Doctor Who and Poetry Book

Right-o, I’m back. On the Doctor Who fan front, I just want to say that, after recently seeing Seeds of Doom, which is indeed one of my favorite Doctor Who serials ever, and rewatching it again confirmed that, Sarah Jane Smith, oddly enough, reminded me of Clara. I don’t know if it was intentional when they cast the part of Clara, but the way that Sarah Jane dressed in that episode, especially in the mansion…maybe Steven Moffat was trying to emulate the old companions by casting Jenna Coleman in that role.

I’m also in the midde of Terror of the Autons, the first Master story with Roger Delgado, and I was intrigued to discover that radio telescopes play a part in that story, just as they did in Anthony Ainley’s first full Master story, (Keeper doesn’t really count) Logopolis. Very, very interesting, I also wonder if that was why they included radio telescopes in Logopolis, as a homage to this sequence in Terror. Maybe.

I have also seen all of Trial of a Time Lord, in case I didn’t mention. My theory is that, when she was taken to the courtroom, she was a future Mel who had been on the cruise and then went on holiday for awhile, or was still traveling with future Sixth Doctor when she was summoned to the past Sixth Doctor’s trial. She was taken back to the future Sixth Doctor/holiday by past Sixth Doctor, and past Sixth Doctor looked forward to meeting her again, the first time for her, second time for him. Yeah, that’s my opinion. And Valyard does bear some passing semblance to Peter Capaldi, meshed with another person.

and quite recently, I saw Children of Earth, for the second time ever, and oh my gosh, Peter Capaldi…oh, he is the Doctor, this is the first time I’ve seen him in a role since the announcement, and just seeing him walking about at the start of the series made me squeal. And yeah, he really was the middle man forced to do things he didn’t want to do, but he did them anyway, until he reached that breaking point. He once was a good man.

I’ve also seen Ambassadors of Death–that alien spaceship looks sort of like the one that shows up in Claws of Axos, though I’ve only seen one episode or so of that a long time ago–and it’s a pretty good story, really should have been Liz Shaw’s final story, she had a very good part in the story, and the way the Third Doctor left mission control at the end…it felt like it really could have been a season closer.

And while the Brigadier did do a terrible thing when he destroyed the Silurians, and the Doctor could not forgive him for that, the concern that they showed for one another when they were in trouble during this serial…well, it shows why the Doctor didn’t want to leave or desert or rally against UNIT, he still cared for them, especially the Brigadier. He probably didn’t know where he could have gone, anyway, seeing as he was stuck on Earth and he didn’t really know very many people on Earth at that time. Unless he tried to contact Ben and Polly or Barbara and Ian, but he probably didn’t know how he could reach them, or if he did, maybe he didn’t want to interfere in their lives anymore. Conjecture and fan speculation, I know.

Anyway, on the writing front…I’m on Smashwords.
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/353817

This is my poetry book, ‘A Song of My Heart’. Come check it out. I will post The Smiling Stallion Inn on Smashwords and I will get it on Amazon, as soon as I get the edited version back. I hope it’s soon. It’s bound to be soon. That’s all for now.

Not a Resurrection of the Daleks fan

Personally, I sort of hate Resurrection of the Daleks, or at least I don’t like it that much. Not just because that, even with the replacement DVD, I had to keep stopping and restarting with technical glitches, but…yeah, a bit too grim and slow/ugh in its pace. A lot of stuff does happen, but it seems to go on a bit too long in spots. That does happen in some Doctor Who serials, but it’s crushing/restricting here, in some ways. The side characters don’t really do a lot for me. Heck, Lytton was even better in Attack of the Cybermen that he was here. Yep, this adventure wasn’t as fun as some others, as Tegan said, a little bit annoying in some ways. I suppose it had to be for Tegan to feel like leaving, but I felt like leaving it as an audience member.

Even Warriors of the Deep was better than this, for being goofier at times, even if that was unintentional. Timelash, I liked that better than this. Currently, Resurrection of the Daleks is one of my least favorite episodes. Someday, I might make up my own list of favorites and non-favorites, and Resurrection is definitely on the non-favorites.

To serialize my novel or not?

