Bryce Moore's Blog, page 153

Our Latest Four Year Old

It’s always fun to see how excited kids get for birthdays. The younger they are, the more excited. (Well, up to a point. They have to have a concept of “birthday” to really get into it. One year olds? Not so much.)

I think MC is at the “Peak Birthday Excitement” age. She’s turning four, and she’s off the charts hyped for it. Some of that is no doubt that she’s also had the chance to see other people have birthdays in the family so often. People her age. I remember it took Tomas a while to catch the “True Spirit of Birthdays,” meaning realize it gets to be a day all about him, where people bring him presents, and he gets to have a party and pick the food. But it wasn’t like he had examples to check. Parent birthdays are different beasts, really. MC has been able to see Tomas and DC get birthday parties, and so she knows what to look forward to.

What does she want out of the day? “Bags of presents,” she said. I think it’s because DC had some presents that were in gift bags, rather than “Garbage bag-sized bags of presents.” But you never know. We’ve been trying to manage her expectations on that one. She also wants a chocolate cake with strawberries and raspberries on it, going in the vein of DC’s birthday cakes. So Denisa’s taking care of that. Beyond that, I think she’s just looking forward to people singing her the happy birthday song.

So a few presents, a chocolate cake, and people singing to her. Maybe we all could learn a thing or two from how excited four year olds can get for relatively little investment, and how pleased they can be by it.

Really, she’s a fantastic little girl. I still remember how calm and quiet she was right after she was born. No crying at all. She was just looking around, interested to see where she’d ended up. Four years later, and she still(!) takes a two hour or more nap each day. The girl prioritizes sleep, and I fully support that. She has a strong independent streak in her. but she’s also very happy to know her place in the family and to fill it.

Her idea of a perfect day right now would probably be waking up, having sweet cereal for breakfast, watching Netflix, and playing games. (She’s on an Octonauts binge at the moment. She also loves Little Einsteins.) She’s both sad the snow has gone (meaning she can’t ski) and through the roof hyped for flowers incoming. She loves dressing up as a princess, and loves Disney princess movies. Cinderella is her favorite, probably because it doesn’t really have anything scary in it other than a mean woman who’s handily dealt with by some mice.

Hard to believe Denisa and I were wondering if we wanted to have a third child. The family feels perfect with her addition. Happy birthday, MC! You’re awesome.

Being Busy is Relative: My Trip to the ER

Tuesday evening, I started feeling under the weather. Stomach ache. I looked at my calendar for the rest of the week and sort of mentally shrugged. There were some important things on at work I had to attend to, so I had no time to be sick. I’d just have to barrel through it.

Wednesday morning, I woke up feeling worse. Stomach pain was tighter, but off to work I went. Throughout the day, things only went downhill. I started examining those important things I had to get done the rest of the week. Suddenly they didn’t seem so life or death anymore.

Staying home began to look more and more like the way to go.

I came home early Wednesday, and I was in bed since. The important things I had to do were done by other people. But the pain just wouldn’t go away, and I went to the doctor. Which led to a trip to the emergency room. I got to experience a whole bunch of firsts: my first IV. My first CAT scan. My first time having to be in one of those drafty hospital gowns. What a lucky guy.

Four hours later, I’m back home. It’s not appendicitis or cancer or anything scary. Nothing that needs surgery or treatment. Just “acute mesenteric lymphadenitis,” which basically means the lymph nodes in my abdomen are swollen and so are doing their best appendicitis impersonation. Way to go, body.

Still, compared to the alternatives, I’ll take this any day of the week. Nothing that can be done for it other than pain medicine and the passage of time. It should get better in 5-7 days. Here’s hoping.

Anyway. I just found it interesting how quickly priorities can chance. Between Wednesday afternoon and this morning, I went from “I have too much stuff to do to be sick” to “I really hope I don’t have to be operated on later today.” I much prefer being busy to being in need of surgery.

