All right, gang.

These last few days of working with Valerie on the book cover-coffee mugs has just been stupefying. (See the blog post “At It Again“)

It’s not like I don’t remember my writing career prior to Q, but it’s this notion of how many years I’ve been working at it, you know? I lost track. And now it’s back on my plate. My primary focus. And suddenly, I just can’t process any of it.

Nowadays, when I think of my writing career, I think that I’ve written about 5 novels and a few novellas, a bunch of short stories and some scripts… And then when I was faced with choosing the book covers for the coffee mugs, I see I have to choose from 25 books. Of my own. Not the dozens that include my work but are edited by someone else.

What the heck?

Almost all of my books are out of print now, so I kind of forget. But I have bookshelves in my storage closet filled with books I either wrote or edited or contributed to over the decades, so it’s all in there. But I really don’t see it anymore. If it isn’t on LULU or Smashwords or Amazon, I simply forget.

Here’s one small portion of the writing madness in my storage closet. Some of my published books over the years, and all of my journals.

The closet is filled with books, journals, original manuscripts, correspondence — all of it “overseen” by Valerie in Brooklyn, since she is one of the heirs to my humble Estate…

And the idea of having a blog for 25 years just blows my mind. I cannot get my mind around that, still. Where did the time go?

Marilyn’s Room was an offshoot of my first erotic fiction site, Other-Rooms.com. That idea was born in the fall of 1997, when I was riding the subway in NYC, thinking about the terrific erotica writers who were emerging in the US and the UK and I wanted the world to know about them. So I decided to start Other-Rooms. It was named after one of my favorite writers, Truman Capote, and his classic provocative book Other Voices, Other Rooms.

On Other-Rooms, other erotica writers had their own “rooms” where they could publish their erotic short stories or erotic poetry. This was back when the Internet was brand new. There was not the ton of content there is today. Other-Rooms was an incredible success, internationally. Almost immediately, it was getting 5000 visitors a day. And every writer who had a room on Other-Rooms got a publishing deal of some kind (sold a story or poem, or got a book deal). It was incredible. We even made it into Playboy‘s Online Hall of Fame. And I did it all by myself, from my room.

Marilyn’s Room was actually incorporated, in 1998. I had business partners, investors. I had my own server and programmer up in Boston, and a 24-track recording studio in Midtown Manhattan (upstairs from the old Studio 54) was also a partner — it was the multi-media arm of Other-Rooms. We featured filmmakers, spoken word recitals, recorded interviews, erotic photography. Multi-media was very expensive back then and was bulky and very hard to upload. But we did it. And on the Marilyn’s Room site, I had an online journal — which eventually came to be called “blogs.”

But anyway. I remember it all. I just don’t understand how time suddenly just flew.

So I sit at my desk and look at all the works I have in -progress since 2020 and I don’t even know how to begin. Where to jump in. How to get it all done. Plus I still have the play rewrites in full swing all summer.

So it is safe to say that I am overwhelmed.

But before I forget– Valerie created this on Tuesday night and I just love it!!! It was probably my most controversial book ever (the first time I ever actually got hate emails), from 2005 — Zowie! It’s Yaoi! Western Girls Write Hot Stories of “Boys’ Love” — published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in NY, and now you can own it as a lunchbox!! With the Marilyn’s Room blog logo on the back. (My blog logo is also the logo for my self-publishing company: Marilyn’s Room Books.)

So. I’m tired, gang. And confused about this fleeing of time. And of course, I spend a lot of time thinking about my dad, my childhood, since I will be making the trek back down there to see him this weekend for Father’s Day.

For some reason, when I was a little girl, I always bought my dad this for Father’s Day. I really loved the smell of this stuff, and the packaging, plus I could afford it on my teeny allowance! I don’t think my dad ever wore after shave, let alone English Leather…but I, personally, really loved the stuff.

In other news…

This was awesome, gang. Just great historical stuff here.

Gnostic Informant & Ross K. Nichols — Oldest Mention of DAVID & ISRAEL ever Discovered (1 hr 44 mins):

And in other other news–

I’ll just say that I think it’s interesting that Phil is off on his honeymoon for the month of June, not totally silent but basically not posting any intel. And at the same time, SGAnon is “recovering from surgery” and also got a “promotion at work” so he has no time to really post anything right now, either….

Even Charlie Ward is “still recovering”.

And Real Raw News has slowed way, way down…

Lots of silence out there, folks.

So we’ll see.

Meanwhile, I have to get to work on a bio for Sandra for the play. So I guess I need more coffee to get the brain back on track.

Enjoy your Thursday, wherever you are in the world!

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

*******************

Linda Ronstadt & the Stone Poneys, her first hit, which I find myself singing all the time — “Different Drum”, from 1967 (and written by Michael Nesmith, of The Monkees). Enjoy!

