beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I had a dream where I was at a convention and I lost my name badge and they made me a new name badge that said 'writer of the episode School' and that was how I found out I got a Doctor Who script accepted.

Which is a much better convention queue dream than usual, even if the next bit was having to go do Gladiators to actually get in.

But when I woke up I thiught what School could be about, and I reckon I had a pretty good plot bunny, specifically for knows they're adopted Doctor. ( Read more... )

I think that is a pretty good plot bunny, as bunnies go. It is not an outline yet and has a few places that need a bunch of work, but as a bunny, pretty good.

And bunnies are free to a good home, because it is not like any two of us would write the same story anyway.




I did not exactly have a wrap up to that idea though, triumphant ending where, like The Teacher is revealed or something. It's just a bunch of character in a light sci fi wrapper.



Then I got distracted by wanting this older disabled companion to meet silver hair Jack who is having to deal with ageing? But like, by running around in the background of his younger self's life, because it isn't like the him living linear can have aged that much yet. So we get some old footage of classic Jack laughing or something ordinary, mix it with a lot of stunt men being Jack, and then have now silver Jack doing the talking, but it turns into a Doctor lite episode because the Doctor and young Jack can Run, but the disabled companion and silver Jack have slightly different problems with keeping up, possibly involving the bloody stairs. Jack likes to be tall but getting up there is going to get more challenging. And once he is old he is going to be old a very, very, long time. So he is not going to want to admit to the ageing thing, but time travel as a device can give him a side by side comparison. And a disabled person ageing at the usual pace can gently challenge him on the whole 'it'll get better, it always does' attitude. And ask if hels seen a doctor this century. Which could get a very sad wistful face actually, should use that exact phrasing.

I have no idea what the plot is doing, I just want to have this chat with silver Jack.

Because in the books he expressed a terror of ageing and becoming dependent, and that is a Conversation, that can include pointing out that when he found someone like that he helped them, and he isn't the only one. I get by with a little help from my friends, reprise.

Reframe Jack from action hero to *very reluctant* mentor leader organiser. ... he would absolutely hate having others be the ones charging into danger, but if he can no longer get there in time...

Useful story, just needs, like, an entire plot and a place to live in the verse.

Or young!Jack needs sent away conveniently, and sliver edition is only now getting back to Earth.

Something though. Where the story isn't only the spectacle of not dying. Jack can have layers.




Two bunnies, no waiting.

I have finished listening to Captain Jack.
R&J is aboit River and Jack, and how they complicate each other's already complicated timelines.
It weaves through all the other stories and adds more out of sequence River.
Jack really likes her and its always fun when the story tries to make you fall in love again.
So it was happy sad. Happy because they had fun together.
Sad because they end.

I am at the end of this story again, and if I liked being there I'd not listen to so much Big Finish, where it is middles for always, so far.

But the stories are very good, so, happy sad, ends.

I relistened to the first box of Captain Jack adventures, One Enchanted Evening and Month 25.

I love these two so much I just want to draw hearts around them. I am grin like :-D

And it's not because I particularly ship him with Alonso or... Javic, but, the writers brought their A game on those interactions. I don't see it but I can see he sees it, you know?

So I spend the whole of One Enchanted Evening, despite being a Janto shipper who knows exactly what point of the story he is in, following as the story takes us from 'hmmm' to 'huh' to 'just let them kiss already!'
and it is such fun.

As for Javic... I mean there's room to believe nothing happened, but really, of course he did.
And it's hilarious at the end when he's all ( Read more... )

I can thoroughly recommend this set. It is a lot of fun.




And the other thing I noticed, after listening to all that Torchwood and reading Torchwood and watching Torchwood, is this set? Is enough Doctor Who for both sets of listeners.

And that I think is why it is allowed to be fun.

It doesnt have that Adult And Disturbing Material warning from the start of much Torchwood
and I am in the right mood for the lighter tone.

Okay, you know the other day I posted about Captain Jack's theatricality? The short version is: some people comment on Barrowman's acting style being theatrical, big gestures, see it from the back seats body language. I asked what we could learn about Jack if we assume this symbol set is intentional and try and figure out what background could lead to the character being that way.
I forgot a bit of data:
In Adam we see how Jack dressed, how his family and friends dressed, when he was a kid.
And it covers their face. Not all the time, but they have big goggles and cloths to cover up from the sand.
So from that, canon, bit of data we have an actual reason to develop a communication style that relies on body language rather than facial expression.

