handful_ofdust

There are a bunch of fun new phrases I've been picking up on [the secret project]. One is "maybe there's a world where...", which is how you get into proposing an alternate twist on plot/character/theme/etc., one which pivots from the direction that previous proposals have been travelling along. And that's where I feel like I'm living, these days: In a world where. A world where I'm finally delivering on thirty years' worth of yearning and promise. It's nice. I like it, it's nice. Hit me!

This tiny update brought to you by me, running out the door with Cal.

The weather in Toronto continues soupy and grotesque; I stood up after a long period of inaction this afternoon and suddenly felt my head swim, my body clammy all over. I ended up having to eat oatmeal with peanut butter and honey, drink three glasses of water slowly and sit back down again before I felt even slightly better. I haven't had a moment like that in a long time, and it was...off-putting, to say the least. Low blood sugar, possibly crossed with heat exhaustion. I'm still going to bed late and getting up later, and we all need to turn our damn clocks around, especially since Cal is supposedly going back to school soon. Supposedly.

In other news, I'm trying to figure out what my word-count thus far is for this year, which would be easier if everything I wrote ended up in the same place on my desktop. As far as I can tell, the list goes like this:

"The Third Daughter/La Terzia Figlia" (4,452 words)
"Suddenly My House Became a Tree of Sores" (3,390 words)
"Pear of Anguish" (7,460)
"Yellowback" (9,576)
"Poor Butcher-Bird" (7,500)
"Wet Red Grin" (8,962)

= 41,340 words overall. Though you also have to feed in stuff like articles and interviews...I've done at least six of the latter, which might possibly put me up over 50,000. Not so bad, given we're halfway through the year, and I often feel like I'm doing a whole big bag of nothin' much, day after day. Still, I got my latest cheque from Open Road Media (actual money! For actual books I wrote! That are actually selling!), which always makes me feel better. And I'm thinking again about starting a podcast, because I obviously don't have enough pressure on me as it is.

The most recent project, however--after finishing editing "Poor Butcher-Bird" for publication--is to finally do another spec screenplay. I need to flex those muscles again, the ones where you pare an entire story down to bare minimum of visuals, action, dialogue. Sending various people my old spec for various reasons recently was more than slightly depressing, since it caused me to ruminate on how A) I'd finished it over five years ago and B) it wasn't even really done in proper format. I've been nibbling away at this idea for some time now, and I always got tangled up in a cast which was far too big for the extremely restricted idea/setting; this time, I'm going in the exact opposite direction, with a small cast trapped in almost one place, some of whom are probably only seen through a slot or heard through the walls. When you're dealing with a ghost in a women's prison, making it epic doesn't make a lot of sense. I might move further out for the climax; we'll have to see.

That's about all, folks. Stuff and thangs, Lori.

Back at Balzac's for the first time in...a year, maybe? It's really hard to remember. Pandemic-brain. I'm working on "Wet Red Grin," for which I have a FIRM deadline now, and I think I finally have a handle on the main character's voice, at least. I'm also trying to shuffle a lot of the weirdest shit up front, so at least it won't be boring to get into. The last time I did that was with "This Is Not For You," and while I don't think it'll be quite that good (way to sell it, Gemma), I do think it'll work better for the effort. Well, how did I get here? Is almost always a good way to go, as David Byrne could tell us.

Anyhow, the weather in Toronto is at least considerably less gross as of today--nice breeze, pleasantly warm as opposed to OH MY GOD I AM BLEEDING WATER OUT MY PORES. There's a particular humidity that boils off the lake in August and early September that makes me want to tear my skin off and run around "nuda," as we used to call it when Cal jumped around naked with all his parts flipping, but far less cutely.

Balzac's isn't much changed, aside from the fact that you can only sit at (far fewer) individual tables while inside, instead of the long, comfortable built-in bench near the cash I used to monopolize. They're playing jazz today, however, which explains why I've been listening to metal of various types instead: Cultes des Ghoules, Dimmu Borgir, Wolves in the Throne Room, Catacombs. Sun (((O))) for a second and a half, though that one wasn't quite loud enough. You have to pick and choose carefully, depending on subject matter.

