waffling

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It’s finally dawned on me that since I cannot actually finish the book before November, hurrying through the last few Hartnell essays instead of getting Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion together is really dumb. So I’ve been working on that, and it’s coming along well. So well that I’m going to keep this brief and get back to writing about Maxwell the Magic Cat, because I am a sick and depraved person and actually think that’s a fun way to spend a Friday evening.

I’ve also just had a fascinating conversation on the charming moral grey areas of piracy. Which brings us to our discussion topic for the weekend – where are your moral lines on when it is or isn’t ethical to pirate media? When there’s no legal and in-print edition? When you’re researching something and just need to check a reference? Whenever you want to? Never? Tell me, dear readers.…

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I’ve just finished the Human Nature/Family of Blood post. Those who enjoy when I play absurd structural games will be happy. Those who find me unbearable when I do that will probably find September 18th a somewhat disappointing experience. Or, at least, the part of September 18th where they check my blog. I don’t want to suggest that, like, if they go out for ice cream the scoop will fall off their cone or anything.

So, the Hugo Awards happened. I am oddly fascinated by the Hugos, or, at least, the three categories in which I feel like I have any right to have opinions, which are the Dramatic Presentation awards and the graphic story award. They’re the perfect mix of actually recognizing quality and being utterly idiosyncratic. And so I am going to opine on them.

Doctor Who lost Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) for only the second time since the 2006 awards. The three Moffat episodes for 2012 were nominated, along with an episode of Fringe and the actual winner, the Game of Thrones episode “Blackwater.” This is on balance probably fair, though I’ll happily defend the virtues of The Snowmen. “Blackwater” was a really bloody good piece of television.

At this point what I’m really interested in is the 2014 awards. Dramatic Presentation is at times little more than a “whose fandom is bigger” award, which is why it was possible to guess the 2012 winner as soon as Neil Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who was even announced. Game of Thrones frankly had an undistinguished 2013 run. One assumes “The Rains of Castamere” will get nominated, although the field is fairly open if it wants to do what it did in 2012 and compete in Long Form as a full season. But I’m skeptical that it deserves to win. Doctor Who will surely be in with both the 50th Anniversary and Christmas specials. For all that Neil Gaiman seems unbeatable, I doubt Nightmare in Silver will get nominated (though if he doesn’t win for Ocean at the End of the Lane, something went wrong). And, of course, we’ll have Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which offers Joss Whedon, who beat Doctor Who with Dr. Horrible in 2009. So Doctor Who vs Joss Whedon vs Game of Thrones. It’ll be, I think, the most exciting year for the category in a long time.

Clearly the award should go to Welcome to Night Vale. You do all listen to Welcome to Night Vale, right?

In Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) we have an interesting category. The original Lord of the Rings films were bulletproof at the Hugos, to the point that in 2004 the acceptance speech they did for the MTV Movie Awards featuring Gollum won out over the season finale of Buffy and two episodes of Firefly in what is surely the single stupidest Hugo award ever. But The Hobbit clearly didn’t do nearly as well. The Hunger Games also lost out, which is less surprising. And of course one of the two Joss Whedons was going to lose, and it was always going to be Cabin in the Woods.…

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Right. The work update. The Baker book is all drafted, I’ve got the first round of edits back on Wonder Woman, and as predicted, I didn’t quite finish up the Hartnell stuff. (It’ll definitely get finished next revisions week, but I allocated some time to the next Last War in Albion chapter, where I just had a stunning bit of luck involving some bibliographic research lining up Maxwell the Magic Cat strips with Moore’s Swamp Thing run.)

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Just finished off the week’s blogging, setting me up for nine straight days of mucking about with books. If all goes well Hartnell v2 will be almost wrapped up at the end of it, barring the essays that are about things coming out in November. Six to write, which is a little ambitious for nine days when doing the reading/listening for them is counted as part of the time, but it’s not impossible.

The next bunch of paragraphs are about Last War in Albion. But for the sizable chunk of readers who are only in it for Doctor Who stuff, there’s a Doctor Who question at the very end of the post you can skip to.

Last War in Albion continues to be very fun. If you haven’t grabbed the ebook of Chapters 1 and 2, please do consider doing so to support the project. I suppose I should talk briefly about some of my plans there. At the moment I’m planning on running it on Thursdays for remainder of TARDIS Eruditorum. After this set of five entries it’ll go to Chapter Three, which is about Alan Moore’s earliest work. After that we finally get to stuff that isn’t spectacularly obscure, at which point hopefully people will read it.

Obviously, as I’ve said, the format of Last War in Albion is a bit challenging. I stand by my reasons for writing it the way I am – I think I absolutely had to get away from the “episode guide” structure of TARDIS Eruditorum, for one thing. For another, Last War in Albion is about the implications of the comics it covers as much as it’s about what’s in them. The notion of the War is a conscious nod to Faction Paradox, and particularly The Book of the War. Part of the point, in other words, is how hard the War is to pin down.

I recognize, of course, that this makes some aspects of it tougher to follow. I’ve tried to smooth that out a bit in Chapter Two – I’m being a bit less ostentatiously aggressive in where I cut the chapters, and, since the idea of serializing the story this way is in part modeled on comics, I’ve nicked the idea of a recap page. The real problem, though, is figuring out how to make money off of it. Because this is a job, and I need to do that.

