First, an announcement: If you're in North Texas and for whatever reason have felt horribly bereft because I haven't had too many public appearances this year, you have one last chance Saturday. Saturday at 2 I'll be speaking at the Valley Ranch branch of the Irving Public Library, which is located at MacArthur Blvd. and Cimmaron Trail (if you're coming north on MacArthur, I'd recommend passing Cimmaron Trail and making the next right into the shopping center where the library is). I'm not sure what I'll be talking about, as I suspect it will be a free-form, winging it discussion, assuming anyone shows up. And if no one does, I have books to return, anyway. This will be the last time this year I go into "author" mode. Then I'll really be retreating into the "writer" side of my life.

Speaking of which, I'm up to 7,000 words in the new book, though I've realized I'll need to do some reworking on the last scene in order to make it do what I really want it to do. I "met" my villain for the first time yesterday, and I think I love her. She's going to be a blast and a half to write. I've found the perfect conduit for the usually suppressed bitchy side of my personality.

Now that most of the fall TV season has started, I've got my preliminary TV score card. Before I get to that, though, I have to rant a bit. Most of my local network stations last night, for some odd reason, decided to show all their widescreen series that should have been letterboxed as full screen. I have a widescreen TV, and yet no matter what screen format I tried, it was still all out of proportion, with the sides cut off. It was extremely irritating because in any shot where a character was near the edge of the screen, either the face was cut in half or cut off entirely. There'd be this nice close-up of someone off to the side, and that person would be talking, but we'd just see his ear. I know it wasn't the way these things were meant to be shown because the network logo in the bottom corner of the screen was cut in half, and the commercials were all shown in the same proportion -- but with the commercials, they were still enlarging them even if they weren't letterboxed, so pretty much any print on the screen was missing the first and last letters. I thought for a while that maybe it was my cable company, but The Office was shown in proper widescreen format. Is anyone else having this happen?

So, now, going by days of the week (and speaking vaguely enough to avoid spoilers):
Monday: I may be alone in this, as the episode got plenty of raves, but I kind of hated the House premiere. I thought it came across as pretentious and calculated. I may watch through the fall, since nothing else is on and it makes good background noise for writing medical radio scripts, but when Chuck returns in the spring I will have no dilemmas about which to watch unless things change dramatically in a way that I like, and it's possible that I might be tempted even now by a favorite NCIS rerun on USA.

Tuesday: Speaking of NCIS, I don't have that much to say, as I think I have to withhold judgment on how the opener handled things set up at the end of last season until I see how they deal with the long-term impact. I must say, though, that they managed to show serious depression from the inside out in a way that was both heartbreaking and hilarious.

I'm very glad that Warehouse 13 has already been renewed because that would have been an EVIL way to end a series. I'm mildly worried by the success of the show, though. It was one thing when it was just a quirky summer series, but now that it's the most successful Sci Fi Channel (I refuse to acknowledge the name change) series ever, that tends to get the network suits involved, and that seldom goes well.

I haven't watched the NCIS spin-off. That's something I'll probably catch OnDemand if I get bored.

Wednesday: I was on the verge of giving up Glee, but they got me with this week's episode. I guess I'm a sucker for football stories involving unlikely heroes, and adding music is a bonus. That episode also actually included a song I know (the West Side Story stuff). Although I'm a nut for musical numbers, after the premiere, the music has focused on music I don't know or like, so I'm sure I'm missing all the irony of using this music in show choir. And next week, there's Kristin Chenoweth!

Thursday: I'm iffy about Flashforward. I love Robert J. Sawyer's books, and this is a great cast, but I've got a feeling this will suffer from Lost-itis, but with the flashforwards used as a substitute for real characterization instead of the flashbacks, and with so much focus on the flashes that nothing much actually happens in the present. It also could suffer from the same problem as Heroes, with such a huge cast and so many disconnected stories going on that there's very little forward momentum in each episode. However, this one does seem to have a central character who will serve to tie it all together, and that character is played by Joseph Fiennes and His Amazing Eyelashes, which could make it all worthwhile. It's also possible that I was turned off by the fact that midway through the episode they suddenly blew the picture out into full-screen, so it became irritating and disconcerting to watch. I'll give it another shot, but it's already on probation, and if they keep doing the weird full-screen thing, I may have to break out my rolodex and use the phone number that gets beyond the main switchboard at that station to complain.

I don't know about Supernatural this year. This was another show that suffered from the full-screen thing last night, and they really use the widescreen format, so it was hard to get excited about watching Dean's left ear emote in the darkness. I finally had to just do crossword puzzles while listening because watching was too irritating. I have to admit I'm not too crazy about this season's storyline.

