Week four. Blimey. An episode of WHO that didn’t make me feel like my childhood was being stomped on. Not perfect, and a few aspects I could have done without, but very nicely done and the first episode of the new season that I can imagine watching again. Who’d have thought it?

Weekly blog activity isn’t ideal, but I’m spending so much of my life in front of this computer that it’s easy to resist the temptation to type more than I absolutely have to. The novel is making progress- I’ve dumped one character who was giving me serious problems, and rewired the “exposition” bit of the story. It’s not fantastic, but- as I have to keep reminding myself- it’s like writing an utterly gigantic article, and with my usual methods- throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and then trimming and trimming and trimming- it’s going to take as long as it’s going to take. Annoyingly philosophical, and annoyingly true. I heard back from the first “outside” person (i.e.- not George) to read the first six chapters, and the feedback was very positive and- in true artist tradition- I ended up getting a bit depressed and miserable about the few criticisms they had. Rather silly, especially as they’re right, and I’m going to concentrate for most of May on just getting the actual guts of the story down on the page. I’m at Chapter 11 at the moment, and I’m about to get past the stuff that I’ve already worked on, and into slightly more unfamiliar territory, which is horribly scary. Nevertheless, I’m going to throw myself in and see what happens. What I’ve got at the moment is time- and that is a luxury that I can’t afford to waste. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to get back to ‘proper work’, which is something I’m not entirely looking forward to…

Also- the first new episode of LOST Season 2 for ages, and it actually made me realise exactly how much I enjoy that show when it’s firing on all cylinders. Narrative curveballs galore, and an ending that had me going “WHAAAAAAAT??????” I am doing my best to avoid spoilers for the rest of the season, and am hoping that the season finale is as much fun as last time.

Finished watching Season One of The West Wing this week (thanks to nessreader), which was utterly fabulous and ends on utter bastard of a cliffhanger. I then proceeded to confuse the hell out of myself by watching an episode of Season Seven, which is currently airing on digital station More4. I’d heard that tone-wise, it changes almost completely once Aaron Sorkin left at the end of season 4, and it looks like I may have heard right…

It’s week three, and in an attempt to not repeat myself, all I’m going to say about tonight’s episode of Doctor Who is that it’s nice to see that their rip-offs are getting slightly more surreal, if no more obvious- this week, they decided to treat us to a remake of kids TV show THE DEMON HEADMASTER. And I think the kids TV show actually did it better…

I stormed through the majority of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion this week- it’s a genuinely barmy piece of animation art that starts out as a “young boy and a giant robot” adventure that’s very typical of the Japanese genre known as Mecha, and yet ends up transforming into a totally loopy tale of psychology, dysfunction and the Apocalypse that’s brimming over with some fantastically sacreligious iconography that’s from both Christianity and Kabbalah. It’s also got some utterly stunning uses of classical music, although for some bizarre reason, the biggest and most genuinely head-trippy scene in the final movie “The End of Evangelion” is accompanied by a chirpy (and some might say slightly bland) pop song. And, just to make it even harder to ignore, it’s in English while the rest of the dialogue is in Japanese. Still, it’s crazed, it’s violent, and it’s crammed full of all kinds of images that I’m going to find very difficult to get out of my head.

The book is stumbling slightly, but that’s only because I’ve gotten to a tricky, exposition-heavy part of the story. I think I’ve worked out which piece I need to crack, and I’m going to start trying to sort it out tomorrow. If I can get this bit right, I’ll be able to proceed, and start kicking along with the rest of it, because the previous week, despite its problems, has proved to me that this is absolutely what I want to do. And I really want to find out exactly what happens in the end…

The last few days gave been a strange experience. After an intensive burst of writing, I went a bit loopy, and got some bits and bobs done on other stuff, but needed to metaphorically step outside so that I could repressurise. I’ve got the first six chapters of the book together into a vaguely readable state, and I have sent them out to some people just to get an idea of what’s working (or, more likely, what isn’t). It’s currently running at 55,000 words. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever written, and I’m nowhere near the ending yet. Tomorrow, I kick back into gear, and start full-scale rewriting and construction on chapters 7-12. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I’m taking it one step at a time, and I’m not going to stop until this thing is properly done.

