Life on Queen Street

Yes.

I watched the Superbowl.

Lo, it was good and Green Bay won and the masses on Queen Street celebrated.

Spent the weekend up in Barry's Bay, near Algonquin Park, in serious winter country. Four hour drive to spend the afternoon and evening with a friend who moved back home from Toronto then a four hour drive today to be home in time for the football game.

Because the Superbowl was held in Texas, the menu was ribs and fries and avocado salad. Because it was USian football, we drank Miller Genuine Draft, which tasted beeresque with the added bonus of not actually making anyone tipsy.

Now I'm sitting going through my iTunes library and making some cuts: I'm not a grade eight girl - why do I need a copy of Evanescence?

I mean, "My Immortal"? Really?

Jesus you were emo, younger me.

When I get through that (I'll sleep) I need to come up with another eight endings to stories I haven't written.

No problem, right?

sigh.

A relapsing stomach flu.

Bleargh.

Normally, I'd kill for a day to lay about and do nothing but read. But I feel like hell. Feeling like hell makes it difficult for me to concentrate on reading so I've spent the day reading Stargate SG-1 fanfic.

Another time, I'm sure I'd have something deep or insightful or even funny to say about this but I'm on a 15 minute cycle through the bathroom and dehydration is making me stupid.

So... I've made the decision not to consider my New Year's Day in any way an omen for the rest of 2011. That said, I hope you all are having a much better day.

xo

LoQ

PS - Sam Carter is awesome.

Oops.

Hi. Been awhile.

Sorry about that. The end of August through September so far has been a little nuts. I packed a whole summer's worth of cottaging into the end of August and then it was time for International Hussy Weekend in Rochester over Labour Day Weekend. cretkid hosted the annual gathering of thassalia, rubberneck, fbf and I at Casa a Rock Doc (now with fire). A fine time was had by all I think and this time I was the only one who came down with Captain Trips (original flavour). Two weeks later, I've finally managed to shake my cold in time for the first meeting of the Polaris concom - announced guests: Ben Browder, Adam Baldwin and Armin Shimmerman.

Yes, Ben Browder... 8D

In other news, if you haven't seen Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I recommend it. To paraphrase the great Kim Pine, if Michael Cera's career had a face, I'd punch it. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed SP. As an insufferable Torontonian, I loved seeing Toronto playing Toronto on the big screen in a movie that proudly declares its location and influences - no passing Osgood Hall off as an Opera House or made-up hospital and university names (WTF, Rookie Blue). Michael Cera is an effective slacker hero but the movie really belongs to the supporting cast of Alison Pill, Keiran Culkin and Ellen Wong as Scott's bandmate, roommate and fake high school girlfriend respectively. Unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim the movie suffers from the same problem as Scott Pilgrim the comic book - you're never quite sure what Ramona sees in Scott and she suffers from a not-dire but disappointing lack of agency in the third act. Never totally objectified but never truly in charge of her own destiny, Ramona coasts on Mary Elizabeth Winstead's ability to project a depth and certain badassery to what could easily have become a rote 'dream girl' cipher. Director and adapter Edgar Wright never really pushes the rebarbative qualities of Scott and Ramona, which undercuts the climax somewhat but if you liked the book, you will love Scott Pilgrim vs the World. For the rest of us, Scott Pilgrim is well-made summer flick with more than enough fun to overcome an underwritten female lead.

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30 (non-consecutive) Days of Writing

8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?

Lately, fanfic (if you can call it a genre; I think you can) is winning by volume. However, while my fanfic is all SF (Farscape, Roswell, The Sarah Connor Chronicles), my original writing is a mixed bag: contemporary horror, historical fiction, short fiction, poetry, fantasy. I think my favourite to write it fantasy. I like the grandeur of high fantasy, the ability to blow life up to maximum magnification it provides without the limitations and responsibilities of historical fiction. Historical fiction is life recreated in miniature, a revelation of exquisite detail. Fantasy is high drama, operatic and soaring; self-gratifying to write.

That said, I firmly believe there's a special hell for writers who create quasi-medieval settings without the least understanding of medieval society, economy and culture. Perhaps it's not surprising that my favourite genre to read is actually non-fiction, particularly histories of the late middle ages and the Italian Renaissance. I find books like The Devil's Broker and A Distant Mirror are not only more compelling and more dramatic than contemporary fantasy fiction, they're better written, while Caterian Sforza would find Cersei Lannister a silly and insipid creature.

