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The Writing Teacher in Summer

It has been a long time since I had the self-discipline to simply stop for the summer. There were always summer courses to teach, curricula to rewrite, etc. I promised myself, however, that this summer would be different. Yes, I’m spending a lot of effort on this blog, and I’ll put in big time preparing for fall classes, but this will be a more relaxed summer than most, time to do some other things:

  • I started the summer running sound effects for Mid-Ohio Opera. When the phone rang on stage, I was pushing the button. When lightning flashed and thunder rolled, I was pushing the button.
  • I spent a week at Disney in Florida with grandkids, my first trip there. I get the idea that I’m one of the last people in Ohio to get there for the first time (probably not true).
  • The highlight of July will be a bike trip on the Great Allegheny Passage bike trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, about 45 miles of riding a day. Fun stuff! Forests, trees, tunnels, rain, sunlight. And of course, to get ready, I had to take a two-hour bike ride every day. Great fun.
  • One evening project has been re-reading all the Harry Potter books. I read them when they first came out, 20+ years ago, but not since, and when I rewatch the movies (a good evening alternative to watching the dreadful news of the day on TV), I keep noticing odd things: plot holes, bits of dialog that make no sense. It turns out that almost all of these problems are resolved by reading the book.
  • When the newest Dune movie came out, I missed seeing it in a theater (alas), but I got my own DVD copy. I’ve been interested for years in how a written piece becomes a movie, so I began by re-reading the first Dune novel. The whole business of stagecraft is also very interesting to me, and YouTube has a lot of “How they did that” material that I’ve been watching. (The sound design people spent a week in Death Valley just to learn what a sandy desert sounds like!) It’s been really enjoyable to go into depth on this piece.

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