Galleys . . . and cats

Seb is back.

He and Neely have been keeping me company this week. I've been reading the galleys and looking for typos and things that absolutely had to be changed.

And it occurs to me that if I were given the chance to revise this book now, I can see a lot of things that I could do to make it better.

Can I do them in galleys? Probably not. Not most of them anyway. Sad, but true. A fact of life.

So while I am, of course, still glad of that "no revisions" time I had to myself in May, time I desperately needed for other things as a matter of fact, I do have twinges of regret now that I didn't have one more chance to attack the book, to tweak it (as editors are fond of saying), to streamline it a bit, to sharpen things up.

I'm doing a tiny bit of sharpening now. I'm hoping it helps.

And I'm getting back into Christo's book. Finally.

I re-watched Father Goose the other night to see how it worked as a "Save the Cat" movie. It was a two hour film. At exactly one hour in, Cary Grant made the first move toward getting involved with the kids in the film without anyone coercing him into doing it.

It was the turning point at exactly where Blake Snyder said it would be. Other bits fit, too.

The opening was a masterpiece of a set up. Right there in the first image you saw the single unsteered boat blithely trailing the dinghy toward the dock as the radio blared news of the war. And then Cary Grant emerged, flipped the station to the upbeat song "Pass Me By."

It is a great fun movie. Almost too much fun to watch because I did more of that than analyzing it. But I guess that means I'll just have to watch it again.

One thing, though . . .

If you have a movie with Cary Grant in it, he doesn't have to save any cats.

He just has to be Cary Grant. It's enough. You're already cheering for him.