Yesterday I wrote 2700 words, which was lovely. Two more chapters and I will be at the midway point of the first draft of the Scotty book! Huzzah! I do feel like most of those words were crap, but I advanced the plot, I advanced the story, and we’re percolating right along, which was truly, well and indeed, lovely. I hope to reach the midway point of the book by the weekend, which is when I am hoping to finish revising “Don’t Look Down” and “My Brother’s Keeper,” and maybe even “The Problem with Autofill.” Huzzah! I love that I am working again, and I am trying to keep my confidence in my work up. It’s so easy to get distracted, it’s fucking easy to hit that downward spiral, and I WILL NOT HAVE THAT THIS YEAR.
Ain’t gonna happen, bitches.
I finished reading Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed this week, and I really enjoyed it. It really made me think about a lot of things, not the least of which are the on-line social media lynch mobs. I mean, there are so many truly terrible people on Twitter, trolls and bots and so forth, that it’s easy to forget that some of the people we see posting vile things, or things we totally disagree with, are people, just like we are; even though we may not agree with anything they do. I know it surprises people that I have conservative friends, but I do; and as long as they aren’t nasty and trollish, I like having them around on my social media. They do sometimes help me see things in ways that I’ve never thought about before, that may not ever have occurred to me, and I do appreciate that insight. The fact that I can see their posts and comments means that they haven’t blocked me; they may have hidden me–and to be fair, the shirtless men that get me banned all-too-frequently on Facebook might be a bit much for my conservative friends–but I also never see them saying anything homophobic or anything that makes me think they buy into the homophobic bullshit that is so frequent on their side of the spectrum; whether knowing me has anything to do with that, I don’t know. I’d like to think so, at any rate.
My next non-fiction is John Berendt’s The City of Fallen Angels. I’d forgotten I even had the book, to be honest; I was rearranging and reorganizing bookshelves the other day and there it was. VENICE!!! How could I resist? So, it’s on the nightstand for my before-I-go-to-sleep reading. I’m also itching to get back to Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes. Seriously, pre-order the hell out of this one. You won’t be sorry.
I also read some short stories. First up is “The Misfits” by Naomi Rand, from Crime Plus Music, edited by Jim Fusilli:
Where would you have been without me, go on, tell me that why don’t you, you ungrateful bitch. I made you.
That was his parting shot to me. Johnny O believed that until the minute he cast his eyes upon you, you didn’t actually exist. My ex-manager thought I was some piece of clay he breathed that lousy cigarette breath into to coax to life.
I believed otherwise. My version is that when we met, I had already been alive and well and living in Calabasas for seventeen years. I, Julie Weston, was a senior at Calabasas High. I’d already been accepted to my first choice school, UCLA. And why not? I had a 4.0 average. Plus, I was captain of the girl’s swimteam, lynchpin of the debate team, and to top it off, I was dating the boy most likely to be crowned prom king. So really I did exist before. Not only did I exist, I was well on my way to making my doting parents proud. But you be the judge.
I fucking loved this story; it was amazing. A chance encounter in Tower Records, and Julie joins an all-girl band called the Misfits, which begins a quick rise to stardom in the late 1970’s. It kind of reminded me of the true story about the Runaways–the all girl rock band which launched Joan Jett and Lita Ford–and some of the horrible allegations that have come out in recent years about their manager, how the girls were manipulated and/or sexually/emotionally/physically abused; I couldn’t get that out of my head as I read the story. It’s absolutely terrific, with a great ending. I have to say, I am loving reading my way through Crime Plus Music.
Next was “Rooms by the Sea” by Nicholas Christopher, from In Sunlight or in Shadow and editor Lawrence Block:
There were two doors into this house. The first, in a small unfurnished room, opened directly onto the sea. It could only be entered from the water. When it was left wide open on a sunny day, the light slanting into the room illuminated half of the near wall on a diagonal. As the sun descended to the horizon, the wall could be read like a sundial: its illuminated half shrinking until the entire wall had darkened.
The second door, in a foyer on the other side of the house, opened onto a rough path that wound through a forest and ended in an obscure park at the city limits. The fountain in that park, centered by stone mermaids that spout water, had been dry for months. The buildings that lines the city streets were red and brown. The sun ate into their brick, sending up puffs of dust. At dusk their blue windows turned amber. On the fire escapes women were smoking and reading, gazing up occasionally at the river of bruised clouds that flowed to the sea. One of them, a redhead, was reading a slim memoir entitled Rooms by the Sea, written a century ago. The author, Claudine Rementeria, was married to a Basque shipping magnate who had immigrated to America. She herself was Basque, and shortly before her untimely death at thirty, she wrote the book in her native language, Euskera, in order to please her husband. Aside from a small private printing at the time–of which only a few copies have survived–her book hadn’t been translated and published in English until recently. The redhead, Carmen Ronson, the thirty-year-old great-granddaughter of Claudine Rementeria, owned both the English translation and one of the extant Euskera copies.
This story read more as a fable; a literary story rather than a crime story, with a haunting tone to it; Christopher did a great job creating a mood that carried through the whole story with the rhythm of the words. It’s more of a magical realism story; a fable, if you will, relating the Basques back to Atlantis and…it’s hard to describe. It’s quite good.
And now, back to the spice mines.
Queer and Loathing in America 