(August 25 – 31)

It’s been another busy week of writing activity for me (although the writing itself slows down somewhat in these winter months). I finished my rewrite of When The Darkness Comes, submitted it to a magazine and, once again, had it promptly rejected. I also had another idea for a new short story and start writing that (the novel, and various other projects, are slipping further and further away at this point).

Meanwhile, the fact that I need to do something with my stories, other than use them as tools for attracting rejection letters, has promoted a little creative planning. For many years I’ve considered putting together a collection of my short stories, but I’ve held off since I know it’ll most likely sit there in the Amazon catalogue never being found by anyone. The other idea that’s popped up from time to time is doing audio versions of my stories, and this time the idea has really stuck—I could do a podcast series of my stories, approximately one per week/episode.

Obviously I wanted to get an idea of how many episode I could potentially sustain (I have this idea of doing ‘seasons’ of 13 episodes, but have no idea how many seasons I could deliver) so I did an audit of all my stories. Over the week I’d unearthed a handful of stories sitting on my Google Drive that I’d forgotten I even wrote, which made me realise it was time to be a it more organised. In the end, counting them all up revealed that I have written 45 (completed) stories over the years (with about 10 more in various ages of uncompletion). This means I’m well on the way to having four seasons, or a year’s worth of stories.

Now I just need to make it happen.

Watching

This week I asked the Elderbeast what he wanted to watch for our Sunday movie, and was pretty surprised and impressed when he said “The Godfather”. I asked why, and he said it was in the IMDB top 10 and he wanted to make sure he’d watched every movie in the top ten. Pretty awesome. I did a quick check and found that the movies weren’t available on my various streaming services, so we went off to JB Hifi and found the blurays for Godfather parts 1 and 2 in a ‘3 for 2’ deal … bit of a dilemma since they never made a third Godfather film. We ended up adding Pacific Rim: Uprising to the pile, since the Kinderbesten both wanted to see it.

Anyway, after all that I’m not going to talk about The Godfather because it’s so damn long we only got halfway through. More when we finish it.

(Ironically I later found out that all of The Godfather films are on Prime Video. Oh well, you can do much, much worse that have Godfather 1 and 2 in your collection).

I started watching season two of The Terror, which has been pretty well received. Only one episode in it I like the emphasis on historical verisimilitude and supernatural terrors, which gives it a strong link to the otherwise unconnected first season.

Friday’s horror was an HP Lovecraft adaptation called Dagon, which was a bit of a curiosity. It was made in 2001, but it felt overwhelmingly like one of those straight-to-video horror movies that kept the video industry going in the late eighties and nineties. It had some truly gorgeous cinematography, but was let down in parts by some distinctly hokey CGI. It was also tonally disjointed; aiming for brooding terror for the most part, but featuring a lead actor who had literally used Harold Lloyd as an influence. A mildly interesting oddity.

Reading

I’ve picked up Wool again, which I’m continuing to enjoy and can’t fathom why I’m being so intermittent with it. Anyway, let’s see how many more weeks it finally takes me to finish this.