The Office seems to have returned to its initial subject matter of focusing on how soul destroying it is to work in an office with an idiot boss whose numbers are too good for him to be fired, no matter how bad a jerk he is, after a few seasons that seemed to go more into the personal lives of the characters or else go a bit over the top. Not that I disliked that, but it is fun to get back to more of a focus on the office.

There are a few other things I may try to catch OnDemand, but that's about it for my TV viewing right now. I am finding that I'm getting pickier, that I prefer a good dose of humor instead of straight drama, and that I'm getting a bit fed up with all the darkness, doom and gloom.

Now that I've had a chance to recover, I can do a rundown on the fun that was FenCon. All of this is more or less from memory, as I didn't try to take notes.

I had the somewhat intimidating experience of moderating a panel about a TV show with one of the people who writes for the show in the audience -- and with me probably being the least knowledgeable person on the panel. As I said on the panel, I was there mostly to play Oprah and keep the discussion going, and fortunately the show writer who was present is already a friend, so he wasn't quite as scary as someone else might have been. The panel was to discuss the upcoming regeneration of the Doctor on Doctor Who. That's one area where I almost wish I wasn't as plugged in as I am, because I can imagine that not knowing that it was coming would make the show more intense -- if you didn't know when it was coming, then every time the Doctor got into serious trouble, you might wonder if this would be the time that kills him. But we don't live in a world where that kind of secret can be kept, given that, as Paul Cornell reported, the announcement of the casting of the next Doctor got higher ratings than the fantasy TV series on another channel.

While many of us were kind of hoping for an older Doctor next time around, I had to say (and got some agreement on this) that the younger actor makes for a potentially interesting contrast -- this ancient being, who seems to have been really feeling his age lately, in a very young body. The concern some of us had is that with an equally young Companion, the situation is set up for yet another one of those unresolved sexual tension simmering romance things, and there I have a big yawn. I suppose we shall see next year what it will all be like.

Then we had a rather fun panel on Trek vs. Who. It was set up to be a big debate, but instead we kept finding parallels and similarities. Paul Cornell, naturally, came down firmly on the Who side, but the rest of us, as well as much of the audience, couldn't really choose. We decided that the Borg beat the Cybermen, but that the Daleks beat the Borg. Paul would love to see what would happen if the Doctor met Captain Kirk. I thought that the way the characterization has gone on most of the Trek series, they're essentially doing regeneration without admitting that they're the same characters in different bodies (though Keith R. DeCandido and I agreed that Deep Space Nine was mostly an exception). The Trill on Trek seem to owe a debt to the Doctor, with multiple lives of the same person in different bodies, but with memories carried over. In Trek, it's a huge deal when Earth comes under alien threat; on Who, it's just Saturday. Until I started thinking about this, I never would have considered that the two series were at all alike, but it was interesting how similar they really are.

The panel on Suburban Fantasy got kind of wacky, and I'm not sure we really got anywhere with it, but it was fun. One thought I had was that setting a fantasy story in a suburban environment might play up that sense of the Other. One big theme that comes up a lot in urban fantasy is that sense of being an outsider or the Other -- and yet in the city all the other outcasts tend to find each other, so you get a nice Other community. In the suburbs, the Other would be more isolated and would stand out more. And then we digressed seriously into discussions of a demon that can apparently be killed with cucumbers, which led into talk of using a Salad Shooter as a weapon or rushing to the Western Sizzler salad bar when being chased by said demon. And it went downhill from there.

We had a fun panel discussing the Sci Fi Channel (I refuse to acknowledge the name change because it's just silly), their name change and where their programming could be going. There's some fear that changing the name could be the first step toward moving away from actually being a science fiction channel, especially given some of the programming, like wrestling. I'm not in quite so alarmist a mood, given how successful Warehouse 13 has been (one week, it even beat the ratings for its competition on one of the major broadcast networks). I wouldn't mind seeing more shows with actual spaceships in them, but I'm not minding the current programming. And, darn it, Mansquito was a fun movie. Bad, but fun.

And now today, I plunge into really serious writing on the new project. I spent much of yesterday getting back into that mindset by making lots of lists of random things about the main characters.

I think I got motivated by those writing sessions at A-Kon because I'm up and at 'em relatively early today, considering that I've already been to the library (I timed my visit to coincide with the toddler story hour, rather than immediately after the toddler story hour, when the library is swarmed by toddlers). Now all my errands for the day are done and I can focus on work. I felt like such a slacker when hearing about the work schedules of some of the long-time and big-name people on those panels, which made me want to get to work. I suspect that explains why they've had long, successful careers and why I'm me.

Plus, I topped the halfway point in the current project last night, which means I'm really getting to the part where I tend to crank it all out in a frenzy.

