I just realized that lately I spend most of my days playing with dirt and plants, and most of my nights playing with paper, scissors, glue, glitter, jewels, and such. Obviously, I have achieved my near-lifelong ambition of regressing to age 5.

In other news, Peter Straub has selected my story "Pansu" for Fantastic Tales: American Stories of Terror and the Uncanny, which he's editing for the Library of America. The volume is due out in October 2009. (Because I am lazy, I just stole those two sentences from greygirlbeast, who also has a story in the book, and substituted my title.) I'm pleased by Peter's choice of "Pansu," as I'm pretty sure this is the first love the story has received since Camelot Books first released it as a chapbook -- no reviews that I can recall, no reprints except in my own collection -- and I do have a certain affection for it. As I wrote in my foreword to The Devil You Know, after a lot of difficult nonfiction pieces and fiction that was grim in every sense of the word, "Pansu" showed me that I could still thoroughly enjoy writing. Between this anthology and Small Beer's release of Second Line (the Value of X/D*U*C*K omnibus), this October is shaping up to be a big month for me.

This post on therealpzb made me happy, not just for the kind words about D*U*C*K but for the props the poster gives to novellas in general. They're a form I like very much, both to work in and to read. The poster mentions Different Seasons, which may well contain Stephen King's single finest piece of writing ever ("The Body"). I believe Peter Straub does some of his absolute best work in novella form ("Pork Pie Hat," "Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle," more). The post was particularly welcome just now because the latest, otherwise mostly favorable Amazon customer review of Antediluvian Tales complains that "Even D*U*C*K, her latest, has been downgraded to a $35 'novella.'" I suppose it's bad form to bitch about four-star reviews -- and I do appreciate the fact that the reviewer seems to read everything I publish -- but this annoyed me a little. First of all, D*U*C*K wasn't "downgraded" to anything. I contracted with Subterranean Press to write a novella and I wrote one; neither SubPress nor I ever claimed it was going to be anything else. Second, I don't know what those snarky quotation marks are for; novella is a perfectly valid literary term and D*U*C*K is a perfectly valid novella. Third, if you know you don't like novellas and find $35 (a price over which I have no control) too expensive for such a book, don't buy the fucking thing. No one is holding a gun to your head.

Novellas have a bad name even among writers, because they're hard to publish: magazines and anthologies don't want a piece that will take up that amount of space unless you're a big name. And no major publisher is likely to publish a Different Seasons-like collection of novellas unless you're a really big name. One of the things I value deeply about Subterranean Press is that this kind of corporate BS isn't an issue; as long as it's good work, they will publish story collections, novellas, short novels, chapbooks, and other interesting forms for which the larger publishing world has little time.

By the way, I linked to Subterranean's D*U*C*K page because I noticed that Amazon is temporarily out of stock, but in general, it's better to buy my Subterranean books directly from Subterranean; they'll get there so much faster that it's well worth giving up the slight Amazon discount.

I was invited to a crawfish boil today and really wanted to go, but woke up with a bum right leg that wouldn't stop raving and whinging even after five Ultrams and the heating pad. Fucking thing. Later on it eased off a bit, but by then Chris had already taken the car to work, so I messed around in the backyard, chopping weeds with my brand-new hedge shears and thinking of the most horrifying scene in King & Straub's Black House; hanging a couple of new bird feeders; planting some kind of shrub called Esperanza Gold Star, which is supposed to have "clusters of showy, fragrant yellow flowers summer to frost." (I'm hoping we won't have any freezes next winter; my gingers did OK in the last few, possibly because I covered them, but my habaneros are only just now showing the feeblest signs of coming back.) And then just sitting on the back steps, watching the perfectly ordinary yard birds -- sparrows, house finches, cardinals, mourning doves, the occasional trouble-making blue jay. And of course the "street eagles" (pigeons), who amuse me by crowding in and covering the biggest feeder so thoroughly that you can't even see it.

Milton brought me the Esperanza Gold Star plant about three weeks ago, as well as a baby fig tree and a baby orange tree with delicious-smelling blossoms, heaving them into my yard in a grocery cart before I knew what was going on. I don't even want to know what nefariousness resulted in Milton gifting me with trees. Normally I turn people away if I suspect the stuff they want to give or sell me is stolen, but in this case there seemed little chance of returning the trees to their rightful owner(s), and I didn't want to just let them die. Ah, well. There is an abandoned nursery in the neighborhood where plants still grow. Maybe they came from there.

