Wicked Ace Space

The last three months seem to have passed in a flash.

I've been working too hard. A project that I've been responsible for since it began in 2020 recently hit a "lots to do, not enough time to do it in" phase for the first time, and I've been struggling with maintaining a reasonable balance between work and the rest of my life as a result. I've got a lot of personal investment in this project's long-term success, and it's leading me to work "just a little bit longer" and sneak glances at my email & IM out of hours. The blurring of lines caused by hybrid working probably hasn't been helping me here, either, which is a shame, because it's got a host of other benefits as a paradigm.

The result, of course, is that I've been totally exhausted for weeks, and feeling disconnected from my social life to boot! I haven't touched any of my creative projects, and it feels like I'll never get back to the headspace where I'm capable of doing so (although, intellectually, I know it will be possible eventually). I've also had a flare-up of RSI in my hands and wrists, although not yet as bad as it was at its worst in 2014.

In good news, though: I've noticed that I'm doing this. That's the first step in doing something about it. I'll admit that the RSI symptoms were a bit of an alarm bell in this respect - the one upside of them! I've started taking some active steps to fixing the situation, including:

• Finally started looking for a more ergonomic desk setup for my home office (since I'm in there 2 days a week as standard!)
• Made sure, while I was out of town Fri-Tue, not to look at my work phone at all
• Took a bit of my workday attention away from the project to focus on process improvements & training which will make it easier for members of my team to take over things I currently do, and do them effectively
• Reminded myself that I can trust my team do the things I'm delegating to them - they are competent & smart!
• Invited friends out for a drink yesterday (just to hang out, no film or show or board game, which we don't do so much these days)
• On catching myself looking at work messages this morning, turned the work phone off and shut it in the office room
• Today, dragged myself back out to the Pub Where I Write on Fridays: even though there's no way I'm going to get any actual writing (except this blog, I suppose) done today, physically going to the location is an important part of making space for it
• Bought tickets to see some more great films at the cinema, where I can't get distracted by my phone

And on that last note, I have still been managing to get to the cinema a fair bit in between all the overwork, so here are some highlights...

Film
In contemporary releases: Rye Lane (2023) was delightfully charming, Polite Society (2023) was fun, I didn't love Leonor Will Never Die (2022) as much as I'd hoped, and I had a good time with both Medusa Deluxe (2022) and Asteroid City (2023). I did catch Across the Spiderverse (2023) before it left cinemas, and while it was as beautiful and funny and emotional as the first one, I don't love two-parters, and I think it would have been stronger if they'd hit the edit a bit harder and made it something that could stand alone with a completed arc. I also made it to a hard-to-find screening of Lactopalypse, the movie of an Estonian web series, and that provided perhaps the most "wtf" 90 minutes of my life this year.

But of course the bulk of my film consumption is what could be termed "a doomed attempt to catch up with all the cinema of the past hundred years", so I've seen a lot more in the way of older films, both at the repertory cinema and on streaming or DVD at home. The top highlight here is that I went into Jeanne Dielmann, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) knowing very little about it, and was absolutely blown away; I've always thought Citizen Kane to be wildly overrated, and I don't think Vertigo is the best Hitchcock or the best James Stewart film, but if good art is about eliciting a reaction in the audience, then their successor at the top of the Sight & Sound poll is among the very best of it.

Elsewhere, I attended a screening of Girl/Boy (1972), which has an unexpectedly modern feel in its treatment of its central queer couple. I watched both Gaslight (1940) and Gaslight (1944) in quick succession (1944 rounds out its characters better, but over-explains the plot in the back half, and has a somewhat defanged final scene, likely due to censor influence). I was lucky enough to find the better of the two most famous 40s movies starring Orson Welles, The Third Man (1949), playing in actual Vienna; a rewatch, but always worth it. I finally watched my first Hammer horror, Horror Express (1972), and my first Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible (1996). And I had a whale of a time watching Auntie Mame (1958) just last weekend, having heard of it for the first time earlier that day.

Reading
I find non-fiction easier to handle than fiction when I'm overwhelmed in other areas of life, so I've been carrying on my non-fiction-only streak. Despite the overworking, I've had enough travel in the last couple of months to pack some more books in. They've basically been on two themes: film stuff and queer stuff.

The real highlight of my recent reading was How to Survive a Plague by David France, a really well-written narrative of the AIDS crisis (from a primarily New York based perspective). It took me on an emotional journey, and taught me a lot in the process. I also enjoyed Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World by Paul Baker, which isn't 100% a queer narrative, but obviously talks a lot about the queer community's relationship with camp. I've started Queer Footprints by Dan Glass, but I'm finding the "walking-tour guide" style a bit tough going in print.

