Squirrel Evolution

As I was saying before Blogger ate my last post . . . I live out in the country, so I see a lot of squirrels. For years, they’ve been running in front of my car and almost making it safely to the other side of the road before they suddenly stop and dash back in the direction they came from. Sometimes they make it, and sometimes they don’t. But lately I’ve noticed that they don’t stop running anymore, they just keep going. Which makes me wonder if the instinct that makes them go suddenly stupid is being bred out of them, at least around here. Squirrels that keep running will live longer and have more babies, after all. Genetics was never my strong suit, but it makes sense to me. When I mentioned to Livia that I had been pondering this matter, she said, “Why don’t you put it on your blog?” So, for what it’s worth, here it is.

I haven’t posted the past couple of days because I’ve just been sitting and writing and thinking about squirrels (but the less said about that the better . . . oops, too late). I did manage to finish Terrill Lankford’s EARTHQUAKE WEATHER. Aldo and Vince are correct in their comments below: this is a very, very good book. I’ve been on a run of good fiction in recent weeks: Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, Hickam’s World War II novels, and now Lankford, who writes some of the smoothest prose I’ve run across. It makes me glad I have his two earlier novels, so I can go ahead and read them.

Currently I’m delving back into the pulps and reading “Company of the Damned”, a good riverboat novella by Harry F. Olmsted (one of my favorites despite the fact that he farmed out a lot of his work to ghosts) in the October 28, 1939 issue of Street & Smith’s WESTERN STORY. This looks like an excellent issue, with stories by Peter Dawson, Norman A. Fox, and Ryerson Johnson in addition to the Olmsted novella.

I’ve tried not to dwell on my page production recently, but since it’s the end of the month . . . 15 pages today, giving me a total of 379 for September.

Squirrel Evolution Redux

Blogger ate the whole blasted post, and it was a good one, too. Maybe I'll try to reconstruct it later. Right now I'm too disgusted.

Library Day

This was one of those errand-running days, including stops at a couple of libraries. Dealing with traffic and people wears me out worse than sitting and writing all day, yet another reason I'm glad I don't have a real job.

I finished that Eagles book by Johnstone and am about to start EARTHQUAKE WEATHER by Terrill Lankford, which is gotten a lot of good comments from people whose opinion I trust most of the time.

Catching Up

Today was a day for catching up on various things. I went over the pages I wrote yesterday, worked on my zine for the OWLHOOT Western apa, and wrote part of that outline for my next book. I had trouble with it and had given up on getting any of it done today, but then while I was just sitting around I started getting ideas and made some notes in longhand, which is unusual for me. After that I was able to write several pages of the outline and may finish it later tonight.

Still reading that Johnstone book.

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.)

Allergies

For the past three and a half weeks, ever since ragweed season started, I've been alternating between wanting to claw my eyes out of their sockets and blinking furiously because they were watering so bad I couldn't see straight. Being both frugal and lazy, I kept hoping they'd get better on their own. Well, they weren't, so today I gave up and went to the doctor. The nurse, the medical student who was working there, and the doctor himself all looked at my eyes and winced, so they must have been pretty bad. But now I have steroid/antibiotic eyedrops, and in the words of Johnny Fever, "I can see!" The old optics are still pretty sore, but at least they've started to improve already. I can type without the words looking like they're underwater, and I can read well enough so that I finished the manuscript of Hickam's THE AMBASSADOR'S SON, which is an excellent book, well worth reading when it's published next spring. But read THE KEEPER'S SON first, which is even better, probably because it has a broader scope in its story and a greater range of characters.

I wrote a little today and should finish the current book tomorrow or the next day. I thought I could "see" the rest of the book in my head a couple of days ago, but today I discovered I still haven't figured out quite all of it. I don't foresee any problem wrapping it up, though.

So far I've managed to keep to my goal of watching a chapter a night of ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP and have enjoyed it a lot so far. There's a nice touch of perhaps unintentional humor in the first chapter. The bad guy's henchmen go to the newspaper office to wreck it, but the hero shows up to stop them. Unfortunately, he stops them by engaging them in one of those epic, set-destroying, Yakima Canutt-directed brawls so typical of Republic Pictures, and the office winds up wrecked anyway (although by the next episode it's back to normal as if nothing ever happened).

The Duke

So I'm standing in line at the post office today, waiting to mail that copy-edited Trailsman manuscript back to the publisher (I went over it and answered the queries this morning). It's John Wayne Day at the post office because the new stamp bearing his likeness came out today. The employees are wearing Western clothes and there's a TV and VCR set up in the corner playing a tape of RIO BRAVO. For a visit to the post office, not so bad, though the line is still too long. But then some jackass in line behind me announces loudly that he doesn't see why John Wayne should even have a stamp and declares that people shouldn't make such a big deal out of John Wayne because "he wasn't even in World War II!" Well, no, Wayne wasn't in the war. He was 33 years old when it started, married with a family, and hardly draft material. I don't know whether he had any physical problems that would have disqualified him or not. But this guy (who was in his forties, which means he wasn't in World War II, either) kept going on about it, and I kept thinking about Lucy Van Pelt taunting Schroeder with "You never saw Beethoven's picture on bubble gum cards, did you? How could Beethoven be so great if he never got his picture on bubble gum cards?" Everybody ignored the guy and he finally shut up, but I'm still puzzled by the whole thing. How could somebody have such an irrational hatred for John Wayne that they make a scene in public just because there's a John Wayne stamp?

Other than that I wrote a little, but not much, and I'm still reading that Homer Hickam novel, which is very good so far.

Pictures

As you can see below, I've finally figured out how to post pictures on this blog. (Of course, the question remains as to whether or not I can muddle my way through the process again.) George Lewis is kind of a bozo -- no offense, George, wherever you are -- but Linda Stirling is well worth posting.

Linda Stirling and George Lewis from ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP 

DVDs

Someone on one of the Robert E. Howard Yahoo groups (I think it was David Gentzel) mentioned a few days ago that the DVD of THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, the film from a few years ago about REH and Novalyne Price, had shown up in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart. Since I was at Wal-Mart today, I had to paw through the bin and see for myself if it was there. Sure enough, it was, and I bought a copy. I've seen this movie only once, and a fairly poor video copy at that, but it was at the Cross Plains Public Library during Howard Days one year, so that's gotta count for something. Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching the DVD, even though this is the 106-minute version that omits a couple of fairly important scenes that explain why Hester Howard refers to Novalyne as "that Indian girl". Apologies to the non-REH fans out there who have no earthly idea what I'm talking about.

But since it's too late tonight to watch a feature-length movie, and since I probably won't get off my ass long enough to go see SKY CAPTAIN while it's still in the theaters, I thought I'd start watching one of the serials I have on DVD, one chapter per night. I'm leaning toward ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP, starring the beautiful Linda Stirling.

I didn't get any work done today. A visit to Wal-Mart pretty well wipes me out for the day. Plus I had copy-edited MS of a Trailsman novel waiting for me when I got home that I'll need to go through, probably tomorrow.