Tag: The Witch’s House

The Itchy Glowbo Blow

Wednesday and we’ve made it halfway through the week, Constant Reader. Didn’t think it was quite possible, did you, when Monday dawned so early and ugly? We expecting thunderstorms today in New Orleans–it feels cooler and damp this morning, but I don’t know when we are supposed to have said storms; probably this afternoon. I slept really well again last night–it’s been lovely getting good sleep lately. I felt a bit tired yesterday when I got home from work, and so took it a little easier on myself when I got home. I managed to get caught up on my emails (such a weird feeling) and did some writing last night. I think I’m still a bit in the post-book malaise phase of things, so writing anything isn’t easy (not that it ever is) but Paul got home late so was left to my own devices once I finished writing for the evening. I did watch some documentaries on Youtube about the Hapsburgs last night (I also discovered an English-language biography about her–Margaret of Austria–which I added to the my list of books to buy…which is almost as out of control as my TBR stack, which is now essentially the entire living room), and I read a short story in Hitchcock’s My Favorites in Suspense anthology; a dark little Charlotte Armstrong story called “The Enemy.” Armstrong was a writer I discovered as a tween, when Mom let me join the Mystery Guild Book Club; I got an omnibus by her (The Witch’s House, Mischief, The Dream Walker) which I greatly enjoyed. I rediscovered Armstrong thanks to the work of both Sarah Weinman and Jeffrey Marks, which enabled me to continue reading in her canon.

Armstrong won an Edgar for Best Novel for A Dram of Poison, a charming if dark little story of suspense; maybe the rare Edgar winner where there’s no dead body but the plot has to do with preventing an accidental death? It’s very clever, and incredibly charming, but beneath that clever charming surface it says something dark and awful about human nature and character–people who are unhappy spreading their misery to others. Armstrong was also made a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. Her work may seem a bit dated in the modern day–technology and society have moved on from the times she lived and wrote in–but I think it’s well worth the read. “The Enemy” is that same style of writing as Dram, a serious subject presented charmingly, and the death of a child’s dog the catalyst for an exposé of something darker and nastier…and yes, the plot also hinges on the darkness a human being is capable of creating. It’s a really clever, if slightly dated, story–and you can’t help but smile or laugh at the last line of the story. I am really enjoying these time capsules into the past, to tell you the truth. I bought a few more of these anthologies on eBay yesterday, too. It’s nice to have short story collections around for those times when my brain can’t really focus on reading an entire novel.

I have been listening to Carol Goodman’s The Drowning Tree on Audible, but I may have to break down and finish actually reading a physical copy because I can’t keep listening every day and with my memory a literal thing of the past these days, I’m not sure I remember enough of the story to pick it up again this weekend. I also picked up copies of her new novel, The Bones of the Story, along with Paul Tremblay’s new short story collection, The Beast You Are. I do like Tremblay’s writing–A Head Full of Ghosts was one of the best horror novels of the last decade, and I’ve liked everything else of his that I’ve read–and I think this may even be his second collection. I am also hoping to pull together another collection myself this year–This Town and Other Macabre Stories–but I am not sure if I will have the time. I also got the copy edits for a short story I contributed to an anthology in my inbox last night, so that has to go onto the to-do list, and I still have page proofs to get through. But for the most part, it seems as though I have a guilt-free free weekend, which one can never truly go wrong with, either. I’ll have some errands to run, of course–I always have errands to run–but there’s no stress or pressure on me either, which is kind of nice. I think maybe that’s the reason I’ve been sleeping so well this week? No pressure and my schedule has kind of normalized, gotten back to normal, settled back into the routine my body is used to, perhaps?

Yes, that makes total sense to me.

