It amuses me to see Labour get their own back on the Conservatives' reactionary sniping over the past couple of years. I dislike it when the opposition, whoever they are, sit there and pass judgement on the current government's decisions, since I'm pretty sure they'd do a similar or worse thing in the same position, but damn is it good to hear Labour gleefully pointing out the flaws in the Coalition Government's budget choices. And I'm not even a Labour supporter, but I feel the Lib Dems, now they've been given a chance to make a difference, have flailed and compromised until they have lost sight of their goals completely, overwhelmed by the Conservatives. It's sad to be proven right about both the party I support and the party I mistrust.
On to less inflammatory things. 'Dark Harvest' by Norman Partridge is a teen horror book with aspirations to the style of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. In fact, its lyrical phrasing and rolling, elegant style is highly reminiscent of 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' by Bradbury. I found this novel in my local library, displayed face-out by some helpful librarian soul in the teen section. I'll admit, I'm dreadful for judging books by their covers, and this one is a corker. However, the novel itself entirely justifies it. 'Dark Harvest' tells the story of a little unnamed midwestern town with a sinister ritual: every year, an entity called the October Boy, a living pumpkin man, has sweets stuffed inside it and is given a knife. Its aim is to get to the church by midnight and the aim of every boy in town is to knock the stuffing out of the October Boy and feast on the sweets within, winning fame, money and a chance to get out of this sinkhole of a town.
The characters are a little generic and I must say I find it difficult to remember their names (hero is a teenage boy blah blah alcoholic father blah blah big dreams, small town) but they do fine for a story that is well-constructed and atmospheric, full of rustling cornfields and dark tarmac roads. The story is much less slow than 'Something Wicked...' (which I still haven't got through) but it defied my expectations. This is no slaughter-a-minute teen slasher movie in book form (unlike the film of the same name, which is unconnected as far as I can tell) but a dark meditation on small-town life (as seen in 'American Gothic', 'Something Wicked...', 'Stepford Wives' and most of Stephen King's canon) with really interesting overtones of ancient ritual. I can't talk about my interpretation because it would be a massive spoiler but there's more going on than meets the eye in this simple set-up.
Overall, it's not unlike a lot of other things in this vein, but 'Dark Harvest' is a highly enjoyable read and well-worth having a look at.
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Monday, 28 June 2010
'Def by Temptation'
Yesterday we made an Aztec (or Mayan, I'm rubbish at remembering which one's which!) Sacrifical Temple Cake. With gummy bears as the Aztecs and jelly babies as the helpless conquistadors being sacrificed. It was a delicious day :)
It was a follow up to our earlier project, the Gingerbread Fortress of Doom, but in this instance we actually made almost all the parts of the structure rather than using a gingerbread house kit.
So, while we were doing this, we had to have some rubbish film going on in the background because watching 'The Princess and the Frog' meant we didn't get the baking started till around 3:30 (it's a good film, though). One of our number of creative cooks has a wonderful ability to collect really random bad horror films, so we put on the dreadful 'Def [sic] by Temptation'. It has Samuel L. Jackson in, somehow.
I don't really feel I can review it properly as we didn't get through it, but 'Def by Temptation' (1990, Troma Films) concerns a succubus/vampire preying on lecherous gentlemen. My friend originally bought this (very cheaply) because it a) looked awful and b) had Samuel L. Jackson in. Well, we reckon Mr Jackson owed someone involved with this film some money, because he is in it for five minutes, during which time he shouts a blood and hellfire sermon, is threatened by the succubus and then dies in a car crash. It's...terrible. Like, really terrible. It's directed, written and produced by James Bond III, the main characters (James Bond, played by James Bond III) and Kadeem Hardison have massive chunks of completely irrelevant dialogue that presumably Mr Bond thinks is deep (including a section about how amazing New York is because "y'know, everyone's a character", kill me now).
