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🦩 Unofficially 🌞 Summer 🏖️ 2021 🌴
It’s the kickoff of social 🏖️ summer for 2021 and woo! It’s my kind of summer, baby! It’s in the high 40s. 🐧 It’s overcast and rainy. 🌧️ I’m in Heaven…
🌼 Blossoms 💐 of 🤲🏻 Gratitude 🌼
Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul. ~Henry Ward Beecher
A friend of mine, Sean, and I were having a talk about his impressions of a movie he saw on Amazon Prime called Sound of Metal. He said the way in which the film depicts Ruben’s hearing loss really helped him understand and appreciate that he still has his own senses. I’m looking forward to watching this film based on his recommendation.
It’s good to be reminded that we have so much that we can be thankful for. Despite the growing collection of medical conditions that keep introducing themselves to me, I have tons to be grateful for.
Sure, my vision is slightly doubled in my left eye and cloudy to the point of being nearly opaque in my right, I can still see reasonably well with corrective lenses. I also have a medical appointment in August to discuss potential solutions to this problem.
Sure, it hurts when I bend and twist but my ribs did actually heal from the trauma of being pinned under a minivan. At least I’m still alive and able to function in a reasonably normal way. I can’t do factory work anymore but that’s not such a bad thing. It was getting kind of old anyway.
Sure, I have a lot of medications, complications, symptoms, dietary requirements and whatnot, but there are so many who have it so much worse than I do. It helps to keep this in mind and be truly grateful for what I have. It reminds me of the “Counting My Blessings” song from White Christmas.
🇺🇸 Memorial 🤍 Day 🎖️
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So, actual summer doesn’t start until June 20th but Memorial Day is commonly held as the unofficial beginning of Summer. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, we generally have off from school and schedule our family getaways.
All the focus on family get-togethers and seasonal sales often overrides the real meaning of this holiday weekend.
We owe a debt of gratitude to those who never returned from the wars they served in.
Before you grill that meat, serve up that lemonade and pasta salad, buy that bathing suit or binge your favorite TV series, give a moment of silent appreciation to those who gave the final full measure of service to this country.
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🚧 Change ✍🏻 Your 💻 Tools 🧰
If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking. ~
Paul Arden
It helps to switch it up from time to time.
I’ve been stuck for a while for a variety of reasons that I have frequently mentioned.
I’ve also started using some new tools to try to shake things up a bit.
The Wednesday evening Writer’s Cafe of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group has been instrumental in getting me active again.
The feedback has been invaluable and it’s giving me some perspective on how people react to a cold reading of the stuff that’s been floating around my head for over a decade at this point.
They have absolutely no information other than what’s on the page.
I have all of the backstory, ancillary characters, intended developments (to a certain extent), character’s appearances and so forth.
Clearly, I’m not communicating even a scintilla of what’s under the surface of this stuff and I need to do a better job of showing what needs to be shown without overdoing it. Nobody likes infodumps in their stories.
Nevertheless, it is there between my ears waiting to be properly expressed in the story.
One of the many problems I’ve been having is that I am primarily a “discovery writer” but my plans to write The Sentinels as an extended series of novels and associated media require an actual outline of some kind.
The MCU seems pretty random as you go along, but it’s based on over 50 years of published comics. The stand-alone movies that introduced the core characters who eventually became The Avengers had a lot of little Easter Eggs in them.
Hardcore comics fans (like my son, Connor) who are intimately familiar with the various storylines that the heroes have navigated over the decades, could probably spot them.
The thing with MCU and DCEU movies is that they are spectacular. They have all the action and special effects to satisfy hardcore comics fans and new audience members alike. The more obsessive fans can go back and analyze the movie storylines to see how they compare to comic book canon.
The Easter Eggs are usually alluded to in subsequent movies so that even the most rabid hyperanalyzers look back at them and say, “Wow, how did I miss that?“.
That’s the level of planning I’d like to have in the Sentinelsverse body of works. As a guy who is primarily a “discovery writer“, this really doesn’t play to my normal methodology.
I did put some retro-teasers in A Misfit Christmas and All I Want and will need to make those fit into the Sentinels novels as I go along but I’d really like to have the level of outlining spelled out for myself so I can weave the later characters in as bit-part passers-by, kids sending fan mail or whatever.
That’s big picture stuff.
In the short term, I’m actively working on the first of the series and, based on the feedback from the GLVWG Wednesday meetings, need to get the salient details into the story so that people know what’s really going on.
They weren’t able to discern Dave Wisler’s age from the conversation he was having with his dad. Neither of those guys had a sufficiently distinctive voice. I knew that instinctively and dealt with by overusing “tags” in the dialog.
That’s not the correct solution.
I actually need to give them each their own voice so that the reader can figure out who’s saying what based on what’s being said rather than counting lines since the last tag.
It’s a learning process, just like any skill. Practice makes better. Not perfect, just better. That’s all anyone can really ask.
Tons to do today, so I need to get on with it. I hope you’re enjoying your holiday weekend.