By Roy Mathur, on 2014-06-15, at 20:45:00 to 21:57:00 BST, for Roy's Rocket Radio
Time management is the one thing I'm finding is the most important thing to sort out as a new writer. I've always played at being a writer, but the truth is that it's a full-time job. Sure you can bang out a novel in a year while holding down a normal job, but trying to earn a living at writing is an entirely different proposition.
Incredibly prolific horror writer Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Box etc.) once said in an interview, that writing was hard work and he did it to put food on the table. When I first heard that, I thought this was just typical writer machismo, but after cranking out chapter after chapter myself, I think he was right.
All I'm saying is stick with it, make time for it. If other things (but not family) suffer in the process, then so be it. If things like too many hobbies get in the way, cut some of your extra activities out. You need some other interest as a distraction, but what you really don't need is too many distractions or things that aren't paying off. For example, my only extra thing now is this podcast. You can see that from my limited tweets and blog posts.
Broadcast: 22 May - 26 June 1965
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: Richard Martin 1-5, Douglas Camfield 6
Producer: Verity Lambert
Cast: William Hartnell as the Doctor, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright, William Russell as Ian Chesterton, Maureen O'Brien as Vicki and Peter Purves as Steven Taylor (companions).
The team play around with the Time-Space Visualiser, a sort of time TV on which they can pick up on any event in history (lottery anyone?). Ian dances horribly to the Beatles who they pick up on the machine for a few seconds (The Beattles!)
They then land on a desert planet. Ian and Vicki go for a walk, find a door in the sand, are trapped and then menaced by the land octopoid (Mire beasts). The Doctor and Barbabara lie in the sun, but the Time-Space Visualiser picks up a Dalek transmission which tells them that they are on Aridius , in the Sagarro Desert (get it?) and the Daleks a planing to finally rid themselves of their enemy the Doctor.
The Doctor and Barbara narrowly avoid the Daleks and watch as the Daleks and their native slaves, the aquatic-looking Aridians, dig up and then unsucessfully try to destroy the TARDIS. Some of the Aridians rescue the Doctor and Barbara, but hold them captive, but unharmed on the instructions of the Daleks who have threatened their species with destruction. Vicki and Ian are also found and captured. The Mire beasts attack again and the team escape back to the TARDIS the confusion.
They are then chased (hence the title) through time and space by the Daleks who have constructed their own time-ship. First to the top of the Empire State Building in New York, causing a tourist to go doo-lally. Then to the Mary Celeste, causing the crew including a baby to panic, jump off the ship and drown, great going Doctor! Finally to a haunted house full of monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, that the Doctor believes is the product of the imagination, but unbeknownst to him, is actually a deliberately fake haunted house attraction. At this point they lose Vicki who hides in the Dalek time-ship and ends up on a world called Mechanus where the TARDIS itself has already arrived.
On the time-ship the Daleks have constructed and released a killer-android duplicate of the Doctor to finally destroy him. In the jungle the team is reunited, but attacked by intelligent fungoid creatures, then by the duplicate Doctor. There is a fight between the two which the Doctor wins.
Later they notice a giant city, but when exploring it are captured by the native robotic Mechanoids ("Mechonoids") (like really big polyhedrons. They lock up the team in a zoo-type cage and meet another man called Steven Taylor, a pilot who was captured before. He is friendly, but a little batty after his long incarceration. The Daleks attack the city to get at the Doctor, but the Doctor and the team escape via a near suicidal 1500 ft descent down a coil of cable into the jungle.
In the meantime there is an enormous battle between the Mechanoids and the Daleks. Everything blows up and then team escape, but Steven is lost when he goes back to get his lucky mascot---a little teddy bear (shades of Castaway). They find the Dalek time-ship and eventually Barbara and Ian convince the Doctor to program it to return them to earth, which it does. Happily back on earth 2 years in the future they destroy the time-ship and are happy to be back. In the future the Doctor admits that he will miss them. The TARDIS continues its journey through time and space.
The first two episodes with the Aridians and the final two on Mechanus are great, but the two in the middle just seem like an excuse for a bit of time-travelling pantomime.
I'm really REALLY, going to miss Barbara and Ian! Great performance by Peter Purves as the deranged marooned man. I liked him better on this than I liked him on Blue Peter years later. Nice to see the Dalek meet their match with the Mechanoids.
