Living in a van under the stars
Hello, friends!
I’m off work this week, and spending that time bouncing between good books, three-hour naps, and revisions of my current work-in-progress, The Dark Age. So this’ll be a short one! I’ve got some Zs to pull.
Shortly after my last regular newsletter, Squish knocked on my study door. “Daddy,” she said, “what exactly do you know about supermassive black holes?” As it turns out, most of my black hole knowledge comes from movies, which, as Squish informed me, often get the whole black hole thing wrong.
We talked a while about astronomy, because that’s a big focus in her fifth-grade studies, and the conversation drifted to light pollution and the Bortle scale. (The Bortle scale is a way to measure the darkest places—and therefore best for stargazing—around the world.)
“Me and my friend, you know what we want to do?” Squish asked me. “We want to live in a really cool van, and just drive around to all the darkest places and set up our telescope on top of the van.”
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. A Dad’s-time-to-shine moment, just dropped right into my lap.
“Squish, you know that book I wrote a couple years ago?”
“Awake in the World?”
“What if I told you that the main character in my book does exactly what you just described?”
Since then, Squish has been reading Awake in the World, squeezing it in between her other current reads. (She’s a multi-track reader, currently juggling The Lord of the Rings, a backyard stargazing manual, a Minecraft novel, and two Scary Stories for Young Foxes books.)
We’ve spent weekend nights on the deck with a little table-top telescope, but Squish has declared she’d like a scope of her own for her birthday. Not just any scope, either. She wants OSPERT, from—you guessed it—Awake in the World.
How cool a dad am I?
Squish and I have been watching lots of science videos on YouTube recently, too. She’s particularly into the In a Nutshell series by Kurzgesagt, and one of those videos made me realize that The Dark Age had a ginormous plot hole. I wrote about this in last week’s Dark Age newsletter; go check it out!
Here’s to parenting wins! And here’s to The Dark Age, which needs a lot of work this week.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
Thanks for subscribing to Letters from Hill House! You’re reading the free edition.
- If you’d like to also receive The Dark Age letters, here’s how to do so
- If you’re enjoying the newsletter and would like to buy me a coffee, here’s how to do that
- My web site has more writing, and info about my books
- If you just want to say hello, just click Reply, or email me
Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links for which I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.