Routine operations

[altariel]

One more sleep, then Doctor Who! Eeee!

Ahem. Yes. So this week, now that I’m entirely free of teaching commitments, I’ve been trying to get back into the same writing rhythm I established while I was holed up in the t’internet free zone of the flat in North Carolina. On the whole, I’ve been doing a fairly good job of it. Go me. It helps that when I work at the very back of the house I don’t have a reliable internet connection. It hinders that my laptop is now such a venerable and ancient machine that it needs to take a nap every twenty minutes. (By a nap, I mean: the power cuts out and it goes dead.) So I’ve liberated borrowed pinched mraltariel’s laptop. Which is a whole lot sexier than the pile of shite I have, but I do feel like I’m camping in someone else’s house and making free with their facilities. What does this button do?

Anyway, whatever the helps and hindrances, I’ve averaged slightly over 2k a day this week, and I hope to keep up that rate for the foreseeable future, and possibly better it next week. I’m switching between two projects at the moment: one of the novels (the NaNo one, which seems to be heading very nicely towards a completed first draft, whereupon I can stick it in a drawer for a couple of months and start work on another one), and a short story which is inching forwards a few hundred words at a time, because I’m working on it in the afternoons when, frankly, I’m a bit fried from the morning sessions. It does leave me a bit brain sore and tired at the end of the day. Sorry if I haven’t answered an email; I'm going to try to catch up over the weekend.

The other working rhythm I’ve been trying to re-establish is the exercise-and-watch-telly routine, and that also seems to be working well. I got to the end of season 2 of The Wire last week (not as good as season 1), and this week I’ve been watching Adam Adamant Lives! (or, "What Sydney and Verity Did Next"). The one about the Edwardian adventurer who wakes up in the Swinging Sixties. I gather that people who saw it at the time remember it very fondly, but it strikes me as very much the Torchwood of its day; i.e. not as good as the premise promises. In part, I think this is because comparisons with The Avengers are inevitable, but the leads (Gerald Harper and Juliet Harmer) have nothing like the chemistry of John Steed and Mrs Peel. But also the plots suck.

Speaking of Gerald Harper, we saw him at the Arts Theatre the other week in a production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which started with possibly the most badly performed piece of theatre I have ever seen. Really, you thought the three poor actors concerned were just going to stop, apologize, and say they’d come back on again. (I think one was an understudy, and another was the understudy of that understudy... Oh god, that particular one looked stricken. Like he'd never been on a stage before and the enormity of it was suddenly hitting...) The following week, however, we saw Colin Baker and Liza Goddard in a hugely entertaining production of She Stoops to Conquer: if this pops up at a local theatre near you, go and see it, because it was a great night out.

Speaking of Mrs Peel, the repeats of The Mrs Bradley Mysteries have been on one of the UK wotsit channels, and I wish they had made more of these, because they are so good. Does Diana Rigg have chemistry with everyone? She and Neil Dudgeon are brilliant. (My favourite romance, too: rich girl and poor boy.) We missed one episode, and of course it was the one with David Tennant.

Eeee! One more sleeeeeeep!

ETA: AND - Edward Woodward is in The Bill next week! Oh, someone cast him in a retired-Callan-style role before it's too late! Or at least repeat Wet Job.

Comments

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much my view. Sometimes I hate her because of her awful prose and massive racism etc, but I always manage to convince myself I like them and go back for more. I do love the BBC Poirot and Marple adaptations, they're just so gorgeous and undemanding.