So last week I predicted we would be back on the Tyrion storyline and I was wrong. Very wrong. Instead we got a humongous battle when the wildlings finally attack the Wall and Castle Black. They attack with thousands of wildlings, the crazy bald cannibal Thenns, including Joseph Gatt, who I met a few weeks ago, as a Thenn warg, who can see through the eyes of animals, e.g. Bran Stark, (see also http://roymathur.com/blog/milton-keynes-collectormania-joseph-gatt-garret-wang-william-atherton-etc-etc-etc/).
What really blew me away were the giants riding mammoths. GIANTS RIDING MAMMOTHS! Dire Wolves and Mammoths---mega fauna from our own past... now you know where GRRM must bet getting some of his inspiration from (search for also Rancholabrean fauna if you want to find out more of the science stuff).
I chatted to my mum about the mammoth bit and seeing her eyes light up, I wonder whether she should start watching. The question I'm asking is -- is GOT suitable for parental viewing? See, we (the kids) worry about what our parents watch; it's not just top-down familial censorship. E-mail me your views.
Back to GOT, there are a few shocks in store, of course, that we aren't going to talk about unless you want more spoilers. Great TV and yet another unmissable episode (see http://roymathur.com/blog/youtube-trawl-best-ever-game-of-thrones-moments-ever-everrr/)
Excellent low-budget horror from two Canadian filmmakers Derek Lee and Clif Prowse who also star in it.
It follows the found footage paradigm and is very reminiscent of Chronicle (2012). Basically two guys set off on a round-the-world trip and a horrible illness is contracted by one of them.
It is very definitely a film that follows the traditional horror tropes, but novel in a execution (though I have read this line of plot in another very well-known horror novel). But what's great is the way the film veers from a video travelogue to something very different. There were also a couple of welcome moments, when I thought my heart would literally stop; the effects are great too. A recommended and excellent effort from relatively novice filmmakers on a limited budget.
This film follows Allen Ginsberg's relationship with cool and disruptive Lucien Carr when they are students at Columbia University in NYC. They also get involved with William S. Burroughs (he of Nova Express, The Naked Lunch). Carr is trying to get out of a relationship with David Kammerer, an older man who is doing his course work for him. When Carr transfers his affection to Ginsberg, Ginsberg takes over homework duties too. Along the way we also meet On the Road writer Jack Kerouac and the whole thing culminates in the murder of David Kammerer by Carr. Ginsberg leaves Carr in jail and Carr is later treated leniently (those were pretty intolerant times back in the 40s). Ginsberg writes about the incident in a story called The Night in Question and is then kicked out of Columbia, but later receives his story with an encouraging note from his former lecturer.
Daniel Radcliffe makes a passable beat poet Allen Ginsberg in this drama bout the early days of some of the big names the Beat movement. Though I believed they never considered themselves as such. Dane DeHaan does his usual standup seductive weirdo role we have seen most recently when he played Harry Osborne in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), but has been doing since way back when in Chronicle (2012).
Arnie's back in the saddle for this one with the IP holders washing their hands on their last attempt at a reboot in the awful, awful reboot in 2011. This is to be a direct sequel of the original Arnie film Conan the Barbarian (1982), which means that they are also forgetting about the terrible pantomime that was Conan the Destroyer (1984) (though Grace Jone's was good in that).
I really hope they get it right this time. I have heard that they are writing the story specifically with Arnie in mind. Great to see him back to what he does best and not faking it as some kind of obsolete, right-wing, cold-warrior Republican twit.
I had a choice, Maleficent or X-Men: Days of Future Past and I choose Maleficent. So this is the live-action re-telling of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, based on Charles Perrault's 17th Century Mother Goose Tales. Essentially fairy tales from oral tradition; written down.
Angelina Jolie plays Maleficent, an orphan fairy who falls in love and is later horribly betrayed. So what we see is the fairy tale told from the POV of the villain.
Enjoyable movie and nice to see such an unusual take on a fairy tale. Definite case of subverting the form. Angelina Jolie and SA producer and actor Sharlto Copley are great in their roles as evil fairy vs evil human. (NB/ Sharlto is great--- District 9, The A Team's Mad Murdoch, Kruger in Elysium). Sam Riley holds his own as a crow. You will definitely root for Jolie's evil fairy and, of course, she steals most of the scenes with her sheer screen prescence. Go see it!
Open World Zelda for the Wii U from Nintendo was announced for 2015.