I have a standing joke that my pseudonym is “and others.” This comes from the fact that, of all the anthologies that have published my stories, none have put my name on the cover. It’s always “Stephen King…and others” or “Brian Keene…and others,” etc. I’ve considered registering www.AndOthers.com as a secondary domain. (I discovered recently that my pseudonym’s middle name is seventeen, as in “and seventeen others.”)
Well, all that’s about to change. I finally cracked a cover. I contributed an essay to the Overlook Connection’s new catalog, due out in October. Check out my message board for more, including a coupon offer at Overlook and a sneak peak at their new web site.
We watched a couple of movies over the weekend. No, that’s not exactly right. We watched one movie and gave up on another. It’s very rare that we quit on a film without getting to the end, but this one was a two-thumbs-down for both of us after 30 minutes. The film we watched and enjoyed was The Good Woman, starring Helen Hunt and Scarlett Johanson. Based on an Oscar Wilde story. It’s a compendium of just about every Wilde witticism ever uttered, but it’s also a good story, with great performances, especially by Hunt.
The movie we quit on was The Breakup, starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston. Geez, I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking when they put this project together. It sucked from the very beginning. Vaughn was obnoxious and tedious at the ballpark and he didn’t get any better. The singing scene at the dinner table was embarrassing. And it just got worse. We gave up on it around the time the pool table arrived. I don’t often unrecommend movies, but save your $4.25 on this one. Sheesh. My wife suggested that it played like one of Woody Allen’s more boring productions.
On the book front, I’m about 1/3 of the way through Naming of the Dead, the new Inspector Rebus novel from Ian Rankin. I put Dan Simmons’ The Terror aside because I was having a hard time plowing through it. It’s interesting, but it reads like a mid-19th novel, and it takes its bloody time getting anywhere. I will go back to it, but I needed something where I felt like I could make some progress, and the books on the TBR pile were piling up, with a batch more of eagerly anticipated titles on the way from Amazon.
I’m getting surprisingly close to the end of my NaNoWriMo novel. I’m past 83,000 words and I thought that a few threads were going to require some major wrangling to get them to converge, but I came up with some ideas during the morning session that made me realize that I could probably pull this off in another 10,000 words or less. I hope so, at least. Once I finish, I plan to do a complete editing round to refamiliarize myself with the whole story, then drop what will essentially be a decent first draft without too many typos off on my agent. Of the four novels I’ve written to date, this is the one that I think most closely resembles what people will expect of me.
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