The scenes where the succubus kills people are high on the softcore and disappointingly low on the gore. Cynthia Bond is very game as the 'temptress', but the reason we gave up on this film was that, despite having more murders per hour than a lot of modern films, it was unbearably boring. So we can't really put forward a reasoned judgement, and judging by the Wikipedia article on 'Def by Temptation', the pace presumably picks up after the bit we watched, in order to fit all the action described (which would have made it rather more exciting). The article reads like James Bond III himself may have written it, as I'm pretty sure the film itself wasn't that coherent. Essentially: disappointing, even as a bad film, due to the director/writer/producer's pretensions to something more than a trashy mess. Characters were introduced and murdered before we got to know them, and I honestly couldn't care less what happened to the ones who stay alive more than five minutes. The plot is surprisingly coherent, but I suspect that's only because there isn't much of it. Overall, avoid. Like 'Blue Blood', it has much promise as a trashy treat, but never comes close to living up to it. And unlike 'Blue Blood', 'Def by Temptation' doesn't even have Derek Jacobi wrapped in a tennis net and sacrificed by Satanists (note that the Wikipedia article on 'Blue Blood' refers to an entirely different, and probably better film).
It was a follow up to our earlier project, the Gingerbread Fortress of Doom, but in this instance we actually made almost all the parts of the structure rather than using a gingerbread house kit.
So, while we were doing this, we had to have some rubbish film going on in the background because watching 'The Princess and the Frog' meant we didn't get the baking started till around 3:30 (it's a good film, though). One of our number of creative cooks has a wonderful ability to collect really random bad horror films, so we put on the dreadful 'Def [sic] by Temptation'. It has Samuel L. Jackson in, somehow.
I don't really feel I can review it properly as we didn't get through it, but 'Def by Temptation' (1990, Troma Films) concerns a succubus/vampire preying on lecherous gentlemen. My friend originally bought this (very cheaply) because it a) looked awful and b) had Samuel L. Jackson in. Well, we reckon Mr Jackson owed someone involved with this film some money, because he is in it for five minutes, during which time he shouts a blood and hellfire sermon, is threatened by the succubus and then dies in a car crash. It's...terrible. Like, really terrible. It's directed, written and produced by James Bond III, the main characters (James Bond, played by James Bond III) and Kadeem Hardison have massive chunks of completely irrelevant dialogue that presumably Mr Bond thinks is deep (including a section about how amazing New York is because "y'know, everyone's a character", kill me now).
The scenes where the succubus kills people are high on the softcore and disappointingly low on the gore. Cynthia Bond is very game as the 'temptress', but the reason we gave up on this film was that, despite having more murders per hour than a lot of modern films, it was unbearably boring. So we can't really put forward a reasoned judgement, and judging by the Wikipedia article on 'Def by Temptation', the pace presumably picks up after the bit we watched, in order to fit all the action described (which would have made it rather more exciting). The article reads like James Bond III himself may have written it, as I'm pretty sure the film itself wasn't that coherent. Essentially: disappointing, even as a bad film, due to the director/writer/producer's pretensions to something more than a trashy mess. Characters were introduced and murdered before we got to know them, and I honestly couldn't care less what happened to the ones who stay alive more than five minutes. The plot is surprisingly coherent, but I suspect that's only because there isn't much of it. Overall, avoid. Like 'Blue Blood', it has much promise as a trashy treat, but never comes close to living up to it. And unlike 'Blue Blood', 'Def by Temptation' doesn't even have Derek Jacobi wrapped in a tennis net and sacrificed by Satanists (note that the Wikipedia article on 'Blue Blood' refers to an entirely different, and probably better film).
Friday, 25 June 2010
Thoughts on editing
You know, it might seem like a trivial point, but people who write books on writing seem to regard editing as some magical process that just happens. After all, once you've written a whole novel, how hard can it be to draft it?
Well, it turns out it can be pretty hard. Because you have to reread your work, which can be unpleasant at the best of times. Of course you'll come across sections where you think "Oh, the cleverness of me!", but for the most part, it will be cringeworthy. Because, apparently, as all the books tell me, the first draft of every novel ever written was bad. I don't believe them. There's no way it could be as bad as mine.
