Yes, I spelled it the Canadian way. I do that sometimes.
Honours come in all sizes, big and small. It is an honour to be nominated for an award, or to get honourable mention. It’s also an honour to appear on Ellen Datlow’s recommended reading list, which she publishes in association with her annual Best Horror of the Year anthologies. I’ve had the honour of having stories mentioned on a number of occasions. This year, she included “Aeliana” from Shining in the Dark in her comprehensive recommendation list.
This weekend I put the finishing touches on a 7000-word essay that will be published as a magazine cover story sometime this fall. I can’t say where yet. I’ll read it over one. more. time. and probably make a bunch more changes to it when doing so, but it’s essentially finished, a week or more ahead of deadline.
This week, I’ll be celebrating my 30th anniversary with my day job. It’s hard to imagine that I’ve spent over half my life working for the same company, although it’s had a couple of name changes during that time. My father had over 45 years at his job, so I still have a way to go to catch up to that family record.
Usually it’s careless workers who cause problems with electricity or water mains on a Friday afternoon near our office, but last week it was just nature. A 30″ water pipe twelve feet below the surface of the boulevard by our building broke open of its own volition, eroding the ground under the road surface. The entire road, which is a major entrance/exit corridor for the community, was closed in both directions over the weekend. One direction was reopened after they confirmed that the road could still hold traffic, but the other direction is going to require a lot of work to get it back into service.
We watched a few movies on Amazon Prime this weekend. First, we saw Late Night, written by and starring Mindy Kaling, and featuring Emma Thompson, Amy Ryan, Hugh Dancy and John Lithgow, with some celeb talk show host cameos. Thompson has been the host of a late night talk show for nearly 30 years and her ratings have been on a steady slide for the past decade. Kaling’s Molly ends up being the first female in the writer’s room at a time when Thompson is on the verge of being replaced. It has a lot to say about representation. Pretty good.
Then we watched the Australian drama Ladies in Black about several women who work in a posh Sydney department store in 1959. The main character is a teenager on the verge of finishing high school who works at the store during the Christmas rush. It took me a while to realize that the actress who plays her coworker Fay was Rachel Taylor, who plays Trish Walker on Jessica Jones, and Julia Ormond is unrecognizable as the “continental” Magda. It’s a thoroughly charming film. Feel good all the way through.
Last night we saw The Hiding Place starring Kim Hunter (in her final role) and Timothy Bottoms. It’s based on a stage play and it feels like one, too. Hunter plays a mother who is (probably) exhibiting signs of dementia and Bottoms is her son. There have been other family members, but they’re gone and the story gets to the bottom of what really happened to one of them. Hunter (who played Zira in the Planet of the Apes films) is divine, but I had a hard time with the staginess of the direction. They did break free from the single-room setting on occasion, but they never found a way to break free from writing that works better in a play than a film.
