The Ten Doctors

This is a lot of fun.
Canon play, bringing the Eighth Doctor back into the fold, and lots of fun with old and new friends – all in a charming cartoony style. I LOVE this. Fanfic done right.
(via Progressive Ruin)

I like to hope that Verity Lambert would have found it hugely amusing…

Ooh, and while we’re on the subject, this was rather good, wasn’t it?

A creature of habit

My days are quite structured now.

I rise at 6AM, shower, have breakfast, peruse the headlines. At 6.45 Clare gets a cup of tea and a kiss. I am on my bike and cycling to the station by 6.55. I park up, snag a cappuccino no sugar from the AMT cart, and wander to platform 9 where the 7.10 to Paddington is waiting. I have a favourite seat, tucked right at the back in the corner, and because the train is almost empty at that point I have no problem getting it. 

This is my principal writing time of the day. In the hour it takes that slow train to reach London, I will have done the best part of a thousand words. 
At Paddington I take the underground into work. I no longer read the free paper as a way to kill the travel time. It annoys me too much. I read a book instead. Currently it’s Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn. It amuses me.
I then work all day.
On the train home, I will hopefully manage another 600 words. If I get on a train where I can’t get a seat, then that’s a half-hour wasted, so I pick my ride back with care. Once home, I will cook the evening meal, spend some agreeable downtime with Clare, before picking up the tail end of my wordcount and posting to the Nano forums. Then my brain will usually shut down. I will be in bed by 11PM.
Repeat until December 1st.
Ah, the creative life.   

Keeping count

You may have noticed a new widget in the sidebar, keeping track of the wordage I’m hammering out for NaNoWriMo. At time of writing, I’m just about back on track after a lazy weekend. But man, I’d forgotten how disciplined you had to be just to keep your head above water with this challenge.

It doesn’t help that there are people that have already passed the 50,000 word barrier. God, that’s demotivating…

The Ugly Truth about Radiohead

I am one of the 40-odd per cent of people (according to a slightly spurious poll published this week) who actually ponied up some cash for the new Radiohead album. And in fact I paid slightly over the average for it. Why? I’m a great believer in bands going their own way and getting their music to the fans without needing a middleman. The release of IN RAINBOWS seemed a worthy exercise, and one I wanted to support. It was money well spent, not simply for altruistic reasons (yeah, yeah, I know, support your local mulitmillionaire rock band) but because it’s the best thing they’ve done since Kid A. 

It’s interesting to read about the backlash/sneering/feigned surprise that yer average punter would decide not to pay any money at all for the music. These commentators clearly aren’t paying attention. It’s becoming an industry truism that “the album” is becoming little more than a loss leader for concert ticket and merchandise sales. For better or worse, people are out of the habit of paying for music. Why should they, when even twerps like me can configure a P2P client and snag stuff for free? But Radiohead are still laughing, as with no marketing campaign they’ve still managed to achieve 1.2 million hits in under a month, with a significant majority of visitors downloading the album.  That’s brand awareness for you. Free publicity? Priceless! Thanks for doing all our advertising for us, blogosphere!
It’ll be interesting to see if the physical release, out early next year, offers any extra value. This is a strategy that I’m paying close attention to for reasons of my own. Let’s put it like this. The Radiohead approach doesn’t just have to be applied to music. Just ask Cory Doctorow. Or for that matter, Michael Moorcock.
while we’re on the Creative Commons tip, let’s have a bit of a mashup, shall we?
 

Honey, I just accidentally created a Fox show.

Here’s some inspiring news – Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku are working together again, on a new SF show called Dollhouse.

Weird that Joss would be happy to work with Fox again after the way he was treated over Firefly. Still, anything that gets him back behind the idiot lantern is good news by me. Check his comments about the WGA strike too…

Aaaaand They’re Off!




November already? Blimey. It’s been a busy 2007, but it doesn’t seem like a year since I wrote the first words of what would eventually become Satan’s Schoolgirls. And now here we are again. It’s NaNoWriMo season, and I am again obsessed with word count and the ever encroaching deadline of December the 1st.  This year, I’m giving an old short story the respect it deserves, and opening the world it contained up to closer examination. The story is The Prisoner Of Soho. It’s got magick, gang warfare, kerosene powered mecha and espresso-fuelled madness drooling off every page. You will need this story in your life. Trust me, I’m a writer. 

You can find ongoing word-countyness and choice cuts from the story as it develops by simply clicking on the PARTICIPANT icon to your right at the top of the page.
Yeah, by the way. The only reason I’m hammering it out so quickly is cos I’m at home with flu at the moment. Little to do except sit and write.  Trust me, that’ll change. By month’s end I’ll be panicking about the deadline just like everyone else. 
Shouts to my writing buddies this year, Clive and Rob. Good luck, guys, and just remember. Keep cranking it out.  