Last night was the Arthur C. Clarke Awards- which was my cue to descend on the throng and drink plenty of booze. It happenned in the Apollo Cinema, just off Picadilly Circus, and while the whole thing was a bit of a crush, it was tremendous fun. I ended up having a wonderful (and not at all geeky) conversation about Doctor Who with China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station, and I also accidentally ended up tasting one of the most ludicrously unpleasent ice creams I’ve ever sampled in my life. They were handing them out free as we entered the auditorium where the ceremony was taking place, and I was briefly cheered and happy- until I tried some. And then, I discovered that the name “Chilli Red” wasn’t some kind of metaphor, or a description of the colour. Actual, honest-to-god, chilli-flavoured ice cream. Thankfully, I survived this ordeal, and ended up going out for Pizza afterwards, and staggering back onto one of the last tubes at Midnight.

I spent most of today recovering, sorting out some paperwork stuff (particularly relating to my tax return), and this evening, I had a screening. It was UNITED 93, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been quite as shaken up by a film as that. I heard about it first via a trailer, and my first thought was, I will admit, “I”m really not sure if that should be made.” The fact that it was Paul Greengrass directing peaked my interest, but it was the kind of thing that I was both fascinated to see and slightly dreading at the same time. You can debate the “too soon” issue until you’re blue in the face, but taking it just as a film, it’s an amazing piece of work, using a documentary-style edge, constructed through improvisation so that the level of reality is nothing short of horrifying. And yet, it’s a film that needs to be seen. It doesn’t cheapen the story. It doesn’t go for the political angle. It just tries to show, as closely as possible what happenned, and what may have happenned, and it does it magnificently. Film isn’t just supposed to entertain. Sometimes, film is designed to do what UNITED 93 does. I’m not going to be in a rush to see it again, but it’s a truly magnificent piece of work.

Time to relax for a little, and then bed.

Sometimes, you have to get angry in order to work out why you get angry.

I’d been telling myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up about the new series of Doctor Who. After all, having lived through the worst of last season, they’d have to be going some to get that bad. And any time I want to watch the old show, it’s there. It’s something I grew up with, something which, for better or worse, was a part of my life from as early as I can remember, right through to 1989 when the last episode of “Old Who” aired. And, after having made my wife’s life hell for 13 weeks last year, I really didn’t want to do it again. I thought I was primed. I thought I was prepared. I thought wrong…

I’ve started falling back into the old patterns. I even wrote a lengthy e-mail to my reviews editor at SFX, because he’d written a review on the website of last Saturday’s episode where I couldn’t actually believe he was talking about the same piece of television. I was agog, and it resulted in a lengthy (hopefully slightly entertaining) e-mail, and yet what does it matter? Why does this affect me so?

It’s not the fact that a certain proportion of New Who is, to be honest, not that good. Doctor Who being a quality rollercoaster is something that I’m used to- there have been brief periods in the show’s history when it’s delivered a series of classics in a row, but, for the most part, it’s a process of taking the rough with the smooth. It’s enjoying the bits that work, and wincing at or attempting to ignore the bits that don’t. All this should have been training for the new series- and yet, it wasn’t. And I think, underneath all the ups, the downs, the whys and the wherefores, I actually understand the reason now.

It’s not because it’s not very good. It’s because it’s not very good- and successful.

It’s because they have, for the most part, thrown out the intensive, off-beat, conceptual storytelling of Old Who, replacing it with louder, flashier stuff that makes some exciting noises, but falls apart if you look at it too closely. Stuff that makes emotional sense, but doesn’t really make actual, honest, common or garden sense. They’ve coated it with CGI gloss, thrown in lots of gags to make sure that it’s a ‘romp’ and nobody takes it too seriously. And people have bought it.

I could cope with Who being bad when nobody was watching. Hell, I was still a fan during the Sylvester McCoy era, and I could cope with it. Because of the stories. Because of the worlds that the show was still attempting to build (The last, real, genuine ‘Old Who’ story, for me, was the McCoy era adventure The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. And yes, there are bits in it that don’t make sense, but everything around it is so well put together, atmospheric and strange that it doesn’t make a difference).

