itsallovernow | Dec. 17th, 2003

Blue Eyes is now 101,849 words and 170 pages long (Times 12 point font, single spaced). This is astonishing to me. And I'm estimating another 15-20 pages left. I'm so damned close. And too anyone who was traumatized yesterday, I will only say that the story is not over. These characters still have choices in front of them.

My mother called me at work yesterday to get my flight itinerary. She knew vaguely when I was coming in, but silly woman, she wanted specifics. Then says this to me as an afterthought, like a comfort.

My mother: "You know they caught Saddam, right?"

Me (having no idea where this statement came from): "Cause I was worried that he was hanging out at the Burbank airport."

She then burst into fits of giggles and I had to wait while she got herself under control. I know exactly where I got my stream of consciousness brain. Happily, I didn't inherit her paranoia. She thinks they're tapping the phones at work. I'm not saying she's wrong, but she's not selling state secrets.

And thank you Hotwire for allowing me to fly out of Burbank. That's like a little Christmas gift all by itself.

***
Yes, I'm admittedly jealous that people got to see the whole LOTR trilogy back to back. When we saw Fellowship in the theater, the credits rolled and my dad looked over at me, "Can't we just stay here? Surely we should be able to see them all at once."

He hasn't seen TTT yet because of the stroke, but come hell or high water, we're going to ROTK. He would have loved to sit there in the dark for 10 hours and just keep watching.

He'd let me play the records of The Hobbit and Return of the King over and over again when I was little, and while I think the movies are brilliant, and Ian McKellan has become the epitome of Gandalf, it still trips me up a little to not hear John Huston's voice booming out some of those phrases.

My dad read The Hobbit to me when I was a kid, got me a picture book with all of the text of the novel, but with pictures from the cartoon, and finally had to laminate it for me because I read it so frequently. I can still see where his good copies of the trilogy sat in our house, remember how the pages felt, the color of the ink on the spine of each one. The movies are fantastic, but the experience of going, of seeing them, it's so visceral, so tied to my childhood.

Sigh, I'm sure I'll be a mess at the end. Even thinking about the ending of ROTK makes me sniffle. I can't imagine the impact it will have for people pulled in by the movie, never having read the books.