Gregeration X Newsletter January 7, 2023 – Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is treating you well so far. I’m fresh off a two-week vacation in which I caught up on sleep, spent some time organizing the house, reading, watching movies, and spending time with family and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in several years. All in all, it was a wonderful holiday season.

I only watched one movie “at the theater” over the holidays, that was Avatar: The Way of Water. Regardless of whether you enjoy James Cameron and his movies, there is one thing the Avatar movies get right, and that is immersion. For me, immersion is one of the main reasons I watch a movie. I want the filmmaker to take me to another world (or time) for two, or in this case, over three hours. The animation, special effects, and 3D really make getting lost in the world of Pandora very easy.

I watched the movie in a Regal 4DX theater. It was my first time seeing a feature-length movie in this format. Previously I’ve seen similar things at Disneyland (Honey, I Shrank the Audience), but the experience was only around 20 minutes.

The 4DX experience, which includes seats that tilt, shake, vibrate, pulse, spray water, and puff air, enhanced the immersion in some ways, especially in scenes where the characters were flying or floating, but almost as often took me out of the action. Some of the shaking seemed to come at weird times or was overblown.

If you’ve never seen a 4DX movie, it’s certainly worth experiencing to see if you like it. I probably won’t rush back to that format soon, but I look forward to watching Avatar: The Way of Water in a more traditional 2D or 3D format on a high-quality screen in the next few weeks.

Mechhaven Missives

In terms of editing Mechhaven Book 4: Rally Point, I’m a few chapters ahead of where I thought I’d be at this time, which feels great. I have five more chapters to review in my first editing pass. I plan to finish those this weekend or early next week.

What comes next? Once I finish my first editing pass in which I primarily concentrate on obvious spelling, grammatical, and readability errors, I also look for areas of the story that need work. The next step is for me to write a few additional chapters to help flesh out the story. I’m looking forward to starting on this next week!

Featured Authors

I have three featured authors this week. Please take a look and support them if you can!

Zedger: Edge of Zion (Hybrid Genesis Book 1)

Elysia Lumen Strife

War is in their DNA. Marci, ex-commander turned rebel, aims to destroy the Astral’s hybrid genesis program which captures her people and builds them into soldiers for their armies. Astrals, those of High-born blood, not mutated from the toxins and radiation, rule from their protected cities with savage weaponry and the ranks of redesigned Tellurians.