Review of Episode 21: Mad New Ruler of Spectra is now available on the Episode Guide page: Professor Doriarty builds cyborg horses for Spectra.

Review of Ep 17, The Alien Beetles, available on the Episode Guide page:

Mark: Zark's right as usual.
Zark: I'm sorry I'm always so right.
Me: *barf*

I don't know if I've ever said or not, but comments are welcome to this blog: you don't have to be a Bravenet member to post, either, as comments should be enabled from anyone and everyone.  Feel free - and I'd kinda appreciate knowing I'm not talking to a vacuum...

Two more parts of One Down posted in the Fanfic Archive tonight. I'm hoping to get to writing a couple of episode reviews this weekend, but no promises. GuildWars may take over my attention again...

I contemplated NaNoWriMo this year. Last year was a dismal failure, though, because we were travelling across the US - LA to Kansas to Chicago to Washington to Jacksonville by train. That's a lot of miles, and I just found myself unable to sit down and concentrate on writing while on trains.

Add to that, that we were on trains and neither of us was really able to sleep...my nascent novel died somewhere on a train track.

The NaNo model doesn't really work for me, anyway. I get the idea, and actually applaud it - anything to get folks writing, right? But I'm not a speed writer by nature. Mostly, I write fairly slowly; I edit and such as I go along, just keep slogging along. The concept of 'just get down on paper, to hell with the typos' doesn't work for me. There are very few stories I've written that have come fast; I think the only one that has in the BotP-verse is 'Little Wing'.

So, no NaNo for me this year. But I am trying to get back in the swing of writing - not so much in the BotP-verse, but Pern. I belong to an online writing club - no RPing, just straight writing in a shared world. I have seven characters there; six are dragonriders, one's a weyr-based healer. Keeps me entertained, anyway.

Most of the fic I've written is posted here; of the stories I've done, there's one that's head and shoulders above the others in terms of generating feedback, and that's the Ithaca arc.

Which is pretty good for a series that hasn't been finished - certainly gratifying for a writer to get that kind of response!

(From hereon out in this post, you may run across spoilers for the series; I guess everyone reading this - someone is reading this, right? - has already read the series, but just in case, I thought I'd say that.)

I've written Ithaca IV, I and III, and they're up on the website: II and V are still hovering out in the mists and, to be honest, I don't know that they'll ever get written. VI is written, though it's very short; it's just a brief epilogue, barely more than a page, but I can't post it until I've written II and V.

I was the end of the war between Spectra and Earth, with Mark, Princess, Jason and Tiny at Camp Parker, recovering; Tiny isn't there, having died in the last hours of the war. III was a few decades later, after Keyop's death; by that stage, Mark and Princess had divorced (with hints that the experience wasn't exactly amicable), Keyop had died. Mark was working undercover for GalSec, Princess was Security Chief, Jason's occupation was uncertain, but he was around when Princess needed to talk. IV was set a few hundred years in the future; Princess is working for GalSec, and is on Spectra investigating reports that things are turning ugly there.

II would cover either Keyop's death and the effect it had on the - now three - surviving members of the team, or Mark and Princess' divorce and the reasons for it; V would be a reunion between Mark, Princess and Jason, set after IV. So, a lot of water under the bridge for Mark and Princess; imagine meeting up with someone you first loved, then hated, and then avoided for a few centuries....

That's assuming I write them, of course, and that's by no means certain at the moment.

For one thing, everyone can uess, I reckon, why Mark and Princess divorce; the straw that broke the camel's back doesn't matter. They just weren't ready for it, that's all. And Keyop's death - well, IV makes it clear why that happened. So I don't need to write it. And V - well, I'm just not sure where that's going to go. So I can't write that just yet.

