Slowly getting back to work on the novella that’s due at the end of the month. I’ve been doing more thinking about the story than writing, but that’s not a bad thing. Thinking is part of the writing process, after all. I believe I understand what I need to do to expand the existing text. In fact, the original version of the story cuts a lot of corners that deserved more. I never explored who the characters were in any depth, and the detective arrives at the conclusion without much effort. All that is going to change. Just hope I have time to work it all out properly.
House went in an unexpected direction last night. With only one more episode to go, I think, all of a sudden they introduce this storyline where he’s injecting himself with a drug that is currently only being tested on rats. Where did that come from? And (according to the previews) it looks like this wacky Hail Mary is going to give him a severe case of tumors. Huh. I’m really glad that Thirteen is back, though. She elevates the show because she is the only character who can talk to House on his level and who truly gets him. Last week she told him that fatalism was his survival mechanism. The opening of this week’s episode was funny, with the spurned lover putting his ex’s photograph on the missile target. And it’s been a while since the patient of the week was a poisoning victim, and with Spanish fly no less. The subplot about the boxer was tedious, though.
Two episodes of The Event remain, and will still don’t really know what the series’ title refers to. Maybe we never will if it is canceled, which seems to be likely. I like the way Jarvis figured out how to nullify the threat of the First Lady only to have her turn the tables on him and let Blake and Simon decoy him. Nicely played. He’s in a real bind now that the antiserum has been administered. His bit with the predator drone already has his staff thinking he’s a nutcase.
I guess the whole thing about the First Lady being one of them was subterfuge because Simon didn’t reveal it to Blake and you think he would this late in the game when things were so desperate. The scene in the shopping mall was a little odd. They wasted a lot of time going through channels to set off the evacuation alarm. Vicky should have pulled out her gun and fired a warning shot. That would have gotten everyone out of there in a hurry. I liked Sean’s solution to the countdown time. “There must be something else that will disrupt the power,” Vicky says. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” My solution to the problem, too, though shooting around that tank of virus was a little risky. Nice finale. We need to infect a hybrid. Where do you think we could find one of those? Oh, wait, we just happen to have one on hand.
An interesting episode of Law & Order: Los Angeles. However, Dekker (Terrence Howard) is turning into an unlikable character. Win at any cost, even if there’s another possible suspect. Attempt to destroy a suspect on the stand knowing full well there’s another one in lockup. Two weeks in a row his ethics have been questionable and de la Garza must be wondering what she got herself into when she agreed to work for him.
Caught up on Castle, with just one more episode to go. Last week’s entry was fun, the trip to L.A. Meeting Gene Simmons (Castle: This is so weird. I dressed up like him for Halloween. Beckett: I did, too.) and visiting the Nikki Heat set where they encounter two actors who look a lot like Ryan and Esposito and learn that the star is in rehab (because of what was euphemistically described as “a mix-up in medication”). Beckett was so far off the reservation in the quest to find her mentor’s killer that she described the weather as “sunny, with a chance of ass kicking,” the ass in question being her own. She seemed to take to the city, though. “In L.A. for a minute and she’s already spouting cheesy movie dialog.” And she understood the magic of the city, too, using the Nikki Heat set and props to con someone into providing evidence. Castle & Beckett had another missed moment in the hotel suite. It was almost like a French farce, with doors opening and closing at the exact wrong moment.
In this week’s episode, the writers did a good job of misdirection. We were led to believe that the victim was a sweet little thang, but it turned out she was a cold, ruthless blackmailer. All of the guest stars were viable suspects. I was really glad they didn’t make it the woman who ran the pageant. She was fingered as a likely candidate late in the episode but she hadn’t had much screen time up to then. The best part of the episode, though, was the loose parallels drawn between Alexis’s dilemma and Castle’s hesitance to make a move with Beckett. Any of the advice he gave to his daughter could have been applied to himself. “Have you ever been crazy about someone who’s determined to push you away?” Alexis’s boyfriend asks him, and on the last syllable of that question, enter Beckett.
