Elizabeth Sandifer

So, first of all, thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon after my somewhat desperate Saturday appeal. We’ve still got a long way to go before this upheaval isn’t a major financial stress, so expect me to bang on about it for a while more, but the weekend was still a big relief.

To that end, I want to highlight a specific tier: the $10 a month tier, which gets you not only all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and any new writing that isn’t intended for a specific venue, it gets you Britain a Prophecy serialized scene by scene as Penn and Nechama finish them, an exclusive set of ebooks called Apocrypha Eruditorum, more about which in a few weeks, and a log of all the media I watch, with reviews of a lot of it. I just posted one yesterday, which included a retrospective on Partners in Crime and a review of John Wick.

But one of the things I read last week was provided as a review copy, and it feels unfair to gate that review for Patrons. So here’s a sample of the sort of thing you can expect in the form of a review of the latest volume of About Time, Tat Wood’s exhaustive series of Doctor Who criticism.

About Time Volume 4.1: 1975-77

New volumes of Tat Woods’s astonishing About Time series are always intensely welcome events. In this case what we have is the first half of a revised version of Volume 4, which originally covered the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras in a single volume coauthored by Lawrence Miles that offered by far the scantest coverage of the series. Now we have the first half of a diptych, splitting Hinchcliffe and Williams into separate volumes and diving in with the kind of exhaustive hyper-detail that has characterized the series since Miles’s departure from it.

On one level, this is a small problem to have. Yes, About Time is marketing to a niche of obsessive fans—one that I’m obviously in having written what remains the only real Doctor Who criticism that you’d mention in the same breath as it. This is a staggeringly impressive book, full of rich detail and fascinating arguments. For the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan it’s aimed at, it remains irreplaceable. I’d have much rather had it by my side than the original edition when writing the relevant era of TARDIS Eruditorum.

But that’s a literally unique use case, and for most use cases it’s hard not to feel like this edition is simply too much book. Certainly when one looks at the price tag—$40, twice the original edition, with Volume 4.2 slated to release in June for $45, ultimately more than quadruple the price. An expansion was certainly warranted—the original volume’s 328 pages are clearly too scant to do justice to six seasons of Doctor Who in the About Time attempts. But the new edition’s 864 pages and $85 price tag are equally clearly simply too much.…

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So, last week I was forced to launch a new Patreon because Patreon refused to allow me to change my existing one over to monthly billing instead of the per-post grind I’d been on since 2014. Since doing that, however, I’ve faced a $2000 a month drop in income. This isn’t strictly speaking a surprise—obviously you expect to lose some people when you have to sign up for a new paying service to replace the old one. But it’s a lot more dropoff than I’d been expecting, and frankly has blown an absolutely terrifying hole in our monthly budgeting. So I’m just going with an open plea here: if you have ever liked my work and generally thought “El deserves to be able to have food and housing while writing the stuff she writes,” now is the time to support it directly. Just $5 gets you all my ebooks, all the issues of Britain a Prophecy, and the whole of the Jodie Whittaker TARDIS Eruditorum to date.

Including, notably, “I Thought It Would Hurt Me, And I Was Right (Spyfall),” my essay on the Series 12 premiere.

$10, meanwhile, gets you a weekly roundup of my media consumption with reviews, which this week is going to inlcude a retrospective on Partners in Crime along with a review of John Wick. But we’ll talk about that on Monday, when I hold back the next part of LWIA to post a review to this site……

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Hi folks. I’m going to start with the big headline announcement, and then get into the myriad of details and obvious questions. But, basically, both of my existing Patreons, the one for criticism, and the one for Britain a Prophecy, are shutting down, and instead I have a brand new single Patreon that will cover all of my projects at a flat monthly rate. You can find that Patreon at the same url as my old criticism one, https://www.patreon.com/elizabethsandifer. If you backed either of my previous Patreons, you should be able to get a significantly improved set of rewards for roughly the same amount a month that you were paying before. (Note that if you were backing my criticism one, the number will be 5x whatever you were doing per post, because I always did five posts per month.)

It would mean a lot to my short term financial stability if you would go back that Patreon, because doing this means abruptly nuking roughly $4000 a month in income across both projects and if I don’t get the new Patreon up to that level quickly then I’m going to immediately be in serious trouble.

You might fairly ask why I’m doing this, given that fact. The answer is multi-faceted. My longrunning Patreon for this site has always been a per-creation deal. That was because I created it in August 2014 to fund reviews of Peter Capaldi’s first season, and I’ve been locked into that ever since, churning out five posts a month every month for years. That’s been awkward for years, but in the last six months it’s become unmanageable as I transition to doing more fiction work. I really, really need to be on a “bill monthly” style of Patreon for my mental and physical health. Unfortunately, because Patreon is, technologically speaking, a steaming pile of garbage that survives mainly by dint of not having any direct competitors, it turns out to be impossible to convert a per-post Patreon into a monthly one. My only option was to start a new Patreon. So here I am, abruptly starting my Patreon from scratch despite the fact that my ability to eat and pay rent is dependent on it.

