Over the Christmas break, I went through the page proofs for The Dark Tower Companion. Typically what you do with these is mark your changes in the rather spacious margins, photocopy any pages that have errors, and then send just the affected pages back to the editor. I decided to do it a little differently. I created an Excel spread sheet that listed the page number, the line number (line numbers are listed on each page of page proofs), the original text, the amended text and an explanation of the change. For coverage, I scanned the part of pages with changes, which allowed me to combine what would have been 50 or 60 sheets into a 12-page pdf. I emailed both to my editor. Today I heard back from him. “Your corrections document was the most organized thing I’ve ever seen. Bravo.” A successful experiment, then. He also told me that the first galleys were in and that he’d send me some shortly.
I can’t remember exactly how I became aware of Steve Earle. His song “Copperhead Road” is well known. I must have heard something about his album “The Revolution Starts Now” that inspired me to buy a copy (back in the days when I was still buying physical CDs) and I liked the title track and got a kick out of the one that is politely called “F the CC.” All of a sudden I started seeing him on screen in a bunch of places. First as Walon on The Wire, the guy who sponsors Bubba into sobriety and then again on Treme, where he plays Harley, the street musician who becomes a mentor and father figure to Annie. As an actor, he makes a fine musician, but even so, when we reached the final episodes of Season 2 of Treme, we were shocked by what happened. Just one more episode in S2 for us.
Last year I gave up on The Walking Dead halfway through Season 2. After continuing to hear people grumble about the show, I congratulated myself on the decision. However, my pal Bill Breedlove (who has a short story collection called How to Die Well coming out this month, by the way) kept telling me I needed to give it a second try, so I did. I made it to the end of the second season last year and now I’ve embarked on the eight episodes of S3. I was impressed by the changes between seasons. The show looks much grittier. The characters look like they’ve been through the apocalypse, a couple of times. They’ve learned stuff (using homemade silencers, for example) but they’re struggling (who eats owls?). Now that they’ve reached the prison, I’ll be curious to see how things play out.
