After whining about how I couldn't write yesterday, I sat down with the six page, plot-points outline I'd sketched on Saturday and wrote fifteen pages. It isn't good by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm pretending it's a writing exercise and hoping the whole process gets easier (and the quality of the output improves).

I'm a little aggravated that I have another eight pages I meant to bring with me today and key in but then I remember that I've turned over a new leaf and I'm not writing/blogging on company time any more. (This doesn't count. It's before 8:00.)

In the end, I did have to sit down and re-watch episodes of course. Having experience with the show, I was careful to skip the really tedious ones.

No doubt it's a failure of intellect or artistic appreciation on my part but I find myself unable to get enthusiastic about look at me! camera work with endless scenes panning across clumsy portrayals of drugged-out lunatics or look how amazingly clever I am fast cuts and swooshing that have little final effect but to make the viewer dizzy. I can appreciate creative camera work in support of a story, but the camera work, in and of itself, really isn't the point and it should take over the screen.

(It's like contemporary "fashion." "Fashion" used to be about what people wore. Nowadays it's an end in itself. Stick-figures, with as little resemblance to actual human bodies as possible are used as props to drape cloth on. Why don't they just get rid of the models and use dummies?)

This morning, I ordered the two OaT episodes that were released on DVD. In the future, I'll at least have those two episodes and the movie in decent visual quality for watching. It may improve my opinion of the show itself to see episodes that aren't third or fourth generation, who knows?

There are a few other episodes I really like but I'm assuming the odds of any of the rest of the show being released on DVD are somewhere between "slim" and "you have to be kidding."

On the other hand, as Lynn reminded me yesterday, a bad show leaves a lot more room for fanfiction. With a really good show, where the characterization is on target and the stories are intelligent and well-written, there's less for a fanfic author to "fix." I guess I should be grateful that the show my brain wants to write about was so very bad indeed, but I don't feel that way when I'm watching it.

It's really, really hard to come in to work in the morning and not dive straight into the 30 or so news sites I've been in the habit of reading over the past couple of years. I feel a little twitchy...the way you do when you're going through withdrawal.

I guess I could actually go to work. I mean, so what if I showed up early? I could just buckle down and get some work done.

Or, I could sit here and be bitter than I forgot those eight pages.