Hello, friends.
We’re racing toward the end of the school year and I’m excited but also a little sad and a lot stressed. There’ll be some major changes happening at the workplace including leaving my classroom after ten years. Student art and projects have come off the walls with still more to do. I’ll have to go through all the stuff I’ve accumulated over the last 17 years that went from one room to another with me and see what stays and what goes. And then there’ll be some other major work as I help build a new program. In other words, again, lots of stress.
Still, at least the end of the year is screaming toward me and I’ll be trying to really get into some major writing and creating. More on that another time (maybe).
Anyway, let’s get into today’s update.
Welcome to the 72nd installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and using why too much technology is bad.
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Anyway, let’s do this!
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Work continues on Project: Monster’s edits. I’m just over a quarter of the way through the book and things are good. I had a brief technology scare early this week when I tested editing it with my Huion drawing tablet on my computer. It nearly wiped out almost 100 pages of edits from the PDF that I’d done on my iPad. Luckily, none of the edits had actually been wiped out but I decided to do a backup anyway.
If you read the sneak-peek at The Monster in the Closet that I posted last year, I can say that there are some definite differences now. Nothing major. There aren’t any new characters or situations but there’s tightening up, getting rid of asides that, while providing some color to the overall narrative, aren’t important.
Here’s a little look:
This is a good example of getting rid of things that I felt added to the overall sense of who the characters were and what their situations were but don’t really add much to the overall story.
I don’t believe a novel must be nothing but story and plot that moves things forward. Long stories should be allowed to move around a little, it’s part of what makes them fun to read, but there’s a fine line with that. As I read the above passage, found myself a little bored by the stuff I removed. I could’ve punched up the writing, I’m sure, but since I’m trying to lose 50 to 100 pages, cutting seemed the best option.
So that’s what this past week has been like working on the edits.
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In this spot over on Patreon, I a wrote little about some art things I’ve been doing. The only way to know about it is to become a Patron!
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Tomorrow will have been my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I know one of the things my mother was sad about when she died was that she wouldn’t get to make it to 50 with my father. The two of them loved each other in such a wholesome way. Mom could be a challenge and my father could be set in his ways, their nine years apart were truly the difference between two generations. Still, I never saw them fight. Not for real, anyway.
Dad misses her immensely. A huge piece of him is gone now but he’s doing pretty well, all things considered.
But it bears saying: happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.
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Late Night with the Devil was as fun as I’d been reading online. A fun movie that got under my skin.
The new season (series) of Doctor Who is terrific. I’m not one of those people who are terribly judgmental about things I like and have been enjoying Doctor Who straight along. That said, the stories that Russel T. Davies and his colleagues are telling are definitely monumentally Doctor Who and this week’s episode, “Dot and Bubble,” is one of the best treatises I’ve seen regarding social media and the vapid diseducation* of so many young people, particularly those with the means to do good. Take the unwillingness to learn or do anything outside what makes one comfortable, add a dollop of racism, and you have an amazing prosecution of social media and so many influencers.
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* I see that diseducation is not recognized as a word, but this is what I mean. Social media tends to take what education people have and throw it away, making them dumber, though that don’t realize it. It reminds me of what Harlan Ellison warned us about in The Glass Teat books when he wrote about the dangers of television. It’s even worse, though.
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And I’ve come to the end of another exciting update. Thank you for reading!
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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