I also have ideas and thoughts pinging around in my head. I’m itching to get back to the works I have in progress; I want to get a strong first draft of two different novels finished before I leave for Bouchercon next (!!!) month. I actually, finally, made a to-do list yesterday; I am hoping that I can get my life back on track the way it was before the pandemic and the madness of the last few years. That doesn’t mean that my blood pressure won’t continue to go up predicated on the constant assaults on everyone who’s not a cisgender straight man from the demons on the right–which is part of the reason my interest in the Civil War and the 1850’s, that terrible lead-up to the split, has been heightened these last few months. I do see a lot of similarities in the split between conservative v. progressive today, which was predicated along the lines of abolitionist/pro-human trafficking back then. One of the books my father gave me to read was called Southerners in Blue, which was a novelization of the true story (albeit poorly written) of a Union sympathizer and others like him in Winston County, Alabama. (If you’re not familiar with Winston County, the easiest way to explain it is this county did not vote for secession and essentially stated that if Alabama had the right to secede from the Union, the county had the right to secede from Alabama. They did not secede from Alabama, just said they had the right to predicated on the secession arguments being presented, but have gone down in Alabama history and lore as having actually seceded even though they most certainly did not) Basically, in some of the northern counties of Alabama there was basically a second civil war, between the “secesh” and the “Unionist” supporters, and the mountains of north Alabama were filled with deserters from the Confederate Army, This was also novelized into a book called Tories of the Hills by Wesley Sylvester Thompson, which is incredibly rare (my uncle has a copy, which my aunt won’t let be removed from her house–wise, as I would totally steal it). I had read another book also while I was up there, about the Kansas-Missouri border war–which had a decided “secesh” slant to it, of course, while complaining that all previous histories were “unsympathetic to the Missouri slave-owner point of view”. I’m sure he had a point, but simply because there are two sides to every story doesn’t mean each side deserves to be heard, or that each side’s opinion has equal weight. It did spark my interest, though, and I really think there’s a book in this little-known history of north Alabama. Again, it would be difficult to write–lots of potential landmines there–but it’s also, as I said, not very well known and with today’s tribalism mentality–not to mention how loud the Lost Cause fanatics are–it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the notion that the South wasn’t monolithic in its thinking.

Because no group of people are, really, which is why I don’t like being asked for a gay perspective on anything; I can only speak for myself.

But while I continue to research this aspect of history and try to figure out a way to get a novel out of it, I am going to map out two others. One is already in progress, and the other is a New Orleans ghost story I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time now. The trick is to make it different from every other ghost story I’ve already written. Good luck with that, Mr. Repetitive!

Heavy heaving sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.

I Can’t Stop Loving You

Thursday, Thursday, what a day for a daydream.

The weather took a turn last evening; sometime after the sun settled in the western sky a storm blew in, with high winds and a lot of rain and a significant temperature drop as well. It was quite a shock when I went to get in the car after work last night; I’d worn a polo style shirt to work–even had to use the air conditioning in the car (IN EARLY MARCH), and so was freezing and shivering by the time I walked across the lot to my car. It’s gray and dreary outside right now as well, but I don’t think it’s very cold–it’s certainly not noticeably cold in the Lost Apartment, which means its undoubtedly warmer outside.

I had a lot of errands and things to do yesterday before heading into the office for my half-day; and one of those errands was, of course, going to the gym. Now that I am adding weight every week, it’s getting to be more work and more strain on my muscles, but it’s a gradual thing and quite nice to be working hard again. I don’t really have any goal as far as appearance goes–which was what my workouts were always predicated on before; I initially started working out to get in better shape and improve my health, but vanity soon began playing a part in it as well. I think after 2000 was when I started focusing on peaking my body at Southern Decadence and then again at Mardi Gras; Id always clean up my eating for a few months before and also do more, and more intensive, cardio in those months so that I’d look my best for those occasions. Decadence and Mardi Gras actually make the most sense for me to use as goals for my workouts, but I don’t know if I want to even think that way again. I don’t know that vanity is going to be enough of a motivator this time around…maybe it will eventually come back into play again, but it hasn’t reared its ugly head yet. Anyway, with the extra weight now the workouts are harder and I am feeling them a lot more–especially the legs. But I am not sore this morning–I’ve not woken up sore the morning after a workout since I got back to it–but my muscles are certainly tired afterwards, and for the rest of the day. But this morning I woke up feeling somewhat rested–there’s some tightness in the hip flexors, but that’s to be expected.

But it feels so damned good to be working out again!

Tomorrow, though, I think I’m going to wait until after work to go to the gym. It’s hard to go in the morning and then go to the office, even on a half-day, so yeah, I think it’s going to be better to go after work. I”m pretty pleased with myself–I’ve resisted the temptation to skip every single time–even to the point where I don’t even think about skipping, which is pretty awesome. I’ve only missed my Wednesday workout on Ash Wednesday, and that was primarily because the gym didn’t open until noon that day so I couldn’t go.

I did get sort of caught up on my emails yesterday morning, but of course this morning they are out of control again, which is certainly Sisyphean, isn’t it? I’m not quite awake yet this morning, so I probably won’t be able to make any progress on them until at least after I finish my second cup of coffee this morning. I also just went out to feed the outdoor kitties, and it’s brisk out there; I definitely need my skull cap today.

