Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving (observed). I planned to have turkey dinner last night, but events conspired against us, so tonight will be the real (observed) day.
We watched a French movie called Une Aventure this weekend.The film is also known as Only the Night in English. It was available through On Demand—for free. We knew almost nothing about it, but decided to give it a shot. It stars Ludavine Sagnier, the femme fatale who was in Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling. It’s about a guy who works nights at a video library who sees a neighbor (Sagnier) from across the street in obvious distress and behaving strangely. Turns out she is a somnambulist, single mother with a strained relationship. The guy gets tangled up in her life—I think he believes he can rescue her from her situation—to the detriment of his own relationship. The opening scene shows the cops picking up a gun at a crime scene, so we know from the get-go that someone is probably going to get shot, which was enough to keep me going. Like many French movies, there is a lot of silence and very little dialogue. There’s an open question at the end that really makes the film worth while revisiting.
I’m still working on Interred with their Bones. A fun enough book, but not as much fun as I thought it might be at the beginning. The author got too caught up in trying to make this a thriller, which means that everyone the protagonist meets up with is killed a few minutes later, which makes the plot verge on the ludicrous. The historical aspect is interesting, but the convenient underground escape tunnels and other forms of egress from difficult situations strain credibility to the breaking point. The most interesting thing to me is how little we actually know about Shakespeare—we have no letters to or from him, and very little biographical information other than births, marriages and deaths.
I got two stories out the door this weekend. First, I tidied up my Apex contest story and got it off, then I finished revising a longish (5100 words) older story that really hasn’t been around the block very much. The original version was 6300 words and accepted for a science fiction anthology that languished without a publisher. It’s a heavily plotted story, which makes it a little less fun to work on than most of my stuff, so I’m curious to see what sort of response it receives from the markets. I sent it to Strange Horizons. We’ll see. I currently have about 18 stories in submission. I’m hoping at least one of them gets a taker before I have to send ’em all back out again.
I am revising a story at the behest of an editor. The market was interested by the style and mood but found the ending predictable so they suggested a different approach. I concur that you can see the twist coming a mile away, but I was locked into the story as it was, so having some external feedback was useful. Another morning and it should be ready to return to the market.
I had an e-mail from the person proofing a story that will be coming out as a chapbook from Cemetery Dance in the near future. He had a suggested rewrite for an awkward phrase, which I concurred with. In addition to telling me how much he liked the story, he also said that it was one of the cleanest manuscripts he’d ever proofed. That pleased me as much as him liking the story.
The geeks on Big Bang Theory are still pretty funny. I liked the shared-world game scene in last night’s episode.
