Work continues apace. I've got Last War in Albion up and running, and it'll roll out again on Thursday with the start of Chapter 2. I'm going straight into working on Chapter 3 so there will be less of a gap there. I've tinkered the format in a few subtle ways that I hope will boost readability without sacrificing what I'm trying to achieve with the structure of the project. This one has narrative theory, the pulps, superheroes, and the remainder of Grant Morrison's early work. Only one more chapter after that before we get to things anyone has ever heard of!
I've also got a few more of the extra essays for the books. Baker is still one off from done, though I might get him finished off this weekend, but Hartnell had two and will get a third. Three is a little slow for a week on those, but again, Last War in Albion was added in here. Next week... no Torchwood, actually.
Meanwhile, the Storybundle offer heads into its final few days. To recap, for a price of your own choosing you get four nonfiction books on Doctor Who, including TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton. If you pay more than $10, you get two more books, one of which is The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, which features some of my favorite posts from the history of the blog along with a few paragraphs of introductions about them. It's a slender little thing, but it was fun to knock together, and while I may recycle it into something else, it won't be available again in 2013.
If I can put a small plea in, I'm still doing adjuncting on the side to bring in a little bit of extra money, and at the last second one of my courses was pulled and given to a full time faculty member whose class had gotten cancelled for lack of enrollment, which means my pay for the rest of the year just took a five thousand dollar hit. It's seriously not a big deal - we've got the Kickstarter money as a nice cushion if there's any sort of crisis, and have a comfortable living wage, but it's still just a little stressful to suddenly lose a bunch of money you'd been budgeting on.
Which is to say that I do make money off the Storybundle deal, and if you don't mind having the tip jar shaken, this is my job and this is a chance to support my work and get some neat bonuses along with. (And I've got We talked last week about Dalek I Love You and Dining with the Doctor, leaving Barry Letts's memoir Who and Me and Earl Green's Vworp!
The latter of these is a pretty straightforward reference manual. It's got a good account of the plot of every story up through The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, a reasonable selection of facts, and reviews no more idiosyncratic than anyone else's, mine included. It's information that can be found elsewhere, but this is certainly a handy version, and if you're not one of those people who knows every story in history off the top of their head then it's probably quite helpful. Better than either Wikipedia or TARDIS Index File for casual readers, for my money, and probably a solid resource if TARDIS Eruditorum entries for stories you've not seen ever get a bit rough going. If you're the sort who reads About Time and the like, this one's not that useful, but for the non-hardcore this is well done.
The former is a memoir focused on the first chunk of Barry Letts's time on Doctor Who, extending up to the end of Season Eight with The Daemons. (There is, tragically, no second volume, as the book was released posthumously) It's an odd duck - tremendously detailed on the one hand, but also based on limited memories and with demonstrable inaccuracies. (Its final chapter ends with the claim that the Daleks hadn't appeared in five years prior to Day of the Daleks because producers were tired of them and they were falling out of favor, which is simply not true.) Still, for Pertwee fans it's a treasure trove, as he basically explains his continual efforts to make Doctor Who into a Buddhist parable.
And those are the books. It is, I think, quite a nice haul. There's something for just about anybody in there, and a few things worth trying out at the price. I hope you will check it out. Sorry to so blatantly push the tip jar out; I'm afraid it's not the last one that'll go out this week either.
None of this is remotely a weekend discussion topic though, is it? Here - since Last War in Albion's on the mind this week, let's ask this: what topics that are within the scope of that are you most looking forward to? I've already said the focus will broaden beyond Moore and Morrison (indeed, Gaiman enters the picture at the same time that Morrison returns, and there's no way I'll ignore Milligan. And eventually Warren Ellis turns up too...), so what things are you hoping will get judged as part of the War?