Tag: Tubby and Coo’s Bookstore

Rock the Casbah

Wednesday morning, can’t trust that day. Not going to work on Monday messed my body clock up and thus set my brain on “not normal! not normal!” and so I am all messed up. All day yesterday I kept thinking it was Monday; this morning I woke up thinking it’s Tuesday, which it obviously is not. I am doing a really good job this morning of not letting anxiety take hold of my mind–it’s trying, really hard–because to complete the “leave” process from work I need a form filled out and signed by my surgeon. (My fault, had I paid more attention I would have known and could have taken it with me Monday morning; instead I had to fax it to his office yesterday and they will send it back today–which has me anxious.) It’s very weird to think that I’ll be out of work for three weeks–very very weird–this is the longest break from going in since the quarantine; and even then I had things to do at home. This is three weeks of not doing any day job work, having no day job responsibilities, and the entire days free to do with as I wish–within the context of being limited by the surgery recovery. I do plan on catching up on a lot of reading, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even be able to get some writing done, during my period of limited activity. At this point I really just want to be done with the surgery and be well into the recovery process.

I did a book event last night virtually with Tubby and Coo’s Bookstore, with Jean Redmann and H. N. Hirsch, which was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it. Of course, having to use my brain and try to be smart and funny exhausted me, so Tug and I immediately repaired to my chair for an episode of Moonlighting, and some other Youtube videos before I finally went to bed. Paul didn’t get home until after I went to bed, so I didn’t get to see him at all yesterday; it’s that time of year again. I spent some time rereading Mississippi River Mischief and paging through Death Drop again; I’ve fallen behind on my blatant self-promotional posts because my creativity for that has kind of dried up–I’m not very good at it to begin with, really–but I know I need to do more, so I hoped looking through the books after talking about them for an hour would inspire me to find more things to post about them. We’ll see how that worked out today, won’t we?

I need to do some cooking this week, too–I wanted to make my mac-and-cheese (something else relatively soft but very delicious and filling) and I need to make a red velvet cheesecake, too. I don’t think I am going to go into the office on Friday, after all–Tug has to get another shot that morning, and there’s something else I have to do but can’t quite remember what it is as of yet, and at some point I need to take Paul to Costco to pick up his new glasses. But that means I’d have to do all this cooking and baking tonight, and I feel pretty confident in saying “yeah, I’m not going to be in the mood to do that tonight” because it’s a lot of fucking work and I also need to run errands on my way home. (See what I mean about it being later in the week than I think it is? I keep thinking oh you can do it tomorrow night because no I can’t.) I guess it will depend on how I feel when I get finished with everything I have to do tonight, and how much attention my sweet little needy kitten will need once I get home–because once I am in that chair and he’s a purring kitty donut, it’s over for the night. One thing I do find adorable about him (there are many many things I find adorable about him) is the way he sleeps on me. He’ll start out as a kitty donut, and then gradually stretch out on his back until his is sprawled across me full length on his back, legs akimbo, and dead to the world with his neck fully extended. I’m so glad we got him and I’m so glad he feels so safe and comfortable and loved and at home. (He did make a few appearances in the on-line event last night.)

I also have those questions we were asked last night, so I probably could turn those into a self-interview as a means of self-promotion. I’ve done that before, after all, and it always works. Hmmm. Something to ponder the rest of this morning, no doubt.

I am finding the imminent death of Twitter or the Social Medium Formerly Known as Twitter slow and painful to watch, yet for some reason I cannot seem to bring myself to deactivate my account there. I don’t worry that someone else will grab my user name and create a fraudulent Greg Herren account; why would anyone do that to me when there are any number of other, more important people you could impersonate to greater effect than me, after all. (Besides, there’s nothing stopping anyone from impersonating me on social media as it is; someone could be doing it as I type this and I have no idea) Social media used to be a lot of fun in the olden days before Q-Anon and MAGA and conspiracy theories and so forth; in other words, in the golden era pre-small-dicked-billionaire. There were always issues with Twitter and trolls; we always were hearing about people being hounded off Twitter by trolls or outraged mobs of users; there was an “old West” feel about Twitter, and it did seem like public lynchings and humiliations happened there a lot. I was always worried about tweeting something taken a way other than the one intended–which happens very frequently there–and going viral. (Anxiety, I have it about everything because it does NOT discriminate; there’s nothing too small for me to have massive anxiety about.) But I do miss the way Facebook and Twitter used to be–fun and functional places to reconnect with friends and/or readers. Now they’re just bad habits I can’t seem to quit, like smoking cigarettes or snorting coke–things I know aren’t good for me, do nothing for me and if anything at all, are incredibly bad for my mental health, yet can’t seem to stop doing. Well, I quite smoking twelve years ago and haven’t done cocaine since the 1980’s, so I know already I can give up bad habits. I just worry that I’ll lose touch with people I care about and don’t interact with or see enough as it is.

