Aspirations

I never know when a Storytellers Unplugged essay is going to strike a chord with readers. This month’s entry, Aspring Writers, garnered more comments than most of my essays for the site (though nothing near as much response as Apparently I Write Like a Girl — that one I expected would ring a few bells). This month’s essay doesn’t really offer any advice or solutions–as with many of my pieces, it’s a meandering rumination on a personal observation or experience. But I always like it when people comment.

I finished the work in progress on Sunday morning and submitted it. The final editing round was a pruning session that trimmed about 100 extranneous words from the story. Now I’m doing research for a new story. I have the opening scene developed in my mind, and I have a pretty good handle on the main character, but I still don’t have all of his story worked out.

We watched Post-Grad with Alexis Bledel, Michael Keaton and Carol Burnett on Friday night. It was a little campier than I expected, with Keaton veering toward Beetlejuice territory but it was cute and I now want to start up a web site called CheapAssTravel.com, referenced by Keaton in the closing moments.

I got the DVD of State of Play (the UK miniseries) on Saturday and we watched the whole thing, 330+ minutes, that evening. My wife had never seen it before–she really liked it. Excellent drama, with John Simm and Bill Nighy, along with Philip Glennister. I still haven’t seen the US remake and can’t imagine how they boiled it down to under two hours. The guy who plays Dominic Foy is hilarious.

Finished reading Horns by Joe Hill and am currently working on my review. Started The Spire by Richard North Patterson. It’s a cold case mystery, except the only person interested in re-opening it is the guy who found the murdered co-ed’s body 15 years ago now that he’s back on campus as the new president. His best friend was convicted of the murder. There’s another crime in the contemporary story–the previous president is accused of embezzling nearly a million dollars of the university’s endowment.

Cold Case was okay last night — I liked the way they camped up the historical story like a really bad noir parody. The personal stories of the main characters are starting to overwhelm the main plots, though. What exactly is Nick Vera obsessing over?