After a long week of hot weather and no precipitation, I finally dragged out the hose and the sprinkler on Saturday afternoon, after I mowed the lawn, and gave the grass and peripheral bushes a good soaking. Of course it started raining two hours after that, and it looks like we’re in for a rainy week. Oh, well. I tried. The plants were starting to give me withering looks, so what could I do?
What did I accomplish this weekend? Something. Not much. I finalized six book reviews and sent them off to the Accent editor, so I won’t have to worry about that for another several weeks. I prepared a submitted a novel excerpt to a magazine I found recently that specializes in novel excerpts. Hadn’t heard of it before, but it seemed intriguing. I picked a chapter from The Silent Desert that stands more or less on its own. I found it instructive to read the chapter as if it weren’t part of a book. I actually liked it quite a bit from that perspective because of the way it refers obliquely to information doled out in previous chapters, but a reader should be able to pick up by inference what’s going on. I wish I could write short stories that way.
The chapter required a little bit of polish, but two or three readthroughs sufficed. I’d previously polished the first fifty pages of the novel as a contest entry, so it was already in decent shape.
This morning, I headed back into the scary territory of the novel in progress. I know it’s probably not smart to start on it now since I’m going to have a five-day stretch coming up soon when I’m not going to get any work done at all, but I thought it was time to at least retackle the existing pages and blend in some of the things that occurred to me during my recent research trip. I’d really love to get beyond the existing pages and start into new material but realistically that’s probably not going to happen until the middle of next week.
We watched Batman Begins last night. Spending so much time on backstory and exposition was a bit of a risk, but I think it paid off. It’s not a stunning film, but a thoughtful one. Some of the secondary characters were a little tepid (Katie Holmes is nice to look at, but anyone could have played her role—she didn’t bring much personality to it), but Michael Caine is always fun, even if he almost always seems to be playing the same character in different circumstances. Gary Oldman was a pleasant surprise, playing it subdued and straight for a change. Are they working on a sequel? I’d go see it.
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