The doctor is in

I received PDF proofs of Doctor Who: Destination Prague from the range editor of the series this morning. That’s a title I’ve never heard of before, but I presume he’s someone responsible for overall continuity within the Short Trips series and to the official canon. I have two weeks to report back any quibbles or problems I see with the unproofed copy. I look forward to rereading “Leap Second,” but I’m even more looking forward to reading everyone else’s contribution. My story is a little past the mid-point in the anthology.

I spent most of the weekend getting caught up with in-progress or pending business on my desk so I can get back to writing short stories. I wrote and/or completed three book reviews:

• The Terror by Dan Simmons
• Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
• The Intruders by Michael Marshall

I know that my response to The Terror is the minority report, and I’ve expressed it on message boards before, so this is more or less my final word on the book—unless someone wants to discuss it with me.

I also got my questions together for an interview I’m conducting for an upcoming, but as-yet unannounced, project—and submitted them to the interviewee.

I read more than half of John Grisham’s Innocent Man this weekend. Our innocent man is now on death row and has just met another innocent man in the cell across the hall.

We watched Marie Antoinette on Saturday night. Not the best film we’ve seen recently. Though the story of Marie is fairly well known, the movie left out some things that I considered important to know, and glossed over others. To wit: Why was the dauphin the grandson of the King—what happened to his father? Did Marie speak French when she came to Versailles? If not, how did they handle the language issue? (I don’t think I knew before that she was Austrian by birth.) Why did only two people (the man who called for breakfast and Marie Terese) speak French in the movie? What happened to Marie & Louis’ children when they were imprisoned?

I also wasn’t terribly impressed with the modern music embedded in the film. If you’re going to modernize something, why take half measures? Either go all out or stick to the period. As it was, it just seemed anachronistic and silly. I know the idea was to depict Marie as a “pop star” but that didn’t really work for me. They also did a very poor job of conveying the passage of time, I thought. 80 minutes on a short period of time and then 20 or 30 minutes on a nearly 20-year chunk of history. I think my wife liked the movie more than I did. It was okay, not good.

Amazing Race: This must be the first time in the show’s history that teams began the next leg after a pit stop before other teams reached the pit stop. How quickly things can change, though—the intersection really messed up the beauty queens. It’s getting down to the wire, though. Five teams left. I’m still rooting for the beauty queens. They seem to have avoided the acrimony other teams heaped on them in their previous run. Now Charla and Mirna are the ones everyone loves to hate—and small wonder. The way they treat people.