Naked Came the Creole Gumbo

She came tearing through the Lafayette cemetery, stark naked, covered in diamonds and blood, running for her very life, stumbling into a marble mausoleum, tripping over a tree root, falling, getting up, running on. He was behind her, gaining. She reached the unlocked cemetery gate, ran across the street in the darkness, ducked through the back door of the most notorious bawdy house in the city of New Orleans, and bumped into a large, well-dressed man.
"Hello, sugar," the man said. "You busy right now?"
It was Huey Long.

Thus began the infamous bodice-ripper I tried to write a few years ago with two other women I had met at a week-long workshop. What did we really call it? I've forgotten now.

It seemed like a wonderful idea when we started. I had credentials, having written eight published books. Rae had singular gifts, honed at one of those famous MFA programs in Iowa or wherever. Carol had actually completed a formal course on how to write erotica. How could we fail?

Rae had the idea to set the book in depression-era New Orleans to take people's minds off their present-day economic woes. That sounded good. And of course there must be sex scenes. The younger women were more than willing to write the sex scenes, since I was way too prudish, and I could provide the Crescent City ambiance, being the only one among us who had ever been within a thousand miles of New Orleans. And so we began as we meant to go on, with gusto. Or gumbo. The first chapter was a killer, as you can see from the above, which pretty much summarizes it. Once inside the house, of course, Magnolia or whatever it was we called her had to become one of the working girls, or risk being thrown to the mercy of Beauregarde, her murderous husband.

After setting up the situation we had to introduce a bunch of colorful characters, put them in scenes, and slide in some juicy back-story about Beauregarde, who murdered Magnolia's innocent maid (the sister of the blind whorehouse piano player) and maybe some political stuff about the run-up to Huey Long's assassination. I was very uneasy with the sex scenes. While Rae wanted to go upstairs and get handy professional tips from the other whores, I found myself wandering into the kitchen and pestering the kindly black cook for gumbo recipes. Carol tinkered with our dialogue and dressed the madam in inappropriate outfits.

It was starting to look as if it might not hang together. Our styles were too different. I seemed to be trying to turn it into a murder mystery, if not a cookbook. Then Rae wrote the sex scene.

It was too much for me. Not that it wasn't brilliantly written. It was. The situation was that Magnolia was forced by the madam to put out for one of her less attractive customers or leave the house. The encounter was not like yummy fantasy sex but like real sex one might have with a mildly unpleasant stranger, an encounter that leaves one feeling embarrassed, inadequate and judged. I know this is Art, I said to myself, but I can't stand it.

So Rae and I sort of let it lapse. I threw away the scene I had written of the voodoo orgy in Congo Square and the one where they killed the Huey Long character. Some months later Carol sent us a wistful email. What were we doing with the book? We said we had both become involved with other projects. Which was actually true. Rae is a hotshot on the internet now and I turned myself into Irene Fleming for a bit. I don't know what Carol is up to. It was fun working with them, but I won't be collaborating with another writer any time soon. It doesn't work for me.

Yesterday I Googled Myself

Not, you understand, because I'm a self-absorbed narcissist, although I can't persuasively deny it, but because writers who are trying to get themselves into the public eye are supposed to check from time to time to see whether their names are appearing online a lot. In order to do this we enter our names in a Google search, in quotes, and see what comes up.

So what did I find? 8400 hits. 100 pages of hits. I've been at this for quite a while, it seems.

Strange things appeared. And normal things as well. First of all I found stuff I put out there on purpose, like this blog, and The Crime Writers' Chronicle (my group blog), and my web site (www.kategallison.com). Then there were guest blog posts I'd done. An occasional interview. And a few reviews of my books, most of them kind. Many, many offers to sell books of mine, from Amazon and other online bookstores, from Ebay, and from Belgrave House, who reprinted the Mother Grey backlist for readers of ebooks. Google books. Somehow a number of my books got put up on Google Books.

One site claimed that I was 25 years old. That was piquant. Another claimed that I was 79 and my name was Galloway. That, too, was sort of intriguing, but once again false. One site offered a download of my first book, Unbalanced Accounts. Since they had no right to do this I was quite annoyed. There was no contact information on the site or I would have fired off a blistering letter. I put the case in the hands of the Authors Guild. If you want to read Unbalanced Accounts you can find it on Amazon Kindle, and I think you can 'borrow' it from Amazon for free. I, for one, never steal stuff if I can obtain it any other way.