Beckett got to reminisce about “her own private Vietnam,” rooming with a beauty queen (“Elle Woods on steroids”). “Our place smelled of hairspray, perfume and cigarettes. I’m surprised we didn’t spontaneously combust.” Creepy conversation about pageants with his mother, who admitted that her talent was the way she wore a sweater. That seemed like dialog more appropriate on Two and a Half Men. Castle’s funny of the week was a pun: “Hoisted on your own Picard,” referencing an artist, not Star Trek. The finale is supposed to end with a dramatic moment: I wonder if that was what they were foreshadowing with the Captain’s retirement threat. “He retires all the time,” Beckett says. “He’s the Brett Favre of the NYPD.” Obscure reference of the year: “We’ll be the father/daughter version of Grey Gardens.” I had to Google that one.
Summer is here. High of 92° today and very humid. Little chance of rain for the week. Drought now covering most of the state. Other places are getting more than their fair share of precipitation. Why can’t we? Sometimes I wonder if the sky has forgotten how to rain.
I finished reading 
I received my contributor copy of 
The week after a con is always a busy one, just scrambling to get back to where I was before I left. I don’t think I’m going to get any writing done this week. I have to read about 40 short stories by the end of the weekend for the contest I’m judging, so that should pretty much fill up my waking hours.
I finally got caught up on last week’s Justified and watched the season finale, too. Wow. What a nice wrap-up. The aftermath of Raylan’s aunt’s murder was the first time Olyphant really reminded me of Seth Bullock from Deadwood. It was mostly in that dead-arm way he has of walking when everything’s bottled up inside. His scene with the prostitute when he was trying to find Dickie was pretty funny: Two pump chum. And I wonder how many people are old enough to get his reference to Quick Draw McGraw, who was one of my favorite comic characters when I was a kid.
In the elevator on Saturday morning I found myself saying that I was on my way to a panel on how to kill people. Only at World Horror could you say something like that and not attract strange looks.
I drove to Austin a little less than a week ago to attend World Horror 2011. I got on the road around 9 a.m. because I had to pick up Guest of Honor Joe Hill at the Austin airport shortly after noon. I got no more than 10 miles before the low-tire-pressure light came on. I pulled over and checked all the pressures. Everything was okay. Reset the indicator and ten miles later it came on again. I played this game all the way to Austin (175 miles), but after a while I stopped checking, just reset the indicator. Joe’s flight was a little late coming in, so I had time to find free wireless in the airport and make my first tweet of the con. It was about the compelling subject of “throwback” Pepsi, which is made with real sugar. I’d forgotten what Pepsi was supposed to taste like.
I’m back from World Horror in Austin. I’ll write more about the convention later when I can think straighter. Anyone who’s been to a conference like this will understand that there’s a certain amount of disorientation after returning to real life. In brief: it was a complete and total blast, and an unqualified success at every level. Nate Southard and Lee Thomas, along with the other organizers, put together an awesome convention that ran like a well-oiled machine. I’m sure there are pictures all over the ‘net for those who weren’t there…and for those who were but can’t remember.
I’m driving to Austin tomorrow morning for 
We spent the weekend in a beachfront house in Surfside, Texas, which is on the Gulf of Mexico about 45 miles down the coast from Galveston. This is our fourth trip to that community, and our third staying in the same rental. It was a get-away-from-it-all weekend and it was perfect. There was a fairly strong wind coming in from the gulf that modulated the temperature. It never got overly hot, thanks to that constant breeze. The waves were high, loud and constant. We cooked meals, walked on the beach, sat on the deck without fearing sunburn and read. Oh, so relaxing. Highly recommended. The beach was fairly busy for so early in the season, though people tended to pack up around 4 or 5 p.m. The water must have been reasonably warm because quite a few people went in. Lots of kites being flown.