Bryce Moore's Blog, page 149

MEMORY THIEF in Chinese

It’s a new week, and I’m still in Utah, but Saturday the news broke, and I wanted to share it with you lovely people. At the end of May I got an email out of the blue with the bestest of news: a Chinese publishing company (Beijing White Horse Time) has bought the Simplified Chinese rights to THE MEMORY THIEF. The news about the film deal caught their eye and brought extra attention to the novel.

It’s kind of strange blogging about something that I’ve known about for so long. It would be so much more fun to share the news right after I found out. But it seems like everything in publishing operates on a delayed schedule, so I get great news and then have to sit on it for a long time until the ink is dry.

What does this deal mean? Ideally, authors sell as few rights to their work as possible with each deal. Publishers would love to get World Rights: the right to publish the book in any language and country in the world. Authors try to just sell North American Rights, which is what I did with MEMORY THIEF. That frees me up to sell the book in as many markets as I can. (Germany, France, Indonesia, China, etc. Basically each country is a different market.)

Some markets pay a lot, some pay a little. In this case, I almost got as much for the Chinese rights as I did for the North American Rights, so it was a fantastic surprise. Better yet, it’s another advance, meaning it’s money I get right away. And the most fantastic thing about it is that I didn’t have to do anything else other than sign a contract. No revisions. No drafts. No nothing.

The Chinese publisher will take care of translation, getting a cover, and all that jazz. I just get to sit back and look forward to seeing my writing in a new language at some point in the future.

It’s my first international sale, and that feels like a great threshold to cross. Maybe the interest from China will catch other countries’ eyes. Who knows? But for today, I’m just happy things continue to move forward so nicely.

Huzzah!

The Best Things are Often Outside Your Comfort Zone

I’m a person who loves his comfort zone. One of my favorite vacations of the year is the one I take around Christmas, because I go nowhere. I stay at home and play games and watch movies and eat food. It’s lovely. But as anyone who’s been following my life lately can tell you, I do many more trips and vacations than that, and most of them end up requiring a whole lot of planning and travel. Each time one of those vacations comes up, I inevitably wonder what in the world I was thinking that made me think it was a good idea.

Because I like my comfort zone. I’d happy stay at home each day. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s easy.

But often the best things in life are none of those. The things I remember for years after are the things that brought me out of that zone. That forced me to do things I’ve never done before. My mission to Germany. My semester abroad in Israel. Family vacations to Dublin, Paris, London, Germany, and Slovakia. Situations where I was frantically scrambling around, trying to piece things together and then hoping for the best as we headed off to the airport.

Of course. one could say those experiences are the most memorable because they involved the most pain. They were hard, but as time goes by, I forget the hard parts of them and only remember the good parts. And that’s true, no doubt. But it’s also true that the times that I have struggled the most have also been the ones that have had the biggest impact on who I am as a person.

This is strange. I’m trying to just talk about “hard” vacations, and I somehow keep being drawn to make a connection between hard times and hard vacations. Clearly there’s a difference between the two. Going through turmoil in life is much different than bringing it upon yourself because you want to go to Europe for a few weeks. But I’m reminded of rollercoasters. They’re terrifying, really. You strap yourself into a machine that’s going to whirl and loop and race you all over the place. It’ll jostle and rumble and shake you. Why do we love them? It’s chaos, and far from comfortable.

But I think we like them because it’s a way of having those tough times without having to have too many of the baggage that goes along with them. It’s controlled terror. Constrained.

And maybe that’s why I love these vacations, as much as I dread them and panic as I wonder if I have everything under control before we leave. (How will I get from the airport to the hotel when we arrive? What will we do? Where will we eat? How do we get tickets?) The lead up to the vacation is the same as getting in line and waiting for the ride to begin, listening to the clack clack clack as the coaster approaches the top. And then the big day arrives, and it’s whirls and loops and races all the way to the finish.

Chicago starts tomorrow. Then comes Utah, Yellowstone, family reunions, and more. It’ll be a fun ride, and I don’t know how much I’ll be able to post to my blog for the next while. Apologies in advance.

Wish me luck.

Movie Review: Beauty and the Beast

To celebrate the end of school, we had a movie night. Trying to pick a movie that will actually interest all my children (and be appropriate for all of them) isn’t exactly an easy choice. We typically end up watching things that aren’t really great for MC, but keep Tomas’s interest. This time, I decided to go with something that would be good for MC, but which Tomas might not love: the new live action Beauty and the Beast. (I was pleasantly surprised when Tomas expressed enthusiasm to see it, and watched (and enjoyed) it willingly. Yay!)

