"Oh, Ms. G, I think you're trying to seduce me."(Was gonna go with "Tell me what I want to know or Mr. Fett gets it, but Ben Braddock set my BJG button...it seemed appropriate. They're gonna cut open my brain and find nothing but stand-up, Motown, and The Graduate, I swear.)

And then you can write a whole new mystery about it. Ayelet can murder me with a stockpot, or something...

Dude, y'all are in a bracket enough to be a L&O. Briscoe:Bad review? She should have just stuck to Cliff's Notes, like me. Of course, I love that part of the Homicide book where Detective Landsman asks the eager rookie if they have found the pogo stick he believes is the murder weapon...the streets of Balmer won't be safe unless he does...it's all very funny, till the kid tries to look for it. Hope he never made detective!

erika, you know what? I can still name my favourite bit in Simon's original book. It was when the two homicide cops are off duty, and one of them is seriously thinking about quitting, and the other one is trying to talk him out of it. And they're parked on a side street, away from the station, and they realise this kid is casing them, scoping them about, thinking about robbing them and stealing the car. So one of the cops, exasperated, gets out of the car, stalks up to the dumbfounded kid, flashes his badge, and snaps "We're police. Go rob someone else."

I hurt myself suppressing outraged whimpers of joy over that one.

I know! "We're fat old white guys. That's all they see. A mark."

"I'm not old. Speak for yourself."
So FG.

Oh, I had to share this -- for erika's delectation, and others' amusement.

It's the story of whose face is used on the standard NYPD/Homeland Security target, when people practice shooting at gun ranges. (Hint: they call up Ernest Borgnine on page 2.) Registration required.

[link]

There's a drabble topic in there somewhere, but only if everyone can bear to drabble about jowly, puffy men in ugly track suits.

Typical cops...trying to make it look like nobody, it looks like everybody.(Maybe somebody having fun with his supervisor?) Seems I read someplace, not sure where, that if a suspect is the same race as a sketch artist, the sketches look like them, sometimes

Question re: drafts, especially electronic ones. What do you keep? I can see keeping a radically different version of a scene or chapter, just in case you decide that that approach is really the best one, but if you're just futzing with dialogue, word choices, etc., do you just change it and forget it?

Connie, speaking just for me? When I change, I change. It's a question of commiting to what you've decided to say, and a question of trusting your instincts.

The only time I save something is I've done a radical rewrite or taken out an entire scene, which isn't something I do often. I'm a linear writer - start at the beginning, and write in order - but I will save those, especially if I think those originals might be useful in a later book or later scene in the same book.

Connie, I usually define a draft by its sense of completion. If when you're done, you think, "Okay, this is the story as it stands," then save it. And when you start making changes, you call it a new draft, and you can make little changes on that one to your heart's content until you decide, "Okay, this is the story as it stands."

It's funny cause I was looking at my documents and I found some stories I'd started years ago. They're only a few beginning paragraphs, and if I do pick them up, I'd like to save those few beginning paragraphs regardless of whether I change them completely in the very first draft, since I'm so far away from when I initially thought of the story. So that's a case where I would save something that's incomplete.