Photo credit: Lauren Grandinetti
An interesting weekend. For one thing, I received two short story acceptances within about an hour of each other. That’s always nice. One of the stories is about ten years old and has been out the door over a dozen times. Finally, it sold to a pro-paying market, so the moral of the story is: stick with it!
The second story has a slightly shorter lifespan, but it was written four or five years ago. It didn’t get submitted as frequently because there weren’t many markets where it would fit, but I finally found the perfect one. The other unusual aspect about this submission is that I sent it in to the market a little over a year ago, and then forgot about it. When I was revisiting my submission log a few weeks ago, I decided to query the market, only to discover that they had no record of ever having received it. So I sent it in again and had my positive response within a couple of weeks.
All very cool.
I spent most of Saturday role-playing at the Montgomery County Sheriff Office Citizen’s Police Academy. We were given a number of scenarios that were fairly common in the life of a police officer, and we had to be the cops and decide how to handle them. To add realism to the situations, we were given “air soft” guns that are virtually identical to real Glocks and other hand guns. They have CO2 cartridges in the magazine area and fire pellets hard enough to raise bruises. (Yes, we wore eye protection.) To get us comfortable with the guns, the first thing the deputy running the event did was ask for a volunteer to shoot him. I stepped up.
I think I’m the only person in the class who does not own a firearm and has rarely shot one. The last time I fired a gun was when I attended the Houston Police Department’s Civilian Police Academy a number of years ago. They took us to the firing range one evening and we got to shoot a clip at a target. I did surprisingly well that time. I still have the target, with a decent narrow spread. This time I took aim at the officer’s chest from about 10 feet away…and shot him in the arm!
The first batch of scenarios were domestic violence calls, which are among the most dangerous and unpredictable situations in which police officers find themselves. Very often, we were stumped at how to proceed once things went in a difficult direction. In the afternoon, we acted out “routine” traffic stops, most of which were anything but. Armed suspects, people who decide to flee, people who act unpredictably. It was fun, but it was also enlightening. Here are a few photos from the weekend and earlier sessions we had with the Crime Scene Investigators (where we saw some real-life lifted fingerprints that look nothing like what you see on TV) and the bus that took us off to tour the jail.
On Saturday evening, we saw Patton Oswalt (pictured above) “in concert.” The opening comedian didn’t get a formal introduction, and he only called himself Richard, so I have no idea who he was. My favorite part of Oswalt’s show is when he turns his attention to the people in the front row. He usually picks three, and the final one was pure comedy gold, a professional wedding singer that he got a lot of mileage out of. I guess I’ve been to a stand-up show before (my wife says we saw one back in the 90s), but I don’t recall it at all. This one was quite memorable. In the picture above, he suddenly noticed the strange backdrop on the stage and invited people in the audience to take a picture and tweet them at him.
Last night we watched “Rosa,” the latest episode of Doctor Who. We were greatly impressed by it. Although there was an alien entity acting as the bad guy, the worst villains in the episode were human.