So recently, I was reading a discussion about authors using digital self-publishing platforms to publish novellas, and a commentator mentioned publishing parts 1, 2, and 3 of a novel as novellas, which got me to thinking…perhaps I should do that with the digital versions of my novels, serialize it. My novels are pretty long, around 400 pages or more, and it might be easier for readers to purchase an 80 page portion of my novel at a time and then continue on with later chapters. It would also be pretty much around the same price range, I think, if my portions are around 1 or 2 dollars. However, I would like to hear some opinions on this topic, even though I have very few readers. Please comment. I would add a poll if I could, but I can’t, it seems.

The Smiling Stallion Inn: Sample 1

Note: The Smiling Stallion Inn, the revised version of Coe Baba: Life and Love is being edited right now, but I have decided to start sharing snippets from that novel here. It might not be the final version of what will be published, I still have to wait for the editor’s input on some things, but I’m going to go ahead and do this. Enjoy.

***
Basha had heard simplistic versions of this story, intended for children, from his school teacher and from the Old Man, and he had read more advanced versions of this story, intended for adults, in two separate volumes of Legends of Arria. Though the frame of the story in every version remained the same, details changed, some of the events were left out, and the writers or storytellers occasionally glossed over some of the more gruesome or questionable acts, omitting what might have really happened, or what the people might have really felt or thought during the course of these events, depending on what you read or heard. Basha occasionally had to imagine the events, and fill in the gaps himself. This is what came out of it, uneven though it was.

“‘Almost 3,000 years ago, Corrica was the mightiest island nation in all of the Black Ocean whose inhabitants used triremes, long boats with oars mounted on top of each other on separate decks, to travel to different islands, and conquer them with vast legions of warriors.’” The teacher read from his textbook to the children who tried not to fall asleep. “‘The ancient Chronicles testify that the island nation of Corrica was destroyed in fire and ash. Only a few of its long ships, filled with men and women, managed to escape the devastation. They endured a long, arduous voyage…’”

The ships cut across the water, farther and farther away from where they had come from and the horrible disaster they had left behind them. They had witnessed the destruction from the water, the plume of smoke and ash rising up into the sky, covering the whole island they had once called home. And from the mountain that had once been just a mountain, but was now a volcano, fire flowed down in a turgid mass, lava. But the burst of air and heat that had bloomed from the volcano, obliterating half of its crown and sweeping across so that even those in the ships had felt it too, had razed the City of Elders, the capital of their empire. Corrica was dead, and they were the last of it.

They wept and mourned for days and nights, unable to contain their sorrow and fear as almost everything they had ever known and loved had been destroyed, and they did not know where they were going. Many were sick in this time. Their whole culture had been built upon conquering the other islands that surrounded them, and all that they knew of the world beyond them was these islands, their slaves and vassals. Once the other islands learned of Corrica’s destruction, it was likely that they would turn upon the Corricans in their midst, to repay them in kind, and so they could not dock at these islands. They had to keep going, beyond anything they had ever known, into waters they had never traversed.

The Once and Future King of The World’s End

BIG SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN The World’s End, directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as part of the Cornetto trilogy.

I just got back from seeing The World’s End and I’m still thinking about everything that happened. The Once and Future King, Gary King, there can only be one King and he is the King of his past and of his future, in a sense, and of course, his best friend is Andrew Knightly, like Knights of the Round Table. The story from the start of the movie was the same as the whole movie, it was the plot of the movie, just like Shaun’s plan in Shaun of the Dead–Shaun’s plan did happen, just not the way he wanted it to, and Nicholas Angel’s morning routine of going through the town of Sandford, winding up at the supermarket, and such, that was all replayed in how the gunfight turned out and which opponents he faced when.

That’s the point of the Cornetto trilogy, I suppose, Edgar Wright sets up the plot pieces with the actors playing along in their roles, and the whole point of these movies was that these non-conformists, played by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, stood up against conformist, societal forces like zombies, the Neighborhood Watch Alliance, and the Network. The World’s End is indeed the end of the trilogy, because the Network basically gave up on trying to change these non-conformists and went away, ending the old world in the process. Even though it was a darker world, the non-conformists had basically won, beaten the Network, and now they had to get started on making the new world work again. Of course Gary King is going to wind up leading his new buddies, the blank versions of his old buddies, out on quests, because that is his nature, even as crazy as that is. He really is the Once and Future King, unchanging in many ways, or at least he won’t give up and surrender without a fight.

