We have an outdoor concert pavilion about five miles from our house that is the venue for a lot of rock, country, jazz, blues and classical music during the summer. Under normal conditions, five miles is enough to absorb all the sound, but if there’s heavy cloud cover, as there was last night, the sound bounces around and we can hear the performances almost as if they were in the back yard.
Last night, Carlos Santana played me to sleep. Can’t beat that with a stick!
On Friday I had a letter from my agent saying that an excerpt from The Road to the Dark Tower is going to be used in a textbook called Literary Newsmakers for Students. For those of you at home taking notes, the excerpt is from pages 285-287. I don’t really know the context in which it will be used, but it’s pretty cool all the same.
I also found out this weekend that Stephen King’s Gotham Café received the Best Adaptation Award from the The International Horror and Sci-Fi Festival. Lion’s Gate Films will be reviewing the winning screenplays, whatever that means. Though Gotham has won earlier awards, this is the first one that directly pertains to my work on the film—the script. By the way, I saw Kevin Brief (our man Humboldt) in previews for a new ABC Friday night comedy called Hot Properties. I think it’s just a guest appearance but it’s a funny clip in the preview. He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and acting raunchy with one of the characters.
I spent the weekend revamping a story that I first wrote in January 2000 and haven’t touched since. It’s a long one, originally 7800 words but edited down to 5800 after several rounds of revisions, and a bit of a gimmicky one, but it’s a good gimmick, I think. Though it ended up about 25% shorter than the original version, I think there’s a lot more to the story now than before. More layers, more texture and more oomph.
Addendum: This weekend I read Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. A dreamy, literary, intelligent, fun and entertaining book. Attempting to describe the plot would make it seem either trite or dense, depending on how I set about doing so, but it’s neither. Highly recommended.
One Response to Santana in my back yard