Tune in to this spot tomorrow for big news (for me, at least). And, no, it won’t be because I won the Powerball lottery draw. Well, it could be because of that—I bought a few tickets for the first time ever—because the odds are about 8.75 million to 1 against, but the thing to which I refer is a sure thing. I’m not sure I’d want to win $500 million, anyway. Too much money. A person would have to spend all their energy figuring out what to do with it and making sure other people weren’t misusing it. $20 million would be nice, though.
I finished The Racketeer by John Grisham and moved on to The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling, which is been at the top of my TBR stack for too long.
I finished the first draft of a short story yesterday morning and revised it this morning. I don’t often write stories that fast, but this one has been rattling around inside my head for quite a while, though I could never seem to get myself to sit down and write the durned thing. Mostly because I understood the “big picture,” and I knew the opening section, but I had no idea about how it was all going to come together. On Monday, I told myself I might as well write down the part I know, and I did, which amounted to about 1300 words. Then, yesterday, I first reread the part I’d written the day before and then I plowed ahead with no idea where I was going. Lo and behold, it all fell into place and I ended up with a 2800 word first draft. Then I struggled with the title. I did come up with one, but I’m not 100% sold on it. Also, I usually delete about 10% of the total upon revision, but after today’s session I still had 2800 words. Not all the same words I started with, but the same number. That’s interesting (to me, at least).
I’m in the middle of the eighth and final season of Weeds. It’s a funny, quirky series, where the characters tumble blindly from one bad decision into the next. The cliff-hanger at the end of Season 7 was interesting, and I like where they’re going with Season 8. I’ll be curious to see what they decided upon as a conclusion. I can sort of guess, but not with any degree of confidence. I think it will have something to do with a certain bullet. I haven’t always liked all the characters (I found Elizabeth Perkins’ Celia Hodes tedious) and their related storylines, but there have been some great moments. I also like the way Mary Louise Parker’s Nancy Botwin swears. It’s like she’s not sure she can say the words and she stutters up to them or draws them out, curling up her lips in the process. I wonder if that was a creative decision relating to the character or if that’s the way Parker swears naturally. I hope some of the characters from the first few seasons show up in the finale, too. The decision to make Nancy and her family flee California left some good characters behind.
The Hour returns for its second season tonight. The show stars Dominic West of The Wire. I hadn’t heard that it was renewed or even that there had been any plans for it to continue. I only found out about it from a sidebar ad on a page I visited yesterday. A rare instance of internet advertising actually catching my attention.
Only one episode of Sons of Anarchy left this season, although chaos is a better word for their situation. I never thought I’d see what happened early on in this week’s episode, and the final scene was just ugh. Big black blobs. What a reminder. So, Tig. What’s going to happen with him? That’s the main question I’d like to see resolved next week. The rest is mostly bookkeeping. The Irish are mad, the Mayans messed everything up, the Chinese seem to be happy with how things are going. Pope is okay so long as Jax falls in line. Nero’s back in the game. Belfast’s population might increase by one. Wendy’s return to favor is brief. What a mess.
A good episode of NCIS this week. I was sure the missing girl’s father was going to be somehow involved, mostly because he was acting like a jerk. Everyone had a chance to act maternal or paternal without getting overly sloppy about it. Rizzoli and Isles is back with a decent first episode. I’m glad they’re sort of dispatching with the baby. In the books, Rizzoli is a mom, but I’m not sure that would work on the TV series.
