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From time to time I revisit The Bechdel Test, because my fiction tends to feature a lot more men than women. Now I'm not going to go out of my way to make sure my work passes, because I hate tokenism in any form, but it does keep me thinking about women in fantasy.
(I'm pretty certain the latest version of my work-in-progress fails, since there's only one conversation between women and it involves one girl dressed as a boy and another who is fooled by the first's disguise.)
The Interwebz now abound in silly autogeneration tools (one of the funniest is the ScriptFrenzy plot machine), but TwitterSheep is almost as much fun!
I've just been watching a DVD of "Twelfth Night" (the BBC/Trevor Nunn version with Helena Bonham-Carter and Nigel Hawthorne), and it suddenly struck me that this play is the twin (no pun intended!) of "The Merchant of Venice".
Last night we went to see "The Merchant of Venice" at the Globe (a regular annual trip arranged by the campus sports and social club). The production was very good indeed - great acting and lots of music and spectacle. Unusually, they had added some bits of scenery to suggest the cityscape of Venice: at one corner of the stage were some rustic wooden poles, perhaps ten or twelve feet long, for tying up gondolas, and the normal short run of steps up to the stage had been replaced by a wooden bridge. The costumes were mostly Elizabethan but with a few tweaks to add the flavour of a busy modern metropolis (the programme made comparisons between Venice and New York), such as trilby-like hats for the men and one of the merchants in dark pinstripes!
I've just finished reading "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch, and I have to say it's pretty damned good. I've tried to avoid spoilers in the following review, concentrating instead on Lynch's writing...
Yesterday's trip to London was exhausting but definitely worth it - almost as good as a trip back in time (and without the smells!)