I started working on an old short story that I plan to completely revamp. I’ve had some encouraging rejection letters with good, constructive criticism to guide me. I also came across some news items recently that I planned to weave into the story. It’s only a 2000-word story (the first version was exactly 1000 words for some contest many years ago), but I think it’s going to end up a lot longer than that when I finish this renovation. One of the critiques was that there was too much story crammed into too little space and that I needed to step back a bit. After tinkering around during my work session this morning, I came to realize that the news items I discovered could turn into the main thread of the story instead of being merely incidental. I want to do a little more research. However, if I find that there’s going to be a lot of work involved, I may put the story back on the shelf for a while. We’ll see. One of my biggest issues at present is that there’s a science fiction element to it, but it is essentially a non-genre story. However, the speculative element comes right at the beginning and might be off-putting to editors who think it is a sci-fi story. This new approach may help alleviate that somewhat. It’s food for thought, at least.
A good serial killer case to end off the season of The Closer. For a guy who had committed a bunch of murders already, he wasn’t all that hard to find, in the final analysis. Nor all that hard to dupe into confessing. The “shocking twist” at the end wasn’t such a big deal, either. The most interesting twist was the fact that it was All in the Family — Kevin Bacon directed the episode, and his and Sedgwick’s daughter finished off her repeat appearance as Brenda’s niece. Xander Berkeley was good as the cop from El Peso–it seemed like they might have been testing him out as a series character of his own, perhaps a spin-off. After all, even though he didn’t end up winning his wager with Brenda, it looked like he might get his way in the end.
I wonder if Peggy is going to be the to suggest that “Patio” should be renamed “Diet Pepsi” on Mad Men. I thought it was interesting for Don to suggest that his father-in-law move in. The middle-of-the-night bootlegger episode might have him reconsidering the wisdom of the decision. The scene between Don and the British guy where the latter confessed that he had no idea why they bought the agency was interesting, too.
Earlier this year, I downloaded the program LJArchive to keep a backup of my Live Journal posts and comments after the scare where people thought the place was going to get shut down. Until recently, it’s worked like a charm. Now it doesn’t. Apparently there was some change in the LJ configuration which the program doesn’t like, and now I get the cryptic message which is today’s subject line. Apparently if you turn off downloading of comments you can go from one error to a different one. Since the program is no longer under development, it looks like we’re screwed, unless LJ restores whatever it was that was changed over the weekend.
