Finally making some real headway on the novella in progress after some serious renovations. So far I changed it from first person to third person, changed that person from a woman to a man and gave him a sidekick because I thought he needed someone to keep him company during the ensuing 15,000 words. Really changes the dynamic of the story, as might well be expected. Up to 2700 words of the first new draft at the moment, though some of that is renovations to the existing text, and there are a lot more words ahead that I hope to salvage in some form.
Here’s a funny one. Last week I received a check drawn on a Canadian bank for a forthcoming short story appearance. Happens often enough that I no longer worry whether the bank will cash it. They charge $1.50, but no big deal. Check went in and then, five days later, it came back out again. Talked to the people at the bank today—they send checks like that on to an international division and apparently once it got there someone noticed that it wasn’t dated. Signed, countersigned, everything else was fine, but it wasn’t dated. So they’re sending it back to me so I can write the date on it and cash it again. Wow. Talk about picky.
Still reading Devil Red by Joe R. Lansdale. Hap is in a very existential place in this book, trying to figure out who he is and why he does the kinds of things he does. I’m having a hard time following all the suspects related to the case they’re investigating and, after a fashion, much of it doesn’t seem to matter. Besides, unlike most writers, when Lansdale hits a slow spot in the book he doesn’t send in a man with a gun…he sends in a lot of people with a lot of guns. And bombs.
One of the problems with this season’s Amazing Race is that I liked all the teams out of the gate, so I don’t want to see any of them get eliminated. Still, last night’s episode had a tough ending. What I can’t believe, though, is that after that horrible challenge where one of the team members had to drink all that freaking tea, they rewarded them with bottles of iced tea when they got to the finish line. Yuck. I’m surprised some of them didn’t burst. There must have been bathroom breaks that we didn’t get to see. Otherwise their eyes would have been floating in their sockets by the end.
Continuing with the tea theme, we had an interesting article in our internal corporate monthly newsletter written by a colleague from Tokyo about what it was like to go through the earthquake and how they subsequently heard about the severity of the calamity and the way things have been disturbed ever since, mostly with the rolling blackouts. He sent a photograph of a McDonald’s in Tokyo that has turned off the golden arches lights to conserve power, for example, and factories are turning off heat, unnecessary lights and vending machines (including the ubiquitous tea machines). On the first night that his house was subject to a scheduled blackout, he compares the scene from his window to something out of a zombie or apocalypse film, enhanced by the fact that he can see a graveyard from his house.