This was a light con for me, and since I'm not really into manga or anime, I only went to the sessions where I was speaking, so I just took the train downtown, did my panels, then took the train back. The train seemed to be popular with the con crowd because there were usually a number of people heading the same place on the train. That made for an amusing moment Saturday morning. The train was crowded, and I ended up standing near the front of the car next to a guy I'm pretty sure was a pro football player (based on my deciphering of his tattoos) who was going with his family to the zoo (which is on the same train line). There were a couple of people in full costume, complete with cat ears and face paint, and that didn't seem to raise much of an eyebrow. But then a guy who pretty much fit the stereotype of Fanboy #1 got on the train, and things got fun. You know the guy -- typical "nerd" and way too chatty about the things he's currently obsessed with, especially the moment he finds someone else who might know what he's talking about. Claims to have Asperger's Syndrome, but you're not sure whether he's had an actual diagnosis or if he's diagnosed himself and uses that as an excuse not to develop social skills. The football player was staring with horror at the way that guy went on and on and on. Even the people in full costume were giving him the smile-and-nod, gee, it's been nice talking, but we'd have to go if there were anywhere we could go looks. The whole thing made me crack up completely because you don't see too many situations where people who are obsessed enough to go around in public in full costume are like "your level of obsession is totally weirding me out."

Though, to be honest, if he'd started up the conversation with the people across the aisle from the cat people who were wearing Blue Sun shirts (in other words, the Firefly fans), I probably would have ended up joining the conversation. But I would hope I have the social skills to notice when the people I'm talking to are getting tired of the conversation.

Now I have to go determine whether or not you can get a cell phone signal on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Can you hear me now?

So, I went with my best buds to see Star Trek today, and I have to admit I really liked it. I still have a few reservations, but if I detach myself from what I know about Star Trek and just look at it as a space-adventure movie, I did enjoy it, and when I allowed myself to retain a bit of my inner geekiness without the nitpicky part, I thoroughly enjoyed all the in-jokes. The wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff wiped out most of the "Muppet Babies" issues, aside from Chekov, and messing with the timeline doesn't change the fact that, given the ages stated specifically in the original series, if Kirk is in his 20s, Chekov isn't on the Enterprise, not even as a 17-year-old whiz kid, but I loved the new take on Chekov enough that I'm willing to let that slide. I think my favorite character re-creation was Bones, who was pitch-perfect and who seemed to fit, time-wise. I'm glad I saw it with geeky friends, so we could enjoy the shout-outs together, and there was one extended mildly inappropriate giggle fit when a particular sequence struck us as something right out of Galaxy Quest. I liked that they kept a lot of the 60s series look without trying to make the ships too streamlined and modern. When the sequel comes out, I'll be there.

I guess I am capable of admitting when I'm wrong.

Since we went out to a late lunch after seeing the early show of the movie, and then I went grocery shopping on the way home, I guess I'm going to be inverting my workday today and working on Saturday, but it's supposed to rain tomorrow, and maybe by distracting my conscious brain for a while I've allowed my subconscious brain to come up with a brilliant solution to the problem that's eating me (I have two ways to go with a scene, and I can't figure out which way is funnier).

Thanks for all the fun science fiction recommendations. That may help me come up with good summer reading. Really, right now "fun" isn't too popular in the publishing world. "Dark and dangerous" are the buzzwords. Romantic comedy and chick lit are pretty much dead except for a few authors -- and even there the chick-lit-like books are mostly about what happens after marriages fall apart. The cover blurbs all seem to go along the lines of "Mary Sue thought she had the perfect marriage, until she caught her husband with the pool boy. Now she's trying to cope with being a single mother, re-establishing her career and re-entering the dating scene." Not really my idea of fun reading. Fantasy -- both urban and otherwise -- is all about the dark and dangerous. Science fiction seems to mostly be about how the world is coming to an end because humans are terrible. Maybe I'm shallow, but for summer reading, in particular, I want to read about people I like having adventures. A touch of darkness and danger is fine, but I don't want to wallow in it.

Sometimes, that strong craving to read something is a sign that it's something I should be writing, but I suspect that if I tried to create a Firefly-like space adventure it would probably end up looking like Firefly fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off. Or else I would be so conscious of trying to avoid looking like I was writing Firefly fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off that I'd be making character choices strictly for that reason, which isn't good, either. Maybe someday an actual plot/story/character will drop into my head and I can write it, but at the moment I'm not even sure there's a market for that sort of thing.

