Category: A Whole Lot of Running

Bridge To Terabithia, where do I even begin with this book? I found it by accident in the library at my elementary school (the KY one instead of the AZ one). I had been looking for something else entirely and found Bridge To Terabithia instead. I was always the last kid out of the library so I had to hurry because the rest of my class was waiting on me. So I grabbed it and took it home and proceeded to have my entire world wrecked. I think I read it four times in the week I had it.

I’ll try to explain a little more about that without getting into massive spoiler territory for anyone who hasn’t read it. Bridge To Terabithia is a book about the power of imagination. It is also a coming of age story. Our protagonist is a boy kind of stuck, wanting something else, something different, but not necessarily having the ability to change much right now. There’s a multitude of reasons for it. His family isn’t that well off and he’s got at least four sisters that are named in the text. There are expectations he’s supposed to meet.

And then he meets the force of nature that is his new neighbor and there’s all of a sudden light at the end of the tunnel that he can almost reach. There’s a glimmer of hope that he’s able to see. That he doesn’t maybe have to stay stuck, that it’s actually possible to get out.

That was really important to kid me.

Coming back to this book as a grown-up, I also love that it emphasizes that once you get out, you reach a hand down and pull up others who are looking to make their own way out and free. All in all, there’s a bittersweet magical quality to the book that leaves you a bit different after you read it.

So I am a little behind with this, I know. But this past week/weekend I was finally able to finish The Originals s5 and the first season of Legacies. This is also your SPOILER WARNING.

Holy wow, Batman.

I mean we knew that things were going to be bad after the way that s4 ended and to know that there was going to be a time skip on top of this being the last season of Originals? The showrunners aren’t exactly known for their happily ever afters. So I was already braced for things to get deep down and dirtier than even what we’d seen before. The show did not disappoint there and neither did the cast.

The amount of emotion that each of them put into every moment was fantastic and it was a good way to send the show off. Certain moments had me sniffling into the couch. It was a really fascinating look at the different factions and how far they’d come since the beginning and how far certain characters had come.

One of my favorite moments is when Vincent marshalls the New Orleans coven and gets rid of the Ancestral Well, putting all the Ancestors to peace at last, and letting go of that power sink. It was a good moment for him and the right decision if the coven wanted to move ahead.

While I hated losing some of the characters that I really loved, it was a good send off to see Klaus and Elijah going out on their own terms together. And for New Orleans to really recover/bounce back from the faction wars between the big 3 and then between the Mikaelsons and the very Nazi-esque faction of blood purists – the Mikaelson vampires needed to go as well. Klaus and Elijah are gone, Rebecca is marrying Marcel after she takes the cure and becomes human so she’ll eventually pass on. Marcel may or may not follow her. Kol is married to Davina and may well follow her when she eventually dies. Freya is human and while powerful, she’s not immortal. So with the Originals sorted out and Hope going back to the Salvatore School…it was the perfect tee-up to the first season of Legacies.

Legacies takes a look at the next generation with Hope Mikaelson , Josie and Lizzie Saltzman (yes those twins) and others. It’s a season about hard decisions and their consequences and like the title tells you, the legacies that get passed down from parent to child. We get to meet some amazing new characters and see exactly who and what and how things happen in a world post-TVD and TO. It also explains a little more about certain plot threads from The Originals and TVD.

It’s August. Which means that con prep has shifted into high gear(as of the writing of this blog post, I have 23 days, 5 hours, and 33 minutes according to the countdown on the con website .)

I have my tentative panel schedule and it looks awesome. Of course, with it comes a fair bit of homework. Pleasurable homework – this year it’s rewatching/finishing 4 seasons of TV, rereading two books, and writing an updated workshop as well.

You know, in addition to my day job, writing the novel, and also working on Patreon things.

It’s going to be Crazy Pants McGee here in the Hobbit House that Nerd Built which is just the way we like it (it’s also the reason we take September off to recover).

I’ll post sneak peeks of my schedule throughout the month so you can see some of the awesome fun stuff I’ll be doing over Labor Day weekend.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there as well! I’m in the program and on the website under my Muggle name. I’ll be in the app too as soon as this year’s version gets released.

It is always interesting to watch action movies when you are a child of the military-industrial complex. Growing up on military bases and in and around the DC-Metro area makes its mark on you. It’s a little weird to describe sometimes, but by both deliberate training and general osmosis, you become a little more sensitive to a whole host of things. You tend to notice different things that civilians don’t always pick up on.

So you pick up on a lot really quickly, because that’s a thing that keeps you alive in the real world, but those skills also transfer over to movie watching.

Especially action/adventure/spy movies (or shows). Which all of us have love/hate relationships with and none of us can actually stop watching them. It’s almost a game to spot the mole or spot that one flaw that is going to be SUPER critical in 5,4,3,2, now.

It gets even creepier when the thing takes place somewhere you know well. Winter Soldier is one of the finest pieces of action cinema that I’ve seen and it’s also one of the most chilling simply because I know that city and that terrain pretty intimately.

Olympus Has Fallen was literally breathtaking, not just because of the premise (which was terrifying on its own) but because of the response times. The little details in that film had some family members dissecting it and how it couldn’t work like that in real life for their own peace of mind.

MI-5/Spooks had some episodes that were similar in nature. The ones that were just a little too realistic and had us squirming uncomfortably on the couch because “there but for the Grace of God go I.”

The reason this thought came about was because my AR (Awesome Roomie) and I were watching an action movie (Stratton on Amazon Prime, I definitely recommend it) because I love action movies and she loves Tyler Hoechlin and we were both having audible reactions to some of it for really different reasons.

So which action movies/shows are your favorite? Let me know in the comments!

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind” – Kurt Vonnegut

**

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.  – For The Fallen,  Laurence Binyon