Recent Reads: She-Wolves: the Notorious Queens of England was a Christmas gift, and I’m making an effort to get through my stacks of non-fiction this year (oh, god, I haven’t updated my TBR page for 2018 yet…), so I dug right in. It’s what it sounds like: a history of England’s most notorious queens, and it reads, I’m afraid, like someone’s dissertation. There’s a great deal of “this is what I’m going to say” “here’s me saying what I’m going to say” “now that I’ve said it, let me summarize…
Picoreview: The Greatest Showman: I am conflicted about The Greatest Showman. I wanted to love it unconditionally. I went in prepared to. Unfortunately, I ended up liking it conditionally, perhaps because I grew up doing musical theatre and I have Far Too Many (Entirely Correct) opinions about what makes a musical work, and The Greatest Showman…missed a lot of them. I felt like it’s a musical by people who don’t fully understand how musicals work (which, given that the music was written by the people who did the IMHO excoriable…
I…have been complaining bitterly on Twitter, and somewhat less bitterly here, about the buses in Drogheda. To summarize: they suck. They are either late or early and when they’re late it can be “I’ve been standing here in the cold for 70 minutes” late and if they’re early it can be “I got to the bus stop on time and never even saw the damn thing,” so it’s EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to get to the gym by relying on it. Like, I tried to go to the gym 3 times last…
January was an excrutiatingly busy month and I don’t actually know how I got this all done, but somehow I did. I: – submitted a manuscript to three publishers – submitted a proposal to a publisher – wrote & delivered an Old Races short story for and delivered a novella to the patreon crew – wrote a 2 page book proposal – wrote a grant application, including a 12 page book proposal – wrote a 10 page book synopsis/proposal – hashed out a film synopsis (still needs work) – got…
Marvel Movie Marathon: Thor: This is really a pretty straight-up enjoyable movie. Given my recently-discussed inherent level of dubiousness regarding Iron Man, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the character I absolutely thought they *could not* make work in a cinematic universe was Thor. I thought—honestly, I *still* think—that introducing gods into a superhero world was asking too much from the audience, and the fact that they went to a mild degree of trouble to ensure everybody that no, these are technically aliens, not gods, did not, IMHO,…