When I was in high school, animated Disney movies were sort of like Pixar movies were a few years ago. Between The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast, Disney seemed to be unable to go wrong. (Until Pocahontas came out and reminded us that yes, they could.) But for a stretch there, it was all awesome. I was (and continue to be) a big Disney fan. Bought the soundtracks. Saw the movies multiple times. The whole deal. Beauty and the Beast is a show I even saw on Broadway.

Still, I was skeptical about how it would turn out. The buzz I heard was all positive, but you never know with one of these productions.

In the end, I really loved the movie. Well acted, well sung, well directed, with special effects that somehow managed to pull it all off. (I bought the non-3D version, but that Be Our Guest number almost made me wish I’d gone for 3D.) Really, the only quibble I had was personal: they excluded two of my favorite numbers from the Broadway musical version (“Home” and “If I Can’t Love Her”). Normally I wouldn’t hold that against a movie, except they made the decision to include the orchestral version of Home for a snippet of the movie. To me, that’s like letting someone smell something delicious, and then letting them know they can’t eat any of it. Why bring it up at all if you’re just going to ignore it? I got all excited, and then . . . nothing. (As for “If I Can’t Love Her.” they went and included a Josh Groban version on the soundtrack. Come on! Put it in the movie!)

(For reference, here are the two songs I wish they’d included)

But really, how good does the movie have to be where my only complaints are about relatively obscure things they didn’t include that I have a personal attachment to? The movie was a delight from start to finish, and it did exactly what it set out to do: adapt the animated version almost note for note. It really made me admire the original all that much more. It’s got an engaging story and characters that are actually well rounded. The live action expands on some of that, but it didn’t need to do much. Casting Emma Watson in the lead role pretty much set the movie up for success right away. And you know the singing is pretty impressive when I waited through the credits to double check if any of the actors were dubbed. (They weren’t!)

I ended up giving it a 9/10.

The End to Another School Year

And thus we come to the end of another school year, and the start of the couple of months where I think working is the hardest. It’s so much easier for me to head into work every day when I know my family’s in the same predicament. Sure, I get up earlier than they do, but at least I leave the house knowing the bus is coming soonish. Misery loves company, right? (Despite the fact that I enjoy going to work, I actively dislike getting up in the morning. Just keeping it real here, folks.)

It’s hard to believe another school year is in the books. Tomas is done with seventh grade. DC is done with third. MC has her first year of preschool behind her. It was a big year for all of the kids, for a variety of reasons. For Tomas, I saw him really come into his own in terms of taking responsibility for his schooling. He’d been able to coast through school up until this point, but this year things stepped up a notch, and it too some adjustment to get the hang of that. He came through that experience strong, and he finished the year with great grades.

DC has really upped her reading game since September. She dove right into the library’s summer reading program as soon as school let out, and she’s been devouring books. That makes me very happy for so many different reasons.

MC is just at the point where school is a fun thing to do. But that first exposure to it is important. We’re so lucky to have great teachers in the area for all ages.

Of course, I also realize that things aren’t all smooth sailing for Denisa now. She’s got three kids at home that she has to wrangle each day, which makes her job considerably harder. They’re signed up for swimming lessons, tennis lessons, and they’re planning outings around town and to the library, of course. So she gets to sleep in longer than I do, but her days are likely just as hectic.

And we’ve got trips scheduled, of course. The big one this year is an expedition to Chicago, then to Utah, with a side trip to Yellowstone and Wyoming because why not. There are three family reunions sprinkled in there. We’ll no doubt be plenty busy, and we’re hoping to go camping some when we come back.

Ever have so much fun scheduled you kind of wish you hadn’t scheduled any of it?

I’m at that point now. If I can iron out all the plans, then maybe I’ll start to feel more on top of things. Wish me luck . . .

And congrats to my awesome kids, for being awesome.

Book Review: Three Parts Dead

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was very impressed with this book. I picked up the whole series when it was on sale one day on Amazon. Never heard of it before, but I read Patrick Rothfuss’s review of it, and I figured it certainly sounded worth $13 as an experiment. Why not?

So glad I bought it.

As far as fantasies go, it’s a bit of a strange one. Set in a sort of alternate history feeling-ish present day, where magic and gods are real. Or were real. Most of the gods are now dead, usurped by magic users. Probably. The world building unfolds as the story goes on, so it’s not something you necessarily wholly understand right at the beginning of the book, and Gladstone does a fantastic job doling out information through the narrative, as opposed to using information dumps.

