Wrapped Up

I've been waiting for the usual end-of-the-book sprint to kick in, and yesterday and today, mostly today, it finally did. I finished the first draft of the current project late this afternoon. Still have some editing and polishing to do, and Livia hasn't even started going through the manuscript and finding all the things I screwed up yet, but still, it's a good feeling. Tomorrow I plan to write an outline for the next book. I have a short plot written up for it, but I need more than that to write an 85,000 word book.

Tonight I was pawing through an old stack of videotapes, rewinding stuff I'd taped years ago that I'll never get around to watching, and I found a movie called PRINCESS OF THIEVES, starring a pre-PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN Keira Knightly as Robin Hood's daughter. With nothing better to do, we sat and watched it, and it turned out to be okay. The plot was completely predictable, but the production values were good and Knightly makes a good swashbuckling heroine. Since it's a made for TV movie, and a Disney one at that, the action sequences are fairly tame, making this sort of the movie equivalent of a young adult historical novel. An entertaining couple of hours, and another blank tape to go back on the stack.

Yesterday was one of the rare -- very rare -- days when I didn't read a word of fiction. Just never got around to it. I've remedied that today by starting RAGE OF EAGLES by William W. Johnstone. The Eagles series is probably my favorite of Johnstone's work. The books are what I call kitchen-sink Westerns, which means the hero meets a lot of historical characters and takes part in a lot of historical incidents, and the books usually have several different standard Western plots crammed into one. (My favorite of this type of Western is Louis L'Amour's TO TAME A LAND, which is probably also my favorite L'Amour book.)