I don’t need the latter, and it looks like for the next few days, at least, I won’t be the former.

Heavy Meta #9: Interview with Woody Hanstein

 

Time for another podcast episode! This week, we’re joined with local author Woody Hanstein to talk about his books. If you’re local and you’ve written something, drop us a line. We’d love to talk to you too!

Right click to download audio file.

Family Relations: Memory Thief Chapters Three and Four

It’s Wednesday, and that means it’s time for another chapter commentary on THE MEMORY THIEF. This week, I’m doing two chapters at once, mainly because in the original draft, chapters three and four were just one long chapter. They featured the introduction of Chris, Benji’s best friend (who ultimately became his twin sister. Talk about a convoluted past.)

In the original, there’s no talk of divorce. No scene with the parents shouting at home that night. Instead, we have Benji telling Chris about Louis, and then the two of them walking home after school, followed by walking over to the fair to see Louis, and running into Genevieve for the first time. That part plays out as you see it in the present book, for the most part. The biggest difference is that detour to Chris’s house for a pitstop on the way to the fair. It did feature a description of that house that I was particularly proud of, so I’ll give it here, just so you can see it:

We reached Chris’s place, an old Victorian with a turret and everything. Green, and built back in 18whatever. A long time ago. When we were younger, we used to go through the house, knocking on walls and checking for loose floorboards. A house that old had to have some secrets: hidden gold, secret passageways. Those were standard issue things two hundred years ago, weren’t they?

We never found any. But we still thought that was more due to the secrets being that well hidden, rather than them not existing at all. There was this spot under the staircase where I was sure the floor was six inches higher than it needed to be. Chris’s Dad wouldn’t let us saw into it, though. One day.

Nothing elaborate, but I liked it.

Anyway. As the book evolved, family took on a larger and larger part in the plot. Some of that came from making Chis into Kelly, but I decided I really needed the parents’ divorce to be a real, tangible thing. We didn’t see too many actual examples of his parents fighting in the first draft, so I added the scene at night which turned into chapter three.

My editor and some readers questioned why the potential for divorce would be so upsetting to Benji and Kelly. It’s a common enough thing these days, they reasoned. Why would it be so terrifying? I didn’t budge on it, though. I think that for some kids (especially kids who know full well that their parents fight a ton), the unknown is one of the scariest things they can come up with. Nothing’s more unknown than having your family broken apart. It’s easy to come up with worst case scenarios. Even in bad situations, it can be comforting to already be familiar with the pain than to try and figure out how you’ll respond to the pain that’s coming. It must be worse, or at least that’s what you assume.

Having lived through a divorce as a child, I could personally relate to what it could be like, and I’d had experience with friends’ families going through divorce later on. It’s very traumatic, no matter how common it might be. So I stood my ground. But I had to have more scenes (at least one or two) where the parents were actively fighting. It’s one thing for Benji to tell the reader he’s afraid of divorce, but that lacks a real punch. Show the parents fighting, and show the subject coming up, and then show his reaction to that, and it makes more sense that he’d be worried and upset. We see it firsthand, and so we believe it.

Sometimes it feels like the job of a writer is to do mean things to good characters, all in the name of good tension. What can I say?

Writers can be real jerks.

What to Do When You’re Involuntarily Bumped from a Flight

When it comes to travel, things often go wrong for me. Whether it’s flights getting entirely canceled, or Colombian soccer teams making planes have to go back to the gate right before takeoff, I’ve seen my fair share of flying fiascos. So when the video surfaced of the United passenger getting dragged off the plane after being involuntarily bumped from the flight (after he was already seated!), I looked at it and thought, “That could be me someday.”

And as a librarian, I’m a firm believer in the importance of having knowledge. The right knowledge. The knowledge you need for the situation at hand.

