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Posts Tagged ‘Who in Review’

Diary #782

Posted in Diary, Fiction, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on June 24, 2025| 1 Comment »

We had another unusually-chilly spring this year, so I didn’t trust my tomato plants outside until this past weekend; if they can’t survive in the first week of summer, I’ll just have to throw up my hands in despair.  But though the temperatures haven’t been quite summery, even by Olympic peninsula standards, the days are as long as they’re going to get, and that means my seasonal anxiety is back.  As I’ve noted in the past, it isn’t nearly as bad since I moved to Sunset as it was in Seattle, probably because the quiet of the countryside counteracts some of it, while the noise and commotion of the city aggravates it.  But this year, it sneaked up on me because I’ve been attributing my emotional stress to grief.  It wasn’t until a week or so ago that I asked myself why that should be worse now than it was immediately after Grace’s death, or in the first few months afterward; I only just realized that as is typical for me, the anxiety runs under the surface and breaks out at weak points.  Expressed another way, the anxiety is acting as fuel for my grief, making it just as intense as it was in January and February, and more intense than it was in March and April.  But now that I’m done with Who in Review (and have even set up my store to sell autographed copies), I have time and space in my life to do some creative writing again.  I’ve already written two new stories for Lost Angels, with a third probably coming this week; it’s percolating through my brain, going through the alchemy by which grief, loss, and pain are transmuted into art, much like a compost heap transmutes organic garbage into humus for growing new plants.  When the tomatoes are ready, I’ll use some of them to make salsa from the recipe Grace and I developed late last summer.  And when Lost Angels is published, the pain I’m enduring now will have given rise to beauty I can share with the world.

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Diary #779

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on June 3, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It’s been a few years since my last new book, but after four years in the making, Who in Review is finally here!  The process started in March of 2021, when Grace and I decided to watch every single televised Doctor Who story from 1963 to the present, and I reviewed each one on Twitter (along with reviews of every episode of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures) as we went, running all year and into 2022 before it was done.  Then in April of last year I started copying the whole thread to Bluesky while also compiling the reviews into a book, which required considerable reformatting and modification, plus adding two appendices which couldn’t have worked in the microblogging format.  I finished that early in October, but Grace was diagnosed with cancer just a few days later, leaving me no time for proofreading until this past April.  I found a lot more errors in the proof than is typical for me; I reckon that’s probably due to the change from microblogging format, which left a lot of extremely long sentences strung together with comma splices, plus other, weirder errors.  But at least it’s done, and on Sunday I ordered a box of copies to sell as autographed copies in my own store; they’re supposed to arrive next week.  In the meantime, here’s the link to buy the paperback on Amazon; if you want an autographed copy, you’ll have to wait until my own copies come in (when you see the image for the bookstore in the right-hand column change to the cover image displayed here, they’re available).  I’m also working on the Kindle version; it’ll probably be done later this month.  I’ll keep you posted!  But those of you who just want a regular, unsigned paper copy needn’t wait.  And with any luck, this book may attract new readers and supporters to my existing body of work.

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Diary #777

Posted in Diary, Fiction, tagged , , , on May 20, 2025| 2 Comments »

I finished the rough draft of my seventh book, Who in Review, early last autumn, but Grace was diagnosed with cancer just a few days later so I was much too busy caring for her to have any free time to do the proofreading.  After Frank & Olivia’s visit I was able to motivate myself to start the proofreading process, then last week I got the physical proof in and have been doing the third and final pass.  I proofread my books three times: once as a Word file, then as a “virtual proof”, and finally as a physical proof.  Typically, I only find two or three errors at most in that third pass, but this time I’ve already hit nearly a dozen in just the first few chapters; I reckon it’s because, unlike my previous books, the contents of this one came from an epic-length Twitter thread rather than this blog, and that change in format was bound to generate more errors than usual with fewer opportunities to catch them in the pre-manuscript stage.  But in any case, it’s almost done and should be available by the end of this month.  In case you missed previous mentions of the project, this book contains my reviews of every single televised Doctor Who story for the first two incarnations of the series, Classic Who (26 seasons from 1963-1989) and New Who (13 series from 2005-2022), plus some speculation, a chronology of the Whoniverse, and more.  Judging from the amount of positive feedback I received from the first version of the thread on Twitter in 2021, and the revision on Bluesky last year (actually ending only a couple of weeks ago), you won’t want to miss this one if you’re a Doctor Who fan.  And with any luck, this will draw attention to my earlier books from folks outside my established readership.

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Who Thoughts

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on August 19, 2021| 2 Comments »

If you follow me on Twitter, you have undoubtedly noticed that every day since March, I’ve been tweeting my thoughts about Doctor Who as Grace and I watch the entire series from 1963 to the present.  On Saturday we finished the classic series and have now started New Who, so I think it’s time to unveil something I’ve been working on behind the scenes:  everything I’ve posted to that Twitter thread, collected in one big page.  Practically since I started, my Whovian readers have been asking for this compilation; I’ve been doing it all along, but I wanted to get to what seemed like a natural point to unveil it.  I’m also working on some supplemental materials, including an attempt at a unified chronology of The Doctor’s adventures, but those will have to wait a bit longer until I feel they’re ready to be seen by eyes other than my own.  Then next year, I hope to get it all compiled into a book in time for release the following year, the program’s 60th anniversary.  If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even make a little money from it, and maybe it will introduce more readers to my other work.  But in the meantime, I’m just enjoying writing something light, fun, and even a bit academic for a change.

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Who Knows?

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on March 19, 2021| 4 Comments »

The venerable British science-fantasy series Doctor Who has been one of my favorites since it first appeared on our local PBS station (WYES in New Orleans) in the summer of 1981; like many Americans of my generation, the first episodes I saw were those starring Tom Baker as The Doctor, which originally ran from 1974-81.  But as most of you probably know now, he was only one of many actors to play the part, because when a Time Lord (that’s the alien race to which the Doctor belongs) dies, he regenerates into a new form, with a new face and a new personality.  When WYES realized how much pledge money the series brought in, the station naturally did its best to acquire as many seasons as possible; at one point they were playing the Fourth Doctor episodes (starring Baker) on Saturday night, the Third Doctor episodes (1970-74, starring Jon Pertwee) on Friday night, and the then-new Fifth Doctor episodes (1982-84, starring Peter Davison) on Sunday morning.  Eventually they even got ahold of as many of the 1960s episodes featuring the first two doctors as were then available; it was then I discovered that many of these early shows were missing, casualties of lean times at the BBC which caused many of them to be taped over because videotape was expensive and newer shows had to be recorded on them.  In the decades since, some of the missing episodes have been discovered in various places; others have been reconstructed with animation or stills from the original soundtracks (which all managed to survive).  What that means is, with some effort and ingenuity it’s now possible to watch the entire show from 1963 to the present, and last month Grace and I decided to do just that.  Lorelei Rivers is a Who superfan, and graciously allowed me to borrow her complete classic collection; we’ve already watched the first two seasons and soon we’ll move on to the Second Doctor, the one I’ve seen the least of.  Back in the ’80s, I loved watching the series with people who were dear to me, and prior to the pandemic Lorelei and I regularly enjoyed our Who nights; it’s great fun to see them again now with Grace.  And I’ve even started a running Twitter thread on my impressions of the old shows, which despite being less sophisticated than their modern counterparts are still a helluva lot of fun.

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