Muggy Monday

This morning I opened the office window when I was writing so I could hear the downpour falling against the leaves, which is a sound I love. I’m glad I was inspired to mow the lawn last week during a cool spell. I don’t know that I would have been able to this past weekend, it rained so much. I think that will be the last time I have to cut the grass this year. Yay!

I thought I might have Chapter 1 of the novel ready to send to my agent this morning, but I kept adding new details and changing things around, so I’m going to spend at least another day on it. It’s only eight pages long, but this is where the voice of the narrator gets defined, and I want to take my best shot at it before I hand it off for his feedback.

I wrote and posted my review of 9 Dragons by Michael Connelly last night. I’m now reading Ilium by Dan Simmons. I’ve had the book and its sequel since they were published, and I think I started Ilium once before, but I decided to hold off until Olympos was published. Faced with those two massive books, though, I always found something else to read, so I’ve been putting them off for years. I now have them on my Kindle, where their mass is less daunting.

Last week’s CSI was quite good. I liked the opening twist — the fact that it looked like the woman in the shower was going to be killed when in fact it was the guy who pulled open the curtain who ended up in the morgue. The “locked intestine” mystery is fascinating, too, and the beginning of an ongoing subplot featuring this new serial killer. All that and they managed to toss in Malander’s son, too. They also did something I thought was clever. I recognized the actor who was the killer early on, but then he fell out of the story long enough for me to forget that I suspected him at the time, simply because he was a recognizable actor. The magician’s trick of distracting the audience.

The Mentalist had a bigger issue, though. Once you bring Paul Michael Glaser onto the screen, you know he’s going to be involved in the storyline at a high level. He’s not just window dressing. However, it was a pretty decent episode, and I like the fact that they are continuing to go down the serious path most of the time. Friday night’s Law & Order was well done, too, I thought. It’s hard to believe the same creative team is responsible for that show and the vastly inferior SVU. I hear via the rumor mill that Vincent D’Onofrio is leaving Criminal Intent, which is a real shame, as he is what got me hooked to the show in the first place. Bobby Goren is one of the most interesting characters on TV.

I figured out the “trick” on Private Practice this week about halfway through the episode, a trick that extended even to the episode’s title.

We watched a charming movie this weekend, The Golden Boys. It starred Rip Torn, Bruce Dern and David Carradine as three former boat’s captains who live together in a house on Cape Code. They decide they need a woman’s hand to keep them in line, so they draw lots and one of them has to advertise for a wife. Mariel Hemingway is the woman who answers their ad, which stirs up a little tension among the three men. Charles Durning also stars as a friend who is all fired up over that demon rum which is infiltrating their community. Sedate, but charming, and it’s a delight to watch the three men interact. We also watched Duchesse de Langeais, starring Guillame Depardieu, based on a novel by Balzac. A  plodding period piece with some incomprehensible developments. Where was the Duke, for example?