Yesterday, I spent a little over an hour at the front of a classroom. My buddy Danel Olson invited me to speak to his Gothic class at a local college, something I’ve done once previously. It was a relatively small group, perhaps 16 students, but they seemed interested and engaged and asked good questions. Several of them admitted to being aspiring writers, and one was a musician. The latter asked if I ever got story ideas from dreams (answer: rarely, although I do sometimes work on story problems while I’m first going to sleep), because he sometimes came up with song fragments that way. Another asked how I went about researching weird story details without having people think I was weird or plotting a homicide.
I got up early on Sunday morning to watch Canada’s gold medal-winning hockey match. Well, I time-shifted it and stayed off social media, so it was almost like watching it live. Man, they played well. Hard to believe they’d only been a team for a couple of weeks. They played like they’d been together for years.
The PLRC check arrived yesterday, and the exchange rate wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’ve made more money from When the Night Comes Down via the PLRC than I have from direct sales! And I only get fractional credit for that book since it has three other authors. PLRC is gearing up to handle eBooks in the future, which should be interesting.
I put up a couple of reviews: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris and The Chase by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. I liked the Ferris book well enough except it sort of fell apart at the end. The Evanovich book is the first by her that I’ve read (she writes the Stephanie Plum novels). It’s a check-your-brain-at-the-door frolic, which was a lot of fun.
A lot of crap went down on Justified this week. Most dramatically, Raylan issued a put-up-or-shut-up ultimatum to Art (treat me the way you always did or transfer me). I wonder what mayhem Raylan will get up to during his vacation to Florida. Boyd and Cousin Johnny finally had their reckoning. I loved their little tete-a-tete scene, sitting side by side revisiting the past. The Crows blew everything out of the water with their trigger fingers, though. What was up with that? And Wendy Crow getting all flirty with Raylan.
Then Ava made a risky move with the heroin traders in her prison, one that could come back to bite her given Boyd’s sudden problems south of the border. The bit with the one-legged hacker was pretty funny. Raylan half-liked the guy, wanted to be the one to catch him and bring him in. “What if I teach you how to be caller #7?” He was so proud of the fact that he cleaned out Raylan’s bank account, but I was wondering: how much could that be?
The Amazing Race is off and running. Really glad the annoying “twinnies” got eliminated. They were so determined not to repeat their former mistakes and then set about repeating them time and time again. And Survivor, too. I can’t believe J’tia survived not just one but two tribals after her dismal performances and then her outrageous behavior at camp. Both votes were something of a surprise, but the latter caught me flatfooted. Did not see that coming at all. I have a suspicion this is going to be a rainy season.
Rizzoli & Isles is back. It’s more than a little weird to still see Lee Thompson Young all these months later. And season two of The Americans got off to a good start, from the disastrous encounter with the Afghans at the beginning to the cataclysmic discovery in the hotel room at the end, which will no doubt have a far-reaching impact on the season. And poor old Stan. It’s hard to know which side Nina is really on, or if she’s on a side at all. Is there a degree beyond double agent? Triple agent?
And, finally, we get down to episode 6 of True Detective, which, according to Nic Pizolatto, is the end of the second act. All the cards are on the table and, in 1995, Marty and Rust have hit rock bottom in their relationship (that was one heck of a running tackle), while in the modern day it is just being rekindled. Now we know the reason for their falling out, and it’s sort of what we expected, but not quite. I love how Marty’s wife sat there lying to the cops and you could tell she wasn’t as good a liar as Rust and Marty, but she still got through it. It was sort of sad to learn that they didn’t really save that little girl from the meth farm, that she was mostly catatonic years later. One amusing set piece was the positioning of the little angel and demon figurines on the counter while Marty was indulging himself with Proctor’s niece from Banshee. Meanwhile, over on Banshee, the last guy she slept with got turned into hamburger…
