Posts
The 12 Blogs of Christmas: Twelve. New Year's Resolutions.
Thanks for all your hard work across the 12 Blogs, Laurie Pink. Please go and visit her Flickr site here where there are more Paul and Mike cartoons to be had. And a picture of a newt on a chair.
I think we have a definitive ruling on the issue that's been taking up a lot of our time since yesterday: David Howe says that, according to the scripts and contemporary documentation, it's spelled 'Varga'. I love how that got as far as Gallifrey Base, like it might be a spoiler for the next season of Doctor Who. I doubt Brian would have raised it if it was.
I think we have a definitive ruling on the issue that's been taking up a lot of our time since yesterday: David Howe says that, according to the scripts and contemporary documentation, it's spelled 'Varga'. I love how that got as far as Gallifrey Base, like it might be a spoiler for the next season of Doctor Who. I doubt Brian would have raised it if it was.
And there's a resolution to another of the stories mentioned during our time together this Christmas: Anne K.G. Murphy and Brian Gray won the Transatlantic Fan Fund, and will be coming to Eastercon in 2010! Thanks to anyone who voted for them.
And we have another Christmas straggler reporting in!
Gail Simone: 'For this holiday, we decided to take off to Iceland, a part of the world we've never been to before. It does sound a bit nippy and brisk, and there's only four hours of daylight this time of year, and viking cuisine seems to primarily be fermented testicles in poison-flavored aspic, and I'm told that every once in a while someone dies a few feet from safety in whiteout conditions, but other than that, I'm sure it's lovely. More seriously, we plan on riding horses over the lava fields, visiting the Blue Lagoon, seeing all the museums and just generally enjoying the land Bjork called home. If I get frostbite of the brain, I'm having Paul write all my Secret Six issues in the coming year, mainly because I think it'd be hilarious to give Bane a British accent.'Hmm, frostbite on the brain, eh? That's all it would take... 'Scandal Savage would enjoy Yorkshire Pudding. Fewer calories than might imagine.' Seriously, Gail, any time! Thanks to Gail, and to all those who were kind enough to share their Christmas and Millennium thoughts with us.
And if you're doing some Christmas Eve comic shopping (well, you might be!) please do bear in mind that the Dark Reign: Young Avengers collection by me and Mark Brooks is in your comic shops today on both sides of the Atlantic.
I wasn't quite sure what to say today. I'm pretty much exhausted, to be honest. In a lot of ways, I think that's why I do the 12 Blogs. There's part of me that's kind of a workaholic ('I'm Batman,' I once whispered to my rather startled wife). He isn't truly comfortable unless he's fending off the terrible things that might happen in the future by doing something about them, right now. That's also why I'm often up so early. (You should see my dreams: right on the nose, with no Freudian masking at all, rehearsals of worst case scenarios. Last night I was being refused entry to a convention!) So towards Christmas, when things are going to be really busy anyway, I crank it up a notch, and thus can feel honest and relieved during the days of lying around eating stilton that follow. (I probably should do something useful, instead of merely striving to entertain. Next year I'll try to explore that.) I think any freelancers reading this might recognise this condition.
This year's been an extreme rollercoaster of the above, most of which you didn't hear about and probably never will. A couple of huge things looked like they were going to happen, and then went away. Both may well hove into view again, this being showbiz. One of the losses was my own damn fault for not being good enough, one was just the weather. My response to that first loss was, after a lot of self-directed anger and falling into rivers and cutting holidays short because I was too stressed to enjoy them, a tremendous focus. I finished two novels, one being the new one, the other a drastic edit of the book I once thought I'd have to abandon. I held onto the back of a bucking TV pilot, and now have something in the can, with my name on it, that I'm incredibly proud of. (You may or may not hear about it, depending on whether it goes to series.) I kept being offered exciting stuff in comics. I worked on my craft. I punched and punched and punched and didn't honestly look up from that until now. And all the time I'd come here and blog in that bantery tone of voice I do. I was generally a happy drunk at conventions as well, apart from one or two moments when I really wasn't. I think, judging by where I am at the end of the year, that long stretch of furious action paid off. But here's one New Year's resolution: I hope I can manage next year a lot more calmly.
