I submitted two more short stories this weekend and am at work revising another. I currently have fifteen stories in circulation at markets all over the map, ranging from the current HWA anthology (deadline for submissions is today) to Asimov’s, to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine to Crimewave and a whole bunch of others. The stories range from 1200 words to about 6000 words, if memory serves. There might be one that’s a touch longer than that out to a fantasy market.
I think I had the idea for my next novel this weekend. I awoke on Saturday morning with a concept very clear in my mind, and it has persisted ever since. I will have to do some research in the coming weeks. Maybe I’ll do NaNoWriMo after all. Depends on how prepped I am by the end of the month.
We watched The Good German on Friday night. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Toby McGuire, plus Beau Bridges. Filmed in black and white and clearly a smorgasbord homage to Hitchcock, The Third Man and Casablanca. It melds some archival footage into the mix in a way that makes it look like a film produced in 1949. I thought it was okay, but there were times when the filmography distracted me, and the heavy homage to Casablanca at the end pulled me way out of the fantasy. I also wasn’t terribly impressed with Toby McGuire as an actor and wasn’t sad to see him vanish from the film. The story is one that doesn’t get much play, but I’m familiar with it from Michael Slade’s Swastika—Nazi rocket scientists had their terrible backgrounds whitewashed to make them more palatable to the American public so we could take advantage of their highly advanced technology.
I’m currently reading The Fever Kill by Tom Piccirilli, a good noir novel about a guy who returns to his hometown to resolve old issues related to his father, a former cop. The protagonist, who goes by the name Crease, is also a cop, now, but one who has deep ties to organized crime. My only quibble with the book is the constant reference to his car as a ‘Stang. Don’t know why that irks me, but it does. I’m about halfway through and looking forward to the resolution. I really liked the scene between Crease and Edwards, a cop he had a serious run-in with ten years ago. The “bad cop” turns out to be something quite different than we are prepared to expect, which is a very nice twist.
I tuned in to Cold Case last night, mostly because there was nothing else on. Blech. One thing that bugs me about this show, and has since the beginning, is that the murder scenes are unconvincing. Confrontations rarely rise to the level of frenzy expected for homicidal rage. Last night’s show was another example of that. The motive was weak, weak, weak, and the depiction of the final moments was terrible. I’ll probably still tune in from time to time because Sunday is a slow night, but seriously. Blech.
I caught up on a few taped shows, too. Grey’s Anatomy had a decent launch. I like Meredith’s half sister and hope she gets a lot of screen time. The “deer” story was neat, the paper-clip-gobbling dude was just strange, and the internal decapitation defeated expectations. All the medical plots had positive resolutions, which isn’t the norm for that show. The emotional plots didn’t really stray outside what’s expected for the show. There were no surprises. But the season is young. Without a Trace continued a storyline for last spring, but the new plot about the African adoptee whose “father” wanted him back was perilously close to the storyline of a Law and Order episode from within the last year or two.
