Writer Inaction Figure

I discovered this weekend when heading out for my library presentation that all the snow and ice we've had this winter have had an interesting effect on our roads. We tend to have wonky pavement anyway because the soil has a bad habit of shifting, but now there are places where it's like driving in Berlin, circa May 1945. We don't just have potholes. We have potcraters. You could lose a Smart Car in some of those holes. There were one or two where my Focus would have been iffy.

But I had an absolute blast at the library talk. There were people there! I won a Jane Austen action figure in the trivia contest (as soon as I saw that, I had to have it. I would have trampled little old ladies to win that action figure). One bad thing about hanging around with geeks who collect stuff is that the "it loses value if it's not in its original packaging" mantra has been drilled into my head, and even though I have no plans to sell my action figure, it still feels like it would be wrong to take her out of her packaging. The packaging is clever, though. They have the list of facts about the character, like it's for a superhero, including "weapons of choice." For Jane Austen, it's "character analysis." Though I would have included sarcastic wit, as well. For the moment, I think Jane will reside next to Mulder and Scully (who are in their packaging), but when I clean/redecorate my office, then I may take her out of the box and find something fun for her to do. I wonder what my powers and accessories would be if they made an action figure out of me. With me, it would have to be an inaction figure.

I ended up hanging around afterward, chatting with the librarians and some of their friends, and the conversation turned to Buffy, as these things tend to do. It turns out that one of the librarians was someone I'd met earlier when I did a program at a different library, and I was the one who convinced her to watch Buffy, and now she's a huge fan.

Otherwise, my weekend involved a fair amount of reading and some TV/movie viewing. I got caught up in watching the opera Turandot on PBS. I was using it as background noise, just listening to the music, but then started paying attention, and I kind of want to find a way to steal the plot (which is a fairly common fairy tale set-up). Then I watched Wanted via HBO OnDemand and was rather pleasantly surprised. The laws of physics pretty much go, "Well, obviously we're not needed here!" early in the film, and it adheres very strictly to the Hero's Journey structure (to the point I was ticking off the points), but there were still enough twists to keep me more surprised and engaged than I expected, and it was very much an "ordinary man rises to the occasion" story. I must say that it made me start pondering what would happen on The Office if Jim ever got fed up with Michael and snapped (and he was actually the secret son of a society of assassins, who had inherited magical assassin powers).

But now I must make good use of a rainy Monday and get down to writing. Speaking of which, I'm drawing a blank on subject matter for a writing post. Any questions or topics you want me to discuss?