Anatomy of a short story

I did my final editing pass through my essay for Storytellers Unplugged, which I will be posting in the wee small hours of tomorrow. I have to be at the high school 15 miles north of here at 7:30 a.m. to judge the high school science fair projects, which means I’ll be getting up earlier than normal for a Saturday. Hoping to sleep in on Sunday, at least. My essay is called “Anatomy of a short story,” and it’s a peek under the hood at how the idea for a recent short story came together, warts and all.

I’ve been transferring music like a fool to my new iPod, and I still have about 90% of the available space free. I think I transferred ten or twelve albums last night while watching Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy. I keep waiting for this thing to start bulging, it’s packed with so much music.

How fickle they are on Survivor. One moment a participant is a hero for finding a good source of food and the next she’s packing her bags and heading home. It will be interesting to see next week who has a close encounter with death, as presaged by the previews. I wonder what the producers do for the team with no water to make sure no one dies from electrolyte imbalance.

I’m looking forward to the all-star version of Amazing Race, which starts this weekend. It will be interesting to see how teams who have some insight into how to play the game fare. There was an interview with Uchenna and Joyce in today’s Houston Chronicle (they’re from Houston), and they had some interesting insight into the role hunger plays in the game. “You can’t help but lose weight. You have no control over when you’re going to eat again…The average viewer thinks you get a break every 12 hours, but that’s not true. You get a break at every pit stop. You might not get to a pit stop for four days, and if you only have $20 or $40, you use most of that for cabs or airport fees. It gets to be a guessing game; do you eat now and hope this food and water are OK?”

The second part of this three-part Grey’s Anatomy event was good, too. Go Izzie! I wasn’t entirely sold on Alex’s solution to the information crisis (posting pictures of corpses showed a lack of sensitivity, I thought), but he was in a difficult position.