Yay. But in fairness, the warmer weather earlier this week was definitely an aberration.

I wrote another few sentences last night on my Sherlock tale, which was something–given how tired I was last night when I got home from work–so I am counting that as a win. Progress has been ridiculously slow on this story, but I am hoping to get through it this weekend, as well as starting to revise two other stories (I remembered there’s another anthology with a due date at the end of the month); i really need to make a to-do list this morning, and get back to getting organized as well as stay there once I have achieved that glorious state. I have too many things going on at the same time now for me to allow myself to remain as scattered as I’ve been; I was beginning to feel like I had a handle on everything and then of course it was Carnival and I’ve been treading water ever since. I always feel like there’s something I’m forgetting, and then it turns out that of course, there was indeed something I was forgetting.

In fact, yesterday I was talking to a client about the parade deaths this year, and it popped into my head that I remembered how–everything is material, remember–those tragedies could work in a short story I already had in progress, so I of course made a note and perhaps–just perhaps–I need to go through my notebook and my journal and start tracking the things I need to get done better. I remember I used to make a monthly to-do list, as a macro, and then use that to make my weekly to-do list, and then would make a daily one every morning. Extreme? Perhaps, but it worked and I was always able to get everything done that I needed to get done.

I also started looking through The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury last night–you know I’ve chosen her Mischief as my next reread–and I was reading the introduction by Alice Cromie, and thinking, yes, this is all very true, Armstrong’s heroines were all women going about their every day lives and then had to buckle up and get to the bottom of something. I also reread the first page of The Witch’s House, and Armstrong’s skill at sucking her readers immediately into the story was incredibly apparent. I seriously had to resist reading more; Mischief is the reread, not The Witch’s House, but I might definitely have to come back around to it.

I also had a brilliant inspiration for “Festival of the Redeemer” yesterday. I admire Daphne du Maurier’s short stories immensely, particularly the longer ones, and I don’t precisely remember why or how this inspiration for the story came to me, but I am very pleased with it, and it makes the story much more du Maurier-like, which naturally made me like it even more. I always have trouble with the middles of my stories and novels, as you are probably already aware, and this idea is simply perfect, especially given the way the story opens. I also discovered, when I got home last night, that I had actually written a lot more on my story “You Won’t See Me” than I thought I had, which is always a plus. Sometimes I think I’ve written something and I actually haven’t; I just thought about it, and the thought is so vivid that later I think I actually wrote it all down and didn’t.

Or I did and lost the document, which is also always a possibility.

Okay, I can feel the caffeine kicking in, so it’s back to the spice mines with me.

10001568_10152344893366473_852517041_n

Act Naturally

Iris Saturday, always one of my favorite days of Carnival. I love the Krewe of Iris, going all the way back to my very first Carnival, as a visitor in 1995, when the ladies buried me in beads. They have continued to do so, every year, since we moved here in 1996. I love this parade so much that I opened Mardi Gras Mambo, aka Scotty III, at the Iris parade. I had originally intended to make the entire book about the Krewe of Iris–Scotty’s sister, Rain, belongs and rides every year–but life interfered, as it often does, and Mardi Gras Mambo went into a different direction.

Which, of course, doesn’t rule out that I won’t someday write another Carnival novel, and build the story around the Krewe of Iris.

Yesterday was some day. It was sunny but horribly cold–low fifties, high forties–and I had a gazillion errands to run–and because five parades were going to run last night, I had to run them early for fear of not being able to park near the Lost Apartment and having to lug everything several blocks, which would have made me homicidal. I also went to the gym before I went down to the Quarter to do condom outreach; and I skipped the cardio, given I was going to be walking several miles as well as standing for hours. I also swung by the library to pick up the book I’d requested: Four, Five and Six by Tey; which is an omnibus collection of three Tey novels. I’d wanted to reread The Daughter of Time, and as it was the only Tey I read and this omnibus was available, I thought, why not? The other two included are The Singing Sands and A Shilling for Candles. It’s a very old edition, much handled and with stained pages, which makes it seem even cooler to me. I also took down my copy of The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury, the omnibus I’d gotten from the Mystery Guild as a child that introduced me to Armstrong (this is not the original copy I had; I bought it again on eBay several years ago) which included Mischief, The Witch’s House, and The Dream Walker, as I had an eye to rereading Mischief….although someone recently mentioned to me that The Witch’s House is very similar to Stephen King’s Misery–and I thought, blimey, it kind of is, and so I may reread it as well.