Here are a couple more samples that I think look great on a coffee mug — or an apron, as it turns out!! (Valerie’s idea)

And all of these have the “Marilyn’s Room” blog logo on the other side (see last night’s post).

And it occurred to me yesterday, while Val and I were working on these, that I’ve had the Marilyn’s Room blog continuously for 25 years now. That is a hell of a lot of posting to the blog, isn’t it? I’ve used different servers, different platforms over the decades — and I’ve been here on WordPress the longest: 9 years already. I have no clue where the time went.

And also, yesterday, while we were getting the cover art together and choosing which of my books I wanted to include — narrowing it down to 20 (twenty!!??!!) — when the hell did that happen?? 20 books??

To be fair, I’m including the cover art for Girl in The Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse, which isn’t finished yet. But there were 5 other titles that I left off because the covers were either absolutely boring or just did not look great. (And this doesn’t include any of the many books I contributed work to — that number would just get ridiculous.)

Anyway. I do not remember all of this life happening, gang. I mean, I kind of do, but I kind of don’t — I don’t understand how all this time unfolded and happened.

Okay, well, here’s Valerie’s great apron idea!! I find this strangely perfect but really funny (I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind buying this, but we’re selling it!):

It would look like this if you wore it– just in time for Father’s Day!!

Anyway, so that’s been fun…

Okay.

Yes, I realize we have an indictment thingie going on over here, and that Truthers are ready for this to be the thing that triggers everything else. I sure hope so, gang. We’ll have to see. (I still think it’s extremely odd that Phil’s on his honeymoon right now and looking really happy. I always try to factor that into everything I’m seeing.) (And just fyi, everything out there contradicts everything else out there, so I’m just sitting tight and watching it all.)

Meanwhile, no notes yet from Sandra about her meeting with the director of the play, so I have another wide open day in front of me. Now that the exciting coffee mugs are, basically, finished — just awaiting some finishing touches from Valerie — maybe I can really get down to some actual writing today.

That’s really it for now. In the event something significant actually happens regarding the indictment, I’ll jump back on here.

Meanwhile, thanks for visiting,

I love you guys. See ya!

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James Tabor — Did the Essenes Write the Dead Sea Scrolls–What Can We Say After 75 Years? (1 hr 11 mins):

Another one for that one I love, just for the thrill of it all! Enjoy, gang!!

Bob Dylan, “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love)” 1985.

Well, the Simon Parkes update from yesterday did not cause me to make any additional enormous changes to my life. Yay.

He did say that he was tired of everyone just not telling the truth (meaning other truthers, but also White Hats and all the optics….)

And I have to say, heartily, that I concur!! I am so ready for the lies, the optics and the subterfuge to be over.

But in the meantime…

I can’t help but notice the dozens and dozens of happy honeymoon photos from Phil & Keri in Italy, so I’m thinking there is not much to worry about right now. And so on we go!

Quickly to the topic of my new TV!

I could not believe how easy it was to set up. In under 5 minutes, it had even recognized my firestick and set all that up, too. I was sort of flabbergasted by how quick it was. It sort of did it in spite of me, sitting there.

However, setting up Cue Streaming on the TV is not going so well. It works like a charm on the laptop — enough for me to see that there is simply way more stuff than I would ever want to watch in a lifetime, let alone in a day or a week or a month. So I don’t know if I will keep the service or not. I really do not like TV, but I’ll wait and see what I think once I actually get the streaming to work down there in the kitchen.

I’m totally 100% happy with just having Amazon Prime, so we’ll see. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m still on a little hiatus from rewrites on “The Guide to Being Fabulous” because Sandra just finished a quick film shoot up in Toronto and wants a break. And once again, I concur!

But even though I would like to take this little break-time to work on some writing of my own, I also have a ton of stuff to keep on top of regarding the James Tabor research group.

I’m halfway through re-reading The Jesus Discovery (which is just fascinating, gang. Wow. Even the second time around.) But I still have some papers to read before the next zoom meeting, too —

One is “The Geochemistry of Intrusive Sediment Sampled from the 1^st Century CE Inscribed Ossuaries of James and the Talpiot Tomb, Jerusalem” — 22 pages.

Another is “The Talpiot ‘Jesus’ Tomb: A Historical Analysis” — 28 pages.

The third is 15 pages of notes on “Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palestinae, Volume I: Jerusalem. Part 1:1-704 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010)”.

And between now and the next zoom meeting is, of course, Father’s Day, which means I’ll be doing a lot of driving again and spending some time being exhausted on several levels.

Plus, I have that pesky part-time job to squeeze in there, too. But for now, it’s only 3 evenings a week.

So we’ll see, gang. It just gets stressful, finding enough time and brain-space for all this stuff (and people) I love!