For another, the Ithaca world is a sad, painful one. Tiny doesn't survive the war, Keyop lives only a few years after it, Princess turns into a hard, cold person. Mark's a cipher; he doesn't appear in what I've written so far, except peripherally. Jason's the best adjusted of the lot of them. It's hard to enter that world; it's not a fun place to be, so I don't know that I want to go back there. Every now and then, I footle around with it and think that I should go back there, and it never quite pans out.

I quit smoking on 31 January, 2005, nearly two years ago. When someone asks whether I smoke, I say I'm a non-smoker - not an ex-smoker, a non-smoker.

And yet, there are times when, if someone offered me a smoke, I'd really have to work to say 'no thanks, I don't smoke.' Now and then, a cigarette would taste so good.

I've had two slips since I quit; at an industry awards night, and again at an industry conference, both earlier this year. Had there been another smoker at work today, there could have been another one. It's spring in Australia - though a warm, near-summerlike spring, with hot afternoons, and I was alone at work, with not much to do. Just the sort of day that, once upon a time, would have seen me out the back of the office. Shady patch, shoes off, enjoying the cool pavers under my bare feet, half doing tai chi while smoking (not kidding)...

No more smoking. Bad me for even thinking it.

Fixed the links for One Down parts 2 and 3 - thanks to Denise for the heads-up.

I've also added Part 4 and Part 5. More to come in coming days.

I mentioned last time that my husband and I were rewatching old Star Trek episodes? We're most of the way through the final season of TOS, and there are two things I wanted to note.

First, and BotP related - Keye Luke shows up as Governor Donald Cory in 'Whom Gods Destroy'. I didn't recognise his face, but all through the episode, I was thinking 'gee, I know that voice.'

Second, and non-BotP related - is 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' as much self-righteousness as can be jammed into one episode? Yeesh. You know, looking back, I think 'Battlefield' was the first ever Star Trek episode I ever saw; on rewatching it now, I kind of wonder why I ever watched any more....

Not one of Trek's best, no. For that honour, I'd nominate 'The Trouble With Tribbles', 'The Empath', 'The Naked Time' (despite the stupid plot moment that requires a crew member in an environment suit to take off a glove for no good reason), and 'City on the Edge of Forever' (no matter what Harlan Ellison reckons).

Currently reading:
Just finished 'Big Bother', an analysis of the Big Brother shows - a particular focus on the Australian version, but mentioning its overseas stablemates. As insightful reviews and analyses go...well, it was pretty shallow, sadly.

Still in the library bag and about to be read: Tanith Lee's 'White As Snow' (I haven't enjoyed many of Tanith Lee's books except for Silver Metal Lover, and I hated the sequel to that, so I'm a bit doubtful over this one); Ira Levin's 'Sliver' (given that he wrote 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Stepford Wives' and 'The Boys From Brazil', I reckon it's got a better than even chance that I'll like it); the Peter Beagle-edited 'Immortal Unicorn', an anthology of unicorn stories.

Currently playing:
Guild Wars - a MMORPG (massive multiuser online roleplayer game). Think World of Warcraft but better. Two chapters released already, in Prophecies and Factions; a third one goes online in a few days, called Nightfall. Fast paced play, excellent level of content for Prophecies and (I'm guessing from looking at the prerelease stuff) for Nightfall, amazing graphics. If you play GW and ever run across a character with the surname Varss (Deya Varss, Anya Varss, Belya Varss, Miri Varss, so on so forth), odds are it'll be one of mine.

For someone who lives online, I don't do a lot of online gaming, though. GW is pretty much it.

Currently watching:
Husband and I are currently ploughing through the Star Trek universe - well, selected parts of it, anyway. We've watched the entire run of TNG, and we're almost at the the end of TOS at the moment. Which leaves us in a bit of a quandary; the video store doesn't have DS9 in it, and neither of us give two figs about either Voyager or Enterprise. Do we wait for DS9 (we're assured it's on the way soon) or move onto something else - say, Buffy? Or is there something else we can immerse ourselves in?

Yeah, there's always BotP and review writing...