But I need to finish Ali Brandon’s Double Booked for Death first.

Anyway, the walk to the Quarter was invigorating; the cold once I was down there and no longer moving not so much. I wore a T-shirt under my sweatshirt; a work T-shirt over the sweatshirt, and tights under my jeans and yet was still cold. I lasted three hours out there, then walked home during Muses and Babylon (both rescheduled from Thursday; neither had marching bands or walking groups, so they literally flew past as I made my way up St. Charles. Paul managed to get our annual shoe–and was home when I got here. We went out to the parade route to catch Hermes and d’Etat, with every intention of staying out there for the rest of the parades, but eventually were too exhausted and came inside. Hey, we saw four parades. And while today is also cold, at least the sun will be out for Iris and Tucks, which will make it a lot more bearable. It’ll be cold for Endymion tonight–so glad we’re not going to be out there. The closest the Endymion route comes to our house is Lee Circle (I hate that it hasn’t been officially renamed, but I get it–the city officials have been busy being corrupt, dealing with the Hard Rock, the issues with the fire department, and of course, the tragic death during Nyx on Wednesday night), and it’s always packed down there. I think Endymion also had to be rerouted, maybe? All of the parades turn towards the river at Canal Street this year (because of the closing of Canal by the Hard Rock Hotel disaster site) which also made walking home last night ever so much easier. Muses hadn’t reached Poydras when I got there, so I was able to crossover there and walk up the sidewalk side of the parade. I caught some things–not much, no shoe bracelet this year for the first time ever–and then after I was past the circle there was Babylon right behind. Dinner last evening was a corn dog.

We wound up hanging out with our neighbors and folks from the neighborhood, and having quite a lovely time, despite the cold. Hermes’ floats are beautiful, d’Etat is rude and satirical, but we were too exhausted and tired and cold to wait out the fifth and final parade of the evening.

I also slept very well–yesterday was quite a taxing day for the old Gregalicious. I even stayed in bed for another two hours; I woke just before seven, but was able to nap intermittently for the next two hours before I finally decided to go ahead and get up.

And now I have to do some cleaning and get ready for the day. Iris is rolling in less than an hour, which means it’ll be here around noonish.

Happy Saturday!

1891003_10152320755851754_1640336919_n

Major Tom (Coming Home)

Tuesday morning.

I made an enormous decision regarding the point-of-view in the WIP; one that I should have made a long time ago: instead of third person point of view, I am going to revise and rewrite it in the first person. It makes more sense; I don’t know why I didn’t do it that way in the first place when I wrote the first draft; but that was so fucking long ago who knows why I did anything back then? I revised the first chapter yesterday, and it seems much more real, much more immediate, and much more involving than it did before. I think this was, indeed, a wise decision–at least until next week, when I am pounding my head against the wall again and wondering why the hell I decided to do it this way?

Why am I a writer again? Because I clearly hate myself.

Sunday Paul and I binge-watched It’s the End of the F**king World, a Netflix original series, and were quite taken with it. We wound up watching the entire season Sunday night–the episodes are only about twenty-one minutes long–and the two young kids who play the leads, Alyssa and James, are really quite appealing. James lives alone with his father and is a self-diagnosed psychopath; when Alyssa first crossed his path in the school cafeteria, he decides she’s interesting and he decides to kill her. He’s been killing animals for a while now, and has decided to move on to people, and she’s as good a victim as anyone. Alyssa lives with her mother and her perfectly awful stepfather, who have two kids of their own, and it’s obvious Alyssa isn’t wanted there, and her mother is too dominated by her new husband to stand up to him or for her. As a result, Alyssa has a bit of an anger issue. She also hasn’t seen her father since she was eight and he left her mother–but even though he doesn’t see her he sends her a birthday card every year. These two oddballs decide to steal James’ father’s car and run away together…but it continues its dark path. James and Alyssa are, if nothing else, oddly compelling and you can’t help but root for them to find some kind of a happy ending, although the events that keep happening to them make that virtually impossible; their crimes gradually get worse and worse, and I couldn’t help but think of them in terms of Bonnie and Clyde (no doubt because I am still reading Pictures at a Revolution) and Natural Born Killers; they didn’t mean to start committing crimes but once they did, they had no choice but to keep committing crimes. It’s all kind of noirish and charming; funny yet disturbing, and incredibly original. We also get to know the two–as they grow closer to each other and start to truly care about each other, they start sharing their childhood traumas and frankly, with all that scar tissue it’s no wonder they didn’t fit in anywhere.

