Sometimes life does its own thing: Recent goings-on
Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, #18
I swear, really, on pain of something, that I did not intend to go a month between instances of this newsletter. Sigh!
Real Life has offered up its usual round of unexpected Things, some of which can be called Frustrations and others Obstacles; there were A Few Welcome Opportunities, and there was also a Farewell. (To a restaurant, specifically…more on that below.) It’s been a rough go, this writing thing, but while I’ve managed to keep some progress going on my Work-In-Progress and also maintain an almost-daily posting regimen on my site, so the only thing that’s really suffered has been…this newsletter.
That being the case, this is going to be something of a catch-up issue, full of linky and update goodness. Here goes:
ITEM the FIRST: Writing Progress
My current WIP (that’s Work-In-Progress, for those of you who don’t hang with writers much, and that might be wise, we’re a strange lot, prone to odd moods, sudden shifts of emotion, and an occasional desire for unusual food and drink) is an essay collection focusing on Star Wars. Much of the content is drawn from posts I have written in my blogs over the years, first on Byzantium’s Shores and more recently on ForgottenStars.net. I’m not just copying-and-pasting the posts to the book, though; I’m revisiting many of them from the ground up, heavily revising and in some cases openly rewriting them as I find that certain opinions of mine have changed over the years. Working on this book is a fun exercise; it’s nice to work on a large project that’s not fiction, actually, and revisiting think-pieces from earlier generations of my brain is sometimes a fascinating trip through time. (And, it must be admitted, sometimes a frustrating trip through time: “Why on Earth did I think that?” is a thing I occasionally find myself muttering while digging through stuff I wrote about Star Wars back in, say, 2007.
I do have a title in mind for the book, but I won’t utter that for a while. I’d like to have this book ready for release in 2024. I’m enjoying the process enough that I might follow it up with a James Bond essay collection sometime after!
ITEM the SECOND: Wrapping up the Rachmaninoff newsletters.
I will continue writing about Sergei Rachmaninoff during the rest of this year on my site, but my Four Works series of newsletters still has one installment to go, and it’s a doozy. I’m actually writing that one longhand before I port it to Substack, because in honesty, it’s a piece I’ve been intending to write quite literally for years now. My deep dive into Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony is coming, but I’m not sure when.
ITEM the THIRD: Recent adventures and things from my site.
My main base of operations online continues to be my website, ForgottenStars.net. I try to post there nearly every day, even if all I have to post is a photo or a quick link to something I found on YouTube. The balance of this newsletter is, therefore, a Roster of Things that Appeared on My Site That You May Have Missed.
A: A Trip to Toronto.
The Wife and I love Toronto, but even so, we hadn’t been there in over a decade, for various reasons. So, at the end of April, we finally went. The city is very, very different now than it was when last we went, and that visit was long enough after our previous visit that there were enormous changes then, too. It amazes me that Buffalo, which for all its charms remains one of America’s poorer cities and pretty much a backwater, is just ninety minutes’ drive away from the continent’s fourth-largest metropolis by population and a place that is seeing phenomenal growth. I chronicled our visit here and here: what we did, what we saw, and some ruminations on the challenges we faced in exercising traveling muscles that have atrophied (and some other actual physical difficulties thereof).
Many more Toronto photos (and some Niagara-on-the-Lake ones) at the two links above!
B. We saw Grease.
I mean, not for the first time! We’ve watched Grease a ton of times over the years, but we saw it for only the third time in theaters, and I gave thoughts on the movie, here. Grease remains The Word!
C. Our 26th Wedding Anniversary!
We didn’t do anything to actually celebrate on our anniversary, because we usually celebrate by going to Rochester for the Lilac Festival (see below!). But I did mark the occasion on the site, here. Many photos! Here are two that aren’t in the post:
D. Our afore-mentioned trip to the Lilac Festival!
Which was…a washout, because there was one day in May when it rained a whole lot, and that was the day. Alas! Read about it, with many more photos, here.
E. A rant about a game show.
One great thing about a blog of your own is that you get to rant about anything you want! In this case, it was the ending of an episode of Jeopardy! which really got under my skin. Read about it here. I’m still irritated about it!
F. Every Memorial Day, I write about a man I never met.
A man named Larry Havers died in Vietnam in 1967. I repost about him every year.
G. A restaurant we liked closed.
No, a restaurant closing is not particularly newsworthy, but it still sucks! The place doesn’t seem to have closed due to financial difficulty but out of a need for the owners to reduce their workload as a young family, and I can certainly sympathize with that. I wrote about our last visit to Compass Run here.
H. I found myself in partial agreement with Ben Shapiro.
I know, I was shocked, too. Read about that here.
I. I finally returned to Chestnut Ridge Park.
This was a pretty emotional trip for me, for many reasons—but mainly because Chestnut Ridge is a park I visited frequently with our beloved greyhound Cane, who died last September. This was my first visit there since the last time I took him up there, last July. Read about it here. Many photos from a beautiful day at the park…and I took time to wear wildflowers in my overalls.
And that should catch you all up on recent life events, for the most part! Look for another newsletter in a week or two, depending…and in the meantime, may the Force be with you!
Exeunt,
-K.