auroracloud | Sep. 29th, 2018

The BBC has released a short clip from the first new Doctor Who episode on the official YouTube channel. When it comes to spoilers, I'm of the camp "If it's been officially released by BBC / the creators, I'll probably watch it / read it / hear it; if it's not officially released then I want to know nothing of it". So I watched this one as soon as I could. You know, I actually really like Chibnall's "saying as little as possible" tactic because I like not knowing much when heading into the new series, but I also like getting a little appetizer like this now when there's not much time left to wait!

Putting it and my (oh so very lengthy and refined) reactions under the cut. In possible comments, please don't post any spoilers that aren't officially released stuff.

( First Look )

I went through my word counts today, and realized that I'd passed 100K words for this year on Tuesday. Woo! I previously thought I'd have to take my

inkingitout pledge down by a bit, because the writing hasn't been going that smoothly on much of the time this year. But with the writing spurts I've had now, suddenly 150K does seem feasible again. So I'm keeping it for the time being and seeing what happens.

Of course, word counts are always a bit vague an indicator for me, because I work with two very different languages. I write my fanfic in English and my original stuff in Finnish. As I've probably mentioned before, because of the very different structure of the languages, the same thing written in Finnish has way fewer words than when written in English. (I'm not sure what the average ratio is, but my guess is that the word count in Finnish is 20-30% less. Some day I'll actually check this by comparing translations to original, or googling a source.) So in times when I write a lot of original stuff, the same amount of writing yields fewer words. On months when I write a lot of fanfic, it's easier to get high word counts. On the other hand, writing does come easier in Finnish when I'm on a roll, because there are fewer hesitations about the right register, the exact meaning of a word etc.

Linguistic digression for my own amusement, because boy do I know how to have fun on Saturday night. If you're wondering why Finnish word counts are lower and I haven't already explained it to you, it's mainly down to three things: 1) we have no articles, 2) we use way fewer prepositions and phrasal verbs, and instead conjugate/decline words, ie. change the form of the word by adding a suffix or a few or half a dozen, and thus change its meaning. This also means that often you can drop a pronoun because the verb already shows it; and when you can drop it, in written form it looks clunky if you leave it in. And 3) we use a lot of composite words, so expressions like "summer holidays," "Christmas presents," "chocolate bar," "Crown Princess," or "sonic screwdriver" are each just one word in Finnish.

Examples on point 2: "a dog"="koira", "my dog"="koirani," "for your dog"="koirallesi". Verbs are still more fun! "While I was/am writing"="kirjoittaessani".

Oops, sorry, lengthy linguistic tangent over there. I love linguistic tangents. I miss geeking out about languages more, I used to do that.

Today's Writing

I slept kind of badly last night - woke up too early and took a long time to fall asleep again - so I've been rather tired most of today. I tried to edit my various femslash ficlets, and made some progress, but then my brain just stopped doing edits. So I started another ficlet and got over 500 words on it. I have a feeling that by the time the prompt table challenge ends, I'll have a fair amount of ficlet drafts and none that have been edited and posted...

Tally

( Days 1-21 )

Day 22:

alexseanchai,

bic_hok,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

sylvanwitch,

trobadora,

ysilme, and me. (8 so far)

Day 23:

alexseanchai,

bic_hok,

carenejeans,

cornerofmadness,

sylvanwitch,