Day 43 - Books and Toys and Writing

Another short update:

Today's Progress: 2098 words on In Flight.

I'm building the ending now.  I've got a lot to continue to work on in the earlier sections, but I have momentum on the end of second act climax and the end.

I had a good writing session at Taco Bell today, and I had hopes of having another 3k day, but that didn't happen.  (Ended up baking bread and doing a few other things, and then was too tired do more than 600 words or so).

When I got home from Taco Bell, though, I had two lovely gifts waiting for me. Well, one real gift, and one self-actualized gift.

The first was a spiffy Agent Coulson Bobble Head.  I am a big fan of Agent Coulson and Agents of SHIELD.  The self-referential, recursive, meta thing here is that Coulsom is a collector of cool kitsch, so it seems only appropriate that one would collect a Coulson Bobblehead.

It's a magical toy.

The other package had a hard-to-find Detective Nathan Shapiro book in it!  This was one I had read at the library and never expected to find again, but there were a few at Amazon that weren't priced way out of my range.

So I bought a damaged but readable copy....

And I found that it was complete with dust jacket!  And though the dust jacket had a big tear in it, it was a very neat tear, and otherwise in very good shape.

And the cover is a particularly nice mid-century design.  Very abstract, and yet still almost representational.  The book is about a guy who jumps into a taxi and finds he's sharing it with the body of a woman.  Thus, the cover, which looks mostly abstract at frist, resolves into an image of... a woman's body in a taxi cab.

(You can't see what it says in the red numbers beside the body but that's a sign giving the cab's rates: 25 cents for the first 1/5 mile, and 5 cents for ever 1/5 mile thereafter.)

If I remember right, this novel features an Englishman who arrives in Manhattan only to find himself on the run accused of murder.

Which brings up an interesting point: this is yet another 'standalone' suspense novel.  That is, even though Shapiro ties them all together, the protagonist in each of these books is an ordinary person in jeopardy, and the bulk of the story is made up of that person's story.

Also, of the four, two are women-in-jeopardy, and two are dude-in-jeopardy stories, which keeps them firmly in the "mystery" section rather than the "romance" section that a lot of similar novels were in at the time.

Anyway, I need to go to bed.

See you in the funny papers.