Et In Arcadia Ego

Another post in my Keeping Friend 3 Distracted From Those Cruel, Cruel Coursework Words series. I've tried to preset them so they continue to post one a day, even when I'm on holiday, so it'll be like I've never left my desk...

Hurrah, come one, come all: it's Haunted Mansion day!

From the moment you step out of the Florida heat into that unnaturally chilled building - there's the Dorian Gray portrait, that rots from a young man to a corpse before your very eyes, just to walk past en route to the real ride. They play the same music as always, which I can still hear, and you see the last bit of light from the door, and are lead by a icy host into the lift - "please move yourselves into the dead centre of the room" - and then the paintings start to change...

...if ever I die - and on balance, it seems likely - please bury me under a Haunted-Mansion-style gravestone, with an awful awful pun on it. I get myself into this mood every few weeks - terrifying, when you think about it. It's starting to get ridiculous. But this time, I blame Guillermo del Toro - for he has announced he is making a new movie based on the ride! Hurrah - joy, joy, joy! I've actually been intending to see the awful-Eddie-Murphy one anyway: such is my love.

Ooooh, hang on dear reader - I'm going to see if I can find my pop-up book!

[one breakfast later]

No luck. I hope it hasn't been thrown away. The Mansion obsession is a recent development, so it seems likely. In other related news - do I really need a Doombuggy clock? I may try to make one.

In todays issue: Shopping and Library trip; "Look to Windward" review; discussion of allegory; The Film Project Google Is Advertising Everywhere It Owns i.e. Everywhere; Update on B7 Updates

I - Shopping and Library trip

Went shopping this morning, and accidentally stumbled across a sale.

I should add I have been swamped with vanity all week. I've started doing victory rolls for my job; they require time and effort to both create and maintain. For the first time in my life, I've actually worried about my hair for more than ten minutes a day. It's a curious experience, and very irritating; but like all things, a nice place to visit, though you wouldn't want to live there.
I love my new hairstyle, and have been leaving the fringe roll in even while not at work.

Anyway, in a rare show of actually buying new clothes from a mainstream store, I got myself a brilliant white lace shirt, and am the happiest dandy in town; I'm amazed I hadn't done something like this sooner, considering the heavyweight of frilly gents in my memory. I also got a little knitted dress, which is close to my dream-dress as worn by Jo in The Three Doctors (sorry, no photos). Though now I think about it, and my penchant for adopting the style of whoever is most in my brain, and how plain and grey and 80s it is, and how ludicrously huge the sleeves are...

I wonder if I haven't just committed my first Avon-related fashion decision. I know I do this all the time for people I adore - this just seems especially low.

The highlight for me was the library. Going to the library fufils all the fun of shopping - the thrill of the chase, the joy of something new, the thrill of posession - with none of the burdens - i.e. spending, and wondering whether your house can handle the crap-tonneage. Consequently, I always max out my card allowance - which today was 12:

• "Appointment with Venus" (DVD) - interesting! All about the Occupation, filmed in Guernsey. David Niven stars - as does my grandfather, who was a College Cadet at the time and drafted in to play spare Nazis or something.
• "Stalag 17" (DVD) - POW movie, all about manly men, stoicism and betrayal. Slashy, so LJ tells me.
  
• "Solaris" (DVD) - the remake of this movie was one of the most incredible experiences. Technically interesting, haunting and emotional, thematically rich and hyperbole inducing. When I started frothing about it online, I was barraged by people saying - "oh, but that's nothing compared to the original!". If they're right, then I should be in for a favourites-list rearranging treat.
  
