The Marvel movies are like bananas

Revision update: I’m running through each chapter of the manuscript and trimming it down, with the (soft) goal of making each chapter half as long by taking out words and phrases. It’s a drastic benchmark that I haven’t reached on any of my chapters, but since reaching the goal isn’t really the point here anyway, I’m good with it.

Unrelated to anything, I’m in a weird headspace with regard to the Marvel cinematic universe. I’ve only seen three Iron Man movies and the first Thor film. I just cannot commit to watching anything else because there’s so much there, and trying to keep up with each new movie’s references, callbacks, and context means I’m going to have to buckle in for hours and hours of movie watching in a very particular order to really get what is going on in each one. For instance, with the third Iron Man movie, I had to look stuff up afterwards to make sense of the stuff that was being talked about. For most of it, I could only be half-tuned to the plot because I had so many gaps.

I run into this problem with any long-running series. It’s the main reason I have started Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. There are fourteen books in that series, and not one of them is shorter than two hundred thousand words. I can’t commit to that! I barely have enough time to read as it is; getting locked into a four-million-word saga is just too big of an ask. I get anxious buying too many bananas at the grocery store for fear of them rotting before I can eat them, and this is way worse than that. I don’t really have a point to all of this, just making note of I problem I’ve got.
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-J. E. Ayers