One thing I did find this year was tremendous comfort in the bosom of the audience. No, I mean as a group. (Honestly, your minds.) It's that feeling I got when I went on Twitter the other day and answered every question, when I got on stage at Worldcon and FenCon, and looked out at the sheer number of people. I was more comfortable up there than at almost any other time in my life. (At Lord's watching cricket: that's the most comfortable.) I could have set up a little tent and lived on those stages. I think interacting with crowds like that made me feel so much better because it reassured me that I could still do, at least in its most basic form, my job: communicating with people.
A few years back, I made three New Year's resolutions: to have published at least one issue of an American comic book; to get another novel out; and to have a TV show produced upon which I had a creator credit. The first one has already happened, and I hope that maybe next year will see the other two. I've sold my house, my wife is free to pursue her calling. I have loads to be happy about. The disappointments of this year are actually tiny in context, even kind of selfish. 'What's he got to moan about?' you may well ask, and you'd be right. But I'm sure Arthur Miller sometimes woke up beside Marilyn Monroe, looked across at his awards, and thought: 'Bloody Shakespeare.'
Something I touched on above has become an issue for me lately. I've sometimes taken care, writing on this blog, to be non-controversial. I think I was afraid I'd alienate a part of the audience. This coming year, I'm going to try and be a bit more open. I think many of you might like to hear an actual opinion, and that all of you are grown-ups who don't necessarily have to agree with me in order to stick around. It's not that I have a particular political axe to grind: my problem generally is that I'm stuck halfway between most sets of opinions, with personal beliefs from the left, right and middle, and so always seem to end up with a gang of folk who are horrified that one of their own might think that! While they might have been entirely comfortable had I been one of the other lot. Now you guys are going to hear all about it. That's my second resolution. You lucky people!
Some, hopefully not much of, the above may involve a certain amount of theism. I still don't like to talk about religion openly. I like to think it's because I don't want to bore people or convert them. But actually it's because I'm afraid I'll look like a weirdo. But you know: I am a weirdo. I think a lot of Anglicans might enjoy saying that out loud. We're not the norm any more, we're not in charge, and we should stop being the last people in the country who insist that they're completely sane. I think that's actually more honest and attractive to people, that theists are weird folk who do weird things, and not, you know, clean cut lads and lasses who like a game of footie when they're not busy oppressing gay people. (You're going to be bored next year by my yelling about equal marriage rights too. I want gay priests working for gay bishops marrying gay people in churches.) Oh dear. I've started already.
Over the years, I've been offhand, cruel and dismissive to my friends, and those who might be my friends, far too often. I spent my teens and twenties doing that as a career. Even with this year's focus (did I really say 'punching'?) I've started to much more seriously appreciate the brilliance of other people. Since moving to this town I've had the honour of making loads of friends who have nothing to do with the media worlds I move in. Soon, as well as keeping that lot, I'll have to start again in a new town. There are still some situations where I'm socially awkward. (Bloody read-throughs for one thing. I love hearing a script read by actors, but I get so conscious of all the power structures in the room that I can barely speak for twitching.) But that's getting better. In this regard, I may be rather more normal than I thought I was. I actually have to make an effort, every now and then, when I'm down the pub, to remember to hold on to a bit of geek outsiderness. That change has been so valuable to me. So my final resolution is this: to take care to be kinder to my friends, and not repeat the occasional cruelties of even the most recent times.
Phew, that all got a bit serious, didn't it? I'd originally wanted to talk about what I hoped for from the world in the next decade, but in the end I suppose I could only speak for me. (And, having anticipated, in the forward to one the X-Files guides I contributed to, that the 2000s would be a 'party decade', I rather doubt I have a gift for prophecy.) Finally, I want to say something about my central belief system. By which I mean Doctor Who. It's always a wonderful moment, especially for the children watching, when a Doctor regenerates. This time it's going to be enormous, as perhaps the UK's leading TV star vanishes to be replaced by... the UK's next leading TV star. The appeal for me, and I'm sure for many of you, is that feeling of mythology. That archetypes are being tweaked here. Through heroic sacrifice, the old man dies and the new man is born, with the new decade. I'm sure the timing there isn't just down to the TV schedules. I look forward to the romance of that change, and the huge public reaction, and the fans who loudly mourn for their departed gallant... only to be swiftly charmed by someone new, doing what seemed like it could only be done one way, in another way. It all always happens. It's all always a surprise. It's great. And it speaks to me of old and deep things, and it suits the turn of winter. And can I just say, Russell, you were brilliant. Sincerely. Thank you so much. And Steven: go get 'em, mate.