I'm really glad Readercon turned out as well as it did for so many people. I'm still not sure this virtual version was "for" me, per se, but I appreciate being able to interact with a couple of people as they brushed by.;) And now I must go back to what I was doing, lit and fig.

Halfway through the week again, and so little done that didn't involve Cal. Yesterday I slept a lot, possibly because I was proactively dreading today's visit to the dentist, in which I was supposed to get the first two of several pending fillings (replacements, but who knows what lurks underneath, until the vaguely white cement comes off like a lid? [Unpleasant.]). Surprisingly, however, the new guy at the new place--Dr Frank, Yonge and Front Dental--turns out to really know his shit; that was genuinely the least amount of pain I have EVER felt while getting work, and he placed the freezing so expertly I barely felt it in my lip or gum, during or afterwards. Crazy. Oh, I am old, old; I have seen three forests rise and fall, yet never before have I seen dentistry not leave me with my back rucked up and my nerves sparking! It's a new era, folks. Which is just as well, since I have two more next month, and so on.

Otherwise: Pushing hard on "Wet Red Grin," while also hanging around on Twitter far too much. I riggetty wrecked myself over the weekend by stupidly deciding to reorganize and cull my books right before a pre-recorded Readercon 2021 panel on Tanith Lee, one I prepared for so badly I didn't even know I was the moderator until I showed up. Luckily, sovay was there to help out, and all of us just spent the whole panel fangirling over Lee and her potential influence anyhow. Four days on, though, I'm still having a sadly hard time getting up, sitting down and standing for long periods of time, because my ass, lower back and thighs feel like I didn't lift weights for...about three years, at least, before spending an entire day hauling giant bags of books around. Which is, indeed, what I did.

Cal is doing pretty well with the second week of drama camp. Sometimes he just sort of peters out near the end of the day, but everybody understands why. He gets up in a reasonably good mood, puts his clothes on, eats his breakfast and then sets up the Zoom link next to his synthesizer, which he proceeds to play continually throughout class. They tried to get him to do a monologue, and he turned it into a song; I'm going to suggest he raps the next one, if they try again. When they ask him to mute himself so they can hear the other students, he does. That's high sociability, from Cal.

Over the last two days, it was just him and one other student with a single teacher, and they wrote, rehearsed, performed and recorded a play together. (Yeah, I helped. A lot.) It's called Pop-Up Love. Cal plays The Guy Who Likes To Sing, who's travelling across Canada doing pop-up concerts; he falls instantly in love with a dairy farmer who comes out to tell him he's upsetting her cows. After he manages to win her over with his musical courtship, she says: "I'd like to see you again," to which he answers (Singing): "Well, I'm not going anywhere, because my piano is stuck in your field." Annndddd...scene.

All right, back to it.

The good part is that Cal's dentist's visit went wonderfully; he acted like a total adult, bloomed when I told him how proud I was, skipped home and signed onto his afternoon drama course. I was tired as hell, so I lay down and fell into a nest of nightmares for three hours, trusting Steve to look after him. The bad part is that at some point during that time-period, he apparently (probably accidentally) exposed himself to the rest of the class while adjusting his pants in front of the camera, which meant his teacher immediately turned his camera off for the last thirty minutes and then didn't write to us about it until later that night, when Cal barely remembered what had happened. Always fucking something.

Anyhow. Now he's acting like he's never going to get up again, let alone sign back onto his drama course. And Steve is lying in bed, awake but not up, while I drink the last of our coffee and compose this, listening to an old playlist I've labelled "Bad Romance." I was tired before; I'm super-tired now. Freytag.

So: I have the best sort of good news I can't talk about, ie the sort I would literally get sued for talking about. Yes, folks, I signed an NDA on [something]! Which is just one of the reasons next week is going to be somewhat of a nightmare for me, but hey, better a nightmare than not, I guess. Cal finally has a dentist's appointment; I finally have a dentist's appointment. Got an interview over Zoom and a discussion about Ari Aster's Hereditary over Skype. Cal is beginning his two-week drama camp, which needs to be done online, so we need to set up email on his iPad (finally). Etc. etc. etc.

