I’m making decent headway on the story that I need to get in the mail by Friday to meet the deadline. I wrote 1200 words yesterday morning, deleted 100 of them this morning upon revision and added another 1000 or so. I figure I’m better than halfway through the first draft, and I have a pretty good idea of where it’s headed, though that idea changed after I scrawled some bullet points about where I believed it was heading.
I also received an invitation to submit a story to a loosely themed anthology, which is always nice. I have until July to come up with something for that one. Hopefully I don’t wait until the last minute again, though I’m very happy with how I’m working under pressure on this one.
I posted a review of The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths on Onyx Reviews today. I’m currently reading Mystery by Jonathan Kellerman. I used to buy his books the minute they came out, but I think I may have missed a few over the past couple of years. This one starts with an intriguing coincidence. Alex and Robin stop off at a favorite watering hole when they see a sign announcing that it will close after that evening. The place is pretty much gutted already, and there are only a few people taking advantage of the wake. One of the other drinkers is found murdered the next morning far from the bar. I hope that there will be something connected to Alex beyond this chance near-meeting or else it’s pretty far fetched. I haven’t read the dust jacket copy (actually, the galley doesn’t have a dust jacket!) so I have no idea where the story is going. I like that.
The oh-so-dramatic accident involving team redheads on The Amazing Race turned out to be a fizzle. Unused to driving on the opposite side, Jaime strayed too far to the left and knocked off a guy’s side mirror. However, the guy insisted on calling the cops, which put them well at the back of the pack. They were convinced they were out of the race when they finally arrived at the pit stop, but Mike and Mel had worse luck in the find-the-frog-in-the-freezing-mud challenge. Though this wasn’t shown on the broadcast, they were medically disqualified from the race due to hypothermia. It wasn’t simply a matter of them giving up—the producers took them out.
Zombies are everywhere these days. Even on House. No, it wasn’t the patient of the week, but there were a number of dream sequences meant to represent Cuddy and House’s respective anxieties over the possibility that Cuddy had terminal cancer. Cuddy dreamt of a Leave it to Beaver happy family (with Wilson as the milkman), and a scenario that resembled Two and a Half Men (including House in a Charlie Harper shirt) and also had a dream with a Bob Fosse-like showtune where House, in top hat, danced and sang “Get Happy.” The best dream, though, was the one where House was in the basement of the hospital and was attacked by zombies: his team. Fortunately, he had remembered to bring his axe-cane and his shotgun cane, so he dispatched them all with prejudice. The other dream looked good, too, with Cuddy and House loading up their six shooters as if they were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
I was open to the possibility that they were actually going to kill Cuddy off. After all, this is the show that dispatched a couple of other regulars without much warning. Instead, they went a different route, using Cuddy’s illness to expose House’s shortcomings, effectively driving a wedge between them. Though he appeared to step up to the plate toward the end, the circumstances under which he did so revealed his true nature. Is he headed for another spiral? We’ll see.
Was there a patient of the week stuck in there somewhere? Oh, yeah, the nice young kid who turned out to be a drug-dealing possible terrorist. He survived, I guess.