I’ll be very curious to see how the second season turns out.

I also have two more short stories to discuss.

First up, I returned to Lawrence Block’s In Sunlight or in Shadow for Stephen King’s “The Music Room”:

The Enderbys were in their music room–so they called it, although it was really just the spare bedroom. Once they had thought it would be little James or Jill Enderby’s nursery, but after ten years of trying, it seemed increasingly unlikely that a Baby Dear would arrive out of the Nowhere and into the Here. They had made their peace with childlessness. AT least they had work, which was a blessing in a year when men were still standing in bread lines. There were fallow periods, it was true, but when the job was on, they could afford to think of nothing else, and they both liked it that way.

Mr. Enderby was reading The New York Journal-American,  a new daily not even halfway through its first year of publication. It was sort of a tabloid and sort of not. He usually began with the comics, but when they were on the job he turned to the city news first, scanning through the stories quickly, especially the police blotter.

This short story is one of the creepiest things I’ve read during this edition of the Short Story Project. King is always good for creepy stories, but the casual, calm matter of fact way the Enderbys go about their ‘business’ is what sets this story apart. The fact that they sit around and chat, quite normally, about the ‘business’ as though they were talking about nothing more important than the weather is very chilling; the kind of thing that would make a lovely episode of Twilight Zone. Very well done, very creepy.

Next I read “The Splintered Monday,” by Charlotte Armstrong, which Sarah Weinman included in her terrific anthology Troubled Daughters Twisted Wives. This story was originally publishing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was a nominee for the Best Short Story Edgar.

Mrs. Sarah Brady awakened in the guest room of her nephew Jeff’s house, and for a moment or two was simply glad for the clean page of a new day. Then she found her bookmark between the past and the future. Oh, yes. Her sister, Alice, had died on Monday, been buried on Wednesday. (Poor Alice.) This was Saturday. Mrs. Brady’s daughter, Del, was coming, late today, to drive her mother back home tomorrow.

Now that she knew where she was, Mrs. Brady cast a brief prayer into time and space, then put her lean old feet to the floor.

The house was very still. For days now it has seemed muffled, everyone moving in a quiet gloom, sweetened by mutually considerate behavior. Mrs. Brady had a feeling that her own departure would signal a lift of some kind in the atmosphere. And she did not particularly like the idea.

I first discovered Charlotte Armstrong when I was in junior high school; she was still alive and still being published, and was still rather popular. I got a Charlotte Armstrong Omnibus from the Mystery Guild; the novels included were The Witch’s House, Mischief, and The Dream Walker. I read and greatly enjoyed the first two–Mischief was made into a movie starring Marilyn Monroe, retitled Don’t Bother to Knock–and they weren’t like anything I’d ever read up to that point. I did read some more of her books back then, and I never forgot her. I was quite pleased when Sarah, along with Jeffrey Marks, began shining a light on Ms. Armstrong and bringing her back to her proper place in the history of the genre.

“The Splintered Monday” is a great example of Ms. Armstrong’s gifts as a writer. The premise, as seen above in the opening paragraphs that set the stage for the story, is quite simple. A woman, who was a hypochondriac but also ill–she was, as we learn as the story progresses, a narcissist as well who insisted on being at the center of everything, and everything was all about her–has died. Her sister was visiting and her sister is quite aware of what the deceased Alice was like. But something is off, something is wrong, and Mrs. Brady can’t quite put her finger on it…so she decides to find out for herself. At first, she doesn’t learn anything useful; and it’s more along the lines that everyone is coddling her, protecting her from the truth about her sister’s death for ‘her own good’ which annoys the crap out of her. But someone in the house has a very good reason for keeping things from Mrs. Brady…because if Mrs. Brady knows everything, she’ll put the truth together and will catch a very clever killer. Armstrong’s mastery is evident in every paragraph; there is a sweetness to her writing and a sweetness to her main characters, but there’s also a very strong sense of right and wrong, of common sense, and a heroic purpose to their investigations. This is why I love Armstrong so much…and was thrilled to read this story.

And now, back to the spice mines.

13233127_1085752474819105_4062313888774090464_n