Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

Foreword: I'd planned to tell you one last story about fate, destiny, Buffy and free will. However, fate itself intervened with this Waitrose advert about some pleb called Phil getting involved with Keira Knightley at Christmas and cooking her a pie to cement their love... I believe it's called The Perfect Gift . But of course it's fantasy. Nothing like that could ever happen in real life. It's impossible. Impossible. I got a present for someone in 2010, and I wrote this article for an autism magazine in 2011. I called it A Christmas Gift . I'll let you guess who the girl was. Glasgow. Winter 2010 As I’m both autistic and grumpy, it would be easy to fall into cliché and call Christmas a soulless masquerade of empty commerce, fake cheer and religious hypocrisy; and to say that, faced with tinsel, Santas, elves, a pile of cards I have to send to people I scarcely even know and who might be dead, I feel like taking a midnight plane to Vegas and staying in a sleazy mo...

Two recent occurrences reminded me of time's ripple effect ( in which one tiny alteration to the past can drastically change the future ) and the tantalising possibility of a resurrected  Buffy the Vampire Slayer making an end run around the ripple by following a metaphorical Yellow Brick Road to a glorious and surprising finale.. First, that glorious drunkard, The Critical Drinker, explained how 2025 was turning out to be the year that broke Hollywood . According to The Hollywood Reporter, box office revenues for this October were  the lowest in twenty-seven years . Then  Dave Cullen dissed the return of nostalgia reboots . Old shows who had their day long ago being brought back in a desperate and probably doomed attempt to draw in the madding crowds. Shows like Malcolm in the Middle , Scrubs ... And Buffy . Normally, I'd agree with Dave, revel in the Drinker's sarcastic commentary about the latest disaster caused by Hollywood's current catastrophic cycle of creative ...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer : New Sunnydale 's pilot  has been filmed, Sarah Michelle Gellar is working with a crack team to continue ( not reboot) the Buffy saga and Ryan Keira Armstrong is an extremely talented young actress. So what could possibly go wrong? Just about everything, probably. And before anyone else does, I will admit my own bias. Yes, I think they should all do it my way but that's not going to happen. There are about three main reasons which, from my skewed perspective, mean that Buffy II is most likely buggered. The first one's a doozy! As previously explained, an extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable series of events threw myself, Dru and Juliet together, sent me halfway across the world to a mythic meeting on Sunset Boulevard and (it seems) presented me with the lost story arc . The way to continue Buffy , develop many of the existing characters' story arcs in completely unexpected ways and turn the Slayerverse upside down. The odds against all t...

  "We've found cancerous cells." That's not the kind of information anyone wants to hear, but the brain of a focused Asperger can at least cope with it. That was last October and it's fair to say I had no more than "a brush with cancer." A grade 3b melanoma which only required one small op and a year long course of pills, not immunotherapy. Aspergers are also good at dealing with terrible facts and, oddly enough, because I'd just gone back to my literary roots in Monterey and seen the Book of Deer in Cambridge I was a little more phlegmatic than most about the possibility of death. The finales of both those experiences really had felt like the closing credits of two TV movies so while I didn't actually want to die, I was a little more at ease with my fate than others might have been. Both of my books ( Dear Miss Landau and The Legend of John Macnab ) were autobiographical or at least quasi-biographical. Macnab 's hero, John Sandiman, was f...