Second Sundays - July 2022
- Vanessa M Therrien
- Sep 11, 2023
- 3 min read
Happy First Second Sunday!
Thank you for joining me in this new experiment. Here are my five things I thought you would enjoy this month!
It's Camp NaNoWriMo season! Unfortunately, I spent most of this first week laid up with tweaked muscles that made it very uncomfortable to sit or stand for more than a few minutes, so I got a delayed start on Dragonstone revisions, but I have started! As in previous years, I'm tracking my progress through the NaNoWriMo website to keep me accountable and to get periodically rewarded with cool little badges.
Right now, I mostly just want to get through scene 1 this month, and if I'm able to achieve more, that'll be an extra win.
I also went back and did some re-designs for a few creatures. There is a character from each one of these species that appears in Dragonstone, but the designs are mostly just a loose representation of each animal rather than a character portrait. I just wanted something more finalized and colored to look at while I write.
I finished The Silmarillion! I'll admit that the first few chapters are a bit beastly to get through because of all the new names that are very similar to one another (such as Feanor, Finarfin, and Fingolfin), but once I made it a habit to check the family trees in the back of the book the reading became much easier. All in all, the stories were very enjoyable and illuminating, and I'm looking forward to reading some of them more in-depth in The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien. But for now, the next book on the list for the First Age is Unfinished Tales.
I also want to share exciting news for Tolkien fans - we have two new books coming! The first is an edition of The Silmarillion illustrated with Tolkien's own paintings.😱 I have the illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings that came out last year, and let me tell you, it is GORGEOUS, so I know this one will be too.
The second book is The Fall of Numenor, which will be a more complete and detailed account of events in the Second Age, which we have not had before! (Except perhaps in the Histories of Middle-Earth series, which I have not read yet.)
Both books come out in November and are available for pre-order everywhere. I already ordered mine, of course, and now I'm counting down the days!
Being laid up for a few days wasn't all unproductive. I went down some random tv show rabbit holes looking for something new and stumbled across "Ancient Top Ten" on Hulu. I was seven episodes in and in and out of napping when I heard something about an astrological clock. Astronomy is the most celebrated of the sciences in Quaison, so I was suddenly up and paying attention for this one.
The episode is called "Ancient Greek Tech" and it specifically talked about the Antikythera mechanism (first picture), which was essentially an Ancient Greek astronomical clock that could predict celestial events. Naturally, I did a quick search for the mechanism and discovered other astronomical clocks like this one in Prague (second picture). Isn't it gorgeous?!
I created a new section on Pinterest for Quaison technology and saved the Wikipedia pages there if you'd like to learn more.
Since it is Camp NaNoWriMo, I want to toot that horn again for a second. It really is a fun way to track your writing progress.
But also, here are some "studio" snapshots of what I have on hand to help me this month as I go through revisions.
Music is in the background of pretty much everything I do, and I'm very intentional with the types of music I pick depending on the activity. Since I'm back to writing, I thought I'd share my top albums for the scene I'm revising at the moment. These will change as I hop between settings, and now that I think of it, it might be fun to create specific playlists to share in the future. But for now, here are the links to the albums on Spotify:
Comentarios