I’ve been working on a total revamp of a short story—I think I mentioned that last time. It started at a 5300-word straight crime tale and it’s going to end up—with a little more work—as a 7000-word supernatural crime tale. The characters have been completely reimagined, and the setting is geographically the same but technically different. The story’s own mother wouldn’t recognize it.
Bad news in the mail today. Not a rejection, per se. The spec proposal I sent off early last week was returned as undeliverable at that address. I guess I was given some bad information. I have another address to try, so I have to repackage it and send it back out tomorrow. This new address is “correct” but a level of abstraction away from the intended recipient, so it might not ever get into his shiny hands. Here’s hoping.
We watched a couple of movies last weekend. First was Elizabethtown, with Orlando Bloom and Kirstin Dunst. Bloom does a passable American. He’s a wunderkind whose big project fails catastrophically, costing the company he works for nearly a billion dollars. Then, just as he’s about to commit a very creative form of suicide, he finds out that his father dies and has to go back to Kentucky to represent the family. (His mother is Susan Sarandon, and she’s a bit of a flake). He meets Dunst on the flight back home and thus begins one of the strangest non-romances in the history of film. It could have been a schmaltzy movie, and it’s never quite sure exactly what it wants to be, but we enjoyed it. Sweet, but not saccharin.
The other was a total different creature, an HBO film called The Girl in the Cafe starring Bill Nighy. He’s the British actor you’d recognize from any number of films (including I Capture the Castle). In this one, he’s a financier working for the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) of the British government. An awkward, gangling misfit more comfortable with numbers than people. He meets a young Irish woman in the cafe one day and, on a whim, invites her to tag along when he goes to Iceland as part of the British contingent to G-8. At the end of each day’s negotiations, he laments the progress on certain vital global issues, and she creates some very awkward moments when she speaks out as his voice by proxy in social situations. Their relationship is interesting—they are mismatched in age and social status, but they’re good for each other. But we had to cringe every time it was clear she was about to say something true but embarrassingly awkward.
I just finished reading The Black Dahlia. A decent enough book, though far too long, I thought. Some good surprising revelations, but I wonder at Ellroy’s decision to turn Emily Smart into something that he admits he knew she wasn’t: promiscuous, slutty, porn actress. The afterword in the new edition wherein he analyzes his own psyche and life situation is a little bit TMI for my taste, too. I haven’t yet read an Ellroy that I unreservedly liked, and have experienced one or two that I despised.
Next up: The Terror by Dan Simmons. A healthy 750+ page historical horror novel. Yay!
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