My first podcast (yeah, I’m late to this party) turned out to be a doozy. I’ve listened to most of Sold a Story while on my new Happy Hour WalksTM, and consider my mind blown. I had absolutely no idea that this war over how to teach kids to read was happening. Please, save us all from zealots, true believers, evangelists and marketers. The story of how a wrong idea poisoned US education or decades is…astonishing.
The “Happy Hour Walks” thing is my attempt to reverse a decades-long bad habit. Instead of settling in around 5pm, relaxing and having a drink, I’m getting out and taking a long walk. Turns a negative (health-wise) into a positive. And so far, so good.
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Finished my proposal project yesterday. It was frustrating – everyone thinks they are an expert writer and editor. I had half a dozen people going into the document and changing my work into something…worse. Lots of nonsense, gratuitous changes of “happy to glad”. And *everyone* who tries to use the word “comprise” in a sentence fucks it up. At least I get paid to fix and re-fix my wanna-be editors’ errors. And now I can get back to some creative writing.
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We’ve watched The Wheel of Time on Amazon the last week or so. It’s my second time through season one, and of course season two is brand new. I like it more than I did the first time. The events in the series sometimes follow the books closely and sometimes not at all. Lan is completely different than I imagined, Moraine more somber/serious than I remember, and the Matt stories are just unrecognizable. Liandrin is a central character in the TV series, but not so much in the books. The series *has* made me consider going back and reading the books again, but…15 books, 12,000 pages, 4.4 million words! It’s a big hill to climb. (Good source for WoT stats here.)
My brother Mike hates the series, but I’m coming around to liking it. There’s no way to translate that much material from word to screen without changing a lot. If Jordan were alive, watching the series would probably kill him. Tough to see your creation re-interpreted.