all there from the very beginning. (Of course, the Straight White Male Literary Icons were the only people getting critical acclaim back then, your John Updikes and Saul Bellows and John Gardners and Philip Roths and William Styrons and so on…and the bestseller lists were peopled with mostly straight white men like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon and Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace and Herman Wouk–things are better now, I ‘d say) I’ve just finished the second act, in which Johnny is working as a private tutor for Chuck Chatsworth, with the inevitable call back to the lightning rod salesman’s futile foreshadowing attempt to sell the owner of Cathy’s, a steakhouse/hang out that always hosts Chuck’s high school graduation party. Johnny has a vision of the place being struck by lightning and burning rapidly to the ground with celebrating teenagers trapped inside. He tries to convince Chuck not to go, and even Chuck’s father, not quite believing, offers to host everyone at the Chatsworth house instead–getting about half the crowd…and it is during this get-together that Johnny’s horrible vision comes true and the news of the tragedy breaks. It’s really an incredibly powerful, well constructed scene, and the character of John Smith, the victim of fate who never really understands why he has been so cursed, is really one of King’s best.

I wish I could write a novel half as good as this one, which I am looking forward to finishing tonight. I think next up will be Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare.

And on that note, I need to get back to work and. get cleaned up for my appointment. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in on you again soon.

I Can’t Help It

Yesterday afternoon’s doctor visit went fairly well, all thing considered–I certainly feel much better after that visit than I ever felt after visiting my former primary care physician, who should lose his license (more on that later at another time, but I will share that story at some point not to shame my former physician but as an example of precisely why we have to advocate for ourselves with medical professionals)–and I have to say I am in a good place about everything medical this morning. I don’t have gout (yay!), but rather have psoriatic arthritis in my toe, which isn’t great–but it’s not so painful that I need medication for it. I just know that the toe joint hurts whenever I bend it. Better that than gout, right? And my blood sugar is high, but not quite pre-diabetic, so I do need to cut back on rich and fattening foods (which I should do anyway) and increase my exercise (well, once the arm is healed I will be all over that, thank you very much). On Halloween I have an early fitting at the dentist’s–meaning the day when the soft food diet becomes history and a bitter memory is nigh, and eventually the surgery will be here and then it’ll be recovery time.

Nothing like spending the holidays recovering from a surgery.

I spent some more time with The Dead Zone last night, and got through the part where Johnny’s psychic gift is actually exposed to the world at last, even as he is still recovering and going through horribly expensive surgeries (King was also ahead of the curve in that he was writing about how medical bills can bankrupt people long before it was in the public discourse). This was when he touched his physical therapist and saw that her house was on fire; it was witnessed by several people at the hospital and of course, someone leaks it to the press and reporters descend on his hospital. I am really enjoying this book this time around–I always do–but the days when I could just pick up an old favorite and revisit it are in the past; now I always think about the others in the piles and on the bookshelves that I’ve not gotten to quite yet. I also saw yesterday that rereading books was yet another example of anxiety functioning; drawing comfort from the familiar–you know how the book is going to end already, so the anxiety that comes from not knowing how it will end–which makes me read faster and unable to put a book down–is absent and you can just enjoy it. This is precisely why Paul and I used to always rewatch the rebroadcast of LSU football games on Sunday–so we could actually watch the game without the stress of worrying about the outcome; and there were often things we’d missed in the heat of the moment.

I also watched another episode of Moonlighting, which I am enjoying very much the second time around. It’s held up pretty well, outside of the occasional misogyny; and there’s a lot less of that than you’d think, given it was the 1980’s and misogyny was still rampant everywhere (not that it’s ever stopped, but shockingly things are better now than they were forty years ago). The chemistry between young Bruce Willis and a gorgeous Cybill Shepherd was off the charts–even if her character was a bit over-the-top angry sometimes; it’s easy to see why Addison was a fan favorite, even though she came into the show as the bigger name and no one knew who Willis was. But the show was going for the rapid-fire dialogue of the great screwball romantic comedies of classic Hollywood–His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey–that I absolutely have always loved.

Paul got home after I went to bed, and I was so dead to the world I couldn’t tell you when that was or what time, which is my way of saying I slept super well last night. We have a relatively light schedule at the office today so I should be able to catch up on all my work. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the pain management clinic–more surgery prep–but it’s also my work-at-home day, which means I made it through the week and to the weekend again. There’s also not an LSU game this weekend (it’s the pre-Alabama bye week) and I also looked at what games there are this weekend and yeah–nothing I particularly want to watch, so I should be productive this weekend, even if that means just reading.

I also watched the season premiere of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and doing some more thinking about my reality television viewing and why I am drawn to these shows about horrible people behaving badly. They used to be just a pleasurable, turn my mind off kind of entertainment; much as soaps used to be (and I watched plenty of those back in the day, which is a topic for another time as well) but something’s changed in the last few years, even before the pandemic, really; my mentality about these kinds of people has shifted in some ways that I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, I know they’ve always been terrible people–even the ones I liked–but I guess before I was able to just see them being horrible to each other and it was entertaining in a weird, performative way–like how you can’t help but look at a car crash when you pass one. The 2016 election and all that followed in its wake made me realize that these are terrible people and that probably spills over into other parts of their lives as well–including things like politics and social justice.

