Loyal readers of this lofty blog no doubt recall that while I am a fan of Johnny Depp‘s movies, I’m not a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, except for the first film in the series.
However, I just saw this new trailer for Dead Men Tell No Tales and I really loved it! So here’s hoping, gang!
All right! I can’t tarry here too long today, gang, so I will only ask this one Riverdale question:
Have any of the writers of this show ever spent time together in the same room???
Doesn’t it feel as if they just make this sh*t up as they go along; none of the writers knowing what the other writers are writing from week to week? (Okay, two questions!)
Not that it isn’t incredibly fun; not that I’m going to stop watching it, but when I am watching it, I keep thinking that the reason we didn’t see a particular plot point coming is because it wasn’t, in fact, coming until just a mere moment ago!! Surprise!
Okey-dokey!! Gotta scoot, gang! Thanks for visiting and here’s a little something to kick off your weekend! See ya!
Oops! I know what you were thinking!! But consider the source: With me, what else could 3 on a bed be besides cats??
Huckleberry, Weenie, and Lucy on the bed
As always, click to see a larger image.
Here’s something you really don’t want to miss!! A chance to buy a used trade paper edition of my award-winning erotic novel, Freak Parade, for only $2,140.95 plus $3.99 shipping!!
Hurry! Buy it now, while it’s only $2,140.95 plus $3.99 shipping!!
Good Lord!! It kills me when I see these alleged “collectors’ editions” of my past books for sale online that not even I can afford to purchase! (However, I don’t need to afford them, because I’ve got copies of them all in storage, a mere 25 miles from here…)
My guess is that this is a signed edition and perhaps it even has the sticker on it that proclaims it a “Silver Medal Winner in the Independent Publishers Awards in New York City”, back in 2011, or somewhere around then.
If you’d like to save about twenty-one hundred and twenty dollars, you can buy a regular copy HERE, new, for $20.95; and if you’re an Amazon Prime member, I’m being alerted that the shipping is free! Send the book to me, here in the hinterlands, and I’ll sign it and place that coveted silver sticker on its cover for you!
I might even be willing to personalize the inscription for you, too, but I can’t guarantee anything as unpredictable as that, since that depends on my mood at any given moment. (Just kidding.) (I’ll probably write something about how you & I are really great friends and about how I couldn’t have made it this far without you!)
Anyway. I discovered this collector’s book while trying to get some cover images and links together, in anticipation of adding a couple of pages to this blog — pages where you can buy only my most recent books . Just about everything else from my illustrious 28-year career is out of print, although you can still find them all over Amazon…
Don’t be surprised if, one day soon, you come visit this blog and discover it looks slightly different! I’ve been reluctant to take that step. I’d been overseeing the original Marilyn’s Room since 1998 and it got exhausting. Partly because I had 2000 -3000 visitors a day and it got exhausting.
I closed down the old Marilyn’s Room in 2014, after some changes were instigated at GoDaddy that I wasn’t happy about, so I took that opportunity and went on a quiet, tiny, commercial blog-hiatus and have been happily tucked away here on WordPress since then. But I guess it’s time to branch out at least a little bit, enough so that readers who are new to Marilyn’s Room can at least find my current books.
Okay! Today’s that magical day wherein another episode of Riverdale unfolds before us at 9 PM Eastern time! I need to get a whole lot more writing accomplished before then, so I’m gonna scoot, gang! Have a happy, Lent-filled Thursday wherever you are and whatever you’re doing!
Finally, last night — just mere moments before the airing of the newest episode of Riverdale on the CW — I finished my revisions of Act One of Cleveland’s Burning.
I think I’m happy with it, but I’ll know better once I go over it again here this morning. Last night, however, I was extremely happy with it.
As an aside, I want to say that I really loved how, at least for now, they’ve done away with the pesky problem of pedophilia in Riverdale[Spoiler Aert!!] by simply forcing Miss Grundy to leave town… I guess we’ll see how that pans out. (And, you know, back in the day when I was in high school, they never asked heterosexual teachers to leave town; they basically just told the teenagers who were sleeping with their teachers to “knock it off.” Ah, the 70s! Gotta love ’em!) (If you were a gay teacher, however, your life was essentially over and they would have put you on the front page of the newspaper.)
Anyway. Back to the topic of re-writes. It is a strange phenomenon, and one I go through with every single project I write — I know exactly what I want to say, yet getting it onto the page can take, literally, forever. At first, I go merrily along, typing, typing… And then suddenly, I hit an impasse and wonder how on earth to get words onto the page. I don’t know why that happens, but it always does. It’s not as if I suddenly lose my vocabulary, or my sense of how grammar is structured. I can see what the characters are doing. Yet I just can’t get the words out!