• The Brothers Karamasov (Fydor Dostoyevsky), England Made Me (Graham Greene), Mr Pye (Mervyn Peake). Going on holiday next week to a house in the south of France. It's in the middle of nowhere, and people keep assuring me it will be tedium inducing - hence me glomming up books. I'll probably take the first two - I've tried reading the last before, and it didn't stick. There's something nice and clear about old fashioned books that lends them well to the bittiness of holidays, which in their turn provide the sort of desperate atmosphere required to get to the end of any novel heavier than a chichiwawa. I read Crime and Punishment in a French caravan. Quite a mistake - that book is excellent and intense, and I remember feeling intensely queasy. Perhaps that's why the "holiday novel" is so appealing - they are deliberately bad, because reading good books are a distraction...
• Fifty Key Television Programmes - a media studies textbook of sorts, listing contexts and questions. I already have the impression that I'll already know everything it has to say about any show I'm a fan of (Doctor Who, The Prisoner, Queer as Folk, Brass Eye and Twin Peaks are among those listed). But maybe not, and it might give me some new ideas.
• Postmodernism - incredible. It's a little illustrated guide, and before it gets to postmodernism it's describing all the other art movements it is post-. I suddenly understand art of all kinds in a deeper way than I ever have. It's amazing how small a nudge I need to start thinking critically about painting. Vincent and the Doctor was enough to point out what Mr Gogh was trying to achieve; this book has done the same for every major art movement since 1900. Goodness knows why I picked it up, but I'm glad...
• The Indigo Children - oh yes! Because the longer I have it out, the longer other people can't. I'll update you with juicy extracts, just as I will for...
• How to Survive 2012: Tactics and Survival Places for the Coming Pole Shift. I'd ask "WHO ON EARTH FUNDS THESE NUTJOBS?", but it's clear the answer is: Guernsey Library. Case closed...
• And my new favourite book - A Hairdresser's Guide To Period Styles, with tutorials from Prehistory right up to 1990s-Rachel hair. My poor hair has had a pretty free ride so far; it's about to get the whole flush of teenage vanity in one or two frenetic weeks as I attempt a decade a day. I'm particularly excited about the French Aristocrat.
  

II -Look to Windward" review (spoiler-free)

I finished Look to Windward, but now I wonder (with my habit for forgetting blogs) if I ever told you about it in the first place? It's by Iain M. Banks, the man who wrote my once-favourite book Use of Weapons. I can't remember much about it, beside Staberinde, the chair, and enjoying it all very much. I never read one of his books since, because they are dense and I'm easily distracted. It was sheer force of will - and four days left to my own devices at work - which pulled me through.

Mr Banks is a sci-fi genius. He creates these technologically advanced worlds packed with ideas which are just part of the scenery. This one has behemothaus, which are kinda like starwhales with whole ecosystems living on their backs. Lesser authors would have written a book just about that. It makes his universe feel complete, and real; and I love the idea that for all these changes, human problems will stay the same - love, death. And his depiction of new social mores and expectations are just as thorough. His books are worth reading purely for the spaceship names, and, bless it, Wikipedia's got a list of the lot. Some favourites are Resistance is Character Forming, Very Little Gravitas Indeed and Nuisance Value.

I have some misgivings about the end, however. I read almost up to the climax, and I cared so darn intensely that I chose sleep over ending it. I had fantastic dreams in which I explored every possibility, watched it all go horribly wrong and then gave it a happy ending: I was that worried. It rather went pfut and fizzled when I read it again in the morning. Still, good up until the point I thought "...oh, that's it then?".

I'm still a little embarassed at my mind, however. The novel started in the first person, with a soldier in a battle trying to protect someone in a trench. On this basis, I assumed the narrator was male - including after the revelation that the second character was in fact the husband of the first. It was several chapters later, from the perspective of this wretched husband, that we established that actually our first narrator had been female - and I'd totally assumed it was a gay man.

I'm sure both parts of this suggest interest things about my priorities, prejudices and expectations.

Still, Banks will do that irritating modern novel thing of showing dialogue for ages but not clearly attributing it to any characters, so once you work out what's going on you have to go back and read it again with them in mind. Often, it's a deliberate point - and are there some convos in Windward which are never clearly attributed to anyone - but I hate it because then I get confused and make big, basic mistakes like the gender of key protagonists. And the worst thing is, I held it against Worosei for the rest of the darn novel.

Lesson of the day (facetious)
Never assume you know the gender of anyone real or imaginary unless clearly stated.