Really, it’s the sort of book that makes me jealous as a writer. It’s so well done, I wish I’d been able to do it myself.

Better yet, that’s all just the background for the story. This specific fantasy is more a murder mystery book with a legal slant, that happens to take place in a fantasy world. Pulling off all of that at the same time is incredibly difficult, and this book makes it feel like a breeze.

A god and a judge die the same day. The deaths seem unrelated, but a magic-using lawyer fresh out of school is hired by a law firm to come in and represent the dead god’s priests in an effort to resurrect a zombie version of the god that will continue to at least do most of what the living god had done for his believers. And as she explores the case, she discovers all is not as it seems.

It’s an intriguing book that’s unafraid to shove its readers straight into the deep end. I can definitely see why Rothfuss loved it, and I’m already well into book two. If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, I encourage you to give this book a shot. Best of all? It’s a stand alone. Yes, it’s part of a sequence of books, but this one exists perfectly all on its lonesome.

Let me know what you think.

View all my reviews

Achievement Unlocked: Library Director

I remember when I moved to Maine, just a shade less than 10 years ago, Denisa and I had a conversation about where my career might take me. I was fresh out of library school, though I’d already been working in libraries for seven years. We hoped we might be able to settle down somewhere for a while, but as I took a look at my coworkers, I felt like the odds of me having much upward mobility at my library were pretty slim. My director had been there for about ten year already and was years and years away from thinking about retirement, and even if he were closer, my supervisor was only a few years older than me.

It seemed clear at the time that if I ever wanted to really “move up” in the library world, it would likely entail a physical move as well.

But if there’s one thing these past ten years have taught me, it’s that you really can’t plan for the future too much. The future almost always has other ideas.

Case in point: here I am, ten years later, and as of yesterday afternoon, I’m officially the Library Director at my job.

I am, of course, very happy and proud of that accomplishment, though it certainly has come at a cost. There are far fewer librarians at my institution now than there were before, and they’ve all left under a variety of circumstances. Some happy, some very sad. So in some ways, this has been a game of “Last Man Standing.” But here I am, and it’s important to celebrate your accomplishments when you can, because you never know when that whole “future” thing is going to throw you another curve ball.

Being a library director means more to me, as a librarian, than it likely does to non-library folk. For one thing, it’ll be so much easier to tell people what I do. “Library Director” is easily understood in a way “Manager of Informational and Research Services” just isn’t. By the time I got to the end of saying my title aloud, most people had already fallen asleep. But Library Director is a title that’s fairly universally understood. It also means I’m quite firmly entrenched in administration at this point, though thankfully my library is small enough that I still have plenty of opportunity to get out and actually be doing things. It’s a very “hands on” role for a director at my university, and I like that.

Where do I go from here? If I can swing it, this would be a lovely part of my story to finish it off with “and he lived happily ever after.” Not that I have nothing more to do at this point, but rather that I’m in a spot where I’m very happy. My family is happy. I love the area. I admire and respect my coworkers, and I feel like my work is contributing to society in a very beneficial way.

I have no real desire to use this as a launching point to go be a director elsewhere after a few years. I would love to dig in and make my library the best it can be.

We’ll see what “the future” has to say about that . . .

For today, I’ll just be glad things are going well. Maybe I’ll buy a few Magic: the Gathering cards to celebrate.

The Budget Didn’t Pass. Again.

I’ve had several people ask me how the school budget vote went yesterday. I’ve been pretty vocal about my support of it, so it makes sense I drop in to update you all to let you know it was voted down. Complete results are listed here.

It’s interesting to me that a bond for funding school infrastructure managed to pass despite its lack of support. I imagine some of that is because the sentiment against the budget is aimed at administrator salaries more than anything, so once that’s separated from the issue, it becomes less contentious. (Although that bond barely passed, so it’s not like too many conclusions can be drawn from it.)

I debated even posting at all today. Inevitably the No side shows up to gloat. I know there are many decent, upstanding people on the No side, and that I can’t judge an entire group based on the actions of a few, but I will say there are some individuals out in front of the No side that are loud, vocal, and obnoxiously rude. People who, if they were on my side, I would do my best to distance myself from. People who I feel are making this whole process much worse and contentious than it should be.

In the end, I decided to post anyway. Because I’m not going to let some brash, tactless mouthbreather dictate what I do and don’t say online. And I’d already written a big post to a few friends, talking about what I thought about the results. Here’s that, which represents most of my thoughts as I woke up and read the news.

