I’m ready to call it a usable version 1.0. I’m sure there are bugs, but I’ll work those out as I use it more.

The only upgrades I did over the original are to add a second line so you can see the Y register, and it can display all 32 bits of binary without scrolling (wider “LCD”)

I wrote more than 200 tests, because the last thing a calculator app needs is to get the math wrong.

Submitted it to the app store (free). Now we wait for approval.

The first one was about five years ago. It has every problem you’d expect from someone who’d never written fiction. Flat dialogue, scenes that wander, characters that exist to serve the plot instead of the other way around. The bones are good, though. There’s a real story in there. I just didn’t know how to tell it yet.

The second was last November. Twenty-nine days, start to finish. Better, but the middle act drags, the villain is a cardboard cutout, and the romantic thread pays off too early, robbing the ending of the tension it needs. I learned more about pacing from writing that book than from anything I’ve read about writing.

This one I started in mid-February. A genre I don’t normally read, and I read a lot. I wanted to see what happens when you can’t lean on familiar patterns. And it turns out that’s where the real work is. Every scene forced me to think harder because I couldn’t coast on instinct. I noticed things about structure and rhythm I’d never have caught writing in a genre I’ve already internalized.

122,000 words in a month (424 pages). Around 4,000 words a day, mostly on breaks from work and in the evenings.

Somewhere around 60%, it all fell apart. It always does. You’re too deep to start over, not close enough to the end to see the shape of it, and every sentence feels wrong. You start to think maybe the whole thing was a mistake. That’s the wall. The trick is knowing the wall is normal and writing through it anyway, because the other side is where the book starts to come together. Pieces that seemed disconnected start clicking. Threads you planted fifty pages ago suddenly pay off. That feeling is hard to describe. It’s like the book knows something you don’t, and it’s been waiting for you to catch up.

I read through it twice when I was done. This is the first time I’ve been happy at the end. Not “happy for a first attempt.” Just happy.

The two main characters have clear arcs, and I identify with both, which is probably why I keep rereading it. That’s also the biggest problem. One of them has too much of me in it. I can feel it when I’m reading. The character stops being a character and starts being a journal entry with dialogue. A reader wouldn’t know that, but I do, and it pulls me out. Figuring out how to put yourself into a character without making them you is something I haven’t solved yet.

I don’t have aspirations to be a fiction writer. I’ve been writing online for 25 years, and I’m good with that. This was about learning the craft of storytelling by actually doing it. Writing bad scenes and sitting with them until I figured out why they were bad. There’s a feel for tension and pacing you can only get that way.

And it was about finishing something long and hard. Showing up every day for a month to the same project, through the parts that felt broken, through the days when I wanted to start something else, through the wall at 60%.

I got one copy printed. It’s amazing that you can get a book printed and bound for $19, including shipping. Nobody else is going to read it. That was never the point. But the progression from book one to three is clear, and each one is a different kind of better. The first taught me structure. The second taught me speed. This one is the first thing I’ve written that I actually want to reread.

I just walked out of Project Hail Mary, and I don’t feel like I need to see it again.

That’s the review, really. But let me explain.

Ridley Scott directing Matt Damon was a far better Andy Weir adaptation than two Lego Movie directors pointing a shaky camera at Ryan Gosling and a rock puppet.

Credit where it’s due. Rocky, as a practical effect, was the right call.

That’s not to say Project Hail Mary wasn’t entertaining. It was. But the pacing never lets you sit with the gravity of the situation. The Martian lets you feel the weight on Watney’s shoulders. This felt like watching The Lego Movie. Frantic, bouncing from one thing to the next, never stopping to breathe.

I found it kind of irritating.

I’ll leave the spoiler-free version at that.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The book works because it earns its moments. Grace wakes up alone, has no idea where he is or why, and that confusion sits with you for a long time. In the movie, the amnesia is so poorly established that, if you haven’t read the book, I don’t think the audience would even pick up on the fact that the flashbacks are him remembering. You lose the fact that he spends a real stretch not knowing why he’s there. And then I wonder if the last couple of flashbacks land the way they should. He chickened out, didn’t believe in himself, and they basically abducted him for the mission. If you don’t understand that he doesn’t remember any of this, it lands differently.

The same problem hits the Rocky relationship. In the book, Grace and Rocky spend a long time just trying to figure out how to communicate. It’s painstaking, and that’s the point. That’s what makes the relationship work. In the movie, they’re practically finishing each other’s sentences within minutes.

