Spring has sprung, for the time being at least. We’re in the mid-70s today with overnight lows in the upper 50s. Supposed to be the same for the next several days, although there are also gusty winds, up to 30 mph, which is fairly unusual around here unless there’s a big storm associated. I’m not exactly sure why wind is so rare here, given that we’re not all that far from the coast and the ground is mostly flat. Maybe it’s the trees. People don’t expect to see trees in Texas, but there are a lot of them in East and Southeast Texas.
I took a break from writing this morning, and am taking tomorrow off, too. Then it will be into editing mode full tilt for the next five to six days until I get the manuscript in shape to be turned in to my editor. Once I get that off my desk for a while, I have a Cemetery Dance column to turn in, a few book reviews and essays to write, and a couple of short stories to finish up. Everything else has been pretty much on hold for the last five weeks while I’ve been at this project.
I like the arms dealer on Burn Notice, Seymour. He pops up every now and then, but it would be nice to see him more regularly. He adds a touch of zeal and wide-eyed wonder to the show. He almost hero-worships Michael, even as he’s getting his ass kicked by him. “Mr. Smiley,” aka Tom from Lost, was a guest villain this week. He got his ass kicked, too, by Fiona.
This Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice crossover is going longer than I thought it would. At first I thought they were exaggerating the extent of the crossover, by having a few seconds of Addison at the end of the former and a few seconds of Derek at the end of the latter, but I guess it’s going to get more involved next week. I’m wondering what’s the deal with Izzie’s tests. If there’s something wrong with her, it must be in there somewhere. It was suggested that the anemia results were actually the patients and the cancer results were hers. Possible. I think there’s something in the files that she stuffed in her drawer, though.
I’m enjoying Spade and Archer. It really has the feel of a book written five decades ago. Kudos to the author for getting so much right. One interesting thing about the Hammett style is that you don’t ever get inside Spade’s head. It’s all camera pov. Even though the book is completely from his perspective, everything we know about him we discover through facial expressions and dialog. It’s an interesting approach that I’ve tried only once, in a story that’s not yet published. Not my favorite writing style, but an interesting experiment.
Lots of chatter over the Stephen King/Stephenie Mayer item from an upcoming USA Weekend magazine interview with King. My daughter read the Twilight novels during Christmas vacation. Consumed them as a break from the stuff that she’s reading for university. While the stories were captivating, they were also pretty forgettable and she also had less than flattering things to say about the author’s writing. I think there’s a place for purely escapist fiction. I, too, read a number of authors who I don’t think are the world’s best writers by any stretch of the imagination. Michael Crichton was a fairly heavy-handed writer whose characters had less depth than the pages on which they moved, but I always came away from a Crichton novel feeling like I’d learned something. Though I haven’t read Clive Cussler for a few years, I enjoyed his early Dirk Pitt novels, even if the characters had become parodies of themselves. It would be great to find someone who writes fast-paced adventures with fully formed characters, but books like that are few and far between.
