Doctor Who has a new spin-off! Oh, the happiness!

This weekend, we watched four musicals, all made last year. Enchanted, Sweeney Todd, Once, and Across The Universe. The best movie, by far, was Once. Although, I enjoyed all of them. Sweeney Todd's main failing was that the orchestra was about twice as loud as the actors making it very hard to understand the lyrics and dialogue without blasting out my ears. Enchanted should have had more than three songs (and more character development). Across The Universe should have traded one or two trippy songs for a few more straight-forward songs. Most of these choices -- the over-loud orchestra, etc. -- seem to me like ways for embarrassed movies to try to hide the fact that their characters are bursting into song for no reason other than to express themselves with music. I wish people weren't so bothered by that concept. It's one of my favorite conceits, perhaps more so than interstellar federations and FTL drives.

Even so, it is heartening that so many musicals were made last year and watching them got me to thinking about what a musical of Otters In Space would be like. Don't get too excited -- such a project is many, many, perhaps dozens of years off. But I would love to make one. With the improvements in CGI and flash animation and home recording studios and midi files and all that stuff... It seems like some day I could put a musical Otters In Space together. It might look like a cross between Strong Bad and a Warcraft fan-made music video, but that would still be incredibly neat.

Whether this overly ambitious idea ever comes to fruition or not, I think it's still been a useful exercise to think about. For one thing, I realized while trying to picture the heroine and her sister singing the opening duet that I've been writing them backwards. In adding a sister into the second draft, I've been altering the heroine's personality and giving a lot of her old personality traits to her sister. So, now, the name and physical description for the heroine are really better matched to the sister. Of course, it's incredibly jarring trying to imagine this new character in my novel's starring role. I've lived with the old heroine for two years... and now a different cat is taking her place? That's downright spooky.

Between the general spookiness and the pain of the damage control I'll have to do after the massive search-and-replace to switch their names, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to actually make the change. But, with a little time, I'll probably come around, since I'm pretty sure it'll be better that way.

My plan to catch up on Battlestar Galactica didn't work out so well. As of Friday night when the new episode aired, I had all of the episodes I'd missed recorded. I went through the DVR with a check list, and they were all there. However, by yesterday afternoon when I settled down to start watching them, six of the twelve were gone, along with the new episode of Doctor Who.

Comcast refunded us $13 and apologized profusely for this known problem. Of course, that doesn't give me back all the episodes I lost, nor does it stop it from happening again at random times in the future. In fact, the only way to deal with the problem is to keep a "canary" show or two on the DVR and watch it like a hawk. If the canary show vanishes, then the DVR is broken again, and we need to call Comcast.

Under the influence of a great deal of caffeine (Daniel thought it would be a good idea to get two massive coffee drinks -- one hot, one cold -- and pass them back and forth, alternating sips), I happened upon a wonderfully trippy concept. I call it Doctor Battlestargatekawood. See, those are the sci-fi shows I'm somewhat actively watching these days, and the idea (oh the trippiness!) would be to take them all and (I'm not sure how one could actually accomplish this...) put them on *shuffle*. Oh yes. And I'm not talking about entire episodes -- I'm talking about watching one scene from Stargate followed by one scene from Battlestar Galactica followed by one scene from Eureka... and so on... and so on...

Of course, ideally, you'd have more than just Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactic, Stargate, Eureka, and Torchwood in the mix -- for starters, you'd need all the Star Treks, Babylon 5 (which I still need to see), and Farscape. I'd be really curious to see how long such a video concoction could actually hold my interest.

There is a penguin that makes my tea.

Battlestar Galactica is starting its last season this Friday. And, better yet, the sci-fi channel is playing reruns all week. So, once they're all collected on my dvr, I should be able to sift through and find almost all of the ones I've missed -- basically the second half of season three. This means I'll be almost (if not entirely) caught up before it starts back.

The illustrations and page-layouts for The Field Guide to Surreal Botany became available today for the authors to proof, and the illustration for my piece is absolutely gorgeous. This is the second time I've been illustrated -- the first was for "Forget Me Not" in Greek. It's the greatest feeling. I take an image in my head that I can't see strongly enough to actually draw it but can see well enough to thoroughly describe it. Then, by describing it, I get the image into another person's head, and that person is able to put it down as a picture on paper. And I can finally see for real what I've been imagining for years. It's amazing. And what a sign of respect! I mean, getting paid for your writing is the standard sign of respect, but, in many ways, being illustrated feels like a more powerful one. I wrote something and an editor liked it enough to go out and hire an additional artist to create a secondary work based on mine. (Or, in this case, the editor actually illustrated my work herself.) That is just incredibly neat.