Sunday, May 02, 2004
So, if you've been hanging around anxiously waiting to find out what happened when I tried my runes, in the end I didn't. Sorry. Every time I approached them I totally blanked out on questions worth asking. Now I know that I don't need to ask the most important question in the world ever but even a 'where am I now' query didn't seem worth it as I know where I am now, nowhere. I'm personally adrift as I have been for months, a year or so now. Not writing.
But I feel quite good because when I saw that nothing was happening with the runes I at least was able to seize the initiative and move on to other things. I mowed my little back garden, I love the smell of cut grass even if it's a hayfever trigger. We've had overcast weather so far this weekend but this afternoon the sun finally came out so I was able to sit outside on my little deckchair and do some work. A couple of years back I finished a bit fantasy novel called 'Thanatos', as I'm not going anywhere with the new writing I've decided to go back to working on tightening up this one. At the moment I may not be too good at pumping out new material but I seem to find critiquing and editing old stuff okay. Hopefully, when I've finished this my creative juices will be flowing again to continue on something new.
It's been odd watching the new stuff on Sky One this year. 24 series three I haven't watched at all, I'd lost interest by about three quarters of the way through the first series. I just felt it got more and more implausible as time went on, no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't get around the fact that some episodes should have spent most of their time with Jack sitting in his car impatiently drumming his fingers on the steering wheel or shouting "Come on, move you bastards!" out of the window.
Angel series five has been surprisingly fun, especially the puppet episode. Of course, a main element to making this series an improvement on the last is the removal of Angel's son Connor, who after the first episode became the weekly annoyance as they contrived reasons for him to fight his dad each episode. This ruined any chance of him being interesting. But last week we've had Fred turned into a blue-haired super demon for no other reason than it seems the shows creators thought we might like to see more of actress Amy Acker's breasts. Only now she's given up her destructive ways and apparently wants the Angel team to show her what it means to be human and some more of this earth thing called kissing.
Being a fan of sci-fi, it's strange that I dumped the other fantasy offerings pretty quickly, Tru Calling I wasn't able to reach the end of the first episode while Jake 2.0 I lost interest at the end of episode two. I'm not particularly partial to cop shows yet I'm watching and so far enjoying both The Handler with the massively underrated Joe Pantoliano and Las Vegas and I think I can see a connection. The people in The Handler and Las Vegas know what they are doing, so we follow them in and learn about them along the way. With Tru Calling and Jake 2.0 the characters are ordinary people put into extraordinary situations so they just seem like idiots. Yes Faith or Tru or whoever will be a hero because that's what she'll become and that's a boring storyline that I'd read a million times before. Much better is when we take that as the starting point, or at least grant the characters experience, and then go on from there. And if you have a klutz like Jake going up against someone who's supposed to be the world's premiere assassin, it's just stupid when he wins. But transpose that to a vampire assassin going up against Buffy or Angel, who are trained in fighting techniques, it is both more 'real', within the terms of that TV show of course, and more exciting.
Anyway, after all that, I'm going to be away for a couple of days as I've heard there's some real life passing through and I want to grab some before it runs out. Back wednesday.
But I feel quite good because when I saw that nothing was happening with the runes I at least was able to seize the initiative and move on to other things. I mowed my little back garden, I love the smell of cut grass even if it's a hayfever trigger. We've had overcast weather so far this weekend but this afternoon the sun finally came out so I was able to sit outside on my little deckchair and do some work. A couple of years back I finished a bit fantasy novel called 'Thanatos', as I'm not going anywhere with the new writing I've decided to go back to working on tightening up this one. At the moment I may not be too good at pumping out new material but I seem to find critiquing and editing old stuff okay. Hopefully, when I've finished this my creative juices will be flowing again to continue on something new.
It's been odd watching the new stuff on Sky One this year. 24 series three I haven't watched at all, I'd lost interest by about three quarters of the way through the first series. I just felt it got more and more implausible as time went on, no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't get around the fact that some episodes should have spent most of their time with Jack sitting in his car impatiently drumming his fingers on the steering wheel or shouting "Come on, move you bastards!" out of the window.
Angel series five has been surprisingly fun, especially the puppet episode. Of course, a main element to making this series an improvement on the last is the removal of Angel's son Connor, who after the first episode became the weekly annoyance as they contrived reasons for him to fight his dad each episode. This ruined any chance of him being interesting. But last week we've had Fred turned into a blue-haired super demon for no other reason than it seems the shows creators thought we might like to see more of actress Amy Acker's breasts. Only now she's given up her destructive ways and apparently wants the Angel team to show her what it means to be human and some more of this earth thing called kissing.
Being a fan of sci-fi, it's strange that I dumped the other fantasy offerings pretty quickly, Tru Calling I wasn't able to reach the end of the first episode while Jake 2.0 I lost interest at the end of episode two. I'm not particularly partial to cop shows yet I'm watching and so far enjoying both The Handler with the massively underrated Joe Pantoliano and Las Vegas and I think I can see a connection. The people in The Handler and Las Vegas know what they are doing, so we follow them in and learn about them along the way. With Tru Calling and Jake 2.0 the characters are ordinary people put into extraordinary situations so they just seem like idiots. Yes Faith or Tru or whoever will be a hero because that's what she'll become and that's a boring storyline that I'd read a million times before. Much better is when we take that as the starting point, or at least grant the characters experience, and then go on from there. And if you have a klutz like Jake going up against someone who's supposed to be the world's premiere assassin, it's just stupid when he wins. But transpose that to a vampire assassin going up against Buffy or Angel, who are trained in fighting techniques, it is both more 'real', within the terms of that TV show of course, and more exciting.
Anyway, after all that, I'm going to be away for a couple of days as I've heard there's some real life passing through and I want to grab some before it runs out. Back wednesday.
