Bryce Moore's Blog, page 143

Division of Labor

Denisa and her brother are off on a trip to New York City today through Sunday, and I realized as she was preparing for the trip that I need to do a better job of involving her in the process of trip planning. Typically it’s something I bear the brunt of, figuring out the schedules and the logistics. How will we get there? What will we do when we arrive? How do we get where we’re staying? How much does it cost? How do you pay? What’s the public transportation like?

These are all things I’m fairly familiar with at this point, and even then I stress about them a fair deal when it’s time for us to actually go. (It took a while this past time when we were in Chicago, for example, to figure out how to buy the transit passes I wanted from the airport machines.) For Denisa, however, it’s mostly new.

This isn’t to say Denisa isn’t an active participant in our travel plans. But there’s a big difference between going over the plans as a proposal once they’ve all been created, and actually creating the plans in the first place.

That said, Denisa and I definitely have divided some tasks between us naturally over the course of our marriage. I’m over trip planning, ticket purchasing and the like. She takes care of groceries and laundry. I’m tech support and random handyman. She’s in charge of runs to the dump. It’s not like we sat down and took turns picking tasks. It’s just sort of grown that way organically. I wonder if it would be different if we took time to do it the other way. How have other people done their division of labor in their marriage?

In any case, she and Miloš are staying at an Airbnb. They’ll be heading over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art tomorrow to check out their medieval collection, then walking around Central Park and Times Square. Taking the bus there and back from Portland. She’s skeptical that she’ll have fun, but I’m pretty confident she’ll have a blast. Being in a big city can feel quite liberating when you’re there on your own without kids. So many things to do and places to see. Yes, it’s a real pain to get there sometimes, but I’m almost always happy to be wherever I am, once I end up there.

Though I don’t blame Denisa for being skeptical about the Airbnb. You never know what you’re going to get until you get there . . .

What will I be doing at home with the kids? Movies, video games, board games, and more*!

*”more” in this case means I have to do writing and a bunch of chores, and I’m going to enlist the kids to help with that. If we get the chores done, we might be able to do all the rest. But there are a lot of chores . . . Wish us luck!

In Which a School Budget Meeting Goes Right

Denisa and I went off to yet another school budget meeting to vote on the latest proposed budget. (For those of you playing along at home this is for the 2017-2018 budget. The one that started in July. Yes, we’re still trying to get it set. This has been a doozy of a year.)

After the last such meeting went so horribly wrong, I was left discouraged and pessimistic that any chance of turning things around would be within reach. I honestly felt like throwing in the towel, and my post after that meeting reflects that. I concluded with this:

Democracy is decided by those who show up. It doesn’t matter in the end if they show up because a little yellow sign told them to or because they did extensive research into a subject. Their votes count the same, either way. And either way, we will have a school budget that the majority of voters in our community support. The question really becomes “Who cares more?”

But then the community poured out for the vote, and they overwhelmingly came to the budget’s defense. So we got essentially a do over. A Groundhog Day-esque chance to redo that horrendous meeting, and that happened last night.

And it was wonderful. 300 people showed up to the earlier meeting. 550 showed up last night. 200+ of the people voted to slash the budget at the earlier meeting. 500+ voted to support the budget last night. It was completely overwhelming. A massive tide of school supporters that simply flooded the gymnasium. They had to keep putting out more chairs and bleacher seats to keep up with the people who kept coming.

The meeting still took 2.5 hours, but the tone of it was very positive. For the most part. There were two significant blips in that. The first is the traditional voice of confusion embodied by one lone voter who inevitably rambles her way through the same tired questions time after time. She doesn’t believe she’s getting honest answers. She doesn’t really seem to understand any of the answers she does get. So she keeps asking the questions each time. It’s frustrating for everyone. She’s clearly upset, and so is everyone else who’s forced to wait through her muddled queries. I’m typically patient, but I’ve sat through enough of these meetings to see this for what it is.

The second blip was new. A voter (sorry: DOCTOR) from a local town who was very aggravated about the fact that the school budget had been attacked, and who had shown up to defend it willfully. You could tell he was frustrated with the glacial pace of the meeting, and while I can certainly relate(!), I also believe we can look for more polite ways to handle it. (For those of you who are new to the area and didn’t get the repeated references he was making to where he works, might I point you to his web site, which I present without further comment? He does have a doctorate in biochemistry, after all.)

In any case, it’s done. The budget is set again and ready for a vote. It appears the opposition has thrown in the towel, but we simply cannot lull ourselves back into complacency. We need that many people showing up time and time again. Because you never known when the opposition will come back, and our schools’ budgets have been slashed enough. Perhaps with that amount of support, we can begin to start bringing in new initiatives to not simply keep our students’ heads above water, but to start branching out into new directions.