Lesson of the day (serious)
On the planet Chel, the name "Worosei" is feminine.

III- discussion of allegory

It also irked me during a big exposition chapter, where my mind glued what it was telling me about terrorism, vengeance and advanced cultures meddling with "underdeveloped" ones for their own good, to the dedication "For Gulf War Veterans". And I thought, "bastard - it's an Iraq allegory!"

Oh, how I loathe allegory, and hated getting trapped in one. I know its a sci fi staple, but I can't stand them. It's an position, not the position, and it lies in my specific literature uprbinging or whatever.

Deconstructing allegory was meant to be the whole point of this post; I've got kinda distracted, and now it's 12:30 in the morning. But in brief. If you approach both fiction and art from my perspective, then allegory has to be anathema.

My feelings on fiction are that it is real, or as good as real, if you are truly involved in it. This governs my attitudes towards how I consume it - I don't like eating while viewing, I don't like people talking, I'm not interested in continuity errors, blooper reels, or actors, I hate spoilers. And also governs my responses to it: it closely influences my real world views, and I tend to have emotional breakdowns when things inevitably get wrong, as they tend to do with a greater frequency in drama, because I'm always too darn involved. An interesting byproduct of this - I don't really enjoy parody, I can't help but take them deathly seriously. I'm like the bloody Thermians off Galaxy Quest.

As for art, well - Oscar Wilde got me young, and his philosophy I can't shake. Art for art's sake alone - not to push a point, not to describe life as it is but life as it should be - to be beautiful. I like my fiction wholly escapist - social realism is a dirty phrase. And while I'm interested in media representation, to be honest I'd rather oppression of minorities than oppression of artists. Yes, any or all of them; even the one(s) I count under. I rather wish I didn't; logically I don't. But in my heart, in response to say Disney's refusal to release Song of the South, I'm always with the product over the people. My justification is that these things are fascinating because of their offense value, and in context they are important historical documents. Maybe that's honest, I don't know. It's interesting that by undertaking a movement which believes morality has no place in art, you are taking perhaps the strongest moral stance of all.

You may disagree with both of these. Often, I do. Certainly I don't believe I'm "right" - although I am right for me. Allegory hampers enjoyment of both fiction and art for it's own sake. I love Animal Farm. It's my favourite book about farmyard creatures.

The irony of this whole thing is that Look to Windward was written a whole year before "our" Gulf War, before 9/11, before Afghanistan, the lot. Which isn't to say he couldn't have been inspired by similar activities in Gulf War One and Two, and creepy foreign policy pre-2001; but it did mean that the very specific meaning I saw in it was all in my own mind. I created the allegory. I think I hate it all the more for that.

IV - The Film Project Google Is Advertising Everywhere It Owns i.e. Everywhere

I meant to take part in this, and I feel less of a wannabie filmmaker for not having done so. The premise: film your day, upload it to the 'Tube and then real filmmakers will edit it together into a documentary of this day in history.

Call me pretentious, but I couldn't possibly think of portraying something in film until I've considered what it is I have to shoot. Cinema conveys what you see through indirect means. You see, say, two happy people - but the camera will be close to their smiles, the light will be bright. You can't make decisions like that on the fly.

And I've been thinking a lot about realism too - and the artifice of documentary. Did we have to prepare a special day, worth filming? What if I went overboard, and did something unusual - is that OK? Or overcompensated and made my day unusually dull? Is it possible to just film everything that happens - the camera's presence would itself make a difference to it's realism.
I know everyone feels their life is ordinary, but mine is not of itself worthy of cinema. I'm not struggling; I'm also not about to propose to my girlfriend, or give birth to my first child, or bungee jump for charity. Nothing outstanding, and easy to shoot. I feel my perception, my imaginative life, and my friends are the two things in my life which are truly extraordinary, and may be of interest to others; but that's not easy to convey on camera.

Now I've spent my day (but not recorded it), I know how I would have done so. I may still undertake it as a project, but it'd require a lot of patience from friends and family, more than I think any of them could give on an idea that may not ultimately work.