If you can stand a couple more Our Lady of Good Counsel videos, I think these two are very good.

Another one from nola.com

By reader Sarah Elise Lewis

For interested parties, my current round of eBay auctions ends tomorrow afternoon. That first-edition hardcover of Swamp Foetus -- a real rarity -- is currently priced at $76, and from what I've seen online and in convention dealers' rooms, it would be a bargain at twice that price. So go getcherself a bargain, and help this precious boy. Shameless, I know, but the situation is what it is, and right now it's pretty damn sucky.

LINUS, in an old Peanuts strip: "I’m aware of my tongue ... It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can’t help it ... I can’t put it out of my mind. ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ..."

Have you ever had this happen? I have, but I don't find it all that terrible. However, for the last two days I have been aware of my heart, which is quite unpleasant. I'm not having chest pains or anything like that, but I can just feel it in there -- the shape of each ventricle and aorta, the pumping (which feels/sounds like PA-KOOSH, PA-KOOSH, PA-KOOSH), the blood rushing into and out of it. It disturbs me the way watching a large, dangerous piece of machinery do its job sometimes disturbs me.

In more heartening (HAR!) news, I e-mailed Peter Straub last night, and he replied to me, as he always does, with tremendous kindness and sound advice. I won't go into details because the conversation was very personal on both sides, but basically, he pointed out to me that the events of the past two-plus years are facts, that my life really has been squeezed into this shape, this terrible vortex, and that it's not all my fault; also, that it's hardly surprising that those events should be so deeply inscribed on my soul that I'm not all shiny-better yet. I can't control the weather. I didn't break the levees. Despite my guilt and sorrow about evacuating, I couldn't have done much good if I had stayed, because we were in no way prepared. (Next time [please God, don't let there be a next time] we will be.) I didn't do this -- it's as if someone knocked me senseless and then gave me a huge, ugly permanent tattoo that I didn't want.

This all seems so elementary, but somehow I hadn't grasped it until I got Peter's e-mail this afternoon, and I guess I had some kind of breakthrough -- I started crying and wailing at Chris that I didn't do it, I didn't do it, my life has been permanently altered by forces beyond my control, I did not make this awful, distorted shape. In a four-paragraph e-mail, Peter somehow made me realize things that neither Chris, shrinks, my other friends, the news, nor anything else has been able to do. I'm not, like, magically healed or anything, but I feel a little stronger from realizing these things.

Today Chris and I had lunch at Casamento's, then the first Cajun Eggnog daiquiris of the season. (Every year I get somebody asking me what a Cajun Eggnog daiquiri is, so let me go ahead and tell you right here and now: it's an eggnog-flavored daquiri with bourbon in it, and no, it's not spicy, and no, there is nothing remotely "Cajun" about it, but that's just what the daiquiri shops call it.

Last night I dreamed that William walked into the bedroom, pure white and strutting as he always did. My heart leaped up when I realized we must have made a mistake somehow and he wasn't dead -- but then a black coloration started at the tip of his tail and quickly traveled all the way up his body, turning him into a different cat.

Well, I don't know if Peter Straub is a good actor or not -- he seemed to me very much like Peter Straub -- but I will say that the quality of the acting on One Life To Live made him look like a seasoned pro. Between that and the commercials, which were invariably depressing, disgusting, or both, I don't think I'll be watching the soaps anymore. One great thing about pro sports on TV is that the commercials very seldom feature potty-training products or "upbeat" pitches for Alzheimer's drugs. Basketball in particular tends to slant its advertising toward the young "urban" (read "black") male, which makes for better ads overall (and don't counter me with the one about the fratboy idiots worshiping the magic fridge; I don't like that one either).

The title of this entry was false advertising. I don't actually have a happy bunny story. I guess I'm just not in happy bunny mode lately. However, I can give you this jolly picture of me and my friend Mindy at the Cafe Adelaide dinner:



Drunk? Certainly not!

Mindy is Isleño, the people whose festival I was talking about yesterday, and she will be one of my research angels for Dead Shrimp Blues. However, she told me the other night that her grandmother was Italian. No matter who you meet in New Orleans -- black people, Cajuns, whatever -- sooner or later they will invariably announce to you, "My grandmother was Italian!" Mine wasn't, but my late step-grandmother*, Marcella Russo, was, and her family was a big influence on the Stubbs family.


