Birdwings

No luck whatsoever with decompressing. Life and more life, lots of projects and requirements crossed off my to do list, and new stuff added just as fast. I feel tired all the time.

However, I have set myself a bit of tunnel vision with regards writing, and am therefore making actual swift progress. I am barreling through my Erin vignettes (half are done, #6 might get finished over tomorrow tea) with the rigid deadline in mind that I want them all basically wrapped by the time I finish season 3 in my Teen Wolf rewatch. I don't want to do a binge like this again. I am tired and want to finish my longstanding Lydia WIP, so I have to have the Erin stuff out of the way by the time I start season 4, so I can then dedicate the bulk of my mental energy to writing at pace with the episodes and getting the whole remainder of my Lydia series drafted while the voices are clear in my head.

I started it two years ago, when my circumstances were so different. The Erin fencing vignettes were an idea I had around that time as well, and which seemed breezy and simple. They are both long overdue to get done and walked away from, so I don't have to keep coming back to them, feeling like I never get any closer to the finish line. I'm aiming to have both series wrapped up this winter. Three volumes of Lydia's mental anguish, for three seasons of TV. Five more fencing ficlets. Lots of writing progress on both the past couple weeks, despite all the life stuff.

Hey, remember when I posted back in March about having hired a carpenter to fix some major problems with my house?

Well, this week is when he finally came out here to start the project, and judging by the first leg of it, he'll definitely be worth the money, and I won't have to worry about my home slowly rolling off its alleged support beams toward an inevitable collision with the ground.

Painfully sad to hear the familiar sounds of carpentry from the yard after all this time. Grief makes even good things feel like bad things. I had to call my mother to come get me yesterday, because it was just too much, so she took me out for tea and brownies to recover. Today it should be easier to manage.

So once this is done, I'll have a stable foundation, and a roof that hopefully doesn't leak, and I will therefore have the time and security to pursue other improvements in other years, so I can continue to live here.

Still on my Teen Wolf kick, I ran across some commentary for the unbelievably creepy scene of Allison looking at Lydia in the hospital, filled with flashcuts to extreme gore. I had wondered if it might be in reference to the murder tape in Lost Highway. No, it apparently was inspired by Carrie and The Shining (neither of which I've seen), but that's not the part that impressed me and sent me all in a dither to make this post.

The director of the episode was Russell Mulcahy, who directed 39 other episodes of this show, along with the original Highlander movie!

And also, the first episode of Jeremiah! WHHAT?

He got his start in music videos, which explains why he's so connected to an MTV teen drama, and I know Teen Wolf is frequently derided as a bad show, but it is a damn fine looking one, and Mulcahy is obviously a big part of that, with his stylish directorial chops making everything 80% more arthouse than it needs to be.

And apparently I'm a HUGE FAN. He's one of my favorite directors! By accident! Always read the fine print! (I mean, clearly I did, or the name Mulcahy wouldn't have eventually rung a dim bell and made me look him up, but it took me long enough).

This guy is the secret sauce that connects all three of the fandoms I write for. WHO KNEW?

I published the Erin & Smith vignette: Displacement. This ended up a tidy 1,776 words, and took a ridiculously long time to complete. I had the ending last year, and a couple pivotal lines of dialogue on the way to it. The rest was up in the air, and Mister Smith is rarely a cooperative character (hard to be, when his whole canonical shtick is that nothing about him is ever explained), so I drew a blank on finishing it and left it to simmer. Cue a couple weeks ago, when I finally got another line, and managed to stitch the needed conversation together, and all of a sudden it was done.

So I'm well underway with this series, because I don't want it hovering over my head another year. Progress report on the rest:

Elizabeth - Basically done. A nice happy AU.
Kurdy - Finally have a good, solid idea for him (thanks, Killa). Unwritten. Involves grief, so will have to wait for me to be in the right frame of mind.
Theo - Obnoxiously flirty fluff. Half-done, I guess? It feels insubstantial, which just proves why I Fail at Fluff.
Libby - I know what I want it to be, but I'm not sure I can get there. A glorified synopsis.
Jeremiah - Messy angst. Half-done.
Lauren - Triple dose of angst. Near-complete!
Lee - Written ages ago. Needs a total rewrite, but I think the bones are good.
Sims - What's the opposite of a nice happy AU? Maybe I'll post it on my birthday, because this has no other reason to exist.

Mostly, I'm just relieved that writing is starting to gain some momentum again. I've got an idea for a Kurdy & Sandor fic when these are mostly cleared from the queue, and I've even started to get a bit of mental energy for my Teen Wolf series that's still hanging over my head unfinished. Start small, work up to big. And probably I needed the summer away from writing to recharge, or something. So forward march, while the weather is good.

Actually finished one of my "Erin teaches random Jeremiah character swordfighting" vignettes! It's been sitting incomplete for ages, and the missing convo snapped into my head and it was done. Hurray.

In other ficwriting news, I am officially scrapping my idea for a Jeremiah/Brimstone crossover. That universe is simply too dark, and I don't want my favorite characters anywhere near it. The fun has gone out of the premise, and I'd rather expend my mental energy on something more positive.