Looking over the final results, the big takeaway for me is that the No side is maxed out. They can bring out about 1,650 people to the polls each year.

In 2015, it was 741 for and 1,045 against.

In 2016, it was 1,518 for and 1,655 against.

In 2017, it is 1,458 for and 1,643 against.

Where we’re losing this is in getting out the Yes vote. I don’t honestly believe that’s due to some failure on our part to motivate people and make them aware of the issues. I believe it’s because the narrative is too strong for us to fight. An increase of 3.5% is too big of an increase for the general person to believe is absolutely necessary.

I’ll be honest: when I heard it was as big of an increase as it was, I was disappointed. I felt like it would add fodder to the no side and make passing the budget difficult. I still fought to pass it, because I trust the school board and know how complicated this can be, but if the increase is enough to give someone like me pause, is it any wonder it does the same for others? This year, it looks to me like people just didn’t think it was worth fighting for the same way as last year. I feel like our GOTV effort was much stronger, and yet we had 60 fewer votes?

Scratch that. It was specifically Wilton where things went south. 89 fewer votes for us there than last year. That means that elsewhere, we were up a total of 29 votes. Not great, but something. So what made Wilton so different? [I've since learned that Wilton's taxes spiked last year, and that many attributed that spike to the school budget, despite the fact that in the school budget, Wilton's taxes went down. The spike wasn't due to the school budget, but the school got the blame.]

Another problem I see is that when the budget is reduced, it doesn’t result in any easy-to-see calamities. Last year, it meant we lost half of a World Languages teacher, some Ed Techs, and some contingency funds. The average person is going to shrug that off and say, “I guess there really was some fluff they could cut.” We can explain how important those positions are and what that contingency fund does, but it doesn’t make a meaningful impact. No matter what we say, that doesn’t come across as “core.”

I remember the first school budget meeting I went to. It was back when the board was proposing changes to the bus drivers so the district could save money. And it was flooded with people upset about the change. They wanted to increase the budget so that they could save those positions. Is that savings still there, ready to be gained?

As it is, I feel like even many school parents don’t feel like the budget needs saving. My daughter had multiple people make fun of her yesterday because she was outside with Denisa holding a “Vote Yes” sign in the morning. 3rd Graders don’t have opinions about the budget–their parents do. And apparently some of those parents have strong enough “No” opinions that they’re bleeding through to their kids and making their kids just as nasty as some of the “No” adults can be.

To reverse this trend, we need the board to bring forward a budget that’s flat funded. Or at least have a long, frank discussion or Letter to the Editor about what such a budget would look like. Special Education costs have to go up. So how much would we have to cut to off balance that?

Everything else we’re doing just isn’t making a dent in this problem. The No side is demanding a flat funded budget or (better yet) a budget that’s less than last year. The community needs to know what such a budget would look like. What would be cut? Until we see that, the No side can continue to bring out its straw man “reduced budget” Christmas land budget where everything is still sunshine and strawberries. Bring it into the harsh light of reality, and see what the community thinks then.

In any case, it looks like we have another round of budget meetings, and then at least one more vote for the school budget. Joy.

Changing Your Self Image

I think the biggest help for me in my never-ending quest to be a healthier person has been a simple mental shift. Choosing to be a different type of person. A healthier person. It’s the difference between being on a diet and not. When I have dieted in the past, the simple act of calling it “a diet” implies that it’s temporary. That it’s something I’m doing right now that I don’t want to do forever, and that once I’ve reached a goal (a certain weight), then I’ll be able to stop doing it.

So a diet is temporary. Is it any wonder, then, that once that diet’s over I always went back to the lifestyle that led me to the need to diet in the first place? I thought of myself as a person who likes to eat and enjoy all manners of sugary sweetness. When I’d go to a restaurant, I’d order the big meals, because I was a Hungry Person. I’d get the largest drink. The biggest fry. And when I ate at home, I’d take big portions.

The last time I was “overweight” was April 7, 2016. (It’s easy to tell, since I log my weight every day, and that’s the last time I was over 196.) That means I haven’t just dieted and gotten to a goal weight. I’ve maintained that weight for well over a year. Through holiday celebrations, conferences, stressful times, and more. I was 187.4 this morning. I went up some while I was stress eating in Utah, and I imagine I’ll go up some again when I go on vacation next week. But I believe what’s keeping me around where I want to be is the fact that I’ve changed what my baseline is.