But the way New Who is made now… and the way it’s being embraced as a daring revamp of a creaky old bit of shaky-set nonsense… it makes it feel like none of that ever mattered. Like the stories and worldbuilding and limitless scope of the original show didn’t matter. Like all they really needed was a decent SFX budget, a bit more characterisation, and lots of sexual Doctor-Companion tension, and nobody would have needed to worry about anything as dreary and uninteresting as the story.

The only way that I’d be made really happy by New Who, to be brutally honest, is if it fell flat on its face. I know it won’t, and that it’ll be around for a little while, at least. But, I’d honestly rather be watching something where there’s genuine imagination at work, even if it’s creaky, unconvincing, and decades old. I sometimes feel terribly out of step with the world, like I seriously don’t belong. The world of Doctor Who was a place where I felt like I belonged- a world of magic, and terror, and strange creatures, and a bloke in a Police Box who was strange, difficult, unpredictable, and yet would also turn out to be the best friend you could possibly have.

And the world of New Who… it’s not somewhere I feel like I want to visit that much. I’ll keep on looking from time to time. But I still miss the other world. And I wish that it didn’t feel like the more succesful New Who gets, the more of that old world gets knocked down.

There’s still room for magic in the world. You’ve just got to look a little harder for it now.

(Hope some of this makes sense…)

Okay- it’s Who, week deux, and I’m going to try not to go on for too long about this week’s episode of Who, mainly because of the fact that it actually left me kind of uninterested. There really wasn’t that much to it, except “Oh, we’re in Scotland!” “Look, Queen Victoria!” “HOLY SHIT! A WEREWOLF!!” and then lots and lots of running around. Again, we had a climax that really made very little sense whatsoever (from a writer who should drop the “T” and have Deus Ex Machina as his middle name), and a final scene that leapt from a bizarrely sombre moment where Queen Victoria banishes the Doctor and Rose for taking their dangerous lives far too frivolously, to a lengthy camp gag about “Ha, ha, the Royal family are Werewolves!” Russell T. Davies seems to veer from loving the horror side of Who to derailing entire episodes with camp in-jokes, and never finds a balance. And the whole, myth-making Torchwood running plotline is getting kind of tiresome. If they’ve got time to basically trail an upcoming spin-off, they’ve got time to think up an ending that actually makes sense. It’s all shiny, CGI surface- take it away, and there’s very little there. Suddenly, last week actually seems slightly better….

Elsewhere, life has been very little other than writing the book, which is going gradually but well. I’m coming to terms with the fact that, at the current going rate, it might end up quite long (I’m up to 50,000 words of the current draft, and I’ve only got a quarter of the way through the story). The fact that I keep finding ways of making the plot even more complicated has absolutely nothing to do with it… but I’m having fun, and will hopefully be able to start showing bits of it to people soon.

Lots to do. Not enough time to do it…

The plan for the evening was to go to the screening of SILENT HILL- but instead, Pathe decided to cancel it (only three days before the film is due to be released!). Print problems was their excuse. I ended up scurrying around the West End, and finally working my way into a screening of TELL ME WHO YOU ARE, a rather odd documentary about a famed cinematographer and his relationship with his son, which was halfway between illuminating and being a jumbled rummage through other people’s home movies.

There’s a few new pieces up at my fiction blog Division X– it’s all strange, weird, subconscious stuff. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My blogging levels will be low for a while, as I’m currently entering an intensive time where I’ll be writing solidly for the next four weeks, in an attempt to get the novel into serious shape. As a result, sitting in front of this screen typing is the last place I want to be, but I will try and keep things under control and keep up to date. At the least, it’ll be a good way of working out my Who-related frustrations…

George had the venerable nessreader and lovely lovely Jenny from work (well, Jenny’s ex-Waterstones, technically…) over last night for dinner, and it was great fun- although nessreader, in her usual way, managed to write it up much better than I ever could. And she says she’s not a good writer. Phah…

Read on, Macduff…

Okay- so low expectations was the way to go…

It wasn’t the soul-destroying semi-embarrasment that the first episode of the last season was. It did have a selection of enjoyable moments. And, when he isn’t making speeches or going that little bit too OTT, David Tennant was very good and a hell of a lot more “Doctor”y than Christopher Eccleston ever was.
However, the first episode of the second season of Doctor Who was still a bit of a bloody mess, and continues Russell T. Davies’ grab-bag method of throwing as much money at the screen in the desperate hope that nobody notices how shonky the story is. (There’s a climax, involving plague carriers being cured- and then infecting other plague carries with a cure- that seemed to make no sense whatsoever.) Just have lots of people running around, lots of CGI (not all of it very convincing), and everyone will be happy. It’s official- I’m not convinced! (And it’s bizarre- George’s opinion was very close. She’s always very vexxed at the fact that she now can’t enjoy something without analysing and criticising it, and every time this happens she glares at me and says “Look what you’ve done to me!!!”)

