Our first significant cold front arrived yesterday. Overnight temperatures dipped down to within a few degrees of freezing, and we’ll see the same thing again tonight. Today’s high temperature was only 47° (about 8° C). Of course, this being Texas, we’ll be back up into the seventies on Sunday and nearly up to 80 on Monday.
Amongst everything else I’ve been working on lately (mostly short stories), I’ve been revisiting a couple of novels I wrote a number of years ago. The first was one that I spent quite a bit of time with my agent getting it up to speed, but it didn’t go anywhere. However, I met an editor this summer who was interested in my work, so that manuscript is now sitting on her desk (or, more likely, in a stack on the floor somewhere, always supposing it’s been printed, which may not be the case). The other is one that I finished in first draft, but my agent had some fairly significant notes that I couldn’t quite figure out how to address while maintaining the story I wanted to tell, so it languished, too. I decided to pick it back up again and see if it was as satisfying as I remembered. Happily, I still like it a lot, so I gave it three good passes to update it, fix some logic holes and whip it into shape and submitted it to the Minotaur/MWA first crime novel contest. It’s a long shot, of course—probably a very long shot—but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Reading these two manuscripts has renewed my faith in my novel-writing abilities, so in 2017 I’m going to put as much of the other diversionary projects aside as I possibly can and concentrate on writing another one.
We watched the Ab-Fab movie last weekend. We had finished dinner, during which we’d shared a bottle of wine, which seemed like the best way to approach the film. We had another glass each during the movie. That wasn’t enough to make it enjoyable, alas. I’ve had a complicated relationship to Ab-Fab, which I first discovered not long after I moved to Texas. Some of it I think is hilarious and some of it is total crap, in about equal portions. One of our biggest issues with this movie is the number of cameos by people we were probably supposed to recognize but didn’t. The closing credits were chock full of “as herself” and “as himself” listings, but they weren’t people we were familiar with, so some of the stuff probably went over our head. I knew who Kate Moss was, and Emma Bunton and Lulu, but that was about it. The film had its moments, but on the whole I wouldn’t recommend it.
We’re all caught up with This is Us, which continues to be enjoyable. Jimmi Simpson (Hap & Leonard, Westworld) has a small but memorable part in the winter finale. He impresses me every time I see him in something. Speaking of Westworld, I was very happy with how the first season finished. It’s a fascinating show, a little reminiscent of Lost except the perspective is from “the Others” rather than from the “castaways trying to escape” for the most part. Thandie Newton was amazing, and I got a huge kick out of the way Armistice reacted to her new high-powered toy in the finale. Anthony Hopkins added a necessary layer of gravitas to the proceedings. Alas, now we have to wait until 2018 for new episodes. That’s a long, long time. Who knows what the world will look like then?
