I wrote another 600 words on the WiP this morning, then realized after I finished where the story really wanted to go. The realization means that I need to go back and revamp most of what I’ve already written, because a crucial event is going to take place a day earlier and some of the floundering around that the characters have been doing will go away. Should make for a more streamlined story that cuts to the chase faster.
The temperature fell a lot more quickly today than anyone anticipated. By late morning it was down below 30° and that could spell trouble for the late afternoon drive time because it’s also been raining. A hard freeze tonight. Then we’re up in the seventies next week.
A nice episode of How I Met Your Mother this week. I’m rooting for Ted and Zoe, and now that Zoe is getting a divorce she and Ted can move full speed ahead.
After binging on Sherlock Holmes for a couple of weeks, I’m back to The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths. I’m also reading Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith to my wife. A change of pace for him: a mix of Celtic mythology and contemporary stories influenced by the myth.
I wasn’t giving NCIS my full attention this week—I was working on a jigsaw puzzle on the far side of the room from the TV set—but at some level I registered that the psychologist assigned to perform psychological evaluations of the team seemed to know an awful lot about them. Stuff that would never appear in their personal records. It was a Sherlock Holmes moment: I saw but I didn’t observe. Didn’t piece it together until the truth of the situation dawned on Tony and was verified by Gibbs. Nice work, writers.
The “evaluating the team” gimmick has been done so often that I easily anticipated the report: they’re all crazy or dysfunctional but they work together as an excellent team. The episode (titled “A Man Walks into a Bar” after the riddle the psychologist poses to Gibbs) was also a clip show, a series of flashbacks throughout the show’s history, with a particular concentration on the early years. Clip shows can be boring or by the numbers, but this one was done well and served to evaluate the status quo of the characters. It also seems to foreshadow a couple of things. Perhaps McGee and Abby getting (back) together? And perhaps something ominous happening to the team.
