Goodbye, Doctor.

Well that was a big pile of fucking terrible.  Obviously some of you out there don't agree.  You're strange and wrong, of course.  What am I talking about?  Doctor Who, of course.  That little BBC show that was off the air for about fifteen years and was brought back in 2005, to much fan fare and fandom creaming.  Really, about nine years down the line the shine's tarnished a bit.  And by 'a bit' I mean its now about as shiny as a tennis ball.  So it goes without saying I feel the need to go on a spoiler-ridden rant about it.

Seriously.  SPOILERS, morons.  If you don't want anything given away because you haven't caught up don't read on.  Although, I don't think anyone who is interested in Doctor Who will be behind that much.  You never can tell.

I'll admit I was one of the many people who got very excited when it was announced Doctor Who was going to return.  I watched it as a kid.  From what I learned more recently I was the only one in my household who enjoyed it.  How's that for making you feel shit?  Makes me feel like I was some kind of pre-pubescent dictator of the television.  That just sounds hilarious when thrown out into the ether.

So, the excitement in the year or so before Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to the screen was quite palpable^*.  Christopher Eccleston was a good choice.  An actor with gravitas and the ability to play it light.  And ears, such magnificent ears.  My enthusiasm lasted through that first series.  Even then, there were concerns.

I mean the format for Doctor Who was always multi-part stories, told in half-hour chunks.  Davies came back and changed the format to stand alone forty-five minute stories.  It wasn't too terrible, for a while, but we'll come to that.

Then there was Rose Tyler.  In the first of this new series, the preoccupation with the companion was quite refreshing.  Rose Tyler wasn't a terrible character, and I was surprised how good an actress Billie Piper is, being more accustomed to her previous incarnation as teeny pop performer.  Now I see that's when the rot started to set in.  Russell T. Davies ran with this and Steven Moffat's taken that cue and gone further with it.  The companion being either a fawning cypher or unreasonably stubborn.  Whatever the companion, they shoved in one of my pet hates about modern storytelling: the pathological need to have a romantic subplot.  It's not the pinnacle of story, most of the time it's as interesting as overhearing a loud teenager's phone call.  Now we're here, on the cusp of the abyss^**.

The latest series of Doctor Who has been a dismal affair.  It's not just the preoccupation with the companion, in this case the empty vessel that's Clara Oswald, but let's dwell on it a moment.  In a show that's ostensibly a fantasy/science fiction premise, it felt like a lot of time was lavished on the life of Clara Oswald.  It's happened since Rose Tyler, through What's-Her-Name^† and Amy Pond.  These last series it's been turned up a couple of notches.  To the point it felt like a standard drama with some sci-fi spotted through.  Not even interesting drama.  The most mundane and boring stuff they could dredge up:
     "What's for tea tonight?"
     "Chips."
     "Oh, okay...Oh look.  The Doctor."
Wouldn't have been so bad if the sci-fi stuff counterpointing it was at all interesting, but it was like a shot of beige thrown into a wall of grey.

It doesn't help that Steven Moffat can't seem to write women.  This post here details his many crimes against women characters.  Clara Oswald was a dull character who was supposed to have strong traits, but never managed to show them.  She could have been played by a washcloth on a stick with 'Clara Oswald: Strong Female' stitched on it^‡.  In the last episode of the latest series The Mistress describes her as a 'control freak'.  What?  I never got that.  You can't just say that without having the character display it.  She was deceitful and wilful when she wasn't being a compliant puppet, but control freak?  And her wilfulness was always used in the most stupid way, in order to advance a plot that was in danger of plunging down a hole and managed to find another one.  Not that plot holes worry Steven Moffat much...

...Because, as Cracked observed, Doctor Who currently lives in a fucking plot hole.  And fuck does it.  I couldn't even tell you what the last few episodes were about, they were such a mess.  I have been chided in the past about my stories lacking internal logic.  You know, that thing where, no matter how nonsensical something is in a story, it makes sense in context.  Sapphire and Steel was great at it.  Most people couldn't follow what the fuck was going on, but there was a sense of some underlying logic that you just didn't understand.  Current Doctor Who tosses that out the window BECAUSE SOMETHING FUCKING COOL IS HAPPENING!  That only works in small doses, when entire episodes are full of contradictions it gets tiresome.  It feels like the writers have been throwing things on a page and hoping they miraculously come together.  That only works with stir fries.

I could even forgive the twisted mess the stories have been if they had been interesting, but they have completely lacked any kind of excitement.  You can see they want to be, like the kid who's wearing the glasses and drawn-on scar, really wants to be Harry Potter, but doesn't quite do it.  Russell T. Davies wasn't great at this kind of narrative excitement, but he did manage it, possibly by pure chance, in all the arm-flailing and scurrying around.  These recent episodes have been plodding affairs desperately pointing at the screen and shouting, "See!  Excitement!" while pointing at a tree.  The stakes never felt that high.

