One of the rules I’ve learned in the writing biz is that he who hesitates might miss out on opportunities. I heard last week about an editor who had a couple of open slots in a themed anthology. He was looking for proposals. Rather than dithering around, I contacted him within hours of the announcement. I found out this weekend that my proposal was accepted. So now all I have to do is write the story. It’s interesting in that I know better how it ends than how it starts. That never happens.
Winter is coming, or so they say. Current forecasts have us below freezing for 6-8 hours on Friday morning. So long as there’s no precipitation, that shouldn’t be a problem. But if it rains…
The accompanying photo is of the Sai Wan cemetery in Hong Kong where Commonwealth soldiers who died there during WWII are buried, along with a memorial wall (the building at the top) for all those whose remains were never identified. One of my uncles falls into that latter category. My grandmother had several sons involved in that war. One landed on the beaches of Normandy, one spent the war afloat and a few of them went to Hong Kong, two of them ending up as POWs in Japan. My father tried to enlist, but he was too young and his faked ID apparently didn’t fool anyone.
Yesterday was my 19th wedding anniversary. We had a nice dinner with our daughter and her boyfriend. The day before, my wife and I went to the “downtown” section of our suburb and saw two movies and had lunch on a patio (probably won’t be doing that this weekend). First we saw The Judge with Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall, plus Vera Farmiga and Vincent D’Onofrio. A decent family drama about an insufferable lawyer long on the outs with his father who returns home for his mother’s funeral and ends up having to defend his father. There is a lot of family and local history to unravel. The movie’s a tad on the long side, but we liked it. Then we saw Interstellar, which is even longer. It wears its 2001 influence on its sleeve, without that earlier film’s obsession with itself. It has some Doctor Who wishy-washy timey-wimey stuff near the end, but it’s a decent thriller with some fascinating set pieces and a moderately strong emotional core. Some of the science is as solid as a film can get and some of it will wrap your head in knots trying to rationalize it. Fun, and definitely one for the big screen.