It’ll be interesting to see how the season progresses- but I’ve yet to be convinced…

Less than three hours to go before the new series of Doctor Who starts, and it’s an odd time. This used to be a major, world-defining thing for me– and now, I have to admit that I don’t know how much I care. It’s just one of those things, when a show is around for long enough for you to actually grow out of it, that you have to get used to- at least, if you’re as generally obsessed with stories as I am. There’s a couple of things I’m looking forward to- mainly the episode where classic companion Sarah Jane Smith comes back, and I’m interested to see how they handle updating the Cybermen (despite the fact that the new Cybermen look overdesigned, clunky, and lack the strangely elegant menace that the best versions had), but there’s not that much that’s got me going “Wow! I hope that’s good!” On the flipside of this, low expectations (especially based on some of the truly crappy episodes from last year, some of which I haven’t even been able to watch again- and I can usually handle anything Who can throw at me) might be the key to enjoying this. I just can’t help feeling that the whole Russell T. Davies worldview (complete with “moral crusader” speeches that always get my goat up) is, at heart, completely opposite to the way Doctor Who always was for me.

At 7.15, we shall see. I’ll try and post later to either vent or say “gosh, it wasn’t too bad”. Only time will tell.

That’s what my life largely consisted of today. I sat down, and tried to get the plot of the novel down (or at least what’s there so far) onto cards, so that I’d be able to get an idea of how it’s working, how everything fits together, and where the horrendous gaps are. I’ve got some decent ideas- not sure exactly how I’m going to proceed at the moment, but it’s possible that if I spend the next month solid doing very little other than writing, I may actually get somewhere.

Or possibly not…

I’m coming to the end of another burst of subbing at IPC. Sometimes, it’s rather guiltily like being paid to twiddle your thumbs for most of the day, but this time things have been relatively intense. It’s lots of very detailed, very precise work that does get extremely wearing after a while. It’s well-paid, though, and generally making sure that I’ll be able to stick to my plan of shutting down on Thursday and concentrating on very little other than the novel. It also gets me out of the house, and gives a bit of shape to the week, which is sometimes a very welcome occurrence. It’s just a little frustrating working on listings pages- mainly because all it takes is a few schedule changes and suddenly everything you’ve done for the past hour is completely irrelevant. I get on well with everybody here, though, and I’d far prefer doing this on the basis of when I need to, rather than subbing all the time, getting lots of money, and very probably losing the will to live in the bargain (which, according to Revenge of the Sith, is all you need to do in order to actually drop dead…)

Saw ASK THE DUST last night- a literary adaptation that seemed to be the typical thirties-set “blinkered writer sets out to learn about life, but gets MORE THAN HE BARGAINED FOR!!!”, with lots of metaphorical gubbins about the relationship between America and Mexico, the idea of the Melting Pot, and Los Angeles itself. It’s one of those romances that are beautifully written, very well acted and yet without the spark that makes you care about what happens to these people. Despite the best efforts of Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, the mixture of aggression, passion and compulsion in the central relationship never actually works- it always feels very arch, very structured, and very metaphorical without ever feeling real. Bizarrely, the stuff around the relationship is far more interesting- Donald Sutherland proves exactly how good he can be in a small role as a sozzled denizen of the hotel where Farrel is staying, and there’s a short relationship between Farrell and a sad-eyed, strangely crazed and ultimately tragic woman called Vera (played by an actress called Idina Menzel) that actually has more subtlety, spark and genuine interest than anything that happens between Farrell and Hayek. It’s rather a disappointment when she gets killed in an Earthquake… On top of this, there’s the classic melodramatic touch of having your lovers reach a place of peace and bliss away from the world where everything seems perfect… and suddenly, the girl starts coughing every so often. Yes, it’s the classic “Moulin Rouge” effect (Farrell is even a writer, just to make it even better), and soon Hayek is dying of TB in as photogenic a manner as possible. There’s beautiful photography from Caleb Deschanel and it’s all gorgeously made, but despite some fantastic dialogue, I really couldn’t wait for it to end. (How very cynical and unromantic of me…)

