Hidden Kids and Found Steampunk

I went back to the beginning on the current project, and I think it's a good sign that I still like it. I'm finding things to fix and a lot to edit, but that's just part of the process. I'm forcing myself to work in small doses so I don't get so caught up in the story that I just read and stop editing.

A couple of random thoughts ...

After thinking my way through Star Wars for writing post examples, something occurred to me (that was only tangentially related to my post). I love Obi-Wan, but he did the worst job ever of hiding a secret baby from his psycho father. He gave the kid his father's last name and took him to his father's home planet to live with his father's stepbrother, then he kept his own last name to live nearby and keep an eye on the kid. If he really wanted to keep the kid hidden and safe, he'd have changed his own name to the Star Wars universe version of "John Smith," given the kid a similarly nondescript name, and then he'd have taken the kid to some world where neither he nor Anakin had ever been, given some story about being a widower, and raised the kid himself in total obscurity, but possibly with some Jedi training so he'd know how to use his abilities properly. Most of the events in The Empire Strikes Back wouldn't have happened if Luke's name hadn't been "Skywalker" and Darth Vader hadn't had a reason to have any interest in some random rebel pilot. That's a plot issue I can't eradicate by ignoring the prequels.

On a brighter note, I've found my fun steampunk. I'd read the Hungry Cities books by Philip Reeve, which were good but which kind of got dark and had the underlying darkness of taking place in a grim, post-apocalyptic world. But he has another series that's more of a purely fun steampunk adventure. I managed to get the second book in the series (I'm not even sure the library had the first), but they seem to be self-contained. The first book is Larklight, but I read Starcross. They seem to be aimed at a younger readership (they're even illustrated), but they're still pretty fun. Now I want something like that but aimed at an older audience so I can get a little more psychological depth along with the fun adventures. I'll discuss it in more detail in next week's book report.