I’m laughing about The Hole In the Wall pub, cause there definitely was a hole in the wall at the end of that, and The Mermaid was where the three Marmalade Sandwich sirens attracted three of the guys, and The King’s Head was the point where King went crazy and tried to make a break for it on his own, he was cracking up, The Old Familiar was the second pub and it was just like The First Post, or the first sign I should say of something gone wrong, The Famous Cock was where they spotted the crazy old guy, the Crossed Hands was where the first fight took place, and the twins showed up at The Two Headed Dog, The Beehive was where they met ‘the Queen Bee’ and learned about the true nature of the aliens, and they disturbed the nest of bees, (I’m having trouble remembering what happened at The Trusty Servant, maybe that was where Greene met his end, and The Five Companions was where the teamup nearly ended, I suppose. I definitely remember what happened at The World’s End.)

(The Smokehouse was where the guys regrouped and tried to smoke out any blanks in their midst. And that poor guy died in the park, where he had been laid out on a park bench twenty years ago. Anyway, yeah.)

P.S. Arc Words and Bob Barker Is The Key

I have sort of been intrigued with how they introduced the mythology of Darla into Angel during Season Two and there was a mention in one of those episodes (I don’t recall exactly where, maybe in The Trial or before) of Holtz chasing after Darla and Angel, so another shout-out to upcoming events in Season Three. It’s become a touchstone in several shows in recent years, such as Doctor Who or Lost, that they would mention or remark upon future key developments as arc words or teasers, like Mr. Saxon, Bad Wolf, and the Medusa Cascade. Something that attentive fans might pick up on and be eager to speculate about at the time the show was airing, or a way for fans rewatching the show, maybe years later, to reminisce on those glorious or glorificuous moments. And Bob Barker is the Key.

As for the Doctor Who stories I’ve watched since I last posted…well. I mentioned being stuck in the middle of Doctor Who and The Silurians? Maybe even that I had been watching The Two Doctors around that same time? Well, since then, I’ve seen Warriors of The Deep (Okay, pantomine horse, but they tried their best. Could it have been worse? Maybe, if they had not even tried at all. Not the best Doctor Who story by any stretch of the imagination, I agree with the opinion that the Silurians should have gotten the more flexible costumes while the Sea Devils should have been stiffer. Why couldn’t they just do makeup instead of rubber costumes? Was makeup more expensive than rubber costumes? What about face pieces instead of full body pieces?

You know, from what I’ve seen, the Silurians may be ‘advanced’, but they are just as bad as humans at starting wars between the inhabitants of this planet. In Doctor Who and the Silurians, one of them unleashed a plague/epidemic that could have destroyed humanity, for goodness sake! Not to mention the mutually assured destruction ploy of Warriors of the Deep. Okay, not all Silurians are like that, although their leaders certainly have not set a good example in all of their encounters.)

I’ve also seen Timelash. (Cough, again, not exactly the best story, but not the worst story, H.G. Wells is okay, though the Sixth Doctor can be a bit difficult to love. And that triangle Timelash tinsel tunnel [tongue twister] is not the best effect.) I’ve also seen the Awakening, which I pretty much liked, Revelation of the Daleks, an interesting setup/premise, I grant you that, especially after it had time to settle with me and I read/heard some more about it. By coincidence, I had actually seen The Loved One movie just before I saw this story, and it really did remind me somewhat of that movie/story, although the character changes with the funeral director/cosmetician…not exactly sure I liked Doctor Who’s take on that relationship, but there was promise there with those characters.

Besides the first two stories of Trial of a Time Lord, I’ve also seen Frontios (An excellent adventure/premise betrayed by terrible monster costumes. “The Tractators!” as Turlough kept screaming weren’t as scary as he made them out to be. And I still have no idea what they did to him, or should I say, his planet Trion. Ah, well, with Turlough, it seems that we’re glad to get any kind of backstory at all. I thought there would have been more in Frontios, and what was in Planet of Fire…a little too late, I suppose I should say. Like Philip Sandifer said in his own blog about Planet of Fire, there was so much promise in this season/era of Doctor Who that was never delivered upon, just a spark amidst the mess, really.) I tried to watch Resurrection of the Daleks, but the disc was cracked, and so I had to get a new one. In the meantime, I went ahead and saw Planet of Fire. So that’s where I am now with Doctor Who.

