Editing The Rings Of Hail Mary

Welcome to the October 2024 edition of...
What I'm Into, What I'm Up To
#49

What I'm Into

• The Rings Of Power Season 2 (Amazon Prime)
  I know this is probably a controversial opinion, but I really like this show.
  
  I was not extremely into the story during Season 1, but I really liked being back in Middle Earth so I went along for the ride. And obviously, very high production value for the most expensive show ever made.
  
  But Season 2 has upped the game for me, especially in its second half. If you've been on the fence about watching it, take the plunge.
  
  Oh, I should confess, I've never read The Silmarillion or the hundreds of pages of appendices in The Lord Of The Rings, so I was much less invested in Tolkien's cannon of events and characters and things, which helps in liking the show since it seems to break cannon quite a bit to condense thousands of years of events and drama into several seasons of television.
  
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
  They're making a movie out of this, probably to try and capture some of that financial magic The Martian generated.
  
  Christopher Miller and Phil Lord will direct. Between the Lego movies and the Spider-verse movies, I'll watch anything those two guys are creatively involved in. And Ryan Gosling in the lead role doesn't hurt either.
  
  The book feels a lot like The Martian, with all the math, engineering, problem-solving, and humor, but a few steps further into the speculative side of speculative fiction. I really liked it, for all the reasons I liked The Martian, and was equally surprised about liking it in all the ways I was surprised about liking The Martian.
  
  A lot of the criticism on Goodreads boils down to: 'It wasn't a realistic story.' For me, any time an author ventures into wild what-if scenarios, they are going out on a limb one way or another. In Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir makes a bunch of world-building decisions that support his unique strengths as a storyteller, and I was all in.
  
• Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind, Volume 7 by Hayao Miyazaki
  I am nearing the end of this long manga journey, and so far the final book is as beautiful and rich and intriguing as all the ones before it. Once I finish, I plan to go back and watch the film to see how it compares and how many storylines they had to cut to fit a film-length runtime.

What I'm Up To

I am onto the editing stage for the newly revised (again) Skytrails book.

What else can I say, except this is obviously a labor of love because there is no other foreseeable reward for the work I've put into this story other than satisfying the obsession with finishing it once and for all in a way I can be happy with ten or twenty or thirty years from now.

I am enjoying the process of reading back through the story, but I am also a little shocked how much I'm using my red Sharpie. I've been through these paragraphs and pages so many times, I would've thought every sentence would hum and sing. But no, it can always be a little cleaner, a little tighter, a little crisper....

I'm hoping to re-re-re-release Skytrails (version whatever-it-is-now) by the end of the year, then onto another exciting storytelling adventure.

Otherwise, home renovations fill my time. The kitchen is taking the majority of it. One day it will be done and we will love it. A couple months ago there would have been a wall where my laptop now sits perched on the new island countertop. It's the perfect height for a standing desk, and I am loving using it that way.