It rained early in the day yesterday, but cleared up enough for local fireworks. We didn’t go out to watch any of them, but heard them start around 9 pm. One good thing about all the rain—and it continues unabated today—is that it is far cooler than normal. Three days in July have set new record low maximum temps for the day. Yesterday, for example, was only 82 when the normal temp is 93 for this time of year.
I spent the day off editing, but not what I thought I would be editing. I discovered that one of my older stories was lying dormant. I had submitted it to an anthology in 2005 and was told it was on the short list and hadn’t followed up. I came across something that reminded me of it on Tuesday, so I tracked down the market and discovered the book had been published last year, so I guess I didn’t make the cut. I did a heavy rewrite, trimming the 4800 words down to about 4400 and improving the story, or so I believe, found a new market and shipped it off.
This morning I returned to the story at hand. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the first, intense revision and have trimmed it by about 800 words so it seems like my early impressions were correct—that it was at least 1000 words too long. One more session and I should have a lean, mean second draft that I can really tear into. My goal is to get it done before NECON, which starts two weeks from today. Yee haw!
We watched a French film last night called Merci Pour Le Chocolat. The preview said it was Hitchcockian, and I guess in a way it was, but it was also very, very French, by which I mean the credits rolled just when I thought they would. It was an interesting movie, but there were a ton of loose ends and some unexpected behavior by certain characters that I couldn’t rationalize, primarily in the older generation. The gist of the story is that a young woman, an aspiring pianist, learns that there was a temporary mix-up in the hospital the day she was born and that the nurses thought she belonged to a different family. Just so happens the mistaken father is a fairly famous pianist. Though everyone involved assures everyone else that it was a brief mistake quickly cleared up, the woman is fascinated that both she and the man are both piano players, so she seeks him out and introduces herself. Her unexpected appearance throws family dynamics into a tizzy on both ends of the equation and an already unstable, probably sociopathic, character is pushed to do something desperate.
I received my contributor copy of A Dark and Deadly Valley on Tuesday. A terrific looking hardcover with exceptional pulp cover. So far I’ve only read T.M. Wright’s story “After Dunkirk,” which is moody and surreal and strongly reminiscent of Waiting for Godot. My story is called “Sturm und Drang” and is set in the bunker during the fall of Berlin.