Speaking of space adventures, I'm going to have to come clean with a confession that will show that I'm either a bad geek or a truly geeky geek: I have no interest in the new Star Trek movie. In fact, I'm kind of opposed to the very existence of it. It's not for the reasons given in the Onion spoof video about Trekkies hating the film. I have no objections to more action and fewer scenes of debating ethical issues. I just hate the idea of a prequel to the original series involving the characters from the original series (I wasn't thrilled with the idea of Enterprise, either, but at least that was set in a different era).

While I am a fairly old-school Trekker (I may even be a Trekkie, to be honest, though I don't own a set of Spock ears, I don't have a Starfleet uniform and I don't speak Klingon), I'm also capable of being open-minded about it. I love the original series for what it was and have fond memories of watching it. I saw it in bits and pieces as a kid (my mom watched it during the original run, part of which I was alive for, so I guess I was indoctrinated early), then they started running it after school when I was in high school. Both my parents worked at the school, so we all came home together and watched it every afternoon. I fell in with the group that I ended up hanging out with in college when they used to gather in someone's dorm room to watch Star Trek every afternoon before going down to the cafeteria for dinner. The fourth movie came out my freshman year, and there was a big group outing to go see it.

But I'll admit that I liked The Next Generation even more when it came along (we crammed into a dorm room for that, too). And my favorite series of them all is Deep Space Nine, which should prove that I'm not really the hidebound, old-school Trekkie who refuses to accept anything that doesn't meticulously follow Roddenberry's vision.

My problem is that I'm not a fan of re-boots, especially not of something so iconic. If you're going to do it, go the Battlestar Galactica route and really re-do it without pretending it has any connection to the original. But to re-boot with a prequel that takes place not too terribly long before the original? I can't quite deal. The ages don't really line up well and it all ends up looking like the Muppet Babies, where there was already an "origin" story of how they met as adults, and then suddenly they all were in the same nursery together as babies. And then there's the look of things. The original series had a pretty distinct look that had a lot to do with the time period and the budget, and there are a couple of ways to approach it -- you can update the look and pretend it was always like that, just depicted using the technology available at the time, or you can go with it, acknowledge it and accept it as the aesthetic of a particular era. I loved the way they dealt with it on the "Trials and Tribbleations" episode of Deep Space Nine -- they considered it a particular era with a particular style and acknowledged that things really did look like that then. They even dealt with the old-style Klingons with the "we do not discuss it among outsiders" line.

I would have been all for a Star Trek re-do with a new crew -- like the next-next generation or even another ship. But my old-school Trekker heart won't let me cope with other people playing Kirk, Spock and McCoy in a universe that looks nothing like the Trek universe. The movie's getting great reviews, and I might have been willing to be dragged by friends, but my friends are going at a time when I can't go, and I can't picture myself taking time out to go to the movie on my own.

So, do I have to give up my geek badge of honor for not seeing a Star Trek movie, or do I enter the Geek Hall of Fame for being too geeky to accept the re-boot? I already didn't see the latest X-Files movie. It looks like I'll have to see the new Harry Potter on opening day (I plan to) to retain any geek credibility.

The productivity did at last slow a bit. I got more work done on the tax organizing, which also resulted in cleaning out a space. But I came to a crashing halt on the writing when I realized I'd created a McGuffin. A McGuffin, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the object the people in the story are seeking, and the details of what it is don't really matter all that much to the story because the important part is what the people are willing to do to get it. One of the more famous McGuffins is the Maltese Falcon, or else the letters of transit in Casablanca. In spy stories, it's often "the papers," and it doesn't matter much what the papers really are, just that everyone in the story is desperate to get them, and the consequences will be dire if they fall into the wrong hands. But in my story, the nature of the object everyone's seeking does matter because it plays a role in the plot. My problem was that I hadn't figured out all the details yet, so I was treating it as a McGuffin. And then I reached a part where it starts to matter what this thing really is, what it can do and what people know about it. Even worse, it's the kind of thing where there are legends about it, and then there's the reality. So I had to work all that out in my head before I could write another word, and then once I worked it out, I realized I was going to have to totally rewrite the last scene I'd written because a character's reactions were all wrong for the situation (which could partially explain why the villain was being too nice). By then, it was almost dinner time and I had a headache (which could have had something to do with the yellow haze in the sky from the smoke blown here from the wildfires), so I called it a day and figured I'd sleep on it to re-plan my scene.

In other news, it looks like tonight is the season (and maybe series) finale of the Sarah Connor Chronicles and the season finale of Friday Night Lights (which made me bawl like a baby last week -- it didn't help that the big game was played in my university's stadium). But I'll be out singing for a church service. And then Sci Fi starts showing Primeval, which I've already seen, but which I may watch again.

