I received my first rejection letter of 2010. No, maybe it’s my second one. I think so. They don’t sting quite as much as they once did, but I had hopes for this one. It was intended for Blood Lite 3 but it failed because it wasn’t funny enough, according to the editor, who wrote me a nice message about it. That was my biggest fear. I think the story is quite good, but it’s more satirical than funny. I don’t really do funny well. Droll, maybe. “The Bank Job” has funny moments, but it’s not hilarious. I’ll try placing it somewhere else, of course.
The Edgar Award nominations will be announced next week. I hope that Thin Ice is nominated. The Level Best Books anthologies are almost always noticed by the awards committees, and I hope this year is no exception. I dare not hope that my story in the collection will be nominated: it would be bad luck to hope such a thing, right?
I just realized that I have to write a Storytellers Unplugged essay this weekend. Monday is my day for it to go live. I don’t have a clue what to write about. I’m sure something will come to me. It always does.
I finished The Silent Land by Graham Joyce last night. It was every bit as good as I hoped/expected. It’s a difficult book to say much about without discussing the ending. With Graham, there’s always the open question about whether a surreal experience truly happened or whether something is affecting the characters’ perceptions (or, perhaps, the reader’s). Sometimes all it takes is the presence of one tiny inexplicable thing to raise the question. I’ll review the book shortly, but I have to think about how to do so without giving too much away. When people ask me who my influences are, I almost always mention Graham Joyce. Next up: A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block, the new Matt Scudder book.
I recently ordered a copy of a novel I read in school: The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler. As I wrote previously, this was a book whose title and author I couldn’t remember but I’ve always wanted to read it again to see if it holds up to my memory of it. I must have read a bunch of books in school, but I don’t remember many of them. I do have a vivid memory of reading The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier at some point, so maybe I was paying attention. What I remember more than anything else about that book is the fact that I learned the word “patina” while reading it. Not sure why that stuck in my mind the way it did. Another book that I really enjoyed was The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu. I guess that anticipated my fondness for spy novels. It’s about a true scheme whereby a body was dumped in the Mediterranean with “confidential papers” about the Allies plans that were intended to mislead the enemy during World War II. I’ve never seen the movie, though. Should track it down.
Not much on TV this week. I still watch Grey’s Anatomy, but don’t often write about it. It’s my one soap opera show. I watched Desperate Housewives during the first season, when it was as much of a whodunit as a dramedy, but I gave up on it very quickly in season two. I didn’t care much for the Christina plot in Grey’s Anatomy this season, but she seems to be getting back to normal. I like the fact that the cast is expanding to the point where the originals aren’t so important any more. I thought they handled the aftermath of last season’s shooting well, and it was gutsy to follow up last week with having the same staff facing the victims of another shooting. Especially poignant was the inclusion of the mother of the shooter, played by Susan Ruttan from L.A. Law (Arnie Becker’s long-suffering personal assistant), given the events in Tucson of a week ago. Like the case of the married BTK killer, people assume that the spouse/parents must have known something, but it’s entirely possible that they didn’t. The bombshell dropped in the last seconds of this week’s episode was totally unexpected (by me at least).