I’m going to finish watching Trial of A Time Lord, Discs 3 and 4 are coming soon, then I’m going to go back to watching Doctors 3 and 4 while also finally seeing some of Doctor 7’s first serials, and rewatching some of his that I have already seen. And maybe I really will get into Farscape as well. I tried watching the first two discs of the first season (apparently this was two years ago, surprise, I thought it was a year ago) and never got fully invested in it, or was thrown off, so I will try again to watch Farscape. Wish me luck there.

Puny Master

I just saw ‘Planet of Fire’ and with the last cliffhanger and episode for that story, I couldn’t help laughing and saying, “Puny Master, puny Master, crush him with your shoe, Peri! Why did she have to sneeze just when she was about to crush him? He was running around like a scared little mouse, climbing into and out of his console! I almost wish that he could have been talking with a squeaky little voice when she first uncovered him inside his ‘Master control box’. Ha!

No wonder he needed Kamelion to help him out of that fix. I had wondered why he was using the robot to save him, in that he had to be incapacitated in some way. I never imagined he would be so small, though, until a minute or so before Peri uncovered him.

I’m also in the middle of watching ‘Trial of A Time Lord’, so I happened to just see Peri’s last story before her first story, which is kind of strange, but oh well. I liked The Mysterious Planet well enough, a very good story with some funny/brilliant moments, but Mindwarp sort of dragged a little bit more and I did feel frustrated with it, the back and forth questioning as to whether or not the Raak attacked the Doctor and Peri and the Doctor betraying them, not to mention the fiasco with Sil and his people, the ‘rebellion’, and Peri’s ‘demise’. Brian Blessed was pretty good even with his fairly limited role, and he tried his best to make the guy likeable enough.

As usual, I’m going back and forth between watching the stories and reading Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum blog on the story to see what sort of thoughts he had about it. It’s pretty interesting, and I agree with his opinions most of the time. I have also been checking out An Adventure with the Wife in Time and Space blog as well, just getting into that after hearing about it from Sandifer. Pretty funny and excellent as well, I think on a personal level, I’m somewhere in between the wife and husband in terms of their opinions of the Doctor Who episodes/stories.

I’m still watching Buffy/Angel, although a bit more intermittently, having finished up Angel Season Two (I struggled in the middle of Season Two, but at last I finished watching it. I had not realized that Lorne never revealed his name until the fourth-to-last episode of the season. And there was a bit at the beginning of Reprise…the sound effect of the bleating/crying comes from the goats, but then the camera focuses on the broken baby doll in the shopping cart with Angel in the background, so they were already thinking about Connor! Or at least that’s my opinion there.)

I have not finished watching Buffy Season Five, however. For a while there, I saw quite a few episodes, but then I stopped after I saw The Body and finished up Angel, and it’s a little hard getting back into Buffy. The episode Forever took Forever to watch.

I’ll mention the other recent Doctor Who serials I have seen later.

Editorial Review

I forgot to mention. I received the editorial review for my work. And while there was some helpful advice on there, which I may act upon for some given amount, there were some bits that the reviewer wrote on there which made me wonder…did he/she read my work that closely? I mean, some bits were in my work that they thought I had forgotten to mention, although admittedlly it may have been a small enough mention not to be noticeable to casual readers, but still. I don’t think it was quite worth the price that I paid for the service. Maybe half of the price. I wish they could give me a discount for editing the work itself after I got an editorial review. Editing probably would have been cheap enough without having an editorial review.

I don’t know if the editing price will be worth the return on my investment, but it is less expensive than some of the other editing serivces with other self-publishing companies, so I might as well try it. I am concerned that spending so much on the first book may leave little left for subsequent books, or may just throw me off on spending to get the second, third, etc. books edited, but I will have to wait and see if there’s any public notice, I suppose, especially after I do Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly reviews.

I was daydreaming about purchasing 400 copies of my book and selling them at some con. Maybe someday soon I’ll do something like that to see if that generates any buzz. And I finished a fanfic story today. Yay. Not to mention…oh my gosh, I saw the Sherlock teaser trailer and heard that the new Doctor would be announced tomorrow! Yay!

