Archive for category new york

baby, it’s cold outside

Dec 27

Posted by kate in kindling fire with snow, new york, photos | No Comments

This was the scene out my bedroom window yesterday afternoon in the middle of the storm, so you can see 'my' backyard (which has been taken over by the cafe on the first floor) and the yards in back of the surrounding buildings.

Since you’re on the internet, you must be aware that the east coast got quite a storm yesterday. This is going to sound like a ham-fisted stab at book promotion, but this storm was a lot like the one on which I based Kindling Fire with Snow. In Brooklyn, we got about two feet of snow, but this is complicated by the fact that most of the plow operators and sanitation workers who would clean it all up are on vacation for the holidays.

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers posting photos of the snow blanketing their lovely yards, but snow is something else in the city. So, I took a couple of photos. You can click on any of these to enlarge them (but I took them with my phone, so they are not that sharp).

This is a block near my apartment this evening. In the distance, there are people digging out their cars.

I am apparently not always of sound mine, because I got up this morning and figured I’d walk to my office. I didn’t learn until I got there that I needn’t have bothered, but I figure I earned some brownie points for hiking all the way there in snow up to my knees (it’s about a mile from my apartment). I came home this evening to find that things had much improved, at least as far as the sidewalks being shoveled, but as far as I can tell, Brooklyn hasn’t really been plowed yet.

This is my block, which, as you can see, hasn't even been plowed yet, as of just before 5pm.

The walk home, just as dusk was falling, was punctuated by the squeal of the tires of cars stuck in snow banks. It makes me pretty glad I don’t drive. Also pretty glad I didn’t have to leave Brooklyn, because a bunch of the trains are still out.

It’s sort of a fun adventure, but it’s sure as heck not easy to walk in. I am, granted, not exactly in peak physical condition, but climbing over those snow drifts was rough on my ankles. Here’s hoping they plow by tomorrow.

The snow day yesterday provided me with a good solid block of writing time, and I was quite productive, so at least we got something out of the storm.

awkward segues and crazy weather

Oct 12

Posted by kate in kindling fire with snow, new york | 1 Comment

February snow storm

Kindling Fire with Snow was inspired by these two crazy blizzards that blew through Brooklyn in February. New York is not usually prone to extreme weather, which is what made these particular blizzards remarkable.

We’ve had some equally crazy weather here in Brooklyn the last few weeks. We had a tornado touch down near my apartment about a month ago (Gothamist has pictures of the damage). I missed most of the storm itself due to the fact that it happened while I was traveling via subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I saw the damage, though. I tree fell down in front of the church across the street from me and there were dozens of downed trees in nearby Prospect Park, which is really heartbreaking. Then yesterday, we got this insane hail storm. I came home in the middle of it. It was pretty strange to see what looked like ice on the sidewalk when it wasn’t even cool enough to put on a jacket.

I don’t know if I have a point besides to say that anything can happen, and weather sure is a strange thing. I mean, I lived in Massachusetts for a while, where the motto is generally, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes,” (70°F days in December! Snowstorms in April!) but this weather lately has just been bizarre. And inspirational, apparently, if I got a novella out of it. Which comes out on October 20th.

details, details

Jul 26

Posted by kate in books, new york, WIP | No Comments

This weekend was really unbearably hot and humid in New York. This is going to make me sound a little like a pretentious snob, but I decided to beat the heat by spending a chunk of Saturday at the Met. The Met is by far my favorite museum in the city, maybe because its collections are so vast. You could spend a week there and still not see everything. I’ve been probably a dozen times in the last five years, and I bet there are galleries I have yet to step foot in.

One of the funny things about living in New York is that it’s easy to take cultural institutions for granted. It’s always there, so you can go see it later. Although, I sometimes fill in stretches of idle time with tourism. I get bored and go wandering. I’m pretty well-read on New York City history, so it’s fun to put a visual to something I’ve read about.

