Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #3
kellysedinger.substack.com
So...COVID. That was fun.Turns out I'm not bulletproof or some kind of anti-COVID supergenius; I'm just a person whose insistence on masking and getting every vax shot as soon as I'm eligible and continuing a lifelong policy of, well, just not being around people in general translated into dodging the COVID bullet for two and a half years. As Mr. Quint from JAWS might say, "Not a bad record for this vicinity!"Thankfully, my symptoms were mild, amounting to a cold that would have just been a run-of-the-mill annoyance had it happened outside the COVID context. I wound up with an impromptu week off from work, which is having the side effect of making me reconsider in the future whether or not I want to keep carefully guarding my vacation time and only taking it as long weekends.Anyway, that's enough about COVID. I blogged about it every day last week, so you can read about it on ForgottenStars.net if you like (and I do encourage daily visits to my site!). Just a few notes on how we spent our week that was a curious blend of vacation and house arrest (with no ankle monitor):First, I wrote quite a bit! I blogged every day, and I also started some longer posts that are currently drafts that I'm working on for the future. And I got some good solid work done on the novel-in-progress, the fifth Forgotten Stars novel. This book has made me realize that before I write the next volumes in this series, I'm going to have to do some heavy-duty plotting and outlining. There's just no other way. I've reached the point where "pantsing" it is just not working out. It's a productivity thing: I can really only work on one project at a time, and if these are going to take this long to write, then I'm not going to get anything else done, and that's a problem because my head is full of way more stories than just the adventures of two plucky Space Princesses.Second, we watched quite a bit of stuff. More American Pickers, about which I wrote more in the first installment of this newsletter! Still a really fun show, but occasionally I detect undercurrents of nastiness between the two leads that makes me wonder if the seeds were planted way back then for the discord between those two gentlemen now. (Google them if you're not aware, but there's a lot of drama between Mike and Frank unfolding now.)We also started Obi Wan Kenobi. As of right now we're three episodes in. It's an impressive production, extremely well-made and with top-notch acting. Not all of it makes sense, and I'm not sure about the way the vastness of an entire galaxy keeps translating to a universe in which it seems like everybody knows everybody else. Also, three episodes in the show's tone is unremitting seriousness. I'm told it lightens up on the back end of the series, which would be nice. I'd like to see Star Wars embrace its fun roots more often.Two movies we watched: Uncharted and Jungle Cruise. These end up being very similar kinds of movies, although we didn't know that when we picked them: Indiana Jones-esque quest adventures, with centuries-old maps and artifacts that bear the secret to unlocking fabulous treasures and booby-trapped vaults containing secrets and, of course, the multiple parties questing after these treasures, each with secrets and hidden motivations and conflicts galore. The template is all there, right down to the "tracking the heroes' progress via a map with a red line showing their travels" device.These are fun movies, to be sure, but one thing I notice is that ever since the "heist" story returned in a big way in the early 2000s (not just Pirates of the Caribbean, but also Oceans Eleven and Now You See Me and 21 and even, going back a little farther, The Thomas Crown Affair) you can't just have a good guy with uncomplicated motivations racing bad guys with nafarious motives to the treasure. Indiana Jones wasn't complicated; he didn't want the Ark for his own purposes. He just wanted it in a museum where people could appreciate it and where Nazis couldn't use it to give their armies invincibility. Simple. But in the current batch of Treasure Quest movies, all the heroes have baggage and motivations that don't align, so you end up with a lot of scenes where the heroes are yelling at each other because they don't trust each other. All of this eventually plays off with some kind of big "Do you trust me?" scene, where one hero is in a life-threatening pickle and has to decide whether or not the other hero actually will save them.These are fine tropes, really! But I'm getting a bit tired of seeing them play out every time. Now, it was pure happenstance that we happened to watch Uncharted and Jungle Cruise in back-to-back weeks, thus putting their similarities on display. But we've watched a lot of heist stuff in recent years, because there is a lot of heist stuff out there. I think the heist-story has evolved to the point where it's time for the tropes to be, as the kids say, subverted.Oh, and speaking of both those movies: both movies are gifted with very watchable