(November 24 – 30)
Every Christmas I like to write a ‘Christmas horror story’. It doesn’t always happen, but last year was one of the years that it did and I’m keen to repeat the effort this year. These stories are usually inspired by M.R.James (you’ll understand why if you’re into Christmas ghost stories) and for this year I’ve decided to revisit an idea I started working on quite some time back. As occasionally happens, I had a good hook for a story but wasn’t quite able to wrap the right story around it. Rather than start it from scratch, I’ve picked up the pieces that I abandoned and given them a light shuffle. Based on progress so far it’s feeling like the right choice.
Fingers crossed I’ll have this done and dusted in time for Christmas.
Watching
Not too much to write about this week. I started watching The Mandalorian, about which I’ll have more to say when I complete the series. Most significantly, I watched my first ever episode of Black Mirror! I really have no idea why it’s taken me this long, as Black Mirror is 100% my sort of thing. The episode in question was called Playtest (from season 3) and revolved around a young traveller earning some spending money by testing out a new augmented reality game. Needless to say, things go … poorly.
The main character, I later found out, was played by Kurt Russell’s son which explained why he looked so familiar (his smile, in particular, is stolen right off his Dad’s face).
Reading
This week I went straight into another Doctor Who audiobook by Big Finish, this one simply called Master. This one came with an irresistibly gothic presence—four people trapped in a mansion on a stormy night—and delivered on that in spades (in fact, it was very reminiscent of Sapphire and Steel). The story, inevitably, didn’t quite live up to the premise but this was a superb production overall.