In Which I Try Not to Moan and Groan

Tonight's sky is unedited.

Okay, first off, the usual excuses: distracted by Doctor Who (and Torchwood), blah, blah; must sleep (yeah, yeah); another sunset photo (ho hum). The sunset was tonight's and it's just as well I photographed it from the parking lot at work, because the color was almost completely gone by the time I reached Safeway. I've tried hard to smudge out a rather obvious feature of the background, and even so I've very nearly given the game away about where I work. But the sky is exactly as the camera captured it. I think I had it set on "Vivid" for this particular shot, but it's pretty close to what my eyes saw.

Through the usual mysterious means, tonight I saw the first episode of Series Two of Torchwood, Doctor Who's darker, sexier spin-off. The guest star was James Marsters, who played Spike on BtVS. He had dark hair for this, and looked a bit older ('cause he is), but even so, John rightly remarked that the character, Captain John Hart, was pretty much Spike. Early Spike, mind you, not the lovesick, ensouled, redeemed version. He and Captain Jack have a history together as partners, Time Agency colleagues and lovers, but Jack has clearly outgrown the amoral bad boy. And guess what: it's not a one shot role, as was previously assumed. He turns up in the season preview trailer as well. Cool.

Other than that, listening to a three hour BBC radio show to get to a five minute interview, and reading the Doctor Who Forum all night, I've actually managed to accomplish a few things. For one thing, I've rearranged the sidebar a bit, and added a box with links to the most current editions of the three memes I'm involved with. Assuming I keep up with it, you'll always be able to easily get to the the announcement entries so you can play along, and see who else has done so. My readership has dipped a little since last summer, so if you detect a whiff of desperation in all the cross-promotion, your virtual nose is not deceiving you. It's not about my personal ego (much); I'm just trying to get enough people aware of the continued existence of the Weekend Assignment and Monday Photo Shoot to drum up sufficient participation to keep the two memes going. That said, I should know better than to look at my blog stats. No good ever comes of it.

The other accomplishment of the evening was getting through eleven pages of editing on Chapter Three of Heirs of Mâvarin. I'm sorry to say I have missed working on the book one night already this year, but other than that I've spent at least a little time on it every night. Tonight's big problem was the scene that follows on from another scene that I cut entirely. I'm not good about making largish deletions, but even I knew that previous scene was lame and didn't need to be there. Five minutes later, though, I rescued the first sentence of it to lead off the next scene about those characters. I then fussed and agonized, agonized and fussed, trying to get a decent transitional sentence or two in behind it. The current version is, um, acceptable.

Karen