casts. I keep waiting for Dwayne Johnson to break through into something really good, but Jungle Cruise is entertaining enough, especially if you're curious about how they got a movie out of a theme park ride that's just a fake boat ride while some dude recites a series of terrible puns. Just try not to consider the fact that no river on Earth can do the things this movie has the Amazon doing. I imagine many a hydrologist walked out of this movie with a serious eye-twitch. As for Uncharted, I kept thinking, "Wow, they could have made some effort to make Tom Holland look a little different from his Peter Parker!" And it's disconcerting when it becomes clear that the writers had no idea how to use a major character in the third act, so they just made the character vanish until the shooting was over. And if you want to see one of the most garishly implausible action finales ever filmed, this is the movie to get.OK, that's it for movies. I also rewatched The Man Without a Face, but that one gets its own essay at some point. Other teevee shows? We love Only Murders in the Building, and I think we're about to finish that one? It releases one episode a week and I think the finale of Season Two is coming up. Steve Martin has recently stated that this show will likely be his final acting gig, so I hope they at least get another season or two out of this. I am also increasingly convinced that Selena Gomez is going to emerge as one of the biggest talents of her generation. She's been around a while and she's only getting better.And then there's MasterChef, because we can't quit Gordon Ramsay. This is the show where you see the least of "Mean Gordon", though he does show up occasionally. Joe Bastianich got in some of his best mean quips of the last few seasons in a recent episode where the contestants were tasked to make a Vietnamese dish, despite the obvious fact that some of them had never tried a Vietnamese dish in their lives. This remains a fun show, but it really contrasts the American approach to cooking competition shows ("Make us a gourmet meal in a style you know nothing about, in 45 minutes! GO!") with the British approach ("All right, you lovely people, you've had a week to practice this, so if you'd be so kind, please take the next five and one half hours to bake us a lovely chiffon cake with the icing of your choice, with tasteful decorations. Thank you. And now...bake, please!")So, that's all for now. I hope all is well with y'all.-K
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #3
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the…
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: the newsletter of author Kelly Sedinger - Issue #3
So...COVID. That was fun.Turns out I'm not bulletproof or some kind of anti-COVID supergenius; I'm just a person whose insistence on masking and getting every vax shot as soon as I'm eligible and continuing a lifelong policy of, well, just not being around people in general translated into dodging the COVID bullet for two and a half years. As Mr. Quint from JAWS might say, "Not a bad record for this vicinity!"Thankfully, my symptoms were mild, amounting to a cold that would have just been a run-of-the-mill annoyance had it happened outside the COVID context. I wound up with an impromptu week off from work, which is having the side effect of making me reconsider in the future whether or not I want to keep carefully guarding my vacation time and only taking it as long weekends.Anyway, that's enough about COVID. I blogged about it every day last week, so you can read about it on ForgottenStars.net if you like (and I do encourage daily visits to my site!). Just a few notes on how we spent our week that was a curious blend of vacation and house arrest (with no ankle monitor):First, I wrote quite a bit! I blogged every day, and I also started some longer posts that are currently drafts that I'm working on for the future. And I got some good solid work done on the novel-in-progress, the fifth Forgotten Stars novel. This book has made me realize that before I write the next volumes in this series, I'm going to have to do some heavy-duty plotting and outlining. There's just no other way. I've reached the point where "pantsing" it is just not working out. It's a productivity thing: I can really only work on one project at a time, and if these are going to take this long to write, then I'm not going to get anything else done, and that's a problem because my head is full of way more stories than just the adventures of two plucky Space Princesses.Second, we watched quite a bit of stuff. More American Pickers, about which I wrote more in the first installment of this newsletter! Still a really fun show, but occasionally I detect undercurrents of nastiness between the two leads that makes me wonder if the seeds were planted way back then for the discord between those two gentlemen now. (Google them if you're not aware, but there's a lot of drama between Mike and Frank unfolding now.)We also started Obi Wan Kenobi. As of right now we're three episodes in. It's an impressive