V - Update on B7 Updates

My Blake's 7 comments are itching towards spoiler territory. Or rather, anyone is who is interested enough to want to know how I feel about it, will not want me to talk about the things I need to say. Anyone who doesn't care still won't care. So I am saving them all in one post, which I will publish eventually, and then you can decide to read them or not as you will. Of course, when it's all over and done - and it will be, they all are eventually - with I'll be to embarassed by my old obsession to let them to the light of day. I'm keeping it with the sentence-long fic fragments, another two of which popped into existence today. It's such a bizzare unintended project. I wonder how long I've been having them for, and not noticing?

Or if I've ever had this before? This is the first time I've had my obsessive process under such close observation. I'm sure this will ultimately serve a purpose. I've got all the recogniseable stages down on paper. I wonder if I could force an obsession into existance? Or keep one going? Or make one die?

New Torchwood looks terrible - shock! You can't and shouldn't judge anything before you've seen it. All the same, the list of wrong is epic and horrible.

Everyone seems to be nitpicking: the Old Guard are complaining they're just like Owen and Tosh, Racefailers are marvelling that there are only two races - caucasian, and "non caucasian", bastions of good taste wondering whether Oswald The Paedophile is really a good idea

For my part, I'm more annoyed that one of Esther's defining characteristics is that she's deeply and secretly in love with Rex. Problems:

• No men and women are ever just friends ever!
  
• Rex Matheson is so thrilling and funny - how could anyone resist!
  
• That's Esther's only personality trait!
  
• Straight people? In Torchwood?!
• Have we really never seen a buddy procedural drama before with the two leads in love? (i.e. X-files, Fringe, Bones, Ashes to Ashes, Torchwood S1, Dempsey & Makepeace, Alias, Johnathan Creek...Supernatural :p)

But that's not to say that it can't work. If anything, my cynicism is rooted in how much I disliked Torchwood pre-Children of Earth. I've rewatched some recently and softened a bit - it's not uniformly terrible - but still, to my mind, crude and obvious.

Of course, in my head the greatest police buddy drama that never existed is "McGoohan and Darrow Investigate...". Patrick McGoohan is older, world-weary and sarcastic - Paul Darrow is charming, reckless and sarcastic. They fight crime. They demolish crims with their cut-glass accents, they wither would-be mob bosses with their irrepressable Britishness, they devastate women with their wit - would have been made in the 70s, so it could have been outrageously mysoginistic and everything. What's not to like?



I have discovered The Caretaker. It's all over the internet, legally, so there's no excuse for you not to look him up. His first album was aptly entitled "Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom" - nowadays, he's interested in amnesia. The result is swirly, creepy music-of-the-lost that adequately fufils my love of old music boxes and my sense of Haunted Mansion loss without scaring me too badly (this song, which I adore, has prevented me from sleeping)

I can't get enough of it - "Von Restorff Experiment" is my new favourite, possibly because the song it rehacks is one I already enjoy. One of my chief motivators in seeing movies is, believe it or not, music - I probably go for musicians I enjoy over actors. Turns out the Caretaker was sparked by The Shining. Lol....that movie has already given me nightmares, and I haven't even seen it - I've promised myself not to. Something about Stephen King's imagery just sparks off my terror circuits quicker than anything. Still, now I've got this itch to see it, a mad idea I really shouldn't act on. Silly me...

Anyone who lives in the world should bookmark this site: http://contexts.org/socimages/
Unlike most websites I like, it updates as frequently as I check it - almost daily - and effectively concerns everyday imagery which reinforces stereotypes. If you are a person - and if you're reading my blog, then you probably are, then you'll find something to entertain you on Sociological Images.

I've promised to post every half hour for the entertainment of Friend 3, who is at present slacking when she should be working :p I can't guarentee I'll keep it up though...

