Dance Your Stupid Off

I’ve been pretty silent lately on the subject of news and popular culture, not because there’s been a dearth of commentworthy topics, but because I’ve been singletracked by a pesky plot point in Book the Second. With the cancellation of Dance Your Ass Off, however, I can no longer remain silent. The time has come again to get my whinge on.

For those of you who’ve long since burned your TV guides, abandoned the internet and turned your unplugged plasma screens into a lightweight building material (and who are therefore presumably reading this via telepathy, the secret transmitters in your fillings or the subether waveband), Dance Your Ass Off was intended as a reality TV cross-pollination of Dancing With The Stars and The Biggest Loser, viz: fat people dancing competitively in order to lose weight.

Process that for a moment, if you can.

In what should come as a shock to absolutely nobody on the face of the Earth, ever, the show has been cancelled after one episode. However, in what should count as the jusitifcation for the extinction of the human species should a race of eccentric aliens ever point a space-based laser cannon at our fair globe and demand a moral accounting of our foibles, no less than one million Americans still watched the debut episode.

Process that for a moment, if you can.

In today’s news, the executives of Oxygen, the channel on which Dance Your Ass Off aired, explained the modus operandi behind a show which Absolute Power’s Charles Prentiss and Martin McCabe might very well have dreamed up in one of their more cynical moments – which is saying something – thusly: “that dance and diet were two areas of interest for younger viewers, so combining both themes into one show made sense.”

Process that for a moment, if you can.

This is more than stupidity. This is bot logic. The independent popularity of two things in no way suggests that they should be combined, unless your are a crazy person. Just because the human race currently needs oil and water to survive doesn’t mean we should try and blend them into a single super-substance that we both drink and use for fuel. Ice-cream and steak are both pretty good, but would you serve them together? (Note: lovers of chicken fried steak and twinkies aren’t allowed to answer that question.) I mean, seriously. The satire practically writes itself.

Unless, God help us all, you are Oxygen’s senior VP of original programming and development, Amy Introcaso-Davis, who said of the show that “if you have five pounds to lose or 150 pounds to lose, it’s something you think about all day long.”

Message for Oxygen: you’re so concerned with weight loss? Why not trim the Goddam fat from your upper management circles. Make them dance through the boardroom as they leave. Dangle the possibility of rehiring if they can demonstrate that they have had a single original, nonsensical thought since 2000, or at all. Film everything secretly, then air it.

It’s not like you haven’t made worse  programming decisions.

Winter Conference Highlights

Yesterday was the Pan Macmillan Winter Sales Conference – my first ever book event, which I attended as part of the Ford Street delegation. It was a long day in the Yarra Valley full of free food, speed dating with sales reps, speeches and free wine, although not necessarily in that order, and I had an absolute blast. So here, recorded for posterity, are some of the highlights:

1. Spending the day with the wonderful George Ivanoff and Meredith Costain.

2. The proliferation of tiny little custard tarts topped with glazed strawberries, of which I devoured my own bodyweight.

3. The self-help author whose pitch to a room full of publishers included the words ‘nobody reads books anymore’ and the admission that he didn’t read, either.

4. The number of sales reps/Pan Macmillian people who were not only lovely and interesting, but fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

5. The speed-dating session, wherein I repeated myself umpteen times in the pursuit of marketing my book, but nonetheless had a fabulous time. And also, it was actually timed speed-dating. With table numbers and a stopwatch.

6. The free drinks from 5:30 onwards.

7. Bradley Trevor Grieve’s speech at dinner, which included a toast in Swahili and a rousing defence of dogs, and which made reference, among other things, to Hitler, skydiving, French cinema, fevered morphine dreams, Egyptian mythology, Paris Hilton and hermaphroditism.  

8. The part where I was awarded a soft toy Siamese cat for asking a vociferous and pedantic question about undines. 

9. The fact that, due to the effects of free alcohol and the suggestions of not one, but two lovely PanMac people and also my own madness, said toy cat was promptly dubbed Selina James Grieve. Thanks, Anita and Robin!

10. And this was only my first conference.

A Day In The Life

The following was written in response to Meanjin’s Spike challenge to describe one’s daily routine as a writer, which was inspired in turn by this article. Enjoy!

A Day In The Life

1. Jolt awake to radio alarm at ungodly pre-noon hour for day job attendance.

2. Proceed to hit snooze alarm at ten minute intervals until getting up seems inevitable rather than merely obnoxious.

3. Get dressed in shortest amount of time possible.

4. Cycle to work, muttering imprecations about the oblivious jaywalkers and lane-eating buses on Swanston Street.

5. Spend better part of day in government data-entry fog.

6. Cycle home again. Repeat step 4, but with flashing lights.

7. Remove cat from top of barbeque and enter house. Play Final Fantasy XII for two hours.

8. Dine with logician-spouse while watching Spooks, pointedly ignoring large whiteboard spouse holds across his lap while simultaneously working on set theory.

9. Commandeer lounge after spouse retires to bed.

10. Write on laptop until 1:25AM, realise what time it is, feel guilt over being up so late prior to impending work day.

11. Lie awake in bed for two hours, conscious that good writing-or-sleeping time is being pointlessly wasted by insomnia.

12. Fall into fitful sleep, punctuated by scrunched, repetitive dreams of killing wargens in Final Fantasy XII.

13. Jolt awake again at radio alarm.

14. Repeat until published.

 

Update, 17.07.09: Won the contest and a year’s subscription to Meanjin! Woo! Thanks, Spikeblog!

Midway Point

We’re halfway through the year.

This is exciting on many levels, not least of which is that in 43 days, I’ll be entering the UK for a glorious five months. Already, so much of significance has happened in 2009 – Solace and Grief being accepted for publication, joining the excellent SuperNova writing group, planning our trip – that part of me finds it hard to believe how much else is yet to come. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll be meeting my publisher at Ford Street, Paul Collins, face-to-face for the first time. Later this month, I’ll be attending my first ever event as a writer, the Pan Macmillan winter sales conference, about which I am both exhilirated and nervous. Once we’re in the UK, Toby and I will have our second wedding anniversary in Bristol; we’ll be in Scotland for winter and Surry for Christmas, which will be a new experience for both of us. I’ve started writing short stories, which is a new and fascinating thing – not that they’re brilliant so far, but I’m working on it, and the more I write them, the more confident I feel. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been blogging less: my strange ideas are ending up in stories rather than expository posts, refracted through a fictitious lens instead of a journalistic one.

I’m loving 2009. My only worry is that so much will have happened by December 31 that the sheer volume of significance will cause a mental implosion – that it will be too hard to remember each little thing, and so I’ll forget everything instead, swept away by the Big Event of 2010, which will be the book release itself. But at least I’ll be able to use my blog as a reminder. After all, that’s part of why it’s here.