It turns out there’s this thing called the “US Department of Transportation” that governs how air travel works in this country. (Well, there is as of today. Who knows what will get cut next under the Trump administration?) They have laws that dictate what companies have to do for passengers in a variety of situations, and that includes laws governing people who get bumped when they don’t want to get bumped.

They have a handy web page that goes over your rights as a passenger, and I encourage you all to read it, or at least to be aware that it exists, so you can consult it if you ever are in a travel bind. But since I also know from experience that my blog readers don’t like clicking through to articles, I’m going to summarize the steps to take for involuntary bumping here.

First, airlines are required by law to look for people willing to be bumped in exchange for compensation. What form that compensation takes is up to the airline. They can offer travel vouchers of varying denominations. They might offer hotel rooms and meals as well. There are no laws saying what they have to offer, only that they have to offer something. Often that offer will go up if no one takes them up on it. For the United flight that received all the news coverage, they were supposedly offering $1000 for people willing to be bumped. No one took them up on it.

Be aware that it’s totally in your rights to be fully informed about what exactly the airline is offering if you choose to be bumped. Will there be blackout travel dates for those vouchers? What flight will they put you on instead, and when will you arrive? How long is the voucher good for? Can you use it for international travel? Of course, if someone else chooses to be bumped and doesn’t care about the restrictions, the airline is welcome to deal with them instead of you. It’s a negotiation to find the person or persons willing to be bumped for the best deal for the airline.

But sometimes (as the United case shows) that deal isn’t reached, and the airline has to bump somebody. They overbooked in an effort to make sure the plane was full. (Statistically, it was likely some people would cancel or not show up for the flight, so the airline overbooks to the point where they think that will balance out. Sometimes they’re wrong.) If you are bumped involuntarily, you have some very good rights, but they depend mainly on the delay to your travel:

If your new flight gets you to your final destination within an hour of your original schedule, you get nothing. Good day sir.
If your new flight gets you there between one and two hours late (one and four hours, for international flights), you’re entitled to 200% of your one way ticket fare, up to a maximum of $675.
If your new flight gets you there later than that (or they don’t rebook you at all for some strange reason), you’re entitled to 400% of your one way ticket fare, with a maximum of $1,350.
If your ticket didn’t show a fare (you were using frequent flyer miles, for example), they’ll base the one way fare on the lowest price someone paid for travel in the same class you were booked in.
You always get to keep your original ticket and use it on another flight. You can also make your own arrangements and request an “involuntary refund” for that ticket. This is above and beyond the compensation listed above.
If you paid for any extras on the flight (baggage fees, etc.), the airline is required to refund those payments.

There are some exceptions to these rules that you should be aware of:

It assumes you had an actual written reservation on the flight, and that you arrived within the check-in deadline the airline posts. If you got there late, tough luck.
If you got bumped because they switched sizes of planes for whatever reason, you’re out of luck. You’re not entitled to anything.
If you got bumped due to safety regulations (weight of the plane or balance constraints) and your flight had 30-60 people on it, you’re also out of luck. Go figure.

And here’s one thing to be very aware of: if you’re involuntarily bumped, the airline will likely try to pay you what it owes in the form of ticket vouchers. You are entitled to ask to be paid in a check, instead. Once you cash the check or accept the free flight, you lose the ability to get more money from the airline. You’ve accepted the deal. If being bumped involuntarily ends up costing more than the airline is willing to pay, you can contact their complaints department and ultimately taken them to court. But not if you already accepted the deal.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

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Sign Up for My Author Email List

It occurred to me Friday that I really ought to have an author email list. An easy way for fans to sign up to get updates from me about my writing and my books. Yes, there’s this blog, and I keep it up to date, but it’s requires you to be an active participant. You have to go looking for my page to find out what I’ve been up to, and even once you’ve found it, it’s not like I write updates all the time. You’d have to sort through the posts to find the latest and greatest.

If you miss the post where I talk about my new book or a new release coming out, then it’s doubtful you’ll ever see it unless you really dig.