Team Traken have picked their convention for the year. It looks awesome - low key guests (i.e. no damn actors), just lots of goodwill and silliness. Four years ago, they had a sci fi quiz where all questions had to be answered with plastecine models. Two years ago they added morning ballroom dancing to the agenda, as well as hosting a panel on the Doctor and the Master.
Besides, my mum was at a conferance once and she got chatting to the guy sitting next to her about my fabulous Sixth Doctor coat she was making. And it turned out he and his wife dressed up as the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa at weekends - he had photos on his iPhone - and reckoned this convention was the one to go to.

Because they are having a costume parade, we're thinking of going in convoy this year. We've narrowed it down to Trial of a Timelord:

or these three from Black Orchid:

I can't decide which I prefer; both would make an equally stunning impact, I'd get to be the Doctor both times, it's just that with one I get to wear my marvellous Sixth coat (and requires no effort), and the other I get a new costume. It's also impossible to work out which will be most suited - if the weather is warm, then my associates will die in Trial gear but be happier with Black Orchid. Vice versa for me, and vice versa for everyone if it's cold.


What else? Blake's 7 just got darker, much much darker; logic tells me it can still get nastier, but I can't quite envisage how. I'm looking forward to S4, where I thoroughly expect some serious vengeance to go down. I keep getting snippets of prose in my head, just one or two sentence chunks. It's interesting - I've never felt such an urge to fic before, and never with the main characters, and never in such bizzare a manner. Goodness knows what I'm going to do with them, I feel like such an idiot even typing them out. My antipathy for fic is absolute...

...which is why I volenteered to do a script for a DW fan project, but y'know, Doctor Who is different. In so many ways, from everything else ever. It's 45 years long and constantly changing. I've recently been surprised to discover that my favourite episodes of Blake's 7 are exactly the same as everyone else...but of course they are. It's only one show after all. Doctor Who is so many damn shows, one on top of the other, and "Greatest Episode Of All Time" isn't a constant but a statement of intent: A Good Example Of What I Think This Show Should Be Like. Which is why it can't fairly be compared to any other TV show, either positively or negatively - it's so much bigger. It's not linear, it's not consistant - it's frequently not very good, but for people who "get it" this doesn't seem to matter at all.

Anyway, with help my script is now trundling towards a first draft of sorts, at least an outline.

And that's my first half hour up! Expect another post in about an hour...

Modelling...
Yesterday me and my sister did some objectification in the woods in the rain. The results are now up on Facebook. Maybe I should be Britain's Next Top Model? I certainly enjoy modelling, although some of the finished products which come close to come-to-bed-eyes creep me out a bit. I think it's the fun of being able to morph and create new stories so quickly. In one afternoon I was a fairy, a warrior, a statue, an elf, Snow White, the Highwayman's woman, Red Riding Hood, a lost innocent, and innocence lost. No other art form lets you play with so many ideas with such freedom. Inevitably, we also did some dead photos. What is it about me and looking dead?

While I squalled in mud and got covered in resin, we chatted a bit about objectification and the male gaze and the rest. But the ultimate problem is, I'm an aesthete first and everything else second. So while I respect and understand, i.e., Socialogical Images for getting their pants in a twist about things like this, or this - if it's in the name of a good picture, then do I really care...?

Music...

For exercise, I'm hooping to Mike Oldfield. I do not think Mike Oldfield is, on the whole, a very good artist. While his music is impressive, his songs are way too long and repetitive, and sometimes are just noise. Having said that, when he gets down to it it's beautiful stuff:



That's the end of Side 2 of Incantations - which is 4 sides long - and it's worth sitting through the dross for it. Perhaps I should work it out? I'm learning to play his "Rio Grande".

Most of my piano efforts are focused on incidental geek music - incanon songs, performed as part of the narrative. Some Firefly, some Blake, some Who. And Sander Cohen's Masterpiece from Bioshock. The great thing is, it's all good music and quite unrecogniseable except to the initiated, so I like the injokey nature of it. I think there's a great evening to be had, though, performing that type of music - particularly all the ballady ones. There's no reason Dayna couldn't perform Gaeta's Lament, while Gaeta (in happier days) jammed to Hero of Canton - space ballads, like ballads from all places and races, are timeless in their themes.

And it keeps me off the Formby, to the relief of absolutely everyone.

