Daylight is beginning to glimmer. I’m on my last day of flu meds and feel like I’m on the mend. I’m still stuffy and coughy from the bronchitis (didn’t I mention I have that too?), but that’s par for the course. I get it at least once a year. My poor hubby is not doing well. He caught the flu from me and has been miserable. I’ve had him on occillococinum and oodles of vitamin C and ibuprofen to keep his fever down. Of course on Friday he felt better, so he decided not to go to the doctor. Bad idea. He’s felt horrible all weekend and has been too congested to sleep well. So I’ve been in caretaker mode because I was the less sick of the two of us this weekend. Which has meant no writing. I’m about 1900 words in the hole on this week’s goal. I don’t have any particular faith that I’m going to make that up today, so I’m preparing myself for my punishment at Jen‘s hands over at Mission:Accountability.
I’ve been catching up on my Bloglines this morning and trying to forget that Daylight Savings Time started today. I hate Daylight Savings Time. It doesn’t save power, doesn’t make people get outside more when it’s hot outside, and does not give us an extra hour. It just means that my butt is out of bed an hour earlier for no good reason. Nobody’s going to want to talk to me tomorrow. I really don’t understand why they don’t just pick one and leave it. The rest of the world doesn’t participate in this lunacy. Yeah, I admit it. I’m a little cranky.
One of the things I’ve been doing this past week is watching lots of TV, and I’ve become addicted to a new show. TNT’s Leverage. From the show’s site, “The series follows a team of thieves, hackers and grifters who act as modern-day Robin Hoods, taking revenge against those who use power and wealth to victimize others.” This show encapsulates the thing I love the most about The Count of Monte Cristo and packages it into a nice episode length bite. It’s a real feel good show in which the bad guys absolutely get what’s coming to them. Same kind of feeling I like in USA’s Burn Notices (and we have to wait until JUNE for that to come back?!). In a world and economy where all the news is bad all the time, such shows do particularly well, I think. We need that feel good and to have our belief in goodness prevailing reinforced somewhere. We turn on these shows and we know that by the end, we’re going to get that emotional boost, that the bad guys are going to get theirs.
That’s the kind of contract that we have with our readers. At least in most genres. Nobody wants to read a book in which the bad guy wins. That’s not a satisfying ending. But of course, we can’t make it too easy for our hero/ine. We have to throw some abuse at them. And it’s even better if it looks like things aren’t going to work out for our hero/ine, only to find out at the last minute that something else was going on all along. That’s one of the things I love about Leverage. The original plan turns out to be way more complicated and satisfying than you originally thought.
This is all kind of disjointed. I should probably go take a nap…