I like markets that e-mail back to confirm that they’ve received your story and that it is under consideration. I’ve had a couple lately that have done a very good job of keeping me up to date, even if the end result of them was a somewhat baffling rejection letter from a team of readers who offered up their comments, which were all over the map.
A nice new review of Tesseracts Thirteen in Publishers Weekly.
As I was watching episode four of the new season of Dexter, I was struck by a similarity between the situation and the Peter Sellers movie Being There. That film was about a simple gardner who, through a series of misadventures, ends up becoming a political consultant. His banal sayings are interpreted as the results of deep thought and are assigned far more meaning than they merited. When Dexter says, “I never leave anything to chance,” he’s both saying the truth and grasping at straws for something to say as he is asked for love advice by his two co-workers. It’s a surreal situation from his perspective, these two passionate characters asking a sociopath for life advice, which makes it gloriously amusing.
The conclusion of the episode was not what I expected at all. I won’t say any more than that unless someone wants to bring it up in the comments.
I wish we had a Hoser Hut around here. Hoser Hut is the fictional bar on How I Met Your Mother where Canadians gather to belt out the national anthem, drink beer and watch hockey. One of the reasons I like this show is because Robin is an expatriate, like me, and she takes a lot of ribbing about her Canadian roots. However, this jesting is written by people who really know their Canadiana. Setting part of last night’s episode in a Tim Hortons — that was brilliant. There’s very little more iconic to an expatriate than Tim’s.
There was, I thought, a slight discontinuity in Castle this week. An episode or two back, Beckett was revealed to be fluent in Russian, but this week it was Castle who picked up on the clue about the Cyrillic writing, not her. The James Bond subplot was funny, with the theme music standing in for actually mentioning his name. This continues to be a fun show. The resolution of the story of the little boy was nice, with his real father repairing his train.
I wonder how much longer they’re going to string poor chase along on House. The guy’s starting to look like a drug addict. I guess we won’t be getting any more new episodes for a while because of the baseball playoffs and World Series. House can be such a bastard to Wilson sometimes.