Speaking of Sci Fi, they announced a few weeks ago that they'll be changing their name to "Sy Fy" (or something like that). Part of their reasoning makes some sense -- since "sci fi" is a widely used, general term, they can't trademark it (though you'd think that might have come up when they were naming the network in the first place, and then you do have to wonder about the Food Network, since the word "food" is also pretty widely used in a general sense). But then the rest of their reasoning is utterly baffling. Apparently, they feel that the name of the network is keeping people who might like some of their shows from watching those shows because those people don't think they like science fiction. They seem to think that there were a lot of people not watching Battlestar Galactica, in spite of all the critical raves and awards, because it was on a network called "Sci Fi."

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If someone thinks they don't like science fiction and therefore are avoiding a show just because it's on the Sci Fi channel, I don't think they're any more likely to watch something called Battlestar Galactica on any channel (especially not one called "Sy Fy," where it sounds like Sci Fi when you say it). And then even if you change the name of the series to something that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with space battles, they're still going to see the spaceships and robots and figure it out. I couldn't even think of a series description you could put in a TV Guide that left out the science fiction elements and didn't sound boring.

Then there's the fact that, apparently, people who actually like science fiction aren't good enough for the network, and they'd rather make a futile effort of tricking people who aren't into spaceships into watching than make a good network that their audience will watch (which would probably not include wrestling). It's like the nerdy boy in high school who gets a crush on the cheerleader who will never give him the time of day and attempts to change his image so she'll like him, but it doesn't work because she still knows he's a nerd. Meanwhile, he's completely disregarding his cute and nerdy female best friend who likes him the way he is. Ultimately, he'll end up never getting the cheerleader and also losing his best friend who would have liked him. It's like a John Hughes movie from the 80s, as played out by a television network.

Though, actually, I suppose that if it were a John Hughes film from the 80s, the network would be an awkward girl chasing the high school stud while ignoring her dweeby male friend, and she'd actually end up with the stud and still be friends with her friend, so perhaps the problem is that the executives have seen too many John Hughes movies from the 80s.

Memo to the Sci Fi Channel executives: Your network is not Molly Ringwald. You will never catch the "popular" audience, no matter how many wildly creative prom dresses you wear, and when you change your image and ditch your nerdy friends, we won't forgive you and stick around. Give us spaceships and robots with good scripts and acting. Give us Doctor Who (and while we know you have to put in commercials, you don't have to use a chainsaw to do so). I'll even take Mansquito (because that was actually rather entertaining, in a ridiculously silly, drive-in on the TV kind of way). Hire someone in programming who is actually a fan. And we'll be there.

I never did make it out to that movie or to the errands, but I did some cooking, reading and relaxing, and now that it's March (happy Texas Independence Day!), I think I have to force myself out of hibernation mode and get my act together.

In other news, my Friday science fiction viewing is disappointing me again. After the killer mutiny two-parter on Battlestar Galactica, they've gone all talky again, but this time instead of C-SPAN in space, it's Lifetime in space. By the end of the last episode, I was yelling, "For the love of all that is holy, will someone please stop philosophizing and SHOOT SOMETHING!" It didn't help that they've also gone into contemplative thinky mode on Sarah Connor Chronicles, where our friendly neighborhood Terminator is relegated to making pancakes.

Seriously, people, what part of "killer robots" do you not understand? What good is a TV series about killer robots if the killer robots just sit around being pensive and contemplating the nature of existence? The killer robots don't have to be bad guys. Good killer robots can be our friends. But it's nice if every so often they get to do something killer roboty, you know?

So that I can get appropriate killer robot activity levels in my entertainment, I've decided that what I need to do is find the shows where people are shooting things and blowing up stuff and generally being awesome and declare some of those people to be either Cylons or Terminators, and then I'll have some proper killer robot shows.

On Chuck, Casey is definitely a Terminator (really, if Adam Baldwin didn't have a steady gig, he'd have to be cast as a Terminator on Sarah Connor Chronicles -- that is, if they needed a Terminator to actually terminate stuff). His picture is in the dictionary next to "killing machine." He may be starting to contemplate humanity, but he doesn't let it get in the way of smashing, shooting, hitting and otherwise destroying anything in his path. Meanwhile, what is it about Chuck's brain that makes him able to hold all that info? I'm thinking Cylon.

Gibbs on NCIS is clearly not human, but I'm not entirely sure if he's a Terminator or a Cylon. He has a lot of Terminator-like characteristics -- he doesn't stay down if he's hit or shot, and he even eventually reboots when blown up. He doesn't seem to feel pain or need food or sleep. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse or fear, and he will not stop until he's solved the case. He drives like a maniac. And that would explain how Mark Harmon is still so hot 25 years after being the Sexiest Man Alive. But then, wouldn't the metal endoskeleton have been noticed during his military career? Being a Cylon could explain the infamous "gut," because then there would be a bunch of psychically linked other Gibbs models tuned into all kinds of surveillance feeds and sending him information. On the other hand, maybe the military knows he's a Terminator, and he's tapped into Skylink to give him info. I think I'm going to go with Terminator because that explains so much.

