Wicked Ace Space

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.