I finally had a chance to get back to the story I’m revamping for an editor. I wrote a new beginning last week, and now I’m ripping the rest of the story apart, salvaging the good bits, and taking it off in a new direction for the final half. I’ve finally reached the stage in the creative process where the story is getting under my skin enough for me to think about it while I’m not working on it. I have some scrawled notes on a Post-It note, things that occurred to me after I finished work this morning. Questions that need to be answered–or at least should be asked by the characters. I hope to have a new first draft of the story done by the weekend.
I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but Barnes & Noble are showing the Stephen King Illustrated Companion to be sold out at their warehouses. There are, no doubt, still many copies left in their stores, and the ZIP code search will let you find a store near you that still has it in stock. I e-mailed my editor to get clarification. Apropos of this–Locus had a nice little blurb about the book in their “Books Received” column this month. Not a review, but they clearly did their homework about what the book really is.
Only one episode of Dexter left, and it’s hard to imagine how they’re going to get from where Episode 12 ended to where Episode 13 must in only 50 or so minutes of screen time. There were a couple of improbabilities in this week’s episode. First of all, it’s hard to imagine that Deb would go alone into the lair of the person who she believed killed her lover and shot her. Sure, Quinn was tagging along out in the hall, but it was a dumb risk to take for no good reason. Secondly, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could get into Miami’s homicide division and just wander around that way. I’ve been inside the Houston Police Department headquarters downtown and it’s a little like going through Checkpoint Charlie. Not all the elevators go to all of the floors and people are kept very compartmentalized. All of that notwithstanding, I’m still enjoying the hell out of the season and I look forward to a rambunctious finale.
“Good thing he reads Russian literature,” the homicide detective on Castle said last night. “If he was a Nicholas Sparks fan, he’d be dead.” Another cliché of the genre–the mysterious man with amnesia who may or may not hold the key to the mystery. As with other episodes of the show, they take the cliché in a different direction. I totally expected “Amber” from House to be the killer, and then again I totally expected him to react to the dog, but they did none of those things. I liked the final exchange between Castle and his mother, where she confessed to being afraid of getting hurt in her rekindled relationship. “That’s the cost of living,” Castle says, which I thought was a great line.
That was the second time in a few hours that I heard the same sentiment. In The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith, a man who is about to be married muses that committing to marriage doubles his chances of being hurt. Since we’ve come to the end of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books (I’ve read all ten of them to my wife since June), we’ve moved on to another of his series, the 44 Scotland Street books. I received an ARC for the newest one so I decided to start with it. I feel like I’m missing a little bit of backstory on the characters from the previous three books, but I suppose that will come with time. I also have the ARC of the 11th Ladies’ Detective Agency book on the way. The author is supposed to be in Houston early next year, so we hope to meet him.
The Big Bang Theory continues to be one of the funniest shows on TV at the moment and by far the best exchanges are those between Penny and Sheldon. They must have an absolute blast making that show. There are times when they seem to be genuinely laughing at each other’s reactions to things.
