(October 6 – 12)
This is the last week of the school holidays, and my last chance until Christmas to take advantage of the relaxed morning routine. I ended up making pretty good use of this bonus time by completing rewrites of two stories: one being the second edit of the story I finished last week (which is shaping up nicely); the other a rewrite of a story I wrote last year (and which I really enjoyed revisiting).
The most exciting news of the week, however, is that a friend of mine (who has spent the last year building an impressive side-career as a voice artist) sent over an audio recording of another one of my stories. It’s fascinating how different the experience of listening is from reading. I could edit a story a dozen times, but there are things that jumped out at me in this recording that I really wish I’d captured and fixed earlier.
This is the first of the stories that I hope will fill the first season of my upcoming podcast, and I’m finding myself really keen to re-experience some of my other stories in this way.
Watching
This week I started watching NOS4A2 (or, more correctly, NOS4R2 if you’re british in persuasion). It’s one of a long list of shows I’ve been excited about (in this case, having read the book) but have generally failed to watch with any great urgency. I’m liking it so far: I particularly like the characterisation of the two main players (Vic and Maggie). I’m also enjoying the slightly unconventional way that it’s filmed—more like an indie drama than a horror movie/show. Given these other stylistic choices, the extremely on-the-nose makeup for Charlie Manx, the main villain of the piece, seems rather misplaced. I’m engrossed thus far, but I do worry if the slow pace and general unwillingness to capitalise on the out and out horror opportunities buried in the story may find my attention waning.
For Horror Friday we went for a repeat viewing of The Cabin In The Woods (which I think I’ve only watched once). I’m still blown away by how funny, clever and properly horrific this film is. It boggles my mind that it was almost left on the shelf due to lack of confidence.
Reading
This week I finally finished Wool. Yay me! I went straight from that odyssey into the sequel, Shift, which I’m pretty excited about reading again because I remember almost nothing about it—except that it was interesting. Sure enough, I’m racing through it so far, but I expect it’ll take me a few weeks as it’s a bit of a chonker.
In audio news, I also discovered a podcast all about M.R.James stories—entitled A Podcast To The Curious—and checked out a pair of episodes dedicated to Casting The Runes (which, you should all know, provided the basis for one of my favourite movies, Night Of The Demon). It was pretty good and I’ll definitely be checking out some more.
In less successful listening, I picked up the audio comedy series Heads Will Roll from Audible. This has been on my wish list for some time now, mainly due to the involvement of Kate MacKinnon, who is a comedy goddess, and probably just a goddess in all ways. It was, as expected, really, really funny but somehow lacked something for me. I’ll most likely check out the rest of it, but it wasn’t the compelling listening experience I was hoping for.