I was thinking about this today because my knowledge of some New Yorkish things is maybe unusual, even for a New Yorker. My current WIP is about two historians, and I wrote what I thought was a pretty clever line about how how bad an idea it would have been for a Victorian gentleman to have put a Civil War monument in Upper Manhattan. (“Exhibit A being Grant’s Tomb,” one of the characters says.) And then I realized—I bet plenty of people have no idea where Grant’s tomb is located, New Yorkers included. The point of the line, of course, is that it’s not a popular tourist attraction, although I’ve been a few times. (I should get some extra history nerd points for having been at its re-dedication in 1997.) It’s up in Riverside Park, near-ish 120th Street, a pretty easy walk from the Columbia University campus. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent Grant, chose the location primarily so that she could visit the tomb frequently. Apparently Central Park was a possibility, but she settled on Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson. A pretty spot, to be sure, but out of the way enough that it doesn’t attract many visitors. Or, at least, historical sites like that don’t have the same cachet as some other places in the city. I expect this is something two historians living in New York would know—both where Grant’s tomb is and the fact that hardly anybody ever goes there; for the record, there are some neat little exhibits on Grant’s life and Civil War history generally inside the mausoleum, which Wikipedia says is the largest mausoleum in North America—but I added a sentence explaining the joke.

It’s one of those things. Where do you find the fine line between sounding authentic and being so obscure as to lose your reader’s interest.

Speaking of my weird knowledge base, I helped Z.A. Maxfield with some of her New York facts for her new release Stirring Up Trouble. It’s a really fun book, I heartily recommend it.

brooklyn pride

Jun 13

Posted by kate in new york, photos | 1 Comment

Yesterday was Brooklyn’s gay pride festival. Conveniently, it happens in my neighborhood. It’s a much smaller scale production than the big New York Pride parade, but there is a street fair and a night parade. I had to be somewhere else last night, so I missed the parade, but my friend M and I walked over to check out the street fair. I took a few photos. You can click on them to see larger versions.

The street fair kind of looks like every New York street fair you’ve ever been to, but with more rainbows and activism.

These balloons were at the 15th Street entrance to Prospect Park.

We stopped and got ice cream from the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. The truck can often be found near Union Square in Manhattan during the summer, if you happen to be in the city. I heartily recommend the Salty Pimp—that’s vanilla soft serve drizzled with dulce de leche, sea salt (!), and dipped in chocolate. You would think salt would be kinda weird on ice cream, but you’d be wrong; it’s actually delicious.

I’ve seen this guy in the pink gown at every parade I’ve ever been to in Brooklyn. I call him the Parrot Man, because he’s always accompanied by that parrot on top of the other guy’s head.

Finally, we stopped to listen to some live music on the stage inside the park.

hot!

May 26

Posted by kate in in hot pursuit, new york | No Comments

In a continuing effort to entertain the visitors to my website that Google Analytics insists I’m getting, I have spent the better part of the last four days wracking my brain for something to put in a blog post.

What I got right now is that it’s hot. 95ºF in NYC today. I just turned on my AC for the first time this year. (I forgot that it takes a couple of hours before it really starts cooling the apartment, so I probably should have turned it on before I left for work. Instead, I have a hot apartment and a phenomenon I like to refer to as “droopy cat.” This mostly involves my feline roommate draping herself over furniture or else laying splayed out on the floor.) Summer in New York is something else. On the one hand, I work in an industry that slows down some in the summer, so I have more free time. On the other, it’s sticky and dirty and unpleasant at times. A woman from Florida worked in my office last summer and spent a great amount of time complaining about the heat. When I pointed out that she’d lived her whole life in, you know, Florida, where it is hot, she made the valid argument that everything in Florida has central air, and also you drive in an air-conditioned car to get there. I think my whole block was constructed before central air was even a spark in the eye of its inventor, and I do not own a car, so I was sympathetic.

On the plus side, some of the rose bushes I walked by today were really gorgeous. There’s a brownstone a block away from my office that has this massive rose bush with bright fuchsia blossoms. I would have taken a photo, but the owner was watering said rose bush, and that felt tacky.

Bad segue! Today, I listened to the podcast of last Friday’s Fresh Air (the NPR show). They did a tribute to Law & Order that consisted mostly of clips of Terry Gross’s interviews with the creator and various cast members. I haven’t watched the show in a while, but, as you know, I love police procedurals, and L&O in particular, so I’m sad the Original Flavor version was canceled after 20 years with so little fanfare.

