I know there is not a lot of love for the Sixth Doctor, but does anyone remember his episode The Two Doctors? It was a multi-Doctor Six-Two combo, and it was all about food. I seem to remember some kind of insane cannibalistic alien chef, running around with the Second Doctor who had somehow lost his mind, and they were talking about food and…[Read more]

To add to the meal list for AG episodes, the Ninth Doctor had what looked like a very lovely dinner out with the Slitheen woman in Cardiff. There was wine!

Eleven definitely viewed the concept of work through a child’s lens– his big concern at UNIT HQ was if he had a desk! (Or was it an office?) And his moment of “I could be a curator” had a b…[Read more]

Wow, wow, wow. There have been some fabulous ideas put forth on this thread recently. I won’t even try to comment on all of them, just a few more recent ones that have stayed with me.

@ichabod    What a very eloquent discussion of choice and what it means. Ever since I discovered DW many years ago, I always in my daydreams chose the Blue Box. Bu…[Read more]

Late to the party but I got here in the end!

I really enjoyed this. It had a very different feel to it, an entirely human threat which was already unusual in DW even by Troughton’s time. (He must have really enjoyed playing Salamander. I do enjoy “evil alter-ego Doctor” stories!) It had an almost cinematic air and a great soundtrack. Int…[Read more]

Re the Guardian. That TV premieres guide was appalling. I don’t think that trying to compete with Buzzfeed is really the way forward, myself. But what really floored me was the arrogance of the nitwit in the comments who was unwilling to accept that criticism might be valid. Nice way to engage with your readers!

@ScaryB   They’ve been using that…[Read more]

@purofilion    Congrats on Queensland’s great election result. @ichabod   You Are Not Alone. Canada is of course still sitting in the anti-progressive waste bin, here’s hoping we can finally do something about it later in the year.

@ScaryB  I wish I could believe that the internet actually gets more people properly informed, but I suspect t…[Read more]

So much to catch up with! Thanks to everyone who generously shared their outside world writing. There are some immensely talented people on this forum! (I especially enjoyed @pedant’s Snow Goose piece. Excellent prose is hard to find these days.) I am realizing that I need to make time to check out the fan creativity page, which I have n…[Read more]

@purofilion       I love these intimate looks into the education systems in other countries. It’s too easy sometimes to forget that most other places don’t do things very much the way your own place does. There is pretty much zero essay-writing in the high school science courses here, the most writing they get up to is lab reports. And I am cert…[Read more]

@Juniperfish     That’s a rather lovely remark by RTD. In a way, it mirrors what happens in other art forms (painting, sculpture, music), where the original work is put out there, and has spawned, sometimes over a very long period of time, a “conversation”, as @ichabod puts it. I think I agree that the “Big Conversations” aren’t exactly the sam…[Read more]

@ichabod      I don’t think that’s fair at all. I rather like pewter.   🙂

@pedant   @ichabod

Fascinating. I can only assume that Mills & Boon et al know who their intended audience is, and aren’t especially interested in reaching outside it.

And yes, @pedant, you’re quite right about McCaffrey. I tend to do a basic dragons=fantasy equation, especially nowadays with all the dragon-based children’s lit out there, but h…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip   To be fair, they do teach them how to reference the internet. His objection is the old-school bib assignments where they give you a topic and you have to include examples of various types of sources. I tell him that, while the day might come when all useful information resides freely and openly on the net, it hasn’t come yet. (Pa…[Read more]

@ichabod     I too love LeGuin’s writing, although I’d say my personal favourite is probably The Dispossessed (with an honourable mention to the poetic beauty of the Earthsea Trilogy). Like @BarbaraLefty, years ago I read widely of the old school sci-fi writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, and so on, and never missed the female viewpoint. Interes…[Read more]

Oh, and I meant to say that I think the “Writer’s Retreat” idea is a great one, although it might be a good idea to title it in such a way that people don’t think they have to be writers in order to participate. I like “The White Hart”.  🙂

@pedant     Well, me and the BBC.   🙂   Seriously, though, you’ve made the point I was trying to make, which is that the terminology is problematic.

(I should say that, after resisting the PD James book because I didn’t expect to like it, I finally read it and lo and behold, didn’t really like it. Not that it wasn’t well-written, but for me,…[Read more]

@Ichabod   Do not get me started on the funding of public education. Here in British Columbia that is a battle we are fighting every day. We have a great system that they are quite literally penny-pinching to death. My husband is a PAC chair (like the PTA) and sits on a couple of school board committees dedicated to improving infrastructure for c…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip   @purofilion    @janetteB

(Just looked over this post and it got a bit lengthy… sorry!)

Well, yes. Arbutus Jr. is a very bright boy, a delight in most respects. He is however living in optimism that when he reaches the promised land of uni, he will neither have to take any humanities courses ever again, nor have to write any…[Read more]

@ichabod    I will definitely look out some of your work! Kudos to you for getting it available in e-book format relatively early on. In my world, there is a definite place for both e-book and hard copies, and some writers/publishers have been terribly slow in getting on board. I find that the electronic option keeps our fairly small home from dr…[Read more]

Such fascinating conversation going on here! Where to begin?  🙂   (rubs hands together)

@Bluesqueakpip    Though, truthfully, the difference between the best ‘fanfic’ and ‘professional writing’ is often rather like the difference between amateur and professional actors.     Namely, the one is doing it for fun, the other gets paid.

Case…[Read more]

@purofilion     I would argue that you are a great kind of writer… relaxed about it, and very eloquent! I so agree about the uni students. As an undergrad, it was my job one year to correct the papers of the first year music history students for composition as opposed to content, and some of them were so horrific that there was no simple way to…[Read more]