A Week of Accomplishment

This is a week of accomplishments. For one thing, unless things go incredibly crazy, I will likely finish this draft of the book today. My usual daily word count would bring me to right about the word count I want for this phase of the book. I've seen the "movie" of the rest of the book in my head and played out the scenes, so I think it should go pretty smoothly. I just have to decide exactly where to end it, as the movie seems to continue to set up the next book, and I don't know if those parts need to go in the next book or this book.

One of my characters has really surprised me by rising to the occasion. I'd always imagined that this character might be able to do some things, but I didn't see it happening in this way or at this time.

I have to say, this book is turning out to be pretty good. That publisher is going to regret passing on it because this may be the one that starts the buzz for the series in a big way.

Of course, that will be after I've done some rewrites. I may give myself a couple of days off before I go back and start rewriting. By "days off," I mean doing my taxes and giving my house a good cleaning. And doing a ton of reading, as I need to read a book for a possible blurb and read all the Nebula nominees by the end of the month. In fact, Sunday is going to have to be a serious reading day for me.

My other accomplishment this week was playing a piece of music on the piano with both hands. I've always been fascinated with the piano. I had a little toy piano as a child, and I taught myself to play some basic things on it. The girl who lived across the street when I was in preschool through first grade was taking piano lessons, and when I was at her house, I'd go through her piano lesson books and then go home and try to do those things on my toy piano. I was the weird kid who begged for piano lessons while all my friends who were being forced to take them begged not to have to. But I didn't get to do anything musically (other than the regular elementary school music classes) until sixth grade, when I got to be in band. I'd sort of taught myself to read music, but that was when I really got fluent in reading treble clef, without having to stop to think what each line and space was.

When I was in my mid-20s, my parents gave me an electronic keyboard for Christmas, and I bought a "learn to play piano" book. Then I hit a major roadblock of frustration. I would look at an easy piece of music and find myself totally unable to play it. While I can look at the treble clef and identify a note at a glance, on the bass clef I had to stop and go "good boys do fine always." I'd played oboe and flute, so I wasn't used to the idea of playing more than one note at a time or having to make my fingers work independently. The keyboard got put aside, other than occasionally for helping me work out notes in choir music, but even there, it was easier to play it on the flute to see how it would go, since I couldn't play the piano in rhythm or at tempo.

A few years ago, I got a stand for the keyboard, so it sits more like a piano, and so I played with it more often. I got to the point where I could identify the keys without counting from middle C, and then I was able to play the melody line of music in rhythm or at tempo. I've also been trying to work on reading bass clef, so in choir when the director is working with the men, I make myself figure out the notes in their part.

So this week when I was working on my solo for church Sunday, I worked out how to play the chord that leads into my part (that first note is tricky to find). Then I thought I might be able to try playing for real, and I got out that book. This time, it seemed to click. I'm still in the early beginner stages, but I've worked my way up to playing songs that use both hands at the same time and that even use chords on each hand. I'm actually playing the piano! I've even managed to sing while playing. The keyboard is just outside my office and near the spot where I've been writing, so it makes a good break between writing sessions. I feel enough excitement about the achievement that I may even stick with working my way through this book, and then I'll have to look for more piano lesson books to keep developing.

One of my motivations right now may be the fact that a friend in choir has offered to lend me a Celtic harp and teach me the basics, but he has to get his loaner back from someone else. Since that will require using both hands and playing more than one note at a time (and a piano is basically a harp on its side), I figured that playing the piano would be good preparation while I wait. My goal is to be able to play something I can sing with, and a small harp is more portable than a piano. I tried playing guitar, but my skin doesn't form calluses, so pressing the strings against the frets was painful and didn't get better. I was taking lessons, and my teacher even said that it wasn't the instrument for me.

I've been trying to spend less time online, and this is what I've been doing with the time I've freed up.

Romantic Stuff

I've got to get geared up for a convention this weekend, and then there's that Valentine's thing. I actually don't care about Valentine's Day one way or another, and that's not just me being bitter and single. It just seems odd to have a random day designated for romance, whether or not that day is meaningful to you. Each couple should have their own day that means something to them and their relationship, not something dictated by a bunch of corporate marketing departments. Really, when you think about it, Valentine's Day is like the least romantic thing ever because it's romance on demand, without meaning. It's obligation rather than sincere sentiment.

