40% solution

I sent the first section of my novel, Missing Persons, back to my agent today. Because that’s the kind of person I am, I picked up the calculator to get a rough estimate of how much I was sending him. More than 1/3, less than 1/2 — but, as it turns out, exactly 40% by page count. Exactly. 138 pages out of 345. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it’s cool (to me, at least) when something like that happens.

We watched a lot of movies this weekend. On Friday night, we watched the Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy pair Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which were filmed nine years apart. In the first one, Hawke, who is running around Europe to get over a recent breakup, meets up with Parisian Delpy in a train between Budapest and Vienna. They hit it off and, on a whim, Hawke’s character invites her to get off the train in Vienna for the night. He has a flight back to Texas the following morning, so their plan is to see the sights of Vienna by night and hang out together. Nothing more.

It’s a magical film. The chemistry between these two actors is amazing. Their dialog seems natural, almost ad lib. They have a few interesting encounters with locals throughout the night, nothing serious, nothing major, but they’re falling for each other big time and the clock is ticking. Thoroughly magical. The sequel takes place nine years later, and is a darker, less magical film. Hawke and Delpy’s characters are both plagued by that magical night — nothing else in their lives has measured up since then. They’ve had professional successes, but their personal lives are a mess. The dialog, again, is very natural, but this time I didn’t sense their connection. I ended up thinking that if they were meeting for the first time they might not even like each other. A good example of how idealizing something from the past can be nearly ruinous.

On Saturday we watched a couple of old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films from the 1940s. Rathbone is a fine Holmes, but he’s a sanitized version. His darker side (drug use, for example) is missing and he’s much more of a lady’s man than Doyle’s Holmes ever was. Bruce is a funny Watson, almost a basset hound, harrumphing and bumbling his way along. The stories are absolutely unbelievable at any level, but they’re a lot of fun nonetheless.

I read Gary Braunbeck’s “In the Midnight Museum” this weekend. I won a set of the page proofs from Dark Discoveries in a contest. It’s about a guy (Martin) who has become suicidal because he doesn’t seem to be making a difference to anything, anywhere. He ends up in a mental clinic, where he discovers that he made a difference to at least one person, and that person is far more influential in the universe than anyone might have guessed. However, that person is having major problems of an incredible magnitude, and it falls to Martin to pull up his pants, shake himself off, and save the day. There are at least three descriptive passages that I wish I could steal and make my own. Beautifully written. Full of the angst of parental loss, which is something that resonated with me. This is a novella from Necessary Evil Press that you can pick up at Shocklines. Highly recommended.

I went straight from there to “The Hides” by Kealan Patrick Burke (another novella, also available at Shocklines. This book has one of the most poetic introductory paragraphs I’ve read in a while. The author biography on the back flap is a riot — I had to read it aloud to my wife to explain why I was giggling. The novella has to do with an uprooted American teenager who finds himself in Dungarven, Ireland (County Waterford, if you know the geography). Terry’s “gift” is his ability to arrange meetings between murder victims and their killers. I’m enjoying it so far, very much interested to find out what’s going to happen now that he’s had an unexpected revelation about a family member.