Earlier this year, I took a day-long course at work that gave me the credentials of an emergency first responder. Since then, my colleagues and I have jokingly asked each other if we’ve saved anyone yet. There was an incident at the grocery store one evening where a woman rushed in to say that a man was having a heart attack in the parking lot, but it turned out he was just tired and need to sit down in the shade for a few moments.
This morning, I saved someone’s life. Okay, it was a fictitious person, and she’d been dead for a couple of years, but still. In the first draft of the novel I’m working on, a character is stabbed in the neck in the opening chapter and spends most of the book in a coma. At the end, she’s taken off life support and allowed to die. My agent felt that the incident took place too early in the book for us to care about this character, so I planned to relocate the incident later in the novel. However, this morning, as I was working on the novel’s timeline, I came to the realization that the incident simply wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the book. It would have been too disruptive to the main plot and would have caused such an emotional impact on the main character that I couldn’t justify some necessary behavior on his part. So, she gets to live. Maybe I’ll off her in a sequel, because it’s a good scene, but for now she lives.
I also figured out the interweaving of the three main plotlines and fleshed out the characters of this no-longer-dead woman, who now needs a backstory and some motivation, and another character who I only recently envisioned but who plays a major part in the new first chapter that I drafted last summer. It’s all starting to come together. Within a couple of weeks, I expect to be ready to plow ahead with the second draft.
Did you catch House singing karaoke with Chase and Foreman last night? Boy, was that ever unexpected. I loved the exchange between House and 13. He raised the issue of her mortality and she fought back. “My self pity’s optional,” she said. “What about yours?” The gag with the milk in his coffee from the inexplicably lactating patient was funny, too. Everyone on his team wanted to say something, but none of them could.
I also thought The Big Bang Theory was amusing last night, drawing a parallel in the fractured relationship between Penny and Leonard and Sheldon like divorced parents sharing custody. Good to see Maggie from Eli Stone on Castle last night, too, playing Beckett’s friend Madison. Her character was a shining light on that underappreciated show. I was a little bit dubious about the liquid nitrogen science, though. Unless the victim was totally immersed in a tank of lN2 for a while, he should have been well and truly thawed out six hours later. It was a funny gag, though, to see his hand come apart like that, so I forgave them.
Nothing tops Breaking Bad, though, for potent storytelling. This week’s episode started with something of a creation story, a bit of an explanation for what made the two lethal assassins from Mexico the way they were. Then we get Hank going off the reservation on Jesse, beating him down for using Marie as a diversion. Then the lawyer telling Jesse that the beating was “the best thing for you” (and his follow-up jest calling Walt the “cute one” in the group now). However, my favorite part of the episode was the fascinating trajectory of the bullet that originated with the talkamatic gun dealer (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Steve Buscemi) and ended up…well, you know where it ended up if you saw the episode. I wonder what will happen to Walt’s lab assistant now that he’s been dismissed. Nothing good, I fear. However, the big question for me was who made the warning call, and why? Was it the manager of the chicken joint? That gleaming axe biting into the asphalt–another powerful image.