But the things I brooded over longest were the reviews on Goodreads. Now, the Goodreads folks are generally lukewarm about my work. Why that should be, I'm not sure; probably their tastes don't run in the direction of the sort of stuff I write, light comedies of manners with dead bodies showing up from time to time. Perhaps they like stories of earth-shaking conflict with everyone's emotions endlessly described. I don't know, because I don't read anything that they read. Quite likely that's one of my problems.

I got a few complaints on Goodreads that I can sort of understand, for example that there isn't enough sex and violence in The Edge of Ruin for it to be considered a real murder mystery. Or car chases. No car chases. Of course, in 1909, you could outrun most of the existing cars on foot. Maybe they're right about there not being enough sex. I did have two of the movie actors getting it on in the hotel linen closet, but it happened off the page. I guess I should have been more explicit about that encounter. (The maid uttered a piercing shriek and dropped her armful of towels at the sight of Mr. Chalmers' wrinkled, heaving buttocks. Faye Winningly, moaning softly, was still wearing both her shoes. There was a hole in the sole of the left one.)

Perhaps, for the modern taste, I should have been more explicit about everything, not just the sex. Subtlety doesn't fly these days. To get subtlety you need an active imagination. To get subtlety you have to have a common culture with the person who is being subtle, so that when I raise one eyebrow you understand at once what I mean by that. We don't have that commonality anymore. Cultural diversity has its drawbacks.

I'm still trying to figure out what the fellow on Goodreads meant who accused my work of being amateurish. How could that be? Ten of my mystery novels have seen publication. For fifteen years I made excellent money writing software manuals, good ones, too, user documentation that you could actually follow. I know how to say exactly what I mean, and clearly. If I'm not a professional writer I'd like to know who is.

But enough of this, at least for another year. I promise I'll stop whining about my Goodreads reviews. In fact I promise never to go on their site again. The next time I post I'll tell you the story of how two other women and I tried to write a steamy bodice-ripper together. It's a very funny story.

This Morning I Set Fire to my Oatmeal

It wasn't actually this bad.

My normal morning breakfast, cardiologist-approved, consists of half a cup of oatmeal flakes, a handful of raisins, and a pinch of sea salt, in a microwave-safe bowl, with the microwave set to run for three minutes. We're having a party tonight, happy new year to you, by the way, and I'm a little behind in my preparations. I was supposed to have made the pecan pies yesterday. So today I feel a little stressed, a little rattled. Harold needed the microwave for his bacon. He has to go to work on Saturdays. Hastily I popped my breakfast into the cooker, as my dad used to call it, punched the minute-button thrice and retired to the dining room to read the Times.

It was not very long before smoke and expressions of alarm came rolling out of the kitchen.

Flames were issuing from the microwave. The raisins were all on fire. What had I done? I'll tell you what. In my mad haste to get breakfast I forgot to add the water.

Harold blew the fire out, God love him. Eventually I summoned the nerve to pour a little water on the smoldering raisins. The dish did not crack. The bacon was able to be cooked. I fixed myself a bowl of dry cereal and retired to the dining room to eat it in shame. "What's wrong?" Harold said. "I set fire to my oatmeal," I said. "It's the beginning of the end. Dementia is upon me."

"No it isn't," he said. "You do that all the time."

"I do?"

"I seem to recall you burned a hole in a pot five years ago."

"Oh. Right."

"And what about the time we went out and left something on the stove that caught fire and Karen had to break into the back of the house and put it out."

"I don't remember that at all." Karen hasn't lived next door in something like twenty years.

"And what about that aluminum pot?" Yes, I melted the bottom right off an aluminum-clad pot. That I remember well. The melted aluminum took on a viscous quality like chewing gum. It was interesting, but I couldn't get it to go back on the pot.

"Relax," he said. "You're not getting any wiftier. Just stay in the kitchen with the pies. Take your computer in there."

So here I am. They'll be done in another half hour.

Christmas Memories #4

I promised to tell you what happened when we went to Granny Hill's house after we finished having Christmas with Ma Gallison. I don't remember what that ride was like, though I know we had chains on the back wheels going klish-klish-klish all thirty miles of the way, and as a result had no problems with skidding or getting stuck. When we arrived we found a spray of evergreens with a big red bow hanging on Granny's front door instead of a wreath. The reason for this was that Aunt Billie, my grandmother's sister, was visiting from Kingston, Ontario. Her husband, a famous and beloved Canadian general, had died that year. She was still deeply grieving. To hang a wreath on the door would have reminded her of that constantly, she said, and she couldn't stand it.

