May | 2026 | Marilyn's Room

If you are a long-time reader of this lofty blog, you no doubt recall that, in honor of Elvis’s marriage to Priscilla, Wayne and I also got married on May 1st!! (Elvis’s wedding day, about 25 years earlier.) (And we walked down the aisle to “Hawaiian Wedding Song” from Elvis’s movie, “Blue Hawaii”.)

So here’s this!

33 years ago today! When I was still very much a brunette and Wayne still had all his hair! (The bride & groom decoration on top of the cake was from my maternal adoptive grandparents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary cake in 1977. I still have it.) (The decoration, not the cake.)

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Wow, gang, so yesterday was another incredible day for me.

I discovered that on the Internet Archives, they have now added both the Masquerade Books 1st trade edition and the Blue Moon mass market 1st edition of Neptune & Surf!!

This just thrills me, gang, because now not only can you read Neptune & Surf online for FREE (these are not eBooks, these are the pages of the actual books), my beloved first book will also live on sort of indefinitely for all time.

You can find them HERE.

And FYI, Internet Archives currently has 6 of my books in the archives that you can read for free. Plus a few erotica anthologies that have some of my stories in them.

But this next part almost blew me away even more yesterday — and it can be found at the same link.

It’s a podcast from France, in French –it was uploaded to the Archive July 1, 2017 — where the podcaster discusses the 2nd French edition of Neptune & Surf.

The 2nd edition was titled, Sex In America [<– AmazonUS link] and was published by La Musardine, Paris, in 2011.

Her beautiful forward to the podcast reads:

Sex in America, mon coup de coeur du moment ! Non vraiment, mon seul regret c’est que l’autrice n’ait pas écrit beaucoup car perso, je lis sans hésiter n’importe quel autre de ses ouvrages. Alors pourquoi ce coup de coeur ? L’écriture me plaît, comment la décrire … Je dirais que l’autrice a l’art de vous emmener, de vous immerger dans le monde qu’elle raconte. Oui, car elle raconte des mondes, des époques.

Translation: "Sex in America, my current favorite! No, really—my only regret is that the author hasn’t written very much, because personally, I would read any of her other works without hesitation. So, why did this one capture my heart? I love the writing style—how to describe it? I would say the author possesses a gift for sweeping you away, for immersing you in the world she portrays. Yes, for she tells tales of worlds—of entire eras."

Honestly, it just blew me away. And the podcast has already been streamed in the Archives 7,566 times!!

And it’s been up there for 9 years already. In French, no less!

And I just had absolutely no clue until I found it yesterday, basically by accident.

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Okay.

On a totally different topic.

From James Tabor yeseterday:

“In this video I invite you to join me in an interactive test of when and how AI can go wrong dealing with Historical Research.”

When AI Gets History Wrong (33 mins):

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All righty!!

Here’s this!

A great shot of Roy Orbison in a UK hotel, in 1964!

And here’s this! I love this song! But who doesn’t?? “Only the Lonely”, 1960:

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And I guess since it’s May Day, all my hashtag streams on Instagram updated because there were a ton of photos on there that I hadn’t seen before!!

But first, here’s this!

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A couple of gorgeous shots of Keith!!

By Annie Leibovitz, 1975:

In NY, 1988:

And a photo by Fernando Aceves, 1995:

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And some great ones of Nick Cave, which I’ve actually seen before but they haven’t popped up in my stream in, like, years.

Nick in Paris, April, 1997:

Nick in April, 1992:

And Nick Cave, more recently, but I don’t know the actual year:

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And with that….

I will add before closing and heading to town, I did spend a good amount of time on the short story yesterday. I did not finish it, because now I’m not sure if I want it to be a short story or a novella.

I just don’t know. I don’t think it’s working as a short story.

But I still have a few more days to work with it and maybe make it work as a short story, assuming I can get time to focus on it before the deadline.

I guess we’ll see.

And today, I’m back with my favorite 95-year-old Japanese man, but now I have stuff to do that the private nurse used to do: pick up his prescription at the pharmacy, and get his hearing aid batteries, and also locate the office of his primary care physician, which I know is near the hospital but that’s all I know.

If he doesn’t want to run these errands with me and wait in the car (it’s cold today and sort of rainy), I’ll go by myself. If he does want to come with me then we’ll go have sashimi & sake after the errands and behave like our old selves!! We shall see.