It makes me INSANE.
However, I can look at all my completed, published projects (of which I have many), and see the proof there that the condition is always temporary, so I stick with it, grueling as it is.
What tripped me up yesterday was having my character go into a diner and order a cup of coffee at the counter. It felt wrong. At first, I thought it was the counter attendant’s age — so I changed him from a teenager to a 50-year-old. Then I had my character pay for the coffee with a dime. (In 1963, a cup of coffee cost a dime.) Then I had him leave a tip. Then I deleted the tip because it was taking up precious screen time. But then the neighbor girl puts a nickel in the jukebox! Suddenly all this screen time is being “spent,” as it were, on dimes and nickels. It was really just ridiculous. So I stopped everything and walked away. I flopped down on the bed and read several chapters of Peril At End House, c -1932 by Agatha Christie and all was right with the world again.
So back to the desk I went and I realized that the character is simply at the counter drinking a cup of coffee! For heaven’s sake, just get rid of the counter attendant altogether, along with all the dimes and nickels. And finally, the rest of the scenes came and the act was over! Commercial break time!! Yay.
And last night was a great feeling — to finally finish Act One.
Act One in a one-hour TV drama is the longest chunk. Everything else after this gets shorter and shorter, so I really do feel a great sense of relief. Especially since, this coming Tuesday, a mere 5 days away, the notes for Tea Cozy Murder Club will be coming my way… And the final, final, FINAL edits for the one-woman musical I’m working on with Sandra Caldwell in New York are sitting atop my desk, awaiting my attention…
It’s no wonder I wake-up tired.
Okay!! Have a happy Friday, gang, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing! And, as always, thanks for visiting! See ya!
Ah, what could be better than using the royal “we”?
I do, of course, refer to myself as the one who was not only persuaded, but also who did the persuading!
I’m talking about the cold open vs. Act One issue (see post below). It finally became glaringly apparent that we were already into Act One from the top of page 2, so I just went with it and then made great progress.
One thing that has sort of stymied me, though, has been watching the new CW television show, Riverdale. That show (which I am really enjoying, although I can’t really see in what way it is related at all to The Archies…) (ha ha).
Anyway, Riverdale takes a full ten minutes in its cold open. I’ve been timing it! It feels like the show is practically over before they roll the opening credits! Even though it does a great job of drawing you well in to the storyline, as a writer, that means you get maybe 45 or 50 pages to present, circle back, and tie-up the entire episode.
That feels way too restrictive for me, even though I love how it comes across in Riverdale.
Anyway. I got past it! And now I feel pretty confident that I will have the revisions for Cleveland’s Burning (aka Untitled Cleveland Drama) completed by mid-February! Yay! Then on to all the other stuff that needs revisions…
On another note:
Another wonderful thing I’ve discovered about living here in the hinterlands of Ohio (or in any State’s hinterlands, I’m guessing) is the ready and constant access you have to farm-fresh produce!! Wowie. I have an indoor farmer’s market within walking distance from my house. Literally, I can drive there in under 2 minutes, which means that, if I’m driving, in less than 120 seconds, I am standing amid farm-fresh produce! And in spring & summer, the outdoor farmer’s market is only 10 minutes away. (I’m a vegetarian, and of course prefer either really fresh or organic produce whenever possible, so you can imagine my delight over farmers’ markets.)
Also, I finally bought a cheap, hand-held spiralizer the other day. I love it. I made zucchini “spaghetti” last night for dinner and it was incredible. (I didn’t buy the zucchini at the farmer’s market, though. They didn’t have any. Of course, I hated to ask myself why zucchini was available anywhere in the dead of winter because the only answer that came back to me did not include the words “natural” or “organic.”)
Anyway, it was just too cool! A whole bowl of “spaghetti” that only had about 200 calories — and 140 of the calories came from the olive oil. I ate the big bowl of spaghetti while watching a 47-year-old re-run of Laugh-In. A show I loved as a kid, and I still love it now! The sun was going down and outside of the enormous picture window in the living room, I was a bit spellbound to see how magnificent the endless sky looks when one lives in the hinterlands.
Good food. Quietude. Nature. Peace. And Laugh-In. It doesn’t get any better after a long day of re-writing a story I am really passionate about.
Okay, gotta get moving here. I’m going to leave you with a choice here today, gang:
The sublime (the song that inspired my opening scene in Cleveland’s Burning):
Or the ridiculous! (I love this song!!!) (They actually managed to squeeze it into Riverdale in episode 2!)
Marilyn's Room 