So, I broke down and decided to give 24 a shot, watching via Fox On Demand online. Watched the first two hours and was whelmed. Neither over, nor under, just whelmed. (Turns out that whelmed is a real word that means “to cover with water,” so “overwhelmed” is a tad redundant and “underwhelmed” is just plan oxymoronic.) The best parts of 24 so far are Annie Wersching as the FBI agent and Janeane Garofolo as the stressed-out computer nerd. I’ve always like Garofolo, and to see her wringing her hands in anguish as she tries to do her job–priceless.
I received from my agent the near-final draft of the contract for the book I’ve been mumbling about this month. Compared to my previous book contract, this one is the soul of brevity, only six pages long, and normal-sized pages at that. It’s very clean and straightforward, and my agent negotiated some terms in my favor that we thought might be carved in stone. More about those later, once the project is announced–which might be sooner rather than later, because yesterday I reviewed a press release intended for Publishers Weekly sometime this month.
I’m pretty much at the 2/3 point of the manuscript as of this morning. This time next week I’m supposed to deliver the first 1/3 of the text, so I think my editor will be pleasantly surprised. The book is coming out this fall, so keeping on schedule is very much a concern. I’m going to complete the chapter I’m working on over the weekend and then spend the days next week polishing what I’ve written so far.
My Storytellers Unplugged essay will appear like magic early tomorrow morning. I wrote the item a couple of weeks ago so I would have my schedule clear for the aforementioned project. I really thought it was going to be worse of a time crunch than it ended up being, which is a relief.
I knew what Grissom would do after retiring from C.S.I. and as soon as I saw the reading on his GPS in the closing moments of the show, I knew who was going to show up at the end, but that didn’t make it any less touching or affecting. At last, Gris was letting his heart lead him instead of his head. I can’t believe they didn’t throw him a big going-away party, though. Heartless bastards.
