Your New Favourite Blog

[coalescent]

Over the past few weeks, I have repeatedly followed links that end up at Abigail Nussbaum's blog, Asking The Wrong Questions. The post about Mal was hers, for one. Ever slow on the uptake, I have just taken ten minutes out to browse the rest of the blog, and found more than enough to convince me I should be reading it more regularly. And not just because she agrees with me about the Hugo short fiction and Cloud Atlas. Some highlights:

• The Television Novel


• We Know They're Evil Because They Watch Voyager or, Some Scary Thoughts About Being a Genre Fan


• Four Popular Misconceptions about Pride and Prejudice


• Is There Someone at the End of this Rope? Thoughts on M John Harrison, specifically Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart, with reference to Light.


• You Keep Using That Word, or the value of escapism

Go. Read. Then go add the lj feed, which inexplicably has only two people watching it.

Comments

[storme]

Looking over that blog, I was thinking that I perhaps wasn't keeping up with TV and SF enough to really get much out of it.

Then I read the post where she rants about Wuthering Heights, and now I am in love.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Things about that blog that I love:

- That she writes about books and tv, in genre and out.
- That she can be damned insightful.
- That she is not afraid to be, uh, forceful in her opinions.

I think my favourite line so far is the one about the Booker judges being "convinced that their tiny, insignificant day in the sun is actually the pinnacle of human existence." :)

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Go. Read. Then go add the lj feed, which inexplicably has only two people watching it.

Yessssssssssss...massssssterrrrrrrrrr. [stumbles off in zombie-walk]

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

It's hit ten readers. This is the heady power the internet has granted me. I must be careful not to use it for evil.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

No, no, use it for eeevil! Come on, you know you want to! Please?

[grahamsleight.livejournal.com]

No! I am not in your thrall! I have an independent mind!

*adds feed*

[midnightmelody.livejournal.com]

24. Which isn't significant in any base, but is, I suppose, '99' in base 5.

Don't use it for evil, use it for *science*. Far better.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

34 now. I'm holding out for 50.

Don't use it for evil, use it for *science*. Far better.

Of course! I should have thought of that. :)

[andrewducker]

Added. Her stuff about Lost and X-Files is spot on.

Lost should have been a serialised story, with the whole thing worked out in advance. Spinning it out too long will kill any interest people have.

BG can be spun on indefinitely - but you can't leave the interesting questions hovering there forever, although you can leave us with interesting stories to tell after the initial questions are answered.

Because TV is extremely money-oriented and tuned to be shown once or twice and then forgotten there's a deep trend towards flogging it until it dies. If the market was more about long-term sales, then there'd be a reason to stop when it was good and flog the whole thing as a box set from now to the end of time.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I've just left a comment there. It is very good that TV Novel post..

[tinimaus.livejournal.com]

Baaahh! Baa-ah!

(just in case you are wondering, that's my impression of a sheep)

[communicator.livejournal.com]

What a find, thanks Niall

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Added.

Much appreciated.

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

I succumbed also, as now that you mention it I've enjoyed several of the entries you've linked to. I also highly recommend holidaying on the planet of the brain slugs.

[adelheid.livejournal.com]

I'm drunk. And looking at your icon is not helping to improve my vertigo (yes, ok, so being drunk is exacerbating the vertigo even more than the icon, but you're not supposed to think such things). I might stop and lie down.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Had to go off early to dayslog, but read enough to be really glad you discovered this blog, and added it at once.

I don't want to stick my snout into her blog and begin gassing away, but I did find myself yes-butting at the TV novel posting. Not specifically about the shows (most of which I have not seen) but about the handling of scenes...

One of the things that puts me off TV in fact is the belief that you need to keep the conflict going all the time, that subtle or inward transitions and moments are to be used rarely, if at all. "If in doubt, someone pull a gun" might as well be a TV rubric, and I get impatient when I see it in novels. In TV it seems there is often not enough time to let emotional stakes build in a convincing way, so we have to have the nicest character get cancer, or someone pull a gun, or someone's kid go missing in order to keep the pot boiling enough to get people past interminable commercial breaks.

Fine. But I really hate that kind of thinking in novels. (And my definition of 'TV novels' is not novels based on TV, but novels that follow the TV rubric.)

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I love DS9, Voyager and B5. Clearly I have a Fatal Flaw running through my otherwise Good-Guy Nature, and that Fatal Flaw is codenamed Frothy Fun in The Delta Quadrant, Or, How the Borg were Castrated.