In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades. –
“So Long Ago, So Clear”
Trying to use [social media] without muting is like trying to have a garden without weeding. – “Maytweets”
Journalism that doesn’t at least occasionally offend the government isn’t real journalism. – “Yes, They’re Still Tweets”
My emotions are often insidious, slippery things, which is why I often used to refer to the “snakes in my head”.
– “Thirty Years Gone“
…Alan Manning Chambers…[has been] arrested…in [Orange County, Florida for talking to a cop fantasy role-playing]…as a 14-year-old boy…Chambers is the former leader of Exodus International, an Orlando-based organization that promoted so-called conversion therapy and claimed for years that people could change their sexual orientation…in 2013…Chambers apologized to the LGBT…community and announced Exodus International would shut down…[admitting] that he had masked his own attraction to men…
The…latest [stupid social media fad], known as “ballmaxxing,” has [foolish] men injecting fluids like saline or Surgilube into their testicles to increase their size….[sometimes] to the size of grapefruits…for [fetishistic] purposes…Physicians have called [it] one of the most reckless body modification trends to emerge from male online communities, warning that [it] often leads to permanent damage…Specific risks include infection, abscess formation, and cellulitis…kits bought online…may contain toxic materials that are not only harmful but also unsterile, increasing the risk of…permanent disfigurement…Surgilube…is not bioabsorbable…which…can…result…[in] the need for surgical intervention to remove embedded material…
…Montreal sex worker Adore Goldman is organizing a…[stripp]er strike…in the midst of F1 weekend — one of the busiest times of the year for the city’s clubs — to demand greater labour protections and push for the decriminalization of sex work. She says strippers’ employment status as independent contractors, which is now an industry-wide norm, has for too long shielded club owners from ensuring safe working conditions….[presentl]y, she and members of…the Sex Work Autonomous Committee (SWAC)…[ar]e zeroing in on the “bar fee” that clubs charge dancers to work…but…clubs…treat…[dancers] as…employee[s] despite the self-employed label….[dictating] what time [they] can come in, what time [they] can leave and penalize [them] for being late…The strike also includes erotic massage parlour workers…One of…SWAC’s ultimate goals is to create a union grouping all kinds of sex workers…
Cops across California are getting incentivized to arrest more people for stealing from chain stores with the help of millions of dollars in grant money that they can use to buy surveillance technology from companies like Flock…[which are] facing national backlash for [enabl]ing…privacy violations ranging from stalking ex-girlfriends to tracking people seeking abortions out of state. It all goes back to a [fascist] collaboration between the retail industry and the California Governor’s office…based on the [false] premise that retail theft is linked to organized crime…a narrative largely pushed by lobbies like the National Retail Federation…[which has] no [demonstrable basis in fact]…Walgreens famously walked-back its complaints about shrinkage three years ago…[but]…the…plan…helped unleash ALPRs on California cities…including…Bakersfield, Irvine…Chula Vista…Los Angeles…Santa Rosa…Vacaville…and…Modesto…[but]…the most Flock-happy [cop shop] appears to be th[at of] San Francisco…which received $15 million in grant money…to install 400 Flock cameras around the city…
The FBI wants to buy access to automated license plate readers…nationwide, which would likely allow the agency to [unconstitutionally] track the movements of vehicles—and by extension people—across the country without a warrant…The…[only two] companies that [can] provide the [level] of data the FBI is seeking…[are] Flock…and…Motorola…which acquired Vigilant Solutions…in [Search of Problems]…
…a [typical and representative] North Carolina [cop] planned to kill Black people in a mass shooting at…the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival…Christopher Gillum…was arrested…[on April 22nd] at a hotel in…Destin, [Florida] and…will be extradited to Louisiana to face charges there…Gillum’s family reported him missing on [April 21st] and he has a history of self-harm…[but] left the state before…the [family could] involuntarily commit him to psychiatric treatment. [North Carolina cops didn’t bother to try to stop him because he was only threatening to murder]…Black people…
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
As a lifelong bibliophile with a special interest in reference books, I’m always delighted to find a useful one that I didn’t even know existed. Regular readers know that I’ve been working on a novel, The Big Boom, set in New Orleans of 1925 and featuring the characters from “Until the End of Days“ and “Hellhound”. It will surprise no one who has read more than a few examples of my work that I’m an absolute fiend for accuracy; anachronisms and other such errors really annoy me when I encounter them, so there’s absolutely no way I’m going to let them creep into my work if I can possibly avoid it. But once in a while, the fact one needs is far too obscure for the enshittified latter-day Google to turn up, and since there is no academic library nearby that can turn into a complicated search unless I want to rewrite that section of the story so as to avoid referencing unknown facts.