Being ridiculously short of money (and habitually steering clear of buying comics in favour of graphic novel collections, anyway) I was leafing through the latest issue of INFINITE CRISIS in a comicshop just to find out what ridiculous things are happening in the current cataclysmic hysterically overcomplicated DC Universe crossover series, and there was one moment that really made me stop and think “Whaaaat?” Basically, it’s a sequence where a supervillain called the Psycho Pirate (Hmmm…) is killed rather brutally by another character called Black Adam (and they wonder why superhero comics have a bad reputation?). It should also be pointed out that the Psycho Pirate wears a funky golden mask that enables him to alter people’s emotions. What happens in the scene is pretty gross- Black Adam rams two fingers into the Psycho Pirate’s eyes (with corresponding splats of blood)- and in the next frame, he’s pushed the mask all the way through the Psycho Pirate’s head with the result that, quite naturally, the Psycho Pirate’s head explodes in a gigantic splatter of blood and brains. Just to make this absolutely clear- this isn’t played subtly, done in silhouette or anything to tone it down whatsoever. It’s blunt, nasty, and full frontal, and done simply to shock, which I found a bit sad. Having grown up with 2000AD, I’ve seen plenty of hilariously excessive violence- and yet it always works best when there’s a certain point, or when it’s handled a certain way. When it’s just being thrown into what is essentially a big, silly spandex and superpowers saga in order to make it seem “grittier” and “more real”, it’s exactly the kind of post-Dark Knight and post-Watchmen bollocks that has made certain comics very difficult to read. It’s aiming everything at gore-hungry fanboys who didn’t think The Authority was hardcore enough, rather than remembering that we need different styles and things aimed at different ages. It’s like the daft, silly teen mermaid movie AQUAMARINE that I saw last week- which was actually a lot more fun than I expected. It’s not particularly amazing, it’s predictable and there’s a whole load of awful sea-related puns- and yet, it does the job that it sets out to do, which is to tell an appealing story for 11-14 year old girls. Saying that all entertainment should be ‘sophisticated’ and ‘multi-layered’, appealing to every audience, forgets that there’s actually something to be said about stuff that’s aimed purely at kids. And, I guess, that’s what annoyed me about INFINITE CRISIS- that it should be something that kids can enjoy without indulging in utterly gratuitous gore, instead of something that’s only going to appeal to people with a PHD in DC Universe continuity.

Another reason why I didn’t like that was simply because the Psycho Pirate turns up in a wonderful Grant Morrison comic called Animal Man, is used really well and imaginatively (he’s the only character who remembers the continuity-shifting events of Infinite Crisis’ predecessor, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and as a result tries to bring back all the alternate Earths wiped out in the Crisis and lead the characters on a rebellion off the comic page into our reality- trippy, trippy stuff…) and written out well. And suddenly, he’s back for no apparent reason, and being used in an obscure piece of retro continuity and meeting a gory, pointless death. It’s like with the Doom Patrol- which, under Grant Morrison’s stewardship, was a beautifully strange Dadaist riot of a comic, and yet the characters then were shifted around, ignored, and finally rebooted in a totally different version. I hate it when they do that, because the loose, strange continuity of the DC Universe was one of its finest traits- the fact that in the same universe as Batman and Superman, we had weird stuff like Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Animal Man- hell, even The Sandman actually takes place in the DC Universe (hence appearences from Mr Miracle, The Martian Manhunter, and even Superman and Batman in “The Wake”). It was a great way of leaping from one world to another, with all these wonderful interconnections- and yet now, with Vertigo, and all the other transformations, it feels terribly homogeonised, smaller, and far less interesting. This is probably the main reason I don’t buy comics anymore- because there’s nothing that’s really seduced me into spending my money.

Of course, the third volume of Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen is coming out soon, but that’s a different story…