But it is a handy time to discuss what is and isn't romantic and to make lists, and such. Earlier this week on NCIS, one character was facing her first Valentine's Day after a divorce and said she wanted to just stay home and watch a movie that night. One of her co-workers gave her a Valentine's Day gift: the DVD of Aliens for a movie to watch that night. That cracked me up because of a discussion here a few years ago, in which I declared my view that Aliens is actually a very romantic movie. Seriously, that scene where Hicks teaches Ripley how to use the gun is totally swoonworthy (and there are no other movies -- Hicks and Ripley got married and adopted Newt and lived happily ever after, with the occasional alien incursion to battle because they need a bit of excitement in their lives, so there).

For more recent movies, I guess Stardust would be high on my list where I actually like the relationship and feel like I could imagine the couple really working on a long-term basis. And, yikes, even that isn't truly recent. I liked the way the relationship was developed in the recent version of Cinderella, and Far from the Madding Crowd was a nice one. Mostly, though, romance in movies has been pretty awful lately.

On TV, my current favorite relationship is Emma and Hook on Once Upon a Time. That show is such a hot mess in so many ways, but this is the one thing they seem to be getting mostly right. Yeah, they started as enemies, so there was some bickering, but then he quickly realized that his life had gone down a bad path if someone as awesome as she is thought he was a jerk, and he made a sincere attempt to change. He's gone through goodness knows how many portals to other worlds on her behalf. Once thing I like is that it's been mostly a slow build (well, from our perspective. In the show timeline, it's been months, even though it's taken years for us). They went from enemies to allies to friends, to closer friends with a bit of flirtation, to actually being romantically involved while still being friends. It wasn't one of those TV "I hate you/kiss/bed" relationships. Now that they're together, it isn't always smooth sailing (there's the minor issue right now that he's dead, but she's planning to do something about that), but most of the conflicts they're dealing with are external, and they're facing them together. It's proof that the Moonlighting curse doesn't have to apply if you do it well. You can get together a couple without it sapping all energy from the show.

For music, I have to share this:


Sigh. This is from the Broadway show The Scarlet Pimpernel, as performed by the divine Terrence Mann. I suppose it's not entirely a happy song, as it's about a relationship that has ended, and it is sung by the villain, but remove it from context and it sounds like someone who believes in what the other person can be and hopes for her to be able to live up to that potential. I have this as the alarm for my cell phone alarm clock. If you have to wake up, you may as well wake up to something like this. Also, it starts softly and builds, so it's not jarring, and I want to listen to it, so I don't hit snooze.

Friday Geeky Odds and Ends

Oh, man, ballet was tough last night. I woke up already a bit sore. I don't know that we did anything particularly difficult, but the teacher was really focusing on technique, and when I focus on doing things exactly the right way, I know I'm a little more tense. Plus, if you've been doing things the wrong way, you use a different set of muscles when you do things the right way. Thus, the sore thighs. It probably doesn't help that I got there early and was watching the really advanced class in the adjacent studio. Those are the teens who are probably going to dance professionally. I should know I can't do anything close to what they can do, since they're young enough to be my children and have been dancing far longer than I have, but having seen them made me try harder -- possibly harder than I should have. And now I have a week off because of spring break. I've told myself that I will exercise this week so I won't suffer too badly when I go back, but we'll see how that goes.

I also get a week off from choir, starting Sunday morning. I drew the short straw in being assigned to the quartet singing at the early service on the morning of Daylight Savings Time, but the choir isn't singing at all Sunday, so instead of having to do two services, I get to go home when I'm done with the music for the preschool Sunday school. Then there's no rehearsal or children's choir on Wednesday. If I get groceries on the way home from church, I won't have to leave the house all week! Other than to go walking or to a movie, or something like that. Anyway, my quartet is singing Aaron Copland's arrangement of "At the River," and it's pretty easy for me because sopranos sing the melody, except for this one descant part that's a little tricky.

I finally got around to watching the pilot of Awake, the series in which a cop seems to be living two parallel lives -- one in which his wife died in a car accident and one in which his son died. In each life he's got a different partner and a different psychologist, but clues from one life bleed into the other. I'm kind of iffy. It's on when I'm out, so it will be an OnDemand show, and probably one I'll catch a full week later, since NBC is now putting the as-aired versions OnDemand for the first few days, complete with commercials and network promos for things that have already been on. I like Jason Isaacs from the British mystery series Case Histories, and I like him here, even with American accent, but the series didn't grab me as much as I expected, since I love those "what if?" parallel lives plots (and still want to write one). Strangely, I like the cop part better than the parallel lives part, and the clues bleeding over aren't actual clues but just strange connections, so I suspect they're going for one reality being a dream instead of a science fictiony premise where they're both somehow real in alternate universes. However, this series probably has the highest Harry Potter Score on American television right now, with Lucius Malfoy starring.