As I said, the ebook singles are one idea. And they’re an important one – just getting Last War in Albion to provide a steady month-in/month-out income stream would be a big deal. So, again, please think about grabbing them on the basic logic that kicking me $1.50 or so every 10,000 words or so is something that helps keep the project running. So again, please do think about buying it. Here it is on Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords.

But they are just one idea, and this seems like a good idea to at least talk about some of the other things I’d like to do.…

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Work continues apace. I’ve got Last War in Albion up and running, and it’ll roll out again on Thursday with the start of Chapter 2. I’m going straight into working on Chapter 3 so there will be less of a gap there. I’ve tinkered the format in a few subtle ways that I hope will boost readability without sacrificing what I’m trying to achieve with the structure of the project. This one has narrative theory, the pulps, superheroes, and the remainder of Grant Morrison’s early work. Only one more chapter after that before we get to things anyone has ever heard of!

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My God, work. This was a TARDIS Eruditorum week – still is, actually, as I’ve got one more post to write over the next two days. The stretch before this was the only all-Torchwood stretch, and was frankly grueling – entries that would finish at 1500 words and force me to look through them for space to pry open and fit more observations. (2000 words is less a preference for length and more a way of ensuring the density of coverage I like in given post.) Then back to revisions – I’m actually down to one on the Tom Baker book, and have now done two on the Hartnell book. I’ve unilaterally decided to alter the promised book, dumping Eoin Coilfer’s A Big Hand for the Doctor out of a general complete lack of any interest in talking about a bad book and put in an essay on the most obvious and important book that I never talked about at any length. A hat tip to whichever commenter first identifies it.

These extra essays are frustrating. Part of it is that there’s so many – a byproduct of the Kickstarter. Another part is that I have no commutes in my life, and so never have what I consider optimal time to listen to Big Finish stuff, and there’s a lot of audios on the list. Going to have to just knuckle down and do that, which isn’t punishment, but is still active reworking of my day. Plus many of them are just… hard in not entertaining ways. I’ve already decided book essays can make it to around 1500 because I just didn’t have much to say. I don’t want to just put in book reviews of random out of print 90s novels, and finding things to say about the period the book is about is often difficult. I regularly muse on the fact that if this essay had been a good idea, I’d have written it the first time through.

I’m quite liking the commissions, particularly the ones that pick Pop Between Realities stuff. I think I may go more in that direction starting with the Graham Williams book, leaning away from novels and audios and towards Pop Between Realities stuff and, perhaps, more commissions. I rather like commissions as a concept, and have been finding them very fun.

I had been hoping to plow through all my co-books on StoryBundle so I could talk about them this weekend. In one of those pleasant complications, however, right when I was set to start that a review copy of something else hit my inbox, and that something else was a book I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. I’ll run a very big review in a week and change. Spoiler: there’s a gas mask on the cover.

In any case, I only got to poke at two titles in Storybundle – Nick Grifith’s Dalek I Loved You and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining With The Doctor.

One thing that’s obvious about the Storybundle deal is that these are very different types of books.…

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As promised your open thread to rail about how Doctor Who is basically over now that they’ve cast… well, whoever it is they’ve cast.

Personally, and I’m writing this ages before it’s actually announced (in fact, I’m going to be avoiding this thread for the first few hours while I wait to get to see it), I’m just terribly excited. It’s Doctor Who that exists after the end of TARDIS Eruditorum! I’ll get to watch this Doctor and not have to talk about it on the Internet for years if I don’t want to! I mean, I’ll probably still talk about it on the Internet because I’m me, but I don’t actually have to! I can just shut up and watch Doctor Who. It’s unfathomably novel to me.

EDIT: He’ll do nicely, yes.…

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Yes, there will be a Sunday Pancacking going up at the appropriate time. Until then…

Jed Blue’s My Little Po-Mo Kickstarter is just shy of a stretch goal as the days run out, and might be worth a few bucks.

Andrew Hickey’s California Dreaming Kickstarter is also past goal but with stretch goals available, and worth checking out.

And finally, Neil Perryman is threatening to make his wife watch all of Blake’s 7. You can help make that one happen over at The Adventures of the Wife and Blake – it’s still a few hundred quid short of goal.

And, of course, a new Doctor tomorrow. Until then, read any good books? I’ve just finished Warren Ellis’s Dead Pig Collector, which is pleasantly depraved. And though it’s been out for ages, I did think The Ocean at the End of the Lane was absolutely marvelous, and the best book Gaiman has written since American Gods. Anything else fun and out recently?…

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Hello everyone. It’s one of those weeks where I constantly want to work on something other than what I am, and I find myself spoiled for choice – Last War in Albion’s coming along, but probably not quite ready for Thursday (we’ll see though). I have a bit of a fiction project that hasn’t died yet, which is unusual for my fiction projects, as they usually last under 48 hours, and this just crossed 48. Plus, of course, all the revisions ever, which didn’t get anywhere this week, because it’s a blog week. (Just finished Small Worlds, Countrycide and Greeks Bearing Gifts to write over the weekend.)

And we’re just in that obnoxious part of summer where it feels like it’s gone on a bit too long and like it’s high time for fall. Or maybe that’s just my reduced summer paycheck talking. I don’t know. At least it hasn’t been too extravagantly hot the last few days – we actually had the windows open instead of the air conditioning yesterday.

So, what are you trying to get done before the end of summer? For me it’s the Baker and Hartnell revisions, and will be a tight thing. But tell me about your goals – what deadlines are you chasing? What are you doing with your August?…

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