However, Charlie Crews on Life is totally a Cylon, one of the more philosophical models. He contemplates the nature of the universe when he's not shooting people. But he does shoot people and commit other acts of violence.

The Winchester brothers on Supernatural do lead a very Terminator-like lifestyle. They go around in a cool car with a trunkload of weapons and kill things. But given their penchant for coming back from the dead, I'm going to have to go with Cylons.

So, there we have it, plenty of killer robots doing killer robot things while the characters who are openly killer robots are boring me.

Now, watch them really get it in gear this week after I've said this, and both shows about killer robots will have action in them. I won't complain, though. You can never have too many killer robots.

This has been one of those long/short weeks -- it seems long in the sense that I can barely remember Monday, which feels like it happened a decade ago, and short in the sense that I'm surprised it's Friday already.

As the season of ubiquitous commercialized representation of romance reaches its culmination, I thought I'd share my favorite/most romantic poem. I suppose I indirectly have my college English lit professor to thank for me discovering it. The class was supposedly the general English lit survey course, but the professor had this odd thesis that he used as an organizing principle for the entire course. He was hung up on the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in England and believed that it also marked a transition in the sense of public and private life. He claimed that in the Catholic era there wasn't the same sense of personal privacy as started to come about after the transition to Protestantism, and he believed this showed in literature. So we spent a lot of time analyzing poems by Milton and Shakespeare for evidence of this. It was one of those smile and nod situations because I'm not sure his thesis held up. I must have smiled and nodded well because I made an A in the course. For whatever really odd reason, he was very hung up on the fact that, apparently, Elizabeth I used to hold court while sitting on the toilet (he used this as proof of the lack of a sense of privacy, but I'm not sure how that fit his theory, since she was Protestant). If it hadn't been for the cute ROTC guy in my class, I'd have had to force myself to go to class, and after about the tenth time he told us about Bess on the toilet, even staring at the cute ROTC guy wasn't enough to keep me from losing it, so I figured if I was actually going to learn anything about English literature, I'd have to do it myself, and I started reading the textbook in class while the professor got really excited about a past in which people apparently had no qualms about engaging in various bodily functions in settings we'd consider public. And that's when I found this poem:

When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

It's the second stanza that really gets me because it seems to me to be about a man seeing something special in the woman's soul that others don't necessarily notice, and that he sees that on her face. That stanza gives me the warm fuzzies.

And because there is no subject that I can't turn into a geekfest, I seem to recall that a part of this poem was used in an episode of Space: Above and Beyond (which got me very excited when they quoted my favorite poem). If I remember correctly, the guy used it as his way of telling the woman he loved that he loved her. (As an aside, I wonder how well that series holds up in time, if I'd still like it if I got it on DVD.)

But now, this poem almost sounds to me like it could be about Doctor Who. In a way, it seems to describe the Doctor/Companion relationship, because it always seems to be the "pilgrim soul" that he's drawn to in choosing sidekicks, and then he goes on to hide his face amid a crowd of stars while she's left, as a human, to grow old and remember the time they had together. It especially fits the "School Reunion" episode.

Speaking of geeky things, The Sarah Conner Chronicles is back tonight, in the Death Slot. Dollhouse is also premiering tonight, but I must say that I'm not overly enthused about it. Granted, I haven't been enthused by the concepts of all of Whedon's series, and I ended up loving them. I probably wouldn't have watched Buffy if I hadn't already had my TV on that station and was too busy to change the channel or turn it off. Then Angel was one of my least favorite characters and I wasn't much interested in a series about him, and I ended up liking Angel as a series better than Buffy. But the concept for Dollhouse is more "ew" than "don't care" to me. And it's opposite Friday Night Lights. I can get FNL on OnDemand, I suppose, but I'm still not sure I even want to watch Dollhouse. So, I guess we'll see.

Now I will actually leave the house today because I have to drop off some newspapers at the church so the youth group can use them for some project, and then I think I will stimulate the economy. I desperately need a pair of what I think of as "travel shoes." I need some black shoes that are sort of business casual that I can do a lot of walking in while still looking semi-professional, and that are slip-on for easy transit through airport security. I had a great pair that wore out, and then I replaced them with a pair I thought was identical, but they weren't, and I've finally convinced myself that these shoes will NEVER be comfortable. Since I'm going to New York next month, I will need shoes like that. The quest begins.

