Tag: The Rites of False Spring

Winter Wonderland

And now it’s Tuesday! Hope your Monday was lovely.

Yesterday I was tired; I didn’t sleep well on Sunday night but managed to still get quite a bit finished over the course of the day. There were tornadoes (YIKES!) on the North Shore, but I ran some errands on the way home in the rain and then wrote another chapter of the book–another shitty-ass chapter, but a chapter nonetheless–and also caught up on logging entries for the Bouchercon anthology ( as well as sending acknowledgement emails), and made progress on the email inbox, which was delightful. It’s always nice to feel like you’re getting somewhere rather than just spinning your wheels, isn’t it?

I also spent some time thinking about my short story, “Solace in a Dying Hour,” which is what I’ve renamed “The Rites of False Spring” (which is a great title and I will recycle, it’s just not right for this particular story); I really like the new title, it’s from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Tamerlane”; I was paging through a collection of his poetry and that line jumped out at me, and I thought, you know what, that title fits the story you need to write better than the one it currently has and so decided to swap them out.

I woke up before the alarm this morning, and I do feel rested–the upcoming shower will undoubtedly shake off the cobwebs, at least one would hope so–but once I had finished writing and cleaning the kitchen last evening, I was a little too tired to actually do any reading, so I just sat in my chair waiting for Paul to come home while watching Youtube videos about ancient Egypt; the 18th dynasty to be exact, and primarily about the heretic pharaoh, Akhenaten, who is just absolutely fascinating to me, and someone I would love to write about sometime–alas, it would require ever so much more research than I have time to do while working, of course, but someday I will make the young adult book ideas I have based in Egyptian history to fruition. (I love when I think about the books I will someday write–the ones that require more research than I have the time to do while juggling everything I must juggle now; as though retirement will eventually provide me suddenly with a lot of free time…which I have already become aware is nonsensical dreaming, since even taking time off from work inevitably involves time being lost to unforeseeable yet easily predictable distractions. Hell, just trying to carve time out of the day to go to the gym is a process of if I go what will I not be able to get done?)

We continue to wind our way through the original Gossip Girl, which is quite fun. I cannot imagine why we never indulged in it the first time around–probably the same reason we never indulged in either The Vampire Diaries or The Originals, assuming we weren’t the right audience for them–but I have no desire to read the books at all, and we’ve also noted continuity errors that are just sloppy writing; “oh, we need to completely forget about this in order to make this episode happen”, which often is annoying–like how i never forgave the Dynasty writers for the massive cheat out of the Moldavian Massacre season finale. I am also highly amused by the Dan Humphrey talented writer who wants to be a writer story–why is it that movie and television writers never understand how writing actually works? I love how he can, in one night, write a brilliant short story–without revision or rewrite at all; no one ever gets anything right in the first fucking draft–as well as the fact that as a seventeen-year-old he got a story published in the New Yorker, yet is worried about getting into Yale and his future as a writer. Um, if a seventeen-year-old got a story into the New Yorker, agents would be lining up for him and he probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about getting into Yale; every university with a strong writing program would be lining up with scholarship offers–faculty wouldn’t have stories in the New Yorker. None of the writing classes I ever took in college ever emphasized the importance of revisions, editing, and rewrites; that’s the one thing I wish I would have learned myself while I was in college.

I am also at the stage in writing a book where I am absolutely certain it’s horrible and I’ve lost my ability to write and this is the book that will decimate my career once and for all, so I guess what I am saying is things are back to normal in the Lost Apartment.

And on that note, I am going to head into the spice mines. Happy Tuesday, Constant Reader.

Academic

And just like that, it’s Saturday again, and huzzah to everyone for making it through another week. It’s another beautiful morning here in New Orleans; the sun already high and shining bright, the sky bright blue. I have errands to run and the gym to get to, and then I am planning on spending the rest of the day reading the manuscript and editing it. It will be a full day here in the Lost Apartment, and I relish getting back to work on my book. I hate being behind–this was the month I was supposed to spend getting caught up on everything else and finishing short stories so next month I could focus on Chlorine–but delays and things happen, as always, and sure, I am in that time of life where one is acutely aware of how quickly the sand is slipping through the hourglass–but I have also learned to not beat myself up over things I have little control over. I have no control over whether I sleep well, for example, and I have no control over my energy levels. I can do the best that I can, but I exert only so much control over any of those things.

Not allowing myself to get upset or stressed over things I cannot control is a lesson I am still learning, alas.

I often feel pulled in many directions (and am fully aware that this is probably the case for everyone; it seems as though everyone is having a rough time since the pandemic shut down the world last year–almost a full year ago; we closed down services at my day job on March 16th) with an inevitable amount of endless tasks for everything I am involved in, and usually every day I have an idea of what I want and/or need to get done with every day; and yet I never achieve those goals because inevitably something new pops in and/or pops up that requires attention of some sort from me, and this inevitably results in me not getting to everything that needs getting to, which then makes the to-do list seem even more endless, and on and on. Part of the problem I’ve been having since the pandemic altered everything is my inability to sit down and make an actual to-do list–because the to-do list would inevitably require me to get through all of my emails, and I sometimes have neither the strength nor the patience to work my way through them all. Right now in my primary in-box I have 56 unread emails–I’ve already deleted the trek–and there’s about another 100 or so in there I’ve already read that probably need a response, or an addition to my to-do list.

I also remembered last night, as Paul and I watched the LSU gymnastics team defeat Missouri, that I’ve never finished watching two shows I really liked and was enjoying that he didn’t–Perry Mason on HBO Max and Penny Dreadful: City of Angels on Showtime. So those, along with a rewatch binge of Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, should go on my list of things to watch while I am making condom packs–or when I am done with work for the day and Paul’s not home. I was quite delighted that he came home from the office so we could watch the gymnastics; I am not really seeing a lot of him these days and so those moments when he is home are more to be cherished and enjoyed because of their rarity. I am a Festival widow every March, really; but this year more so than any other I am really looking forward to the Festival being over.

I also would like to get back into reading some more…I’m not sure what in my brain is broken, but for some reason I can’t read anything other than the chapter of so of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln that I get through every morning. I think it’s a combination of all the things I have hanging over my head, quite frankly, that keeps me from reading–and as I’ve also said, watching television or a movie or even just Youtube videos is much more passive than active and requires little to no brain power. I did come up with a couple of great titles yesterday for short stories as I made my condom packs and continued watching videos about queer representation in films and television from the 1960’s through the 1990’s; there was a lovely little video yesterday of how the Queer Cruise videos guy was helped to come out by viewing The Rocky Horror Picture Show when he was in high school; and that got me thinking about my own history with Rocky Horror, and what it meant to me; perhaps yet another essay someday. Is that still shown as a midnight movie? I would imagine not, given the pandemic and the fact that’s been on television and available to purchase on tape or download now for decades; I remember thinking the first time it aired on television well, that’s the end of that and it honestly did feel like the end of an era. I imagine many freaks and weirdos and queer kids no longer need something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a gateway to their own worlds and the possibilities that life holds for them…there’s more and more queer rep all the time, in books, movies, plays, and television; although I would imagine in more repressive parts of the country Rocky Horror would still be a revelation.

And now I am thinking about writing a short story or a book about a murder built around a midnight showing of the movie. Oy, it really never ends…

I also like this other idea for a story I came up with yesterday: “The Rites of False Spring.” I scribbled down a lot of notes about that one.

And on that note, the spice won’t mine itself, so I should probably head on into the mines.