One thing that stuck out, aside from clips of Jerry Orbach singing in a number of Broadway productions, was something S. Epatha Merkerson said. She plays Lt. Van Buren on the show. She said first that she was cast primarily because NBC was going to cancel the show if the producers didn’t put some women on it. And not even in the titillating sense; they just needed some female characters for balance. Merkerson said that, when she started on the show (in the early 90s), there were only 5 female police lieutenants in Manhattan. Something about that blew my mind a little. Merkerson said she met with a few of them to get some tips for how to play her character, and she went on to say that women had to change the way they behaved in front of certain groups of people and that they had to work hard to be taken seriously.

I like the idea of a straight-shooting female police officer as a character in a book. I have been tinkering with a sequel to In Hot Pursuit that’s not quite off the ground yet, but if I’m revisiting my gay cop character, and the novel will be set in New York, it might be an interesting opportunity to explore that through a character. (I’m just thinking aloud.) Deb Ruiz is kind of a prototype of that. I came to really love Ruiz while I was writing the novel; I like that she’s smart, capable, and doesn’t take shit from anybody. I am, generally, a fan of strong female characters in books, so it was fun to write her. (And to have an actually strong female cop. In a lot of novels I’ve read, “strong female characters,” especially those in law enforcement, tend to demonstrate their strength by, like, not being into fashion and cursing a lot. So often, they have mushy centers and crumble when the going gets tough. Not so Ruiz.

Well, the AC is chugging away and my living room is marginally less hot now. Plus, hey, blog post!

a few random thoughts

Apr 4

Posted by kate in ebooks, fluff, new york, WIP, writing | No Comments

Spring is for sure my favorite season. I like to take walks and I like flowers and I think the first couple of weekends of spring, when everyone is anxious to spend time outside, are like waking up from a long hibernation. This was an especially snowy, unpleasant winter, so it’s kind of nice to see lots of sunny days in the forecast. I took a long walk through the neighborhood this afternoon, admiring all the flowers blooming. I always forget how many cherry trees there are in Brooklyn until they start blooming in April.

I’m finishing up a novella that takes place during the winter, and it’s very hard to write about blizzards when it’s so sunny and warm out!

My Kindle might be developing an inferiority complex now that the iPad is out. I have some reservations about the iPad—I wish it ran OS X, I’m worried reading novels on a backlit screen will give me headaches, I’ve heard the iBooks store (or whatever they’re calling it) is still kind of clunky, though I imagine that will be improved—and have other more essential gadgets to buy first—my ancient iPod is about to kick it—but, golly, it’s pretty.

Speaking of the Kindle, I made a vow a couple of weeks ago that I would not buy any more books for it until I made a serious dent in the backlog of books on it. I did read a number of books that have been sitting on it for months, but ultimately, I’m weak, and I just bought two new books and am eying a third. It’s a disease, my need to buy books!

On the other hand, I’m finding that one of my favorite Sunday-afternoon leisure activities is to sit by the windows in my room and read as the sun sets.

I’m trying to turn my attention to a different work-in-progress right now, which is tough. I’m having trouble writing the end of the first chapter, but know pretty well how the later chapters shake out, so I can’t decide if it’s worth it to skip this and come back to it later, to write what I know will come easier, or to force myself to work out the problems with the first chapter before moving forward. Dilemma!

Well. I hope you all have a lovely spring week. I’ve still got a little bit of sunlight left tonight. I should make the most of it.

fear and loathing in midtown

Apr 3

Posted by kate in new york | No Comments

New York is so weird sometimes. I had a few errands to run in Manhattan, so I decided to take the subway to Midtown. I don’t leave Brooklyn much these days, so going to Manhattan can feel like An Event. And I sure picked a hell of a day! The weather was great. There were lots of spring-related shenanigans in Central Park. As you can see from the above photo, the park was mobbed! Not to mention that iPads went on sale today, so the 5th Avenue Apple Store… let’s not even talk about it. (Although, a friend of mine is featured in the first photo in this Times story. People camped out. Crazy!) Walking down 57th Street, I ran into a wedding procession. No, really, a bride and all of her attendants were walking down the street, surrounded by photographers. (I don’t think the bride was anyone famous, just part of an elaborate New York wedding.) There were kids running around with face paint and tourists running around with cameras, and all-in-all I had fun walking around and shopping.

sunshine and the city

Mar 19

Posted by kate in ephemera, new york, WIP | 1 Comment

Due to construction at my office, I’ve been blessed with a rare Friday off. I took the subway into Manhattan, I’m currently in a cafe near Astor Place, having taken a rather lengthy walk through the West Village, mostly enjoying the astonishingly beautiful weather (it should be 70°F and sunny all the time!) but also looking for inspiration.