I almost never read anything in the current zeitgeist. I have lately been engaged in the project of transcribing my reading list, which I somehow managed to keep without interruption since 2007, and is currently floating around on a messy stack of loose notebook pages in a desk drawer. It seems worth creating a digital copy as back up, and is giving me a nice trip through my memories, but anyway, it is incredibly rare for me to ever read a book in its year of publication. And while Project Hail Mary is from 2021, the film came out this year, so I'm counting it as a sudden swerve into cultural relevance.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book a lot! I have to dock it a star for some nitpicky stuff, but the core of the novel, the friendship between Ryland Grace and Rocky, was almost absurdly affecting. It was also fun for documenting the intricacies of first contact, and inventing a genuinely alien species. I can understand why few sci fi storytellers take this approach, as it would really limit the possibilities of planetary romance if humans and aliens can't even share the same air, but it works so well here, the limitations making a launchpad for some wonderful creativity.

The optimism of the story was also appreciated, although plenty of horrific disaster movie stuff was happening offscreen. I did get nervous around the three quarter mark (my trust in anything modern and critically acclaimed is extremely limited, having been burnt too many times by "charming, nostalgic, warm, funny" novels featuring random scenes of child abuse - I swear, cover blurbs are written by critics who read the first two chapters and the last page), so I flipped to the last pages ( to a reverse spoiler of the kind of thing which does not happpen at the end )

I was also impressed by how carefully the author couched the math and physics lessons, smartly recognizing where the general audience might get lost in the weeds. I think that's why he made Ryland Grace an improbable middle school science teacher, despite his absurd overqualification for the job. I didn't find it that hard to believe (some people are hellacious underachievers in life, and the point is made that Grace is conflict-averse), and it worked great for dumbing down the concepts for the lay reader (like myself).

On the other hand, this did mean the prose was (deliberately, I assume) extremely juvenile. Sometimes I felt like I was speed-reading this thing. It reads on the unchallenging end of the YA spectrum, and the humor is pretty much on that level as well. Some works, some is groanworthy.

The weakest aspect were the flashbacks, which started out as a compelling part of the amnesia process, but gradually revealed some significant flaws, as absolutely every character was extremely surface level. They felt less and less real, and by the time I hit the American scientist whose entire personality was based on robotically oversharing about his sex life, I was genuinely thinking the twist was going to be that he was a 12 Monkeys style psycho trying to sabotage the mission, because who talks like that? Dude was so weird. In the end, I think it was just another attempt at humor, but it really took me out of the novel. His robotic behavior creeped me out so badly that I still suspect ( spoilers about his fate )

Anyway, those problems made the story somewhat uneven, but it didn't really matter. I inhaled it in under a week, because it was just so easy to turn the page, and the central story and relationship was so compelling. I can see why it got big.

I dragged my feet over this one, because last time I watched it, I only knew one of the guest stars (Lindsay Crouse from Buffy) and that gave the episode a fun aspect, what with watching Maggie Walsh get to be a reasonable human being. Unfortunately, since that viewing, I've watched a season of White Collar, and now recognize Tim DeKay. Watching lovable G-rated G-Man Peter Burke be a sleazy college professor gave me the ick, which, when combined with the villain of the week's horrific backstory, made me rather reluctant to sit down with this one a second time.

It actually gets quite fun once the investigation gets underway, though. ( Read more... )

Peter Gabriel made the credits theme! That alone should have kept this show from cancellation. Philistines.

A lot changes from the pilot to this episode (which was fifth in airing order), but also, this episode feels like it was running long and lost most of the establishing shots and some fairly important introductions on the cutting room floor. I was confused several times, and this makes me wonder if that's why the episode got bumped. ( Read more... )

Karl Urban and Keith Urban. Not the same person. Apparently not even related, although both were born in New Zealand. Also, I've actually seen Karl Urban before! Dude was Eomer in The Lord of the Rings! Not that I've seen that in over twenty years.

As is fairly common with mistreated shows, Brimstone aired massively out of order before getting cancelled. Broadcast dates make a complete mess of the first half of the truncated season we got. However, at some later date, broadcast order was switched out for something fairly close to a proper viewing order, with both my fanmade DVD and the upload using this nearly correct listing - although I'm not sure when that redesign happened, or who was responsible, as everything online still just lists the episodes in broadcast order.

Since I already watched the show, and remembered a couple very confusing moments (chiefly when a recurring guest character shows up unexplained in one episode, and then in the following one actually arrives in town), I spent this evening checking the episodes for discrepancies and making a Suggested Viewing Order for anyone interested. ♥

1. Pilot (also sometimes called Altar Boys)
2. Poem
3. Heat
4. Slayer
5. Encore (very important to watch this AFTER Slayer)
6. Repentance
7. Executioner
8. Ashes
9. Lovers
10. Carrier
11. Faces
12. It's a Helluva Life (this normally gets listed before Faces, but it forms a natural thematic pairing with the final episode as both break the case of the week format)
13. Mourning After