Until New Year's Day then, thanks for being such a lovely audience for the 12 Blogs, have a great Christmas, and I'll leave the last word to another master storyteller, as Stan Lee reads 'The Night Before Christmas'!
Cheerio!
Cheerio!
Labels:
Doctor Who,
FenCon,
Gail Simone,
Stan Lee,
Worldcon,
Young Avengers
|
Thanks for a splendid series of posts, and very best wishes for the holidays. Couple of things on this most recent one:
Am very disappointed not to have seen any hypotheses that Varga plants are composted on ground-up-Ice-Warrior. But perhaps I just don't hang out on the right message boards.
Sorry to hear about your two things that might have happened but didn't. But if the resulting "drastic edit of the book I once thought I'd have to abandon." is the book you were referring to a few years ago as _Chalk_, then that's really good news - as I think I said at the time, I was extremely keen to see it.
Re religion, I sort-of-kind-of know what you mean, from the other side of the fence. When you asked me for a paragraph about what I was doing at Christmas, I put in a first sentence about how I wasn't really a believer - as much as anything so I wasn't there under false pretences. Yet that felt a bit odd too - partly because which of your blog readers will be interested in my religious views, partly because of my sense that religion is a very private thing. Matthew 6.1 et seq, and all that. But on the other hand, people describing what they feel passionately about is almost always a good thing, so a more theism-ish blog is just fine by me.
That is, indeed, Chalk! I hope you'll get to see it one day. It's interesting to hear about it from the other side. I think you'll find it's only a very *slightly* more theist blog! Merry Christmas!
I suspect that there are more theists around than many people suspect. "Lapsed Jew" does not, in my case, mean "non-believing".
One of my new year resolutions is to mark rather more of the Jewish year.
I tend to avoid politics and religion on my blog too (not that I get as many readers as you!).
It's easier.
Farah, you're right, despite modern efforts to stop people believing, most think there's something even if they have no idea what.
(If there's one thing I dislike more than proselytising believers - it's proselytising atheists, they're just so negative.)
I'll stop now because I can feel the blood beginning to boil.
Paul: Thanks for writing such great stuff. Have a brilliant Christmas and New Year.
I wish you sufficient over-indulgence to make it worth it, but not enough to make you regret it.
Farah: I think, in SF circles especially, we do hide in the cracks a bit. I didn't actually know that about you. Aladdin: he's behind you! Sorry. Festive. And it's not so much politics, actually. One could get in trouble for stating an opinion about the Christmas Number One, for instance!
Hi Paul,
As Graham said. Great series of posts. To quote the Doctor, 'Brilliant, Fantastic.'
I think that covers Doctor's nine and ten. Which begs the question. What descriptive word will the eleventh Doctor cling too. Can see it now. Him running around adopting the classic eighties phrase. What a stonker, that's absolutely stonking that is.
Either way, this post is to wish you all a very merry time and a cracking Christmas.
Off to see my niece now. She's eight today.
Interestingly, almost every word of your remarks on "coming out" as a theist also fitted my struggles whether or not to come out as DW fan. Not the easiest thing to do when you're female, 50 and have teenage offspring.
And I know what you mean about being non-controversial to the point of blandness at times. Fandom can have that effect on you. I realised that about two episodes into New Who S3 when I realised I wasn't allowed to like both Rose and Martha - it wasn't that simple. In fact, I got kicked out of an LJ community for writing a story saying nice things about them both (sigh).
But getting back to religion, I think it's incredibly important that moderate, sane religious people speak up. Otherwise the ranters will inherit the earth - and there are plenty of them on both sides. I wouldn't want DW to get too completely associated with atheism - that would be a shame.
I've really enjoyed tagging along for the 12 blogs and I intend to stick around to find out what you think of whatever RTD has up his sleeve for us. Happy Christmas!
As I understand it the universe of Doctor Who - like that of Star Trek - is largely secular in that while there may or may not be a Creator in them this is an area studiously avoided with space left so that any apparently supernatural beings can reasonably be assumed to actually be aliens with superior tech. I'm OK with this, which I suppose makes it surprising that I'm not OK with the suggestion in recent years that the Asgardians of the Marvel universe are in fact aliens. The reason I'm not happy with it is that it diminishes them, and in a fictional universe in which there are in fact supernatural beings, why would you do this anyway?
