Domino theory

I’m halfway through John Grisham’s new novel, Playing for Pizza. It’s another of Grisham’s occasional change-of-pace books, with nary a lawyer in sight. It’s about a third-string NFL quarterback who has a catastrophic fourth quarter appearance during a pivotal game, thereby making him unemployable on the North American continent for the foreseeable future. His agent gets him a gig playing for the Parma Panthers for a year while things blow over. It’s a fish-out-of-water story filled with Italian travelogue and detailed descriptions of sumptuous meals and amateur football. There’s not much at risk, really, so it’s just a charming story, a quick read packed with enough pasta calories to make a person gain weight simply reading it.

Yesterday afternoon I watched Domino, the semi-factual movie based on the life of Domino Harvey. It has an amazingly diverse cast, including Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Mean Mena Suvari, Dabney Coleman, Lucy Liu and two of the guys from 90210 playing/parodying themselves. It’s a pretty dreadful movie, but I got it for $2 and it has some amusing scenes and a convoluted plot that almost makes sense at times. The whole thing is filmed in sepia. The miscommunication that gets a guys arm shot off is a laughable setup, and as soon as the Afghani locks himself in the bathroom there’s no question what direction that part of the plot’s going, but it was fun in an MTV-directed overlong video kinda way.

This morning I picked up a short story from 1983 with a mind toward whipping it into shape for a short story contest with an October 30 deadline. It’s a bit of fluff, but it might fit the contest. Geez, my writing was so exposition-laden back then. I clearly didn’t have the show vs. tell thing down, that’s for sure. But the linear plot may be salvageable, if nothing else. The story was only 2300 words to begin with, and after editing the first two pages I slashed away about 400 of those. This may be a bigger job than I anticipated. I got one story back into submission this weekend, which makes 18 out there awaiting a response.