My new Storytellers Unplugged essay is up: The Suspense is Killing Me.
I had last week’s episode of Fear Itself on my DVR. I skimmed the comments I encountered about it online, and gleaned the general negativity toward it, but I decided to give it a look-see for myself. Geez, what a train wreck. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything with so little internal logic.
After that, I watched the most recent episode of In Plain Sight. It’s the sort of show I can watch with one eye will attending to other things, like writing book reviews or reading. Not exactly gripping, but I haven’t turned it off in disgust. Yet. It’s lacking something, though. Good acting, maybe?
Ah, but then I was richly rewarded. I watched the most recent Doctor Who two-episode serial: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead. Other than the overused Whovian trope of having creatures repeat an inane phrase until it becomes tedious, these are two of the best episodes so far this season. Having Stephen Moffat’s name attached as the writer (e.g. Blink) is generally a good sign. What I especially liked was that for a while it looked like it might be whimsical, but then it got deadly serious, with this creeping sense of dread that Blink also managed. And it introduces a fascinating new aspect to the Doctor that I hope will get revisited sooner rather than later. However, would Donna really want to stop at the shop to browse when they’re running for their lives? Really?
Continued work on the new story. I edited yesterday morning’s transcription and layered in some research details to arrive at about 1400 words total. About halfway done, I’d say.
I picked up my diary from my 1984 visit to Oxford, England this morning. I spent two months visiting the crystallography lab, but I also ventured off to Portsmouth one weekend to visit some distant cousins of mine who I’d never met before. I wanted to see if there was anything in my notes that would help assist my recent genealogical research. I noted at the time that the British were paying an awful lot for gasoline: 72 cents a liter, or about $2.90 a gallon. Field Marshal Montgomery used my relatives’ home as a map room while they were setting up for the D-Day invasion, I was told.
