white light, white heat

[freckles_and_doubt]

Come to Cape Town, they say. Enjoy the climate. Hah. It's been stinkingly, horribly, unbelievably, traumatically hot for the last few of days - not only is stepping outside like immersing yourself in a nice warm bath of soup, but within no more than twenty seconds you can feel your skin start to burn. Or my skin, at any rate, mostly because I'm very pale as a result of a pathological fear of the sun. Every clear, burnished-blue afternoon the peninsula lovingly piles up big, fat, white thunderheads over the mountains, but it's just to taunt me, nothing ever comes of it. I am consequently, in addition to being horribly busy, somewhat tending to interleave mad bouts of productive activity with sessions reclining on the couch, hand to forehead, whinging in faint and die-away tones.

I finished what I fondly imagined was the last tweaking of the Gaiman/Miéville paper yesterday evening, and then incautiously went and watched the BBC Neverwhere, which gave me a whole crop of new, interesting things to say. (I loved the series, which is interestingly made and brilliantly cast, and the Marquis of Carabas is incredibly cool, although I trust I found more academic ways to say that he's hawt and I fundamentally want his coat). I'm going to have to reserve most of them for the future rewrite/expansion I'm going to have to do (and submit to a fantasy-focused journal whose readers actually know what I'm talking about), since I only have 4000 words for this paper, and am having to lop interesting limbs off arguments left, right and centre (as both my readers pointed out. Perspicacious sods).

So, paper down, and I spent the day immersed in book updates, more precisely in that mad, academic see-saw between "gosh, this is dreadful" and "gosh, this isn't half bad" which reading my own writing always engenders. The first few chapters may still be dreadful, but they're a lot less dreadful than they were this morning. Also, the Cosmic Wossnames hate me: Enchanted isn't out on DVD, and Happily N'Ever After isn't in any of the nearby video stores this evening. I may be updating this concluding chapter (fairy-tale parody) on thumb-suck, Wikipedia, and my l33t scores in Academic Bluff.

Oh, and it isn't just busyness which is making me neglect to post. Work is still flat out, but the Evil Landlord's computer is having hissy fits which cause it to reboot every five minutes, which, given that it harbours the internet connection, is playing merry hell with my connectivity. He blames my techno-jinx. He may have a point.

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[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Come to Portsmouth, UK. It's currently blowing a gale, driving rain interspersed with sunny spells, & altogether more interesting. & we have a university.