The stakes should have felt high, since the reboot, the series has been running on series-wide arcs.  These in themselves aren't a problem, but it's the need for a new story every week that's ground down the poor show.  It's the same problem that dogs American television, with its obsession for twenty-two and -four episode series.  It gets tired.  There's only so much that can be mined out of a premise.  Before for Doctor Who, that took almost thirty years, with the previous longer-form, multi-part stories, but it's been accelerated this time with so many stories being thrown at us in a series.

And the cardinal problem, for me, is that in a show called Doctor Who, we haven't seen that much of the Doctor.  Whether that's actually the case, I don't know, I'm sure some pedant will show me a spreadsheet showing, empirically, the Doctor was in the show the most.  The problem is, stories don't run on empirical evidence, they run on feelings and if you leave viewers feeling like the eponymous character hasn't been seen enough, you've done something tragically wrong.  Yes, they pulled it off in Blake's Seven, but there was actually a valid narrative reason: Blake was dead.  What's Doctor Who's excuse?  Steven Moffat wants to concentrate on Clara and Danny going down to Asda?  We really need to know how many times a week they see each other?  Come on, that's not drama, that's a desperate bid to make people turn off the television.

For me, after discussing it with my wife, it comes down to a basic problem: Doctor Who is a pure nostalgia-fest.  People who watched the original run, like yours truly, and loved it.  We are hoping for a snippet of that feeling, but for me at least, it's not coming.  I've tuned in week after week only to be disappointed and bored again.  Yes, there have been good things, but they're bogged down and buried by the utter shit.  Don't trot out that tired, "it's a kid's show" bit, because that's no excuse for shitty writing.  Doctor Who is tired now and I suspect a proportion of people tune in hoping it improves, only to be disappointed, their little forty-five minutes of sadness on a Saturday night for a few weeks.  This could be the only thing keeping it afloat.

After the Christmas episode, I'm out, and I'll probably cringe my way through that.  I can't handle the disappointment any more.  I can't handle the fucking terrible stories, either.  The final episode of the recent series was an exercise in not creating tension.  It was remarkable that scenes with a plane besieged by Cybermen could be so boring.  It was so bad I can't even come up with an amusing simile that encapsulates tedium.  But Michelle Gomez was fucking amazing.

There are some things that can be done to improve it: for a start, give us the Doctor, doing things, being mad, solving problems like a fucking beast.  He's smart and he's resourceful, but that hasn't come across well recently, because he's been mostly absent.  Ditch the cult of the companion, it's the worst while giving us an interesting companion, even go so far as a non-human or non-contemporary human.  Think through what's happening in the story more, dude.  Pulpish madness only works when there's a baseline somewhere, without that, doesn't matter how mental that baseline is, the viewers are floating around with a nothing plot.  I'd even plump for longer story arcs, two or three episodes to tell a story and let it breath more – the, "woo! thrown into the plot" thing makes me weary.

None of the above will happen, mind you.  Too many people are vocal in their love of Doctor Who, but for me it's lost its appeal.  It's a bit sad, but I'll be off watching things that are fun, instead of hoping for another episode of Doctor Who to end.

^* I may have jumped up and down clapping at one point.  It's out there, deal with it.

^** Hyperbolic?  Me?  I resent your unspoken implication and challenge you to a duel.  That I won't turn up to and call you a prick for going.

^† Yeah, I skipped the series with Catherine Tate, because I found her comedy vapid and unfunny, I couldn't imagine watching her as a companion.  I might have been wrong in my assessment, but that's where we are.

^‡ Before anyone starts shouting at me for some misogynistic slight, Danny Pink could have been played by another washcloth on a stick with 'Danny Pink: Man'.



Will

I Return (Again!) and I'll Probably Vanish for Months (Again!).

Yeah, so been a while.  It's all part of my hobby of intermittently neglecting my blog^*.  Let's do a bit of a catch up, once again.

Okay so in the year or so since I last published a post, I've...not actually done much.  That's astonishingly embarrassing to be honest.

I'll start with an update on my last foray into self-publishing.  Fuckin' disaster.  Absolutely, shamingly, crushingly failed.  I think about eight of them sold, and those were to friends and family.  When Amazon started hassling me for tax information^** I decided to not bother and they took it off sale.  Kind of wish I hadn't bothered with it now.

Pfah to regrets, I say!  PFAH!!

Onto something a bit more positive: I started and finished another novel.  My first sojourn into the world of full-length crime fiction, hopefully with a twist only I could give it^†.  It's a story I've wanted to do for a long time and finally pinned down a plot I liked.  It sits, awaiting a final edit to be submitted to...er...somewhere.  I'm at a loss.  We'll see what happens once I've gone through it.  Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

This brings me onto something even cooler – I was almost published.  My ridiculous action novel got a bit of interest from a digital-only publisher, and received some good feedback, but they passed.  At least I think they did^‡.  Anyway this feedback was the best and most detailed I've ever had in tightening up a manuscript.  I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing when I'm 'editing', but I feel like I have I'm not an inept macaque with broken fingers.  I was working on that manuscript...

