Yesterday I Cancelled the Dish

DirecTV, I must say before I go any further, is an excellent service. The technician who installed the dish on our roof and plugged the special recording box into the TV set was competent, speedy, and courteous. The service reps I dealt with over the phone were helpful and courteous as well. I never met with the sort of bad service people are said to encounter when dealing with Comcast. If I liked any of the TV shows that were on offer, I would probably have kept DirecTV, even after the two-year special reduced rates expired. But the fact is, there isn't anything on TV worth watching. It's not DirecTV's fault.

Three years ago, when I signed up, I figured that, by the time the two-year contract had expired, anything I wanted to sit down and watch would be available on the internet. It came to pass! Don't you love it when one of your prophesies comes true?

You're thinking, but what about Harold? Isn't he going to miss watching football? No, Harold doesn't watch football. Or anything else on TV. So it's just my thing, and here is what I like to watch:

Old movies. TCM shows them, and sometimes, on Saturday night, PBS does too. Instead I can go to Netflix.com ($8.99 a month), Amazon Prime ($99.00 yearly, or $8.25 a month), YouTube ($0), or the Lambertville Free Public Library, which has a nice collection of movies on DVD ($0). Granted, for the stuff available on the internet you have to have a modern hi-def television set with HDMI sockets, a computer with a high-speed internet connection, and a proper cord to connect the two, and for the DVDs you need a DVD player and also a connecting cord. So you'd have to figure in the cost of that.

I have a personal collection of old movies as well. Some of them I bought from TCM.com. So I'm well supplied with old movies.

British and Australian TV shows. The most marvelous things are available on Acorn.tv, a site on the internet, where a membership costs $4.99 a month. Very little of what they offer can be seen on American TV. Again you need a computer to watch the shows, and also a cord to connect the computer to your TV set, if you need a bigger screen.

Grand Opera. With the machine that DirecTV gave me I used to record operas whenever they aired on Channel 13. But now the Metropolitan Opera has made available a huge selection of their old and current productions to stream on the internet, many in high definition. A subscription costs $14.99 a month, cheaper if you subscribe by the year. Way cheaper than dressing up and dragging yourself to the city, especially if your spouse can take it or leave it alone. Hey, I used to go to the old Met with the cupids and everything. I get the glamour and romance of a live performance. Still, I like being able to see the singers up close.

The Good Wife. This is the last network show I was seriously addicted to. It's been such a downer lately that I can scarcely bring myself to sit through it, especially now that Kalinda has bailed. If I were writing that show she would have killed Lemond Bishop the minute he started threatening her sweetie. (Or either one of her sweeties.) I so longed to see her kick his ass. Now it's never going to happen. Still, I can see reruns of Sunday's show on Monday afternoons on CBS.com. Without waiting half an hour for the show before it to finish running. Why do they mess with the schedule like that? Football, I guess. Or they think we're going to magically fall in love with Madam Secretary just from being exposed to the last half of it while looking for The Good Wife. Sorry, guys, not happening.

News? Not really. Watching network news, or CNN, or, God forbid, Fox news, is like getting punched in the stomach over and over. The things I need to know I can find out by reading the newspaper, without having to endure the sight of full-color footage. Seventy-five cents for a daily copy of The Trenton Times, and we get funnies with our news, as well as the cryptoquote, which Harold solves in his head without using a pencil. Our subscription to the Sunday New York Times includes on-line access to the weekday papers, if there's anything in them we need to see, as well as the complete archives dating back to the beginning of the world, a great boon to those of us who write historical fiction.

When I hear rumors of stuff happening, and I do, somehow, without resorting to network news, I go on Twitter to find out the real story. You may laugh, but it actually works. Ordinary people live-tweet all sorts of things.

The service rep at DirecTV tried to talk me out of leaving, which was okay, because that's her job: "What are you going to do when it snows?" I told her I was going to read a book.

So that's my plan.  I'll let you know in a couple of months how it's working, in case you want to try it yourself.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

No One Is Coming to Clean Off My Desk

On the night table: March Violets (Philip Kerr)

I guess Will Gardner won’t be sweeping the clutter off my desk in a spectacular gesture of jealous rage after all. 

I’m going to miss that fantasy.

And God knows, I’m going to miss Josh Charles. 

Maybe I should have issued a SPOILER ALERT, but I can’t imagine that anyone who’s a fan of The Good Wife still hasn't watched Sunday’s episode or is still completely unaware of the shocked, horrified and furious response that accompanied his departure. I got my hair colored Tuesday (shock, that blond isn't natural), and my stylist and I talked about nothing else for two hours.

Before Sunday night, I'd been focusing my attention elsewhere, on some first class procrastinating about planning for my meeting tonight with members of a writers group at my local library. Most of them are new writers. Many of them aren't writing mysteries. Many of them probably don’t even read mysteries.

So instead of planning, I was obsessing. Come September, I’ll have four novels published. Just four. Who am I to impart wisdom? If I were wiser, I would have begun writing before I started to lose my nouns.

And then Will died, reminding me with a punch to the solar plexus how attached we get to characters.

In visual media, the character creation is collaborative; for Will, it required the considerable skills of the show’s writers and the actor. Novel-writing is generally not. Not unless you’re so famous that you have uncredited co-authors, or you consider a collaboration you and your internal Little Editor, who tells you that whatever you just wrote is 1) trite, 2) overblown, 3) illogical.

The novelist has to come up with not only the words, but also the way they're performed: The cadence of the dialog and the accompanying behaviors that evoke that character. Heck, we even have to supply the costumes.

Mostly we learn about character by doing it wrong. When we write our first books, we often cram every tragic flaw and misery we can think of into our characters, or load our protag up with enough backstory to grind the action to a halt every other page. Or we convince ourselves we’re being spare when what we have is a roomful of dull people who all sound alike. Or that a ‘wacky’ woman is the same as charming.

Gradually we begin to understand what all those books on how to create characters were talking about. We want to write real life, but real life and fiction are very, very different. No character comes into a book without a purpose. No bit of dialogue is meaningless. Conflict is cherished. And unless you’re writing a ‘hero versus nature’ novel, that conflict has to come from the characters.

So, I think we’ll talk a bit about characters tonight. About how and why readers become attached to them. We enjoy a clever plot, but the novel's world is made real by its characters.

I’m feeling better about my meeting. 

But there's still too much clutter on my desk, Will.

Sheila York

Copyright 2014

Note: If you never watch The Good Wife, there was a terrific scene last season in which Will got so upset with Alicia — his former lover — that he raked everything off the top of her desk in one glorious motion.