Now, some of you may know that early 20th-century New Orleans had one of the most extensive networks of streetcars in the United States, but as automobiles proliferated in the 1930s some of the lines began to close down, and after World War II an unholy alliance of Detroit manufacturers and corrupt New Orleans politicians conspired to replace the clean, quiet, efficient, and long-lasting (there are streetcars still in operation today which were built in the 1920s) electric streetcars with filthy, noisy, inefficient, “modern” buses which must be replaced every few years. By 1953 only the St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street lines were left, and in 1964 the Canal Street line was pulled out as well; the only line which survived into my adulthood was the St. Charles line, and even it was reduced to about half of its former range. So when streetcar routes came into the plot twice in the first four chapters of my book, I started trying to find maps of the network in its 1920s heyday, only to be repeatedly thwarted. Finally, a few weeks ago, a serendipitous search turned up a photo of the map someone had posted to Reddit; it was much too low-resolution to be of any use, but the poster had the good sense many internet denizens lack: she named the source. I immediately went to Amazon, located a copy, bought it for the very reasonable price of $20, and it arrived a week ago Saturday. It was published in 1955, was written by a New Orleanian who was an age-peer of my main characters, and was even better than I’d hoped for; it had three different maps (1880, 1906, and a combined 1915-1930 map), detailed descriptions of each route, schematics of the cars, period photos galore, and a wealth of facts I couldn’t have hoped for (such as the fact that the normal fare from 1922 to at least 1955 was 7¢). The whole thing was so exciting that I spent most of the following afternoon immersed in it, editing my text to insert small details, and generally feeling like a kid in a candy store. I know some of y’all probably find this amusing, but as I’ve said many times, “You can take the girl out of the library, but you can’t take the librarian out of the girl.” Or the old woman, for that matter. And I always treasure books which connect me to a world I was born too late to explore for myself.
It's fascinating to watch men with severe, easily-recognized mental illnesses publicly blaming others' mental illness on behaviors that the speakers are incapable of due to their own undiagnosed, untreated psychopathologies.
My teen self would be confused by this.1981 Maggie: So there are new "Star Trek" shows all the time, but you haven't watched one in 20 years?2026 Maggie: CorrectM81: Ditto "Star Wars"?M26: YepM81: Plus all kinds of D&D fantasy stuff?M26: Right again.M81: I DON'T KNOW YOU
Reporters: doing something willfully is not a "failure", regardless of what politicians call it. If a party refuses to comply with some illegal diktat, that party has not *failed* to comply with said diktat; he has REFUSED to comply. The former is an omission; the latter an active rejection.
"Dabbled in cross-dressing" makes it sound like alchemy or some other occult practice.(Yes, I know about the shamans and mystery religions; this isn't that, so let's not)
This is how partisanism warps minds.Distrust of politicians *in general* for wholly rational reasons is subjected to the duopoly's Procrustean bed, then for 21st century readers must be trivialized & infantilized. So anarchists & true libertarians are described by the asinine tag "double haters".
Meanwhile, books on my shelves which were published as far back as the 1920s, and which I purchased as far back as the 1970s, are still 100% readable. And all I have to do to access them is walk over to my bookshelves.
