(November 10 – 16)
I’ve paused on the novel again. This is partly due to chapter four running a little off-track (and me needing a bit of distance from it so I can work out how to stitch the bits back together). However, I’ve also managed to distract myself with a short story I started writing a little while back and abandoned about halfway through … and then completely forgot about! I decided I was quite keen to try and finish this particular story as I feel it could end up being a good one. Novel be damned!
Watching
Amid more Friday The 13th, Doctor Who and Twilight Zone, this week’s main viewing of interest was Prospect, a Netflix original that received a fair amount of hype upon its release a few months’ back.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this, but I ended up enjoying it quite a lot. The dynamic between Pedro Pascal’s and Sophie Thatcher’s characters is good enough to carry the movie, and there’s a brilliant retro-1970s sci-fi aesthetic to the film’s design that I particularly liked. The main shortcoming is that there’s very little character development—you get very little sense that these two characters have been on a journey (even though they end up in a very different place to where they started). The result is that Prospect ends up a little unsatisfying, but it’s still an enjoyable watch for the most part.
Reading
I finished the audiobook of Carmilla this week. My main takeaway from this is that David Tennant does a surprisingly good ‘Van Helsing’ type accent. I read the story many years ago, but it’s interesting to note on this pass how much of a template it provides for Bram Stoker’s later Dracula. Otherwise, a perfectly good dramatisation, if a little forgettable.