For the past few years, we’ve been flirting with drought. Sometimes we’ve been in full-on, high-risk drought conditions, with the local lakes (aka holding ditches) at levels so low that the boats are stuck in mud. Other times we get just enough rain to keep us happy, albeit briefly.
Earlier this week we had two days of torrential rain that, almost literally overnight, took us from “back in serious drought again” to “pretty much caught up to the average rainfall for the year.” Houston has recorded nearly 10″ of rain in May, double the monthly average, and we’re only a tad off for the year. There are hints we might get more heavy rain over the next two days. There was some localized flooding, mostly on low-lying roads and freeway feeders, but no one is complaining. The wildlife is euphoric. You should hear the birds singing. And the frogs. And the mosquitoes…
Today is the official publication day for Joe Mynhardt’s anthology, Tales from the Lake Vol. 1, which contains my story “The Lady of Lost Lake.” The headline author is Graham Masterton, but you’ll probably recognize some other names in the table of contents. It’s available in paperback (Amazon), Kindle, and various other ebook formats from Smashwords. It’s also up at CreateSpace. I did a short interview about my story, which you can read here. The one review to mention my story so far had this to say, “Essentially a lady in the lake story with real no essence but strangely I was riveted to this story and its telling.” I’ll take that.
Although it will also appear in the next issue of Cemetery Dance magazine, we decided to put up my review of Mr. Mercedes at News from the Dead Zone. Check it out!
We’re in that funky limbo time when there’s not much new to watch on TV. Mad Men finished up with an interesting twist, as Don pulls himself from in front of the speeding train with a last-minute gambit. And who couldn’t love the song-and-dance routine that accompanied the departure of one of the original characters? At least he got to see a man on the moon. Fargo continues to be interesting. I loved the way they decided to film the mass shooting at the Fargo office. All exterior tracking as we follow but cannot see Malvo work from room to room and floor to floor. The occasional flash of light from gunfire, but only at the end do we see actual people. Those poor FBI guys.
I’m also still digging Orphan Black, though the show occasionally comes very close to choking on its own twisted plot. It still surprises me how I can look at all these clones as if they were being played by different actresses. Maslany is simply amazing. We watched the original BBC version of House of Cards. Unfortunately the two follow-up series aren’t on Netflix, so I had to order the DVD. The incident at the end of the final installment of the first series perfectly reflects what happened in the first episode of Season 2 of the Spacey remake, but I’d forgotten about it. It has been, after all, a quarter of a century, more or less. It’s a toss-up who breaks the fourth wall better, Spacey or Ian Richardson. They are both so sly.
I’m starting to catch up on the third season of Death in Paradise, a cute cozy-esque murder mystery series set on a fictional Caribbean island. It’s a “fish out of water” story in that the Inspector is British, sent to this outpost because no one much likes his stick-in-the-mud, always-by-the-book ways. Over the course of the first two series, he adjusts to life in the tropics, as much as he can. This makes what happens in the first episode of the third season such a shock. I’m not sure the series can recover from it, but we’ll see. I’m also keeping up with Motive, the Canadian police drama in which the killer and the victim are revealed before the opening credits and you then get to see the police work out what happened and why. It’s pretty good. Not as glossy as CSI, and a little too in love with clever camera transitions, but I like the gruff characters.