- Rob Hansen
So that's it! Oh, how I wish that stress and anxiety made me want to work harder. I think it's many people's secret; thanks for laying it out so clearly. I am, however, totally with you in loving the warmth of a huge con audience. Make me a willow cabin, by all means! Happy hols to you & Caroline, Paul; enjoy your well-earned festive frivolities and excesses with good cheer!
Merry Christmas, and I hope you have a wonderful New Year. I'm so glad I discovered your work this year, and I'm looking forward to getting to know it better in 2010, as well as you through this blog! :)
I'm actually really glad/relieved that you'll be writing more honestly about your views next year. I think we really share a lot. I, too, identify mostly with being a liberal, but my belief in God (even if I don't know what God is), usually makes my atheist, intellectual, lefty friends look at me cross eyed a lot of the time. My few conservative political views are the ones that get me in the most "trouble" with them as well. But I've never been someone who sees the world in black and white. I live in the grey, so a political platform might closely align with what I believe, but will never represent it completely. What also gets me in trouble, though, is that I don't pretend it does. Too many people pretend they are only one thing so as not to rock the boat. I'm glad you're not one of them.
It's funny, I've only just started "participating" on your blog fairly recently, but I really enjoy it. You're always so thoughtful in your posts, and it's great of you to interact with us all in the individual way you seem to do a lot of the time. Thank you for that. It's been a great conversation so far, and I look forward to more in the coming year.
Wishing you and Caroline the best this holiday season,
Teresa Jusino
(the girl in NYC who foolishly promised you Welcome Muffins completely forgetting that she can't cook worth a damn)
PS - wrote this, and included you and Laurie Pink (I hope that was OK): http://www.pinkraygun.com/2009/12/24/make-it-a-doctor-who-christmas/
Thank you for the 12 Blogs of Christmas. Lovely stuff.
And I entirely get what you say about politics - especially as an American, where one is expected to toe the line on one extreme or another. I cherish all of my friends because, even if we don't agree on everything, the have the brains, the hearts, and the guts to think for themselves. And in this season that's something wonderful to hold on to. (Split infinitives and all!)
Aw, 12 Blogs over so soon! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and Caroline, and I look forward to seeing a more outspoken Paul next year!
I think that's actually more honest and attractive to people, that theists are weird folk who do weird things, and not, you know, clean cut lads and lasses who like a game of footie when they're not busy oppressing gay people.
Were I not thousands of miles away and terminally shy in meatspace, I'd totally buy you a beer for that line. :)
Something I should've done earlier is to thank you for the wonderful series of posts. I may not have commented on most of them, but I enjoyed this year's as much as I did 2008's. By way of giving back, here's something that should give you a few minutes entertainment:
http://four.flash-gear.com/npuz/puz.php?c=v&id=3331598&k=24370521
I've loaded a familiar image (scroll to bottom of page and give image a few seconds to load) by way of example, but it works with any image you'd care to use.
Merry Christmas, Paul.
- Rob Hansen
OK, you made me tear up a bit talking about Doctor Who. :) You captured just what regeneration means for us. It's a little piece of magic, especially coming at this time of year, when the tide of darkness ebbs and the light begins to grow again. I'm always sad to see the Doctor go, but happy to meet him all over again!
As many have said: Thank you for all the Christmas goodies! And yes.
Yes to your actual opinions, and yes to the condition being recognized by another freelancer. But couldn't you still feel blessed for the audience you have, the recognition you get and the projects that didn't fall through? Many freelancers in the media world are less lucky. Yup, myself included.
Envy aside, I wish you all the best for 2010 and I am looking forward to reading/hearing more of you then.
Thanks, everyone. Rob: actually, I rather value Who's secular universe (and don't give me Star Trek when a Christ pops up in an original series episode, and oddly, Kirk fails to kill him), I just think that also part of the ethos of the show is being kind to differing beliefs. Ellen: and to you. You're welcome to build beside me on that stage. The audience will be a bit bemused, I think. Teresa: I also start distrusting any ingrained belief set, including my own. I think religion is about *doubt*, especially doubting that oneself is right. And thanks for that posting! Cheers all, it's been great to get such thoughtful comments these days. Hope to see you all here next year.
I've always felt conflicted about religion myself.
I was raised Roman Catholic, and well have seen the worst side of that church and its organisation in a lot of ways.
