For whatever reason my brain couldn’t pull together any sort of birthday event this year so Tuesday’s birthday was pretty quiet. We went out to lunch at a local Indian place Saturday (very good) as an early event, watched a movie Sunday (Soundtrack to a Coup) but Tuesday I mostly read. Which wasn’t a bad thing: it’s very rare that I get a long, uninterrupted block of time to read in, so I enjoyed it. As I was watching the dogs, I didn’t get to go out any except for my visit to Cheesecake Factory.
Mostly relaxing, but then a whole mess of stuff happened I can’t get into here. Nothing catastrophic but very distracting, and it kept us hopping much of the evening (though I did squeeze in my writer’s group meeting and everyone sung me happy birthday). And dealing with the details kept me busy a lot of yesterday too — not so much I couldn’t have gotten stuff done but distracting enough I didn’t get stuff done.
The result? Well I got a couple of movies watched Monday for Jekyll and Hyde (yes, 200 Motels is one of them) and spent Wednesday writing the text. I’m much more confident about my timetable than I was last month — I should be able to wrap up the movie-watching with plenty of time left to put the book together. Beyond writing analyses of the individual movies, I’m also thinking how to rearrange the material from my original TOC — the more I see, the more I can see new relationships that might make for better chapters.
And that was it. Though I did get a couple of posts up at Atomic Junk Shop, one on comic-book ads from the end of 1969, another on Batman stories from the same period. I love the scene below from “The Brain Pickers” for the young stockbroker’s nerdy insistence the bad guys plan makes poor financial sense.
Art by Bob Brown, in case you were wondering.
On the upside, it looks like Local Reporter is up and running, at least for a little while longer, so I’ll be back to covering city government next week. And getting paid, which never hurts.
I also discussed the cover options for Southern Discomfort with Sam, my cover artist. More on that next week. We’re not there yet but it feels like the book is really going to happen (I mean, it always was but it’s nice to be doing something about it).
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Happy Birthday!
Thanks!