No hail storms last night. Nothing on TV, either, so I watched episodes two and three of Torchwood season 2. Sleepers was a hair-raising episode that taps into our fear of sleeper cells. In this case, the sleepers were aliens, and the humans housing them didn’t even know they weren’t human. Their weaponry was hellacious, primitive but effective. The episode ends with the looming but not pressing possibility that the rest of the aliens could arrive at any time, but for now the members of Torchwood will have to go on every day doing what they always do. It’s a risky gambit for a show to make. Either you have to keep referring back to this danger or forget about it. It’s a little like the Armageddon plot in The Dead Zone TV series. Everything else pales in comparison to that threat, but you can’t spend all your time dithering over it.
Because there are other things to worry about, like time obliterating itself, as was the threat in episode three. I like the idea of the people from the present being seen as ghosts in the past, and the helical nature of time folding upon itself hurts the brain only a little. A man from 1918 is taken off to Torchwood’s deep freeze so that his 2008 version can return to that time and correct the glitch that’s caused by…what, exactly? I think I missed that part. It seemed almost like the cause of the problem and the cure were the same. Anyway, a good character-driven episode featuring Toshiko’s unique love interest situation. The next episode sounds like fun. Alien meat in the food supply!
I started reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson last night (original title: Men Who Hated Women). It’s not out in the US yet, but the UK publisher sent me a copy last week. Larsson died after his three novels were accepted for publication in Swedish and they are just now starting to come out in English. The main character in this one is a journalist who has just been convicted of libel against a rich investor, which puts his career in jeopardy. The novel opens, though, with an intriguing vignette about an 80-year-old former police chief who has been receiving a (different) rare flower on his birthday for the past forty years without knowing who is sending them. There are hints that a crime may have been committed, but it’s not clear what, exactly. The journalist will ultimately be asked to look into the 40-year-old disappearance of another industrialist’s daughter, which one assumes will tie into the flower mystery, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I enjoy books set in exotic locations, though I am sure there are a few allusions I’m missing. I’ve been to Sweden before, but never to Stockholm nor to the archipelago where some of the action will take place. It’s a huge book, nearly 600 pages, but I’m enjoying it so far.
I did another editing pass on the short story I’ve been revising last night, and I’m converging on the final version. I can always tell because the number of marks per page decreases. The story was 4600 words when I started on it a few days ago and it is now 3900 words. Tighter, better logical flow, more focused, with a little better foreshadowing, in my opinion. One or two more read-throughs and it should be ready to go out the door. I also added another 1000 words to the novel this morning, and ended up thinking about the story some more in the shower afterward, which is a good sign. For a few days I haven’t been concentrating on where the story should go, even though I’ve been able to sit at the computer each morning and see where the characters lead me. Now I have some more concrete thoughts to assist during the next sessions.
Tonight: Survivor returns, and LOST continues. Yay! Also, Eli Stone, which I’ll end up taping and watching next week some time.
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