One of the things that I love/hate about New York City is that it’s always changing. I walked by a restaurant this afternoon that must have closed recently, because I’m sure I ate there a couple of months ago. The restaurant has been there a while, since I remember eating there with my mother after we took a tour of NYU back when I was applying to college. It was strange to see the awning gone, the for-sale sign in the window.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I would take the bus from my hometown in the Jersey suburbs into Port Authority—which I still kind of think of as the eighth level of hell, though it’s been cleaned up considerably—and we almost always took the subway down to the West Village. We were mostly lower-middle-class kids, so we never had a lot of money. One of our favorite occupations was thrift-store shopping, and it used to be that you could wander around the Village and pop in and out of stores that would sell you clothes by the pound.

The first time I walked down Christopher Street was kind of an accident. It was a couple of years after I moved to New York City. I was lost. It’s not hard to get lost in the Village; it’s literally off the grid, not even the numbered streets running parallel. I was trying to get to a bar on West 4th Street (which, much to my great disappointment, closed a couple of years ago) and I’d made a stop first at some store, and then I just started walking in the direction I was pretty sure was west. And then I realized I was on Christopher Street which, at the time, was all glitter and rainbow flags.

Today, it felt a little sterile. Maybe it was just the sun. Maybe everyone’s in Washington Square Park. The Stonewall Inn is, naturally, still bedecked with more rainbow flags than any building you’ve ever seen, but the rest of the stretch I walked today looked surprisingly nondescript. Across the street, all of the benches in Christopher Park were occupied, people sharing space with the statues, painted white, which I thought looked kind of ghostly (maybe the intention?). The statues commemorate the Stonewall Riots. I also walked by a scary number of empty storefronts today. A sign of our current economic climate? A sign of a bygone era? I walked east a little ways and stopped in a cafe for a snack, ran into a schmoopy gay couple, alternately kissing and trying to decide which kind of cupcake to order. It’s hard not to think about the course of events here, not to remember that those weird white statues are meant to represent the event that made it possible for these two men to kiss in front of a bakery display case just because.

I’m currently trying to revise a novella and having kind of a hard time of it, because sunshine distracts me. I also like reveling in the weird ephemera of New York, in the memory of a city that no longer exists, in ponderings of what the city might become.

I wonder sometimes if it’s a cliche to write fiction set in New York City, but write what you know, right? I love New York and love reading and writing about it.

(Funny, though, that my first published novel does not take place in New York! But Noah is a New Yorker.)

My mind’s still reeling a little, too, after a writers group workshop in which a murder-mystery WIP of mine (which takes place almost entirely in Brooklyn, for what it’s worth) got pretty well eviscerated. I’m taking it as an opportunity to think that the group saved me from sending out a novel that didn’t work. I miss sometimes, and it’s good to be reminded of that. So I’ll go back and revise. But after I spend a little more time in the sunshine.

kiss out

Mar 16

Posted by kate in new york | No Comments

New York is a fairly progressive city, and my pocket of Brownstone Brooklyn is kind of yuppy and liberal, so it’s easy to forget that horrible acts of violence can, and do, still happen here.

A few weeks ago, a 22-year-old man was attacked by five men after leaving a gay event at a pizza parlor in Carroll Gardens, which I would consider a pretty classy neighborhood. I think I’ve even been to that particular pizza place; my brother used to live around the corner. Anyway, when I read the news, I didn’t quite believe it.

