Rainbowshappen

So, today I got my sticky mitts on the CD of the soundtrack from Life on Earth. Yay!

(This was, for those not in the know, the BBC’s amazing series on the development of, well, life on Earth, written and presented by David Attenborough and first broadcast in 1979. You know, the one with the famous gorilla scene. I always loved the theme tune, but it was only available, with other music from the series, on a very limited edition vinyl that was given out solely to the members of the orchestra who played it. Until now. Thank you, Jonny Trunk, purveyor of obscure 1970s TV-related musical geekery.)

Anyway: Are there any TV theme tunes you really love? Whether or not you actually like or watch the program?

(Please post us a link if copyright permits. I’d post you mine but it doesn’t appear to actually be online anywhere. Bummer. It’s rather nicely epic.)

If you were reading a novel by a female author, and it was written in the first person, and it transpired halfway down the first page that the narrator was a male…or vice-versa…would you find it confusing?

Just asking. I can’t recall many books in which this is the case, is all, and as I’m a woman writing a book in which the first-person narrator is male, I wonder if it’s something anyone would find odd.

looking through the two unfinished novels I mentioned in my first entry under this goal.

And you know what? The quality of the writing isn’t that bad, at all.

One is your stock ‘visitors from our world get into another world and have to learn magic to outwit the bad guys’ saga (there were going to be three volumes!). Written when I was very much younger, naive, hopelessly romantic and in a failing marriage, and it shows (the heroine is a total Mary Sue with an indifferent husband, she meets a good-looking mage and, well, you can guess the rest)...but still interesting. There are certain phrases, names and the odd whole character I’m probably going to lift from that and tweak slightly to re-use. Otherwise, to save purely for self-entertainment value, considering there are huge chunks of plot missing which I can’t easily recover because I don’t have the whole edifice in my head, like I did when I was obsessed with it.

The other was my attempt, from just a few years back, at a mainly ribofunk novel, which I had neither the biotech knowledge, nor the intimate knowledge of the outskirts (as opposed to the center) of Cambridge (i.e. the British uni town), to sustain. What did work in that was a sort of culture that incorporated bits of biotech, computer tech and spirituality in an eclectic, slightly scuzzy and dystopian underground urban milieu – and that’s something I’m trying to keep in the current book, although it’s a totally different story in a different, imaginary location.

I suppose this kind of cannibalism is more or less normal.

Is there anyone else out there who habitually uses main characters of the opposite sex from your own? In the ribofunk thing and in this, my main characters are guys, and I’m writing the present one in first person. Don’t know if that’s going to end up being confusing…