In the modern day we have no tradition of funeral wreaths on the doors of the dead. To us, Billie's horror of Christmas wreaths seems eccentric. You're probably thinking that Billie was one of those cranky, willful old Edwardian aunts who appear in the English costume dramas. In fact Billie was nothing like that. To us children she seemed merry all the time, always joking, the best possible company for Christmas next to Granny herself. The women of my mother's family cultivated a light-hearted spirit that made them a joy to be around.

I was horrified to see that Granny had received presents in the mail and had opened them as soon as she got them, sooner than wait for Christmas morning. When I scolded her for this – well, I never would have scolded my grandmother, but I did say, "tut, tut" – she told me she didn't save her presents for later any more. I saved the lesson for later: old people don't wait for things. At least the smart ones don't.



Next morning we again opened stockings. I remember two presents from that Christmas, a bag of barley sugar animals and a game of Mister Ree, which was sort of like Clue. I love candy. I love board games. We all played Mister Ree after a sumptuous Christmas dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by with plum pudding, soaked in brandy and set on fire. What a spectacle! How we all laughed! We should have plum pudding this year. We should play a board game. Cross and Blackwell's plum pudding is pretty good. I think I'll go out and get some.

Have a very merry holiday season.

Christmas Memories #3

The year we moved back to New Jersey from the midwest I was twelve years old, my sister nine. For the first time in recorded history it seemed that we lived close enough to my grandparents to go and spend Christmas with them. When I say grandparents I mean my grandmother Gallison in Vanceboro, Maine, and my grandmother Hill in Saint Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, for by the time I was twelve both of our grandfathers had died.

Granny's House

But which grandmother should we spend the actual Christmas day with? They lived only thirty miles apart, but it was thirty miles of snow-covered dirt road. What we did ultimately was to follow the route we always followed on our summer visits, north from Bangor through the woods to Vanceboro, where we would stay with Ma, and then across the river and off to Saint Stephen to stay with Granny.

Thing was, it wasn't summer. My father knew perfectly well what he was getting into; he grew up in Vanceboro. So as we set out on the last leg of our journey he had the tire chains with him. In the trunk of the car. Night fell, and so did the snow, thick and fast, as we headed into the dread Tomah Woods. All my life I had heard of the horrors of the Tomah Woods, for the Gallisons were not enthusiastic outdoorsmen, though they lived at the farthest outposts of civilization and had been known to work as camp cooks. The Tomah Woods were menacing, it was said, full of kill-crazed moose, runaway logging trucks, mountain lions. And yet there we were, driving through it.

Actually it was darker
than this, and also
nearly vertical

Visibility grew worse, the snow deeper. My father drove more and more slowly. No one else was on the road. It got to be two in the morning; my mother and sister were asleep in the back seat. I was supposed to talk to my father and keep him awake, as I remember. Finally we stopped halfway up a steep hill, the wheels spinning. We could go no further without the chains.

My father had to back down the hill to the nearest flat place.

There was a garage at the foot of the hill, possibly the only building for fifty miles in any direction, but the people who worked there were nowhere to be seen and they had turned out the lights before they left. Still, in front of it was a flat place. While my mother and sister continued to sleep my father laid out the chains, just so, backed over them the way you're supposed to and fastened them on. No creatures came out of the shadowy darkness to get us, but that's not to say they weren't watching.

How I admired my father. What a hero. What a competent person. Of course his mother, waiting by her wood stove in Vanceboro, expected no less. He had told her he would get us there that night, and he did.

Ma

In every little town in Washington County there is a woman called Ma by everyone, as a term of respect. In Vanceboro that woman was my grandmother. She was still up when my father pulled the car into the barn, which was attached to the house in the manner of Maine barns. It smelled of cordwood, piled to the ceiling against the coming winter, and of kerosene and machine oil. We stumbled the length of the barn, over the worn linoleum in the shed, and into the warm kitchen where Ma welcomed us, fed us a snack and sent us to bed. She had put up a tree in the parlor and decorated it with amazing fiberglass angel hair. The next day we had Christmas. We found our stockings hung on the clothesline in front of the kitchen wood stove, for there was no mantel.

And that was our Christmas at Ma's house, playing happily with our new toys, stuffing ourselves with treats. Tomorrow I'll tell you about Christmas at Granny's house. But I won't tell you which Christmas fell on the twenty-fifth of December, because I don't think I ever knew.