I received my on-signing payment for the new project yesterday. It’s always nice to get a check in this biz. The advance was split 50/50 between contract signing and final acceptance of the manuscript. None held over for “on publication,” which is so often the case. Since the final manuscript, pending any requested changes from the downstream editor, is now in the hands of my primary editor, so I’m hoping “acceptance” isn’t too far off.
I finally finished the first draft of the new short story this morning. Came in right at 3500 words, which is at the low end of the requested length. I really like the way it turned out. I came up with the general idea for this story last fall, after a dinnertime conversation with my wife, who had some fascinating suggestions for the direction I could take. The story turned out somewhat like what we discussed and somewhat different. As so many others have said, often you only discover what a story is about when you are writing it, or once you’ve finished.
It’s actually kind of hard to call this a first draft, since the first 2/3 of the manuscript has been extensively revised several times. However, the last 1000 words haven’t, so it’s a 1.67th draft, or something like that. It feels really good to reach “the end” on my first work of fiction of 2009.
The balance of power keeps shifting on Survivor this year. Just when one team looks like the lame duck, they pull off an upset and send the other team on the defensive. I had absolutely no impression of the guy who was sent home last night. None. It was like: where the hell did he come from? Has he been on the show all along? Now we go into one of the frustrating quasi-hiatuses, with next week being an off-night clip show.
The new guys got to show their stuff on CSI last night–Ray Langston and Riley Adams. A lot of people thought that the show was going to decline with the departure of William Peterson, but I’ve said before (probably a few times) that it has flourished with the arrival of Fishburn. It has reinvented itself by getting back to basics. The opening scene had me wondering exactly how much gun training Langston had received to put him out in the open like that. Nice how it tied together at the end with the Riley and Sanders. One of the tensest episodes of the show in recent memory.
