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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who S5 E07: ‘Amy’s Choice’

    A bit late again this week for my Who views – and in this case, only because I’ve spent the last few days feeling somewhat off. It wasn’t a lack of enthusiasm, as this was actually an episode which (despite its small flaws) I enjoyed the hell out of. Fear the spoilers…

    ‘If we’re going to die, let’s go out looking like a Peruvian folk band!’

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  • Marking the Changes

    At some point, I am going to do a life-related update to make it clear that I have been doing a few other things than just watching Doctor Who for the past six weeks. But for the moment, all I want to announce to all and sundry is the news that the first draft of Chill Out, my second novel, is done. It’s not necessarily very good (lots of it is vague and sketchy, lots of it is bad, lots of it is just plain wrong), but it’s done. The whole thing weighs in at 168,000 words, which means I have managed a first draft that is smaller than my first draft for The Hypernova Gambit, something I’m very grateful for. It’s the first step along a long road – the rewrites I’m going to have to do on this are going to be brutal, but I’ve got a much better idea of what I need to do to get it into a readable state. And, frankly, it’s nice to get to one of those points in life where you can simply throw your hands up in the air and holler “I did it!”

    Phase one is done. Now comes the tricky bit…

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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who S5 E06: ‘The Vampires of Venice’

    A little late this week – partly thanks to being rather busy, and partly thanks to the fact that I wasn’t exactly blown away by “The Vampires of Venice”. The Who rollercoaster of quality continues – a shorter TV-related ramble follows. And, as usual, fear the spoilers…

    ‘I knew you were going to say that! Did anyone else know he was going to say that?”

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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who, S5 E04+05 – “The Time of Angels” / “Flesh and Stone”

    A brief delay, and we’re back. And let’s just say, I’m feeling a lot better about Who than I was at the end of ‘Victory of the Daleks’. As usual, fear the spoilers…

    ‘What if the gravity fails?’ ‘I’ve thought of that.’ ‘And?’ ‘We’ll all plunge to our deaths. See, I’ve thought about it.’

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  • Remind Me

    It’s the end of April, and it’s all gone by rather fast. And talking of rather fast, in a few minutes I’ve got to make my way into Manchester to hop on a train and complete the final phase of my action-packed April, where I voyage down to London for the yearly adventure of the Clarke Awards. I’m looking forward to it – I’m even flirting with the idea of (shock! horror!) buying new shoes on the way in.

    The short version of the last couple of weeks is that London Book Fair was good (if quiet, thanks to the Icelandic Volcano gods), and I’ve spent most of the last week doing a combination of working on the book and reading various manuscripts for book reports. I’ve actually reached the beginning of the big action climax of Chill Out, and it’s a little bit scary – but looking back at the rest of the book, I can see traces of the novel I’m going to eventually shape it into. I think it has the potential to be something fun. And maybe not as barnstormingly huge as The Hypernova Gambit…

    I’ll also be doing a more detailed write-up of last week’s Doctor Who once we’re past Saturday – I figured doing it as a double-post and tackling the whole thing would be the sensible route. The short version? I really, really enjoyed it – not completely blown away, and there were a couple of minor niggles (particularly the way Alex Kingston spent most of the first twenty minutes being staggeringly arch), but also Who at its most filmic and exciting. It’ll be interesting to see exactly how they finish this off on Saturday, and where the show goes after this…

    Right. No more time. I must voyage. See you soon…

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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who, S5 E03: ‘Victory of the Daleks’

    And there I was thinking I was going to get nothing to grumble about. No, I didn’t really like ‘Victory of the Daleks’ that much – so here we go again. And fear the spoilers…

    ‘Behold! The restoration of the Daleks!’

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  • The Impression That I Get

    It’s like I blinked, and a week and a half has rushed past in the interim. Suddenly, I’m packing a bag again, as I’m heading off again tomorrow, this time for London Book Fair (which is likely to be an even odder experience than I was expecting, thanks to the fact that a massive number of international publishers have been stranded thanks to the Icelandic Volcano). So once again I’ve packed, and am primed to set off tomorrow at about 10am.

