We had a strong windstorm last night, coupled with a bit of rain. Parts of Houston lost power, but we didn’t. A branch thudded against the roof during the evening–it looked like an Ike relic that had been suspended in the branches of another tree for the past several months. The storm was much worse north of us, especially in Oklahoma, but the force of the wind was pretty impressive. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we don’t get much wind that’s not associated with some kind of tropical phenomenon.
I finished keying in my edits and added two new sidebars at the editor’s request. The manuscript now stands at exactly 33,000 words. Exactly. That probably doesn’t intrigue anyone except for me. Two more sessions of cleanup and revision and it will be ready to go off to the editor. Then I get to wait for the dreaded editorial response, which tells me all the things I have to fix and change! In the interim, I have a few projects that hav been on the back burner for a while that I’ll need to get at, including a Cemetery Dance column due before the end of the month.
I thought the writers played a pretty good trick on viewers in The Mentalist last night. I was quite taken by surprise when I found out who the killer was. I got lulled into that sense of inevitability and obviousness that most magicians rely on. Jane is an interesting guy. He seems so free-wheeling and easy going, and then this hard-as-nails guy emerges from hiding. Not the guy who tweaked the husband for partying so soon after his wife was murdered, but the guy who took the killer to task for saying that he didn’t regret what he’d done, even though the wrong person was killed.
Now that I know that Simon Baker is doing an accent in the show, I’m listening to him more carefully. The only trace of his native accent I heard was when he did the “stay tuned for scenes from our next episode” voice over. That sounded closer to his real accent.
I found it funny that the FBI agents dropped the case like it was a hot potato on the say-so of one person without confirming it for themselves in last night’s episode of Without a Trace. The guy who vanished was a felon, certainly. He had committed numerous counts of fraud at the very least, and he’d been involved in a death that he didn’t report. But since they needed a little time to handle the father/daughter plot, the main investigation was thrown over for a tofu burger.
I should have my Spade & Archer review done this evening. I got most of it drafted last night, but it still needs some polish. I read Adam-Troy Castro’s novella “The Shallow End of the Pool” (from Creeping Hemlock Press) over the past few evenings. I was impressed. There were a couple of places where he fell in love with his writing a little more than I like to see–paragraphs full of flowery prose–but that was the exception instead of the rule. It’s a gritty, fresh, jarring story that leaves just enough unexplained to make it all the more jolting of a tale.