That bit where the Doctor and ( Read more... )

Lodge, David The Art of Fiction
I've managed to read about half of this in one day, 120ish pages. compare to my three day 40 page nightmare in the very theoretical books. this one has a bunch of examples and topics and vocab. what it lacks is... I was going to say depth. I don't know, it's a bit like a tray of one bite sandwiches, you know? Every topic started as an article for a newspaper and it's just a little dab of topic and then there's another one. Would have been good if I'd read it at the start of the semester like the reading list suggested, I guess, but do tend to frustrate now. But whenever I feel like giving up and going to get the thinkier books it comes up with something nifty.

Section on Time-Shift

(quote)

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) is another striking example. The author tells us at the outset that the story of his hero, Billy Pilgrim, is a fiction based on his own real experience of being a prisoner of war in Dreseden when it was destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945, one of the most horrific air-raids of World War II. The story proper begins: "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," and it shifts frequently and abruptly between various episodes in Billy's civilian life as an optometrist, husband and father in the American midwest, and episodes of his war-service culminating in the horror of Dresden. This is more than just the operation of memory. Billy is "time tripping". With other traumatized veterans he seeks to escape the intolerable facts of modern history by means of the science-fiction myth of effortless travel through time and intergalactic space (which is measured in time - "light years"). He claims to have been abducted for a period to the planet Tralfamadore, which is inhabited by little creatures who look like plumber's friends with an eye on top. These passages are both amusingly parodic of science fiction and philosophically serious. To the Tralfamadorians, all times are simultaneously present, and one can choose where to locate oneself. It is the inexorable, unidirectional movement of time that makes life tragic in our human perspective, unless one believes in an eternity in which time is redeemed, and its effects reversed.

(/quote)

There's a bit more, but that's the bit that made me think. The bold is mine (the italic is part of the original). Oddly enough it made me go WWII -time travel- tramatised veteran - Jack?

Thoughts remain fuzzy, but... what kind of guy would find WWII a good place to be?
Because he's got all of space and time to choose from, and he keeps going back there, not just physically but his style and his stories.

Could be he has intolerable facts in his personal history, and something about WWII makes them easier to live with? Like maybe the whole good guys vs bad guys bit?
I keep wondering what side he was on before he chose to be Jack, you know?

... this may seem a bit trivial lined up against, like, serious reality, but ... okay, it's like, Robin Hood the latest version is a haunted man come back from war in the east, and while I didn't much like the series I liked what they seemed to be trying to do, because hello to the relevant. So this stuff unfortunately *remains* relevant. Because the stories told about the past, the bits of it people are comfortable with, contextualise the present. War on terror? Axis of evil. So this shit resonates, and not always in ways that stand up to close scrutiny. So I'm trying to figure out the psyche of a fictional character, yeah, but only because on the bounce/reflection it's kind of relevant.

He's working in the Torchwood special ops paradigm, all that secrecy, all the lies, fighting against enemies that don't line up and wear uniforms. But he's dreaming on the war when it was all simple. Only he also knows too much history - he knows where the dead went after, he knows the people that went off to die, so it isn't a shiny hero story because there's too much lost. But at the same time the losses have to mean something so it becomes a hero story.

... bugger, I need to sleep and I'm not making sense.

Doing this transcript thingy, I have now a whole post in my head about Jack's strategies for conversational control. He makes flirting and (usually sexual) anecdotes a power move, filling up the conversation space. He does this chess knight thing where if he doesn't like where the conversation is going he shifts it sideways, changes the angle on the topic and makes it emotional, shifts things away from being logic about him to being emotion about... so far usually Gwen. It actually isn't very pleasant. But works pretty well.

Also, his boss-cred is so minimal it might be in negative numbers. He can do giving orders and he isn't pointy haired, he listens and makes sense and stuff, but he isn't good when people don't do orders. And where does he get that "We're both responsible" bit? Not out of logic land. He the boss, he responsible, or so he thought about the flashback thing before. This time he hands out responsible to get control back.

Can do examples later. Have other doings to do now.

Thinking about the first two episodes in light of Jack's Issues ( Read more... )

for a bunch of disconnected thoughts, that ended up kind of long.

Some shows you can look at various characters and their stories as illuminating a central character. Some shows they kind of... pass the baton and have different who it is abouts. The only one we want to know about so far is Jack, who is set up as The Mystery for a lot of the other characters. Gwen has a very ordinary up front life so far, and is the one who wants to do the finding out. So I wonder, is it really telling us all about Jack?


But it isn't called Harkness, it is called Torchwood.
Among other things, this makes it much easier should any and/or all characters leave. Can keep the team and replace all the parts of it.
Without the slightly embarrassing 'which one's Blake' questions.


/ramble

At last! Loved it! ( Read more... )
But lookit, hopeful babble and being bouncy happy at the end of an epsode. Twisty interesting scary story with psychology solution happy happy coolness!


And at 0100 I've just finished watching the episode again on BBC3. Haven't wanted to do that before. But I just like this one.