The editor of the anthology where “The Fingernail Test” will be published said that I could take one more polish pass at it before sending it to her for editing, so that’s what I did this morning. I remembered being pretty happy with the story when I submitted it to the Apex contest. I think I made all of three or four changes. Punctuation, better word choice, one slightly stilted sentence restructured. Off it went.
For the third year, I’m a judge for the literary equivalent of science fair. The past two years the number of entries has been very low–last year particularly because of the effects of Hurricane Ike–but this year I have something on the order of 75-80 short works to evaluate. I have to score them on creativity, artistic nature and, most importantly, the way they express the given theme. About half of the submissions are short stories or personal essays, the other half poems. I have grades 5, 6, and 7-12. I’m always fascinated to discover that some of the younger kids put more thought and work into it than the older ones.
This week’s NCIS was a hoot. We’re used to all these crime shows using ultramodern techniques and gadgets. Thanks to a power outage, they had to resort to searching through paper files (with attendant paper cuts), using Polaroid cameras to record the crime scene (when’s the last time you saw an SX-70?) and a gestetner to reproduce the eye witness sketch. Gibbs was in his glory in this low-tech universe. The actual crime itself was secondary.
Castle was fine this week, too, though I did guess the surprise twist at the end about halfway through the episode. His daughter helps to humanize his character, and it’s cool that she’s starting to connect to Beckett.
Thanks to a warp in the space/time continuum, I was able to watch the latest Doctor Who, Waters of Mars. (No spoilers here.) Let’s call it: Under the Biodome. We’re getting very close to the end for Doc #10, and this episode sends him in an interesting and unexpected direction, especially in the last 10 minutes or so. This episode is a rare instance of a near future adventure, and it took me most of the hour to figure out where I knew the main guest actress from: she was the wife on A Year in Provence. Tennant has seen the Doctor through a fascinating character arc, from wide-eyed kid to world-weary and almost jaded. This special was reasonably tense and only featured a tad of goofy Doctorisms, most notably the chorus of annoying, shrill screams. The interaction between Lindsay Duncan and Tenant was very nice.
