AliceFraser

Hauntings and Foreshadowings

Added 2023-12-02 05:20:32 +0000 UTC

Exciting News

After all the shenaniganry and delays that one expects with big logistical life-shifts, I have now officially got my furniture into the place where I'll be nesting/spawning. I am putting together a little podcast studio in my walk in wardrobe l. This year I have recorded on a boat, in a cupboard, on beds, couches and balconies. At one point, I took a whole bunch of blankets into the shower cubicle to make an ad-hoc pod-pod, so just having a little room with a place I can stick up some foam and a mic stand and a chair feels luxurious.

A few trips to some second hand shops for chairs and a table and I'm starting to feel like I'll be able to get out of treading water/reacting mode and into exciting creative forward momentum mode again.

The apartment block I've moved into seems to mostly be populated by retirees who meet in the garden at sunset to gossip, and a few families with kids Laser's age who I'm hoping to woo. I feel a great investment in earning the good will of the sunset club, because it feels like that might be make-or-break in terms of general good vibes and staying on the right side of the strata committee here.

The lady who lived here before us was 94 when she left, and there are still little leftovers of her occupation.

This worryingly ambiguous sign I discovered when we tried to figure out how to make the ancient dishwashing machine go. Sticking with hand washing for now.

I also now have my hands on the final edits of Chronos and Twist, and once those are up on GoFasterStripe, I’ll make them available here for all subscribers. Should be before Christmas as a nice little holiday present from me.

It'll also give me material so I can cut up clips, and put them out on the internet in the modern way, which might slightly cushion the emotional and professional feeling that I'm not around during the festival circuit and for solo show season.

Slightly Nervy-Making News

Had a couple of fun one-on-one consultations this week, and also recorded a Tea With Alice with an academic friend that was really lovely but will need a careful introduction.

Because he's a scholar in the movement of money through charitable organisations in the west bank and Gaza, we sort of inevitably ended up touching on the war there. Which is a subject I've tried to avoid touching on in public. I was writing on The News Quiz with Andy the week of October 7, and there were incredibly heated negotiations behind the scenes about how the show should address it (seriously, in the monologue at the beginning? In a game round? Have the Panel Discuss It?). I got a taste in those two days for how intensely difficult the subject was going to become for anyone to address in a public way; mainly because I think it's so tied in with other heated discussions that many people are looking at any mention of it through a veil of rage and despair and fear.

It is at the point where people are rarely actually reading or trying to understand what's being said unless it's exactly the thing they think ought to be being said in that exact moment (the moment they're reading it, or listening to it - which isn't the same moment in which it's being written or said).

All in all it doesn't exactly feel like a fecund soil in which to drop the kind of abstract thinking-about-thinking, quiet-room-with-a-cuppa approach that Tea With Alice tends to take.

It's tempting to make it a Patreon special, mainly for the safety of serving it to an audience one can assume will give me and my friend-guest a running start on the benefit of the doubt regarding good will and generally anti-murderous non-blood-thirsty approach to the world. But the reason I wanted to do the pod in the first place (and have wanted to do for ages) is that my friend's just published a book and I'd like to help him get it out there to as wide an audience as possible.

That said, too, I loved having the conversation. It was tricky and interesting and I think we turned up some really insightful bits and pieces and I can't wait for those of you who want to listen to listen. Once I've decided on how to do the intro, it should come out early next week. I know some people are avoiding looking at news and commentary on the subject, or heavily filtering to sources they know they can trust not to absolutely shipwreck their faith in mankind of a morning. So with all that in mind, I'll try to get a second Tea With Alice out that week, for people that just want to skip the potential enraging-ness of the whole thing.

It's officially December now. Yesterday I went to the local twilight Christmas markets and got some dumplings from a van with Laser and saw the local dance troupe do a dance to Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas is You. Dinner and a Show! What more could one want? Well ... good dinner and a good show, maybe, but I actually get great genuine pleasure out of watching amateur things.

One of my favourite memories of live performance is of my first night in Cambridge, alone on the wrong side of the world from my family, seeing a flyer and taking myself along to my college's Chapel where there was an amateur local opera group putting on a production of Cosi Fan Tutte. If you know that Opera, the characters are mostly meant to be fairly young, heading-off-to-war-age. The whole cast of the show were in their sixties and seventies, and not all of them had operatic voices and some of them were a bit tone deaf and occasionally those beautiful mozart four-part-harmonies would gel into genuine beauty for just a few seconds, and the men were wearing unconvincing chestnut wigs, at least two of which were completely identical, and it made me so so happy.

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This Week's Events

The Google calendar with all upcoming Patreonite events is up at the linktree https://linktr.ee/alicefraser but the next virtual events are below.

Writers Meeting and Workshop

Sunday, 3 December⋅10:00am – 12:00pm (UTC +0)

Time Zone Conversion: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231203T100000&p1=47&p2=137&p3=197&p4=179&p5=136&p6=152

Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82009355833?pwd=d0g0VVNzaUpObSs4bW1KY2tUS1RCQT09

Sunday, 3 December⋅9:00 – 11:00pm (UTC +0)

Time Zone Conversion: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231203T210000&p1=47&p2=137&p3=197&p4=179&p5=136&p6=152

Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86994371960?pwd=c2hqcHBFS1doamc4dm5jQVpjdXBZdz09

Weekly Salon

Tuesday, 5 December⋅10:00 – 11:00am (UTC +0)