Sure, I go and break my healthy rules while I’m away from home, but when I come back, I’m right back into it. Oatmeal in the morning. A banana at 11. Peanut butter sandwich at noon. I try to remind myself when I’m out and about that I don’t need the biggest meal anymore. It’s hard, though. I’ve got decades of habit I’m trying to overcome, and it’s not like I go out to eat that often, so I don’t have much experience with the healthy ordering thing. But I’m trying.

Still, if I were to suggest to someone how to successfully keep off weight, this would be my main takeaway. I don’t feel like I’ve changed the core person of who I am, but the old person who didn’t exercise and liked to overeat every day?

That person doesn’t exist anymore.

I guess it’s kind of like a reverse Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker thing. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Too. Hot. Send. Help.

One of the bestest things about Maine is the fact that it’s almost always cool here. It’ll get up into the 80s and 90s, sure, but at night, it’ll drop down into the low 60s or high 50s, and that’s all it really takes to cool off your house and leave things pleasant.

Except . . .

Every now and then, it decides it wants to stay in the 70s at night. And when it does that, I am one unhappy Bryce.

We don’t have central air conditioning. There’s just no need for it. We have a couple of window mounted units, but I typically don’t even bother with those. It’s a lot of hassle for just a few evenings’ worth of needed use. But when those hotter evenings come around, I inevitably wish I’d already installed them. Plus, we’ve now moved our bedroom over to be above the garage, and I can officially report that when it’s in the 70s outside at night, that new bedroom is hot hot hot.

Hot enough that the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check Amazon to see how much a portable A/C unit would be. ($400) Not hot enough that I went and dropped $400 on the thing, though. (Tonight’s supposed to be worse. Maybe I’ll reconsider.)

My plan at the moment is plenty of fans, and perhaps a spray bottle by my bed. If I wake up at night and am too hot, I can spray myself down. Is this what I’ve come to? There are two things in life I dislike: being wet, and being hot. I’m just discovering that it’s better to be slightly wet and not hot than just hot. So I guess I dislike being hot more than being wet. What a discovery to make.

Do any of you out there have some ways of dealing with temperatures? I’m sure my Arizona readers are laughing themselves silly as I complain about temperatures in the 70s. That’s okay. I laugh at them when they complain about it being too “cold.”

Thank goodness it looks like tomorrow night is back to a low of 50 degrees . . .

Why I Generally Don’t Blog about Trump Anymore

Sure, I’ll post about him now and then when something really rubs me wrong, but regular readers have no doubt noticed I don’t post about the Orange in Chief nearly as much as I used to. Why is that? Simple. Back when the election was on, I felt like my posts might actually do some good. Like they might persuade a few people not to vote for the man.

These days, I don’t really believe much can be done to change people’s minds. It seems to me like Trump supporters primarily get their news from conservative slanted sources, discounting most other stories as “Main Stream Media” and thus smear jobs or outright fabrications.

We’re at a point where people are believing what they choose to believe. Where they feel justified in ignoring reporting if it goes against their preconceived notions. Yesterday’s Comey hearing is a prime example of that. Those on the left walked away convinced he’d put another nail in the current administration. Those on the right feel vindicated that he admitted Trump wasn’t under investigation, and that several of those main stream media reports really were wrong.

Of course, one could ask whether I’m doing the same thing. Whether by discounting conservative slanted material makes me unfairly biased against Trump. However, I do my best to read far and wide. To consider all angles of an issue to try and get a complete picture. I do still read some conservative posts around the president. But I continue to feel like there’s a very easy way to see what Trump is actually up to. What he thinks. What he wants to do. And that’s to read his Tweets. He provides more than enough fodder for someone to make a judgement on the man, and that judgement (for me) goes in the face of most of those conservative stories.

I’ve had people tell me to ignore what he says and pay more attention to the policies his administration is pushing. I find that shortsighted and dangerous. If Trump really had his way, I believe he would enact every single asinine idea he’s spewed since he started campaigning. I believe he believes he’s 100% right. The only thing holding him back is the fact that he has to work through the government, and thankfully, there are some people who have convinced him in some areas to slow down or change course.

But in the end, I really don’t feel like anything I write is going to change minds. If someone’s still a Trump supporter at this point, they’re hard core. I have no idea what will change their minds. Certainly not me blogging about current events. And if they’re already against Trump, I’m just preaching to the choir.

I don’t write articles about how the sky is blue or the grass is green.

And that’s all I have to say about that.