On the film side, I slogged through The Great British Picture Show by George Perry, which was a £2 find in a collection of old cinema books. It's the first thing I've found giving a history of British cinema (amongst the overwhelming abundance of books about the history of Hollywood), but it's a) outdated (printed in the 70s) and b) very dry, being more of a straightforward factual account than you would find in more modern "pop history" books. It did however lead me to an interesting conversation with my dad about what it was like going to the cinema in the 60s and 70s (one feature film a week! one screening a day, except on Saturdays! this child of the multiplex era struggles to imagine...). I've also discovered the BFI Film Classics series, and devoured Alien by Roger Luckhurst and Silent Running by Mark Kermode, both of which were nice, light trips through the behind-the-scenes of excellent films.

I've been working too hard! A big project kicked off at work this month, and I'm having to remind myself how to work effectively & well on something complex & important without dragging out my office hours too late and wiping out all the energy I need for the rest of my life. Right now, I'm just too tired.

I've bought a few things that I hope will last me a good long while: a new holdall, and a couple of merino tops that can work as base layers or just on their own. I also cleared out my wardrobe (and actually took the bag of discarded things out, rather than leaving it to gather dust in the hallway!), so it feels a bit less overstuffed (although there are still a looot of T-shirts I suspect I don't wear; I've done the "turn the hangers around" thing to see what actually gets use this year).

Film
As is the theme for 2023, I've been watching films in fits and starts: three in a day, nothing for two weeks, two in a day, and so on. Very much as the mood takes me! Since the start of February, I've been through:

Victim (1961) - a key film in British queer history, notable in its time for portraying gay people in a sympathetic light. It holds up pretty well to a modern viewing, and I'm willing to forgive it tilting a little into lecture mode at times.

The Birdcage (1996) - I didn't get on with this as well as I hoped to! I couldn't hang with the characters spending so much of the film asking Albert to, well, "not", and then never really properly apologising for it.

Rope (1948) - enjoyed this one. One of those where you can tell it's adapted from a play because the action never really leaves one room; but I have a soft spot for that sort of adaptation, because they show that films can be really gripping even with just the very basics of the format.

All About Eve (1950) - I enjoyed this! But I can't remember much more of what I thought about it when I saw it (a month ago), so I suppose it may have been just okay (and that's fine!).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - I've seen this before, of course! This was my first time seeing it in a cinema at an audience-participation-encouraged screening, and it was a lot of fun.

Niagara (1953) - an early Marilyn Monroe film, but not an amazing one. It can't decide whether it's Monroe's story or Peters', and it suffers as a result.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) - thoroughly interesting, and I'll be mining this for more films to watch in the future. I'm also doing my best to get hold of a copy of the book it's based on, which is sadly out of print and not available as an eBook. I think I've found one on eBay that won't have to ship from the US, though!

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - not as good as I was expecting, from a "classic thriller"! It kept setting things up and forgetting to pick them up again later, and some key characters were lacking in plausible motivation. That said...

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) - made me wonder if I was too hard on the original! Somehow in the remake they managed to tie up half the problems I had with the original, and then invent a whole new set of their own. Truly a film that Just Kept Going (and I could definitely have done without quite so much mid-00s-style "wooaaah creepy images and paranoia and madness" filler).

65 (2023) - a film from this decade, nay, this year! It's rare that I catch films when they come out, but at the start of this year I looked up expected 2023 releases and made a note of ones that sounded interesting. This was billed as "Alien meets Jurassic Park", but in reality it was just a fine-but-unmemorable action thriller. Much less intense than the "Alien" part of "Alien meets Jurassic Park" makes it sound - it's a 12A - but Adam Driver sure did shoot some dinosaurs I guess. Clocks in at a nice tight 90 minutes at least, thanks to some incredibly, uh, "efficient" plot beats.

Reading
In an attempt to make a bit of a dent in my gargantuan TBR pile, I decided to tackle the Ancillary series. I read Ancillary Justice a couple of summers ago, and it blew me away; I reread it to remind myself of the detail, and it's still incredible! But sadly when I went on to Ancillary Sword, I found a bunch of the same issues I had with another of Leckie's books, Provenance - and as a result, didn't enjoy it very much. I still want to read Ancillary Mercy, for completeness' sake, and because it's apparently slightly better than the middle book, but I'm sadly concluding that Justice may have been a bit of an exception to the rule, which is a shame.