At some point I need to post up a list of useful resources on writing, for myself as much as anyone else (I always forget what that website was called, or whether that book was any good). One that would be up there is the NaNoWriMo website, specifically for its pep talks. They are almost exclusively on writing the novel rather than editing it, but Katharine Paterson's one mentions editing, comparing it to smoothing and carving mined granite (from a speech prepared for schoolkids in a town with a granite-mining industry, so it was a metaphor they understood). At the time I thought it was a fairly obvious way of expressing the idea, but after spending yesterday evening editing, I think I understand it a lot better. Paterson actually provides a useful paradigm for considering the difficulties of editing.
See, I think what defeats me in editing (and I do avoid it where possible, where it used to be my favourite part of the process) is that nobody mentions that once you've got your words down on paper, that's just the first part of the slog. The writing itself is horribly difficult at times, but taking part in something like NaNoWriMo can really help. That's just false economy, though: when you've done the mad rush of NaNo, you've wept and laughed and banged your head on the desk, and you've been lucky or detemined enough to make it to 50,000 words, you're ready to dive right into editing. The site (and many participants) advise against doing that, as leaving it to stew for a couple of months is always good. However, if you're anything like me, when you've left it for a couple of months and are ready and raring to edit, you fish the manuscript out from its drawer, open it up, red pen at the ready and...promptly become disheartened. Because all that time you saved in NaNo by shutting off your inner editor and letting the words flow as they would, all those hours just pressing on, not caring if what you wrote was rubbish, the race to get finished - all that means that editing takes twice as long, because you have to do a draft just to make it readable first.
I think NaNo is a great thing and I certainly wouldn't have one of my now favourite stories around if I hadn't taken part, but trying to edit it is like chipping slowly away at an ugly, rough bit of granite. You have to trust that there's a shape in there to be found, and chip away at the parts until you find it. It's horrible, tough work, and you have to cut off promising bits of stone and sometimes you have to just close your eyes and make a drastic change, risking ruining it completely on the offchance you'll make it better. Then comes the smoothing and the prettifying, but if you've not been sketching out the shape as you go along, you'll have a lot more work to do come the editing phase. Luckily for us writers as opposed to stone cutters, we have a nice handy 'undo' button if everything goes wrong, like the equivalent of being able to rewind time and stick a bit of stone back on. But, if you keep on chipping away, even if there doesn't seem to be a beautiful statue inside this rough bit of stone, you eventually start to see the curves, and maybe they'll build up to something beautiful. I suppose we just all have to trust to our skill that we can effectively make art from a block of stone.
Well, it turns out it can be pretty hard. Because you have to reread your work, which can be unpleasant at the best of times. Of course you'll come across sections where you think "Oh, the cleverness of me!", but for the most part, it will be cringeworthy. Because, apparently, as all the books tell me, the first draft of every novel ever written was bad. I don't believe them. There's no way it could be as bad as mine.
At some point I need to post up a list of useful resources on writing, for myself as much as anyone else (I always forget what that website was called, or whether that book was any good). One that would be up there is the NaNoWriMo website, specifically for its pep talks. They are almost exclusively on writing the novel rather than editing it, but Katharine Paterson's one mentions editing, comparing it to smoothing and carving mined granite (from a speech prepared for schoolkids in a town with a granite-mining industry, so it was a metaphor they understood). At the time I thought it was a fairly obvious way of expressing the idea, but after spending yesterday evening editing, I think I understand it a lot better. Paterson actually provides a useful paradigm for considering the difficulties of editing.
See, I think what defeats me in editing (and I do avoid it where possible, where it used to be my favourite part of the process) is that nobody mentions that once you've got your words down on paper, that's just the first part of the slog. The writing itself is horribly difficult at times, but taking part in something like NaNoWriMo can really help. That's just false economy, though: when you've done the mad rush of NaNo, you've wept and laughed and banged your head on the desk, and you've been lucky or detemined enough to make it to 50,000 words, you're ready to dive right into editing. The site (and many participants) advise against doing that, as leaving it to stew for a couple of months is always good. However, if you're anything like me, when you've left it for a couple of months and are ready and raring to edit, you fish the manuscript out from its drawer, open it up, red pen at the ready and...promptly become disheartened. Because all that time you saved in NaNo by shutting off your inner editor and letting the words flow as they would, all those hours just pressing on, not caring if what you wrote was rubbish, the race to get finished - all that means that editing takes twice as long, because you have to do a draft just to make it readable first.
