June 2022 update!

June 3, 2022

Reminder that this is cross-posted from my Patreon Writing Symposium.

Summer! Summer is here! I’ve got trips planned! I’m doing things!

This month’s Lesson will be: Character (and also Plot). July’s Lesson will probably be Plot (and also Character). Maybe the two central components of fiction. Endless ink has been spilled on them. Entire books. Spoiler: Turns out they’re the same thing. I’m going to talk about that, from both sides.
What’s my current writing look like: If you’ll remember in our last episode, I set aside the novel I said I was going to finish in April. Instead, in May, I wrote a novella and a short story and got them both out the door. Wuf, that felt good. I think I needed to finish something and clear some brain space. Now, I have two novel drafts I’m going to be noodling around with: the one I said I was going to finish, and the one I wrote over the winter that I don’t know WTF I’m going to do with. Agent likes the first couple of chapters but the whole thing needs work. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to read over both manuscripts, outline what I have, and figure out what’s missing and what they need to make the stories feel complete. This is tough, grueling, tedious work that I’m not looking forward to. But both projects are close enough to finished that I know I’ll feel better getting them done. This is the hard slog: not just writing, but writing work that other people will want to read. It’s that last bit that’s the challenge.
I got a lifer bird last week: black-chinned hummingbirds! Two males, fighting like they were in West Side Story.
Moon Knight. Well, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Oscar Isaac is lovely, of course. But by the end I kind of just didn’t care. Except my history/archeology buff friends and I were appalled at them putting packing tape on 3000 year old papyrus. Completely appalled.
I still haven’t been to see the new Dr. Strange movie.
But I finally caught up on a slew of animated films: Encanto, Luca, and Turning Red, which I feel not enough has been said about how it’s actually a kaiju story? That was my favorite part.
And now, Obi-Wan Kenobi. I love it. I love how they’re capturing the aesthetic of the animated series in live action. I love seeing new planets and people. I love what I’ve been calling Executive Dysfunction Kenobi. He isn’t just in hiding—he’s frozen. He’s paralyzed. He fucked up and he knows it and he’s going to have to deal with it somehow. So, so good. I love this idea depicted both here and with Luke-in-exile in The Last Jedi that the Jedi of this era bought into their own myth so hard that they simply don’t know what to do with failure and freeze up. Run away. This is in contrast to Jedi like Ahsoka, Kanan Jarrus, and Ezra from the animated shows, who didn’t have the support of the order and learned to make do without it and find their own ways. (I know Luke is a young, post-Clone Wars Jedi. But his teachers were Ben and Yoda, who maybe gave him an unrealistic picture of what he was supposed to be.) And don’t even get me started on young Leia. She’s everything.