other people's first books

The Times publishes the thoughts of several writers -- Margaret Atwood, Antony Beever, David Almond, to name three -- on their first books. My first screenplay is in a drawer somewhere and will remain so, although I might cannibalize the idea someday. My real first book -- if you could call it that -- was written when I was 16 and mercifully deleted in a Brother word processor failure that could be taken as proof that if there is a god, h/she's anti-embarrassment. In general, I believe in persevering until the work is good enough to stand up and take its licks.

Having been up for awhile, I feel terrible. Some virus? Ibuprofen poisoning? Who knows? I just hope I feel better in time for C's work X-mas party. No one should ever have to attend those things alone.

Back to watching Sunshine State and puttering around on the net. Blogger is being infuriating and weird this morning and I lost part of a post already. So, let me attempt again to point to Chekhov's Mistress' 2004 Didn't List. He recommends a novel by Suzan-Lori Parks, a writer I resolved to read after hearing her response on NPR's "Scenes I Wish I'd Written" feature. Let' s just say the hills are alive.

(p.s. If you can't see anything over to the right, like post links and the blogroll, neither can I. I am hoping this corrects itself, because they're all still in the template and I have no idea what's going on.)

(UPDATE: Nevermind the p.s. It seems to have been a problem with an earlier posts with those damn bullets and blogger's crazy compose editor sticking in HTML tags like they were going out of style.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now watching Midnight Run, which I love, and actually read the script for before I originally saw it. (Great read, seek it out if you're into such things.)But here's the oddness I'd forgotten -- Danny Elfman wrote that syrupy guitar, jazzy '80s score. Bizarre, huh?