I think NaNo is a great thing and I certainly wouldn't have one of my now favourite stories around if I hadn't taken part, but trying to edit it is like chipping slowly away at an ugly, rough bit of granite. You have to trust that there's a shape in there to be found, and chip away at the parts until you find it. It's horrible, tough work, and you have to cut off promising bits of stone and sometimes you have to just close your eyes and make a drastic change, risking ruining it completely on the offchance you'll make it better. Then comes the smoothing and the prettifying, but if you've not been sketching out the shape as you go along, you'll have a lot more work to do come the editing phase. Luckily for us writers as opposed to stone cutters, we have a nice handy 'undo' button if everything goes wrong, like the equivalent of being able to rewind time and stick a bit of stone back on. But, if you keep on chipping away, even if there doesn't seem to be a beautiful statue inside this rough bit of stone, you eventually start to see the curves, and maybe they'll build up to something beautiful. I suppose we just all have to trust to our skill that we can effectively make art from a block of stone.
This week...#2
Monday: I did not write because I was working full time.
Tuesday: I did not write because I was running about trying to tidy up before my mum visited.
Wednesday: I did not write because, again, I was working full time. However, I also forgot to go to a staff meeting in the evening, so what was I doing instead of writing in that time? Rewatching Babylon 5, that's what.
Thursday: I did not write but I did edit. I got a new netbook, after having been without a working laptop for quite a while, and now I have a tiny little computer that I have already started working with. The downside? It's got Windows 7 Starter Edition installed, which means I can't put my favourite desktop wallpaper up, since you can't change the wallpaper on Windows 7 Starter. So no Castiel to inspire me :(
Friday: The day is yet young, and I intend to try and fit some writing or editing in, but my day is pretty goddamn full. Still, at least I'm champing at the bit. Sigh.
Saturday: Work/taking advantage of mum's car to go shopping. However, hopefully I will have time to write in the evening. I might be too tired.
Sunday: Will probably not write as I am seeing friends and we will be baking things that man was not meant to bake, hopefully to rival the Battle for the Gingerbread Doom Fortress. Still, a wonderful day will no doubt be had by all.
Tuesday: I did not write because I was running about trying to tidy up before my mum visited.
Wednesday: I did not write because, again, I was working full time. However, I also forgot to go to a staff meeting in the evening, so what was I doing instead of writing in that time? Rewatching Babylon 5, that's what.
Thursday: I did not write but I did edit. I got a new netbook, after having been without a working laptop for quite a while, and now I have a tiny little computer that I have already started working with. The downside? It's got Windows 7 Starter Edition installed, which means I can't put my favourite desktop wallpaper up, since you can't change the wallpaper on Windows 7 Starter. So no Castiel to inspire me :(
Friday: The day is yet young, and I intend to try and fit some writing or editing in, but my day is pretty goddamn full. Still, at least I'm champing at the bit. Sigh.
Saturday: Work/taking advantage of mum's car to go shopping. However, hopefully I will have time to write in the evening. I might be too tired.
Sunday: Will probably not write as I am seeing friends and we will be baking things that man was not meant to bake, hopefully to rival the Battle for the Gingerbread Doom Fortress. Still, a wonderful day will no doubt be had by all.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
This week...#1
This week
...I didn't write on Sunday because I was recovering from work on Saturday. And because it was my one day off and I'd damn well do as I pleased with it. So I played Patrician III all day, noted some pleasing but not immediately obvious improvements upon Patrician II and accrued vast amounts of money. Then lost the game while I was helping Robin put up a wardrobe. So started a new one. I wouldn't have been able to write anyway: too many distractions.
...I didn't write on Monday because I got home from work and decided to read a Let's Play of Resident Evil for a day, and then play some Spore.
