Greetings...

Yes, it would appear that I finally have a blog. I’m not entirely sure what took me so long – perhaps it’s the steady realization that LiveJournal has reached the end of its lifespan and Tumblr formatting still hasn’t found a way to allow for decent conversational threads. So here I am.

And here’s what to expect:

Painfully optimistic updates on the progress of my own writing. I have a number of finished manuscripts and am currently trying to find representation for the latest one (aren’t we all) and keeping a record of the process feels like the grownup thing to do. Or the professional thing. Take your pick. Depending on how it goes, I may well end up posting extracts or full chapters of my work here in the hopes of generating some interest.

Reviews for various books, films and television shows that I enjoy.

The Snow White Project. This is something I’ve been planning to do for years now. Given that Snow White is my favourite fairytale, I’ve been organizing a marathon of all the Snow White related films with the intention of examining how each one deals with the basic setup of the story and its various components. I want to examine every character, every plot element, every innovation made by each film and see how they relate to each other and the original Grimms fairytale. I’ve already done some preliminary reading, and there’s some fascinating stuff about the symbolism of the old story (three drops of blood, the seven dwarfs, the tempting apple) which I can’t wait to start comparing to the more modern filmic updates. Then comes the fun part: judging which adaptation did it best.

Commentary on various tropes. This is another project I’ve been planning to do for a while. Like many, I suffer from a TV Tropes addiction. You’ve been there. You know what it’s like to start scrolling through a page of their extensive database only to look up and find that five hours have passed. For your own safety, I won’t provide a link. But one thing I’ve always loved about the site is its Most Triumphant Example page, where tropers add what they think is the most quintessential example of any given trope. Since I love playing around with the building blocks of storytelling, I’m going to start making my own lists of the best examples of my favourite tropes. This one might take a while to turn up (and may yet appear on Helen Lowe’s blog – see below), but stay tuned.

Cute pictures of my niece and nephew (my BFF’s children).  

Links to other sites, particularly FantasyLiterature.Com (where I’m a reviewer) and On Anything Really, the blog of my friend Helen Lowe (where I contribute articles in the Big Worlds on Small Screens feature).

I’ll be keeping most of my fan-fiction on LiveJournal, though to be honest, that’s only because there’s only one story in the works: an oft-delayed BBC Robin Hood fic that I’m committed to finishing, but can never find the time to really work on. However, I never start something I didn’t intend to finish, and hopefully my gradual shift here will allow LiveJournal to remain the platform for those still clinging on to hope that it might one day be updated. Which it will. Eventually. But you won’t have to worry about that here.

So there you have it. That’s the purpose of this blog and hopefully one that I can keep updating on a regular basis.


And for those who have just tuned in: here is my LiveJournal and here is my Tumblr. See you around!