A friend who grew up on Country/Western was unfamiliar with Zeppelin, and when "Ramble On" came on she asked me what it was about. I replied, "A dude who gets his girlfriend stolen by Gollum."
Trump is someone who consistently cheats at Solitaire and still repeatedly loses, and when he's done the deck only has about 49 cards. And some of those are from kids' game decks, like one with a picture of an old maid.
First Palantir came for the sex workers, but nobody cared because "sex trafficking".Then Palantir came for young minority men, and nobody cared because "gangs".Then Palantir came for migrants, and nobody cared because "illegals".Now it's coming for you, and I think you know the rest.
While I was working on “Until the End of Days“, I realized it would only be the first of a series of stories featuring Angela Morgan & Diane Rousseau, pulp-adventure characters based on Grace & myself. And by the time I was done with the first story, I already knew that the second installment would be a prequel, telling the story of how they met. Now that one is done as well, so I’m about to start the process of getting Lost Angels, the collection in which they’ll both appear, into shape; I’ve already started discussing the cover with Chester Brown, so I think we’re on track to publish by the end of spring. And here’s the really exciting news: my experience with these longer tales has convinced me that the next adventure should be a short novel, which I’ll probably begin in the next couple of months. But in the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of “Hellhound”, describing the events of Saturday, June 10th, 1922; the video at the end is a song which plays a part later in the novelette.
…While I was perfectly happy to dress and behave like a respectable maid of honor instead of a flapper for one day, there was no way I was going to indulge the government’s current exercise in wet-blanketry. So I took a generous sip from my punch to make room while on my way to the ladies’, then once I was safely away from prying eyes I lifted my skirt to get my flask from its hiding place in my garter and topped the glass back up with rum. Then I checked my hair, smoothed my dress and opened the door to find Tante Mathilde standing just outside.
She gently raised my hand to sniff my glass gracefully, and said, “Just as I thought.”
“Honestly, Auntie, it’s not like you’re a big fan of the Volstead Act yourself.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “No, I’m not, but you’re still too young.”
“I’m twenty-one, Auntie, and I just graduated with a real degree and everything; I’m not exactly still in pigtails.”
“Hmph. Well, at least you haven’t chopped off your lovely hair like so many girls your age.”
“Remember when I fell out of that tree when I was about twelve, and they had to shave my head to stitch it up? I know what I look like with short hair, and it ain’t pretty.”
“Nonsense, dear girl; you’re always pretty.”
“Thank you, but I know you didn’t come looking for me just to see if I was drinking.”
She took my left arm in the way she always did when she wanted a favor. “No, it’s because I want to introduce you to someone.”
“I think I already know most of the guests.”
“She’s not technically a guest, and I think y’all probably met in passing once or twice a few years ago”…She took me over to the doorway that led toward the hotel kitchen; in the next room were several large tubs of ice with electric fans blowing across them to cool the air. That may sound quaint to the modern reader, but keep in mind that air conditioning was extremely expensive back then, and it was still several years before even theaters and hotels in New Orleans began to install them. Diane was standing nearby, apparently taking the opportunity to cool off; she was a tall, fairly slender woman in her mid-twenties with long, straight black hair, hazel eyes, and strong features, and she did look somewhat familiar. “Angela, this is Louis and Claire’s youngest daughter, Diane. Diane, this is my grandniece Angela.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, turned to face me, flashed a quirky but winning smile, held out both of her hands to clasp mine, and said, “Hey there, honey! Ah think we met before.”
“Since you’re Miss Claire’s daughter I guess we have, but I don’t remember exactly when.”
“Ah been tourin’ with the band for almos’ five years, so musta been when we was in town.”
“Must have. I’ve been to the Orpheum quite a few times since then, but I guess never when y’all were playing…Are you doing anything with your friends tonight? You could come over to my house and we can make up for lost time.” She did not answer, but instead looked pointedly at my aunt, whose innocent expression had yielded to a rather sheepish one.