What else? I went DVD shopping:

When big movies come out, little companies produce rip-off versions which capitalise on the zeitgeist. Presumably, enough must be sold to make it worthwhile. Empire did an article on a company who specialises in them; and I've been interested "Sherlock Holmes" ever since seeing it reviewed favourably-ish in the Empire Video Dungeon. This is the first time (as a film buff) I've got my hands on one. Firstly, the colour scheme matches that of the current movie. The quote on the front of the box reads "In an extraordinary league of its own", recalling to mind that other steampunk epic, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Although why you'd want to remind your audience of that is beyond me. The blurb reads:

Fearsome monsters are terrorising London. Holmes and his fathful companion Dr Watson must embark on their most dangerous case yet. The investigation will take our heroic duo on an incredible journey that will see them do battle with their arch nemesis; the mad mechanical genius Spring-Heeled Jack, who will sop at nothing to bring destruction to London. Can Holmes and Watson save Queen and country from annihilation?

Froth! Well I'm there. But the interesting part is this:

Featuring fantatic special effects of period England being ravaged by dragons, dinosaurs and cyber-men, Sherlock Holmes is a breathtaking adventure for the Doctor Who age!

This Sherlock Holmes stars Gareth David Lloyd of Ianto-from-Torchwood infamy. In fact, he recieves top billing over the chap playing the great detective. Note how the blurb subtly appeals to the Whoniverse fans who might have picked up the DVD case. "cyber-men", I imagine their legal bods have told them, cannot be sued by the Pedler estate - Kit Pedler being the man who invented the "Cybermen".

All very interesting; but I was sold at the Sherlock Holmes Fights Giant Dinosaurs point. Watching the trailer, frankly I don't see how I couldn't enjoy it.

Bad television
Which is more than can be said for Classic Battlestar Galactica. I always assumed I would like it more. New Galactica was undeniably excellent, but it did a lot of things that irritate me: the Jack Harkness Conflict Resolution Method, all gun-pointing-and-crying, most episodes; the need to be edgy and relevant and characters which to me seemed inconsistent. As discussed before, oldstyle production strategies just seem to appeal to my sense of drama more - I like 40s British cinema, and characters not talking about how they feel but we're able to infer it anyway, from their actions and eyes. It must also be said, I'm a fan of trashy special effects - when they're good, because I find them more exciting and beautiful than modern special effects. When they're bad, because they're terrible.

Shame; old Battlestar Galactica is very terrible indeed. As suspected, it's got this American solid po-facedness to it - none of the fun of B7's rubbish universe, where things break down all the time. Despite being the last humans in the galaxy, everything i svery shiney - from the consoles to the actor's teeth. The special effects are actually pretty cool, particularly the spaceship battles. But the characters were predictable, the dialogue was awful, and in all, it was a very non-controvertial experience. My sister later commented "I'm amazed they remade it like they did!" I'm not. When faced with a show containing not one, but two adorable little kids with ruffle-able hair, my first response would always be to read it as darkly as possible. Still, it's amazing they got something SO good out of something so very dodgy

And...
Letters project is rattling along nicely - 111 pages long, and the end is within sight! This week is proving to be a challenging one. I'm beginning to interview people about their memories, which has prompted several wannabie-breakdowns. I'm revisiting one of my deep, dark regrets for the sake of completeness - I might tell you how that goes.

And I've got the difficult letters to reason with. I was always sure I was leaving them because their canonicity was so dodgy. Now I revisit them, they're actually more consistent than I remembered - but there's another reason I discover. Its all heavy, heavy, uncomfortable, stuff, atque semper mea culpa.

Do you know how easy it is to read a letter addressed to you, pleading for help, for acnowledgment, begging from the point of death for anything at all, blaming you but still having no one but you to rely on? Alright. Do you know how many I have to type up? About 20, 25 of varying lengths and levels of despair. Mortimer had a lot of destitute exes to ignore. Oh yes, Ruby. You've had your revenge alright. Typing them up is extremely heavy going because of my total helplessness, and partial culpability. What Mortimer did was very much in character and consistant with his mood in that period - he wanted to shut the past out as much as possible. With hindsight, its pretty harrowing stuff. I just want to be back there, arguing my point, defending my position - then giving him a slap and doing the right thing which I can see so clearly now, but he couldn't at the time. It's sorrowful, sorrowful stuff.