All right. That’s kind of it. I want to get started here before I look at the clock and see that I suddenly have to dash off to work… (that happens a lot).

Enjoy your weekend! I likely won’t be posting tomorrow. We’ll see.

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

*****************

Yes, I’m on a serious Ultra Lounge kick these days! I have so many of their CDs from the 90s (back when I also had many cocktails and smoked many wonderful Chesterfield unfiltered cigarettes!). Here’s one of my all-time favorites —

From Ultra Lounge: Bottoms Up!, a double-header: “Big Noise from Winnetka/Midnight Swim” by Al Caiola. Play it loud and just go on and try to have a bad day!! Or night! Okay. See ya!

It’s just one of those mornings, gang.

While I did get to spend some time talking on the phone with Peitor when we were both finally in the same time zone, it was stressful, anxious, sad.

As soon as he left France, his mother, who has been very ill for a very long time and is now in a full-time care facility in Nice, took a very bad turn for the worse. They did not think she would survive the night last night, but she did. And now he is heading right back to France.

We spoke a couple times last evening and, as you can guess, he was unbelievably stressed out.

Tomorrow is his birthday. It is conceivable at this point that she could die on his birthday…

Either way, this is one of my favorite photos of him from last summer. He is in France, with a Swedish friend who is likely going to be involved in our micro-short film, Lita måste gå! (Lita’s Got to Go!).

And while I was hunting for a different photograph altogether, I found this recent photo of my best friend, Valerie in Brooklyn! (far right) This was right before her mother died (her mom is on the far left) (and yes, Valerie is very tall!!):

I was only planning to post about my dear friend, Paul Martin, whose birthday is today.

He would have been 64. He has been gone now for 24 years. So he has officially been dead now longer than I knew him. (We were friends for 23 years, before he died of AIDS at age 40.)

I wanted to write about him today because I connected some spiritual dots this morning, at 6am, while thinking of him on his birthday and getting the many cats fed and getting my own breakfast together, putting the coffee on…

It finally dawned on me that he would be so thrilled with this play I’m doing with Sandra right now, and our progress with it after so many years, because he was in the theater professionally — he was a set designer. At several different theaters, but most notably, he was the set designer at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co in Washington DC. And this led to him becoming a set designer for motion pictures and moving down to Wilmington, North Carolina, to work at what was then Carolco Studios:

But anyway. I sometimes forget that he loved theater so much. As much as I did. We met in the high school theater department, in fact. He did some acting (he was incredibly funny), but mostly he designed our sets.

By the time we graduated high school, we were incredibly close friends. And not just because of the theater connection, but he was openly gay and I was openly bisexual, which weren’t popular things to be, so we had a sort of “safe zone” when we were together.

He had this wonderful vintage 1965 VW camper van — just like this one:

And we would hang out together between classes out in the school parking lot, in the camper. Usually he smoked weed, but I was never a fan of smoking marijuana. But, anyway, we always had a blast together. We loved the same music, the same Broadway shows, the same movies (and he turned me on to softcore gay-guy porn magazines, which really blew my 17 year-old mind!) (Until then, I was a big fan of my older brother’s Hustler magazine collection. So, suddenly, my porn horizons greatly expanded…)

Paul’s dad restored classic cars as a hobby, and had this awesome 1955 Chevy Bel Air that looked exactly like this (and sometimes his dad would let us drive it but we weren’t allowed to go very far):

These recollections about Paul led me to realize that Saturday is the 45th anniversary of us graduating from high school! Jesus. When the heck did all this time fly away, right?

At graduation, I was the Valedictorian (there were two of us — one guy, one girl). I was one of the kids graduating at the top of my class, but to be selected as one of the Valedictorians, you had to write a speech and then audition it for the heads of the school. (And I could write like a motherfucka, even back then.)

Anyway — so I was smart. And that is the sole reason I went away to college — because everyone basically forced me to go. They said I was too smart to not go to college. but all I wanted was to go to NYC and be a singer/songwriter. Instead, I went to college and studied theater — to be an actress, because I’d had the female leads in all the school plays.

I lasted 3 whole months because I hated college. And I hated acting. While taking my theater courses (at age 18), I realized that I would much rather be writing the words that went into the actors mouths, then just being some sort of talking puppet…

Well, you know, I did go to NYC and did become a popular singer/songwriter for a while (until I got tired of writing songs and just wanted to write erotic fiction). But the entire time I was doing all that, I was still seeing every play I could, whether it was on Broadway, Off Broadway, or Off-Off Broadway, or way down in the darkest, deepest, farthest and lowest bowels of some dank basement theater in lower Manhattan…

I have always loved theater. And I always adored Paul, with all my heart. My life has never been the same after he died. And regardless of all the other things I feel about “The Guide to Being Fabulous,” I realized just this morning that Paul would LOVE this show, and he would love Sandra — and is probably somewhere right this minute, loving that I am doing this.

