Day 9 - Cat Vaccinations

Visiting Vet came today.  Feral cat decided that maybe she is so still feral, but we managed to get her two boosters done.  My hand is only slightly shredded.  (Maude and Max took theirs like troopers.  Besides, they wanted to check out all the pockets in that doctor coat. Catnip resides there.  Also, treats.)

Today's Progress: 2076 words on In Flight.  In Flight seems to be on a tear right now, so I'm letting it run.  I think it doesn't want to be a novella.  I'm hoping it will at least be a short novel.  Chef and Mr. Reef -- our heroine's day job bosses -- have decided to intervene, and I decided to let them have more scenes in their point of view.  I'm thinking that they really just might want to turn the catering business into a catering and private investigations business.

Could this be a series? Possibly, but not a regular kind of series.  Back in the 1950's Frances and Richard Lockridge wrote several stand-alone suspense stories, featuring the same police background character -- Lt. Shapiro.  In those first couple stories, he really just lurked in the background, trying to catch up with the hero or heroine who was falling into deep trouble.

They were each stand-alone stories, of course, but Shapiro made them a kind of series.  He'd be schlepping around in the background always a little disturbed by the false trails he was given by the bad guys, until finally, he'd pull a Han Solo, and step in just at the right moment to help the hero or heroine defeat or escape the baddies.

So it is possible that these two will appear again.

Eating, Watching, Reading: Made "Mock-Potato Salad" today. It's basically a pasta salad made with my potato salad recipe.  I like it because the pasta soaks up any excess liquid.  Watched another early episode of Columbo (Ray Milland). And listened to a bit of The Writer's Almanac.  That's Garrison Keillor's 5 minute daily podcast where he talks about this day in intellectual history, and reads a poem.  I save them and listen to several in a row.

I'm still reading The Glass Key.  However, I'm going to start listening to an audiobook of Lieberman's Folly for my art listening when I start drawing again.  This week, I'm trying to deal with kerfuffle too much.  Lieberman (like Shapiro) is another elderly Jewish detective who has a tendency to come to the rescue, but his series is a more hard-boiled police procedural.

BTW. if you want to see omniscient voice handled really beautifully (outside of the Victorian "dear reader" tradition) you should check out the Lieberman books by Stuart Kaminsky.  He does this in his other police procedural series, which is set in Soviet Russia - the Porfiry Rostnikov series.  It seems to me, though, that the first Lieberman book -- Lieberman's Folly -- does a particularly good job of it, especially in a sequence three or four chapters in, where Lieberman's sidekick is sitting in a Chinese restaurant, trying to keep an eye on an endangered informant's apartment across the street, while picking up a waitress and trying to stay on the wagon.  It has been a while, but I remember being floored by his ability to keep us in omniscient through a pretty complicated sequence.

See you in the funny papers.