Some Laughs, Some Tears, and L’il Viggo

After the craziness of last week, it’s been nice to take a few days to decompress and catch up on some sleep. However, we still ended up with a busy old weekend. 

Saturday afternoon saw us as Leicester Square. We’d booked up for a couple of screenings through the London Film Festival. Unfortunately, the one we wanted to see, Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There, sold out scary quickly. The films we chose to see instead were by no means poor replacements.
First up, Grace Is Gone, with John Cusack playing a house -husband who finds it impossible to cope when his wife, an Army sergeant, is killed while serving in Iraq. It’s been widely, and favourably reviewed, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The film’s rep as a tear-jerker is also well-founded. I certainly had something in my eye at the end. 
It’s very much an exploitation movie, though. By which I mean, you’re there for one purpose. Grace Is Gone wears it’s politics lightly, and the linear plot is engineered to take you to the place at the end of the film where you can have a bit of a cry about how awful it all is. Let’s put it like this. It’s a road movie. Once the characters reach their destination, there’s nowhere for them to go but back home to mourn what they’ve lost. The single bit of narrative tension comes from not knowing when Stanley, the John Cusack character, is going to tell his kids they’ve lost their mother. And it’s pretty obvious. 
A film like Grace Is Gone is all about characterisation, and this has it to spare. John Cusack is on top form as Stanley, a failed soldier and the bad cop of the mother/father team, who suddenly has to take on a lot more than he’s ready for. Spontaneity is almost impossibly hard for him, and this really shines through. It’s a long way removed from Lance in Say Anything, that’s fur shure. 

Shélan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, both first timers, get props for the incredible job they do at portraying Stanley’s daughters. Utterly believable. In short, I’d recommend it, if you don’t mind being gently but insistently herded towards an involuntary sniffling fit at the end.

Between times, Clare decided we should stand by the barriers at the premiere of I’m Not There, on the offchance that a certain Mr. Ledger should show up. No dice. she had to make do with Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw, which doesn’t seem like much for 90 minutes in the cold and damp. Still, I’m not a fan, so what do I know. 
Back in the warm, and we settled in to watch Talk To Me, Kasi Lemmons’ affectionate retelling of the life of Petey Greene, Washington DJ, comedian, and peoples activist in the 60’s. This is a straight up, unapologetic biopic, and a fine example of the form. It’s a bit disjointed, a bit obvious, but the tale is still told with a lot of verve. It’s also very funny, thanks to Don Cheadle’s pimp-roll of a performance as Petey Green. The show’s stolen by Taraji Henson, though, who is hilariously OTT as Green’s long-time girlfriend Vernell, big hair, big … lungs on display throughout. Chiwetel Ejiofor also deserves a shout as the solid foundation of the film, playing Petey’s manager Dewey Hughes, a man who stifles his own showbusiness dreams in the face of a greater talent. He, and director Kasi Lemmons were at the screening, where she described him as a national treasure. A sentiment the whole of the Odeon West End wholeheartedly agreed with.
We would have stayed for Q&A’s, but trains and the need to hit the sack before 1am took precedence. That’s the one pain about living in Reading. You can’t leave it too late to get home, and the trains that run any time after half 11 stop at every third lamp post. Slow trip back, but at least you can doze safe in the knowledge that the last stop is home.
Sunday. Miserable, cold and rainy. The perfect day to cocoon with the papers and Goldfinger as a matinee, but I had other plans. Back to The Square, to meet up with Clive and check out the new David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises.
Apart from the rotten title, this is a cracker. It’s written by Steve Knight, who also wrote Dirty Pretty Things, and it shares it’s focus on the grimy side of London life with this earlier film. The cast and direction are uniformly excellent, but most of the attention is going to be on Viggo Mortensen, who plays the Russian anti-hero Nicolai with a cold precision that’s beautifully chilling. Right up to the fight scene in an Islington steam room, where he’s set on by two Chechen assassins. He’s naked. Boy, is he ever naked. This scene will show up in best fight scene polls for years to come, I betcha.
After the movie. Clive and I retired to a nearby pub to plot the next month’s activities. He’s being foolish enough to join me in this year’s NaNoWriMo, 50,000 words in 30 days. Regular readers may recall I made the total last year, and loved the experience enough that it was a must for 2007 as well. This time, I’m going in with a reasonable idea of plot and character, which is a big step up from 06. Expect posts on the blog to be brief at best, although I may throw the odd scene in to break the tedium.
Now, if only I hadn’t knackered the letter N on my laptop…