Who Made Who?

I started revising the previously-titled-but-now-in-search-of-a-title short story that was accepted yesterday. One of the most daunting things to do as a writer: go into a story and rip chunks of it out. Not just a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs, but a few pages. I read through them and plucked out sentences that I particularly liked to see if they can be recycled, but otherwise two or three scenes went into the bit bucket.

It’s easier, though, when it’s a story fresh off the printer in early draft. The finale hadn’t gelled in my mind yet. I’ve found it much more difficult to re-envision stories that I’ve had in the drawer for months or years. I had to do some of that with Missing Persons, and discovered that I really had to wrap my mind around the new concept of what the novel was.

We received a second encouraging rejection on the novel yesterday. I’ve never read rejections before that make my heart swell with pride. Full of effusive compliments about the writing and parts of the story, but it wasn’t quite right for them. Both have been optimistic that the book will sell. We just have to find the right match of editor and manuscript. This experience is so different than a couple of years ago when I worked the Publishers Marketplace on my own with a vastly inferior novel and received rejections by the mailbox-load with nary an encouraging word among them.

I’ll be meeting up with my agent in New York in a little less than a month, when we hope to either have good news to celebrate or else an alternate game plan to discuss. Either way, this is exciting.

I watched the first three episodes of the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who series last night. Boy, what a difference a couple of decades makes in terms of technology and awareness of character. First you notice that the theme music is familiar but different. Modern, in much the same way that the Grateful Dead modernized the Twilight Zone theme in the 1980s. Then you hear the distinctive grinding sound that accompanies the TARDIS. We’re back!

Eccleston only stuck around for one year as the Doctor. He’s a little much to take at first. Hyper cheery, with his frequent outbursts of “Fantastic!” and his marble-chewing northern accent (“Earth isn’t the only place with a north,” he responds when Rose challenges him on his accent.) But his enthusiasm is contagious and I’m growing to like him.

What I especially like about these first three episodes is how they deal with Rose’s experience of being swept away on this daunting, hair-raising expedition. In the classic series, the companions occasionally pined for home, but you rarely saw amazement from them. Rose is constantly amazed. She’s not just along for the ride—in many ways, she is the ride and the Doctor is living vicariously through her experience.

The accents are a little thick at times—and this from someone who grew up listening to British television—but we acclimatized after a while. There’s a decent horror element to the stories (mannequins come to life, creepy metallic spiders, ghosts in the gasworks), too. I also like that the episodes are comparatively brief. The 100 minute classic shows dragged on occasion. These 1-hour-ish shows are peppy, lively and pleasant to look at. Good clean fun.

I finished reading Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. Maybe I’ve got too much Doctor Who on the brain, but parts of the last quarter had me thinking she must have seen Castrovalva. It’s a damned fine book, though. One that keeps you thinking in one direction while it takes sneaky, unexpected curves off into another.