“Actually, that was why I wanted to introduce y’all. Diane has a little problem and I thought you might be able to help.”
“Oh?” I had instantly liked Diane, so I was already inclined to help if possible. But I wasn’t about to make it easier on my aunt; this wasn’t the first time she’d volunteered me for something.
“Normally, Diane stays at my place when she’s in town. But a strange man has been lurking nearby since she arrived Thursday evening, and she thinks he’s been following her.”
“We been seein’ him in the theaters an’ hotels for the last three stops, but we jus’ figured he was a fan; some of ’em are pretty devoted. But he’s hangin’ aroun’ your aunt’s instead of the hotel where the other girls are stayin’, so it must be me he’s after.”
“Ah, so if we can get you over to my place without him catching wise, maybe that’ll throw him off. But won’t he just follow y’all to your next gig in…?”
“Mobile. Yeah, we’re hopin’ to confront him before that. Mah daddy tried las’ night but he took off like his pants was on fire as soon as Daddy came out on the porch. If he loses mah trail today, he’ll need to come to the theater Monday night to pick it up again, then the bouncers can catch him without havin’ to call the cops to the house.”
“Makes perfect sense. You can have Marie’s room; she won’t need it any more!”
“Thank you, ah really appreciate it.”
“I’m guessing you already brought your luggage?” I asked, giving my aunt a look.
“Yeah, it’s in the green room.”
“I hope it’s not a lot; the only place we can carry it in my car is the rumble seat.”
“Just a big carpetbag. Except for mah bass and such, ah try to travel light.”
“There is no way we can fit your bass in a Stutz Bearcat, unless you think you can balance it on the running board”…
…About midnight, I went to get myself another punch, and asked if she wanted more bourbon, which was what she’d been drinking. “Actually, if you don’t mind, ahmana roll myself a reefer.”
“Go ahead; better a legal intoxicant than an illegal one, eh? I’d use it myself, but I’m afraid my lungs are too delicate; I can’t even smoke cigarettes.”
“If you wanna try it, ah could make you tea. Ah usually travel with some ’cause marijuana is illegal in some states, and sippin’ tea is more discreet than smokin’ a reefer.”
I was definitely interested in trying it, so we adjourned to the kitchen and Diane fixed it for me…I can’t say I cared for the taste, but sugar helped, and it wasn’t like I was drinking it for the flavor. Diane told me it would probably take an hour or so before I started to feel anything, but warned me that it might hit me pretty hard because I was unused to it.
“Why don’t we head upstairs, then? We can get you settled in Marie’s room, then if I’m too bent to manage the stairs I can just stumble next door.”
“That sounds like a plan!” she said, so I locked up and turned off the lights, and before long she’d put on her pajamas and we’d made her comfortable in Marie’s bed. I sat in the wingback chair while she rolled her smoke, and soon we were giggling like a couple of schoolgirls. Because we were already in such good spirits I didn’t notice the effects of the drug until I was already highly illuminated, and I think I got quiet for a little while as I adjusted to this new feeling. When I finally spoke up I realized Diane had dropped off, but I was still content to just sit there quietly, looking at everything through chemically-altered eyes and enjoying the breeze through the open window.
After Diane had been asleep for a little while, something very eerie happened; at first it spooked me a bit, but I told myself it was just a drug-induced hallucination and I should sit back and enjoy the show. There seemed to be a greenish-purple aura around her body, and as I watched it seemed to become concentrated around her left hand; it then began to take form like smoke, blowing out from her ring like steam from a teakettle (but in complete silence). It gathered itself into a cloud above her sleeping form, then moved like a living thing toward the window. As it exited I really wanted to get up to see where it went next, but I just couldn’t get myself to move out of the chair; it was almost as though I were tied down with the softest ropes imaginable, or weighed down with an entire litter of contentedly-purring kittens. It was less like not being able to move, and more like I just didn’t want to, even though I did…
I honestly feel sorry for those who truly believe that the best way to “connect” with other people is by boinking them, and the notion that people must boink to feel “connected” is a tragedy. Sexual relationships are held up as the pinnacle of human interaction, but they’re not even close; they’re in fact nearer the bottom because they’re extremely conditional.
