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Written in the Sand
Episode 3 Dune Book 1, Chapter 1 - part two

I apologize for the lateness of this, our third episode. I have left a note to my future self that the holidays require material finished and ready to go in advance. In addition to the normal pressures of producing this podcast while celebrating the holidays, I decided to start restructuring the website. If you visited before, you may note that the resource links now are located under each episode post and the beginning of the episode transcript is now in the post. A bit of work on top of the normal writing, recording, and editing, so it was a lot of things going at once with limited time. Still, I will try to avoid these types of delays as much as possible in the future.

We are going to start off this episode with an additional bit of an embarrassment for me. I'm going to announce a correction. Two episodes in and already having to do this. But, that's okay because it offers me a great opportunity. In our last episode I talked about accepting mistakes, and then I proceeded to make one – and a very stupid mistake, at that.

You might even know what it was, especially if you're Jewish. Yeah, it turns out that Hanukkah does not have 10 days in it. Such a simple thing to check, and yet I did not check, and (to make it worse) as I was writing it down, I knew I should check. But I still didn't. I was rushing and I didn't feel like taking the time to make sure. I literally had this conversation in my head that I should check the number of days in Hanukkah (it's 8, by the way) while another part of me said no, because I had to get things finished. Seriously, it would have taken 10 seconds to do, but I stubbornly refused.

I actually suspect that I sabotaged myself on purpose. Remember when I mentioned that there's something inside me that knows things that I don't consciously think of? Well, in closing an episode about being stubborn about admitting mistakes, what better way to demonstrate that than to stubbornly make an obvious and stupid mistake? So at my own expense, I get to demonstrate a mini lesson about owning mistakes, and leaving them up for the world to drive it home. In addition, I have an opportunity to say that you should never be afraid to face a setback and turn it into something better than it was.

Okay, now that all the mea culpa's are over we're going to move on into the main body of the episode. We are going to start talking about the text of Dune, chapter 1.

This chapter is amazing! There is so much information going on in here that it is going to take me multiple episodes to go through it. I'm going to start by giving a bit of the history of Dune, which is alluded to towards the end of chapter 1, however we are going to give more specifics than are given there.

First off, I have to talk a bit about the extended universe presented by Kevin J. Anderson and Frank's son, Brian Herbert. Just like the David Lynch movie and other books in the Dune series, there is a divide amongst Dune fans about these. And I admit they even within myself I am very conflicted about them.

As far as the main storyline goes, there is some closure to the plot that was abruptly cut off by Frank Herbert's death. For 20 years, fans of the series could only speculate on where this series was intended to go. A cliffhanger dangled at the end of book 6 but no resolution was in sight. Then, came the announcement that the outline for Dune seven had been discovered in a previously unknown safe deposit box where it had sat for two decades.