Friday! That was fast. The week galloped by. Accomplishments: the usual. Did the radio today, and Jasper made an appearance: far from being the dog who couldn't walk earlier in the week, he walked up to flights of stairs to stand outside my door and bark, demanding a walk around the neighborhood. So America got to hear him in full voice, whcih was probably more interesting than my opining on Newt's Space Policy.
Look, I want to go back to the Moon, too. I'd be happy with a base in ten years. I wish we had a big manned probe heading for Jupiter by now. But it's not like we've stopped: Cassini flies by Titan on Monday, again, and we have a craft en route to Mars to deliver a big rover. Just those phrases give me paus: we have a probe flying past Titan, and a craft on the way to Mars. These are extraordinary things. There are positions people hold with which I disagree and understand, but I do not understand anyone who regards a machine on Mars driving around and taking pictures from ground level as a waste of money. Unless you went with the undercoating. That's just a dealership scam.
Got a letter from the dealership where I bought my last car. They would like me to buy another one. No. Don’t need one; I have 37,000 miles on the 2007 vehicle and four new tires, and it’s fine. But it reminded me of the problem I had with the Honda Element, a very curious problem: if I went through a car wash without shutting down the heater or the air conditioner - meaning, I forgot - then the water from the wash shorted out the system. I took this matter to the dealership and spoke to a head guy. He was concerned. He was very concerned. He was glad I brought this to his attention. He’d be calling me back soon to tell me what he found out.
Never heard a thing.
It’s not the lack of response that galls. It was the extraordinary attention and empathy of the fellow I talked with. This mattered to him. This was important. I was important. My satisfaction with Honda was important. Now I wonder what sort of face he made when I left the office. Soured me completely on the place. The salesman was kind of skeezy too, now that I think about it. As we drove around I kept thinking "well, if nothing else, passenger-side douchebags are standard."
It’s the damndest thing. There’s nothing more American than driving a car. Loving a car. There’s nothing worse than the process of buying one. Same goes for weddings, I suppose. The intersection of passion, money, and essential intermediary agents is a recipe for untold irritation. It just seems odd, given the dealership's pleas to give them all FIVE STAR RATINGS on every interaction I had with Honda; anything less would apparently lead to a visit from some pitiless fellow from the Home Office, who would line everyone up and yell and them and bring shame on their heads and lead the dealership's president to hang himself in his office with the ceremonial cord brought from Japan for that very purpose. It comes in a humble teak box. Tradition says it was first used by an emperor's son after he passed secrets to a British mistress.
I’m at 50,000 + on the novel. Isn’t that fascinating? Nothing interests people more, I’ve found over the years, then keeping them posted on their word count. But that’s how I’m looking at this project - three books of 70,000K each, at least, so if I’m at 50K I’d best start thinking how to round it up.
The good part: I’m through the Difficult Middle. That’s the hardest part of every book. You can write a set-up that glows in the dark it’s so brilliant - a term I got from my old agent, before the Stroke of Perfidy that sundered my relationship with the agency, left me without representation, pitched me into a slough of despond of ever finding representation again, which turned into scrappy determination to do it myself, which led to this project - but once you’ve set everyone up, they have to do something. If you know where the book ends, the middle is easier. If you don’t, it can be hell. In the case of “Autumn Solitaire,” I kept discovering that everything I knew about the story was wrong, and it kept changing until I was surprised as anyone else to find out what happened at the Casablanca Bar. In the case of the third novel I had the final scene in mind three years ago when I first conceived it.
Getting there? Well. Hmm.
Here’s how these things work, though. In the first draft there was a chance meeting in a bar with an old newspaper employee, brusque and cryptic. I put it in there as a seed, thinking it might be useful later. It was. When the character reappeared he relayed a piece of information that turned my head around, and made me kick myself. When I first conceived of the book, the Casablanca murders had happened in 1947, the bar had been torn down long ago, and the curious events in the present time related to the old crime, somehow. This was before I wrote a book about the 1947 crime. This was before I realized that the bar would show up in the 1980 novel, and every other novel I will write in the series.
Before I took a nap the other day I was spinning over something the newspaper guy had said, an offhand remark, and I realized I was wrong:
The bar’s still standing. It’s abandoned; it’s the only thing left on the block. But it’s still there. The final scene now has a detail that’s so perfect it kept me awake, shoved the nap away for another day.
Monday: the teaser site with the trailers and all the stuff to get you interested in helping me sell more than 500 copies.
Watched "Tony Rome" last weekend. It's a Frank Sinatra movie from 1967, which is really all you need to know, right? He's a private eye. He drinks. He wears a hat. He's cynical. He's loyal. He gets knocked around. He's good with the ladies. Et cetera.
There's a short scene with a redhead named Dianne Lund. She as married to Don Matheson, one of the guys on "Land of the Giants." Hard show to love, when I was young; it had a spaceship but there was very little space stuff. Cool little craft, though. Anyway:
She does this hard-bitten moll pretends she's carefree bit that's quite alarming when you go frame-by-frame. Her eyes! Where did they go?
It's hypnotic:
If video is not displaying, then . . . well, then it's not displaying.