So here’s how things work on the new Patreon. The basic entry-level tier is $5 a month. That’s equivalent to the old $1 per post tier, and will get you all of the writing I do that isn’t for another venue. So, like, I’m not going to post those two REDACTED that I have coming out with REDACTED to it because I don’t own those, but any essays or short fiction I write? $5 a month. If I decide to go review every Cure album in another baroque effort to flirt with Lexi? $5 a month. And I’ll be posting at least one new TARDIS Eruditorum essay to the Patreon every month.

The $5 tier also includes all of Britain a Prophecy, which was previously a separate $5 a month pledge.…

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What I’m Up To

Well, mostly I’m trying to finish off the Eruditorum post on Resolution, so I want to get through this as fast as possible. A lot of my last week was eaten up by some exciting work for hire news that I can’t share yet. Spent a bunch of last week in Brooklyn working on a piece that I successfully sold, and then spent the early part of this week working on a pitch for another one that I hope to hear back on soon. So balancing that with Patreon work is currently… exciting, and I’m going to make this super brief and get back to it.

Still, we’re back Monday with the first of six parts of Last War in Albion v3 Chapter 9: Brought to Light. We’ll be talking about war comics, Harvey Pekar, the CIA, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Halo 3: Head Like a Hole

As a single, a bit “this book taught me more about penguins than I care to know,” not only incorporating all the needless “Down In It” remixes off Halo 1 but offering five separate and once again mostly interchangeable remixes of the song, made all the worse by the fact that the Opal mix, which is actually interesting, isn’t on the most readily available version. All of which said, the Empathetic mix of “Terrible Lie” on this disc can get it. And I feel like you have to acknowledge the fact that “Head Like a Hole” itself is an absolute classic banger that literally never gets old. Put it this way: unlike Halo 1, this is actually offering quantity as an alternative to quality. 3/9 Inches

Tumblr Ask Theater of the Mind

As always, my ask box is open to anonymous asks if you’d like to lob a question my way.

Since the original run of Eruditorum ended, are there Who episodes that you didn’t love at the time but have since grown on you to become favorites?

Favorites? Not a ton, but I’ve largely grown bored of Tomb of the Cybermen is overrated discourse and come to find it a modest classic. Day of the Daleks I’m probably fonder than I used to be of.

Inverse question: What Dr Who episodes have you found yourself souring on since writing Tardis Eruditorum?

I really struggle to get excited about Genesis of the Daleks anymore. Not sure The Mutants will ever be as good as it was on the precise amount of cannabis I was experiencing right then. And man, Name of the Doctor was rough on the last rewatch.

Which other of the Wh- words would have made a more or as interesting show as Doctor Who?

Whalebone

What episodes of Flux would have been in Dalek Eruditorum?

Probably would have done it as a whole.

Is there a method to the madness with the ordering of the Sandman essays? Or rather, does the ordering make sense if you’ve read Sandman and know the content of the issues, or is it some private system you’re keeping secret?…

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The featured image for this post is the weather outside my office window yesterday afternoon as I got ready to queue this up, and is as good a statement of mood as any.

What I’m Up To

Well I suppose the biggest headline is the first new TARDIS Eruditorum in… months? Almost a year? Not even sure, but my coverage of Juno Dawson’s The Good Doctor is up on my Patreon. Things are quieter on the Britain a Prophecy Patreon, but we’ve got a scene out with Nechama for coloring, which means we should have some writer/artists notes soon, and there’s only two scenes left on issue 5. That Patreon has gotten a little lower than I’d like, so there may be some sort of fancy sale coming in soon where we offer catch-ups on our physical editions or a copy of our re-covered and reprinted #1 to all Patrons who have backed before issue 5 is done or something. We’ll see! Whatever it is, if you back now we’ll be sure you get it. I’ll probably get a LWIA out this weekend, and then it’s Brooklyn again. (So we’ll see if there’s one of these next week.)

If You Post Vacation Photos I Will Let Myself Shrink to Zero Points In A Typographical Hunger Strike

Do we need to get you some help, Centyjust? Like, your pathological aversion to vacation photos and repeated threats of self harm are actually slightly unsettling, and I genuinely worry for you.

No, No, I’m Fine, I’m Just Being Melodramatic and Should Probably Go Listen to Some Nice Angry and Depressive Music To Better Regulate My Own Emotions

Well, good news on that front.

Halo 2: Pretty Hate Machine.

Listening to it, especially if you put it right next to Ministry or Skinny Puppy, the thing that stands out most clearly is that Trent Reznor has obscenely good pop instincts, taking what those bands are doing and making it slap in an immediately catchy way. We can talk about the lead single next time, and “Something I Can Never Have”’s swirling maelstrom of despair is one of those “everyone already knows how good this is” songs, but damn if “Kinda I Want To,” “Terrible Lie,” and “Sanctified” don’t all slap. And “That’s What I Get” at least deserves credit for the most impressively bad lyrics of Reznor’s career. Notably better than I remember it being. 7/9 Inches

Tumblr Asks

As always, my asks remain open and I’m pretty reliable about answering them. (I think I’ve got one sitting that I need to go back to.)

