(no subject)

I do not want to study.
I want to write.
This is why I decided to study writing this year.

Now I am studying Myth & Medievalism and Children's Literature.
I like both subjects. They're interesting. They're giving me ideas for writing.
Yet I do not want to study. I want to write.

Also I keep getting the can't-breathe feeling whenever I think too far beyond the next thing.
I really seriously need to now book a room in Cardiff for the Whoniverse conference.
But that involves finding things out, looking things up, and deciding.
And I'm finding it harder than when I had to stay in London for the Rift.
Which is daft, because London is Big and Scary, as everyone knows.
Cardiff isn't so much big and scary as London.
Also it's where all the stories live, so it's cool.

Yet whenever I think about booking a room there I can't bloody breathe.
Hate that.

I've been reading the RTD Writer's book today. Is full of funny. Not just deliberate funny, but little bits of incidental funny, like him saying there's two gay bars in Cardiff and when he went to sit in one and get drunk he instead randomly ran into a whole ton of DW/TW/SJA staff, and also random guys that just wanted to talk Doctor Who. That's a funny a bit like the teacher trying to find a non studenty pub, which isn't actually a problem at college cause everyone goes same places, and a bit like the thing where stereotypes come from somewhere.
Analysing funny makes it less funny.

I quite like reading about him writing, because a lot of it is reading about him not-writing, which he does until he's past dealine and panic sets in and he restarts smoking and then, sometimes, starts writing. I can feel superior about thus far avoiding smoking, even if I have also avoided writing award winning scripts.

I want to write. Today I keep fiddling with the Electric Sheep script. It has a name, and characters, and a setting, and I think I'm finding something about film and memory and the transience of memory and deceptiveness of film. I want to go poke at that.

Instead I must read Alice in Wonderland, and some more Euripides, and at least one of the huge stack of library books I was so enthusiastic about on Thursday.

I mean I could just sulk instead, or possibly set aside a block of hours a week to write in... that would probably work better, except after last weekend those hours would, once started, turn into 'the whole weekend', even if for me that's four days.

I wrote a Torchwood script in three days. RTDs book is talking about pages per day and how many is a good day and, well, making me wonder if I have in fact made a whole script. I can't count it up without turning it into the same format, which I have the BBC ScriptSmart macros to do, but I'd have to type a whole bunch of it again and I can't figure out this format at all. Transcript format I have practice at, and I put it together from what plays look like in the editions for class anyway, so it's perfectly sensible and worky script formatting, just not what TV scripts look like.

Blah.

I also want to show everyone my script, but at the same time don't.
My beta sent back comments and I'm no longer sure I've succeeded in making the plot work, cause she thinks the one episode character is acting stupid. I thought they were acting explainably stupid. Now I'm left to wonder while my email is replied to.
Does it matter if she's being stupid? If Team Torchwood are not being stupid, could she just be a stupid policewoman without messing up the script? Or does stupid here translate to implausible? I do not know yet. In my head, it makes sense.
This is why there are beta readers. So one person can tell me something is stupid instead of the whole internet telling me.

Typing on my blog is not on the to do list.

(no subject)

I read Alice in Wonderland
I was bored
I never used to be bored
I liked the bits I could remember and didn't like the bits I didn't remember
which makes sense
but then I have to read all them bits I didn't like
so I got bored.

Also i might possibly be sulking a bit.


I like the cartoon with the colors and the songs.
I like the book pictures too.

we'll be studying this for a couple of weeks.


I think I'll go read Euripides some more now.

(no subject)

The RTD Writer book says that he changed it from being Ianto that got shot and raised to being Owen. Which we knew. But it also said he changed it while they were already filming, and had to change things they were saying that day. This I did not know. I'm really glad he did it that way around, because it's a brilliant story with Owen, but woah, the power of the boss writer.

... anyone taking bets on how they'll kill Ianto this year?
Well he keeps ducking at the last moment, sort of thing.

Magic and class, gender, race, and all the rest

I watched Merlin.
I forgot it was on while it was actually on, only caught it because the box is set to.
This is not a good sign.

ASH is as worth watching as ever, and seems to be developing interesting backstory layers.

The kids I'm still not really caring about.
... how old am I, calling them kids?

ANYway

as I have for the last few weeks, I find myself thinking on magic and how differences in portrayal tie in with politics/power issues like class, gender, and race.

There's a lot of subtleties to this one and I know this isn't going to be essay quality thinking here, but I'll have a go.

Lets start with language. Magic spells are in a strange language. ( Read more... )

One thing about magic is it's a kind of power you can't take away. ( Read more... )

So there's ways of writing magic that structure the world as something where power is born in only those of the right descent and polished through elite education, and there's ways of writing it where power is something anyone can get at with hard work. And either way can be the province of good or bad people, or split up and coded so one group gets all the bad.

Guess which my politics prefers?

Also, mostly? I prefer people consciously thinking on it. I've been reading today about writing, and someone actually thought there's stories that aren't political. I have to disagree in the strongest terms. There's only stories where you haven't noticed the politics. Usually that means they support the dominant assumptions. And, well, not always loving that.