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Looked after my Victorian orphan this morning. Apparently the penicillin should kick in by day 3 so he's still not himself, but I prepared for book club interviews whilst he watched TV
An afternoon of Book Club Tuesday and a couple more episodes in the can. Then someone has to take them out of the can and put them on the internet. I don't know why they have to go in the can first. It's just the way things are done.
I talked to Kevin Jon Davies about his collection of Douglas Adams memorabilia 42. He had lots of interesting stories to tell about the man who inspired this blog (I'd been reading the Salmon of Doubt which made me think about writers' block and what a shame it was that Adams hadn't written more stuff - anyone wanting to make a book of my thoughts and ideas subsequently has 20 million words or so to sift through- ha ha ha. And most of it is shit. What do you mean no one is ever going to do that with my material?)
Kevin showed me a copy of the Guide from the BBC production and explained how they projected the information on to the screen. Absolutely insane. His book got to the top of the Best Seller list and is a must for any fan of the writer, if only for the detail that Douglas had wanted a goat with a model of the Eiffel Tower on its head to be in pretty much every scene after the crew had used the Improbability Drive, but no one would ever refer to it.
Then I spoke to Catherine Nixey about her fabulous book , Heresy, about the other gospels about Jesus and the plethora of other holy men and magicians who were pulling off similar tricks to him back in those Biblical times. It's right up my alley, of course and contains lots of stuff I didn't know about, most notably what happened to the hand of the woman who improbably tried to check Mary was a virgin after the birth. It reminded me that I had an idea of a sitcom set in the modern day in which a woman is impregnated by what might be an alien or a god or a devil and then has to deal with a magical child who does the kind of stuff that the child Jesus gets up to in the Apocrypha - killing his classmates, bringing things to life, making people blind. Whether good or bad, a child with these kind of powers, would definitely use them (as any parent will tell you) and every parent would try and cover for them and excuse them and attempt to teach them to use those powers wisely or not at all. If that's not an award winning sitcom then I don't know what is.
If my writing careers shows anything it is that I don't know what an award winning sitcom is.
Loads of fun with both these two and the podcasts will be out in a few weeks.