"Oh, Septimus! - can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes - thousands of poems - Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?"

"By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripedes, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be lost for a corkscrew?"

What worries me most is that for all the Renaissance heroes who rediscovered Cicero, the archivists hellbent on Hancock's Half Hour, but no one is paying attention to now, what is being lost now. The internet in particular - the destruction of all the early cheap webpages (Geocities, AOL and the rest) can sometimes be rescued by the wayback machine, or heroic projects like Reocities. And the death of forums, like Gallifrey One and now I hear my old Genesis hangout, can never be reconstructed.

I'm with Thomasina. I can't bear it. I cannot sleep for grief.

Dear all,

It's taken me 11 days to feel up to writing, but I was amazed to wake up this morning and feel human. Getting back into old habits just takes some time.

The first few days was like wading through the slough of despond, and I only really got out of it by insisting my sister drive me around to find a hula hoop. After scouring the island, I managed to find one I could sort-of use a bit. It's a bright pink monstrosity which lights up red - but only when also playing the nastiest, 8-bit tinny rock you ever heard. It was dirt cheap, and after switching it on you need to give it a kick before it works. But thoroughly worth it: glow hoops are the most terrific thing in the universe, better than Peter Davison in a pile of kittens. Much better, oh yes.

Friend 3 is sure the music it plays is the theme tune from a previous World Cup. Euch...

The only real problem is it's very light and very small, and thus hard to use. To combat this, I've wound metal wire around it a-la-electromagnets. Solved the weight, but it's now murder on the hands. I think I can suffer through it, though - if I tried getting a proper hoop it'd get stuck on the island, like that marvellous poster I've been keeping a space for in London for two years.

Once I dreamed I had star maps all over the bruises on my hands. Because of the mess it makes of my digits, I really can't hoop and play the piano on the same day; piano is winning. I'm currently collecting in-world songs from movies and telly to perform - geektastic. I've discovered the notes B, Bb and C just sound perfection in my voice, and am shifting the key signatures of all the songs I know to include them. Sneaky, but it's like my singing has suddenly leapfrogged into excellence.

What am I up to?

I'm putting a lot of work into the Naked Flame Letters Project - which I haven't touched since it was 30 pages long last summer. It is now 96 pages long. God, I need to get a life, but the idea of it all getting forgotten is just so painful to me that I can't let it go. And I think in 30, 40 years time, everyone will be glad of it.

I'm beginning to have difficulty with it though. I've stupidly left all the irritating letters till last - interminable romantic correspondances, plots which I know bear little resemblance to any sort of canon, and things which are too damn upsetting to touch. One of the problems of digging it all up again is it's like revisiting your most private, your most intense diaries and then attempting to prepare them for public consumption. About four years of my life was spent in that state of mind, so imagine the experience of hearing a song which takes you way back - being dragged backwards is always unpleasant, even for a nice memory - and then imagine it booming at concert volume.

Still, I'm close to being finished. I've started dragging people around and making them help, explaining references I don't know, explaining motivations. It's difficult, because everyone else goes back into old modes as well - complete with frustrating secrecy. It's hard to break through such an ancient mindset and say - look, this is for the future, when you can't remember what you're not telling me now. But I've no right to put it in so many words. It's not like I'm putting everything in. It's not like I can't tell you where the omissions are. Besides, it's a satisfying response too - for reasons explained above, the Flame just eats my brain and swallows me up whenever I get reminded of it, so mentioning intense times and watching other people flounder uncomfortably, and be unable to find the words, makes me feel less nuts.

