Lost weekend

I did a complete readthrough of the 70 pages I have written on the project I’m not talking about (at great length) yet and marked up the manuscript yesterday, then keyed in the changes this morning. This is the first time I’ve reread the text, and I was pleased with it. There were only a few places where I completely rewrote passages. The net result was a loss of about 100 words. Since the text seems to be in such good shape, I may actually try to squeeze in one more chapter before I send it off to the editor on Friday for my first benchmark delivery.

I watched disks 2-4 of Lost yesterday in preparation for this week’s debut of the new season. There were a few things that I had mis-remembered or forgot completely. I was sure that Claire was dead, that she’d been killed in the bazooka blast, but in fact she just went walkabout. Apparently there is a great deal of significance to Christian Shepherd’s footwear. When Jack sees him in the hospital, he’s wearing white sneakers, but in the cabin he appears to have on workboots. I like the reverse planning that first gets us Ben in the Sahara with the cut arm and, several episodes later, the scene with the frozen donkey wheel that explains how he got there, after a fashion.

The Mentalist had a fun episode last night, after the football game. He does tend to get away with a lot. There was a scene in the previews that I didn’t see in the episode, though. It had to do with the little additions in the fake paintings: the TV antenna or the machine gun. I seem to recall seeing a little red tractor in the preview but not in the episode itself.

I finished Rick Mercer’s essay collection and read the first few pages of Joe Hill’s Gunpowder this weekend. Not enough to get an overall impression of what the story’s going to be about, though, and I haven’t read any of the ad copy so I’m going into it blind.

I dreamt the opening scene of a story that I’ve been ruminating over for a while. Actually, I had more or less forgotten about it until I had this vision. I haven’t written it down yet, because I’m still working out the rules of the universe the story is set in, but I think I’ll tackle it first thing after I finish the current project.