Author: Kelly Sedinger

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NOW where the hell have I been???

Yup, that was another unplanned hiatus, folks. This time it was technological in nature: my computer failed spectacularly eight days ago, to the tune of doing a factory reset on the machine (basically, returning it to “Just out of the box” status), after a diagnostic tool told me that my hard drive was failing. This was irritating news after owning this machine for just nine months, so after I got it up and running again with the factory reset, I took it to the Geek Squad for examination and consultation before I risked putting all my stuff back on it and moving on. Luckily, as I am exceedingly religious about backing up my stuff, the only annoying data loss I experienced was a few downloaded teevee shows I was still waiting to watch; these I can grab again or even stream if I need to.

I did learn something, though: apparently Dropbox, which I use as my secondary cloud-based backup, is a massive hog of hard drive resources! And my practice up to now has been to have it running in the background at all times, which means that I’m basically maxing out my poor hard drive each time I use my computer. Ouch. I’m still using Dropbox, but now I’ll only be launching it once a week to sync newly-saved files, and then it’ll be shut down again. After that it took several days of leaving my machine on, plugged in, and connected to the fast WiFi at work to re-download all my stuff from Dropbox and from Google Drive, and to reinstall some of the software I use. Now I’m pretty much back to normal except that I have not re-downloaded Scrivener yet. I am holding off because the folks behind Scrivener are insisting that August 30 will be the drop-dead date by which Scrivener 3 for Windows will finally be released. I’m skeptical on this point (the ongoing delay of Scrivener 3 for Windows after the program’s release for Mac almost two years ago is a sore point with me), but I’m willing to wait, especially since at this point I’m not planning to do any drafting work until fall. Scrivener is the program where I do all of my drafting when it comes to fiction, so I can wait to get it back. (Unless they miss another deadline, in which case I may say “To hell with it” and go back to using LibreOffice for everything.

Anyway, that’s the reason for the complete radio silence on the blog front. As of today, though, things seem back to normal (I hope!), so…onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

My computer is back up and running, yay! But my desk is a freaking pit and I need to clean it today, boo! #thewritinglife

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Tone Poem Tuesday

As I write this, it’s still Tuesday! Wow!

Romanian composer George Enescu is endlessly fascinating, straddling the line between Romanticism and Modernism. He is probably the greatest composer to ever spring from Romania, and much of his work is of nationalistic origin (particularly his ever-wonderful Romanian Rhapsodies, which are favorites. This piece, though, is pure Modernism through and through, with meditative passages and sharp dissonances and a pervading sense of mystery. Enescu wrote Vox Maris over more than twenty years, and apparently he did not live to hear its first performance. I haven’t been able to find a great deal of information about it, but it is indeed a fascinating listen and an amazing piece of orchestral and choral tone painting.

Here is Vox Maris by George Enescu.

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Something for Thursday (Friday Edition)

OK, I need to find some consistency here again…I’ll get back to that Song Challenge thing soon, but for now, here’s a favorite musical number of mine. This comes from the movie High Society, which is a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, this time with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly in the parts played originally by Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and with Frank Sinatra playing the nosy reporter originated by Jimmy Stewart in the original. High Society justifies its musical numbers by relocating the story to Newport, Rhode Island and a jazz festival that takes place there as Kelly’s Tracy Samantha Lord is remarrying after earlier divorcing Crosby. It’s a fine movie, and the musical numbers are all terrific (the film also makes good use of Louis Armstrong and his band), but I’m somehow never quite able to find Bing Crosby convincing as a romantic lead, and when you make a musical with Crosby and Sinatra, it seems odd to me that those two gentlemen are brought together for only one number.

But at least it’s a great number.

“Well Did You Evah” lampoons the kind of gossip that takes place in the rich-folks circles of those eastern communities, and the song itself catalogs the growth of a friendship in about four minutes between two men who are vaguely antagonistic toward each other at the beginning. By the time they reach the song’s final flourishes both Crosby and Sinatra appear to be having a blast, with one of my favorite lyrics ever: “Have you heard? It’s in the stars–next July we collide with Mars!”

Here’s “Well Did You Evah.”