Otherwise: Talked to a director I admire a lot about developing a screenplay with [them]; talked to a local(ish) producer about developing a screenplay FOR [them]. The latter amusingly revealed to me that when I reduce my short stories to log-lines, it becomes super-clear that none of them have third acts, in the classic Syd Field sense. My stuff tends to go more like this: A) Something is wrong. B) Oh shit. C) Well, fuck. Obviously, that last part needs to be extended somewhat, if you want to get more than an hour out of it. ("Hijinks ensue!" David Demchuck suggested, on Twitter; "Hijinks of a very specific sort," I replied.)

Today marks the sixth consecutive day of me trying to get THE FUCK! ouuuuuttt of this place and log up to 10,000 steps at least once every twenty-four hours. On Monday I kicked this off by just walking in one particular direction until I crapped out, then walking back. Saw a rabbit at Corktown Commons; saw a weasel or pine marten on the Don River Trail, slipping out of a hole onto the riverbank, then into the river itself. It's been intermittently humid and rainy, which actually sort of helped, in that if I sit too long in one place I feel like my joints are going to fuse. Like I said before, tired of being huge and ache-y, and I need energy to get this ever-multiplying hill of shit I find myself racking up anywhere close to done.

At any rate. I got my new glasses on Thursday, at least, so am still dealing with adjusting to them, but look very fly nonetheless. A sort of Shirley Jacksonian, low-key angry domestic vibe. My new world-view, now that I'm officially not as angry or horny as I once was, and reasonably happy to be.;)

That's what I often feel about the stuff I commit to Twitter every day. This particular instance ranged through sex as a right/wrong binary, colonialism and the fact that I usually write about stuff instead of doing it IRL because "That [insert thing here] just sounds like a lot of work." Now I need to calm my ass down and talk about some slightly more domestic stuff, before I start a fight with anybody.

(This last part brought to you by having watched a former student of mine get into trouble for trying to rebut that #OnThisDayShe tweet about Violette Morris, Vichy government collaborator, who was killed by the French Resistance. Was she a Nazi torturer? Did she get a mastectomy because s/he was trans? Was she a butch lesbian with issues with the homophobia experienced while competing in France? Did she just want to be in the Olympics, even if they were held in Nazi Berlin? An historical argument can be made for all of the above. People are difficult, sometimes unforgivably so. I just sort of wish he'd read the room better, but the whole thing does still interest me, which is why I'm keeping score, if also keeping out of it. And amusingly, he was the guy who suggested I get on Twitter, in the first place.)

Anyhoo. The soaked bean chilli bake turned out well, so tonight I'm going to try the GF, stuff-I-had-in-my-fridge version of red beans and rice I also made last night, while racking up an insane number of daily steps that later caused me to crap out halfway through the evening. It's currently 32 degrees outside, which is hotter than any of us care for; I'm planning to take Cal out, or get Steve to take Cal out, once the sun starts to fall. No writing for maybe a week at this point, another reason I need to stop pontificating in tweet-chains and do something fucking useful. The haps.

Every night this week, my son has waited until I'm lying down to slyly sneak out of his bedroom, come over to ours and shut the door on us, then go around turning on every fucking light in the place. This is frankly bullshit on his part, and has to stop. So I am currently staying up just to prevent it, which is frankly bullshit on my part, considering how tired I am right now. And yet.

Other stuff I've done lately includes ordering a bunch of stuff from Joe Fresh, some of which I wore tonight while out with Mom, Steve and Cal at an honest-to-goodness restaurant down on the Lakeshore. Cal was mainly a dick throughout the early part, but cheered up considerably once he got some fries and bacon into him. The main take-away from the whole thing for me is how incredibly little I missed sitting around people I didn't know as music blasted loud enough to feel in your teeth, being not wonderfully served food that was okay but cost an arm and a leg. Mom, as per, had stuff to say about every possible part of the process; Steve tried not to blank out or fall asleep. He has a thyroid scan today and blood-work on Monday that the doctor now wants to see him about, so he's basically marinading in worry. It's probably just about sugar in his blood, but that might have something to do with his thyroid, and round and round.