production, extremely well-made and with top-notch acting. Not all of it makes sense, and I'm not sure about the way the vastness of an entire galaxy keeps translating to a universe in which it seems like everybody knows everybody else. Also, three episodes in the show's tone is unremitting seriousness. I'm told it lightens up on the back end of the series, which would be nice. I'd like to see Star Wars embrace its fun roots more often.Two movies we watched: Uncharted and Jungle Cruise. These end up being very similar kinds of movies, although we didn't know that when we picked them: Indiana Jones-esque quest adventures, with centuries-old maps and artifacts that bear the secret to unlocking fabulous treasures and booby-trapped vaults containing secrets and, of course, the multiple parties questing after these treasures, each with secrets and hidden motivations and conflicts galore. The template is all there, right down to the "tracking the heroes' progress via a map with a red line showing their travels" device.These are fun movies, to be sure, but one thing I notice is that ever since the "heist" story returned in a big way in the early 2000s (not just Pirates of the Caribbean, but also Oceans Eleven and Now You See Me and 21 and even, going back a little farther, The Thomas Crown Affair) you can't just have a good guy with uncomplicated motivations racing bad guys with nafarious motives to the treasure. Indiana Jones wasn't complicated; he didn't want the Ark for his own purposes. He just wanted it in a museum where people could appreciate it and where Nazis couldn't use it to give their armies invincibility. Simple. But in the current batch of Treasure Quest movies, all the heroes have baggage and motivations that don't align, so you end up with a lot of scenes where the heroes are yelling at each other because they don't trust each other. All of this eventually plays off with some kind of big "Do you trust me?" scene, where one hero is in a life-threatening pickle and has to decide whether or not the other hero actually will save them.These are fine tropes, really! But I'm getting a bit tired of seeing them play out every time. Now, it was pure happenstance that we happened to watch Uncharted and Jungle Cruise in back-to-back weeks, thus putting their similarities on display. But we've watched a lot of heist stuff in recent years, because there is a lot of heist stuff out there. I think the heist-story has evolved to the point where it's time for the tropes to be, as the kids say, subverted.Oh, and speaking of both those movies: both movies are gifted with very watchable casts. I keep waiting for Dwayne Johnson to break through into something really good, but Jungle Cruise is entertaining enough, especially if you're curious about how they got a movie out of a theme park ride that's just a fake boat ride while some dude recites a series of terrible puns. Just try not to consider the fact that no river on Earth can do the things this movie has the Amazon doing. I imagine many a hydrologist walked out of this movie with a serious eye-twitch. As for Uncharted, I kept thinking, "Wow, they could have made some effort to make Tom Holland look a little different from his Peter Parker!" And it's disconcerting when it becomes clear that the writers had no idea how to use a major character in the third act, so they just made the character vanish until the shooting was over. And if you want to see one of the most garishly implausible action finales ever filmed, this is the movie to get.OK, that's it for movies. I also rewatched The Man Without a Face, but that one gets its own essay at some point. Other teevee shows? We love Only Murders in the Building, and I think we're about to finish that one? It releases one episode a week and I think the finale of Season Two is coming up. Steve Martin has recently stated that this show will likely be his final acting gig, so I hope they at least get another season or two out of this. I am also increasingly convinced that Selena Gomez is going to emerge as one of the biggest talents of her generation. She's been around a while and she's only getting better.And then there's MasterChef, because we can't quit Gordon Ramsay. This is the show where you see the least of "Mean Gordon", though he does show up occasionally. Joe Bastianich got in some of his best mean quips of the last few seasons in a recent episode where the contestants were tasked to make a Vietnamese dish, despite the obvious fact that some of them had never tried a Vietnamese dish in their lives. This remains a fun show, but it really contrasts the American approach to cooking competition shows ("Make us a gourmet meal in a style you know nothing about, in 45 minutes! GO!") with the British approach ("All right, you lovely people, you've had a week to practice this, so if you'd be so kind, please take the next five and one half hours to bake us a lovely chiffon cake with the icing of your choice, with tasteful decorations. Thank you. And now...bake, please!")So, that's all for now. I hope all is well with y'all.-K