And do I really want to spent my off-time encouraging and feeding into the machine that makes these terrible people famous? And what does it say about me that I watch these shows so I can sit in judgment on them and their behavior and feel morally superior to them? It’s one thing when they’re fictional characters designed specifically to prey on your emotions–judging Monica Quartermaine on General Hospital for bad choices is one thing because she’s fictional. Her trials and tribulations are scripted for maximum drama, nor do they matter outside of the context of the program…it’s not real. It’s an entirely different thing to watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and judge Erica Girardi (which I’ve done plenty of, believe you me) when her life and behavior actually have real life consequences. She’s a real person, and what we watch on television is some of her reality but not all of it; we only see what the producers want us to see as they shape her narrative and influence how she is viewed. “Blaming the edit” has become widely mocked–you can’t get a bad edit, really, if you haven’t said or done something that can be used to make you look bad, but the reality is anyone can cherry-pick anything to make someone look bad–Fox, Newsmax, and OANN made a fortune doing that very thing. Don’t get me wrong; I have judged her many times and found her wanting, but at the same time…there is that element of well, she put herself out there to be criticized and judged, but does that make it okay? Does she deserve it?

So sometimes, even as I judge and roll my eyes, I do feel a bit squicky about watching. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the lie that the shows are real. They remind me of professional wrestling before Vince McMahon outed the sport as entertainment with predetermined results (to avoid the federal regulations of actual competitive sport and escape culpability for steroid abuse); fans swore it was absolutely 100% real, when those who weren’t fans could clearly see it was not.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May your Thursday be as marvelous as you are, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow.

Gloria

Wednesday Pay the Bills day has rolled around yet again! I slept well again last night–I’ve been getting very good sleep lately, which has been lovely–and I don’t feel tired the way I generally do on Wednesdays, which is kind of nice. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon so I have to leave work a little early, but not a big deal–this is a routine follow-up to all the tests she had ordered when I switched primary care physicians, which was a huge relief to my mind about everything–and I am going in for my next fitting for my teeth on Halloween morning. We’re having a pot luck at the office that day, so I am making a cheesecake–which I will probably do on Sunday so I don’t have to mess with it on Monday night, which I won’t want to do, guaranteed. It has been a hot minute since I’ve made a cheesecake, and I think this weekend I am going to make white bean chicken chili, too.

And no, I am not wearing a costume to work that day. I also have to go tape “My Reading Life” with Susan Larson that day, and yeah–not wearing a costume to the studio at UNO for this. I also can’t believe that it’s already almost November. LSU has a bye week this weekend, so technically there’s not any real reason to watch games this Saturday, but I will have it on in the background as always and hopefully there will be some good games on this weekend; I haven’t looked yet to see who is playing.

I also spent some time with The Dead Zone again last night, and marveling at the way the novel is constructed; I don’t think anyone today (other than perhaps King) could get away with structuring a book the way he did this one, but it actually, absolutely works 100%. One of the things I’d forgotten in the years since I’ve read the book the last time is how many point-of-view characters there are, and how King uses them to build the structure of the book. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the main character–John Smith, the most simple and basic male name of all time, no middle name, either–is in a terrible car accident and is in a coma for nearly five years, only to wake up with some psychic abilities. This is compelling and interesting enough–the concept of losing five years, how much the world and society can change in that short a period of time (even now, if you think about it, if someone went into a coma in October of 2018 and just woke up this month…think about everything that happened in that five year span, and then imagine having to get caught up on all of that after suffering a traumatic head injury and spending five years in a coma–with a psychic gift/curse of some sort on top of it. But that structure he uses–the first person point of view of the Castle Rock Strangler (Castle Rock’s first appearance in a King novel, too); the lightning rod salesman, and of course the book’s big bad, Greg Stillson (and yes, the similarities between Stillson and a real life politician struck me as far back as 2015)–all of these things are set-ups for story that comes later–the Castle Rock Strangler pov was something else–even all these years later the the words I’m so slick raise goosebumps on my skin. I’d also forgotten how sad the story actually is; Johnny’s mother’s descent into religious mania, in part triggered by his accident; his broken father, crushed by his son’s accident and losing his wife to insanity; Sarah, who was falling in love with him and would have married him but for the accident; and so on. As a teenager reading the book I marveled at how real all the characters were, how fully realized and actualized and developed; they seemed like people I would know and King’s marvelous skill at depicting the conflicting thoughts and impulses through internal monologues was something that blew me away, something I as a writer wanted to try to emulate.

I worked briefly on a short story last night; I wasn’t really tired when I got home, but Tug wanted to sleep in my lap and the story was a struggle, so it wasn’t hard for me to walk away from the computer, in all honesty. Tonight I am going to let him play with the red dot; he needs to play and exercise as he is a kitten, and I have to break myself of the oh Scooter just wants to sleep and never wants to play mentality; he had the zoomies again this morning and it amazes me how he can just leap and bounce off surfaces to launch to a new spot and then flies off the counter and gallops into the living room. My arms and legs are, of course, all scratched up (I also have a long scratch next to my nose; he launched onto my face from the ledge above the bed one night last week), but he’s so cute and adorable; it’s hard to stay mad at him even as he scampers over my keyboard and fucks things on the screen up.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and sorry I am so dull this morning. My life generally tends to be not all that exciting, really. Maybe tomorrow will be better.