In my bag to go away this weekend: Ancillary Mercy, and Fair Play by Tove Jansson, which I picked up on a whim in a bookshop the other week (which is how the TBR pile keeps growing...).

TV
I'm not normally much of a TV person. I'm quite resistant to starting series of things, whether from my horrible knee-jerk reaction to people gushing over something ("well I am not watching it then!" - I'm trying to be less of This Person...) or from a dislike of being dragged along by emotional cliffhangers for 6+ hours. But I have been watching some TV recently!

I caught up with the most recent series of The Great Pottery Throwdown just in time to watch the final as it aired. I love the magic in transforming a pile of special mud into creative ceramics! And this programme always feels like everyone on it is having a fantastic time.

The best news in TV is: I finally got around to watching Ghosts (the BBC original)! A friend put on a few episodes from the start of Series 2 when we went away together a couple of years ago, and that made me realise that I would actually like it, but it took me until a few weeks ago to actually start watching it myself. I was planning to pace myself, since there are not many episodes, but of course I ended up running through them at high speed, because they are amazing! They're awesomely funny (thanks I'm sure to the chemistry of a well-established creative team - the writers and actors behind Horrible Histories, which was sadly just slightly too late for me), and they also make me cry (in a good way, here and there). Series 5 is due this year - I can't wait!

After running out of Ghosts, I picked up Derry Girls, another sitcom from the last 5 years that I just never really got around to. I'm not quite as hooked as I was with Ghosts, but it's very funny (and not too cringeworthy, which I was worried it would be); plus, the soundtrack is packed with bangers from the 90s.

Summer seemed to go on and on this year, hot and sunny right through September. Then I left the country on a Thursday, and when I came back on the Sunday I needed a jumper. The seasons changed all at once; now the trees are turning, now the winds are blowing, and it's rained more in the last fortnight than in the whole four months preceding.

I always feel surprised by spring and autumn. In spring it's the colours - surely leaves were never that green before, I think, as I look on leaves just as green as they are every year. In autumn it's the light - the change from endless blue and bright to something more contained, a dappling mix of gold and grey, bookended by encroaching night. It reminds me, all of a sudden, that time has been passing while I wasn't looking.

I haven't stopped moving for the last three weeks: a weekend out of the country, a weekend in a field, a weekend at my parents'. That exacerbates the feeling of the year running away - I've been all out of routine, and September's slipped into October without me noticing. This weekend, I'm regrouping, reminding myself of all the anchors that keep me grounded. I'm okay.

Drawing
I'm two weeks into a twelve-week drawing class, which is so far exactly what I wanted it to be: an amusement for a Monday night and a chance to focus on something different for a change. I don't particularly mind whether I come out of this with mad drawing skillz, or with just twelve weeks' of fun experience, and that's part of what makes it great. The class comes with a single nod to the concept of "homework", which is "get a sketchbook and draw in it sometimes", and that's a nice addition to my little bag of books that I carry around the city with me for a slack moment.

Writing
Three weekends out of town in a row has had the predictable effect on my writing habits. I have two days of my Couch-to-80K relisten still waiting. I've been writing lists and doing weird metaphor exercises to keep my hand in (and I love that I can just do that and give myself a metaphorical gold star for it). I've written this post! This afternoon, I'm hoping to pick up a little of my fiction project, but if I just write more lists, that still counts.

Reading
I've been back through a couple of favourite Discworlds (because my partner has made 2022 the year he reads them all, and keeps reminding me of the good bits). I'm still following Dracula Daily, which is a fun way to read a classic I would never have got through on my own (as evidenced by the fact it's been unread in my eBook library ever since I bought my Kindle, most of a decade ago).

Film
I continue to fritter away my spare time and cash watching an eclectic mix of films at the cult cinema (recently: Belle (2021) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)), but in recent weeks I've also caught two new releases: Three Thousand Years of Longing and See How They Run. Both a lot of fun, neither likely to stick long in the memory.

...because I'll be too busy travelling to write an update on Sunday.

As a side note, it is Too Fucking Hot again. Please can we lop a good ten degrees off these forecasts?

Reading
Still chugging through The Long Week-End - it's a real brick! - but still finding it interesting, and it continues to serve its intended purpose as idea fodder for my current fantasy project. I'm on holiday next week, so will probably either finish it or pick up some fiction to leaven it.

Film
Rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1998) with a friend. Can confirm, I still love it.

Not technically "film" but I've also been catching up with the 2022 Great Pottery Throwdown on Channel 4, and I continue to be stunned by the ceramics the contestants put out.

Writing
Nothing especially key to report this week, but I did have fun writing half a historical interest article for a fictional country the other day. Lots of "writing around" the novel idea.