    It’s been a fast week and a half. Last week was tricky, thanks to the end of unit 4 of my proofing course being amazingly traumatic (I can only liken it to having my brain squirted out of my ears – and this isn’t even the hard bit – there’s still the hardest unit to go…). Thankfully, since then I’ve been able to do an amazing amount of writing (I even notched up 7,500 words in one day, a wordcount I haven’t managed in a very long time), and have made significant progress on the book. It’s now standing at 137,000 words, and the words left are significantly large but not insanely large. It’s got a real chance of being very good. All I’ve got to do is just keep going…

    And Eastercon? Eastercon was tons of fun. It didn’t quite reach the heights of Rock Band and singing ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ last year, but then I wasn’t expecting it to – it was wonderful getting to meet up with people, have fun, socialise, and actually feel like I was getting into the con vibe in a way I’m not sure I’ve managed before. To be honest, the actual convention side of it was… a little disappointing. There were fewer panels that actually grabbed me this year, which meant I went to very few – and even the ones that did interest me seemed to be scheduled very bizarrely (either early on Friday morning or very late on Monday night). It was good, but it didn’t seem to have a cohesive identity – something which next year’s Eastercon (the pulp/military-themed ‘Illustrious’, aka ‘ManlyCon) does at least seem to have (even if the guests of honour – David Weber and Peter F. Hamilton – don’t exactly fill me with excitement). And, as if that wasn’t enough, in another week and a bit, I’ll be heading off to London again for the annual bunfight of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

    So things are good. I actually feel like I am where I need to be in my life right now. I’ve got tons of projects I need to complete, lots to keep me occupied, and the regular fun of Thursday’s Comics Night at Travelling Man to keep me entertained (where, this week, we proved that there isn’t a single line from any Star Wars film that can’t be improved with a West Country accent).

    Right. Off to finish packing…

    (And there’ll be an understandable silence on Who-related topics while I’m in London. I might save it all up for a double-blog post, tackling this Saturday’s ep along with the first half of the Weeping Angels two-parter. We shall see…)

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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who, S5 E02: ‘The Beast Below’

    Once again, it’s time to look at Who. I won’t be writing this much on every week (if only because on the current form, it’ll get very dull writing “Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are both brilliant” over and over again), but it’s time for me to get my teeth into an episode that may not have knocked my socks off as much as last week’s, but still had plenty of delights on offer. As usual, fear the spoilers…

    This isn’t going to be big on dignity!

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  • TV EYE: Doctor Who S5 E01: ‘The Eleventh Hour’

    Yes, it’s been a busy week. Yes, it’s taken me longer to write this than I wanted. And yes, I loved last Saturday’s episode. I’d have loved it even if I’d watched it on my own, but seeing it in a gigantic hall with hundreds of other sci-fi geeks, and then getting to hang out afterwards with friends and essentially go “Squeee!” lots, was rather amazing. As you’d expect, fear the spoilers…

    ‘Why does nobody ever listen to me? Do I just have a face that nobody listen to? Again?’

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  • Prelude to Eastercon

    How best to sum up the last week of work? Well, you know those films where the hero fights through a whole army of soldiers in spectacular fashion, bests them all, and is then on the verge of victory against the evil villain (although also rather battered and tired by all this), when the evil villain turns and says “Ah, yes- but you have yet to face Umkala!” and reveals the seven-foot-high man-mountain just waiting to kick the hero’s arse? It’s felt a little like that – only in this case, the seven-foot-high man-mountain is my proofreading course. I was hoping to get it finished this week… but this thing is massively, gigantically, brain-achingly hard. And it’s the kind of hard you can’t rush – so instead, I’m giving myself a break of a week and going back to it next Wednesday.

    And the reason why a week’s break is a good idea is that the next four days are going to be exclusively taken up by my third trip to Eastercon. It’s become a fixture in my schedule so quickly, I’m just wondering what the hell took me so long – I guess there’s always a little nervousness at this point thanks to my innate insecurity, a little worry that maybe this’ll be the year when it ALL GOES WRONG, but I’m sure that will evaporate the minute I arrive, check in, and start doing some epic mingling in the bar. It’s my first Eastercon where I’m not actually on a panel, but I’m still going to have as much fun as I possibly can. Updates will, understandably, be rather few, but I will hopefully be keeping my Twitter feed pretty active, and I’ll be back on here early next week with, no doubt, a round-up of my adventures, as well as plenty of thoughts on the start of the new season of Who.

    In the meantime, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do…