Cold case

I’m nearly finished with a partially polished draft of the short story I’ve been working on. The first 2/3 have been revised and edited extensively, and I’ve written the closing two paragraphs, but there’s a little gap near the end that I need to fill in. Then it’s off to the serious editing. It’s coming in very close to the 2500 word limit. Shouldn’t be a problem keeping it down, though.

I took a break from the story yesterday and did a heavy edit on an older short story that’s been sitting fallow for a while. It was originally written for an erotic hardboiled fiction contest, but it didn’t place. I tamed it down extensively for a more general audience, and in the process I think I turned it into a pretty darned good story. There were some plot holes in the original version that I discovered while revising. It’s a real shame that there aren’t more short story markets for mystery/crime fiction, though. Compared to horror, there are damned few. At the top of the heap there’s Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen for pro markets, Crimewave for reputable but semi-pro, and then there’s pot luck with markets that accept crime stories along with everything else. I get the feeling that mystery readers aren’t big fans of short fiction, though I don’t know why that might be.

I watched parts of The Trouble With Harry and the last 75 minutes of North by Northwest over the weekend while doing other stuff. Gotta love Hitch. The famous cornfield scene is a test of the audience’s patience, but it’s absolutely necessary to put us in Cary Grant’s shoes. One car goes by. Long pause. Another car goes by. Another pause. A third vehicle screams past. A guy is delivered to the edge of the road to catch the bus. It’s a long, slow scene that’s the perfect prelude to what comes next.

Something I picked up on that I’ve never noticed before. When Grant is talking to James Mason at the auction, he says something to the effect that his next role will be as a dead person, which Mason says he will play very convincingly. Not long after that, he’s “shot” by Eva and carried out for dead, so his statement is nearly true.

I think I’m losing interest in Cold Case, but it was the only show on last night that interested me at all. The writers have fallen into a certain cadence that shows their hand way too soon. As soon as someone mentions an important object (a piece of jewelry, a stuffed animal, a valuable pen) that is missing, I know that will be the item that proves the downfall of the killer. I wrote the first draft of a review for Who’s Killing the Great Writers of America while watching with one eye and one ear. Tonight’s comedy night on CBS. Nothing else interests me, either.

So, of course some wag bid $6666.66 for the signed DT1-7 that the Haven Foundation has on auction. With just about two days left to go, bidding is up to a cool $7000.

Apex is offering you a chance to fill your pillowcase with all sorts of goodies, including rare items from some of the biggest names in the field for only $1.00 per ticket. A percentage of all proceeds from the raffle will go to the National Center for Family Literacy.