In other, weirdly similar news, Mom consulted with a nutritionist about her increasing trouble digesting almost anything, and confirmed my own longstanding thesis on the matter: At least eighty to ninety per cent of this probably has to do with stress. Which only makes sense, considering how much she's come to hate and fear much of the work--volunteer work, I might add--she does as the president of PAL's current resident board. She's done amazing work, well beyond her due diligence, and the main kick-back has consisted of a particular group of residents blaming her for/fighting her on almost everything. I hear a lot about this stuff, and struggle to not get angry on her behalf, which would be useless. It's just a constant barrage of drama...threatening emails, abusive language, etc. The pandemic hasn't helped. A bunch of old actors and entertainment types who think they're going to die, so why shouldn't they just do whatever they want? Bare their breasts at people, spit racial slurs, hold giant parties on the roof, smoke weed, drink constantly, euthanize other people's cats while they're in hospital--fuck it, man, why not? Okay, Boomer(s).

They think she's getting something out of all this, and they resent her for it, but it's a fucking thankless grind. And she's got it until next year, so coping strategies really do have to be put in place. For myself, all I can do is sympathize, and listen, and lend her Cal whenever she wants him, and hope he does her good. But he's acting like a mix between six years old and sixteen right now, so I'm not sure he's helping, exactly.

Okay, is he asleep now? Let's see.

Yesterday I got a cheque from Open Road Media, and thought: This is the way it's supposed to be. Then again, I'm still driving myself head-first through "Poor Butcher-Bird," derailed as it was when I unexpectedly got ten hours of sleep last night. One hand gives, the other takes away, etc. I also have two interviews to complete, and tonight I'm discussing Ken Russell's The Devils with Sean Thompson (not THAT one) and Brian O'Connell. Should be fun, especially after last week's three-way discussion of Cruising. Up and down and up again, ad inferno.

Cal's spent the last three days revelling in the fact that the city finally turned what's now his favourite splash-pad back on again, the one down at the bottom of Sherbourne Street, on the Lakeshore, just next to Sugar Beach. It's fed by a continual overflow of what I can only assume is probably water diverted from the sewers, cleaned and allowed to course down a system of canals fitted with drains. Two sheeting fountains a bit further up Sherbourne are part of the same package, and Cal loves splashing through both the still-water storm-drain and the canals themselves, which have a river-like flow. On Tuesday he and a neurotypical seven-year-old were chasing each other around, kicking water and chatting excitedly together; the day after it was him and another autistic kid with even less language than Cal likes to use playing next to each other, but still fairly interactively. Yesterday he was followed around by three tiny East Indian kids, trailing behind him like journalists in the wake of a diffident kaiju, while the (probably) mentally-ill homeless lady who lives in a tent next to the storm drain complained loudly about Cal's singing. More IRL socialization than he's had all year thus far, sadly.

(His favourite thing these days is to transpose the raps from "Fancy" and "Mama Said Knock You Out" to "Stronger"'s backing track, except that he keeps modifying the words so he's not swearing, up to and including: DARNage/DARNage/DARNage, think I'm gonna bomb a TOWN, get down! Oh, my guy.)

VERMIS SUM

Now, at my given word
Go thou and do thy work:
Now through the marsh and mire
Now through the veil of fire
Now through the icy mere
Now through the fog-break drear
Go thou and raise the one
Buried long, and far from sun.

Here, path, of which I sang
Here, things I bid be brung;
Here thorns, that twist and sting
Here venom, dripped in strings
Here leaves, with poisoned veins
Here sap, that sears and stains.
Go far, and farther still—
Cease not, until I will.

Here, where the juice runs hot
Here, where the net-roots knot
Here, where the burrow's churn
Good dirt to salt doth turn.
Eyes sealed, mouth locked and bound,
Now turn towards the ground.
Here, where betides the birth,
Dig deep and stir the earth;
Drip blood and make thy toil—
See where seeds rise and boil.
Speak words to make thy prayer:
All we have sought is here.

Scream out, and she will rise
To throw off the soil's disguise.
Wyrm who bred us, hear our cries;
Spread scale-wings to black the skies