Routine operations
Apr. 4th, 2008 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarielOne 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’veliberated borrowed pinched ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 05:30 pm (UTC)Yes, and Doctor Who!
Though I am torn about what to do before it appears
on the internets, because I have stories to be written and Torchwood and SJA to catch up on, and I can't do all of them before D-time.no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 06:01 pm (UTC)Somehow, I'm more excited about the Torchwood finale tonight than I am about Who tomorrow. Which is very strange and not at all what I would've expected when I started watching this series of Torchwood, much as I've always loved it. (Although I am quite happy at the prospect of Catherine Tate as the new companion. She could well be excellent.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 06:22 pm (UTC)Would it matter that you haven't seen Torchwood and SJA? I thought they were careful not to make DW dependent on their plotlines.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 06:24 pm (UTC)Ooh, I'd nearly forgotten it was the Torchwood finale tonight. I'm also quite happy with the prospect of Catherine Tate as the new companion: I think she has had the best chemistry with Tennant so far, and I also think she could be excellent. Particularly if there's no love story going on this time.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 06:46 pm (UTC)And I hope your Doctor Who glee will prove infectious and awaken my dormant squee.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 07:55 pm (UTC)Mind you, since I woke up at four this morning, the point is probably moot, since I'm too tired to do anything much.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-04 10:35 pm (UTC)Go you and your working routines. I'm glad you've been able to establish them here as well.
I owe you email, and also two lots of comments. I will try and do those this weekend - this week got eaten up by the period from hell.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 12:01 am (UTC)Do you like Agatha Christie?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 08:35 am (UTC)Don't press that button!
I'm very much looking forward to Doctor Who. I've seen virtually nothing else of Catherine Tate, and am blissfully free just to look forward to the return of Donna - I liked the two of them together a lot. Hurrah!
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 10:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 10:45 am (UTC)Oops, too late...
I like Donna and the Doctor together too, more than Tennant and Rose together, actually.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 10:48 am (UTC)I wouldn't say I liked Christie, but I did read an awful lot of them at one point: my sisters and I borrowed a huge pile of them from the library and sat around the kitchen table reading them, passing them round as we finished them (they don't take long). I think there are much better Golden Age detectives, Peter Wimsey for one.
I really do like the TV adaptations of the Miss Marple books, although the plots are daft.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 10:48 am (UTC)No worries about comments: any time you have the energy to do them. Sorry about the rotten week.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 10:50 am (UTC)I love my Saturday nights in with Doctor Who, so I'm sure this journal will be squee-ful over the next few weeks, provided they've not doing something really stupid.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 04:59 am (UTC)I've seen one and it was great. I often don't like people talking to the camera, but she, like Richardson in 'House of Cards', does it well. And awww, she brushed a bit of lint off her chauffeur at the end!
no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 05:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-15 02:57 pm (UTC)