*The mother of my father's second wife, to whom he is no longer married but with whom he had two daughters. That would make her my step-grandmother, right?

A couple of weeks ago an Australian reader posted a nice Amazon review of The Value of X in which he expressed his disappointment that the book was advertised as signed but arrived unsigned. (The first two printings of TVoX were signed; when Subterranean wanted to do a third printing, I was frantically trying to finish Soul Kitchen and didn't have time to do signature sheets, so they decided to publish the edition unsigned and Amazon apparently never got wind of the change.) I contacted the reader, sympathized with his disappointment, had Subterranean contact Amazon to see that the change was made in the description of the book, and offered to send my Australian reader a free signed copy of TVoX to make up for the problem. He declined, but thanked me for my kindness.

This morning, he found another way of thanking me for my kindness by posting a one-star "review" of The Devil You Know, which he hasn't read, because Amazon took too long to send it to him.

Look, I can't blame anyone (especially in Australia, where I've heard shocking tales of how long deliveries take to arrive) for complaining about Amazon's customer service. However, Amazon is not punished by the posting of a one-star review; the author is. Since this non-review clearly violates Amazon's TOS, I've contacted them and asked to have it removed, as well as contacting the author and asking him to do the right thing and have it removed himself. (Since I was unable to keep a certain peevish tone out of my e-mail, I don't know if he will do so.) The removal will probably go faster if some of you nice folks also go to the book's page and report the "review" as inappropriate.

Thanks, and I'm sorry I never seem to do anything here lately but bitch and moan. I'll try to tell you a happy bunny story soon.

[Addendum: Here is one happy, if extremely weird, thing: Peter Straub will guest-star on the soap opera "One Life To Live" today at 1:00 PM CST.]

[Addendum the Second: Wow, that was fast; the "review" is already gone. Thanks for your help, and please remember, folks, render unto Amazon what is Amazon's.]

On top of everything else, my brain now insists on composing doggerel in my sleep. Yesterday I e-mailed someone on my birding list, who also happens to live in my old neighborhood, about how raccoons have lived in our 'hood for years (he'd seen a couple post-K, but our dog nearly caught one right after we moved into our house eleven years ago). This morning I woke up with the following stuck in my head:

Charlie she saw a coon
And Charlie she treed it.
She chased it up high
Where nobody seed it.

Why, God, why?

I slept until nearly 2:00 PM today, and despite three cups of strong coffee, am still not very awake. Last night I let Chris read the first twenty pages of "Waiting For Bobby Hebert." His remarks were positive, but by now he knows better to nitpick at this early stage. (I will welcome his nitpicking later.) This story is taking some odd turns. For one thing, though I do plan to deal with the storm in future Liquor novels, "Waiting For Bobby Hebert" seems to take place in some alternate reality where the storm did not hit New Orleans. For another, I find myself wanting to make narrative intrusions à la Tom Robbins (whom I do not like at all) or King & Straub at the beginning of Black House (I like both these authors very much, but Black House is not one of my favorite books by either of them). I've never done this sort of thing before, and I can't decide whether to squelch the urge or let it ride, at least in the first draft.

Well, I've done it again: been forced to sentence myself to a Period of Virtue with a self-imposed three-drink maximum, and preferably only two. Otherwise I'm going to end up breaking my fool neck or something. That's if the flesh-eating bacteria don't get me first -- they may already have a foothold.

On Thursday I had a lovely, civilized luncheon with arthursimone. However, the lunch was at Lilette, the restaurant that broke my heart as chronicled in "Poivre" (a very short story you can find in The Devil You Know), and this was my first visit there in, what, three years? The combination of that and Mr. Simone's extremely pleasant but undeniably stimulating company may have set me off. Or maybe, as has recently been suggested in several forums, all New Orleanians are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and this was simply one of my flashier ways of coping with it. Or maybe I'm just a big fat dumbass. Anyway, I had three -- possibly four -- lovely gin drinks at Lilette, which is enough for anyone, even a post-disaster New Orleanian, to have before 4:00 PM. However, when Arthur dropped me off, instead of going in the house and relaxing like a decent man, I decided it would be a great idea to walk downtown and visit my friend scottynola. Except he turned out to be out of town. And there's a bar right up the street from his house. And I guess I drank three or four beers there. And then I tumbled over for the first of many times. And then a nice, nice man I'd never seen before called a cab and put me in it and sent me home. And when I got there, I found out the nice man had even paid for the cab.