I felt like all my time management efforts fell by the wayside yesterday because I did a lot of goofing off, but then I also accomplished everything on a long to-do list. I had to remind myself that the point of all the time management was to get things done and still have time for fun. It was a "rest" day on the book before I start serious proofreading today, and while I do plan to plunge right into the next project after I send this to my agent, one day isn't enough for switching mental gears, so fun was allowed.

We're currently dealing with the potential of a looming storm. Ike is headed our way, and it is highly likely that we'll get at least a lot of wind and rain by the time it makes it this far inland, but it's still too early to tell what the extent of it will be because they won't know the exact track of where it will go until it makes landfall. That means they can't even give us a reliable weekend weather forecast. Tornadoes are scary, but at least they hit and get it over with. All these days and days of waiting and knowing that something will happen, but you aren't sure exactly what, where, and when, start to wear on you -- and I'm not even anywhere near the coast. I don't think I could deal with the stress of living on the coast. They have mentioned potential for power outages, and considering the power in my neighborhood used to go out just for cloudy days (it has been better in the past few years), I guess I'd better be prepared for that. If I don't post Monday, it could be because I have no electricity. I do have a laptop, but the battery doesn't hold much of a charge these days, and the DSL modem does require power.

In other news, the fall TV season is trickling in. I watched Fringe Tuesday night, and I think I'll be giving it a shot, but I'm certainly not in love with it yet. To be totally honest, I'm mostly there for Mark Valley, and then he was mostly out of the picture, and when he was in the picture, they ruined the pretty. He's one of the few actors where I find the actor himself more interesting than any characters he's played. I guess I imprinted on the idea of military men at an early age, so I can't seem to resist a West Pointer war veteran. In a TV universe where most characters are more unrealistically badass than their real-life counterparts would be, I like the idea of an actor who in real life may be more badass than the characters he plays. I think my main lack of enthusiasm for this show may be because I am so beyond over the government/corporate conspiracy theory stuff. Not that I object to it, I've just seen it a few too many times. It seems like when they need a little extra conflict in a series, they throw in a conspiracy. Even in shows where they are the conspiracy, where they're the ones keeping secrets, they'll suddenly run into a bigger, deeper conspiracy. I'm not sure what it says about my mentality that I generally enjoy it more when Our Heroes are the ones having to keep major secrets from the rest of the world than when they're the ones trying to uncover the secrets and unravel the conspiracy. I guess I prefer the idea of being in the know to the frustration of cover-ups and dead ends.

Speaking of keeping secrets, that brings me to my other recent discovery, and I'm almost ashamed to admit this one because I know it's not that good, but heaven help me, I'm enjoying the heck out of it. It's Primeval on BBC America. That's a channel I only get OnDemand, and last weekend I decided to create my own Sci Fi Friday, since the Sci Fi Channel is just down to Atlantis, so I pulled up the first episode of Primeval from OnDemand, and I got strangely hooked. On Sunday afternoon, I marathoned all the episodes they had posted to OnDemand and waited impatiently for the new one on Monday. When one didn't come up and when I discovered that they were two episodes behind, I found them through (ahem) other means. And once I found them there, I couldn't help but watch the next couple of episodes after that. I guess the best way to describe it is a weird mix between an inverse of Stargate and Jurassic Park -- anomalies from other times (and maybe places?) are opening into our world, but instead of going through them to explore, Our Heroes are mostly concerned with the stuff that wanders through into our world. Namely, dinosaurs and other extinct and very dangerous beasties. And Our Heroes have to protect the world from the creatures while keeping the secret and trying to solve the mystery of the time anomalies.

Basically, it's a weekly series version of Sci Fi Channel Saturday night movies, but I don't feel quite so embarrassed for the actors. It's utterly silly and I can't even begin to explain what I like about it, but I think two words sum up the appeal for me: zombie dodos. Seriously. Plus, there is some good eye candy, with a few nicely attractive men doing manly things, and one of them is pretty much my ideal physical type (and the actor is one I've swooned over in a Masterpiece Theater costume drama). They pulled a twist at the end of the first season (which will be the middle of the season for BBCA, as they're showing the first two seasons as one long season) that could be either utterly brilliant or incredibly sloppy, and I'm not sure which yet (and if it was deliberate and as brilliant as I hope, I'm now trying to find a way to pull it off in a novel). I might even be tempted to get the DVD set for pure cheesy fun.

Now to spend the day reading the first 70 pages of The New Project out loud to myself so I can make sure it flows.

I knew it was too good to last. Our false fall is over, and we're back to summer, though, mercifully, a "normal" summer and not the 100+ temperatures we had earlier. Meanwhile, taking a ballet class with a bad case of Book Brain is, well ... interesting. I'd get a random idea or thought and completely forget the entire combination I was supposed to be doing while I was busily writing in my head. Today, I think I'm going to disconnect from the Internet for the whole afternoon, without even taking e-mail breaks (since e-mail breaks tend to stretch out into other things) and really dig into the book. The publishing world shuts down on Friday afternoons in the summer, so I don't have to worry about any urgent notes from anyone.