So I'm managing about an hour a day, quite enough to be in that state of mind. Much of the drama is still quite upsetting. In particular, a long-running unrequieted love plot was propelled by one of the parties certainties that he could not marry the gal in question without putting her in danger from his family. Today, I turned up a letter from the family which, after months of misunderstanding, boiled down to "you could have married her, you berk, why couldn't you just ask?" - by which point, of course, it was too late. It might have been manipulation or lies - who knows, quite a staggering number of letters are appended with my notes on what was really going on. But it just raked the heartbreak up all over again. I found another, last letter from someone who was about to die on my account. Sort of. She didn't mind death, she said. She was sure she was standing in the way of her sister and her husband's true love. They were quite ill (my fault, I think) and sad (my fault too, I think), but nevertheless I was the person they wanted to confide in last.

I keep promising to update the Doctor Who game. I expect to get around to it. For oldtimes sake, I'm also promising to create "Commute-ocalypse", but I wouldn't hold your breath. Most of my gaming energy is going on a new project. There have been, like, eight different permutations of the Blake's 7 game, my favourite being Friend 4's rejigged Snakes and Ladders - except there aren't any ladders, and the last six squares all contain snakes. Part of the problem is the shadow of the Doctor Who game, which is so brilliantly bonkers - all the better elements evolved accidentally, but it now seems shoddy to write a game any less than its high standards. Doctor Who also has the benefit of a very, very formulaic structure, an obvious perspective to play from, and an obvious set of objectives. How to enshrine that characteristic blend of awful luck, double crosses and sudden turnarounds without it being either frustrating, or turning into an RPG? Ideally, it has to encourage devious, backstabbing and outrageous behavior - even more devious than the Doctor Who game gets. And is there any point, considering the number of people who will ultimately want to play it? But I feel this new version has "it", and could get pretty crazy. Here's to playtesting.

Frankly, anything is better than this.


In the ludicrous, pointless category, I've volunteered to write a script for a Doctor Who fanproject. It has disaster written all over it: the series is set before the Doctor left Gallifrey, in his school days, the type of thing people have their own elaborate headcanons about. And it's hard to have much faith in a premise which involves the Doctor crushing on the Rani, and the Rani fancying the Master. As far as I can tell, the Doctor and the Master are both smitten with the Rani, and one another; and the Rani thinks the whole thing is hilarious. I'm not sure the "showrunner" has much beside hyperbole, but the experience of writing something to a deadline must be healthy. And I have a terrific idea, in part inspired by conversations with Friends 3 and 4, in part by Brazil and in part by the Maughan Library. Something like:

The Doctor can't pass his final year unless he pays back his library fines, which amount to eight billion dollars, five hundred and twenty two credits or the equivalent of eight years servitude on Zeta Six. Luckily, with a whole bay of unattended TARDISes and a little innocent larceny, there's no reason he can't return them before they were ever late and be back in time for tea...

..but on a planet where all documents need to be signed in triplicate (by yourself, from past, present and future), it's not long until the School Council want a word with him. With the Doctor on trial for the first time in his lives...

...and that's where my synopsis stops. I'm trying to pack everything I learnt from the amount of telly I've been watching into it. I need a subplot featuring either the Master and the Rani to be going on at the same time - thank you Robert Holmes - and sympathetic, memorable minor characters to make the world feel real - thank you Holmes and Boucher. I need to make sure the whole thing has a strong plot and doesn't rely on angst and character woobing (thanks for nothing, Chibnall), and that the characters get shat on at least every ten mintues and frustrated at every turn (I love you, Terry Nation), and while we're at it, St. Davies, make sure good guys have their moments of spiteful, unflattering humanity. And an underlying theme/moral/point to make it into an emotional experience (thank you Moff, for making me miss it)

Enough to live up to? My main problem so far is I have two great ideas (trial + library) but they both have to involve the Doctor. It'd make better plot if one of them could be devolved onto one of the other characters.

Lots of television. No movies yet, but I'm going to the library on Monday. Doctor Who is back to being the happiest of happy places. I'm overdosing on Queer as Folk. Getting back into Supernatural. I was amazed to view what, on available evidence, is - wait for it - the darkest ever episode of Blake's 7. I'm sure it can get worse. I love that show.

All told, it's good to be back.