I've now reached the point where the Spike 8 a.m. reruns of CSI NY are episodes I've already seen, so I need to find another impetus to get me out of bed. Unfortunately, unless Sci Fi is having a marathon of something I like and don't have on DVD, there's not much. I think one of the other networks shows the Miami version at that time, but while it can be screamingly hilarious (unintentionally) I don't think I could face it first thing in the morning. This morning, though, I'm not sure anything short of a never-before-seen Firefly episode could have dragged me out of bed. It was cold, dark and rainy, and I never seem to be able to get out of bed on mornings like that. It's one of life's great simple pleasures to lie in a warm bed and listen to the rain on the roof, and I decided that since I had nowhere in particular to go and I'm not on deadline, I could allow myself that pleasure.
For a news update: Book 4, Don't Hex with Texas, will be published in Germany. I don't know when yet. They just made the offer on Friday. This means I have now earned my living expenses for the year, between the movie option, this deal and my ongoing freelance work. Whatever I'm writing now will (I hope) be my salary for next year. That takes some of the pressure off (though having some pressure is good).
My local PBS station thwarted my plan to watch something involving bonnets instead of the Super Bowl. They went into pledge drive mode, so it was yet another repeat of that same Celtic Woman concert. Instead of bonnets, I went with big hats and got sucked into watching Titanic on one of the cable stations. I know it's popular to hate on that movie, mostly because of the silliness of the way a lot of pre-teen and teen girls seemed to react to it, but I do like that movie, and last night I figured out why. It's essentially A Room with a View meets The Terminator, with bonus shipwreck.
The first part of the movie is essentially A Room with a View on a boat -- well-bred young lady being more or less shoved into a stifling engagement with an upper-class twit meets a lower-class man with an adventurous, romantic nature and finds herself torn between society's expectations and following her heart. But it's also The Terminator, with a brief, intense relationship in which the man gives the woman a glimpse of her possible future before he dies in the effort to save her life, and she goes on, remembering him as her first love while she tries to live out the life he told her about. To be honest, I like the movie better before the iceberg, when it's mostly about re-creating a lost world and the comedy of manners that's playing out within that world. Once they start seriously getting involved and then the ship starts sinking, I mostly tune it out, although I do love the very ending when we see the photos of all the things she went on to do. That movie does have a theme I tend to respond to (but which, oddly enough, I've never tried to write) -- the idea that the very worst thing that could happen to you is the best thing to happen to you because it allows you to live up to your potential and turns your life in a better direction. No one would ever wish to be part of a disaster like that, but I don't think she would have had the life she did if the ship hadn't sunk. She was talking big, but I don't think she'd have been truly allowed to escape. The sinking allowed her to disappear and start all over again.
Plus, I've always wanted to cross the Atlantic on an ocean liner, but preferably without the sinking part. I'm not sure I'd want to do that on both legs of the trip, but I haven't decided which direction would be best. On the way over, it would be a gradual way to adjust to the time difference and I'd hit the ground perhaps a little fresher than stepping off a plane, and then I tend to hit the "I want to be home, NOW" phase at the end of a trip, so I'd want to be able to just fly home and get it over with. But on the way back, it would be a way to do some resting and recovering from the way I tend to explore when I'm abroad, like putting a weekend at a spa at the end of the trip. However, I'd still have to fly home from New York, so that might undo the resting. It's purely hypothetical at this point in my life, so I guess I shouldn't worry too much about planning that dream trip.
For the weekend's HBO viewing, I saw Coraline, and I suspect my enjoyment of that was hampered somewhat by the fact that I just read the book. I liked a lot of the movie, but there were so many things added that weren't in the book and that I thought were unnecessary. I'm also not sure why they had to transplant it to America. Then there was Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, which is utterly silly, but William Sadler's Reaper is right up there with Terry Pratchett's Death in portraying that kind of character in a fun way.
And now I need to get to work to earn next year's salary.
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