...I didn't write on Tuesday because I was totally going to and then Robin e-mailed me at work and said I had to go to pick up some post from our Housing Agency and then I shopped a bit since I was in town anyway and then there was no point starting to write since we had to go out to a game.
...this afternoon I shall not write because I have to plan a game I'm running at short notice tonight.
...tomorrow I probably will not write because I'll come home and there'll be a game I have a hankering to play or something important I have to do.
...on Friday I probably will not write because I don't have a working laptop currently, so honestly it's a bother trying to write, and I don't feel like writing longhand, and our PC only has Staroffice or something weird like that on it. I hate writing on Staroffice.
...on Saturday I'm going to be working until the evening. Then there's statting to be done for a livegame.
...on Sunday I'm gaming in Cambridge all day. It's not something I really want to go along to, but I usually end up going anyway. I'd probably just play computer games all day if I didn't go.
These are the myriad reasons I don't write. Maybe by posting them publicly I will shame myself into writing, just so I have something to report. Tune in next week for full-time work week fun!
P.S. I honestly believe that Monday is the first day of the week. But Sunday was relevant.
...I didn't write on Sunday because I was recovering from work on Saturday. And because it was my one day off and I'd damn well do as I pleased with it. So I played Patrician III all day, noted some pleasing but not immediately obvious improvements upon Patrician II and accrued vast amounts of money. Then lost the game while I was helping Robin put up a wardrobe. So started a new one. I wouldn't have been able to write anyway: too many distractions.
...I didn't write on Monday because I got home from work and decided to read a Let's Play of Resident Evil for a day, and then play some Spore.
...I didn't write on Tuesday because I was totally going to and then Robin e-mailed me at work and said I had to go to pick up some post from our Housing Agency and then I shopped a bit since I was in town anyway and then there was no point starting to write since we had to go out to a game.
...this afternoon I shall not write because I have to plan a game I'm running at short notice tonight.
...tomorrow I probably will not write because I'll come home and there'll be a game I have a hankering to play or something important I have to do.
...on Friday I probably will not write because I don't have a working laptop currently, so honestly it's a bother trying to write, and I don't feel like writing longhand, and our PC only has Staroffice or something weird like that on it. I hate writing on Staroffice.
...on Saturday I'm going to be working until the evening. Then there's statting to be done for a livegame.
...on Sunday I'm gaming in Cambridge all day. It's not something I really want to go along to, but I usually end up going anyway. I'd probably just play computer games all day if I didn't go.
These are the myriad reasons I don't write. Maybe by posting them publicly I will shame myself into writing, just so I have something to report. Tune in next week for full-time work week fun!
P.S. I honestly believe that Monday is the first day of the week. But Sunday was relevant.
Thursday, 10 June 2010
Things I am enjoying right now
The Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth Nix. The first one, 'Mister Monday' is brilliant, easily as good (for me) as 'Sabriel', and the teaser for the second, 'Grim Tuesday' in the back has made me champ at the bit to read it. Unlike 'Sabriel', 'Mister Monday' reminds me primarily of vintage Diana Wynne Jones, specifically 'The Lives of Christopher Chant', one of my favourite of her books. The level of detail and vivid realisation of the setting and characters is incredible in 'Mister Monday', and it's rare to find something which takes me so completely on a mental journey to places I'd never imagined. It's like reverting to childhood, and I want to explore further.
'Graceling' by Kristin Cashore. My friends love her writing and I've become quite partial to her blog, This Is My Secret, but now I've taken the plunge and started reading 'Graceling', I see what all the fuss is about. The main thing that struck me (as has been commented on by one of my friends in her blog) was that Cashore has created a character who, by all rights, should be a Mary Sue. She's a tough, confident woman who's niece to a nasty king, has different coloured eyes and a magical ability which makes her literally more kickass than everybody else. She's pretty but doesn't wear dresses and doesn't want to marry all of the lords her uncle puts before her as suitors. She has a strange attraction for an elf-a-like (called Lienid in this) with one eye gold and the other silver and has at least two if not three men fancying her, as well as being the leader of a rebel group who help the helpless. But Katsa is just incredibly likeable as a character. Instead of being a Bitch Sue, she's genuinely misanthropic and cynical for a very good reason - her cruel uncle has her torture and kill folk for his amusement and everybody is afraid of her. Instead of her powers making her a Godmode Sue, they're really not very nice and actually cause her to be a feared and hated figure rather than people looking at her in awe. Her love interest (I'm assuming that's what he is) is called Po, which is an awesomely silly nickname but he is an extremely nice fellow, and the only suitor we've actually seen so far in the book (I'm not hugely far through) isn't a weak idiot to make her one true love seem more wonderful and perfect but is actually smart and cool.
