My first post of 2015. Happy New Year one and all. Turbulent events abroad, so maybe not so happy for everyone, alas. It would be hard to pick a day when that wasn’t true, though.
Our first strong blast of winter is due to arrive in a few hours. I don’t think it’s going to be quite as cold as they were anticipating a couple of days ago, but it will drop into the upper twenties at least. From tonight until sometime Sunday we won’t see temperatures above the thirties. Brrr.
My new toy from the holidays is an iPhone 6. We upgraded from iPhone 4 (not even 4S), so it’s quite a big change. The thumbprint login is fascinating. The process of encoding the print was more complicated than I imagined. You have to roll the surface of your thumb around as the ridges fill in, and then do the same thing with the edges of your thumb, too. But it’s quite sensitive. It works no matter which way your thumb is pointing or which part of it makes contact. The phone is bigger than what I’m used to, and until I got my hardcase for it, I handled it very gingerly. Not sure I like the Otterbox for this one, though. I’ve ordered a different case to compare. The Otterbox has a built-in screen that seems to reduce the touch sensitivity.
Over the holidays, I did little writing but lots of reading. I finished The Witches of Echo Park by Amber Benson, who is going to be at Murder By the Book next week, as well as A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. I’ve written reviews of both, but I’m holding off on posting the review of the latter until closer to publication, which is in June, but suffice to say, I really liked it. It’s The Exorcist for the 2010s. I’m currently reading The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons, which is Henry James meets Sherlock Holmes, quite literally. I’m about a quarter of the way through. The book has an interesting quasi-metafictional aspect to it. Is Sherlock Holmes real or an imposter? Who is the author of his stories, John Watson or Conan Doyle? Intriguing and mind-twisting. (For a list of everything I read in 2014, see this link.)
So I’m back to writing. I have three goals for 2015, in addition to the regular work I do (which includes the semi-regular posts to Stephen King Revisited and the semi-irregular posts to News from the Dead Zone). I’m going to finish the story I’m currently working on before the end of the month. Then I’m going to write the novella that is part of a project I’m doing with Brian Keene. And then I’m going to get onto that novel I’ve been trying to re-start for lo these many months. I’m going to do my best not to get seduced by other projects unless they have paychecks attached to them up front. Try, at least, though shiny things do fascinate, don’t they?
I’m very pleased to see that Eve Myles from Torchwood will be joining the second season of Broadchurch, as well as Charlotte Rampling, who was so good in the final season of Dexter. I almost wish I’d never watched Gracepoint as now I have to cleanse my mind of the visual representations of those characters and remember who was who on the (much superior) original version.
Less pleased to learn that USA has canceled Covert Affairs. It wasn’t a show that generated a lot of buzz, but it lasted five seasons and was always interesting. I suspect that it depicted spycraft more accurately than most spy movies. And, thanks to an ad during last night’s NCIS, I was alerted tot he fact that The Mentalist is moving from Sundays to Wednesdays starting, oh, what? Tonight. My normally on-the-ball DVR didn’t get the memo.
Speaking of NCIS, whoa, what a brutal episode. It started off whimsically enough, with not one but two of Gibbs’ ex-wives showing up at a crime scene. Jeri Ryan appeared as the near-mystical and never-before seen ex-wife #2, back to pay amends now that she’s hit bottom and in recovery. However, one of Gibbs’ nemeses was reproducing crime scenes from his past, right down to the head-shot that took out Kate many years ago, but this time the recipient of the lethal bullet wasn’t an NCIS operative but an ex.
Now that Homeland has finished its fourth season, it’s time to binge my way through it. I’m four episodes in and so far it’s not bad. I thought the plot with the young man who survived the wedding bombing would go in a different direction at first—I thought he’d be radicalized by events. It’s bad enough that Carrie and her group have to combat the hostiles, but she also has to be on the lookout for her own allies who want to stab her in the back. The guy who was promised the job of bureau chief, for example.
I’m back on the elliptical trainer in the mornings before I start writing after a hiatus. Despite the amount we seemed to consume during the holidays, I didn’t really put on any new weight, so that’s good. I’ve discovered that Californication is the perfect program to watch then. Each episode is roughly 30 minutes. What a quirky show.
