We had a rainy weekend. I barely managed to get the lawn mowed on Saturday morning before it started. Then we had another good soaking yesterday. At the midpoint of the year, we’ve received about 27″ of rain, which is just a touch over average. We only got 8″ in all of 2011.
I finished a new short story this weekend. The deadline for submissions was yesterday and when I got up in the morning I still didn’t know how the story was going to end. No pressure. I finally finished the first draft at about 2:30 p.m. and gave it the 3200-word story a good three or four polishes before I submitted it to the anthology. Not my usual way of working, but deadlines are deadlines. This morning I proofread and revised a third of a 60-page document that’s due at the publisher as soon as I can get it cleaned up. I hope to get that one tidied up by tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. I also have to recreate a couple of drawings for my next as-yet unannounced book, which I’ll try to get done by Friday. My to-do list for July is long and convoluted, but I hope to have a handle on a lot of it by the end of the weekend.
I finished Taken by Robert Crais yesterday. It’s about bajadores, criminals who target other criminals, primarily coyotes bringing illegals into the country. They steal the illegals and hold them for ransom, making repeated calls for more money and then disposing of the bodies once the well runs dry. Not bad. Then I started Murder in Four Parts by Bill Crider. I picked it up at World Horror last year and am just now getting around to it.
Got caught up on last week’s Burn Notice, finally. I like capers where the plot isn’t too outlandish. I was wondering how they would sell an epidemic to an entire cruise ship, but they managed to keep it small. I also like it when the caper goes awry and they have to wing it. Since it was Pearce’s plight, it was only fitting that she be the one to step up and improvise. Good episode, punctuated with Fiona’s prison travails.
We finally got to the end of The Sopranos. I knew how it was going to end, roughly, so there were no big surprises there. I didn’t know who was going to die in the final few episodes, though. I think one reason why we weren’t blown away by the series is that we’ve been spoiled by a run of very good TV and cable series in recent years. The Sopranos may have been revolutionary in its time but with Dexter and Breaking Bad and other shows like that on the air nowadays, The Sopranos looks a little pale by comparison. My biggest complaint is the lack of over-arching plots that spanned seasons. The show seemed aimless, and we were a little frustrated by plot points that were never resolved. What did happen to that Russian guy out in the snowy woods?
It’s interesting to see that a lot of people are convinced that Tony died at the end. They rely on the statement that “you never hear it coming” and the fact that Tony is the star of his own life and once that ended so did the show. You could argue it many ways until you were blue in the face, but the bottom line is that what happens next is entirely in the imagination of the respective viewer. I liked the round-table discussion on the DVD wherein someone says, “The Soprano family goes on. You just aren’t invited into their lives any more.” Also interesting to hear Edie Falco express her ambivalence toward her character, wondering why she stayed in that situation.
Not sure what we’ll move onto next. I have the first seasons of The Wire and The Shield on DVD, but I’m not sure my wife is ready for another crime series. However, she has taken a liking to Longmire, so maybe.