And the definition of “DOING THIS” — according to Sandra: “Marilyn, you write like a motherfucka, you know that?!“

Well, anyway…. Here is one of my favorite photos of Paul. It was taken in 1981, the year Foun Kee and I got married. Paul was visiting us from Washington DC, where he was the set designer for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co.

In this photo, he is impersonating me, which is why I love it. He’s sitting at my IBM Selectric electric typewriter, that I’d bought in a pawn shop on 8th Avenue. And he’s sitting at the desk that Foun Kee had bought me as a wedding gift (the desk I still have, at which I have written absolutely everything I have written in my entire career, and am sitting at, typing this blog post right now, in fact).

My guitar, in its case, is leaning in the corner. The window overlooks a gay hustler bar on 8th Avenue at W. 45th Street.

I guess everything comes full circle, in its own way. Happy heavenly birthday, dearest Paul.

And in other quick news…

From Johnny Depp on Instagram just now:

Have a great Thursday, wherever you are in the world, gang!

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

***************

As luck would have it, this is the music I was listening to this morning, when all these thoughts suddenly occurred to me about the theater and Paul– the theme from the 1959 groundbreaking film from Brazil, Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro): “Samba De Orfeu” by Ray Anthony, from the Ultra-Lounge collection, Bossa Nova Ville.

(Isn’t the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice all about death and love and that place beyond??? Hmmm.…)

Well, enjoy, gang!!

Whenever I need to go to town to get the groceries — like today, for instance — and I don’t feel up to driving the 50 miles to get there and back because I’ve been doing nothing but sit at my desk and do re-writes and then more and more and even more re-writes and then laundry and then cleaning the house and taking care of 12 (!!) cats and tending to all the flowers (yes! I bought even more flowers!)…. these guys always offer to do the driving to town for me!

Neighbors are great, aren’t they? I just love them!

But, yes. This morning is about running errands in town and then (I think) catching up with Peitor Angell on the phone this afternoon. He is still in New York, so we’re in the same time zone for a change. Yay.

Which reminds me, the other day, I posted the wrong logo for Abstract Absurdity Productions. This is the correct one:

Also, if you are interested — tonight’s Pride special on ABC, “The Freedom to Exist — The Soul of A Nation Presentation,” which includes an interview with Sandra Caldwell (my partner in all things theatrical) will air at 10 PM (US only). And then it will be on Hulu, indefinitely.

I no longer have TV or Hulu, so I won’t be able to see it. But Val in Brooklyn offered to just tape it with her phone and send it to me. So we’ll see how that goes!

Meanwhile, the rewrites on the play, “The Guide to Being Fabulous,” do indeed continue. And they continue to be great — but they also continue to take a lot of focusing from my wee bonny brain. This is a really BIG thing around my house ( and it works!!):

And also lots of THIS over ice!! (Sadly, it does have sugar, even though it’s organic sugar…)

And when all else fails, I sit and stare at this until the brain fog clears!! I love this photo!! (It’s from the other day, in London I think):

But seriously — I am still loving our fantastic play (one-woman musical, to be exact) but sometimes the deadlines get extreme, especially when I am still trying to fit in a regular, albeit part-time, job.

I just feel exhausted most of the time.

I did touch base with Valerie again about our big merch extravaganza– all the covers of my many books put onto coffee mugs over at zazzle! I can’t wait. I think we will be working on that next week, when there will be a brief shining moment of lulls in the rewrites….

A coffee mug featuring this cover will be going to my uncle down in Virginia, because he said, and I quote: “Wow. That is the best book you ever wrote! That was really HOT!” (And he’s 90…. and has read a lot of books!)

And for Wayne, a coffee mug with this wonderful cover will be arriving in his mail. Because of all the many cups of coffee he brought me at 6:30am when I was hard at work at my desk, writing this for 4 years; and the sandwiches he brought me midday, when I was hard at work at my desk, writing this for 4 years; and the Christmas when he barged in, exasperated, dressed in a really lovely royal blue linen suit that I had bought him, a crisp white shirt that I had bought him and a royal blue silk tie that I had bought him, and said, “Come on, Marilyn! Fuck — it’s Christmas! People will be here in 20 minutes!!” (And, of course, when the book won me Erotic Writer of the Year in London, when I was 39, and he said, “Marilyn, I am so PROUD of you!!”):

All righty!!!!

That’s it for today. I hope you have a terrific Tuesday, wherever you are in the world!! Here, it is lovely, yet again!! Beautiful weather for a drive to town and back (with or without the neighbors).

Enjoy your beautiful day, gang.

Thanks for visiting.

I love you guys. See ya!

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My driving everywhere music for today!!!!! Enjoy!!