thrihyrne | Eels, and writing. No, the topics aren't really related. ;)

evannichols and I watched a video via Netflix titled "The Mystery of Eels" found via Nature. I'm delighted to let you know that it's available online here via PBS. While the narrator's voice wasn't ideal in terms of tone, nuance and the like, the narrator is a writer and artist, and as it turns out, this documentary is based on a book he published once this 'finding out more about eels' project became bigger than anticipated. Or it seems that it became larger than he'd anticipated. James Prosek is a naturalist and other things, and what struck me about the documentary was how engaging it was. Evan and I had selected it because 1) it was live streaming and 2) neither of us knew much of anything about eels. But because this guy James has an artistic approach to the topic, and brought in so much in the various locations (New England, New Zealand, Japan), I found myself quite surprisingly moved and it was poignant. Evan was similarly engaged (though with the narrator's not-made-for-narrating-voice, he'd apparently wanted to bail at first) for many of the same reasons. While it is a documentary about eels, it's mostly about people's interactions with them, lifetimes spent studying them, generations of people revering them and them taking on symbolic capture or freedom.

All of that to say: highly recommended. :)

And in very exciting news, I completed my first original fiction story. It's not the first one I started, but it's first one to be finished. YAY!! I know it will need some serious editing; this was definitely a first pass and was started months ago as a fic for the Harry Potter community. I veered away from that pretty quickly, but I'll need to be sure that the flow and pacing and characterizations are consistent since I worked on it off and on (a lot off) for the past 9 months or so. This gives me hope for returning to my monk fic, which was last summer's project, but hey. My printout is in its binder, ready for me to get back to it for a Grand Re-Read to remember all of the characters and probably take it in another direction as I didn't like what was going on where I'd stopped it.