There was a vigil held last night, preceded by a bit of civil disobedience the organizers called a “kiss out.” Couples (of all stripes: gay, lesbian, straight) stood on all four corners of an intersection and kissed for twenty minutes. There’s been some controversy of the “ew, kissing” variety (see this HuffPo story) but I think it’s great, kissing as a way to raise awareness and (hopefully) counteract the violence. Towleroad posted video.

cop stories

Jan 11

Posted by kate in in hot pursuit, new york | 1 Comment

It occurred to me today that, if you count my forthcoming novel, I currently have three projects in the works with cops as major characters. I have no idea how that happened.

Well, I do. I think I’ve always been in awe of people who work in professions that I admire but could never do myself. That, and I had a friend in elementary school whose father was NYPD, and I remember thinking how cool that was. (And, thinking about it now, he would have been a cop in New York City in the 80s, which must have been horrific. For some perspective, it was reported recently that 2009 had the fewest murders in NYC since the city started keeping statistics. There were 461. According to one of my reference books [New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg] there were 1,384 murders in 1985.)

I’ve always loved mysteries, and police procedurals in particular, probably because I’m a nerd and I like detail and minutiae. Even during the period of my life that I thought I was too good to read romance novels (such delusions!), mystery novels were my genre fiction vice. And for years, I watched a lot of cop shows on TV, especially Law and Order.

I had one encounter with an NYPD homicide detective a few years ago that was not in any way like TV. I was living in Manhattan at the time (so this was probably 2005-ish, if you need some context.) I came home after a long day at work and was somewhat alarmed to see that my whole block had been sectioned off with police tape. The uniformed cops hanging around let me go into my building, though, and it looked like the operation was winding down. I was curious, but didn’t think much of it.

At the time, I was living by myself in a small apartment on the first floor of a large apartment building, one of only two on the block. My bedroom window faced the street. Although I had both heavy curtains and bars on the windows, I guess if I really wanted to, I could have seen everything going on outside.

About ten minutes after I got into my apartment, there was a knock at the door. I answered, and was met by a late-30s-ish guy in a green tee-shirt and jeans, with a police badge hanging around his neck on a chain. He introduced himself as a homicide detective from “the Three-Four.” My first thought was, “Shouldn’t you be wearing a suit?” I mean, homicide detectives on TV always wear suits, right? Anyway, the detective asked me if I’d seen anything, so I told him I’d just gotten home from work and had no idea what was going on. I didn’t ask him what the deal was, either, because I’d seen a lot of cop shows; homicide detectives are always cagey and can’t tell you anything. Although maybe that caginess went only comes with the suit, because the detective then proceeded to tell me everything: there’d been a drive-by shooting on the block. The detective thought it was drug-related, and they’d determined that the shooter knew the victim. (This only made me feel mildly better. I knew there was a fair amount of drug activity in the neighborhood, but out of sight, out of mind. I lived on a major cross-street with a lot of business and consoled myself with the fact that, even if I didn’t live in the safest neighborhood, the trip between the subway and my apartment was well-lit. Although I had nightmares for a few nights after this incident about stray bullets coming in through my bedroom window.) Anyway, the kid who got shot was okay, he’d already been taken to the hospital. And the detective just… told me all of this without my even asking. I really think I would have been better off not knowing, frankly.

That’s an anticlimactic story, I know, but the point is that, um, I was interviewed as part of a homicide investigation that one time. Which is almost as cool as the fact that I have an actor friend who played a witness on an episode of Law & Order, which is maybe only cool to me. Every actor in New York has had at least a bit part on that show. (Not to mention the fact that an episode of Criminal Intent was filmed on the very same block where that drive-by shooting take place, but before the shooting, IIRC. And I tried to sneak onto the set of an episode of L&O filming in Prospect Park once, but the director figured out I was not an official extra and yelled at me. And another episode was spoiled for me because I knew SVU had been filming near Grand Army Plaza—which is right near my apartment in Brooklyn; I walk through it every morning on the way to work—and Detective Benson got some clue about archways, but it wasn’t the Washington Square Arch, and I sat on my couch and shouted, “Grand Army Plaza! Grand Army Plaza!” and lo, the victim was found in Brooklyn.)

I have a character in one of my WIPs who is a mystery writer who finds himself tangled up in a homicide investigation, and although he writes really gruesome things, crime scenes make him nauseous. That’s about where I’m at, I think. I have a lot of respect for cops, I’m fascinated by police procedure, but I’m content to write about it instead of experience it for real.