Hello, Monday! How are you?
I’m in a remarkably good mood this morning, which is unusual for a Monday, and even more unusual for a Monday during which I intend to tackle my storage unit. (There are copies of Mardi Gras Mambo in there, I know there are, there has to be.) Granted, my mood will undoubtedly be completely different once I’ve finished that slog, but it must be done. I will not rest until I have found that case of books.
In other news, I am continuing to enjoy the hell out of Ivy Pochoda’s Wonder Valley, and have all kinds of thoughts about it that I can’t wait to share with you, Constant Reader–but they shall simply have to wait until the book is finished. It’s also making me think some more about an idea I had (what? I told you before, great books inspire me and give me ideas for my own stories! This is nothing new! Keep up, you there in the back) a while ago on our expedition to Bombay Beach and the Salton Sea. Seriously, if there’s ever a place that needs to be the setting for a short story/noir novel, it’s that town. The fact that hundreds of thousands of fish die there in the summer, gasping for air and making the surface look like its boiling, and that the shoreline is literally littered with fish corpses–that alone is a great opening scene, don’t you think? And that the stink of the rotting, dead fish can be smelled in Los Angeles when the wind is from the east?
There’s some serious metaphor just waiting to be written, don’t you think?
I am hoping that when I am finished in the storage unit I won’t be too worn out to come home and write. I just remembered yet another short story I promised, haven’t started, but at least I already had the idea for it. I need to work a mystery into it somehow, which I am not certain I can do, but maybe I’ll just write the story, see what happens, and then get input from the editor. (I also tend to think of mysteries as always involving murder, and that’s not necessarily the case.) We shall see.
Okay, I am going to finish straightening up the kitchen and drinking my coffee before heading off to the spice mines/storage unit.
Here’s another Calvin Klein ad.