I'm going to start doing some rundowns/summaries from WorldCon panels. I think I'll start with the ones I moderated, since I wasn't able to take notes and am therefore more likely to forget what was discussed (if I haven't entirely already). And since it's Friday and I don't want to think too hard, I'll talk about the Firefly panel. The official title was "Firefly: What Would the 2nd Season Have Been Like?" and the panelists were me, Dani Kollin and Rebecca Moesta. I was drafted at the last second to moderate, but as I've put just the teensiest bit of thought into the subject, that wasn't exactly a challenge for me. I think this panel may have been the most fun I had in the whole convention. It was a highly energized hour and fifteen minutes with the audience really into it, and I suspect we could have gone on for quite a bit longer.

These recollections are pretty stream-of-consciousness and may focus the most on what I said because that's what I remember. I did start off trying to get us talking about how we think the series might have continued if Fox hadn't cancelled it, and that transitioned into talking about what might happen if some miracle occurred and they decided to start another Firefly series picking up after the movie, and from there we talked about the rumored possibility that the movie was kind of what was originally planned to be the second season arc, just compressed into a movie. I'd thought about how that might have played out over time. My theory is that the Operative would have been introduced as the season one finale cliffhanger. The pattern on both Buffy and Angel with season-ending cliffhangers was never with the characters all in immediate jeopardy so that the next season picked up right away. The seasons tended to end with the characters defeating the Big Bad and feeling pretty good about things, and then at the very end we'd see something new pop up that the characters might not even be aware of (think Darla in a box). So I suspected that at the end of season one, Our Big Damn Heroes would have had some moment of triumph, and then the very last scene of the season would involve the Operative being introduced, so that we'd know they were going to be in huge trouble, and it would be midway through the next season before they became aware that he was chasing them. Apparently, there is a fan project that has written "scripts" for a season two that does break down the events in the movie into a season, so maybe I'll have to check that out.

Storylines people wanted to see picked up or dealt with included Book's past (Dani thought that seeing the Operative in the movie was seeing a mirror of Book's backstory), what decision Inara would make after the movie (stay or go back to the House), the crappy town where Wash is a hero, and what Jayne's mother would be like. Dani had a fun scenario worked out for that: Jayne would be frantically gathering all his weapons out of his quarters and then dump them on Simon in the infirmary, telling him that they were all his. Then this teeny, tiny woman would come on board and greet Jayne, and our big, tough guy would be utterly terrified of her. She'd notice the stockpile of weapons, Jayne would insist they were Simon's, and then she'd whisper to Jayne, "I don't want you associating with him." There was some discussion as to whether or not the tiny-but-tough mother was a cliche, and I pondered the idea of a more Jayne-sized woman, but I have to admit that this scenario is entertaining to ponder. I didn't seem to get a lot of support for my assertion that the "If I ever kill you, you'll be awake, armed and facing me" line in the pilot from Mal to Simon was foreshadowing. Not that I expected Mal to ever actually kill Simon, but I did imagine that at some point they were going to get into a showdown.

For more speculation, I brought up the fact that Joss's shows tend to have massive cast expansion as they progress, as they keep adding more and more characters. How would that have worked if Firefly had continued to five or more seasons? There's a finite amount of space on the ship, which limits the number of regular characters (unless they start setting up cots in the cargo bay), so perhaps we'd just have a larger cast of recurring characters they run into on a regular basis, with familiar faces at any places they visit regularly. Dani mentioned that the other pattern was turning a de-fanged (mostly) enemy into part of the gang, so one of the new people would probably be something like a vegetarian Reaver -- one who didn't fit in or was an outcast from his people. That sparked some brainstorming, so I suggested that Simon would come up with some kind of chemical or drug that would help the vegetarian Reaver stay somewhat sane (since the vegetarianism only rules out cannibalism) and safe to be around, and there would have to then be a situation where the Reaver crew member was cut off from being able to get his medicine, with time running out before he started going nuts again and became a threat.

We pondered whether there was room to do a musical episode. My suggestion was that it would take place in River's head (I guess this would have to have gone before the movie or disregarding the movie, since she seems to be more or less well now). We'd see the crew going about their business in a normal way, but then we'd see it from River's point of view, and she'd see it all as a big musical.

There was so much going on in that panel, with suggestions flying fast and furious from the audience and panelists, that I can't begin to capture it all. If you were there and want to chime in with something I missed, be my guest!