Buried Under Books

I now have a ton of reading to get through in the next few weeks. I stocked up at the library yesterday on books eligible for the Hugo and Nebula, so maybe I can make some nominations. But this means I'm going to have to devote a lot of my leisure time to reading. Less Internet and TV and more books is probably good for me.

Tonight, though, is a TV night. We finally get the last two episodes of Haven, which got postponed due to an eerie coincidence in subject matter relating to real-world events on the day one of the episodes was to air. A lot of my friends make Facebook posts before some big TV event, saying not to call unless you, personally, are on fire. To which I have to say: If you're on fire, call 911. Why would you call me? What do you expect me to do about it? I would say that unless there's a crisis that only I can deal with, and I must do something about it at that very moment, then don't call at that time, but I can't think of anything that would fit into that category, unless maybe one of my next-door neighbors needed a ride to the hospital, or something similar. That I would interrupt TV for (and have done so).

I took advantage of the lag in airings to marathon the entire series to-date, and I think one of the reasons I like this series is that it rewards repeat viewing. There are so many revelations that change how you see earlier episodes once you learn what's really going on or what happened in the past to set up those events. There's an event in the first season whose meaning has changed at least three times for me, each time we learn more. We still don't know exactly what's going on there, but there are now multiple possibilities in something that initially seemed pretty straightforward. And now they've introduced some time looping to complicate things further. I love this kind of writing and aspire to pulling it off someday. It's a lot like Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear, where it's an entirely different book the second time through once you know the information revealed toward the end. So, anyway, I will not be answering the phone tonight. I would say that this should all free up some brain space devoted to speculation after being left with a cliffhanger, but I'm sure they'll just leave us with another big cliffhanger that won't be resolved for nearly eight months.

In other news, I tried out those Aveda curly hair samples yesterday, and it seemed to work pretty well when I air-dried my hair in the afternoon. I'll next test the way I'm more likely to do my hair -- wash at night, air dry a little while, then put in a bun to sleep and take it down in the morning to finish drying. However, I'm not sure it's significantly better than anything I've bought at Target, and at nearly $30 a bottle per product, and with at least two products required, it would have to be darn near magical, creating perfect ringlets with zero frizz. Still, I remain focused on the quest for the ideal curly hair care.

Now I have to get to work on figuring out this bit of plot I need to fix. I know where I need to end up, but I'm not quite sure how to get there. I may need to try some different brainstorming techniques, like interviewing the character or drawing a storyboard. I wonder if there's a way to brainstorm by cooking. I need to do some experimenting on my exploding cookies recipe.