While mucking around in chapter four revisions, which have been taking a very (very) long time, one of the things I got stuck on was where to place a new paragraph. That may seem odd, given that this book project is a chronological narrative of Jane Grant’s experiences connected with The New Yorker. The sequential time frame provides the basic structure, but there are always some issues that need to be addressed about a person’s life that cut across different periods of time. That’s what I was dealing with.

The paragraph only needed about three or four sentences, but it involved a crucial part of Jane’s love life that had the potential to spill over, with perhaps some negative consequences, into her professional life. A bit complicated, but not too much.

I don’t want to admit how long it took me to listen to that little voice that kept telling me to just write the paragraph. When I read through the chapter again later, which I know I’ll do at least once or a million times, I can move it if I decide it works better in another spot. But at least it will have been written.

So, I did, and it was fine, and I moved on. (It has not gone unnoticed that the “just write” advice is also applicable to blog posts, but that, as you must have realized, took even longer to accept.)

Another big chapter four revision achievement: applying my usually pretty good sleuthing skills to verify the identity of an officer Jane knew in France. The relationship was fairly fleeting, but it nevertheless revealed something important about how Jane viewed marriage. I needed to know something more about the man in question. I didn’t have much to start with, but it was enough to eventually match signatures on two different primary source documents.

Now I’m hoping that my next blog post will reveal some lofty views of chapter five revisions.

What I’ve Been Reading

I really enjoyed two mysteries: The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke and Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom. I especially enjoyed Bloom’s because I’m always here for a good academic murder mystery.

Tana French’s excellent The Keeper is less (much less) a mystery novel than an absorbing tale of the complexities of life in a small, rural Irish village. There’s more conversation than action, so the drama simmers until French delivers a real yikes of an ending. And Ann Cleeves (we refer to her as Anne of Cleves) also dealt a yikes ending in Blue Lightning. I’m a big fan of her Jimmy Perez novels and love the Shetland t.v. series.

Two very good and very different historical novels: Land by Maggie O’Farrell (she always comes up with something interesting) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Questions 27 & 28, about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. While I appreciated that it’s innovative and challenging, I wished that Yamashita’s plot was a bit easier to follow. The subject matter is so very important.

I just started Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins. I’m not sure if it’s going to stick.

I haven’t been motivated to pick up much nonfiction, but I mostly liked Carolines Bicks’s Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, a hybrid of memoir—Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine—and literary criticism/history. I also enjoyed Jayne Anne Phillips’s Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir.

What I’ve Been Watching

So much since I last checked in that I’ll try to keep this short rather than exhaustive.

Right now, what I’m enjoying the most is Reacher (Prime) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+). Saw the first episode of Netflix’s Nordic police thriller, Blood Sacrifice, and it’s intense.

Liked Dark Winds, Mindfully Murder, My Brilliant Career (all on Netflix) and PBS’s new season of Patience. BritBox’s Gone was watchable but ultimately unsatisfying. In the Dark was a bit better, but it needed another season to tie up loose ends. Much more interesting and fun was Ride or Die (Prime). I streamed some good movies: Hamnet, The Friend, Sheep Detectives, Project Hail Mary, and rewatches of MASH and The Big Lebowski.

What Else Was/Is Happening

We went to see the big summer movie, The Odyssey. Our local theater offers $5 Tuesdays (with $2 small popcorn) so it was an easy decision to go. Except for the room-thumping volume, I enjoyed it. I’ve never read any of Homer’s epic, so I only had a general idea of the story.

Then I streamed the 2024 film The Return, with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, which I liked a lot more. This does not appear to be a majority opinion. “A weary existential funk surrounds the movie from the beginning and never lifts,” is how Matt Zoller Seitz describes it in his review on rogerebert.com. I must have really been in the mood for existential funk, because I found it fascinating all the way through. It almost made me want to read Homer. Almost.

This Tuesday we’re going to see Coyote vs. Acme. We contain multitudes.

(Kind of how I’ve been feeling with these manuscript revisions.)

Oh, yes of course, there has been bowling, with its usual ups and downs. This most recent week was one of the best I’ve had all summer, so that was encouraging.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next time.