Musings & Thoughts for Friday, September 8, 2023, or, Summer Still Simmers on ‘Star Trek Day’ – and ‘Reunion’ Gets a Trailer AND a Review!

Late Morning, Friday, September 8, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, everyone.

Well, here we are on Friday, September 8, 2023, the last day of a holiday-abridged workweek and also the first week of both September and meteorological fall. Because of Labor Day, I still feel like this Friday feels more like a Thursday, and, as Arthur Dent says in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

(For those of you who are science-fiction fans or Star Trek fans, today is also “Star Trek Day” – the 57^th anniversary of Star Trek: The Original Series’ TV premiere on NBC.)

Even though it’s meteorological fall (traditional fall does not arrive until September 23 this year), summer continues to linger here in the subtropics. As I write this – by the time I publish this, the numbers will be somewhat different – the temperature outside is 84°F/29°C under mostly cloudy conditions. With humidity at a sticky 71% and the wind blowing from the south-southeast at 5 MPH/7 KMH, the heat index is 92°F/33°C. And while it’s not raining now, it soon will be – the current radar images show a mass of rain showers and storm cells moving into the Tampa Bay Area (TBA). Per today’s forecast, thunderstorms will move through the area, and the high will be 89°F/32°C.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

As you know, earlier this week, my friend Juan Carlos Hernandez and his production company in New York City, Popcorn Sky Productions, dropped a two-minute trailer for my novella, Reunion: A Story. I had quite a bit of personal involvement in its creation; when we all agreed that the video would focus on a brief excerpt from the book – in a film noir-like narrative with a voice over performance by Juan’s talented son Anthony James Hernandez – I got to pick the passage.

I also got to choose the musical cue – it’s titled “New Meditation” – that Popcorn Sky used as underscore, and I gave Juan the relevant information about the book’s pricing and availability, plus a few of the still images you’ll see in the finished trailer.

Other than that, though, the lion’s share of the credit goes to Popcorn Sky Productions for the wonderful blend of still images and motion picture footage, narration, and music. Juan, his wife Adria Kae Woomer-Hernandez, and their son A.J. have my undying affection, gratitude, and appreciation.

And, as if that weren’t enough, my friend and fellow ex-Epinions reviewer wrote her second review of Reunion (back in 2018, when I self-published the rougher version of the novella, she wrote one in Amazon’s product page) for her blog. She posted it this morning on her WordPress blog, Thoughts from the Mountaintop.

(One thing that you must know: Even though Patti and I are friends, she was as objective a reviewer as possible and wrote an honest appraisal of Reunion. If she had seen any issues, such as plot holes or inaccurate details about the 1980s parts of the novella, she would have pointed them out. Just sayin’…)  

Since the weather is deteriorating – not as bad as if, say, Hurricane Lee (now a Category Five storm) were headed hell-bent toward the TBA, but still… – I have a feeling that my midday break is going to start sooner – and last longer – than I’d like. The skies are getting darker – I can tell from the dimness of the light from outside – and I’ve already heard booms of thunder in the distance. I’ve acquired a healthy respect for thunderstorms and lightning strikes that some people laugh at, but I’ve lost a TV and a PC to lightning bolts that have struck near my last two homes in South Florida. So I’m going to wrap up this post and publish it before I log off for who knows how long. In the meantime, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the less rainy side of things.