Weekends are funny beasties. Hours and hours of blank slate that should be ripe ground for getting a lot done. Sometimes it works out that way. Not always.
My major accomplishment from a writing perspective was that I finished and proofed my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes up tomorrow morning. I’ll read over it again tonight for typos, but it’s pretty much good to go.
I also did some major work on the story in progress, without really getting much beyond what I had already. As of this morning, I’m up to about 3200 words, but I really gutted the thing. There was too much backstory early on and too little forward action of any sort. The backstory is needed (or wanted, at least—others may have a different opinion about whether it’s really needed), but I’m doling it out in different ways now. I’m also upping the suspense level somewhat, I hope, and also putting into action the subject of tomorrow’s Storytellers essay.
Right now the story resembles some of those experiments I used to conduct on small electronics when I was a kid. Wires dangling everywhere. Resistors and transistors in little cups on the bench. Smoke rising from zapped components. An empty shell and a circuit board where all these parts belong. I have started reassembling it and testing the circuit logic as I go, but it’s still most definitely a work in progress.
While we were having supper on Saturday evening, we turned on the radio. We like to listen to jazz or classical music on KUHF, the local public broadcasting affiliate out of the University of Houston. The first thing we heard was some bluegrass music, which turned out to be part of the Prairie Home Companion broadcast. Though I don’t come from the Mid-west, there was something nostalgic about the program. It’s radio without shock jocks. A program of the sort that “died 50 years ago but someone forgot to tell them.” We decided to watch the Prairie Home Companion movie with Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, Lindsey Lohan, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly and Kevin Klein. A charming, feel-good, funny, nostalgic film. I could have done without Virginia Madsen haunting the set—except for the brief scene she has with Garrison Keillor where they discuss the joke that was on the radio when she died, but other than that it was just a nice movie. The finale is terrific, especially the “bad jokes” song with Reilly and Harrelson, and Lindsey Lohan’s extemporaneous song that’s a meld of just about everything else in the film.
Watched Columbo yesterday afternoon on Hallmark channel, the one where Columbo goes to London to visit Scotland Yard and gets embroiled in the murder of a rich in-law of the DCI. The kicker at the end involves a pearl in an umbrella at the wax works, and the bastards cut out the best part—where Columbo demonstrates how the pearl really got into the umbrella. I can’t understand why that was edited out. Surely I didn’t blink and miss it.
Final Four on Amazing Race and the men are outnumbered five to three. I’m still rooting for the beauty queens, but the previews make it look like the other teams are starting to gang up on them, as happened during their previous appearance, too. I want Charla and Myrna gone. After that, I don’t mind if any of the other three remaining teams win.
