Sizzlin’

Today is supposed to be another 100+ degree day. Perhaps as high as 102° with a humidex of 112°. Just a few degrees below the temperature at which the turkey is baking in The Accidental Tourist. (“Is this the Thanksgiving we all die?”—one of my favorite movie lines.) Waiting to hear reports of spontaneous human combustion, but nothing so far.

I finally finished the first draft of the story I’ve been working on for a while. What a struggle. I realized yesterday that I had introduced an element that made the story untenable and decided to go back to my original plan for it. That meant ripping out nearly 2000 words and tossing them into the bit bucket. Not as gut-wrenching as it sounds, because it got me back on track and to the end. However, I’m not sure that what I’ve written is really a story, or perhaps just not an interesting one to anyone but me, so I sent it off, warts and all, to the anthology editor for his thoughts. I don’t often do this except in cases where it’s an invitation submission, to make sure I don’t spend too much time going down a road to certain rejection. I’ve worked with the editor before and I trust his vision for the anthology.

I added another dozen or so reviews to the Archives section of Onyx Reviews and actually created an Archives section of the site rather than having everything tacked together at the bottom of the Current section. I also got a head start on my next Storytellers Unplugged essay, which will be posted on Friday. I’d like to get it done sometime in the next day or two so I can record the podcast version to have it ready on the same day.

Burn Notice was good this week. Fun watching the CSS guy get burned, because I was starting to hate the smarmy bastard. Interesting developments between Michael and Fiona. The Dead Zone was a little bit silly this week, and the producers have found a way to prolong the will-they/won’t-they tension between Johnny and Sara. I’m not terribly happy with the way things are going on Big Brother 8, but I guess Evil/Evel/Evol was never meant to make it to the end. Interesting that Jessica is really after Danielle, so we’ll see how that goes. If Dick gets PoV, I have no doubt he’ll use it on his daughter.