A weekend spent un-writing, also known as trimming the fat. My work in progress started its life at 5100 words (well, technically it started with 0 words…) and went down to 4200 and then to 3600 and now to just a tad over 3500, which is the target. One more editing pass and it should be good to go.
I received a couple of years’ worth of royalty statements for The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: 8 Secondary Characters from The Dark Tower Series this weekend and I’m very pleased by how well this little e-chapbook has sold over the years. It started out as a freebie print chapbook to accompany CD’s limited edition of The Road to the Dark Tower, but after they were all gone we decided to test it out as an ebook and it has generated a decent amount of royalties since 2010. Not bad considering it consists of material I cut from the book. CD has it up on even more sites than I realized: Sony, Apple, Kobo, as well as the regulars and their own website.
Speaking of CD, I posted a new News from the Dead Zone column today. Alas, we found out several days ago that FEARnet, with whom CD was partnered and for whom I had written a number of essays, was gobbled up by Comcast and dismantled. The website remains, but most of the employees were let go.
It was a nice spring long weekend, the kind when I can open my office window for most of the day while working. In a month or two it will be too hot after the morning to do so. The power went out for about 10,000 customers on Friday morning, but it was only off for about 45 minutes.
We watched the first two segments of Michael Palin’s Brazil over the weekend. Only two left to go and we’ll be done. With Palin, that is. We’ve watched all of his travelogues, more or less in chronological sequence. This one is from 2012. Brazil’s a fascinating country, especially when he gets to visit some of the isolated indigenous tribes of Amazonia.
I don’t mention Hannibal often, but I really enjoy this quirky show. It deserves a better night (does anyone really watch TV on Friday evening?). It’s surreal—and perhaps never stranger than this week’s episode, which featured Jeremy Davies (Lost, Justified) as a disturbed man, injured by a horse, who inserts corpses into horses in the hopes that the people will be reborn, thus giving rise to the subject of today’s post. Hannibal is usually unflappable, but the look on his face when Will uttered those words was priceless. The show is especially interesting now that Will and Hannibal both know the truth and they both know that the other person knows the truth. They still have to be cautious, Hannibal especially, but they can communicate in code, at least.
Sad to see the Harlem Globetrotters go from The Amazing Race. They always seemed to be having so much fun, even when the going was tough. I remember the episode where one of them was doing a sewing challenge, a long, tedious process, and the other one found a ball and started entertaining the real factory workers with his legendary tricks. I’m continually amazed by how people get upset when someone else does something perfectly legit—encouraged even—such as the U-Turn. It’s put into the game for players to use, and the goal is $1 million, so no matter how buddy buddy you get with other players, ultimately you want to beat them all. It is “just a game,” but one with a valuable prize that only one team gets. There is no prize for second, other than a trip around the world, that is.
An interesting episode of Mad Men. At times I wonder what the show’s charm is to have made it last this long. Not a lot has happened in the first two episodes, but there’s so much history to these characters. I liked the arc of the restaurant scene between Don and Sally. At first, Sally’s pissed, but by the end she’s come around a little. She’s still unhappy with her father, but he was honest with her for one of the few times in his life. Joan is moving up in the ranks of SCP and what started out as a very bad day for Dawn ended with her in a nice place. Pete is still insecure, Peggy is irritating, Roger is droll and out of the loop, but I’m starting to like Harry Hamlin’s character more. How does a show like this end? It’s not like there’s a definite end-game target. I think it should end with everyone celebrating New Year’s Eve 1969. The ball drops, the fireworks go off, some sort of SCP ad shows up in Times Square, and fade to black. The end of an era.