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Hello after a week’s break. Let’s get down to it.

What I’m Up To

Let’s see. In a continuing effort to get my word count back up and deal with LWIA v4’s refusal to play nicely with my ADHD I’ve actually tried poking some TARDIS Eruditorum. So look for that on the Patreon. Past that, I sent a pitch out this week, but have mostly been reading and researching and only just switched back into writing mode in the last two days, in part on account of spending a week in Brooklyn.

But frankly who needs me when Christine is dropping career best essays like this.

Oh God You’re Going To Do Vacation Photos Again

Cool your serifs, center-justified boldface text. It was a much lower photo vacation than the last one, and much higher on low key sitting around Lexi’s place watching Game Changer on Dropout and eating the frankly astonishing popcorn she makes. (I am utterly mortified that the food hippies are right and “nutritional yeast” is good. This is actively offensive to me.) Got to take Christine perfume shopping (she now wears Imaginary Authors’ Memoirs of a Trespasser; I’m rocking Nobile 1942’s La Danza delle Libellule, and Penn added Comme des Garçons’ Copper to his collection) and see Battery Park with her, which is where her biological family landed in the country when emigrating from what’s now the Czech Republic, spent some time in MoMA, and went to a leather dyke event, though. But you’re spared photos.

I’m a Sans Serif Font You Typographically Ignorant Cunt

I think that kind of language is a bit unnecessary, Centyjust. (I can call you Centyjust, right?)

Actually… Actually That’s Kind of Cute

Glad you like it. Anyway, the other thing I’ve done is write reviews of all the official Halo releases from Nine Inch Nails with the intention of serializing them here over the next thirty-four weeks. So without further ado…

Halo 1: Down In It

Something like the sixth best song on Pretty Hate Machine gets two additional remixes, neither distinctive enough to bother pulling this disc out over the album version or, more to the point, the other disc they’re both included on. Still, something’s gotta be the debut single, and this is inoffensive, even if you’re more annoyed than satisfied when it’s stuck in your head. 2/9 Inches

And Now… Tumblr Asks!

As always, feel free to send me asks. 

Which is the better name for them: Nine Inch Nails, NIN, or The Nine Inch Nails?

The Nine Inch Nails, obvs.

Do we ever see the cybermen convert anyone in the classic series? It seems like an obvious thing to do with the premise, but I can’t think of examples.

Attack of the Cybermen. (And Tomb, as someone pointed out in reply.)

Have you read any of Miracleman: The Silver Age yet? If so, was it worth the wait?

None of the new issues; figure I’ll read the arc when it’s all together. But no. Nothing is worth that kind of wait.…

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Hello eyeballs. Would you like some glyphs to massage against your optic nerves? Well I’ve got 8356 of them for you.

What I’m Up To

The general malaise in which multiple people I love are having tough times continues. But I got a Last War in Albion v4 post on Miracleman out to Patrons, I’ll have another on Johnny the Homicidal Maniac this weekend. And, of course, “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair” posted, which I guarantee will be oine of my favorite things I write this year. Monday we’ve got the last V for Vendetta post, as well as me being off to Brooklyn to see Lexi again.

Right. Only one main section this week, because I got

An Absolutely Ridiculous Number of Tumblr Asks

Good ridiculous though! Keep ‘em coming. 

Do you have plans as comics creator beyond Britain a Prophecy ?

Plans evince a certain arrogance that’s unearned at this stage in my career, though Penn and I have a ton of stuff we want to do. More broadly, I’m certainly pursuing options in comics, just like I’m working on a novel. I’d like fiction work to be a majority of my work within the next few years.

Which TARDIS Eruditorum book/era stands best on its own? For me it’s the Hartnell one but curious to hear your take also regarding best run of essays maybe

Quite proud of Volume 4. Really, 1-4 form a nice kind of Eruditorum Golden Age. Literally was just talking to Lexi about the way in which I was using the blog at that time to grind a lot of axes about narratology and long-form serialized narrative, and there’s a really satisfying, let’s go ahead and call it alchemy between my still present academic instincts and my more esoteric tendencies. All of those are quite strong eras. But Volume 4 feels like a real personal peak—as good as I got at the particular thing I was doing at that time.

Starting with Williams the show became a very different thing and I got sucked further into Fandom Debates, and while the highs there—Logopolis, Trial of a Time Lord, the TV Movie, and honestly most of the televised McCoy stuff—are probably my individual favorite essays, there starts to be a lot more filler-feeling stuff in between those high points. Call it the Silver Age.

New series marks a sort of Bronze aAge, and becomes a “covering all those spinoffs before you had a Patreon to monetize the extra entries was not a sound career decision” sort of situation, especially with so many more stories per era compared to the classic. (One season of Tennant is around as many stories as the Baker or McCoy eras.) Add the difficulties of effective hindsight and I’d be lying if I said Tennant and Smith in particular were favorites. But god, that Eccleston run of entries is as good as anything I’ve ever written.

And the Capaldi era, my late career return, is rock solid, wall to wall some of my favorite material on the blog.…

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