The Writer's Life 1/3 - Returns

Last night PBS, channel 21 on Cablevision in NYC, ran the season four premiere of Sherlock. It was powerful. Martin Freeman - Dr. Watson - was outstanding in his key scene. Here are interesting facts about the series from mentalfloss.com: The 2010 debut on BBC One correlated with a sharp uptick in sales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's printed works. According to Nielsen BookScan, 57,000 copies sold in 2009, 88,000 in 2010... In the USA, eight minutes from each episode are snipped in order to make room for sponsor spots... The location shooting is done not in London but Cardiff, the capital of Wales... There have been only 10 episodes in nearly eight years. Sir Arthur died in 1930. Would he have expected his work to still be resonating so strongly? Amazing. Here's the stellar cast:

There are two interesting side by side articles about product returns in today's NY Post. Each year seven percent of goods are returned by customers, 25% of those after Christmas, to the tune of $260 billion. Two of the most returned items are ping pong tables, which take up a lot of space, and doll houses, many of which require sophisticated assembly.

Here's a shout-out to my alma mater, Western Michigan, despite its 24-16 loss to Wisconsin in the Cotton Bowl. The Broncos finished 13-1. Kudos to head coach P.J. Fleck, his staff, and the players... Alabama is the New England of college football. Clemson will have it hands full in the title game... I just checked out my standing in the ESPN bowl pool. With only one game remaining, I've gotten 83% right, which ranks me in the neighborhood of 141,000th. I thought I'd gotten about 50%, which shows my memory is not as good as it once was. The bowls are a tough pick - even without point lines - because many of the teams haven't played in a month.

Doctors in Vietnam have removed surgical forceps from a man who unknowingly carried them inside his body for 18 years. The guy, 54, said the forceps had probably been left in his abdomen in 1998 when he had emergency surgery after a traffic accident. Imagine how rich he would be if he lived in America. Lawyers would be calling him 24/7.

The floating book shop was rained out for the second straight day, which allowed me to proof a lot of pages in my next novel, Five Cents. So far, in 124 pages, I've found six errors. I will also make two changes, substituting "attired" for "dressed" because I use "dress" to end the sentence, and I will drop "tears in his eyes" from another, as I use it or a similar phrase too often in the narrative.

Vic's Short Works: http://tinyurl.com/jy55pzc

Vic's 5th Novel: http://tinyurl.com/okxkwh5Vic's 4th novel: tinyurl.com/bszwlxh

Vic's 3rd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3

Vic's Short Story on Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/k95k3nx
Vic's Short Story Collection: http://www.tiny.cc/Oycgb
Vic's 2nd Novel: http://tiny.cc/0iHLb Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/kx3d3uf
Vic's 1st Novel: http://tinyurl.com/l84h63j

Website: http://vicfortezzaauthor.my-free.website/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic's Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza