Cluttered Like My Head

  There's a popular music listening app that, at the end of the year, looks at your listening stats and tries to summarise it for you. It tells you who your favourite artist is - how many hours you have spent listening to them, and stuff like that.  Last year, it told me that my favourite song was something that I'd probably listened to about 5 times. I can't even recall what it was but I probably listened to it 5 times on day of release and never again - It probably told me that I didn't really listen to a lot of music (on that app at least) and so it gave me cause to doubt the reliability of the data.  It did also give me the opportunity to change things around. It mentioned a streak - you listened to a particular song 3 days in a row (or something like that) - I decided that this year, I was going to try and listen to one song every day of the year, and see what that did for my stats. I didn't quite make it for every day but I came pretty close. I chose to listen...

 As I said before, V was a roaring success, and that success meant that tie-ins needed to arrive. The first if these was the adaptation of the two mini-series in the form of a chunky paperback novel by Ann Crispin. At the time, Crispin was presumably seen as a safe pair of hands. She had experienced breakout success with a Star Trek novel and delivered a V novelisation that is engaging throughout and that rockets along at impressive pace.  Released in the US at the same time as the second mini-series, I think it's obvious to see the differences in approach to the two mini series.  Presumably, in the case of the original two parter, which had already aired, Crispin had access to both the scripts and the completed material. Much like that original show, the first half of the book is more thoughtful, takes more time to develop the characters, and indeed expands some of them from their televised version.  I wonder if, for the second series, she only had access to the scr...