I have always felt very strongly about this, ever since I first started really thinking about the matter before I was out of my teens. Part of the fallacy holds that romantic love is somehow intrinsically different from other kinds of love, but I don’t think that’s true either. Take “love at first sight”, for example; we only ever hear the term applied to romantic love, even though the idea that it represents something other than plain animal lust in that context is highly dubious. And yet there are certainly cases in which another kind of love manifests itself at first meeting. The very first time I really thought of that was in a fictional context: in the movie The Emerald Forest, a tribal chief in the Amazon abducts the son of an engineer surveying for a dam project, and years later he explains to the father that he had fallen in paternal love with the boy at first sight, and could not bear to see him go back to “The Dead World” of concrete and steel which the natives feared and hated.
Over the next several decades I saw other examples in both fiction and real life, culminating in one I experienced myself. In November of 1997 I met Grace at a party and she gave me a ride home; we hit it off immediately, and within weeks I’d received an actual paper letter from her in the mail. After a few more letters were exchanged, she told me she wanted to move down to New Orleans from her father’s place in Monroe, Louisiana, where she currently lived; I invited her to move in with me, and she never moved out. From that very first meeting she was as devoted to me as any sister; there was never any sexual chemistry, and in any case Grace was only sexually interested in men. But looking back to those times, I have no better term for the rapid bonding she experienced and demonstrated than “love at first sight”. And it would be wrong to pretend otherwise merely because it was not romantic love.
When cops use profanity at us, think of what they're telling us. Would you ever curse at your boss? No, but he can curse at you because he has power over you. What would happen if you cursed out a cop? But they curse at us routinely. That tells you how they perceive their relationship with us.
People suffering from advanced dementia often fall back on old "scripts". It's why your senile great-grandmother calls you by your mother's (or even grandmother's) name, and it's why Trump seems to think he's still on a TV show he did two decades ago.
Reporters need to ditch the word "taken" when writing about actions of government thugs.The property wasn't "taken" by goons; it was STOLEN.The person wasn't "taken to the ground"; he was TACKLED.The person wasn't "taken into custody" as if on a date; he was ABDUCTED.Stop soft-peddling evil.
Reading what people say about Twitter makes me realize that the vast majority online expend absolutely no effort on account hygiene. If they treated their bodies like they treat their social media accounts, they'd never bathe, brush their teeth, or change their clothes, and would eat only junk.
In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was called "the sick man of Europe". Now the American empire has become the sick man of the entire planet.
I have lived my life in such a way that I can't picture either of these women accurately enough to compare them in my mind. And I'm very pleased about that.
I block every single MAGA account and every associated lunatic on Twitter the first time I see it. As a result, I now see far more Trumpery on Bluesky than on Twitter, because people keep screenshotting and calling attention to accounts I blocked long ago.
I'm so exhausted by journalists, who should know the meaning of the words they use, referring to people who are not cautious of change but rather mindlessly destroy every Chesterton's fence they can find, as "conservative".
Maybe this misuse of the word "democracy" is a problem of Millennials and Zoomers, who are too young to remember that about half the communist dictatorships of the late 20th century had the word "Democratic" in their names, eg "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" (German Democratic Republic).
OK, y'all, we all get it: politicians and partisans are all huge hypocrites who theatrically perform anger when the "other team" does the same thing they do when in power.Find another goddamned tweet boilerplate. Holy shit.
The problem is that the tech industry is intentionally conflating two different things under the fantasy label "AI". Machine learning is a real, useful tool; chatbots are a toy and a technological blind alley. Conflating the two is like pretending color TV is the same technology as a hula-hoop.