I’m active on social media, but in those cases, I’m at the mercy of Facebook’s algorithms. The big blue F has really upped its game when its come to trying to use it as a way to stay connected with fans. They’ll gladly let a few people see a post, and then remind you that you can pay more to have it be promoted. Thanks but not thanks, Facebook. Twitter, on the other hand, is very hit or miss. You might get some good retweets of a post, but you’re once again at the mercy of the gods of luck to hope that your fans see a post.

I’m reminded of this fairly often, whenever I talk to a friend or family member and they’re surprised I have another book out, or that I have a new one coming next summer. For all the writing and posting I do online, I feel like I’m already pushy enough. And yet so many people still don’t hear about the latest and greatest.

That’s where the email list comes in. Sign up once, and be passively informed about everything I’m up to. It’ll be delivered straight to your email. No need for you to go hunting anywhere. I promise not to get spammy with things. No more than one post a month, and probably fewer than that. I want it to be so that when something comes out from me, people pay attention and actually read it. Know what I mean?

I should have started this a long time ago, but that’s no reason to not start it now. Just fill out the Google form below, and you’ll be signed up right away. Thanks for reading!

Pete’s Dragon is a Bad Movie

Not the old version, mind you. The old Pete’s Dragon is great. Lighthearted fun, and drunk Mickey Rooney. It doesn’t get much better than that. Oh. And songs. The songs are great too. The original was so good, it makes you wonder why they felt there was a need to update it, other than money.

But I like money, and I can’t blame people for wanting to make some of their own. And some of the live adaptations of Disney films have been really solid, so why not?

The thing is, the end result in this case was pretty bad. What’s worse is that it there were a lot of good things surrounding the bad that made it that much more frustrating. The acting wasn’t terrible. The effects were great. There were pieces of a genuinely good movie and plot in there, so you could see that there might be something really awesome, if it all fell into place.

But it doesn’t.

The  movie is much more serious than the original. It’s got no songs. And it has no drunk Mickey Rooney. I’m okay with all of it in principle, but where it all goes horribly wrong is in the story. Denisa liked the movie, so perhaps some of this is just me being irritated that the plotting and characters were so poorly thrown together, since that’s something I look and try to do professionally.

The big problem: the characters served the plot to an extreme. (There’s going to be spoilers here, so if you don’t want to read those, move on.) There’s a character who’s basically only there to go for the stereotypical “I’m a man! I have a gun! I must shoot things and cut down trees and go catch a dragon!) And he somehow gets his hands on a whole bunch of tranquilizer guns and the darts to go with them, so he and a few friends go out to find that dragon in a place in the woods that took them hours to find, getting lost in the process (but magically finding their way back to their car in about 5 seconds when they needed to).

Fine. Whatever. They want the dragon, so they tranq the dragon up. And then somehow they move that dragon in the space of an hour or two (an afternoon at most) onto a huge truck. I have no idea how they managed to do this. They must have needed to cut down a whole mess of trees to have that happen, but then the trees are all still there when they go back. But never mind that. And never mind the fact that there were some other adults present who should have been telling them to stop.

Nope. They got the dragon back. And then they proceed to be stupid and bullheaded about keeping the dragon. (So they can . . . make money somehow? Unclear.)

The characterization problems aren’t limited to the idiot hunter. Nope, they extend to other characters as well. For example, Pete stays with a family for one evening. During that one evening, the dragon sees him reading a book with the fam, and concludes Pete doesn’t want him anymore. Fine. The dragon’s dense, I guess? But Bryce Dallas Howard also somehow becomes so attached to Pete in that one evening that she’s desperate to keep him. Who knows why.

That just keeps coming up in the movie again and again. Characters do things because that’s what they need to do in order for the plot to move forward. None of the payoffs are earned, but the music swells and the actors pretend they are.

