Bryce Moore's Blog, page 190

Selling the Gospel

After this past General Conference, one of the talks that was causing a fair bit of buzz was the one about “ponderizing” scriptures: picking a scripture a week and working on pondering it and memorizing it. In fact, right after the sessions were over, I noticed some people had spotted Ponderize merchandise already for sale. That earned an eye roll from me, but I shook my head and forgot about it.

Until later that evening, when the news broke that the website selling that merchandise had been founded by the son of the man who gave the talk. (Read more about that here.) Now, before I talk about this, I want to throw in a disclaimer: I don’t want to talk about the specifics of this case. I don’t know any of the people involved, and I have no way of knowing what actually happened. Defending the general authority or attacking him make no sense to me in such a vacuum of information. However, I feel qualified to talk about my thoughts in this area. Make sense?

Why did I give Ponderize merchandise an eye roll when I first saw it, and why did the possibility of it being connected to the actual speaker make things so much worse in my head?

People profit off the Gospel all the time. Whether it’s televangelists calling for donations or stores selling church-themed merchandise, it’s a regular occurrence. You see this plenty in Utah, where you can buy Mormon-themed t-shirts, jewelry, doo dads, and more. And I’m apparently fine with some of that. I mean, even as I type this, I’m wearing a German CTR ring that I got before my mission. Most people don’t seem to think twice about CTR rings, but how are they any different than Ponderize t-shirts?

The answer is pretty clear: the possibility that one might use General Conference as a platform from which to launch a merchandizing campaign makes things look pretty sketchy, pretty quick. (Again, not saying this is what happened. But the idea behind the possibility is open to analysis.) To me (and to many, judging from comments online), that steps way over the line.

But to even have that thought is to recognize that there’s a continuum there. A range between making no money off the Gospel and simply preaching the Gospel to make money. And as soon as you have such a continuum, you’re going to have people who debate about where “the line” needs to be put. I saw some objecting not to the Ponderize merchandise, but to the fact that it seemed to go live on Sunday, the Sabbath. I saw others who didn’t see the big deal in the first place.

Mormon doctrine preaches against priestcraft: “Church leaders must labor to build Zion into the hearts of the people, and not for their personal aggrandizement or reward.” And yet many members think nothing of buying Mormon-themed pictures, paintings, songs, clothes, or other items. Perhaps in this case, it was simply the thought that perhaps someone had been preaching specifically to call attention to a website that shocked enough members to giving all of this a second thought.

In the end, this possibility (in my opinion) is a natural outgrowth of how the church has been merchandized to date. After all, as soon as the Ponderize talk became popular, it was inevitable that the t-shirts would crop up. That’s the way things have been going lately. So why would it be okay for a Deseret Book or some other store to make money off this concept, and yet verboten for the man who came up with the idea? (Or in this case, potentially his son?) If that’s something that upsets you, maybe think again before you buy your next Mormon-themed whatever.

To me, it’s a thought problem without a clear solution. If the worst proved true about this specific example, that (to me) would be clearly wrong. But once the door’s been opened, when does it get shut, and by whom? Church leaders write books. Apostles and prophets write books. Those books are sold for a profit, plain and simple. I don’t know what the contract terms are, but you can bet that someone is making money in there somewhere. Why is it okay to buy a book written by a prophet, but not a t-shirt inspired by a General Authority’s talk.

Food for thought . . .

Book Review: Lockwood & Company Series

The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished the third book of this series last night, and I realized that I hadn’t ever gotten around to writing a review of any of them. Which is a shame, because I’ve really enjoyed them all. I’m short on time today, so this will be briefer than the books deserve, but if you’re looking for a creepy story that will keep you turning the pages, with a great protagonist and fascinating world building, then you’ve come to the right place.