I'm currently reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, which is a Swedish Twilight for adults with a Joss Whedon size zero faux-riotgrrl playing second fiddle to the Gary Stu protagonist and depictions of grotesque sexualized violence replacing Twilight's angsty teen vampires in love.

Solar by Ian McEwan, which is a hard book to like even thought McEwan's prose is itself a rich reward for reading. The protagonist, Michael Beard, is a loathsome solipsist of such extent that I rather hope the book reflects some sort of psychic purge for the author rather than think McEwan finds such a figure worthy of his time.

The Dancers Dancing by Eilis ni Dhuibne, an exquisitely observed bildungsroman set against the particularly Irish backdrop of an summer college in the Gaeltacht. It's taken me a tremendously long time to read as ni Dhuibhne's sharply observed depictions of the lives of 13-year-old girls has the habit of triggering unpleasant flashbacks to high school.

9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

I just do? My ideas for stories tend to start as a sentence, a line of dialogue in my head. It repeats until I know who's speaking it or who's point of view I'm seeing and I build out from there. Normally by the time I can put a few paragraphs down, I've a sketch in my mind of who the character is. Over time, the sketch is finished, inked in and coloured... and then I normally throw it out and start over with a line here and a shadow there. Secondary characters, like baby horses, tend to emerge more or less fully-formed and capable of running on their own within moments. They are also more likely to be based on people I've met or inspired by other characters (fictional and otherwise). Protagonists are definitely anthropoid creatures and need time and effort and resources to thrive. The diptych of Katharyne and Rosyaln are probably the two protagonists who've emerged most fully-formed and changed least over time: Katharyne because she's drawn rather strongly from Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth I (and less so her historical counterpart) and Rosalyn because she was intended to be Not-the-heroine-of-every-sword-and-sorcery-novel-I'd-read-since-high-school, which is rather a more concrete character description than I normally have to begin. Since then, though, Rosalyn's character has been refined some with experiences thieved from Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Eileen Power's seminal^a-chem Medieval Women.


( The Questions (and answers) )

I think I might lose my mind if I start thinking about the oil spill, plume, leak... jet in the Gulf.

And I mean that very literally.

So I'm reading a biography of Evelyn Waugh instead.

So yeah, I have a DW account. I just don't read it... and when the entries here automatically cross-post, no link to DW pops up. Well, that's not going to be confusing.

1) I spent the last four days sick in bed and then came to work today, surprised to discover myself woozy, light-headed and without focus. Just when I thought I was being a big, ol'faker my body comes along and tells me "no, honey, you were sick in bed for a reason & you are still not entirely well." Go figure.

2) I'm now in Season 9 of STARGATE SG-1 having somewhat abandoned my "watch only when I workout" plan, what with being sick and all. I'm going to be sad when I get to the end of SG-1.

3) Interestingly, when Ben Browder and Claudia Black are on-screen together in SG-1, it's easier to see them as Cam and Vala rather than 'Not-Crichton' and 'Not-Aeryn' than watching either character alone.

4) Ben Browder is really good as Mitchell. I never watched him on SG-1 beyond the first couple of eps (and "Unending"). I like the way he gradually steps up Mitchell's giddy enthusiasm for SG-1 as the character becomes more and more comfortable within Stargate Command.

5) Sam Carter continues to be awesome.

6) Teal'c continues to be awesome. And his awesomeness is not nearly celebrated enough (I nearly killed myself laughing over the scene in "Lost City" where Daniel fanboys Teal'c's depth - despite it being immaterial).

7) Ellen Ripley is awesome.

I wrote post-Alien Ressurection fic a while ago and I want to write more. *sigh* Add it to the list, I suppose. The literal apotheosis of Ellen Ripley was a really weak idea, antithetical to the character's innate every-person quality, but having turned Ripley into a superhero (that's Joss Whedon for you - loves strong women. Real and/or realistic women characters, on the other hand, seem to be a foreign country to the poor lad) there's fun to be hand in the juxtaposition between Riply 8's self-awareness and her memories of being Ellen Ripley.