I have just finished The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin). I had forgotten how absorbing Le Guin is, and how skillfully she draws you in, from the first few pages where you are just picking up bits and pieces of the setting to the point where you are wrapped in it, like it's a real place and you can live there. The compare-and-contrast exercise of Annares and Urras is fascinating throughout, and Shevek's drive - or drives, in physics, society and family - become easily as compelling to the reader as they are to him.

As to what to take from this into my own writing (because I am trying to do this, to read on purpose and learn from whatever I read)... it is difficult, to distill simple learning moments out of truly excellent writing. ("who am I", the thought comes, "to try to be this good") But I will try. One point, perhaps, is that as no society is perfect, the interest in writing a fictional one lies in looking at where it is imperfect. Another might be about introducing a wholly speculative setting: I want to reread the beginning chapters, to see how the Cetian world was unfolded into something that felt real. And finally, I find the way she uses languague, subtly differentiating the way that the Annaresti and the Urrasti speak, fascinating; it's a reminder that you can show character and setting right down on a grammatical level. "You can share the handkerchief that I use."

Anyway, I'm glad I finally got around to reading this!

Not reading much in the way of books at the moment, but I do keep racking up a lot of open tabs on Chrome, so here, in no particular order, is a handful of things I've read online recently...

Computers
How to debug anything
This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 Personal computer GUI history

Advice Bloggers & Friends
"the best office holiday party date story of all time" at Ask A Manager
Captain Awkward #1239, #1240, #1241, #1242
A Beginner's Guide to Hosting Family for the Holidays Without Melting Down Different website, same Captain Awkward
Too Early Old, Too Late Smart Notes from a year-long goal-setting project from Captain Awkward's husband

Biology & Agriculture
Manor of Mixed Blessings Patreon-backer posts from a smallholder in North Carolina; currently starting up off-grid living with an assortment of livestock (including Soay sheep and Kerry cattle)
The Colour of Onions and The Colour of Beans 
The Great Green Wall Didn't Stop Desertification, But It Evolved Into Something That Might

And The Rest
In pictures: archive photos show what London's public transport used to look like
What is a ternary plot?, which someone, somewhere linked in relation to narrative planning
What it's actually like to visit Riyadh, alone, for Formula E Part motorsports, part travelogue - travelling alone as a woman in Saudi Arabia, for motorsports journalism
GM thoughts: Brick Failures Alternate ways to handle failed rolls as a GM (roleplaying: a thing I do not actually do)

It's November! And I've been writing!

I won't be taking part in NaNoWriMo this year (although I did log into the site, and I'm pretty gutted that they've wiped out the buddy lists, so I can't see what all the people I used to write with are up to :'( ). I've only tried it once since graduating and starting work, and I pretty rapidly concluded that, for me, intense high-output writing is not compatible with a day job in an office - neither my emotions nor my wrists thanked me for it by the end of the month.

But, I've still been writing. This year, I've been slowly working out a writing approach that works for me: namely, getting out of the house for a couple of hours on my day off, finding a cosy corner (recently, a local pub), and setting the low, low bar of "write more than zero words". I usually start off with a #WeeklyWritingWorkout (exercises from a mailing list by author Tim Clare, who did the Couch to 80K writing bootcamp podcast), and then see where I go from there. Sometimes, not far. Today, six pages in an A5 notebook.

The story I'm writing is one that's been kicking around my head as various half-built concepts for several years now. As of about a month ago, I've finally worked out some solid plot beats for it, and it is SO satisfying to be pouring out words at last. Gold stars for me, let's keep this up!


I haven't read or watched much since my last post. Still getting through The Old Ways - I'm getting a little bored of it by now, but I might as well finish - and I saw Matilda the Musical last Wednesday.

I want to get back to keeping track of what I've been reading and watching - what thought-fuel I've been feeding into my brain.
So, this week:

The Old Ways, Robert MacFarlane (unfinished). I have picked up this book from my tall pile of "things to read", but I haven't finished it yet. A slightly poetic kind of book about paths and walking and the following of trails. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender S03. A friend and I have been watching this in bits for a few months now - a rewatch for me, a first-time watch for them (although they'd seen the live-action film...). We watched four excellent episodes on Tuesday (featuring some of my favourite Zuko moments), and on Sunday we're going to see the four-part finale! We're thinking of moving on to Korra as our next regular show; that will be new to both of us.

NASA #AllWomanSpacewalk. I'm watching this one right now! The first spacewalk by two women is live on NASA TV this morning; Christina Koch and Jessica Meir are performing an EVA to replace a failed power controller on the ISS. Yay, space!


