Tell Me, Travel, and Hart of Dixie

ONE: TELL ME

I’m over on Jennifer Brozek’s blog this morning, taking part in her Tell Me series where writers talk about their books. I’m tackling the secret origins of the Flotsam series, which involves considerably more Don Delillo quotes than you’d expect.

And roughly the exact amount of Guns N’ Roses/Supernatural references.

Want to know more? The post is over on JenniferBrozek.com.

TWO: COUNTING DOWN

Four days until I bugger off to Adelaide to spend some quality time with the family. And the fringe festival. And Adelaide Writer’s Week. I’m there until the 4th of March, whereupon I head to Melbourne for a few days of gaming, hanging out with friends, and doing some project planning for 2017.

This largely marks the one-year anniversary of being forced to acknowledge that the sleep apnea was a major problem for me, since you can’t share a hotel suite with your family without someone remarking on the fact that you stop breathing a whole lot.

It feels…longer.

I will largely be out of contact during the trip, what with my current plan to travel without a laptop, so if there’s anything you need, email me before Friday.

THREE: HART OF DIXIE

I’ve just spent the last two days mainlining the first season of Hart of Dixie, which is one of those shows where you can see the fingerprints of older shows and movies underneath. Doc Hollywood is the obvious reference, but there’s more than a few instances where it looks like the creative team have studied the Gilmore Girls and done a scaled down version of its quirky, small-town dynamics. I’d swear that you can actually Reginald VelJohnson channelling the Gilmore Girl’s Taylor Doose from time to time. .

I’m fascinated the show, because it hits a bunch of young adult tropes despite the fact that the protagonist is in her thirties and is trained as a surgeon. I’m a sucker for anything that moves the key rhythms and tropes of one genre into a different context, and the market for coming of age stories featuring older characters is increasing as the idea that we don’t know how to adult is spreading through the culture.

I loathe the term don’t know how to adult. I get its popularity, and the disenfranchisement that comes with realising all the hallmarks of traditional adulthood are basically a cruel joke at this stage of capitalism’s onward march towards totally fucking the world, but I think succeeding from the term adult is a problem. It continues to give the ideas and trappings of traditional adulthood power.

Personally, I prefer XKCD’s ball-pit approach.