Will you like this post?

So, we went to see a play at the Alley Theater on Friday night. It was called Tryst and heavily promoted as a romantic thriller. Seemed like something appropriate for an anniversary outing. Turned out that the definition of “romantic” is “woman naked for 20 seconds on stage” and thriller is “something really bad happens a few minutes later.” It was a decent enough play, set in 1910. A two-person play about a grifter who chatted up lonely women and then conned them out of all their money. Yet it wasn’t at all what we’d expected, so there was an element of disappointment when it ended in spite of strong performances and stark, atmospheric staging.

I got no work done on my NaNoWriMo novel on Saturday. I had a short story I wanted to submit to an anthology that had a November deadline. I usually don’t wait until this close to the end for anthology submissions, because I learned early on that sometimes all the story decisions have been made by the time the closing date arrives. However, in this case, they have a submission period and a reading period that begins on December 1st, so I didn’t feel like I was handicapping myself by taking some extra time to get it right. I had to people read the story and was astonished at how they both identified exactly the same passages that needed work, for exactly the same reasons. When that happens, I sit up and pay attention. It was genuinely eerie.

Finished the rewrites on Saturday and got the thing into the mail yesterday. I also wrote a review of Michael Slade’s Kamikaze that is now posted at Hellnotes. I also had a review of Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen lying around, waiting for Accent Literary Review to rise from the ashes. Amazon reminded me to review my purchase, so I posted the review there, and I see it is up today.

Someone commented on my message board (referring specifically to my Kamikaze review) that they had a hard time telling from my review whether I liked the book or not. I think that is probably true of many of my reviews. I tend not to gush, and I also tend to abstract “me” from the review. I honestly don’t believe many people care whether I, Bev Vincent, like a certain book. As a reader of reviews, I don’t care two twigs whether the reviewer liked the book or movie or whatever. I’m just looking for information to help me decide whether it is something that interests me. I’m usually fascinated when people ask on message boards whether they should try a certain book. “Will I like it?” is the unasked question. *Shrug* No one can decide that but you. Even if I know a person really well, I’m often surprised when I read or hear their reactions to a certain work.

I did get quite a bit of work done on the NaNoWriMo novel yesterday and this morning. I’m just shy of 15,000 words for the first 13 days of the month. Still not a “winning” pace, but I’m happy with my progress. The scenes I wrote yesterday and this morning were completely unexpected. I had written something on Friday that put a character at a specific place and time, so then I got to wondering what led that character to be there. What had his day been like since I last visited him. I’m happy I decided to explore that, as it revealed more about the guy, and set up some more plot possibilities for the future. Then, I wondered—what if someone else saw him, too? And that set up a scene between two other characters that I’m still working on. This writing stuff is akin to magic at times.

Most of the time, actually.