Dave G
nextwave.bsky.social
Dave G
@nextwave.bsky.social
I write, edit, run, teach, play chess, and think — but seldom more than two at once.

Recovering domain investor. Chronic punster.

Into the Brontës, Joni Mitchell, Alistair MacLean, new wave 🎶, Lord of the Rings, Vashti Bunyan.
I’m sure there’s a potential response about Middle Earth’s gnomenclature, but I’m not touching it.
November 12, 2025 at 11:02 PM
I’m sorry you couldn’t return to music-making. While I’ve never played an instrument (apart from a brief, disastrous fourth-grade flirtation with the viola), it looks like fun from the sidelines.

However, you and I have a creative writing habit in common. Cheers to that!
November 11, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Thanks! Every lawyer I know tells me I made the right choice. (And I immediately found my real calling as a middle school teacher.)

I hope you were eventually able to resume oboing!
November 10, 2025 at 11:26 PM
Feeling greatly in need of a raise,
I chose law as a job field that pays.
So I entered law school,
But it just wasn’t cool;
I lasted a week and two days.

(True story. No regrets.)
November 10, 2025 at 10:32 PM
I played at the Moorestown Chess Club in the 1970s. Glad to see that another version of it exists now!
November 7, 2025 at 11:07 PM
In case you don’t want the loud battle scenes in your background music, feel free to check out my Spotify playlist titled “Mellower LOTR”:

open.spotify.com/playlist/7c5...
Mellower LOTR
open.spotify.com
November 6, 2025 at 2:53 PM
LOTR contains almost everything, if you know where to look! 🙃
November 2, 2025 at 3:35 AM
“For Gandalf took the horse that is called Shadowfax, the most precious of all the king’s steeds, chief of the Mearas, which only the Lord of the Mark may ride. For the sire of their race was the great horse of Eorl that knew the speech of Men.”
November 2, 2025 at 3:31 AM
Thanks. Looks like it was used in the [correct] past tense there.
October 27, 2025 at 6:42 PM
I haven’t read “As I Lay Dying” — was he using “Lay” in past or present tense?
October 27, 2025 at 11:12 AM
The book version is so much better than the movie version, where Eomer wails in anguish after seeing Eowyn. The book shows him stricken with “cold fury”, then urging his men into battle.
October 26, 2025 at 3:03 AM
Yay, another adaptation to review for my website! janeeyre.net
October 24, 2025 at 11:53 PM
The Count of Monte Cristo is legendarily epic, but hoo boy is it LONG. (Took me a couple of months.) You’ll reach the payoff quicker in Jane Eyre.
October 24, 2025 at 11:51 PM
I also get why they didn’t include the Scouring, but that choice still feels like a mistake to me. The crux of the whole story was the hobbits’ growth from “children” to grownups who could handle their own affairs in a hazardous world. I would have liked to see that play out on the screen.
October 22, 2025 at 12:00 AM
Reminds me of Patricia Park’s “Re Jane”, a modern retelling of “Jane Eyre” about a young Korean-American woman named Jane who explores her Korean roots.
October 21, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Thanks for the recommendations!
October 20, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Thanks. I haven’t read MG since I taught 7th-grade English a dozen years ago. My influences for my mystery story include a range of old classics: the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (though my protagonists are younger); Encyclopedia Brown; Alvin Fernald; even Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang (book, not movie).
October 20, 2025 at 2:02 PM
I’m in the early stages of an old-fashioned middle grades story, an homage to books I read as a kid in the ‘70s. The protagonists are a girl and boy aged 12. They’re going to run into some danger together, involving an adult “bad guy.” I’m wrestling with how serious/scary the danger should seem.
October 20, 2025 at 1:26 PM
I’ve always assumed it came from some other (non-USA) English-speaking society. Apparently not?
October 18, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Not sure if it qualifies, but this made me think of Air Jane — a comic-style [low-culture] take-off on Jane Eyre, about a "19th-century hoop-shootin', wisecrackin', fun-lovin' governess." Hilarious, yet true to the original high-culture story’s spirit.

www.deviantart.com/hankinstein/...
Air Jane Page 1 by hankinstein on DeviantArt
www.deviantart.com
October 5, 2025 at 12:18 AM
“Talk hard!”
September 27, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Was he playing some of that newfangled skiffle music?
September 27, 2025 at 8:04 PM