(no subject)

Right, so, remember how I said the plan was to sleep 18 hours a day while I’m sick?

IT SEEMS I WASN’T EXAGGERATING.

Go away, virus. I don’t like you.

Phoning Home: Not As Easy If You Don't Know Your Number

Man, writing a first contact scene without a Babel Fish is hard.

Especially when the first thing you want to communicate with the aliens is, “Hi, we’re sorry unscrupulous pirate aliens abducted you, but you’re safe now in the galactic community! Now … can you tell us roughly which of the stars in this vast whorl of glittering systems is yours?”

Not to mention I still have sickbrain,* which means for all I know I just wrote a scene involving psychedelically furred aliens whose faces can fwoomp out like giant inside-out umbrellas and whose language sounds like dueling banjos.

Hah, wouldn’t that be crazy and … oh, it looks like that’s what I did write.

Good god, I’m not even on any drugs other than your basic antidepressants, and yet I see colors in music and firmly believe that the number eight is male and invent flying umbrella-faced banjopeople.

I probably wouldn’t even notice if I took LSD.

Well, anyway. This scene is complex enough that I wasn’t sure I was going to put it onscreen. The aliens are important enough to the plot of this Doctors! episode, but if it weren’t for the fact that it also provides a very useful setting for secondary character development, I might have just scrapped it. I myself would find a slow, uncertain scene involving a somewhat lost galactic culture trying to talk to a thoroughly lost pre-space individual to be fascinating if done right, but then I also found the linguistic appendices in The Lord of the Rings fascinating, so I’m not the best judge here. But I think if I do it right it’ll wind up useful and interesting.

I just hope I still think that when I get all the mucus out of my head. Otherwise I’ll have to try again, and damn, it was tough enough the first time.


*I know I’m whinging, but I am sick dammit and GET to whinge, and I hate the way I think when I’m sick. It’s sort of fuzzy and soupy at the same time.