Lucy Talks

Whew, what a week.

On Monday someone in my circle’s sibling attempted suicide – it failed. A huge dose of sleeping pills and a lot of whiskey wound up eating all of Tuesday, but didn’t take the person out. So now the person is feeling even more a failure – failure at supporting their self, failure at meeting financial obligations, failure in love and building Relationships with a partner, and now failing at suicide too. I keep thinking that I’ve heard the same story before somewhere, but I can’t recall who was the prior attempter of self-exiting.

I got my drive back, and as soon as I can get someone here to help me plug it into a drive box I will survey what survived the drive crash. There is a possibility that some stuff might be on the disk, and I’ll be interested in what made it through the long dark night of the hard drive, a sort of data purgatory. I’m not hoping about any particular things, because I would prefer surprise at what survived instead of any disappointment for that which didn’t.

As I do each morning, I listen to an episode of Jazz in Words and Music. Today’s was interesting – Curt Elling’s jazz interpretations of music from the Brill Building (both major eras), an article on Miles Davis as a way-shower for writers (which I devoured, of course), and a Dave Duglas album. This third one was the most interesting; back in 2012 he released an album sprouting from the brass ensemble works he took from his mother’s recommendation and performed at her funeral after a three year fight with ovarian cancer. They’re all hymns. Dave Douglas left the Presbyterian Church when he was young and has felt no draw back to it, so he interpreted these pieces as folk music. I find this interesting, and I can get his point about those tunes. I enjoy his work, both as a modern player and also as a counter to Wynton, whose stuff seems too formalized and rigid – Wynton reminds me of people I played with at pub sessions back when I was exploring Irish folk music, and those folk players who thought of themselves as chroniclers and bastions against any coloration in their performance or anyone else’s (though I find the term offensive, they were called folk nazis in the community). Dave Douglas has been a clear voice that jazz played on the trumpet is a living thing and that it can grow and change – like what Miles did his entire life. This brings me back to the middle story in the episode – Writing like Miles played. I’ve heard an adage that sums it up well – say what needs saying, and no more. Miles did that, and it’s a powerful thing to remember and apply elsewhere.

I finished the book It Shines about the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. That was a crazy amount of drugs and alcohol. I now understand why a friend of mine was shocked when I mentioned I liked their song "Jackie Blue", because it's atypical for their stuff. And the book has lots of musician shenanigan's documented in its pages or seconds.

Well, I’ve been a bit productive.
I’ve already written about A Long Weekend In Paris. I dove into a story I’ve been working on for a few months shy of four years, Love Spell -- it’s about a wiccan high priestess who uses a blood jasper heart pendant as a protection spell receptacle, stopping anyone who would harm her from being able to do so. Her breakup was so nasty that she’s sure nobody who’s good for her will ever come around her – ah, loopholes, got to love them as a writer. She’s sure she only picks men who are bad for her. That’s the setup of the story. I’ve spell checked it, and in the next week or so I’ll do some editing passes.

What? Is the novel biographical in some way? What makes you think that? Absurd.

lanalucy is going to take the month of August off save for critical stuff like my submission to the Brainz writers group and a couple of factotum things for me. I’m not going to stop writing though, so there’ll be plenty of stuff to edit.

Speaking of stuff to edit, I wrote another Sheryl Foster story for the fix-up novel I’m doing about her. For those of you who don’t want to dig back way far in my journal, this setting is a combination of a soft apocalypse with fantasy elements and an antihero who has a penchant for foul language and a violent streak. My beta readers who’ve read her stuff love it more than anything else I’ve written, because this is a character with the gloves off. This story starts part D of the novel, and though it’s shorter it gets things moving. I suspect everything from this point in the stories will be continuous escalation of intensity to the novel climax.

There’s a t-shirt graphic out in the world that asks, “What if Jesse’s girl is Stacy’s mom, named Jenny?” I like to add in “My Best Friend’s Girl” by The Cars into that mix too. lanalucy and I have done these kinds of matchups for different things (eight years of roommate connection can do things like that), and another one hit me a couple of days ago. For those who don’t get the humor of these things, I know this is very much not the case, but I like playing around with the idea of Debbie Fields, who brought us Mrs. Field’s Cookies, being the same Debbie who was photographed by her grandfather as Little Debbie, the company that makes snack cakes. (No, this is not the case, I know it’s not the case, and I don’t have a deep abiding love that I feel the need to put this disclaimer in so I don’t get a raft of responses about this idea being false – chalk it up to my personal sense of humor). And for those of you who want to delve a bit deeper into the Jesse’s Girl/Stacy’s Mom/Jenny thing, it’s possible to sing the Rick Springfield song chorus as, “I wish that I had Stacy’s Mom; I want Stacy’s mom;8675309.” It tracks well. This is a glimpse into the way my brain works – I find patterns in things and play with them; I also had to write “piggyback songs” for grades in a class, both by changing the words to the song (This Land is Wet Land to the old patriotic Woody Guthrie song) and music (a I/iii/IV/I rock version of Hey Good Lookin’). So this kind of music play is not only something I can do, but had to do for a grade in a class with a professor who was prone to giving blind students lower grades thanks to a gatekeeper thing he had going on. Yeah, I know, way skeezy thing to do, and he had no idea what to do with me, because I was the only student in the entire program who had a B.M. in Jazz Studies. But onward.

I don’t want to let this momentum pass, so I’m going to dig deep into my Work in Progress folder and check for something to work on. And of course inspiration is always a potential thing with me, so something new might drop in for a visit – after all, that’s what happened with A Long Weekend in Paris one morning when I woke up from the basic scenario in a dream.

In other news, things are worked out so I can get the next three months of infusions. In three weeks I’m going in for my annual check-up with my nephrologist; This is going to start out with sixteen vials of blood taken from me, then a bone density scan and some other procedures to check that I’m still progressing well. The not so fun part of this is that it’ll start at 7:30am – at least the traffic won’t be as bad getting there.

I think that’s all for now. Oh, and Dixie’s still a dog; she doesn’t seem to be inclined to change that, though of course she’s inclined in other ways, including her canine yoga poses.

One more thing -- I'm not managing to fix some errors in my topic list, and it may be an accessibility problem. Data and a walk-through/technical assistance would be appreciated.