Inviting Strangers
I don’t invent characters. I invite strangers. Out of my subconscious. Then cut them slack, to see what they’ll do.
Never Let Me Know
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is brilliantly paced to slowly reveal the truth about the characters and their world.
The film may be similarly well-paced but it hardly seems to matter. Everything is revealed (and explicitly stated) in the trailer.
Who makes these things? How many layers of approval do they go through? Why would anyone think it was a good idea to give away so much?
Broken Key
I came home for lunch today, put my key in the lock, and it snapped off about a centimetre and a half from the tip.
It was a shock but, with hindsight, not so surprising. It was more than ten years old and the lock is a bit dodgy. It needs a bit of jingling and jangling to get open at the best of times.
A few millimetres of the broken edge hung from the hole, not enough for my fingernails to grasp.
I managed to find an old pair of rusty tweezers at my mother-in-law’s house but although I have petite, girly hands I’m really not good with small, fiddly stuff. I thought there was a pretty good chance that I would end up pushing the broken fragment unreachably deeper into the lock. I’d end up spending several hundred dollars on a locksmith visit and more on a new lock and keys.
I have to learn to take it easy. On my first try I got a good hold on the chunk of key and it slid out easily.
The steamy summer interior of my hallway has seldom seemed so welcoming.