It was a wet weekend, and it continues to be a wet week. I had this nagging feeling on Sunday evening that I should mow the lawn and I’m glad I did. We received three inches of rain yesterday morning, amid thunder loud enough to rattle the knickknacks. But that was a proverbial drop compared to what happened between here and Beaumont: 13 inches in some places. That’s no typo. Thirteen. What’s stranger, Katy, a little bit west of Houston, received not a drop. Zero. Before yesterday we were 6″ behind our normal annual rainfall to date. With today’s rain, we’re almost caught up. That’s Texas.
I finished the first draft of my new short story yesterday. It’s called Knock ‘em Dead. My first reader suggested some mild changes to the ending that I agreed with. It was one of those cases of: do you show the burning fuse or the explosion? I tend to lean toward the former rather than latter, but I’d straddled the fence the first time around. After a couple of rounds of revision, it’s down to 5300 words. A few more readthroughs and it will be ready to go. If you’re reading this,
Last night I watched an old fifth Doctor series, Snakedancers, which was pretty good. Hadn’t seen it before, but it followed up on a previous episode that I’d seen fairly recently. A Tegan and Nyssa story. My wife and I watched 9-½ Weeks the other night. I’d heard a lot about it, but wasn’t familiar with the gist of the story. Mickey Rourke is pretty twisted, but so is Kim Basinger’s character, because she keeps going back for more. The film is billed as “erotic,” but I don’t know that I’d agree. Very little of what happened was particularly stimulating. I kept thinking—jeezus, that’s creepy. From the moment he tells her that she’s on her own and no one could hear her if she screamed…
Snakedance is a weird one. In some ways better than Kinda, the previous Mara episode, and some ways not as good. If I recall, Nyssa doesn’t have much to do.
Yeah, Nyssa spends most of the episode running around trying to find Tegan, and losing her in the crowd every time she does. She also tries to rescue the Doctor from his jail cell, but gets caught and ends up in the clink with him. I like the secondary characters in this one better than in Kinda. The lazy “heir apparent” and his mother, the local authorities. The guy who runs the house of mirrors.
And in “Kinda”, doesn’t she spend most of it unconscious in the TARDIS? Whoever wrote those Mara stories must not have liked Nyssa very much.