Except I STILL didn't go home. I went to the bar up the street from OUR apartment. On the way, I tumbled over again and skinned my knees, which is when I figure the flesh-eating bacteria got in; I'll probably begin rotting away in a couple of days. And I started drinking gin and soda. And then a handsome young man came up and asked my name, and, as I usually do when strangers want to know my name, I said, "Chris." Except the young man came back pert as you please, "Oh my gosh, I thought you might be Poppy Z. Brite."

"Well," I mumbled into my cups, "I might possibly be that person ... "

It turned out he was at the bar with his boyfriend and they 'd both worked in the restaurant industry and were big fans, especially of the Liquor books. So naturally they decided the best thing would be for us all to do several shots of some sort of noxious pinkish mixture of Jaegermeister and cranberry juice. (I think that's what it was.) The last thing I really remember is clutching a slender but muscular arm for dear life as they walked me home. Thank you, dear young men, even though you really shouldn't have gotten me doing those shots. If I see you again, there is no way in hell I will recognize you, so please reintroduce yourselves. Chris, returning from the errands he'd been doing all day, found me crumpled at the top of the stairs clutching a disposable camera. I really couldn't tell you what I had planned to photograph, and no pictures had been taken, so it will never be known.

After he got me into the apartment, I stumbled around for awhile, falling over seven or eight more times including one triple-gainer backwards off the bed, then laid on the floor as he attempted to carry on a dialogue with me.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?" he says I would ask.

"Dude, I want you to get up and come get in bed."

"BUT THEN WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?"

"Well, then we'll have a nice conversation."

"WELL, I'M NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT VIETNAM!!!"

Apparently this was a recurring motif: I had the idea that Chris wanted me to talk about Vietnam, specifically the war, and I wasn't going to do it. After awhile I demanded, "WHAT YEAR IS IT??? IS IT STILL THE SEVENTIES???"

I'd been rereading The Dead Zone, so maybe I thought I was Johnny Smith just coming out of his coma. Chris told me it was not the seventies, I said several more times that I was not going to talk about Vietnam, and then, hideously, I got the idea that I needed to talk to Peter Straub. He would understand all this and talk me through it. Chris was unable to prevent me from calling and leaving a garbled message on his answering machine, but fortunately he turned out to be at the World Fantasy Convention and I called back the next morning and begged his secretary to erase it, so though I plan to make a clean breast of it to him when I can, I hope he is never subjected to the message itself.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Eventually Chris got me to go to bed, and I spent most of yesterday begging him to kill me, and if he wouldn't kill me, praying to God to please just let me diiiiiiiiiie. But I feel halfway alive today, aside from my skinned knees, my bruised butt, and the knot on the back of my head,

I'm really going to have to calm down, though. Period of Virtue. Yes. Good.

You know what the real problem is? It's the fact that I haven't written anything of substance since August 29. Today I need to get my ass over to Office Depot, buy a filing cabinet and a cheap desk, and get back to work on something, anything, whether it's Dead Shrimp Blues or a Graham Greene pastiche or a story about Rickey and G-man cutting their toenails. It doesn't matter. When I don't write, I fail to thrive, and eventually I get hysterical and dangerous.

And now my tale is told.

Sitting here drinking a frozen margarita Chris brought back from a trip out of the hinterlands. Alcohol doesn't help as much as I wish it did, though. I want more pills. My Vicodin and Ativan are gone. I hardly knew ye.

Today I told my agent that I won't be able to tour for Soul Kitchen. Concretely, I don't see how I will be able to spare the time away from working to make our home liveable again; more nebulously, I have this dread of representing New Orleans, and New Orleans representing disaster, and people looking at me with cautious sideways eyes the way you look at someone whose longtime lover has just died, and of being asked to assauge people's curiosity about What Was It Really Like and How The City Is Doing Now and Will It Ever Truly Come Back and blah blah blah, when come next June I'll surely still be trying to answer those questions in my own mind. I'll tour for Dead Shrimp Blues, when I've had time to decide if and how I'm going to deal with all this in my own work, when I've lived back in New Orleans and become part of it again. In the unseeable, unknowable future.

Back when all of us lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else ... (Peter Straub ... is that Shadowlands? I think so. I wrote to Peter today to let him know we were alive, and immediately got a nice long e-mail back.)

I find that I can't keep doing the music tags, at least not for a little while.