This morning I wrote about 800 words on a work in progress. I hope to finish the first draft of this story tomorrow morning and then revise it for the rest of the week. It’s got to be less than 2500 words, so that shouldn’t be too tough. Then I’ll get it out the door.
Yesterday, I went on a submitting frenzy. I’ve been neglecting my short stories for most of the year and I have a few stories that have been out there for a long time without any response. Two of them I sent queries about. The others I consider to be tacitly rejected and added them to the list that needed new potential homes. I wiped off my dry erase board, which is where I visually keep track of current submissions (in addition to a database program called Sonar that keeps a full history of all submissions that prevents me from sending a story to the same market more than once) and started from scratch. By the end of the afternoon, I had twelve stories back in circulation.
One of them was a story that was accepted this time last year. However, I hadn’t heard from the editor for a while and never received a contract. I looked around and found that it was being reported dead in various places so I pinged the editor and he responded, simply, “dead market.” Would have been nice if he’d notified me at the time rather than leave the story tied up for months and months. Not that I would likely have had the time to do anything with it back then, but still.
We’re watching the old Inspector Lewis episodes, starting from season one. Lots of causal mentions of old Morse. Interesting, too, that the first three episodes all have very strong literary allusions. One of them had Hamlet parallels and the most recent Julius Caesar. Lewis is a great character, straight as an arrow. He has evolved from being the plodding sidekick sergeant into the plodding inspector whose tenacity and rectitude drives him to solve crimes.
This novel I’m reading, Naoko by Keigo Higashino, is fascinating. He’s handling what could have been an icky situation as gracefully as possible and exploring a really odd set of circumstances. At the same time, the main character is also poking around into the history of the bus driver responsible for the accident that put him in this unusual situation, certain that there’s an untold story there. That’s the real “mystery” part of this book. Whether or not it will prove to be speculative fiction in the end remains to be seen.
Haven’t had a chance to see Doctor Who yet, but I’m hearing that it was a good one. Some furor over the possibility that the last episode this season will reveal his real name. Names have power, and some of the better ones were hidden until near the end. Morse, for example, or MacGuyver. Maybe each incarnation of the Doctor has a different name?
I noticed the clue that the murder victim had been shot in the foot on The Mentalist, but I didn’t make all the right connections to figure out whodunit. In fact, even Patrick got this one wrong, though he was in the right ballpark. I thought the stuff between Van Pelt and Rigsby would be lame and awkward (the scene during the stakeout started off that way) but once they got on the radio call-in show, they got it all out there. Good for them.
The Amazing Race was in familiar territory again this week. I was in Dresden and Berlin in 1986, but they were somewhat different places back then. Dresden was deep in East Germany and the Berlin Wall was still in place. The day I went to Dresden, I was with a bunch of British scientists who mused that their fathers had flown over the city once, a little over forty years earlier. This was said in front of the ruins of a church that had been bombed during WWII. Berlin struck me as a very strange city, a bastion of the west completely surrounded by the repressive eastern bloc. It was like the people were partying in the face of apocalypse. I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie back then, an experience I won’t ever get to repeat. I used Berlin as the setting for a recent story, so it was fun to see how it looks now as the racers went around it in circles trying to find their next location. The house of horrors was an interesting addition to their challenges. Trance music blaring.
