The TV/Movie Blitz

Because we were having storms over the weekend, I shut down my computer and disconnected it from everything. We ended up not getting the bad thunderstorms, but we got the rain. Boy, did we get the rain. I was watching on the TV news where they had to close all the freeway exits near downtown because all the access roads and underpasses were flooded, and an SUV sitting on one of the access roads was submerged up to its luggage rack. As one meteorologist said, there's no such thing as "normal" weather in Texas. But today it's nice and sunny, and most of the icky pollen has been washed out of the air, so I'm almost breathing like a normal person again.

I spent most of the weekend on the sofa, reading and watching movies. I watched Gattaca, which had been recommended to me many times by a friend. And then because I found a lot about it kind of depressing (including the fact that Ethan Hawke went on to cheat on and ditch Uma Thurman), I followed it up with And Now For Something Completely Different. I'd been watching the "best of" Monty Python specials, and I think these sketches must have been re-shot for the movie because they looked different in a lot of cases from what they were showing on the TV specials. Then Sunday afternoon I watched Because of Winn-Dixie, which was really cute, but probably not a great idea when I already had a bad case of the sniffles. I'm guaranteed to cry during any movie involving a dog or horse, and you don't need to be crying when your nose is already running. I followed that up with Waiting for Guffman, which was hilarious, but with a melancholy undertone to it. I think I know too many people who could easily have been those characters. The rest of the day, I watched the live news coverage of the flash flooding, and then the Sherlock Holmes episode on Masterpiece Theater.

Meanwhile (because I can seldom just watch TV), I was outlining my publicity timeline and trying to draw a visual representation of the way the plot threads in my book interconnect. I also worked crossword puzzles, sewed the elastic straps onto my ballet slippers and gave myself a manicure.

I think today's task will be to put myself in my villain's head. That's the hard part of writing first-person narration. I only know what my heroine is doing and seeing, but in this book, the villain is up to a lot behind the scenes. I may have to outline the story from his point of view, and then see how it fits together.