I’m not sure why the southern blondes ended up so far behind on The Amazing Race last night. I guess they must have taken some wrong turns somewhere, because they ended up at the marina long after the other teams. I found it interesting that some teams cruised through the kiwi crushing challenge while others gave up on it as a hopeless cause. The separated/reconciling couple has been kicking ass—three consecutive wins—but it looks like next week will be an equalizer, robbing them of their vast lead. I wonder how bad Starr’s arm injury is. She was a trooper, finishing out the challenge and even attempting to drive to the pit stop. Terrence and Sarah have gotten better since the beginning, but Terrence still seems to feel the need to belittle Sarah, telling her how bad she was at something as trivial as opening the clue envelopes. Next week looks interesting. Cambodia. Wow.
Seeing Phil’s Dad at the pit stop was cool. One of the contestants referred to it as “take your dad to work” day. He took full advantage of his position, hugging every one of the female contestants, so far as I could tell.
I’ve had the first chapter of a new novel rattling around in my head for a while, so I decided to commit it to paper this morning. My agent is getting married this weekend, so we won’t be doing any work on my most recent novel for a while, so I guess it’s time to start working on something else in the interim. I had a couple of possible short projects on my to-do list, but neither of them were coming together for me, so I’ve decided to scrap them and tackle the next big thing. This will be interesting work, as it’s both a “sequel” of sorts (second book in a series, to be precise) to the previous novel, the first time I’ve done anything like that, and it’s also a reimagining of an older manuscript, so I have quite a bit of story created, but it all has to be reinvented.
I agreed to be interviewed earlier this year for an upcoming book called Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak. We talked for about 30 minutes by phone. There were certain things I was willing to talk about and others I didn’t want to get into, and Rogak respected those boundaries. However, half an hour is a long time on the phone and your guard tends to come down a little the more you talk, a fact that police interrogators rely on.
So, when I received an ARC of the book last week, it was with some trepidation that I read through it to find out what I had said and how it was used. To my relief, I was quoted directly only twice, once in the introduction and once during the section discussing The Talisman. I was pleased to see that my interviews with Tabitha and Owen King at Onyx Reviews were cited a few times. Rogak is a great quoter. Much of the book consists of facts supported by quotes from various existing essays, interviews and books. She gathers information from diverse sources into a nice, coherent chronology, using recent interviews with people like Stan Wiater, Chuck Verrill, Ridley Pearson, Dave Barry, Otto Penzler, Kathi Kamen, Rick Hautala, Tony Magistrale, Michael Collings, etc. to support the material.
For anyone who suspects that Obama is dry and formal all the time, this video from a recent speech shows otherwise. It’s very, very funny.
