Back again
December 31st 2002 -
Last entry of the year
The last of the holidays were pretty good – about as relaxing as I could hope for, considering the number of friends and relatives we met. All that laziness has, once again, driven down my urge to write about things, so it’ll probably be intermittent weblog entries for a while.
Tropfest
I’ve come up with an idea for a tropfest film that I’m still vaguely hoping I’ll have time to finish before 16 January. I’ve written a bit of the script and I’ve talked about it with various friends, and I think it’s coming together, although in a quite different way from how I had first envisaged it. I’ve given myself a deadline of tomorrow to have the script together properly, so that I can start notifying friends that I need ‘em to help me out. Now’s the time to stop answering the phone…
The Two Towers
I’m too lazy to really get into a serious analysis of this, yet. I enjoyed it a lot. On the other hand, I had plenty of niggly problems with the script. I need to see it again. When I saw Fellowship the second time, the flaws seemed to disappear and I could properly enjoy it without constantly jumping out of the action and thinking “Wow. Lord of the Rings. I’m watching it.” I suspect it may be similar with this one. I’ve never really considered myself a LOTR purist, but some of the changes irked me, particularly the exorcism scene. Now that I’ve had time to mull over it for a while, I’d like to go back and watch it without the distractions. I have a little theory that these films are substantially similar to good music – it takes a couple of viewings/listenings to really get into them.
Work
Back at work, and being pretty lazy – there are only one or two people here, and I’m just working on Windows service installation/uninstallation code – pretty basic stuff, really. Probably a pretty good way of getting back into it.
Jon’s Dr Who Novella
I can’t remember the name of Jon’s Doctor Who novella, but a bunch of us got together on Sunday and read through it and commented on it while Jon and Kate took notes. It was pretty exciting for me. I’ve read some of Jon’s early drafts before, but never participated in one of their read-throughs. We got through the 45k words in about eight hours – five of us reading about 9k words each, and then lots of talking about it in-between. It’s pretty cool. I’d read a plot-summary for his earlier novel-length version, and the tightening to novella-length have done a lot for it. Jon described it as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Doctor” – lots of big emotions and martial-arts action, stuff that I couldn’t possibly conceive of writing myself, but brilliantly handled as always. And Jon’s ability to pop out quotable quotes just doesn’t quit – there was at least one zinger every couple of pages.