I received two atypical rejection letters this week. The first was for a story that had been with the market for about a year. It was a good market, so I was patient, but I queried about it recently, to make sure it hadn’t fallen between the cracks. It did, in a way, but so did just about everything else. The market was regrouping, the editor told me. Revamping. My story had been read with the new approach in mind, but it wasn’t a fit. I was, however, invited to submit something else to the Doctor Who-like regenerated version, and I happened to have a suitable story. It was written several years ago, but hasn’t been out much because there aren’t many markets for that kind of story. I went through three more drafts, trimmed about 300 words from the original 6100 and sent it in.
The second was returned because the anthology it was written for couldn’t find a publisher. I usually don’t submit to anthologies that don’t yet have a home, but the editor has a good track record. I’m not sure where to submit this one to next. I don’t need to worry about de-theming the story from the anthology’s premise, but I don’t know exactly how to classify the tale, which makes finding a market problematic.
I’m about three-quarters of the way through Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night. Ultimately the book seems to be about a guy who came from a middle-class home with absentee parents who aspires to greatness and achieves it, though illicitly. The question is: at what cost? Also: can he hold onto it?
When Raydor’s “foster child” disappeared on Major Case, I was thinking: good riddance. The kid takes up too much of the show’s valuable time without any sign there’ll be a satisfying payoff. He’s also terribly inconsistent as a character. He was a male prostitute when first encountered, but he’s very well spoken (he has an awesome vocabulary and perfect diction) and he vacillates between whining and espousing some pretty sophisticated philosophies. He’s always annoying, though.
I didn’t expect the turn of events on this week’s Covert Affairs. Annie flies to Cuba with her lover and spy target Simon, where they meet up with a Very Bad Dude who is Simon’s handler. The Very Bad Dude doesn’t like Annie and wants to get rid of her. Simon appears to go along, but after locking Annie into a closet at a cigar factory, Simon slashes his handler’s throat. He’s clearly in love with Annie, who saw the whole thing through the keyhole. My question about that, though, is whether Simon knows Annie saw him. The ending was rather rushed. We have to go, Simon says. If he doesn’t know Annie saw him, there was no explanation of what happened to his “friend.” If he does know, there was no discussion of that at all, and you’d think there’d have to be. The scene in the cigar factory was interesting because I’d just read the exact same thing in Lehane’s book, though it is set in Tampa in the 1930s. The most important person on the factory floor, Lehane says, is the person who reads to the workers. Later, though, that job was replaced by a radio.
When I was trolling around for recent classic series that I’d never seen, several people suggested The Wire and The Shield. I knew they were crime shows, and I knew that Michael Chiklis starred in the latter and that George Pelecanos was part of the creative team of the former. That’s all. I bought the first seasons of both series, but hadn’t gotten around to them yet. Since there isn’t much on the tube these days, I decided to watch The Shield. I was really surprised by it. I saw Chiklis on The Commish back in the 90s when he was a roly-poly jovial guy. Now he’s buff and trim and…dark. I wasn’t expecting the level of corruption in his character. After a few episodes I described the show as a cross between the realism of Homicide: Life on the Streets, the procedural aspects of The Closer and the corruption and violence of The Sopranos. Vic Mackey is cut from much the same mold as Tony Soprano. He’s intensely loyal to his team but brooks no disobedience. The law is only a set of loose guidelines and he will steal, maim and kill to achieve his goals. What are his goals? To rule his squad and maintain peace on the streets. I see parallels with Sons of Anarchy, too. SAMCRO breaks the law but keeps order in their town, too, which allows them to maintain an uneasy alliance with the local cops. The other characters are fascinating. I was familiar with Jay Karnes from Burn Notice, and Catherine Dent seems familiar. Walton Goggins, of course, from Justified. I was hoping for more from his character, but it isn’t well developed in the first season. We know he’s from Atlanta and he’s Vic’s right-hand guy most of the time, but he doesn’t appear in some episodes at all and is much in the background of others, unless he’s in trouble. Hopefully there will be more of him in subsequent seasons. I definitely plan to carry on, now that I’ve finished Season 1.
