Choices

I finished reading Robin Blake's "A Dark Anatomy" in hardcover, and liked it.  It's an interesting setting, the 1740s, and the author seems to know it well.  I like historical stories about what I call “cusp” times – when a culture is shifting from one era to another.  This one is a shift from Renaissance thinking (including a belief in witchcraft) to modern (a belief in science and medicine).  I correctly guessed part of the solution, and noted gleefully that some of it involved a trick I used in Hanging by a Thread.  I'd like to read the sequel, but not in hardcover.

I also went to the movies, to see Men in Black III.  I absolutely loved the first one, from the premise to the execution.  I laughed my head off at it.  The second one seemed tired, trying to surprise the audience with a premise that had already been explored in the first one.  But the third one goes deeper, it explores the relationship between the two protagonists.  Josh Brolin does an amazing job as a young Tommy Lee Jones, inside thirty seconds I totally bought him in the role.  The story was funny and touching.  Though there were holes in the plot you could drive a semi truck through, they didn’t matter very much.  Michael Stuhlbarg played a very strange character named Griffin, a mild-mannered person who can see into the future as a series of choices.  Tiny choices people make in the present, tiny differences in circumstances, swerve the future in different directions, and he can see all of them.  “Uh-oh,” he says, “is this the one where K forgets to leave a tip?” and you flash-cut to a big meteor coming in to hit the earth.

All this fun is bad, as I’m trying at the same time to work on the edited manuscript of And Then You Dye.  There are lots and lots of tiny changes wrought by my editor and my copy editor, more than usual, plus some I’m making myself, and it eats rapidly into the time I have to fix things.  I have a big sign taped to the wall next to my desk: Warning: Due Dates Are Closer Than They Appear.  That's a reminder I would do well to heed.  So back to work.