...Until the most shameful thing happened.  I got distracted.  Irrevocably so – okay, not irrevocably, that's an exaggeration, fiiiiiiine.  Bloody addictive computer games^§.  So yeah, from about July onwards is a bit neglected.

But now I'm back, for a wee while at least, and I'll have something to say about that in my next post.  Isn't that exciting?

Ah fuck you, blank-eyed shits^§§.

^* One thing I'm clearly very good at.

^** Really should have read the terms and conditions.  Lesson for you there, kids.

^† Or even if it doesn't make you fall asleep and vomit at the same time, would be good.

^‡ Last year, as you might have noticed, was a year of uncertainty in a few key areas.

^§ I'm looking at you, Borderlands 2, you time-sucking bastard.

^§§ Unless, y'know you offer some advice in the comments.  G'wan!  My gratitude is more valuable than...whatever.


Will

A Tottering Pile

Well, look at that, another rejection.  It's the frustrating grind that every writer knows, when you feel like you're putting your best work out there and it's just bouncing off the impervious skins of cynical agents and editors.  I get it, not everything can appeal to everyone and so many people want to be writers, yada yada yada.  There's been screeds and screeds written on that subject and frankly it's mostly padded out with platitudes and helpless shrugs of the shoulders.  It's kind of inevitable, and when you find yourself doing it you feel like a helpless dick.  No one profits from it and everyone walks away in a deeper depression, their faith in writing and publishing bashed a little more.

I've come to the realisation that a couple of the novels I've been trying to get published for while are never going to see the light of day.  It's even more depressing than the tidal wave of rejections, when you realise the book you've written, read over, re-written, re-read again and re-written numerous times just isn't making an impact with anyone.  For me, that's no impact whatsoever.  There are people out there who get encouraging rejections.  Good for them.  I get the standard 'go away' or I get nothing.  I'm going to stop there, because that conversation's a route to fucking suicide.

So what becomes of these sad, unwanted pieces of literary detritus?  They sit and they moulder, in my experience.  All that work and effort only to be chucked in a metaphorical pile to gather dust and dusty cobwebs.  That pile of mine is getting big, padded out by the short stories and comic scripts that just can't find a home.  It's like an animal shelter where no one even looks at the animals, let alone gives any hope they'll be adopted.  I've been writing for a long time, churning out novels and short stories since I was sixteen.  The first few novels I wrote, I knew not long after they were finished wouldn't go anywhere (they were hand written, for a start) so they've made a cosy base for the growing pile of pages I'm building up that no one gives any indication they want to look at.

I understand why no one wants to touch at least one of the books: it's derivative and messy, so really why I tried so hard to get it out there is beyond me.  A whole lot of wasted effort right there.  Maybe it's because I get pulled into the trap of looking at the worst that's out there and thinking, "If that can get published..." before sending off the sample chapters.  This is, of course, tremendous folly and leads to disappointment and the writing of long-winded blog rambles.

The book that prompted this particular ramble is one I wrote a long time ago, and took quite some time to get from my brain and onto the page, thanks to life getting in the way in one way or another (although I did manage to write a Warhammer 40,000 novel in the middle, that will also never, ever be seen by anyone but me) and I feel quite bad that it won't get a chance.  Partly it's because I waited so long to get it out and partly because it's horror of a particular length the outlets for are almost nil.^*

I often think that I was born a decade too late.  If I'd been writing around the early to mid eighties, when horror novels were de rigueur, then I might have had more of a chance, but, since the early nineties, the kind of horror I like to write, and read, has tailed off to a great extent.  I know a lot of people who will tell you this kind of fiction is still going strong, but I don't really see it.  Then I have to wonder if I'm looking closely enough.

I'm thankful to the small group of people who've taken a chance on my writing and given it a wider audience. It's great to see something that was once a raw twitch in the middle of my brain offered the opportunity to fly.  I keep hoping that the accumulation of work will make people sit up and take notice of me and I might actually start to get some money for this crazy path I've put myself on.

So, here I sit, with a pile of unwanted manuscripts, like a terrible execution device of my own creation that's leaning over my head, always ready for that extra few pages that will finally make it topple and have done with me.  And I keep playing the crazy, obsessed hermit, feeding it and creating my own doom.

^* The first person to mention Lulu.com gets a punch in the throat while I fucking weep.


Will

There's actual sunlight?

My, but I like my films.  I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story.  Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.

In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films.  I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years.  It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.

You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me.  And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.

Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film.  It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.

Not something that can be said for Dread.  I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker.  Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power.  Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes.  Arrrgh!  What the fuck, man?  Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever?  You probably failed, but you weren't that far off.  You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act.  Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be.  That's something you should've learned in primary school.

At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them.  They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me.  No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just).  The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on.  But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.

Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise.  The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them.  If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV.  I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was.  You were wrong, you bastards.

The same applies to Super 8.  This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious.  I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business).  And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP.  The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.

Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go.  I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure.  Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.

I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!


Will