Life in dot points
Jan. 12th, 2020 08:06 am- America was wonderful! Although I would very much like to visit the Midwest sometime when it's not cold and there are leaves on the trees. It was very exciting to see what happens to a swimming pool when it snows, but what if swimming?
- Detroit is a marvellous city, but -- to the surprise of literally no one -- not that easy to get around on foot. At one point we parked, did some shopping, then got in the car and drove to the other end of the parking lot to get to Target, because it was so far to walk (and also two guys were having a punch-up on the footpath).
- Chicago is easy to get around, and I love it. I haven't travelled enough to say it's my favourite city in the world, but if I had the funds to conduct a proper study, I suspect it would still be in my top five. I would not like to live in the United States, but if I had to, I'd choose Chicago.
- We went to a whole bunch of chain restaurants, fast food and otherwise, and my feelings are that (a) Chipotle needs to open up in Australia; Guzman y Gomez exceeds it for quality, but the menus are very different; (b) I'm terribly glad to see that Outback Steakhouse has stopped using fake Indigenous art to decorate its restaurants; (c) Cracker Barrel is like Outback Steakhouse but for America, but I noticed that all the images of Great Americans And American Achievements featured only white people, and that was ... uncomfortable.
- All of Detroit's sports teams lose a lot, which, as a Bulldogs fan, is a Mood. I bought a Detroit Tigers shirt, but it's a wee fraction too small.
- We saw Hamilton in its final days in Chicago; here are some scattered thoughts:
- there are WAY more dick jokes than I had realised just from the soundtrack
- there is no replacing Daveed Diggs, but the man who played Lafayette/Jefferson did his best
- I hate how much I enjoy Jefferson in this show, even though I know we're meant to feel that way
- the actor playing Hamilton was ... not short, but not tall. The woman playing Peggy/Maria was very tall, and (in the second act) almost literally swept him off his feet. It was so far from what I had imagined, it's what has stuck with me in the weeks since I saw it
- that, and I've been very badly earwormed by two lines from "Hurricane", and my brain can feel free to stop anytime now
- everyone knows that "Hurricane" sorely tested Lin-Manuel Miranda's singing ability, and it really does make a difference when the part is played by someone with a stronger voice, even if he's not so good a rapper
- We also visited
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rj_anderson in Stratford, ON, which meant DRIVING across a NATIONAL BORDER, shut up, I'm Australian, this is very exciting to me! - Now I have a pile of Canadian YA and MG fiction to read, which is very exciting and I don't know where to start.
- So, having seen Little Women the other night, I'm reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott instead, obviously.
- (Little Women was marvellous, and a gift to this Laurie/Amy shipper; it didn't quite have my favourite aspect of their relationship -- grieving together after Beth dies -- but their dialogue and interactions are electric. It's a novel I've read a bunch of times, and have very strong opinions about, but don't actually love reading? But I adored this film.)
- I watched the first half of season 1 of Succession on the plane home, and the first five episodes of Brooklyn 99's season 6 on various legs. B99 is always great, but Succession surprised me: I'm so obsessed with finding out how the season ends that we've decided to postpone season 4 of The Expanse until we finish Succession.
- It's easier to get a good cup of tea in the United States than to get mediocre coffee with any kind of drinkable non-dairy milk. At least in the Midwest. There was a hipster cafe in the Detroit suburbs which offered almond milk with their drip coffee, and I was so happy I almost cried. Do you guys ... not have lactose intolerant people?
- I've started revising the middle grade historical space opera! It's good so far -- mostly because I'm still in the early chapters, where the truly egregious continuity errors hadn't yet crept in. Though there's this whole subplot about one of the heroine's dads, and I just ... forgot to resolve it. I have no idea what his deal is. Writing is the worst.
- I'm taking all my Rise of Skywalker angst and putting it into a fresh project: my YA fantasy arranged-marriage-leads-to-falling-in-friendship thingo. I told my writers Slack that my current comps are "the bit in ASoIaF where Sansa and Tyrion are married, Reylo, and the Snape/Lily fic I wrote when I was nineteen". For some reason this made them excited instead of horrified.
- I'm going to try to outline this one from the start instead of just throwing words at the screen and hoping for the best. So far I have A Heroine (Joan, a nerd), An Unheroic Leading Man (Edmun, an awkward turtleduck with a disability, a body count and a chip on his shoulder), A Stern And Complicated Older Woman (Edmun's mother, a common soldier who married the late king; she has an eye patch and I would die for her), The Heroine's Best Friend (Merry, does not know how she wound up in this mess; struggles with problems she can't solve with common sense or a sword); and a very thin vestige of plot: someone has murdered Joan's brother; she has to marry Edmun for Plot Reasons; there is a very high probability that it was Edmun who did the killing. I'm just chucking a whole lot of id in and seeing what sticks.
- I'm like, creating a whole secondary fantasy world from scratch is hard, but fictional murder? That's easy.
- Famous last words. Writing is the worst.