A guy can always hope.

The vote is October 24th, and this time, please vote YES.

Pushing Through on a Project

I’m 500 words shy of the 60,000 word mark on MURDER CASTLE, and I’ve been tearing through it. Most days when I sit down to write, I’m pretty sure what I need to do in the next 1,000 words, and it doesn’t take me a terribly long time to get it done. (About 45 minutes of actual writing time, which turns into a bit over an hour once you count the mandatory durdling time.)

But I’m at a bit of a tricky spot, as well. I’m far enough into the book to realize there are some significant problems with it. I’m not sure how significant those problems are. Basically, I recognize that the main character (Etta) is doing too much on her own, without really interacting with other people as much as I feel she needs to. This has a tendency to make the book a bit too cerebral. Not that she’s not doing things, but she’s on her own for long swathes of the novel.

Some of this is just due to the type of book this is. She’s undercover, lying to most people around her, trying to find information on her lost sister. So in many ways, she’s trying to avoid getting to know too many people. But at the same time, I worry that much of the oomph to the book will be found as she interacts with the people who might be out to kill her. I think I might need to watch Silence of the Lambs again to get a feel for the kind of book I’m trying to write. Not that this is a novel where the main character is studying a serial killer to try to catch a different one, but . . .

Actually, the more I think about it, the more the connection seems clear. I’m writing Silence of the Lambs meets True Grit. Go figure.

In any case, my feel for the novel leaves me in a bit of a precarious position. Part of me wants to stop the writing, go back and read what I’ve done, fix it if it needs fixing, and then finish things off. On the other hand, my gut isn’t just telling me part of the book isn’t working. It’s telling me that it’s going to put me right back where I am now after I fix it. In other words, imagine that you’re trying to get from Maine to Pennsylvania. You know the route you ultimately want to go should be over the George Washington Bridge, but you realize you ended up going through Albany somehow. You know that was a waste of time, but you also know that now that you’re already in New Jersey, it doesn’t really matter. You’d be at this spot of road one way or the other. You can go back to fix that Albany trip, but perhaps it’s better to just get to Pennsylvania first.

That analogy makes a whole lot more sense to me than it probably did to you, but oh well.

The bottom line is that I’ve decided to push forward. I’m becoming more comfortable knowing that my first drafts are going to need some big overhauls. I’d love to get to a point where I can just write them the right way the first time, but I don’t think I’m there yet. On the plus side, at least I’m to the point where I can feel what the big things that need changing will be. Right?

Another 20,000 words, give or take, should take me to the end of this draft. At that point, I plan to immediately go back and read the whole thing, looking to see if the tension levels are right, if there’s enough interaction with other characters, if the voice is consistent, and if there’s anything big I still want to tweak.

But maybe I need to watch Silence of the Lambs again before all of that . . .

A Peaceful Weekend

I’m back at work after a nice, restful three day weekend. Well, not entirely restful. I still worked on writing, which I do pretty much without fail, because at this point, I don’t feel like a day was a good day if I didn’t get my 1,000 words in. Can you write yourself into an addiction? I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to.

We took the family off to a vacation home on Springy Pond, about 45 minutes away from Acadia National Park. The original plan had been to go to Acadia while we were there, but the traffic . . . did not bode well for a trip out there. Acadia isn’t the biggest park to begin with, and between gorgeous weather, the long weekend, and the fact that the leaves in Maine decided to wait to change color until just barely, and it was a perfect storm for big crowds.

So instead we did a couple of outings. Went down to Ellsworth, checked out Woodlawn, did some shopping, and ate some good food. (Big G’s on the way home, and 86 This! on Saturday. I can heartily recommend either.) We also played a bunch of games at the rental house we were staying in, and went kayaking on Springy Pond.

I wasn’t on Facebook much at all, and I have to say I felt a lot better for it. Before the weekend, there’d been another garbage fire of a conversation on my Facebook wall, and it left me with a very sour taste. The vast majority of people I interact with online are respectful and considerate. I believe there are some people who don’t have that gene, or they somehow didn’t have it properly develop during their upbringing. But interacting with people who are blatantly rude can be very depressing. I hate just walking away from someone who’s saying obnoxious things, but I feel like sometimes that’s just what I need to do.

