Congratulations to Usain Bolt for another gold and a world record in the 200 m sprint. And on his birthday, to boot.
Mad Men was good this week. The relationship between Peggy and the new priest is interesting, especially the final moments of the show. The set-up with the American Airlines meeting was well done, too. I found it funny that there were no consequences over Draper’s daughter getting soused during the weekend meeting.
I think Dan made the right choice during Big Brother last night. He stepped up and won when he had to during the POV contest, to keep Jerry and Ollie from gaining control, but his meeting with Renny showed him he was on shaky ground if he tried anything more overt than that, so he outed April for offering him cash for votes and left things the way they are. Unless something changes radically between now and tomorrow, the sequester house will be chilly for a week with Libra and April sharing quarters.
I didn’t get any writing done this morning, but I got a story back into submission and sent Ellen Datlow a story for critique. I won that prize during the recent KGB raffle and I had been waffling for a while over what to send her. For a while, I considered sending the story I wrote for the Haunted Legends anthology, but that just seemed cheesy to me. Like I was trying to go through the back door. Every time I thought it sounded like a good idea, a little voice spoke up and, like Thomas Magnum, whenever that voice speaks I listen. So I sent the Haunted Legends story off to a new market and sent her something else—a story I really like that has been rejected a couple of times. Maybe I can get enough feedback about what’s not working from an editor’s point of view to revamp it and send it somewhere else. It’s a little hard to classify. It could be a crime story, it seems like there might be something supernatural going on and it’s lightly humorous in a twisted way.
Rainy days, these. I’m not complaining. After the dry, dry months we’ve had, a little bit of rain isn’t going to hurt anything or anyone.
I’m reading Ruth Rendell’s The Water’s Lovely. It’s about a young woman who suspects that her younger sister drowned their step-father in the bathtub ten years earlier, when they were 15 and 13 respectively. The main character had a crush on the step-father and there was some improper contact between them (kissing, fondling) that the younger sister knew about. The protagonist worries that her sister may be predisposed toward using murder as a way of solving problems and wonders whether she should tell her sister’s new boyfriend about her suspicions. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the sister didn’t kill the stepfather. Great writing and fascinating setup. There’s also a bottle of morphine that’s like the gun in Act 1—it’ll probably go off in Act 3, but who knows how?