A smaller problem: There’s a subtheme through the movie of evil loggers ruining the forest. But this is just thrown in here and there and not developed at all. This indicates to me that it was a bigger plot point in a different version, but it was edited out almost entirely, which is a symptom of a movie that has been drastically altered from what it used to be. Edited to make it into something else. I would like to see the original version, if it’s out there, to see what went on with it.

You can see this in the way the movie plays out its climax as well. There are three or four different points where it seems the problems are all solved. Three or four climaxes. But the movie just keeps on going. Keeps on having new resolutions. It doesn’t make any sense.

For a movie or book to really work, you need that suspension of disbelief. You need the audience to believe the characters might make decisions they way they’re portrayed. If they don’t, then it all falls apart. That’s what happened to me in this movie. Perhaps some of it was I was disappointed it was messing up a childhood favorite, but I’m usually good at separating myself from that. I think there were just little blips of issues at first, and they made me pay attention to the plot. Start looking at it critically.

By the end, I just wanted the movie to stop. 3/10. Go watch the original and save yourself 2 hours.

Netflix Has Ditched the Star System

(“Netflix has ditched the solar system” would have sounded cooler, but what can you do?) Either which way, the days of rating movies from 1-5 stars on Netflix seem to be over. It’s reduced its user rating system to a very simple thumbs up or thumbs down decision. Did you like the movie or dislike it?

Part of me is bummed about the switch. I had been very dutiful about rating movies on Netflix, and I felt like the algorithm had me down pretty well. I could look at a movie I hadn’t heard about and have a good idea whether I would like it or not based on the anticipated rating Netflix assigned to it. I understood that sometimes that rating might be lower than usual, based on the genre. I didn’t give out many 5 star reviews to action movies, for example, just because many of them don’t warrant it. But I knew when I wanted to watch an action movie and the algorithm gave it around 4 stars, then it would be a really good one for me.

That’s all gone now. Netflix has replaced it with a new algorithm that estimates how good of a “match” a movie or TV show is to your tastes. It’s a percent score, so if they’re really sure you’ll like something, they’ll list it as 98%. That kind of thing. You can indicate what you think of a show by rating it thumbs up or thumbs down, but Netflix has decided it has something far more reliable to judge you on:

Your actual viewing habits.

It makes sense, in a very big-brothery way. Netflix has full knowledge of which shows you watch, when, on which devices. It knows the shows you start but don’t finish. It knows your secret penchant for My Little Pony binges in the middle of the night. It knows your tastes the best way that’s really possible. By keeping track of how you vote with your eyeballs.

I’m torn on this. On the one hand, it makes sense for Netflix to do it. It’s in the entertainment business, and it wants to make sure you’re happy with what you’re watching. It realized that often people wouldn’t give the shows and movies they liked best the highest ratings. Like me, other people sometimes like to watch a movie just for kicks, even if it’s not the best movie in the world. They’ll give it three stars, but they had a great time watching it. But the thing is, sometimes I want a movie that’s going to challenge me. That I’m not necessarily going to love, but which I’ll be very happy that I watched it. It’s not a popcorn flick. It’s a real piece of art.

How will Netflix manage that one? I worry it’ll keep parading the same kinds of shows and movies I often watch, instead. It’ll want to keep me happy on a steady diet of sugars and carbs, when what I really need is a fine dinner now and then. See my point?

It’s also troubling that even with the new system, when I go to “Top Picks for Bryce,” it continues to provide me with suggestions that are far less than ideal. Matches that are just 70% or 56%, leading me to believe those “top picks” are nothing more than paid ads by the content creators. Seriously–why not have the section filled with the content that’s the closest match? It seems like a no brainer.

Anyway. We’ll see how it plays out in practice. Maybe it’ll grow on me. If any of you get experience with it, chime in to let me know what you think.

Getting to the Action: MEMORY THIEF Chapter Two

Welcome back to another chapter annotation, where I talk about the work that went into the writing of THE MEMORY THIEF. Up this week? Chapter two, the first introduction to Memory Thieving.