'Red Dead Redemption' is...well, it's like 'Grand Theft Auto IV' with the boring bits surgically removed, crossed with 'Sid Meier's Pirates' and then given cowboys. It's well-made, fun and engaging. It's got the charm of having your fearless bounty hunter dismount from his wild ride across the plains to pick some flowers. It's got bizarre and unique characters with special kinds of '-philia' (Seth, as just one example), the horse riding is amazing and soooo much easier than driving a car in any game ever, the combat system is something even I can understand and frankly it's just all kinds of fun. I think it was made for a better player than me, though. I keep dying, like all over the place. And while I've found the one game where I don't utterly suck at race sections, I was grateful of the option to skip over them when I failed enough times the game took pity on me. There are some bizarre glitches: at one point all the horse-drawn vehicles were standing in place vibrating with a weird noise. Like, the horses and driver and everything were just bouncing up and down in place. Hilarious. Then my favourite horse got eaten by a cougar and I haven't been able to catch another of the same kind. So now I have a nice white horsey instead, though I really want either a black one or a pearly beige one. I really really wish you could keep more than one horse, like stable them somewhere, since inevitably just as I get a nice one, it'll get shot, eaten by some of the wildlife that is constantly trying to kill you, or buck me off and disappear into the wild blue yonder. Still, lassoing and breaking horses is ridiculous fun, so I don't object too much, I can just never find the kinds I want when I go looking. The game does keep you constantly supplied with horses, btw, they're just usually the rubbish kind that have average speed. So, froth finished on that one.
'Sherlock Holmes' (can't remember what all the series are called). My mum got me the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series in its entirety for my birthday, and goddamn are they good. I'd forgotten how perfect Brett is as Holmes. Much wuv.
'Graceling' by Kristin Cashore. My friends love her writing and I've become quite partial to her blog, This Is My Secret, but now I've taken the plunge and started reading 'Graceling', I see what all the fuss is about. The main thing that struck me (as has been commented on by one of my friends in her blog) was that Cashore has created a character who, by all rights, should be a Mary Sue. She's a tough, confident woman who's niece to a nasty king, has different coloured eyes and a magical ability which makes her literally more kickass than everybody else. She's pretty but doesn't wear dresses and doesn't want to marry all of the lords her uncle puts before her as suitors. She has a strange attraction for an elf-a-like (called Lienid in this) with one eye gold and the other silver and has at least two if not three men fancying her, as well as being the leader of a rebel group who help the helpless. But Katsa is just incredibly likeable as a character. Instead of being a Bitch Sue, she's genuinely misanthropic and cynical for a very good reason - her cruel uncle has her torture and kill folk for his amusement and everybody is afraid of her. Instead of her powers making her a Godmode Sue, they're really not very nice and actually cause her to be a feared and hated figure rather than people looking at her in awe. Her love interest (I'm assuming that's what he is) is called Po, which is an awesomely silly nickname but he is an extremely nice fellow, and the only suitor we've actually seen so far in the book (I'm not hugely far through) isn't a weak idiot to make her one true love seem more wonderful and perfect but is actually smart and cool.
