It's been a busy old life

Back from the final teaching trip to Exeter, and I'll definitely miss the place. I enjoyed teaching the course and had a good bunch of students whom I felt I was really starting to engage with. Well, I still have their exam answers to mark come the summer, assuming that is that they tackle my questions. In the mean time I've been getting some practice in by acting as second marker for some of the essays they wrote on the basis of last semester's course on copyright. Dear God, how do academics retain their sanity after ploughing through several dozen papers on the same topic?

Reviewing one of the essays, I couldn't help but feeling that although it was generally quite good, had it been a Wikipedia page I'd have been flagging it up heavily for further editing. And then I had my Brilliant Idea of the Day: what I need for marking essays is a pad of blue ink and a couple of custom rubber stamps, one saying [citation needed] and the other [dubious]. Start off with your first-impression mark, then knock it back for every time you feel obliged to use one of the stamps.

In other news it's been another week when I barely seem to have seen the inside of my flat other than for sleeping in.

Wednesday - I went with most of the rest of my book group to see the film of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo down at the Greenwich Picturehouse (it being the first book we read). We were all very impressed: the production captures the atmosphere and characters incredibly well, with Noomi Rapace's depiction of Lisbeth being a tour de force. It also retains most of the book's plot, which seeing that it is a rather long and rambling first novel that could desperately have done with editing is quite an achievement - although it does mean that the film also has three successive endings as a result of the book's nested plots, something which worked perhaps better in print. As a cautionary note, the film does not flinch from depicting in graphic detail some of the very unpleasant sexual violence of the book, so if you are thinking of seeing it, do be aware of this. It also has rather annoying subtitling, in that there is no effort to distinguish multiple lines from different characters.

Thursday - after a day at an e-Government conference covering for one of my professors who is off work, it was off to Bank for drinks with ladymoonray, tamaranth et al. The combination of delivering a presentation and then beer and chips must have been tiring as I got home at about 9.30 and fell straight asleep.

Friday - down to the ICA to see the Mamak Khadem Ensemble, appearing as part of a festival supporting Iranian artistic freedom that had been organised by P, one of the students I work with at QMUL. P had kindly arranged a free pass for me, and I'm glad she did - it turns out that Iranian electronic ambient is very much my thing.

Saturday and Sunday - mevennen's course for aspiring sf/fantasy writers. This wasn't a writing workshop as such - although we did all write a story opening and a novel synopsis - but rather a workshop on the practicalities of genre writing, such as the differences between writing short and long works and the actual process of submitting stories and, for novels, finding and dealing with agents. Very informative and also good fun, thanks to mevennen and fellow students altariel and Y WINOLJ. It also got me to actually work out where my current short story idea needs to go, and to get a bit more down on paper about my novel. Now to actually do some of this writing stuff that I understand is necessary to the process.

This week coming: stewarding at an anti-DEB demo outside Parliament on Wednesday, then BSFA if we finish in time. Also, I've been promised a visit from the decorators on Thursday so I may finally be able to bid farewell to the water stains from the leak last October. However, this does mean emptying and dismantling two wall-fulls of shelves, so that's tomorrow night sorted.