I closed in on 70K words on the novel in progress this morning. I should be finished the first draft by the end of the week. I’m at the final showdown. My protagonist is getting the shit kicked out of him.
I went on a Torchwood frenzy this weekend, watching seven episodes starting with S2E04: Meat and ending with S2E10: From Out of the Rain. The latter was definitely the weakest and lamest of the batch, perhaps of the series to date. It was like Something Wicked This Way Comes-lite, and I got the feeling the actors knew how lame it was while they uttered these ponderous lines. Thankfully, it’s the only episode from that particular writer (he did Small Worlds in Season One, which was far better). I enjoyed the previous six episodes (perhaps Adam less than the others), though I’m a little skeptical of the story arc that they’ve created for Owen. Ianto is really stepping into the main pack this season and his snarky little asides are among the best lines on the show. I’m also growing to like Rhys more and more. After Season One I couldn’t see what Gwen saw in him, but he has stepped up to the plate on a number of occasions this season and shown himself to be a man of character. There are only three episodes left in the season, all written by Chris Chibnall who got us off to a good start with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang back in January.
We picked a film called Dirty Laundry from OnDemand on the weekend. It wasn’t a top-notch production by any means, but it made us laugh a lot. The only familiar actor in it was Loretta Devine, who was on Boston Public and plays Eli Stone’s assistant. It’s a prodigal son story about a guy who abandoned his family home in Paris, Georgia for New York. He tells his new friends and his lover that his family is actually from Paris, France, but he has to go back home after a young boy shows up at his door and tells him that he’s his son. There is a lot of arguing and yelling and family discord, almost too much, but we didn’t feel like we’d wasted our $3.99.
Poor Adam on Big Brother. He reminds me of Tom Cullen from The Stand. However, I think he came up with a good set of nominations. It didn’t matter who he picked, he was going to piss off two people, so why not the strongest competitors in the house? Looking forward to seeing what Evel Dick will be up to when he comes back tomorrow night.
I finished reading the stories in The Blue Religion, so I grabbed something off my TBR stack that looked interesting about which I knew absolutely nothing, though I probably requested the book from the publisher at some point in the past. The book is Fireworks, a debut novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop. A blurb on the back compares it to American Beauty, and I guess there is a little bit of that movie’s sensibility in the story, but it’s not what comes first to mind after reading the story. The book is very much character over plot. There’s a lot of navel gazing going on…but that’s not a bad thing because the character is very engaging, if terribly self absorbed. He’s a writer who has published one forgettable novel but has committed to a second, although his writing output has dwindled to nothing over the past couple of years. He drinks Jack Daniels like water and is more interested in spying on his neighbors than actually communicating with them. A brief moment of negligence led to the death of his young son a couple of years earlier and since that traumatic incident he has become less connected to reality. He starts an affair with a much younger aspiring writer and his wife decides they need the summer apart so she goes away to visit her sister, leaving him to his writing and his booze.
The book chronicles his summer, which isn’t terribly eventful. It’s full of non-stories, which are the bane of his existence. Interesting anecdotes that peter out without resolution, like the story he tells about having to share a ski lift with a narcoleptic who needs someone to talk to so he won’t fall off the lift. He doesn’t fall off the lift—nothing of consequence happens, much to the dismay of his audience at the bar. He is adopted by a stray dog, becomes fascinated with a billboard offering a reward for a missing woman, takes a crash course in bird watching and generally finds ways to avoid interacting with people other than sharing stories at the bar.
Essentially devoid of plot, a non-story, but I read it cover to cover between Saturday afternoon and yesterday evening. The voice is distinctive and appealing, enough to get you past all the character’s myriad flaws, and his mini-non-adventures are charming and highly representative of where he’s at. American Beauty was essentially a midlife crisis story, Fireworks is more of an existential angst because of loss story, but I really enjoyed reading it.
