Tomorrow, 10.30 a.m.: Buffy Season 7 Marathon

Buffy Marathon: Oh yeah! My sister and I want to see in how little time we can watch the entire season 7. The only breaks will be: toilet and food. There are 22 episodes and each episode is about 42 minutes: 22*42=924. 924/60=15.4

That's 15.4 hours of Buffy. Broken up by lunch, dinner and toilet breaks, we should be able to finish our marathon Saturday, at 4 a.m. The latest. Wish us luck!


"How I write" series: Angela's guest post about how she writes will be posted at 11 p.m. French time.

"Jeepers Creepers": It was not what I expected at ALL. And the ending is not what you usually see in horror movies. I kinda recommend it--but don't bother buying it. At least not the full price--get it second hand if you really want the DVD.

Writing: My goal for today was to reach 45 000. I still need 458 words to make that happen and it's 1.30 a.m. *bites lip* Maybe I can still do it? Oh, and the chapter I'm working on is chapter 21. I've been waiting a week or two to write it and it is so sad. I'm even considering saving the characters, and if I did, it would be credible. It wouldn't be a "deus ex machina."

I'll see how it goes. Total word count: 44 542.

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”

—Walter Bagehot

“Leave it to me to fall for a *dead guy*!”

It’s half-past four in the morning and here I am, starting a blog post about the emotions TV shows can make me feel. But I really want to write this post now.

See, I’ve been watching TV shows and movies since I was a kid, and it became a ritual to rent a DVD, buy a tub of salted popcorn and a packet of Maltesers and watch that DVD in the “green room” with my sister. The green room was small with a TV, bed that we used as a couch, bookshelf for DVDs and a cupboard full of games.

In that room, I fell in love with Buffy, cried when she lost Angel time and time again, gasped at the drama in Desperate Housewives and stayed up late watching horror movies on Friday nights.

Buffy is a TV show that means a lot to me and I’ve already mentioned on this blog that it is the reason I’m writing Playing with Darts: I want to make readers feel what I felt while watching Buffy. I want readers to fall in love with my characters, laugh at the horrible things that happen because, like my mother once said (I think), sometimes you just have to laugh at the situation you’re in.

I want readers to root for the characters and want them to kill the Big Bad. I want readers to cry when characters die and rejoice when people are reunited.

Oddly enough, what inspired this post is Charmed. Charmed has also made me feel the same things as Buffy. Don’t even get me started on the whole Piper/Leo drama.

BUT I want to talk about Piper and Mark, the ghost from season 1.

Summary of the episode: Tony Wong, a criminal, kills Mark, on his birthday no less, and uses his body to fake his own death. Mark is overjoyed when he finds out that Piper and Phoebe, two witches, can see him. He needs his body to be buried or else Yama will take his soul to hell, even though he’s good. Piper, once she’s convinced he’s a ghost, decides to help him.

I’d only seen that episode once, and rewatching it today was like watching it for the first time. And I was amazed at how the writers and actors and actresses got us caring so much for Piper and Mark in just 40 minutes.

Even just thinking about it now is making me tear up.

I hate and love the creators of those TV shows because they’re so cruel when it comes to our feelings, but I aspire to do the same thing to my readers one day.

Because if a story doesn’t make you feel something–whether that something is anger, fear, happiness, sorrow or love–then what good is it?

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
-Elizabeth Drew