The Wonderful World of Was: March
💃🚽🕺 It's Potty Dance Day! 🕺🚽💃
Happy Potty Dance Day, my lovely people!
Yes, today, 5 March, is a sacred day dedicated to the potty dance. While Potty Dance Day is only celebrated in the United States, in the spirit of inclusivity, I think we can celebrate it the world over. If those of us not living Stateside band together and promote this momentous occasion, I believe we can create a movement that has the world partaking in its joy. For those of you unfamiliar with this time-honoured tradition, the potty dance is an entertaining way that anybody, regardless of their dance skill, can signal their need to urinate, or wait in anguish as they wait for access to the bathroom. Because I’m not going to upload a video of me doing the potty dance, I’ll leave it to the Teen Titans to demonstrate (and perhaps insert an earworm into your head).
Now that I’ve shown new readers what a highbrow newsletter this is, let’s dive in.
Writings
After taking the bulk of January off writing, I was back in full force in February. While I spent the bulk of my month focused on editing Till Death Do Us Party, before I leapt into that, I got ahead with my book reviews, wrapping up all the books scheduled to hit the website until the end of March. Naturally, I stopped there, and since my focus on Till Death Do Us Party is all-consuming, I’ll no doubt wait until late February to start on March’s review, absolutely destroying my head start.
How consuming, exactly, is my all-consuming focus? Throughout the month, I edited the chapters two through twenty-two, from thirty-seven. I’m quite happy with what I’ve gotten through, and I’m quietly confident I’ll be able to get through the rest by the end of the month. It’s a fairly light touch edit, where I’m cleaning up the text (but not the filthy language), where I’m removing more words than I’m adding, if not by much. At this stage, I anticipate the final novel will come in at around 130,000 words or so—at least until an editor hacks and slashes the word count down.
If you’re wondering what’s up with the word cloud I’ve used instead of that graph with my words and editing hours, it’s because I discovered ProWritingAid can generate them, and I’m now slightly obsessed. The image above is taken from Chapter 22.
All in all, it was a reasonably productive month. I wrote 25,650 words, and spent 51 hours and 45 minutes editing.
Isn’t Grogu adorable?
I’m a Star Wars fan. Not an uberfan, not a megafan, not even a superfan, just a fan. I enjoy the movies as well as the various TV shows, and I also play some of the games. My son, however, is a bigger fan. While people in my age group have the original trilogy and those younger than me have those dreadful prequels to call their own, children have the TV series. Sure, they also have the sequel trilogy, but if my son’s any indication, it’s all about the TV series. Namely, The Mandalorian. As I write this, it’s been a few hours since the first episode hit Disney+, and a few hours since, for the first time, I streamed something within minutes of it being available.
The episode’s fun, as they generally are, but it seems as though it was filmed with the express purpose of showing us how adorable Grogu is. I imagine it’s the first season they started work on after the world met him, and this has resulted in more focus on his adorableness. The episode threw out moment after moment of Grogu being cute, giving the audience plenty of moments to “aww” over. Still, until the show decides to have Din Djarin permanently remove his helmet, they can’t trade on Pedro Pascal’s adorableness. Still, we have The Last of Us for that (which I’ll need to get to at some point…).
Cal Kestis is less adorable
Earlier, I mentioned how all-encompassing my writing’s been. One of the many things that’s fallen by the wayside over the last couple of years is my gaming. A sad side effect of this was that I never got through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I played it for a little while, but didn’t progress very far before all my gaming time became writing time.
After taking the time to play Gotham Knights during my writing break, I’ve decided I need to play some more, albeit slowly. So before the sequel comes out, I have Fallen Order reinstalling, ready to jump back into. Sure, Cal isn’t as cute a computer generated character as Grogu, but from what I played, the game was pretty spectacular.
The unextended DC Universe
As I’ve long established in this newsletter, I’m a fanboy. And you may recall last month, I touched upon the first projects in James Gunn’s slate of DC films. No longer the DC Extended Universe (not that it officially ever was), the DC Universe is Warner Bros trying to make that Marvel money from its slate of superheroes, in a time when not even Disney can make that Marvel money anymore.
The couple of paragraphs in that newsletter wasn’t enough, so I wrote a blog post about it. It’ll hopefully be the first post where I just write about shit that interests me, but we’ll see.
Saturday Snippets
Yesterday was the first Saturday of the month, which means February’s Saturday Snippets are now live. If you’re wondering why I waited until March to post February’s snippets, it’s because I posted them on Twitter throughout February. If you don’t want to wait for them, you can follow me over there, where I don’t even wait until Saturday.
I have eleven snippets to share with you, all of them taken from Till Death Do Us Party, draft 4.1, as I work on it.
Natasha Lyonne’s poker face
I’ve used this newsletter to write about Natasha Lyonne. I’ve used this newsletter to write about Rian Johnson. So, with those two working together, of course I’m going to waste a little space writing about them.
Plenty of words on the internet have already been dedicated to Poker Face, and having seen the first five episodes of the season at the time of writing, I’ll just reiterate what everybody else is telling you to do: watch it. It’s a smart, funny, detective TV series where the fun isn’t in trying to solve the mystery, but watch how Natasha Lyonne’s amateur sleuth solves the mystery. Oh, along with the characters, performances, and writing. There’s a lot of fun to be had. The show’s reminiscent of those old cosy detective series of decades past, but with far more profanity.
And the first episode alone features more penises than the entire series of Murder, She Wrote.
Book reviews
I published no less than seven book reviews throughout February, so I have a little bit to get through. It’s an eclectic mix, and if you’re looking to support an independent author, there could be something to your tastes.
The Rebellion Awakens: Sentrys of Terrene: Book I is the latest book in T.C. Marti’s Renegades Epic, comprising multiple series across his Elementals universe. It’s an entertaining science fantasy adventure that works perfectly well if read in isolation from the other books (though it is still the beginning of a trilogy), while rewarding readers who have read the other books.
Five of the seven books I reviewed comprise Hayley Reese Chow’s Odriel’s Heirs trilogy. No, it’s not a five-part trilogy; Odriel’s Heirs, Idriel’s Children and Time’s Orphan are the core novels, while Burning Shadows and Night of Ash are novellas adding more depth to the world. If you’re a fan of high fantasy and young adult coming of age tales (or even just one of those genres), this is a great multigenerational tale set against a wonderful fantasy backdrop.
Last, and by no means least, Endgame by Steve Shahbazian is a cyberpunk novel that throws in philosophy and humanity’s relationship with religion into the mix. It offers the reader plenty to chew on, as it provides a look at a future where faith is commodified by corporations, in a tale that moves from street-level mystery into the metaphysical.
Did I get through a newsletter without mentioning Batman?
I mean, I posted a video with Robin in it, and I linked to a blog post where I discussed Batman, but fuck it. I’ll take it as a win.
And because it’s important to go out on top, the time has come for me to bid you adieu. I sincerely hope you have a wonderful time busting those potty dance moves.
TTFN,
Was