And, in terms of my own writing activities:

• Had a burst of inspiration last Saturday, and wrote five pages of scene for an ongoing fantasy project
• ...followed by a burst of frustration/upset on Sunday when I struggled to get words on the page the next morning
• Trying to practise not pushing and berating myself on the days where it's not easy and fun, while still giving myself opportunities to write
• Attending a fortnightly peer feedback group... only three of us really turning up regularly, and I don't think bringing writing for critique is something that helps me get words on the page at the moment, but I'm showing up and giving feedback anyway, because I'm keen to have face-to-face contact with other writers
• Hoping to meet up with a group of people in November whom I originally met through a creative writing evening class that I took at the end of 2017. The class was weird but a lot of fun, and my classmates were good fun. It's been a long time since we last met up, but again, I'm keen to get a bit more in the way of face-to-face writer interaction to help keep me from wallowing in my own writing woes.

I'm having one of those kind of days. You know, the kind of day where it's been a perfectly good sort of day, and then suddenly the melancholy hits and you're just sitting on the train home feeling blank and miserable. I'm probably tired. Some of the melancholy was from thinking about my writing, namely how I haven't been doing any and can't think of any plot threads to get me going. So, I figured I'd pop over here and write up a post about what I've been reading, because that's at least a kind of writing, even if it isn't the fiction I'd like to be doing.

So, here goes.

Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen (10%). I jumped into this off the back of Pride & Prejudice, but got quickly distracted. I think the fact I'm more familiar with the plot from P&P gives me a bit more staying power for the narrative. Maybe I need to read S&S& Sea Monsters first, to get into the swing of things.

The Immortals Quartet, Tamora Pierce (1 1/4 books). Again, I got distracted halfway through these. They're much better than the Lioness quartet in terms of plot pacing and so on, which was my big complaint with the Lioness books, so it's good to see Pierce growing into her writing. But I just can't bring myself to be as interested in Daine as I was Alanna. I suspect if I read these a decade ago, I'd have been all about it - I wrote my fair share of Girl Talking To Wolves stories back then - but I'm just not feeling it right now. Perhaps the long gap while I waited for the physical books to arrive didn't help, either.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. I've read a few Holmes short stories before, but never any of the novels, and not all of the short stories, either, so when I saw a complete collection for just 99p on Kindle, I figured, why not. I've since devoured the lot (bar His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes, and about half of The Valley of Fear, in both cases because I have a limited capacity for dealing with the stuff with third-person narration about some random people rather than Watson writing first-person about Holmes). Now I'm sad to have run out, and having Opinions about crap adaptations of the character.

Reading the short stories, the Holmes I see is an intelligent, introverted man, with excellent knowledge of his specialist area, who is pleasantly polite in company, occasionally rude to his close friend Watson, of whom he is clearly fond but willing to leave to his own life. He is terse when he's concentrating on work, well-respected and -liked by the police officers he encounters, and excellent at inviting confidences from strangers, particularly women, by means of good conversation. He takes cases out of interest, usually in the problem as an intellectual challenge, but often also interest in the outcome, and he has a clear set of morals which he uses to guide his handling of cases where the 'good' and 'bad' are blurred. Compare this, then, to Robert Downey Jr's generic-Hollywood-genius, of the "too busy doing mad science on every topic to tidy up". Yes, canon Holmes is messy, especially when thinking, but he explicitly rejects knowledge not related to his problem domain (e.g. playing music to flies??). Compare also, to both Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch when it comes to social skills - both are frequently rude and rarely, if ever, display the general pleasant politeness of canon Holmes. In both cases, it feels a lot like we've jammed a lot of a modern "eccentric genius with no social skills" trope onto what was originally "eccentric genius who doesn't always care to follow social norms". And the clinginess! Canon Holmes is like "oh you're going to marry Mary? Fine, I guess. I'll miss you. But you can come out on my detective romps anyway when you want to.".

But, anyway, yeah. Like I said, Opinions. I think we've hit on a "look, you're wrong, you're wrong, give it to me I will adapt it properly for you" topic. (On a different note, holy racism, Batman. The Sign of Four is particularly horrendous, but there are a lot of places where the Victorian racism shines out, and that did sort of lessen the enjoyment factor. I think I'd only read some of the least-racist shorts before now. Eesh.)

I'm not sure what to go read now that I'm done with Holmes. I suppose I could go back to those ones I'm halfway into, but eeeh. Maybe I'll go find something to reread. Or blast through something on Netflix.