YACKETY SMACKETY
Good morning and happy Monday, everybody. It’s YA BOI! We’ve got a lot going on this week. First of all, this is my penultimate week as a 44-year old man. I turn 45 on November 30, and I’m psyched about that. The forties have been my best decade so far, and for a bit there, it didn’t look like I was going to make it through. I’ll be celebrating in New Orleans with Kechi and some friends, but we won’t be doing anything too serious. Everybody’s too busy to plan anything truly elaborate, so I’m just going to eat some Spanish food, eat a little cake, probably swim, and yackety smackety.
It’s another two- reading week! On Saturday night, I read at Beanlandia with Third Lantern Lit’s inaugural Fiction Sessions reading, which was super exciting. They’re putting together this new fiction readings series in New Orleans where they put it on every four months and each reading has a theme. They have a lot of poetry events and mixed-genre events in the New Orleans lit scene, but this is the first one I know of dedicated to Fiction, full-stop. The theme of Saturday’s was speculative fiction, and they tapped me for that along with a broad range of folx, some I’ve known or known of for a while, and some completely new to me.
Daphne Armbruster and Tracy Cunningham hosted beautifully, and the Beanlandia space is amazing. It’s the clubhouse for Krewe of Redbeans, and while I’ve been to that particular part of the Bywater before, I haven’t been by that exact space with the beautiful park with the live oaks and the tidy little businesses. It’s got great colors and a chill vibe, and it’s sort of a museum with that meticulously assembled bean art they make—the jackets, the costumes. They have this great big bean mosaic of a bottle of crystal hot sauce mounted on one of their sliding doors, and if you know me, you know Crystal is my favorite. I’m not a brand loyalty kind of guy, but that’s my sauce right there.
The night’s readers were Sam Cooley, John Greene, Laura McKnight, Rachel Dunphy, Jacob Edenfield, and TQ Sims. I’ll be reading with TQ tonight, actually, at Blue Cypruss Books, for his book release. I read from Dead End Boys, which is always a thrill. It’s really cool seeing how audiences connect with the work and comparing that to how I relate to it. Sometimes I feel like I mined everything in my life and my recent past for Perilous Graves, and so when I was getting started on this book, I was asking myself what was left—but we all contain multitudes and there’s a lot of elements of my life and worldview that didn’t make it into that first book—and that’s before you even get into how my life has changed and a sort of new version of me has been born in the two years since that book was released.
Speaking of, there’s always a lot of talk about what’s going to happen for Mardi Gras 2025, and people are making their plans. Usually, I’m pretty involved in that, but this year, we’re spreading my brother’s ashes on Mardi Gras, and it’s just hard to give thought to anything else. I think I might go for an elaborate costume—full wizard get-up in honor of Brandon’s memory, because that was his favorite way to dress up when we were younger. He used to wear this burgundy cloak to the Maryland Rennaissance festival, and these boots that I called the “Magical +25 elf boots of elfness.” I teased him a little over those boots, but I honestly loved them, and I loved how they made him feel.
If this post reads a little weird, it’s because it’s partly intended as video copy for my Monday message to my Patreon supporters. I’ve never written something else only to realize in mid-stream that I should also post it to my blog carousel. I don’t know if anybody is looking at these entries very closely, but I’d be interested to know how this reads as opposed to my usual posts that are just meant to be read.
The Patreon is still in its infancy, so this is a great time to get in on the ground floor. Of course, one can join for free, but there are also paid tiers where you get more out of the experience. I’m thinking of new features to add all the time. For instance, I’m going to start posting trunk stories as well as highlighting some of the things that are already out there online. I’m already posting rough drafts of Dead End Boys chapters, and this week I’ve got a Zoom interview coming out with R. R. Virdi, author of the Tales of Tremaine epic fantasy series and a bunch of Urban Fantasy novels. I always have a fantastic time talking to him. The hardest part is knowing when to start and finish recording, honestly.
I’ll also be posting more works in progress, poetry, prose, and whatever else. Just a ton of cool stuff we have planned for the coming months. I say “we,” but I’m pretty much on my own for this one—not that other folks don’t throw a little help my way sometimes.
Things are getting more and more interesting with the new novel, and I’m having a great time sharing pieces of it around New Orleans. I’ll make sure to do a better job posting about these events BEFORE they happen, but please check me out at Blue Cypress tonight. It’s one of my favorite book shops in the world, and they’ve been great boosters of Ballad since it came out. I think they clench the category of best book shop cats, too. The first time I went in there, I thought the orange cat was really good taxidermy or something, but then he moved. Well. LET’S START THE WEEK, BABEY!