Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Ten Things I've Done You Probably Haven't

John Scalzi made up his list and asked his blog readers to make up theirs. Here's mine.
  1. Told Orson Scott Card at a book signing that my ex-wife's mother lived just off a Greensboro street he included in Ender's Game.
  2. Was in the operating room when my ex had an emergency C-section and saw spurting blood and drifting smoke over the curtain, just before the doctor said, "This looks like a nine pounder."
  3. Took a much loved 17 year old cat to the vet hoping she could hang on, was told she couldn't, asked to be with her when she went to sleep for the last time, watched the vet walk out for a couple of minute, then return and ask me, "Are you sure you want to take the body?"
  4. Backed a car that was stuck in reverse three miles through city traffic to meet my ride to work at the service station.
  5. Dressed in a grass skirt and coconut bra to raise money at our "Luau" Relay for Life event in 2007.
  6. Driven one of my dad's farm tractors sideways into a six foot deep drainage ditch and walked away without a scratch.
  7. Preached a couple of Youth Sunday sermons at a Southern Baptist Church.
  8. Lost my first wife, after twelve year of marriage and three children, to another woman.
  9. Am married to my best friend, who I met through a Dean Koontz newsgroup on Usenet.
  10. Was recently a contestant on Jeopardy.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The Darkest Evening of the Year

Funny how you wake up early when you fell asleep at 9:00 pm watching TV, isn't it? With the time on my hands these past couple of hours, I've finally started Dean Koontz's The Darkest Evening of the Year, which I gave to Lisa for Christmas. And, very unusually for me, I feel compelled to comment on a book while I'm reading it.

I'm having the most curious experience with Darkest Evening, in that I'm finding myself both inside and outside the story as I'm reading. Dean's prose is simply gorgeous, moreso than in anything else I've had read by him. His only work that comes anywhere near to this is Midnight, which really isn't one of my favorites. That aside, I find myself going back and rereading passages often, and I intend to pull a few of them out for my quote file.

I've noticed in previous books that Dean, who has an unflagging sense of story and a wonderful way with characters, often tends to overreach on description. That tendency often reminds me of a phrase I tried out in a short story in one of my college creative writing classes, "The old man had bales of cotton-white hair." My classmates had quite a laugh over that neophyte blunder. That's the kind of authorial clumsiness that can grab a reader by the scruff of the neck, yank him right out of the story, and promise to beat him bloody if he has the temerity to crack the book open again. Dean's "transgressions" in description are seldom that egregious, but they do at times present minor obstacles down the paths of his tales.

In the first 75 pages of Darkest Evening, I have yet to find a single description that yanks me out of the flow of the story. Yes, I said that I have stopped often to reread a particularly lovely passage; not once has that broken the spell of the story.

I hope there's more of the little girl Theresa and her "twilight eyes". Perhaps it's no accident that Twilight Eyes is the latest mass market paperback reprint of an earlier Koontz.

For now, it's back to Darkest Evening, with no notion of where the story is taking me, but a willingness to go along for the journey, the expectation that I may have already covered the finest part of this book, and the determination that I won't forget the feeling that has come from what I've already read.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Casablanca and Chicago!

Well, I can finally comment publicly about my Jeopardy appearance. It was an experience that was both exhilarating and humbling. I never really got into the rhythm of ringing in, so even though I knew the majority of the answers, I was solidly in third place going into Final Jeopardy.

Turns out, with Kristen and Anna $500 apart and both with more than double my score, if I'd stood pat, I would've won. Of course, if I'd really comprehended that they wanted to know both of the Oscar winning movies whose one word titles were cities beginning with "C", I would've won. As it was, every one of us missed the question -- I only gave them Casablanca -- and both Kristen and I bet everything. Anna had $799 left, so ironically, for this one show, I made more for third place than she did for winning.

I wonder if I can try again.

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Now playing: Eagles - Long Road out of Eden
via FoxyTunes

My 15 minutes is here

I'm a contestant on Jeopardy tonight. The local CBS affiliate interviewed me last night, corporate communications sent an email to everybody in the company today, and a local radio station wants to talk to me during their morning show tomorrow. And to think that this all started with an online test last February!

Friday, January 4, 2008

A Fallen Soldier

I came across a link at Whatever that lead to this. I've never heard of Major Andrew Olmsted before, but I am grieving for a man of integrity.

Here's his blog at the Rocky Mountain News of Denver.