It’s interesting to me (and maybe others, though no one’s noted it yet) that there’s some overlap here between VODNIK. After all, the extended sequences with Lesana showing Tomas what happened to her in the past are essentially the same thing as what Louis shows Benji in this first chapter. I even use similar ways to describe the experience, with both Benji and Tomas feeling strange as they’re caught in a different body, able to view it all and experience everything, but not able to take control of the scene. Like puppets.

So the question could easily be asked if the two are more than just coincidentally related. I don’t have a hard answer for it, but I’ll say that I recognized the parallels when I was writing the memory scenes, and I went out of my way to make sure the two lined up properly. A lot of what I write is done by gut feeling, and only later on do I figure out what my gut was trying to tell me to do. Usually it’s a pleasant surprise, and so I try to follow my gut whenever possible.

As for the memory itself, the scene Louis showed Benji changed from the first draft to the last. In the first draft, Louis was on one of the ships that stormed the beaches on D-Day. It was a basic ode to Saving Private Ryan. I switched it from a ship to a plane mainly because it felt more exciting. More like something a twelve-year-old would find interesting and cool. The nautical version just didn’t have the same punch. It was also much shorter: about half as long. I decided to lengthen it to increase the attention the memory received. I didn’t want it over too quickly.

Other than that, the chapter got tightened a fair bit. In the original, Louis and Benji end up chit chatting for quite a while about memories and how Louis’ business works. This is necessary for me as a writer, because I’m often finding out what’s going on at the same time as my narrator, so I need to have those scenes to have it all make sense. It’s almost as if my characters are explaining to me how their world works. Once I’ve heard all of it, however, I usually have to cut those scenes out. It’s important for me to hear, but it’s not that important for you to read, if that makes sense.

I’ve tried plotting everything down to the smallest detail. I’ve tried plotting things generally. In the end, I almost always switch things up and go into the blank areas of the map, so to speak. One of my main motivations when writing is the same as it is when reading: I want to find out what happens next. If I’ve already plotted it, then I already know it, and why in the world would I want to write it in that case? So instead my first drafts can wander from time to time as I feel my way forward. Which is all fine and good, until I get to the revision stage and have to correct some of those wanderings.

This is especially important in the first few chapters of a book. That’s where I meander the most in my first drafts, and it’s where the reader most wants to get things going and have the plot zip along. As long as I keep this in mind when I’m revising, it usually all works out fine in the end.

Hail the Conquering Hero

Another March Madness came to an end last night. I had a particularly good run this year, up until the finish. I had successfully picked 3/4 of the Final Four Teams, and I called the final two as well. Until the finish, I was ranked 12,000th out of something like 15 million participants on ESPN’s system.

But I had picked Gonzaga to win it all, mainly on the theory that if they did, then BYU would have been the only team who would have beaten them this year, so this was BYU’s last kind of sort of way to win anything. And in true BYU style, the team blew it at the last possible moment.

I can’t really complain too much, though. I still managed to win half of the groups I entered, and I came in second in the other two. My early game was strong enough to even win over people who had picked UNC to win it all. And yes, I won my blog bracket group.

As promised, I’m still giving the runner up a prize. The Real One (Scooter12300), would you please identify yourself? You’ll be in the acknowledgements page of THE MEMORY THIEF 2, though since I won, I get to note that you came in second to me.

Overall, it was a good year for the blog challenge. 22 entries total. And I want to particularly congratulate MC, who managed to come in 10th despite only being three years old. She made her own picks, though I did ask her to start if she wanted to have all the higher ranked teams win in the first round. She agreed to that, and then chose each game after that on a case by case basis. Not bad for a girl her age.

In any case, thanks everybody for playing, and tune in next year for another shot! (And if you haven’t seen the movie “Hail the Conquering Hero,” you really should. Just saying.)