I found Shaelin Bishop's channel randomly, when looking for guidance particularly in relation to writing characters and dialogue, as what I write tends not to be very character-driven. The videos are fairly short, 15–20 minutes long, and are focused on a single topic, making them very effective. Shaelin is a clear and engaging speaker, her examples are very practical and well-informed, and she had some exercises for developing character that I found very useful.
I have not read any of her work, but it’s all here if you want to have a look.
It’s horror. It’s archivists investigating a neglected collection of statements about strange happenings. It’s looking into the archives and finding that the archives is looking back. The premise of the podcast is that each episode is a recording of the archivist in the Magnus Institute, talking about case files related to ‘weird or esoteric’ events.
Individually, [the cases] are unsettling. Together they begin to form a picture that is truly horrifying…
I’ve started, as you do, at Season One, where the archivist, Jonathan Sims, is a new recruit, because the last archivist died, leaving ‘a complete mess of an archives’. What’s not to love?
A post on the Wyrd Britain blog about a radio dramatisation of John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes.
I have a deep and longstanding fondness for radio, and radio dramas in particular. Part of it is the magic involved in conjuring up a whole world through sound, often by the most basic means, in a small studio.
This BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Wyndham's alien invasion / monsters from the deep / ecological disaster classic was made in 1998 but sounds far, far older which is testament to the care of the creators but does give it quite a dated feel.
For me, that 'dated feel' enhances rather than diminishes the prospect of listening to this dramatisation.
Edward James was an important figure in the history of Surrealism, keeping various artists afloat by buying their work (in the process amassing the largest personal collection of Surrealist art in the world). The documentaries, by Patrick Boyle with George Melly in 1978 and by Avery Danziger and Sarah Stein in 1995, chart the progress of
James’s charmed life, from gilded youth as an aristocrat and inheritor of vast wealth, to his old age as “Uncle Edward”, a benevolent eccentric living in the Mexican jungle at Xilitla where he spent many years constructing his own work of art, the concrete fantasia known as Las Pozas.
(I had intended to watch these as a double bill, but the need to crack on with pressing apples to make cider before the apples gave up the ghost entirely meant that the evenings were curtailed, and the Danziger and Stein film will have to wait till the weekend.)
We certainly had not ordered a trailer of logs, and a trip to Next Door established that it had nothing to do with them either. Clearly, someone had got the address wrong, and was probably at that very moment fielding an irate call from the intended recipient.
But no—a text message came later in the evening from a neighbour up the road, who had felled a diseased ash tree and had brought us up a load of the logs 'because it was so cold' (it was; it is). This is the sort of lovely, understated, eminently practical generosity and kindness we have come to know from living down the country: even solitary, curmudgeonly, oddball writers are looked out for and looked after as part of the glue that holds rural communities together. We were very touched. And blissfully warm.
No comments:
Post a Comment