Buffy and Doctor Who stuff again

So on the Doctor Who front…I am sort of in the middle of Doctor Who and the Silurians, although I’ve sort of stalled there after watching the first disc. It’s been a couple of days, disc number two is lying there, but I haven’t really played it. I should have realized I would get into this problem in the Third Doctor era. I’m not sure, it’s not quite my favorite. Good grief, I think I might even like the Sixth Doctor era better than the Third Doctor era. At least the Sixth Doctor pops out at you a bit more, even if it is more of a garish, ghastly 80s style.

Instead, I’ve been really caught up in Angel/Buffy, although…some of the first season episodes of Angel aren’t as great as they would get. I think, personal opinion, with Angel and Buffy especially, it took a little while for them to really gather up steam and be as great as they could be. I mean, compare Angel season 1 with Buffy season 4, as I am currently doing. (When it comes to watching Buffy and Angel concurrently on DVD, my advice is: watch the Buffy disc and then watch the Angel disc for the first two seasons of Angel and seasons 4&5 of Buffy. It makes perfect sense. See, in those first two seasons on the air, Buffy was the real show-runner on the WB and it would lead straight into Angel during broadcast. I feel like Angel season 1 started off really slow and was really trying to set up the premise of the show for newcomers just tuning in after seeing Buffy or whatever. Later on in Angel’s run, they were able to explore and develop the premise a little bit more, add fan favorite characters like the Host and Fred, after they had developed in that slow starter of a first season.

By the time of season six on Buffy and season three on Angel, switch the disc order around, Angel first and Buffy second, because Angel became a big showrunner on WB and Buffy was trying to recapture ground on UPN. Or something like that…)

People may not like the 4th season of Buffy so much, but I think it’s pretty good, especially in comparison with the first season of Angel. It really made me laugh, like the Something Blue episode when Buffy and Spike plan on getting married. And my heart kinds of sinks/breaks a little bit whenever Tara’s in an episode. Oh boy…why? I know, a writer/show-runner really has to develop their show, and sometimes that means losing a character or two, but it makes me wonder…when Joyce popped up again on Buffy in the middle of season 4, around the time of the Faith two-parter, I think Joss was already thinking about The Body. He had already planned on Dawn joining the cast, maybe he knew that Joyce would be leaving the next season. And maybe he was already thinking ahead towards season 6 and how Willow would go crazy with her magical powers after Tara…yeah. Something like that.

It’s been awhile since I’ve watched Buffy/Angel like this, and it really does interest me. Especially when I had forgotten some bits, and now as I read episode descriptions/watch what happens, I remember…boy. What a show. Can’t wait to watch some of the later stuff, like seasons 2, 3, heck, even 4, but especially 5 of Angel. And Buffy has really interesting, pulse-pounding, oh my gosh, change the disc and let’s watch the next episode already! bits ahead. Yay for marathon rewatches.

Doctor Who and Angel too

I was wrong, they were airing Remembrance of the Daleks, not Time and the Rani. My bad, I saw the Rani mentioned in the description for the special, and I just assumed. They did show clips from that episode. But last night, I didn’t really watch Remembrance of the Daleks again, it was being recorded, instead I checked out The Two Doctors…again, probably another bad choice. Too violent for my tastes in Doctor Who, I suppose, although some of the gross-out moments were…well, a little gross, but I continued to watch them. The Second Doctor’s change kind of horrified me, until I realized that he and Shockeye would just go out to a restaurant, and I thought that would be just a fun bit, although I was proved wrong again. I almost thought that other guy wasn’t dying, he was just acting, (overacting, I should say, bit melodramatic) again, wrong.

Anyway, I am rewatching Buffy and now Angel as well, it’s very easy to wind up watching two or three episodes of those series at a time, although I’m right in the middle of RM W/A VU on Angel, and Cordelia just mentioned Patrick Swayze’s ghost…admittedly, that was years ago before he died, and she was just thinking of the Ghost movie that he was in, but that sort of made me sniffle a little bit.

P.S. Oz had a quote in Graduation Day Part 1, talking to Willow, where he said “Our lives are different to anyone else’s.” Makes me think that was a reference to what the Second Doctor said to Victoria in Tomb of the Cybermen.