No, I didn’t love it.  I mean, I enjoyed the heck out of the scenes in thermywhatsitsface, where all the Amazons were jumping around and fighting and what not, of course. Although even in those scenes I had a certain amount of ice in my heart.  You know the kind of thing.  Who does their laundry?  Why are they all the same age?  What do they feed the horses?

It’s when they leave thermywhatsitsface and wind up in WW1 that it gets annoying.  I mean, the woman has lived all her life on an island full of muscular effective autonomous women.  Why doesn’t she walk into a room full of male generals and wonder where are the women? (Wouldn’t it have been neat if there had been a solitary female secretary in the room taking notes and she’d gone straight to her?)  Why does she wander off through the western front accompanied by a man in a kilt, a man in a fez and a man in the wrong movie altogether?  (Wouldn’t it have been neat if she had picked up a suffragette, a VAD nurse and a lady despatch rider instead?)  And why oh why wasn’t the woman in the mask the secret bad guy all along?

Yes, yes: if you like the kind of summer movie where pretty people beat seven bells out of each other using buses and other handy implements then I’d rather watch one with a hero who’s a woman than one with a hero who’s a panther or a hero who’s an ant.

Because in the end THAT was the problem.

Being a woman, for Wonderwoman, is as significant as being rich is for Bruce Wayne or being an occasional rage monster is for Bruce Banner.  It wasn’t the superhero movie that finally recognised women are people: it was the superhero movie where being a woman was the hero’s schtick.

The first week of the writeathon went pretty well.  On Monday I worked on what I used to call the Groats novel and I’m now calling the Taxpunk novel, a near-future what-would-the-world-look-like-with-a-different-economic-system novel that I’ve been taking in bits to my writers group for the best part of a year now.  I have lots of bits but I haven’t found the voice of it yet or found how to stitch my bits of plot together.  However I had a binge re-read of Paul Gallico a couple of weeks ago and I think it might work in a twinkly, people are fundamentally OK, slightly sentimental mode and I certainly had no problems throwing words at it in that register.

Tuesday I put some words onto my prospective non-fiction book, a handbook of government consultation and how (not to) do it.  More of that later, maybe.

Wednesday I had set aside to work on short stories, in particular one that I’d already taken to the writing group: they thought it was ready to go but I wasn’t so sure.  Turned out it needed pruning, not expanding, so I worked on it a bit and then threw some more words at the taxpunk novel to make my quota for the day.

Thursday was the fantasy novel of which I already have several chapters and I got past a passage where I was previously blocked, yay me.

On Friday…. well, that was set aside for PhD work and that’s a whole other blog entry.  Or indeed a three volume novel.

#fivebyfive

It’s now that time of year when the Clarion West students are settling in to the six weeks of the writing workshop and some of the rest of us are shadowing them in the Writeathon.  This year I am using the writeathon to kick-start my writing in the Five by Five challenge: I have five writing projects and I intend to write 500 words on each of them every week.  I’m giving myself the weekends off, and each weekday I shall write 500 words on one of the five projects.  I will also spend at least five minutes a day on each of the other four – thinking, reading, researching, plot noodling, whatever.

Today it’s stupidly hot so I got up early to make the best of the cooler hours of the day, so I’ve already written my quota (616 words) on the near-future economic-change (“tax punk”) novel.  Plot noodling later. #fivebyfive