Awoke this morning to news of another short story sale. This one is for a flash fiction piece that was one of the winners of a contest. The official announcement hasn’t been made yet, so I won’t say where until it has.
Today is also the day Ice Cold goes on sale in just about every format known to mankind. That’s the back cover over there. I’m about halfway through it (I received my contributor copies a while back) and I am impressed by all the various ways people approached the general theme of Cold War. It’s really an excellent anthology. I’m sorry I won’t be able to make it to They Mysterious Bookstore in NYC at the end of the month for the official launch.
So, a couple of days have passed since the season ending of The Walking Dead. My preliminary reaction to it: I removed the series from my DVR recording schedule. I gave it a chance and, in the end, I just didn’t care about any of the characters or what happened to them. Yeah, the bunch at Terminus are probably luring people to the site because it’s easier to have food come to you than it is to go out and get it. As for who among the cast of familiars might already have become barbecue, I really don’t care. The show has never really engaged me after Darabont left.
Last night was the series finale of How I Met Your Mother and I’m still processing how I feel about it. A lot of people hated it; I didn’t. I didn’t love the first half hour, mostly because it seemed altogether too real for a sitcom. I didn’t hate it, but it certainly didn’t provide the warm fuzzy feeling I was expecting from the finale. The second half was better. I loved the moment under the umbrella when they first truly met each other. I liked the stories of their lives in the future. Some people didn’t like what Robin turned into, but it made sense to me: that level of success was always her dream. It’s what she came to NY for in the first place. I have to say, though, that as cute and likable as the mother, Tracy, was, she seemed like an interloper in the future scenes, hanging out with “our five” like she belonged there. They didn’t show us enough of her for her to have earned that place, kidding Barney about “Number 31” and “where are you registered?” It was nice seeing her there, but we should have seen more of her to get to that point. This conceit of making the entire final season about Barney and Robin’s wedding wasn’t a good one, in my opinion, because the wedding was really only important in that it was the place where Ted met Tracy. Otherwise, it probably wasn’t as memorable an event in their lives as we were led to believe. However, the last five minutes repaid all, in my opinion, and it’s where the showrunners always meant to go. The final bit between Ted and his kids (the kids part, at least) was filmed eight or nine years ago so the actors would still be kids (the actress who plays his daughter is now 27), and it’s the way I always hoped things would work out. BTW: According to my calculations, Ted is my age in that final moment.
