Last Friday was my 20th anniversary at my day job. It’s hard to imagine. One of my pert coworkers brought it to my attention that she was 8 when I joined the company. My father worked for the same employer for 47 years, so I still have a way to go.
Another response to my flurry of press releases from a few weeks back, a note in the Northern Journal section of the Saint John Telegraph Journal, which is one of two New Brunswick papers that gets provincial distribution. It’s just a note, but I also had contact from them saying they would consider reviewing the book if I sent them a copy.
Author Michael Connelly has a guest appearance on the season premiere of Castle tonight. The new season is starting up fast and furious this week. For some reason I thought The Amazing Race was going to start last night, but I guess that’s not until next Sunday. Tonight it’s two hours of House and the CBS comedies, plus Castle. I’m going to give the new NCIS a test drive tomorrow night, but if it’s all flash and no substance, like some of the CSI spinoffs, I won’t stick with it long.
We watched the French movie Paris, starring Juliette Binoche, this weekend. She plays the older sister of a dancer who has a heart defect and is awaiting a transplant. The illness gives him cause to reflect on his life, of course. However, the movie is really a series of interwoven vignettes about people who are at pivotal points in their lives. A university prof whose father has just died who starts an affair with a student, after stalking her with text messages that quote romance poets! A love triangle among the workers at an outdoor food market. A man from Cameroon working to get his brother into the country. A bitchy pastry shop owner. It’s all very artistic and artsy, and a nice showcase for the city and its less-often represented denizens.
I’m about halfway through The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I’m neither her to praise nor to bury him — I’m simply enjoying the book as a straightforward thriller, though I think I would have liked something that took more risks instead of being pretty much a carbon copy of The Da Vinci Code. There is the requisite odd character on a single-minded mission, and a fast-paced treasure hunt, this time in Washington, D.C. instead of Paris. The book takes no risks whatsoever, at this point. It’s generally sympathetic toward the Masonic order. For me, part of the pleasure is in solving the puzzles, and I was pleased to be able to crack the Masonic code, although it seemed like the results were gibberish. The Noetic aspect of the book seems like so much faux science that I feel obliged to roll my eyes, but I can get past that, too. I mean, once you’ve tackled the Holy Grail, how else can you up the ante? Brown is a popular target, but I don’t think he’s any worse a writer than, say, Clive Cussler or John Grisham.
I finished revising a short story this weekend, getting it down to 2400 words from 4600, which makes me wonder a) have a totally gutted the story and turned it into something incomprehensible or b) should I be trimming about half from all of my short stories to get rid of the excess verbiage? Hard to say, but I’ve done the same thing to two stories this summer. Submitted it to the CBC Literary Contest and scratched it off my list. I also received payment (finally) for a story that was published over three months ago, though I’ve yet to receive my contributor copy. Supposedly that should happen this week.
This morning, I finally, finally, returned my attention to the novel. Now that I have some firm words of direction and guidance from my agent, I’m going to take the first chapter, which is currently about 16 pages long, and work at it as if it were a short story, honing it to the point that we’re both satisfied with it. Getting the voice right is the number one order of business, both the way the narrator speaks and the things he chooses to speak about. I hope to have something show my agent by the end of the month, which should be do-able. I’m excited to be back in the protagonist’s world again. I was already thinking about him, because he was the viewpoint character in the vignette I wrote while on vacation.