Which of course begs the question, “Why do you still post to Facebook?” I know plenty of people who have stepped away from the venue, or they’ve locked down their posts so only friends can view them. I continue to believe that if my posts are just read by people who agree with me, then they stop really filling a purpose. I want people of all mindsets to read them. I just wish they’d all be polite in their responses.

Perhaps the real answer is just to do what I did this weekend, and unplug for a while now and then to remind myself that mouth-breathing trolls on the internet just don’t matter.

In any case, it’s time to head back into the fray. The semester is practically halfway over, believe it or not. Better yet, there are no conferences between me and Thanksgiving break, so maybe I can catch up on just about everything.

A guy can always hope, right?

MEMORY THIEF Thanksgiving

I’m off on vacation today. Headed to a rental house over by Acadia, and looking forward to relax and try to recharge. And as I drive off, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that step 3 of my plan for global domination is finally complete, just as I planned.

PLAN FOR GLOBAL DOMINATION

Publish MEMORY THIEF in America
Publish MEMORY THIEF in China
Publish MEMORY THIEF in Turkey.
[. . .]
Take over the world

As with many of the best news I get to announce on my blog, I’ve known about this for months, and I’ve had to keep quiet about it. That leads to some strange celebrations. I’m the most excited when I can’t tell anyone, and then when everyone else is the most excited, it’s already old news to me.

But either which way, it’s great news. Three languages! I think these foreign sales are some of the best surprises I ever get. I love having my agents email me to see if I’d like to accept an offer I knew absolutely nothing about. It’s like if someone comes up to you to say you’ve inherited a bunch of money and asks if you’d like to accept it. You don’t have to do anything to get that money except sign on a dotted line. All the work is done already.

I don’t think I would ever get tired of that.

In any case, have a great weekend, everybody. I’ll catch you on Tuesday, when I’m back from vacation!

People Don’t Care about Sources

I’d like to think I have a fairly open blog. I try to look at issues from all sides before I come to a decision, and I’m certainly able to admit when I’m wrong. (Though I typically refrain from posting in absolutes, which makes it much easier to be pigeon holed into one side of an argument or another.)

I’ve had a number of Facebook scuffles over the years. I’ve had posts that are very well read and posts that get ignored. I pay attention to my statistics to see which posts catch people’s interests and which don’t.

I’d like to think most people who read my posts are ready to think about an issue some.

But even with all of that, perhaps *the* thing that surprises me the most is how few people actually click through to the articles I link to in my posts. True, I haven’t done some sort of academic study on this. It’s all anecdotal. But I’m always amazed when I check to see those “clicked links” numbers. Hundreds of people might read an article. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 5 out of those hundreds who actually clicked the links.

My takeaway from this is that people generally want to think how they think. If an argument they hear agrees with what they think, they accept it and move on. If it disagrees, they ignore it. I get baffled how Trump can make the claims he makes and not have the entire country just laugh at him, but then I remember those statistics from my blog.

Often, it seems all you have to do to get someone to believe you is to say something forcefully from a position of authority. And people believe the force and the authority. They don’t question.

I wish more people would. But if even my target audience won’t click them, then I can’t imagine many others who will. And judging from my Facebook posts, this includes people who even click through to read my blog post in the first place. There are often some who will show up, ignore practically everything I’ve written on a subject, and then blithely prattle on about it. The internet equivalent of someone coming up to you in the middle of a discussion with your friends and then blurting out something that was already discussed ten minutes ago.

Please. Pretty please. From the bottom of this librarian’s heart. Click the links to articles that are cited. Evaluate their sources. Figure out if they can be believed or not. You never know what they might actually lead to.

(Then again, maybe you all don’t click the links I post because you trust me *that much*. In which case, I’m flattered. But please click the links anyway.)

That is all.

Unable to Kick a Gun Addiction

I have written extensively on guns and gun control. My opinions are well known to any long time reader. I am 100% in favor of stricter gun laws, and I continue to find it revolting and mind-boggling that after all of the shootings and massacres over the past few years, we have still done absolutely nothing to even try to find a solution. No laws. Sandy Hook happened, and we didn’t change a thing.

But nothing I have written against guns has amounted to jack squat, clearly, and I can’t pretend that another diatribe will do anything, either.

Instead, I’m trying my best to understand the people in this country who believe our right to own firearms is so sacred and holy that it must remain sacrosanct, even in the wake of the tragedies that continue to happen here. Yes, they have their talking points. Yes, I’ve heard them all. No, I don’t believe they hold any water at this point, but they clearly do.

So what’s something I hold dear, and that I wouldn’t want to give up? What if people kept killing other people with video game systems? What if it turned out every time someone turned on a video game, there was a chance someone in the world would drop dead? What if study after study found that in America, high video game use was translating into a huge spike in our mortality rate?

