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Telewitterings – Justified S1

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I’m getting in a little late on this one, maybe, but Kelly and I have been watching the first year of Justified on Netflix Canada. Later seasons aren’t available yet, we’re all of one episode from the end, and I’m hooked and hoping they get S2 soon. It’s a nice feeling.

The big attraction–and don’t they know it!–is Timothy Olyphant, who plays ill-tempered U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Raylan was definitely an outsider within his family of origin, and dealt with it in the time-honored fashion of getting a job that took him far, far away from home. But a penchant for fatally shooting criminals has gotten him sent back to Lexington, Kentucky. Now he’s coping with the dad he left in the rear-view, his ex-wife, a woman who’s been nursing a crush on him since high school and an old friend who enjoys long walks in the forest, church, robbing banks, setting off bombs and homicide.

Here’s the trailer:

Justified was created by Graham Yost, the guy behind one of my favorite cop shows in the whole world, the multi-faceted and complex Boomtown. While its storytelling is more linear–which may be why it didn’t get cancelled just coming out of the gate–its characters are just as nuanced and humanly unpredictable. It’s a violent show, but not horrifyingly so. Olyphant is brilliant, as is his foil Walter Goggins. The supporting cast is engaging, and the season’s arc is tightly wound and doesn’t seem to be taking anything approaching an easy way out.

Hey, what’s your favorite cop show?

Planetalyx Personals

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As I mentioned in this post, I’m trying to get back into the habit of telling you all a little something, now and then, about my actual life. Part of what makes this tricky, for me, is that this presupposes that there’s a nice clean boundary between my work and some ephemeral rest.

Frex: I’m buoyantly happy with the writing I’ve been doing lately. Happy! Personal thing. Joy of creation. Bubbling thoughts of protagonist angst. Intriguing plot challenges. Delighted . . . with the fiction writing. Which is kind of my main job. And yet it’s a job I perform in a lovely cafe environment, with twelve ounces of latte within easy reach, in the company of people who aren’t quite my friends though I’m awfully fond of many of them.

Or, hey: I want to go to Vancouver Aquarium with Barb sometime soon as a birthday outing. And OMG, they’re charging $27 to let you in the door now, plus I think they get rights to your genetic code. We’ve both agreed it’s worth it, especially as they have penguins, holy crap, peeeeenguins!! now. (If any of you has a 2 for 1 coupon you won’t be using this summer, let’s talk).

So, you know, outing with one’s mother, to a nice tourist attraction, to celebrate her getting older. Personal, definitely. Except you all know I’m going to do the same thing with the experience that I do with things like the California Academy of Sciences trip and the Burke Museum trip, which is to say Learn Science Fakts! Mutate the Life Forms! Write more stories like The Gales! and add funky Stormwrack details to the trilogy-in-progress and write the museum ticket off my taxes!

Plus, also, prettifying my blog with pictures from the exhibits. Is that work? Is that play? Who cares, because look! Fossil!

Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle

I could go on. Perhaps I even should go on, because I’ve tried before, quite a few times, to blog about the blur between all the various allegedly separate areas of my life. All of those previous posts have ended up in the bin. Whereas this one seems to be going pretty well.

Want to help? Is there anything you all would actually like to know?

I #AmReading, but for how long?

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Happy Fourth of July, U.S. Friends!

I am about a third of the way into The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and have only just reached the first gory corpse in Patrick O’Brian’s Red Rain.

Neither book is completely doing it for me: The House of Wisdom is good, but I seem to be absorbing it in small chunks. I feel predisposed to extreme pickiness, to feeling dissatisfaction with the books I’m tackling. I’m not sure there’s much wrong with them, but we definitely aren’t playing well together.

I’ll note that this all started well before I started busily bustin’ words for my WriteAThon commitment. On which note, some braggage:

Tuesday – 1,464 for a total of 28,887
Monday – 1,146 for a total of 27,423
Sunday- 850 words, total of 26,277
Saturday – 1,280 words total of 25,427

Sponsor me here! Win naming rights to stuff on Stormwrack! The number of donors in the pool tripled this week, but the odds of winning the draw are still excellent!)

Okay, back to my point, which is books. Reading for pleasure. The delights of the written word. What has been working for me, in terms of reading, is some of the stuff on the ever-delightful Longreads–I read a good piece on a tornado that ripped through Moscow, Ohio, and a New Yorker article about how having pots of money (or even thinking about it) can affect a person’s capacity for empathy or generosity.

So yay Longreads, and all that, but I am still struggling to sink into a good book-length work, fiction or non-fiction, that I haven’t already read. Has this ever happened to any of you?