Some of the casualties of science are understandable. Andy Weir spent real time on the fact that Rocky’s people use base-six numbering because they have six digits on their hands. I get that most moviegoers wouldn’t care about that the way I do. But the core environmental details, the ammonia atmosphere, the extreme pressure and heat differences, those were load-bearing elements of the story. The movie glazes right over them. I’m also not sure the audience ever clearly understands that Rocky can’t see light. Maybe they do, but I worried about that for the whole second half of the film. It felt dumbed down.

And then there’s the tone. The movie leans into goofiness constantly, like that’s the engine of Grace and Rocky’s relationship. It isn’t. In the book, their bond is built on the fact that they’re both trying to save their species, and the hard work and shared hardship that comes with it. The humor in the book comes from the fact that Grace and Rocky understand the universe differently. Their slight misalignment, the way they don’t quite get each other, is what makes it funny. Weir’s humor isn’t always perfect either, but it works because you’ve been through the hard stuff with these characters. In the movie, the jokes are just always there. There’s no counterweight.

The ending is rushed. This is a complaint I have about many movies lately. You spend two hours building toward something, and the conclusion gets two minutes.

With a better director and fifteen more minutes of screen time, this could have been a different movie. Let the moments breathe. Let the audience feel the isolation, the difficulty, the stakes. Instead, it’s a frantic ride that never slows down long enough for any of it to land.

One way to fix many of the problems with this film would be to clearly establish that every flashback you see is Grace remembering it at that moment. Each new memory adds weight to whatever comes next, because he’s learning these things when you are. That’s the whole engine of the book, and the movie just lets it slide by.

It’s a shame. The book is great, and they had everything they needed to make a great movie. I suspect if Ridley Scott had directed it, we’d be talking about a very different film.

But we’re not. This is a movie you see once. It’s entertaining enough. And you move on.

Up until we knew we were right for each other in the “rest of our lives way”, she had loose, somewhat ambiguous career ambitions. Mostly out of necessity. But even before we got married, she was sure she wanted to be a full-time Mom.

This required us to start working on my career immediately. Together, we worked hard to build a path that would allow me to be able to support the lifestyle we chose. We knew it would be hard, and she was a bigger driver of my initial success than I was. One of our very first purchases as a couple was a new computer and $300 worth of Study materials for me, when $300 was A LOT of money for us (it was also our very first Amazon purchase, in the spring of 1998). She was the one who pushed for me to get into Linux before anyone had even heard of it. She pushed me to follow my deep love of first principles, even when I had no idea how.

Her intuition proved perfect timing, because the following year, the dot-com era came to the fore.

As the kids grew up and my career took off, she alternated between homeschooling and facilitating their transition to private school when we could afford it. Eventually, rounding out both kids’ high school as a full-time homeschool mom.

Now that we’re empty nesters, she finds herself sometimes in an uncomfortable position. You see, a lot of people don’t like that she doesn’t have a career now. Even people who should be close to us feel she should have a career. But she still doesn’t really want one. And some people she her as something other than a”successful woman.”

I’m late in my career. My gray is coming faster than hers, and as empty nesters, we find ourselves saying, “What’s next?”

This is an amazing “problem” to have, one that she is handling better than I am.

She’s painting, writing, gardening, bothering the snot out of the kids (who are doing SO GREAT), freeze-drying everything in sight, reading, hiking, and more. It’s exactly the sort of thing she wants, even through the occasional subtle ridicule of others.

I, on the other hand, am now searching for meaning I’ve not found in my career. Thousands and thousands of hours that more often than not feel hollow. I’m not saying I haven’t had fun along the way; I have. But the parts of my life that are important have NOTHING to do with my career success or money. My family is important. My friends are important. Time to explore the world is important. My career is none of those things.

She gets to live the important parts every day. Wife, mother, and caregiver.

WE earned her freedom to do that. Together.

So I’m working to transition my career to something that supports the important parts, while having meaning to people. I don’t care if it’s meaningful to thousands of people or two, but it will be helpful and have purpose.

I wish I had started this 30 years ago, but you can only go forward from where you are.

My first step… paying more attention to the way my wife lives and doing more of that.

And the bonus is that everything is a text file. This gives it the “forever” permanence that other tools can’t or won’t.

It can run Wordstar really well, maybe George RR can borrow it to finish Game of Thrones ;-)

Sorry about the low light. The iPhone 16 has a REALLY hard time adjusting the aperture to make a green phosphor CRT look good.

My mom has a little notebook where she writes down every movie she watches and a few of her thoughts about it. I told her about Letterboxd & she said “does everyone need an audience for their hobbies now?”