"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Not much to say about the day. It was a Wednesday, a little wet and chilly, but nothing too special.
I did learn this evening that the restaurant where, just last month, we had my aunt and uncle’s wedding anniversary/birthday party — a restaurant they quite like, and which has been in Maspeth, Queens, for some eighty years — burned to the ground. Luckily no one was hurt.
And that’s about it, as far as Wednesday goes.
You see what I get for saying nothing interesting happened yesterday? It’s sort of like that time in Austin, Texas, when I told the friends I was staying with for the week that I hadn’t really seen anything weird all week…and then we proceeded to see a truck on fire at the side of the road not ten minutes later.
I was actually in the middle of watching an episode of AMC’s The Killing when the news last night broke, and don’t think there wasn’t a tiny part of my brain that wondered, “What would they have announced if I’d been watching A Game of Thrones? Or How I Met Your Mother?” It’s a weird feeling, being glad that someone is dead, but it’s hard not to want to put a little chalk mark in the victory column over it.
Meanwhile, today was every bit a Monday. Nothing very inter–
You know what? I’m not going to tempt fate. I think I’m just going to go to bed.
Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of “Fast Five”
This evening, I went here, to hear author Peter Straub talk about the craft and process of writing fiction. The talk, which was a lot of fun and full of lots of interesting “tricks of the trade” and stylistic “rules” (like, for instance, how your prose should never rhyme), was free to subscribers to One Story — which, thanks to Heather, I happen to be. And to think, I had never even heard of the Center for Fiction before, much less realized how close — a ten-minute walk — it is to my office.
That was about it for the rest of my day, which was spent back at work but with not much else to report.
I was deeply shocked and sad to learn that Elisabeth Sladen, Doctor Who‘s Sarah Jane Smith, had passed away. She wasn’t a formative part of my childhood — if anything, I was more familiar with her recent work on the series and still-on-the-air spin-off — but she did always seem like one of the best companions the show ever had. She died much too young and will be missed.
And that was Tuesday.
This did, of course, also make me think of Heather.