Meanwhile, the current highest Doctor Who Score on American television is probably The Office, with Catherine Tate (Donna) as a recurring character (who seems to be set up to become a regular next season). It's rather ironic that it's the American version of an originally British series that has the highest Doctor Who score.

By the way, the Harry Potter/Doctor Who Score is a game I play when watching TV or movies after I noticed that almost all British productions involve at least one cast member who's been in either Doctor Who or one of the Harry Potter movies. It's kind of a geeky "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" thing, only you seldom have to resort to degrees. Now that Mark Sheppard has been in Doctor Who, it makes it a little too easy for American series to have a Doctor Who score, so I do have a clause for him where it has to be a recurring role instead of a one-episode villain to count. Otherwise, every series on American television would have a Doctor Who score, and that's just not right. I may have to institute a similar rule for Alex Kingston, except she's a recurring Doctor Who character, and a rather pivotal one at that, which makes excluding her from the scoring more problematic. And that means CSI has a Doctor Who score, no matter how hard I try to avoid it -- though it's still lower than The Office, since she had a one-episode role on CSI and Catherine Tate is a borderline Office regular.

In the meantime, while reading the book on forensics, I think I came up with the murder plot for the book that will kick off my potential mystery series. Now I just need a good evil scheme for another thing I'm working on. I had a dream of one last night, but it turned out to be The Matrix, and I don't think I want to go there.

Mama, I Just Killed a Man (and other murder scenarios)

Oh, this should be a good writing/reading day. It's really dark and it just started raining.

I showed off a little to the preschoolers last night. There's a man in our church who collects musical instruments, and he brought his flutes to show them. We're working on the concept that smaller instruments make higher sounds, so we compared the sound of the flute to the sound of the piccolo, etc. Since flute is my instrument, when he was letting the kids try them, I picked up the "regular" flute and played the main theme from Star Wars (one of the few things I can still play by memory). I think at least a few of them recognized it, and I knew one would because his parents are geeky. The kids weren't allowed to touch the glass flutes, but he let me play one. Most of the kids couldn't get a sound out of any of the flutes because they never did grasp the concept of blowing across it instead of into it, but our special needs girl was the one who did it perfectly and even got a really nice tone out of it.

Then there was a very interesting dinner discussion in which a cop, an accountant (both men) and I were trying to figure out how you could do a "jukebox" musical based on the music of Queen. We figured "Bohemian Rhapsody" could give you the basis for a plot ("Mama, I just killed a man"), and the way you could actually use the epic song would be to break it into its components (because it's a lot of smaller songs put together) and use those at various parts of the story, sung by different characters, and then either for the act one finale or the big pre-finale number, bring them all together, kind of like "Tonight" near the end of West Side Story.

And now I really need to get Queen on CD because I have a sudden craving to hear "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Because my brain tends to fry if I do too much brainstorming all at once, I've been alternating with reading those books I got as background for writing a mystery. One is by a forensic pathologist who's brought in, kind of like a private investigator, to go over evidence before a trial, particularly when the defense isn't happy with the way the investigation is done. This guy warns them that he'll testify on what he finds, good or bad. He's not taking sides, just looking at the evidence. I'd thought that the general way of getting the amateur sleuth into the story in a mystery, which is often that the wrong person has been arrested but the police are so convinced that it's the right person that they don't even look further, was a literary device, but it turns out to be frighteningly common. This guy would show up, look at crime scene and autopsy photos and ask really obvious questions that no one seemed to consider because the original investigation took it at face value and didn't look beyond their initial assumptions. Sadly, in real life it doesn't work out the way it does in books. By the time they figure out the oops, it's usually too late to find evidence that could lead to what actually happened, so the real killer is never found. Most of the time, there's no malice involved in the sloppy investigation, just investigators who are busy and distracted and who are focused on too many other cases to question one that seems like a slam dunk. Apparently, it's relatively easy to stage something to look like suicide and have it accepted as a suicide as long as nothing looks too terribly out of whack and as long as the person behaved in such a way that suicide might be a possibility. The investigators are prone to accepting it on face value (though it would be dangerous for a killer to assume this because any investigation at all can reveal that it's not suicide). That was kind of eye-opening. So, it's not at all unlikely in the real world for the police to fixate on one thing and not look beyond it. The person wrongly arrested may not be convicted (though there have been way too many cases of that happening), but by the time the case goes to trial and it shows up how weak the case is, the trail has gone cold and finding the real killer will be more difficult. Thus, the reason for the amateur sleuth to step in during the investigation while the police are distracted.

I feel strangely relieved to find that the scenario isn't so contrived, and I've already figured out a plot reason for a relatively high murder rate in an unlikely place, so I may be able to pull this off.