I choose to kind of seek my own spiritual answers now. As in a I believe their is a force out there watching over us, but as to the human interpretation of that force. Well your guess is as good as mine.
So, maybe time-lords do exist.
I read an interesting book a number of years back called 'Behind The Sofa', which offered up a lot of interesting insight on how Doctor Who kind tackles some very religious and spiritual subject matters. I think it was by someone called Anthony Thacker.
Hi Paul; thanks for the Christmas blogs, especially your thoughtful Christmas Eve one.
2009 was the year when I kind of gave up on the Anglican church a little. I've spent much of the last 15 years or so trying to resolve being Anglican and being gay, and it's always been difficult (especially as I've belonged to some fairly evangelical congregations). I persuaded myself that just as I needed the CoE, it needed people like me (even if most of the people there would never admit that.)
But this year the constant drip-drip of insult and lack of love and tolerance from the evangelical wing of the international and UK church finally took their toll. I got sick of "hiding in plain sight" and just stopped going. No fanfare, no huffy statements, no dramatic storming out mid-sermon one Sunday, I just haven't attended since Easter and can't see myself returning for the forseeable.
I don't think it's my faith that's diminished, just my belief in what the earthly church can accomplish when it's so deeply split. I'd happily return to a church where I can be myself, but I can't see that happening whilst the evangelical church seems to have a grip on both the Anglican communions structures of power and the media.
Eloquent, reasoned, faithful responses for an inclusive church don't seem to get much prominence, so more power to your elbow for voicing your opinions on the matter; I regret you might find them unpopular.
With best wishes for the New Year
Chris L.
I'm really sorry to hear that Chris. It's the fault of those who drove you away, who, as I often say, worship a book instead of worshipping love, against the whole purpose of our movement. (And even the book is by no means definitively against gay people, that's just the biased interpretation.) We need people like you, and we need to have them in positions of authority. And you're right, that means people who want an inclusive, diverse Anglicanism, for us to actually be the church of that in the UK, need to speak up. I will.
And my wife adds that you'd be welcome at her placement church!
Thank you Paul & Mrs (Rev?) Cornell! Might take you upon the offer if your church isn't too far away!
Chris
She's not a vicar yet, just training. But her assigned parish at the moment is Littlemore in Oxfordshire. If that's near enough, she says, really, do!
I suppose this will sound horribly preachy, but one of the principles I've found most useful as a heuristic is a sort of moral symmetry. Roughly speaking, if you switch the roles around, does action X seem like the right thing to do? To take an extreme example, if you're ready to smite the wicked out of a sense of righteous anger, would you still see it as a reasonable thing to do if you put yourself in the place of the wicked? Possibly, of course -- if I were about to do something harmful, I would want to be stopped somehow -- but it does encourage you to consider the options more carefully.
I was certainly cruel and dismissive at times myself when I was in my teens and twenties, and really, I have to be careful even now, because it's too easy to be clever and forget someone's on the other end of it. That's one case where picturing the roles being swapped helps, and it also encourages one to pause and appreciate that, if one doesn't get too stuck on grabbing the microphone, other people really do turn out to have a lot to them.
By extension, since it is after all a symmetry principle, one shouldn't avoid being controversial. After all, swapping roles, wouldn't you feel that a friend was withholding something valuable if he or she wasn't willing to say what they felt? And wouldn't you feel quite bad if they did it for fear of alienating you? It might not always work out that neatly in a public forum, but it's something worth standing up for.
As for theism, I imagine that most people would agree with me that it's a bit like your enthusiasm for the ending of Battlestar Galactica. I can't really share in it, but if you compare any two people, you'll find a lot of things like that, and that's rather nice, isn't it? There are a lot of valid solutions to the problem of being human, and it's always interesting to see somebody else's.
That's really thoughtful, Brian, and chimes with a lot of my own thinking. Maintaining a conscience, and working at it, and considering one's own rightness or lack thereof all the time is, I think, the most important thing. In my case, because, left to my own devices, I can be a git.
I was wondering, whether your religious beliefs and RTD's lack of ever affected your scripts with Doctor Who, a random thought I know.
I miss your blogs!
I hope it is because you're busy writing my new favourite bbc 3 programme.
.........and a new mini series of Wisdom..........
Thanks! It was never a negative issue. It never really came up very much.