Late Morning, Sunday, April 28, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire
Hi, everyone. It’s a gray, chilly, and rainy Sunday morning here in rural New England. Currently, the temperature is 54°F (12°C) under light rain. (We had some thunderstorms earlier – the first I’ve seen since I moved from Florida.) With humidity at 79% and the wind blowing from the south-southwest at 4 MPH (7 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 61°F (16°C). Today’s forecast calls for thunderstorms to pass through the area and a high of 72°F (22°C). Tonight, we can expect scattered rain showers. The low will be 47°F (8°C).
Weekend Update, Part the First: A Day of (Enforced) Rest
Yesterday was a day of – enforced – rest for me as far as Reunion: Coda was concerned. I wanted to make up for not working on Friday, and I had some good, or at least decent, story ideas for the next scene in Chapter 15, but it was not to be. I was still tired, and every time I thought about going to the .docx file with the manuscript, my brain said, “No way, Jose.” And believe me – I tried several times to coax my little gray cells into doing at least some creative work…but to no avail.
The only novel-related thing I managed to do was reset the page size on the manuscript file from 8.5 inches X 11 inches to 6 inches by nine inches. This is the size that Kindle Direct Publishing prefers for paperbacks; I remember having a hard time fiddling with the page sizing when I submitted Reunion: A Story to KDP, both in the not-so-great first edition back in 2018 and when I republished the revised edition that’s currently available on Amazon.
The smaller page size doesn’t affect the content in any way, but it does increase the number of pages of my first novel. Instead of 200+ pages, Reunion: Coda now boasts 359 pages, including the title page (but excluding the “front matter” and “back matter” pages that I need to create before I publish the book).
“You Were the Chosen One!” – Rewatching Obi-Wan Kenobi on 4K UHD Blu-ray
So what did I do yesterday – besides reconfiguring the page size on the Reunion: Coda file on Word?
Well, I received the Collector’s Edition of Lucasfilm’s Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Complete Series, the six-part limited series that chronicles some of the events in Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi’s life post-Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, including his first (and penultimate) lightsaber duel with the black-armored Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen/voice of James Earl Jones).
I remember watching this show, which is a one-off project (thus the marketing subtitle on the home media release, “The Complete Series”) when it premiered on Disney+ in 2022, when I lived in Florida. I enjoyed it then, and even though I could theoretically watch it on my smaller 4K UHD TV (it connects to the Internet easier than the one in my bedroom), that set is not set up here (much to my chagrin), I got the 4K UHD Blu-ray set from Walmart.
I didn’t choose to buy it there exclusively for the steelbook packaging, but because I thought it would be nigh impossible to buy on Amazon, even on pre-order. Amazon and The Walt Disney Company have disputed the e-retailer’s pricing for Disney merchandise, especially when it comes to Star Wars pre-orders, with Amazon wanting to sell stuff at a slightly lower price than Disney likes, so now Walmart and Best Buy (who go along with Disney’s pricing) are usually better for pre-ordering. (I found this out when Disney finally agreed to release The Mandalorian’s first two seasons on home media last December. I wanted to buy at least the Season One set that month, but it coincided with my move here, and I didn’t care to add a ton of credit card debt to the one I already have, so I demurred. By the time I could afford to buy at least the Season One set, third-party sellers had bought out Amazon’s stock and resold the Season One and Two sets at higher prices.)
Anyway, because I wasn’t working on the novel, and because I had not watched Obi-Wan Kenobi since I’d watched it “back home” in ’22, I spent most of my Saturday watching five of the six parts of the series. I might have been able to watch the whole thing had I not fallen asleep watching Part V. I’ll probably watch it later along with Part VI, provided that there’s no thunderstorm activity when I try to get some TV-watching time in.
Well, that’s all the news – or what passes for news in my life – I have to share, so I’ll close by reminding you that if you have not bought the Kindle edition of Reunion: A Story, it’s now available for free from now till April 1 – and that’s no joke!
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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