Yay!

So I took Crystal's advice and bought the new copy of the Riptide season this morning. I feel perfectly happy about that; I had no other immediate purchasing plans, although there are other things I want to get soon. I looked up an episode guide for season 3 and some of the other episodes sound like a lot of fun too. And getting to own that awesome Chrissy episode ... paradise. It would be neat if the show is always that fun and I could really get into it. I swear, the episode I watched was pretty much exactly like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys: the set-up, cast of characters, setting, suspicion being thrown on an innocent party.... I've honestly never watched anything so much like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, except of course, for the 1970s Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. And the Riptide episode felt more like the books than the Nancy and Hardys' TV series did.

I also watched The Hawaiian Headache in the morning, as I decided to try again to revive the fic and thought maybe I should try to watch that mess of an episode all the way through before I did. I'm still just as confused by it as before and still just as convinced that Dutch is not the murderer. This time when I read my story through, the inspiration flowed again and I just got chapter 4 up about an hour ago. I also tweaked a few things in previous chapters, as I had stupidly not realized that Jim Rockford wouldn't be licensed to practice in Hawaii when I wrote those chapters. I did learn that he could legally work with a licensed detective in Hawaii as an assistant, so I'm going to have Lance White set up shop in Hawaii and Jim can work with him. That will give me the chance to write for that hilarious goody-two-shoes screwball. Naturally he'll have to meet Ginger and Lou, as I depicted in one of my Tumblr webcomics. And I'll probably have the fruit hat incident in the story too, inspired by a conversation with Ladyamberjo and subsequently drawn into another of the webcomic installments.

I'm trying to decide what to do for the climax, as I want some Dutch hurt/comfort. I have a scene I wrote where he shoots a sniper to save his wife and then is shot in the back by another sniper, but I don't know if I'll go with that for sure. It sounds too similar to what happened to Roger Bard in the Mannix fic. Other possibilities are that Dutch is fighting a bad guy and they fall and disappear and Dutch is presumed dead before staggering back up, or that he doesn't disappear in the fall and his wife goes down to him, heartbroken and thinking he's dead, but then he revives.

I'm sure I'll figure it out by the time the scene comes around.