If you read this blog regularly, you already know I’ve been working on a pulp-adventure novella featuring characters based on Grace and myself; their chemistry and repartee are based on ours, so much that I often cried or laughed while writing and proofreading it, and many of the characters and places are based on ones from my own life. Now at last it’s done; it will be the centerpiece of my next collection, Lost Angels, which is beginning to look like it will be published in late spring or early summer. But in the meantime, I’m happy to share an excerpt introducing the main characters; if you’re a paid subscriber and would like a PDF of the whole story, please email me; the rest of y’all will just have to wait for the book!
Friday, October 23rd, 1931
It all started one night at Lulu’s. Diane and I had taken my Tante Mathilde to see the new Marx Brothers talkie, and we decided to have a drink before taking her home. Well, to be honest, Tante Mathilde insisted we have a drink, and she had not accepted “no” for an answer from anybody since her husband died 33 years before. She was the family matriarch, my paternal grandfather’s younger sister, who had already outlived him by 23 years and Maman, my paternal grandmother, by 13. She was under 5 feet tall in heels and under 100 pounds soaking wet, but she conducted herself like the Empress Dowager and kept up with popular culture better than a lot of people half her age, which is why nobody who knew her would’ve been surprised to see her with her grandniece in a speakeasy.
I had a Brandy Alexander, which is what I always had in those days; Diane had a highball, which is what she always had after it became impossible to get decent bourbon; and Tante Mathilde had a Bee’s Knees. It may seem strange that I remember that over thirty years later, but it’s because Diane hated lemons and had apparently made some sort of comment about it while I was in the Ladies’, and when I got back to my seat my aunt was pontificating about how Diane didn’t “know what’s good.”
“Honestly, I can’t leave for five minutes without coming back to static.”
“It ain’t my fault if your aunt’s opinions are still stuck in the 19th century.”
“And it’s certainly not my fault if your friend there is a bumpkin.”
“Who you callin’ a bumpkin, you old crow?”
“Waiter! Another round please!” I wasn’t actually worried; they always sounded like that. It was just their way, and they actually loved each other as much as if they’d been blood kin. They practically were; Diane’s father had worked for Tante Mathilde’s husband his whole life, and she made him the general manager of the sugar cane plantation after the old man died in ’98, so she’d bounced Diane on her knee from the age of three. Of course, nowadays the size differential was almost the opposite: Diane was a tall, solidly-built woman of 5’9″ with long, straight black hair and strong features that hinted at her Houma ancestry, and she had a husky voice which made my aunt’s thin soprano sound childlike.
Anyhow, I wasn’t in the mood for their shenanigans, so I figured I’d throw some cold water on it. But my aunt was not having it. “She doesn’t even like ‘Stardust’. Who doesn’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“When did I say I don’t like ‘Stardust’?”
“Just now, when Angela was off to the loo.”
“I said nobody can play ‘Stardust’ like Armstrong, is what I said!”
“Well, the band here did a lovely job of it just now.”
“It had no damn pep at all. Them cats play jazz like they was playin’ at the Frumps and Fogeys Society.”
“Nonsense!”
“Really, Auntie! Diane knows more about jazz than both of us put together.”
“Especially since she don’t know beans about jazz.”
“C’mon, Diane, you’ve gotta admit Auntie’s pretty hep for eighty-one.”
“Nobody who can’t dig Cab Calloway is hep in my book.”
“I think Mr. Calloway is a fine musician, but I also think all his nonsense singing is silly. All that scooby-doo and hi-dee-ho foolishness, what is that supposed to be? Why can’t he sing sensibly like Jolson?”
Diane had been rolling her eyes while my aunt opined about scat, but in response to that last question she suddenly stopped, looked at her as though she had just upchucked on the table, and stated matter-of-factly, “The only word for Jolson is ‘grotesque’.”
