I must have been zonked when I posted my last LJ entry. The MWA conference, I realized a few hours later, is this coming weekend, not last weekend. Duh!
I had a writerrific weekend working on things that have been piling up on my desk, trying to free myself up to get back to Missing Persons revisions. I wrote three longish book reviews (Saturday by Ian McEwan, Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte and We’re All in This Together by Owen King) for the next issue of Accent, which gets me through the end of July.
I’m also working on a spec screenplay. Almost done the first draft, which I will then ship off to my cowriters, who will probably tear it into little itsy bitsy pieces and reassemble it.
I have a short story or two I’d like to write before the end of the month, but if I don’t get to them, no big loss. I wrote a 90-word flash story for the NECON chapbook, but that was it for fiction other than the script.
I’ve been on a Hitchcock binge lately. My wife bought me three boxed sets of DVDs. One features his late 1940s/early 1950s films. So far, of those we’ve watched Stage Fright, North by Northwest (one of my all time favorites), and Strangers on a Train, which is utterly brilliant. This set has some very good making-of featurettes with interviews with surviving actors and by influenced filmmakers. The other DVD sets are early Hitchcock, dating from his later silent films (The Lodger) to his earliest talkies and into the late 1930s. The only one of those we’ve watched so far is Number 17, which I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. Hitchcock attempted it as a farce on action adventure films, and it ends up being funny, though not perhaps for all the right reasons. The cockney bum is probably the funniest part of the film, but the sound production is so poor that he’s almost unintelligible, though he might not have been any easier to understand live and in person.
We’re doing some housecleaning, so I have an eclectic array of things on eBay, including an extra copy of the Dutch edition of The Road to the Dark Tower, a few coins and some textbooks. The shit sure does pile up, doesn’t it? 😉