Heavy sigh. Why do small-dicked billionaires have to ruin everything?

But I feel rested and together this morning, much more so than the last few days, so here’s hoping for a good day today–by which I mean one in which I can focus and get shit done.

We’ll see how it goes, I reckon.

And off to the spice mines I go. Have a lovely Wednesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll catch you later.

Dreaming of the Queen

And here we are, on yet another Thursday, awake before the crack of dawn so I can go screen people at our two offices–mornings at the Marine Building on Tulane Avenue, afternoon at the Elysian Fields office–before heading home. I’m also doing a live reading this evening for Tubby and Coo’s Bookstore; not sure how that’s going to work or how you can tune in–I think it’s a Facebook thing? But I’ll be posting on Twitter and Facebook etc once I have that information handy. I am not sure how I feel about this–I intensely dislike the sound of my own voice, let alone how I appear on camera–but this is a brave new world we’re all living in, and if I want to continue having a career, I am going to have to start doing all kinds of things I generally avoid doing, because doing things you don’t enjoy or like to do is part of the price one has to pay for a career in publishing. I’ve always admired authors who can do the public appearance thing with grace and wit and aplomb; I am not one of those, and inevitably, as is my wont, am aware of every single thing that goes wrong in a reading or on a panel; whether it’s me saying the opposite of what I mean or stumbling over words as I read…yeah.

Which is why I always get a terrified look on my face when people ask me for career advice. I so clearly don’t know what I’m doing that it’s almost laughable that anyone would want my advice on anything, really.

I read some more of Thunder on the Right last night; again, not really sure why Stewart opted to go with a third person point-of-view rather than her usual first; perhaps it will become more apparent as the novel progresses. I honestly don’t remember anything of this story–which is weird.  It’s set in the Pyrenees, a part of Europe I’ve always been interested in and rarely appears in fiction; and how could I forget the plot of a story that begins with the heroine going to visit a cousin staying in a remote convent in the Pyrenees, only to discover on arrival that her cousin died two weeks earlier. (Then again, I remembered very little of This Rough Magic, and even thought the dolphin was from The Moon-spinners; and was wrong wrong wrong)

We also watched another episode of Defending Jacob, which kind of is unspooling. Chris Evans and Michelle Dockery are both superb in this–at least, so far–but the plot itself…as I said to a friend on Twitter, who had issues with the book (I’ve not read the book), the story is familiar–the concept of ‘what would you do is your child was accused of a crime’ has been used plenty of times, and this is what would be called domestic suspense if it was written by a woman and the main character was the wife, not the husband (Alison Gaylin did a magnificent, Edgar winning job of this very story in If I Die Tonight, which you should read if you haven’t already), and the whole “Dad is a prosecutor but will hide evidence and interfere with the investigation to protect his son, thereby risking his entire career and life because he is so convinced his son is being railroaded” thing…the “heroic dad” trope is such a straight male fantasy that it’s very hard for me to take the show seriously. It’s hard to watch someone do stupid things, particularly when they’re supposedly really smart (LAWYER), that you know are only going to turn out badly because it’s necessary for the plot.

I also finished watching Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne. It’s really quite good, partly because it’s one of those weird historical royal marriages that was surprisingly happy. They were only married five years before Marie was killed in a fall from her horse; Maximilian, in an age when kings and princes and emperors rarely went more than a year between wives, didn’t remarry for nearly twenty years after Marie died. He had lots of mistresses, but never remarried–which was kind of a lovely tribute to his first wife. The show is really well done, and the German actor playing Maximilian is quite hot. (The actress playing Marie is also beautiful.) Their two children, Philip and Margaret, were also quite attractive; Philip is also known to history as Philip the Handsome; how good looking did he have to be to earn that nickname while he was alive? Later Hapsburgs, however, were not known for their looks.

Lord, I have a lot of work to get done this weekend, and I am really dreading it.

Heavy sigh.

And now back to the spice mines.

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