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Tone Poem Tuesday

I don’t believe I’ve heard this work before, or even of the composer, Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico. Revueltas lived 1899 to 1940, and was not only short-lived but also a late bloomer, so his output is not large. The work Sensemaya is based on a poem that is in turn inspired by religious cults in the Afro-Cuban culture, with a blend of African and Cuban chants. The work is strikingly rhythmic and redolent of spiritual dance and chant, with rattling percussion instruments and insistent drive. Its energy, constantly growing over the work’s roughly eight minutes, is compulsive. Here is Sensemaya by Silvestre Revueltas.

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Where the hell have I been?

Why, right here.

DONE! To the beta readers the second draft goes! #amwriting #writersofinstagram #sciencefiction #spaceopera #forgottenstars

And while I’ve been right here, I’ve been focusing on applying first edits to The Savior Worlds in order to be able to get the book out to the beta readers, and today, off it went! Whew.

So, what have you all been up to?

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Something for Thursday

I missed last week, boo! But I’m back this week, yay!

Setting aside the Song Challenge thing for a while, here’s a nifty bit of movie music…for a teevee movie, anyway. Back in 1983 there was a miniseries on NBC (a two-part movie, basically) called V, in which alien “visitors” appeared in giant ships to contact humanity. Their stated reason for visiting was benign, or so they said, but they quickly turned out to be liars who took over the planet and assumed control as they started robbing the Earth of its liquid water (which, the show told us, is “the rarest, most precious commodity you can imagine, and Earth is blessed with an abundance of it”) and harvest humans for food. Now, ignore the ludicrous nature of the show’s SF premise (there’s a shitload of water out there in the universe), the show was a lot of fun and it had some sober things to say about the nature of resistance in the face of evil. But the first installment left things unresolved, so along the next year came V: The Final Battle, which wrapped up the story over three nights. After some really convoluted stuff in the plot department (the first series was much more tightly written), the humans finally achieved victory by developing a biological agent that would poison the Earth’s atmosphere to the aliens (the “Visitors”) but be harmless to humans. The humans dispersed this stuff via hot air balloons in a nifty sequence that was pretty entertaining for a war show, eschewing a giant final battle for a more passively peaceful way of depicting victory. (There was action stuff that played out alongside this, of course, because you had to have some kind of action finale.)

The scene in which the balloons launch at dawn is accompanied by this music, which is as charmingly 1980s as you can get, with synths and drum samples and sounds that mimic whale songs, before the soaring melody arrives. It’s hard not to be cheered and buoyed by music like this. This is the kind of thing I grew up with, folks!

Here’s “The Balloon Theme” from V: The Final Battle.

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Letchworth in Spring

The other day we traveled to Letchworth State Park, a stunning place where the Genesee River flows through a massive, deep canyon and over three cliffs on its way north to Lake Ontario. It was a stunning, perfect day to be in one of the most beautiful places I know.

Here’s what Letchworth looks like in spring.

Canyon at Letchworth #letchworthstatepark #geneseeriver #nature #hiking #trees

Middle Falls at #letchworthstatepark. Water is high and muddy! Lots of mist in the air, and the falls' roar is much louder. #waterfall #nature #hiking #trees #river

Rainbow in the mist #letchworthstatepark #waterfall

Letchworth canyon, looking north #letchworthstatepark #ilovenewyork #geneseeriver #nature #hiking #trees

Upper falls #letchworthstatepark #ilovenewyork #geneseeriver #nature #hiking #waterfall

Wolf Creek, Letchworth #letchworthstatepark #ilovenewyork #geneseeriver #wolfcreek #nature #hiking #trees #stream #runningwater

The Wife, the Dee-oh-gee, and me #Cane #dogsofinstagram #greyhound #greyhoundsofinstagram #letchworthstatepark #ilovenewyork #geneseeriver #nature #hiking #waterfall #overalls #dungarees #biboveralls #pointerbrand #overallsarelife #hickorystripe

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Tone Poem Tuesday

It’s interesting how many of the great composers push others out of the limelight, isn’t it? If not for Antonin Dvorak, likely the greatest of Czech composers, the music of Bedrich Smetana might be better known today. Dvorak’s work is always more refined and frequently touched by genius, where Smetana’s is earthier, maybe just a bit less memorably melodic, and occasionally awkward. That doesn’t make it bad, though–not by a longshot. Here is one of the tone poems from Smetana’s symphonic cycle Ma Vlast (My Country), “From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields.”

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