Yes, I realize it’s a silly theoretical. But would I be willing to give up video game systems on the chance that other people would stop dying so much? I’d like to think that I would. I would be okay with legislation restricting their purchase and use. I am okay limiting some of my rights if that might help solve a much bigger problem.

I get that my gun owning friends wonder why in the world they should need to give up their guns just because evil people elsewhere in the country are using other guns to do terrible, despicable acts. They haven’t killed anyone, and perhaps they’re worried about someone with a gun trying to kill them, and so they’ve decided the best solution is to have a gun of their own. Others just talk about how much they love shooting guns. Or how they come from a “gun family.”

Honestly, I’m done arguing the point. Until gun control laws are enacted and allowed to stay for a few decades, I’m unwilling to listen to arguments that “gun control laws won’t work.” I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it now: gun control is THE political issue I care most about at this point in this country. When I vote, I first look to see what a politician’s record is on gun control. I respect Susan Collins for much of what she’s done in the senate. She’s thinking about running for governor. I think she would likely make a great governor. She voted against stricter gun control laws right after Sandy Hook.

I will not vote for Susan Collins again. Not if she’s running against someone who favors stricter gun control.

I encourage everyone to support Everytown for Gun Safety and other organizations working against the insanity of the NRA, an organization which still hasn’t made a statement about the Vegas shootings. At the very least, guns that are designed to kill people in mass quantities should be outlawed.

The saddest thing for me is that, as with healthcare, I seriously doubt anything real will be done to try to address the problems facing our country. Our legislative bodies are doing nothing to help. They wring their hands about very real problems, and then proceed to ignore them.

“Addiction” seems to be a popular word these days. You can be addicted to any number of things. And in some ways, slapping that term on a person seems to allow the person an out. An excuse for abhorrent behavior. They had sex with a string of prostitutes because they were addicted to sex. They played video games for hours on end, losing their job, because they were addicted. They maxed out five credit cards’ worth of debt because they were addicted to shopping.

I’m not a medical expert. I don’t understand how addiction works, though I do believe it’s a real thing, and I believe there are definitely people who are addicted to sex, video games, shopping, and the like. Certainly there are people who end up ruining their lives by their behavior in those areas.

It seems to me, then, that the country is suffering from a gun addiction. And maybe we need a 12 step program to kick ourselves of the habit. The first step (I’m told) is to acknowledge we have a problem. Many of us in America have long since done this. Apparently we need even more to do so. Because until we can all agree that guns are a serious problem for us in this nation, we’re never going to get to a place where we can come up with solutions.

And I suppose that’s all I have to say about that for now.

Taking the First Step

Just a brief thought for you today. (At least, I think it’ll be brief.) I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about the creative process, and we were discussing how hard it can be sometimes to take that first step. To actually begin working on whatever it is you’re working on.

This morning, I saw the same feeling arise in the construction process, as we try to decide how to proceed actually building the front steps. (So now we’re talking about the first step quite literally.) I’ve been looking at pictures of houses. Studying front steps as we drive by other homes. Watching videos. Reading articles. And at times, it all seems so clear. I’ll go outside and expect I’ll know just what to do.

Except when I go outside and look at where I want the front steps to go, suddenly there are a slew of questions and doubts. How deep do I need to dig? How wide should the stairs actually be? What will I really make them out of? Because when everything’s theoretical, it’s perfect. It’s this Platonic ideal of “steps” in my mind.

Taking things from that theoretical plane into the actual world is really tricky. You need to make actual decisions. Commit real money. And (what’s worse) make tangible mistakes.

I think that’s what causes me to hesitate more than anything. The fear of Doing It Wrong. And that’s true in the creative process as much as it is in the construction process. Doing something the first time is almost always the easiest. Fixing something done wrong can be really difficult, not to mention embarrassing. Because you’re spending more time fixing something you already spent a whole lot of time doing in the first place.

Of course, I don’t think about all the time I’ve wasted in that hesitation before I begin. That doesn’t seem to count, somehow. And so it’s easy to wait. To plan some more. To think things through yet again.

But sooner or later, you have to pick up that shovel and start digging. And if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. Those stairs aren’t going to build themselves.

Crossing the Weight Line

Sigh. I got on the scale this morning and read the result: 196.8. That’s the first time in over a year I’ve been overweight again. It’s 13.8 pounds heavier than my lowest weight, and if I don’t get back under 195 by Sunday morning, then I’ll break my perfect string of being normal weight at the beginning of each month, as well.