8) I want to rewatch RED DAWN. It was one of those movies I wasn't quite old enough to watch that was a staple of sleepover parties in those halcyon days before video stores started carding kids wanting to rent R-rated movies. It was cheesy and early 80s commie-paranoid but I was 12 and the subtext mostly passed over my head. I recall the undefined fear that we were going to be nuked out of existence (I attribute the vogue for apocafic, be it Terminators, Zombies, Goa'uld, etc, among my generation of fans to that vague sense of potential armaggedon permeating early adolescence and childhood) and there was something resonate in the idea that "we", as embodied by the photogenic Teenbeat youth of the USA, could survive and go onto to win World War III.

They've remade it with China in the role of bad guys and I'm just not sure that it's going to play at all. While RED DAWN original flavour seems to me like a fairly harmless artifact from a bygone cultural age, I hope that the remake will one day be porved to be as cluelessly alarmist about the future (and xenophobic) as RISING SUN.

9) The more I think about the ending of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, the more I want to hit Josh Friedman with a copy of anything written by Alice Munro. He probably doens't deserve it, though, I should probably be focusing my ire (and my copy of Too Much Happiness) on some unknown suit at FOX who didn't understand that, no, really - The Terminator is a romance wrapped in a killer robot story; it's the characters, stupid, not the killer robots.

I could so see living here.

It's almost a shaming admission (which offends my Angeleno friends, and I apologize). I feel like one of those Englishmen who lost their heads for the desert - the heat is friendlier than the humidity at home, despite a 10-degree temperature differential. The smog is, surprisingly, no worse and this week, the streets are cleaner. It's easier than I expected to get use to a thin sheen of perspiration but I have to be smarter about water.

Spent the day walking along Venice Beach and I feel pan-fried and scorched in random places - the tops of my feet, my left wrist where it lay in the sun throughout a long and rambling breakfast on Sunset. I'm now part of someone's vacation photos and the unreality of it all tickles me: the valet parking at the greasy spoon; the Hollywood-boy tucking a screenplay into the tiny compartment at the back on his Ducati; then the weirdness of Venice and the Pacific cool of the ocean water on my feet.

When I got changed after boxing class last night, my arms decided to remind me that I'd bee holding them at eye-level for an hour. Ow.

I'm having trouble typing today without my hands shaking from fatigue.

Ow.

In other news - God, I love TORCHWOOD. When it is good, it's very good. So for, Jack's messiah complex is under control, Gwen Cooper is being flat-out awesome and Ianto continues to wear natty, fitted three-piece suits and be smart. TORCHWOOD also seems to be managing Gwen's relationship with civillian husband Rhys (almost certainly going to end up replacing Ianto as Torchwood's tea-boy I think) without falling into any nasty cliches. Two hours in and I am still impressed.

Most of all, I'm impressed by the cleverness of the storytelling - as with the best of DOCTOR WHO, the creepy doesn't come from gory effects but the unusual and unexpected. It's story not spectacle that makes TORCHWOOD compelling, ( spoiler )Those budgetary constraints drive the narrative cleverness to think around what they can't afford that makes DOCTOR WHO and TORCHWOOD so satisfying. Imagine how much time Michael Bay might have had to spend coming up with a plot for TRANSFORMERS 2 if he hadn't had $300 million to spend on robot fights. Ditto McG and TERMINATOR SALVATION, JJ Abrams and STAR TREK (which is the best of the lot and still bloody illogical). Less, as they say, is more and God love the Beeb for it.

God, I'm so damn tired. Foolishly, I'm back to sleeping 4 or so hours a night and that's just not enough.

*yawns*

*rubs eyes*

Dear God, my backlog of stuff to do is intense. If I concentrate this afternoon, work should be more or less under control, however.

It's just fandom that is totally out of control. Damn.

Yes, the title of this short little blog post is metyfour. :)

And because life is better when you smile (this is true, no, really), a little something that put a smile on my face this morning: baby panthers!

Love the planet, LJ, it is a strange and wondrous place.

LoQ

I think I'm last on the boat here but it you haven't seen the clip of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent (linky here: http://tinyurl.com/cf59ft), you really should. Bless her socks, that lady can sing.

Not only is she talented but it's a bloody good reminder to myself, if no one else, to be less of a cynical bastard all the fucking time and, for everyone, that you are never too old or too unlikely to follow your dreams.

I learned that in Ireland. I keep forgetting. So thank you, Susan, for the powerful reminder of your example.