Sunday, January 13, 2013

Various News and Musings


Wow. The Perry sale at Amazon.com the past week was a smashing success! I knew it would be, but I don’t think I expected so many of the volumes to sell so well they would go out of immediate stock and take several weeks to ship. Hopefully that has gotten Amazon’s attention. Perry has been one of the best-sellers in their DVD departments the past few days. Now if they would just realize how many people would pounce if they’d bring the price of the second half of season 8 into a reasonable range! I don’t understand what the problem is and why it has to be so expensive. People are still mad, insisting they won’t buy it on Amazon and that they’ve found it cheaper elsewhere. I can’t buy it on Amazon either, not at their price.

Also, long ago I got a giggle out of the fact that Richard Anderson plays a character named Ray Norman on The New Perry Mason, when Wesley Lau plays a character of the exact same name on Cannon. (And I write for Wesley’s Ray Norman in a Wild Wild West time-travel story that includes Perry characters.) I idly wondered if the scripts were written by the same person, since it seems odd for that name to appear twice in two shows around the same time period.

I finally got around to looking it up. And guess what? It really is the same writer! Robert W. Lenski did both The Telltale Trunk for The New Perry Mason and Hear No Evil for Cannon. I am finding this hilarious. I really expected it to just be a weird coincidence and that the writers would be different. But with this information, I’d say that either Mr. Lenski really liked the name Ray Norman or he was just bored or in a hurry and couldn’t think of another name. Or he even forgot he had used it recently.



Last night I made a few updates to that Perry website I work on now and then. (http://sites.google.com/site/perrymasoncontinued/) I have been getting story inspiration for the Perry mystery scheduled to come after The Malevolent Mugging. I’d really like to try it out, both because the ideas are so strong and because I think and hope it might be fairly popular, with Della in a central role. (Also present would be Gene Torg and Pearl Chute from The Bogus Books.)

But at the same time I’m concerned about trying to juggle two Perry mysteries at once (and the Wild Wild West story). If the new one takes off, updates for The Malevolent Mugging will come even less frequently. If I wait to finish it first, however, I’m nowhere near the end and I might start rushing it. I know for a fact that The Malevolent Mugging has readers, even if they’re often quiet, so I don’t want to disappoint them by having this story take even longer to finish. Or by rushing it and lessening the quality.

But when inspiration calls, it’s hard to make it be silent. Maybe the best thing to do is to just start trying to write the first bit and see what happens. Tentatively the story is to be called The Nefarious Necklace (or something similar) and involves plot ideas both from me and from a reviewer and friend.

And NPR’s Perry-related piece involving Hamilton is this Tuesday, the 15th, on their Morning Edition show! If you haven’t already, look for your local affiliate or plan to listen online.

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