I’m not too worried about getting under 195 by Sunday. I just got back from a conference, and then I had pizza last night. I already know from experience that equates to a bump in weight, but any which way you slice it, I have most definitely been cheating on my diet regime more and more since July.

The thing is, when I’m cheating on my diet, I almost always have a “good reason.” Lots of stuff is happening in my life. I’m stressed. I don’t have time to worry about little things like my health, right? Of course, that’s typically when I ought to be paying the most attention to what I’m eating.

The biggest problem is that even after a year of eating healthy, I still fall back on bad eating habits in times of stress. It’s my way of coping with having too much to do, and I have years of experience using it that way. I know that unless I do something about it, I will slip back up to 215 or so, and then I’ll be right back in the same mess I started in. I knew there would come a time when I would go over 195 again. Now’s the time to get serious about things once more.

And I’ve come up with a new plan.

In conjunction with a group of friends, I’ve started a weight loss group on Facebook. It’s small (just 5 of us), and the rules are simple. We each have a goal weight we’d like to get to. One we set on our own. And each month, we’ve promised each other to lose 5 pounds. We’ll keep that up until we reach the goal weight, at which point we’ll shift to maintaining that goal weight. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

But there’s the incentive.

Each of us has agreed to chip in $50 each month we fail to lose the 5 pounds or maintain our goal weight. The ones of us who have managed to lose the weight or keep it off get to split that $50. So in other words, as long as I always keep the weight off or keep losing weight, I don’t have to pay a single cent. And if I stay on track, I might even get some money (though I really hope none of us has to pay out ever.)

My starting weight was 192.6. So at this point, I need to lose 9.2 pounds to avoid paying the penalty. I have until the morning of October 25th. I certainly would have made things easier on myself if I’d watched what I ate while I was away, but water. bridge.

Ultimately, I’d like to get to 175, and then stay around there, with 180 being my new “line in the sand” weight. The good news is that I really don’t feel like I’m dieting anymore. I do believe I have a new approach to eating, and I just have to stick to it instead of cheating on it.

Wish me luck. (I don’t want to have to pay $50!)

Adventures in Atlantic City

A month or so ago, I found out about a conference on the future of libraries being hosted down in Atlantic City. Since this is a topic I’m keenly interested in, I thought it would be a great chance to head down and see what the experts are saying are headed our way.

As always seems to be the case, the thought of going to a conference became less appealing the closer I actually came to the conference. Life is very busy, and it turned out actually getting to Atlantic City from Maine isn’t the easiest thing to do in the world. Airfare was expensive, and so I had decided to drive down. 8 hours. No biggie, right?

Well, I’m here now. Drove down on Sunday and will be heading back on Wednesday. The drive itself was actually quite pleasant. I listened to half of an audio book. (The Last Kingdom). And the conference itself has been remarkable so far. There was a keynote by hacker extraordinaire, Kevin Mitnick, that made me basically decide we’re all in deep trouble when it comes to security, and there’s nothing we can really do about it.

(How’s that for depressing? Seriously. He took a woman up at random from the audience and found her Social Security Number, home address, phone number, credit card numbers, and everything else about her. It took thirty seconds. He laughed about the Experian hack, saying all that stuff is already available online anyway. Then he showed us all how to clone digital entry cards, set up fake wifi networks, steal passwords, and generally wreck havoc. This stuff is very easy. No real answer to fix it, other than to keep a close eye on your personal bank accounts and report fraudulent activity as soon as you can.)

I’ve learned about library architecture, the Oculus Rift and virtual reality, upcoming trends in technology, and more. Really good stuff.

But it’s at the Borgata in Atlantic City. This is . . . not my thing. I had debated staying in the Fairfield Inn a few miles away, but I ended up going with the Borgata, figuring it would be easier to go to the conference. I really don’t like staying in an actual casino, however. I got to the hotel room, and there’s stylized pictures of naked women on the walls. (Not showing anything, and I suppose it’s supposed to be “classy,” but . . . me no likey.) The lobby is dominated by contrasts: huge, opulent displays of wealth. Flashing lights. Neon. And a whole ton of people staring at screens as they mindlessly push buttons at slot machines.

I’m not typically one to talk about bad vibes, but this place kind of makes me feel sick to my stomach. I don’t have any plans to ever come back. The one exception I could see myself making is if they have this conference here again in 10 years. Because it’s seriously that good of a conference. Though next time, I’ll stay at the Fairfield Inn.

I get that a lot of people dig the casino scene, but this is most definitely Not My Thing.

Looking forward to heading back to Maine . . .