The Final Problem

Yesterday evening I was half-watching the movie Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and based on the novel by Stephanie Meyer. The movie is about a teenage girl (played by Kristen Stewart) who moves to a small town in Washington, where she falls for a local guy (Robert Pattinson) who happens to be a 108 year old vampire. The movie was hugely popular and so were the books. Despite being a vampire story it's much more of a teen romance than a horror film, and the vampires have very little to do with pretty much any other interpretation of them (Meyer has said that she knew nothing about vampire stories when she started writing the books). I've never read any of the books but I thought the film was okay, though not great.

Later on at night I was listening to an episode of Weird Tales, which is a short series of one off radio horror plays inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. They are all original stories, not adaptations of Lovecraft's stories, but they deal with similar themes. In this story a man who has recently lost his job moves with his wife and daughter to a new house, however there are strange smells around the building and the constant sounds of rats scratching in the walls, and the house's last occupant vanished under mysterious circumstances. It was a pretty good story.

I also listened to a radio adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story. This episode was called "The Final Problem" based on a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this episode Sherlock Holmes is on the verge of making the biggest case of his career against Professor Moriarty, the most dangerous criminal in London, however it's three days before Moriarty can be arrested, and so Homes and Watson set off on a journey across Europe with their deadly enemy in hot pursuit. It was a really good story. Conan Doyle had apparently got fed up of writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, because he thought they were distracting him from writing more "serious" literature, and so he intended this to be the last of them (hence the title) but, due to popular demand, he was more or less forced to write more.

It was another very dull day at the office, but apparently they are going to increse the heating slightly. My writing has been going pretty slowly recently, basically I'm kind of stuck with the story and don't really know how to move on with it. It feels like pretty much everything has already been done.