'Red Dead Redemption' is...well, it's like 'Grand Theft Auto IV' with the boring bits surgically removed, crossed with 'Sid Meier's Pirates' and then given cowboys. It's well-made, fun and engaging. It's got the charm of having your fearless bounty hunter dismount from his wild ride across the plains to pick some flowers. It's got bizarre and unique characters with special kinds of '-philia' (Seth, as just one example), the horse riding is amazing and soooo much easier than driving a car in any game ever, the combat system is something even I can understand and frankly it's just all kinds of fun. I think it was made for a better player than me, though. I keep dying, like all over the place. And while I've found the one game where I don't utterly suck at race sections, I was grateful of the option to skip over them when I failed enough times the game took pity on me. There are some bizarre glitches: at one point all the horse-drawn vehicles were standing in place vibrating with a weird noise. Like, the horses and driver and everything were just bouncing up and down in place. Hilarious. Then my favourite horse got eaten by a cougar and I haven't been able to catch another of the same kind. So now I have a nice white horsey instead, though I really want either a black one or a pearly beige one. I really really wish you could keep more than one horse, like stable them somewhere, since inevitably just as I get a nice one, it'll get shot, eaten by some of the wildlife that is constantly trying to kill you, or buck me off and disappear into the wild blue yonder. Still, lassoing and breaking horses is ridiculous fun, so I don't object too much, I can just never find the kinds I want when I go looking. The game does keep you constantly supplied with horses, btw, they're just usually the rubbish kind that have average speed. So, froth finished on that one.
'Sherlock Holmes' (can't remember what all the series are called). My mum got me the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series in its entirety for my birthday, and goddamn are they good. I'd forgotten how perfect Brett is as Holmes. Much wuv.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings...
Let's discuss the weather.
It's raining today. Started off a bit grey and gloomy, but quickly developed into heavy, pregnant clouds and now the window before me is peppered with light dashes of rain, rapidly getting more frequent. This is only interesting (this being England, after all) because the last couple of weeks have been positively Mediterranean. The sun was out, the air was humid and the ice cream cart was out near where I work. Of course, this meant I scurried from shade to shade and watched the summer people drift by lazily in their sunglass- and sandal-clad groups to enjoy the beautiful (and rare) weather. Now the air is soft and humid and the light is grey with nary a silver lining in sight. And somehow I feel better, more like writing. I actually find that when it's grey and rainy, properly rainy, with misty fields and dripping eaves and the smell of wet leaves and damp earth (or concrete), the weather tickles at my mind, makes me jittery and ready to be creative. Inspiration scratches round the edges of my consciousness and snuffles at my free time, reminding me every so often that it would be fun to do some writing, wouldn't it?
Whereas in the sun, I am productive in real world ways, involving unpacking some of the boxes of the move, or going into town. I am also unproductive in time-wasting ways, playing 'Red Dead Redemption' being this week's example. The problem is, I have a million and one non-writing and non-gaming things to be doing that need to be done really quite urgently, but instead, that dozy little bit of my brain that likes to write has woken up and wants to be going. Perhaps the important things I have to do can wait for a day...
It's raining today. Started off a bit grey and gloomy, but quickly developed into heavy, pregnant clouds and now the window before me is peppered with light dashes of rain, rapidly getting more frequent. This is only interesting (this being England, after all) because the last couple of weeks have been positively Mediterranean. The sun was out, the air was humid and the ice cream cart was out near where I work. Of course, this meant I scurried from shade to shade and watched the summer people drift by lazily in their sunglass- and sandal-clad groups to enjoy the beautiful (and rare) weather. Now the air is soft and humid and the light is grey with nary a silver lining in sight. And somehow I feel better, more like writing. I actually find that when it's grey and rainy, properly rainy, with misty fields and dripping eaves and the smell of wet leaves and damp earth (or concrete), the weather tickles at my mind, makes me jittery and ready to be creative. Inspiration scratches round the edges of my consciousness and snuffles at my free time, reminding me every so often that it would be fun to do some writing, wouldn't it?
Whereas in the sun, I am productive in real world ways, involving unpacking some of the boxes of the move, or going into town. I am also unproductive in time-wasting ways, playing 'Red Dead Redemption' being this week's example. The problem is, I have a million and one non-writing and non-gaming things to be doing that need to be done really quite urgently, but instead, that dozy little bit of my brain that likes to write has woken up and wants to be going. Perhaps the important things I have to do can wait for a day...
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