“Grotesque! You want grotesque? I’ll show you grotesque!” With that she reached down as if she were going to get something from a bag that wasn’t there, then said, “What am I doing? Of course it’s at home.”
“What is, Auntie?”
“This simply awful thing I got at an estate sale this morning, and meant to give you.”
“Um…thanks?”
She laughed and patted my hand affectionately. “Oh, I didn’t really mean it was for you, but I thought your Mr. Girard might like it, since he’s a connoisseur of the outré.”
“Which is probably why he likes Angela so much.”
“Look who’s talking!” I said in mock offense, but Diane and my aunt had apparently left off of teasing each other to have a giggle at my expense instead. At the time, Armand Girard was my sugar daddy, and though Diane sometimes joshed me about him, Tante Mathilde had no room to judge because his age exceeded mine by exactly as much as her late husband’s had exceeded hers. Plus, he was basically the only thing standing between me and penury at the moment, and Diane was especially fond of him since he’d given me his “old” car – a 1927 Packard Custom Eight sedan – last year when he replaced it with a new Dusenberg Model J. That of course meant she got to tinker with the Packard, and let me tell you, she had that thing purring like a kitten when it idled and roaring like a lion when I stepped on the gas…
I’m sure you won’t consider it a “spoiler” if I tell you that the “simply awful thing” Angela’s aunt bought led our intrepid heroines into the greatest adventure of their lives, one that required all of their wits and derring-do; I hope everyone who reads it has as much fun as I had writing it!
I’m finally almost finished with “Until the End of Days“. I finished the rough draft late last week, and on Sunday I wrote the prologue; it may seem strange to non-writers that I saved the prologue for the end of the process, but it was necessary because the story is told in first-person, and I wanted to know everything that happened in the tale (which grew in the telling) before I tried to introduce it. Part of the reason was practical; if there were any important details I had not managed to fit into the narrative, I wanted to mention them in the prologue. But another reason was that I wanted to be able to identify as fully with the POV character as possible, since I wanted the tone of the prologue to be more personal. The word count is now in the vicinity of 19,000 words, and I still have a bit of editing to do, (such as describing three major characters more fully), so I think it’s fair to call it a novella. I’ve really worked at developing the characters’ world, so much so that I already have the fragments of two prequels and a sequel in my head, and that’s good because spending so much time in that fictional world of the past makes the pain of my real-world present much easier to bear. The irony is almost too perfect: after spending most of my life living in a future which never came to pass, I now find comfort living in a past that never was.
…my Muse of Fiction wants my attention again; perhaps she feels I don’t need her when I’m happy. Whatever the reason, I’ve written three new stories since finishing Who in Review, and I’m starting on a much longer one than I’ve ever written before, in part as a tribute to Grace…
Because I did want to write a much longer story than is typical for me, I’ve had to develop a new technique; typically, even my full-length short stories come into my head almost fully formed, and all I need to do is write them down and fill in a few details. But that won’t work for this one, which is currently over 7000 words and only in the vicinity of half-done (generally speaking, anything under 10,000 words is considered a short story; longer than that is in novelette territory). So what I’m doing is writing each episode of the tale as it comes into my head, then fitting the pieces into the larger whole and editing as necessary. The first scene I wrote was a pivotal one perhaps halfway through the narrative; I then wrote the first full scene, then the climax and denouement, and now I’m beginning to fill in. The characters are based upon Grace and myself, the setting is New Orleans in 1931, and the genre is adventure mixed with black comedy (which is why I recently re-watched The Avengers and watched The Thin Man series for the first time). I’m enjoying the process, and writing action and dialog for Grace’s character is almost like having her nearby, which is part of why I’m doing it. And I’m already thinking of other situations for the characters. So even though the word “therapeutic” is probably overused in this sort of context, it’s the right one. And I hope it will give my readers a little (fictionalized) taste of Grace’s personality, and the chemistry that made us such a great team.
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In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades. –
