Belated End of the Month Update/Labor Day

Several things came together just right recently to keep me really busy for a while. First of all, the current manuscript was at a fairly critical point in the writing. Then another project came up unexpectedly, and I had to spend quite a bit of time researching and plotting, then writing an outline for it. Finally, yesterday was my father-in-law’s 80th birthday, and Livia and her brother put on a big birthday party/family reunion for him. I didn’t have to do a lot to help with getting ready for that, but it did require me to spend most of yesterday eating mass quantities of excellent food and visiting with relatives, some of whom I hadn’t seen for quite a few years.

Now, though, I have that manuscript where it needs to be, the new outline is done, pending any necessary revisions (and I wrote an outline for a series Western novel while I was at it), and the party is over, so I can get back to more normal activities like writing a belated end-of-the-month update for August.

Writing

Even though the pace got a little more hectic toward the end of the month, I was working hard all through August. It wound up being one of my most productive months ever, somewhere in the top five all-time, I’d guess. But not a record; that much I’m sure of. Still, I was quite pleased not only with the amount of work I got done but the quality of it as well. If something comes of this new outline, which is for a book that will probably have my name on it, then it will have been a good month indeed.

Reading

I didn’t have as much time to read in August, and several of the books I read were longer than usual. Here’s the list:

SUPERMAN: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD
THE NAKED LIAR, Harold Adams
BLAZE, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
THE HANG-UP KID, Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates)
SLATTERY’S HURRICANE, Herman Wouk
HAWKE, Ted Bell
THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE, Bill Pronzini
THE DESERTERS, Luke Short (Frederick D. Glidden)
THE BARBED WIRE NOOSE, Harold Adams
SUPERMAN/BATMAN: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD
THE BOOK OF FATE, Brad Meltzer

I enjoyed all these books and will soon be reading more in Ted Bell’s Hawke series (I already have the next two, ASSASSIN and PIRATE) and the Carl Wilcox series by Harold Adams.

Movies

These are the movies we watched in August: HART’S WAR, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, TALLADEGA NIGHTS, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, DETOUR, DUPLEX, DURANGO KIDS, FLYBOYS, DUMA, and ROCKY BALBOA. I’ve already posted about all of these except the Rocky movie, so I’ll take this opportunity to say that I liked it quite a bit, probably because it’s more like the first movie in the series than any of the others, and the original ROCKY is one of my favorite films. Some of that is probably based on nostalgia -- Livia and I were still newlyweds when we went to see ROCKY (at the old Wedgwood Theater in Fort Worth, if I remember right) and we watched the Academy Awards ceremony at which it won Best Picture in the first apartment where we lived. ROCKY BALBOA provides a really nice wrap-up for the series, and I hope Stallone resists the temptation to make any more. As for the rest of August’s movies, you’ve got a classic film noir, a young Elizabeth Taylor in lingerie, World War I flying aces, and one of the funniest bits I’ve ever seen, the post-closing-credits ender in TALLADEGA NIGHTS. Not a bad month.

Which is true for August overall. Not a bad month. Just really, really tiring.

I hope all of you who celebrate Labor Day had a good holiday.