The set up is pretty straightforward: some years ago, ghosts began appearing in London. Mean ghosts. Ghosts that can kill with a touch. But instead of the adults of the world stepping in and solving the problem, a huge monkey wrench was thrown into the mix: the only people who can see and deal with these ghosts are children, Once people reach a certain age, they stop being able to see the things. (They can still be killed by them, of course . . .)

So the world turns to Tweens for help.

The series focuses on one of the lesser known, up and coming ghost agencies. They’re smaller than most, and it’s hard for them to get ahead, but they’re doing their best to keep up with the big agencies. Stroud’s writing worked so well for me in this series, in a way that never quite clicked for me in the Bartimaeus books. It might be a personal preference, and I’m not sure what the difference was, but I just . . . *like* these books more. They’re quick paced, funny, and entertaining.

If you haven’t already heard of them, I encourage you to check them out. Well worth your time!

View all my reviews

The Wire 1:5 and 1:6

I’ve been busy enough that I’ve really had to make time to watch this week’s episodes. Good thing is such an incredible series. This is also where I feel like the show begins to really dig in. It’s through introducing new characters (for now) and conflicts, and it turns its attention to advancing the story and putting these characters through the grinder. On to the episode reviews!

Episode 1:5

The Wire isn’t a show you can just sit back and consume. It demands attention from its viewers. That’s something that was clear right at the beginning, and it’s still on display as the show moves forward. In a lighter show, we’d have important moments highlighted and emphasized for us. There’d be dramatic music, or special effort to make sure the audience was paying attention ahead of time. In The Wire, these moments come and go, and if you’re not with it, you miss it.

A few cases in point: the lead up to Brandon getting killed is clear as crystal if you know what you’re looking for, but it’s something I really missed during the first watch. Details are dropped throughout the episode: mentions of the other shooter in Kevlar getting killed come up multiple times, Barksdale already put out the bounty on these guys, the hit is mentioned on both sides of the fight (cops and drug dealers). If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Omar’s buddy had been killed violently, and you know that he and Brandon are in danger.

But none of that comes in-scene. We don’t have a closeup of the guy getting shot. We don’t even see a dead body. It’s all bits and pieces, and we’re expected to connect the dots.

Another example: Avon and his brother. We get a huge insight into Avon. Why he is the way he is, what he wants from life. But all it is is him sitting there with his comatose brother. It’s another scene. A scene that doesn’t even seem to advance the plot any. This is the first time we see his brother, and as I remember, we don’t see him again after this. There’s nothing to show why this is an important bit to watch, other than knowing that this show doesn’t put unimportant things on the screen. If they’re showing it, it’s important. It’s something to think about. Why are they showing it? I really like that scene with his brother. It makes Avon a more real character, for one thing, And it provides important back story elements.

Then you’ve got things like Prez moving from being a complete moron to a person who actually does something worthwhile. I love watching this evolution of Prez over the course of the show. They’d been showing him doing word searches in the past few episodes, and here we have the pay off. He likes puzzles, and so this wire really appeals to him in a way normal police work couldn’t.

I like that this show has smart and not-so-smart people on both sides of the line. Avon and Stringer have their share of imbeciles just like McNulty and Kima have theirs. And then you have Omar, a man so smart that he seems to know everything going on everywhere. (Though he can’t magically protect his own from getting injured. Even Omar has limits.)

It’s a strong episode, with more I don’t have time to discuss. Total for me? A 9/10. The tricky thing with The Wire is that sometimes the episodes are all so good, you feel the need to grade them next to each other, and not to TV as a whole. But great TV is great TV, plain and simple.

Episode 1:6

Once again, we have a lot of important things happen off screen that would be garishly displayed on screen in different shows. Brandon’s capture, torture, and death being the prime example. Instead of seeing all of that, we just start the episode (and end the episode) with a close up of his tortured body. From there, we see Wallace, and discover he isn’t just some drug dealing underling. He takes care of a whole group of children.

He’s also responsible for Brandon’s death, even if indirectly. And the way that weighs on him throughout the episode is really well done. For me, so much of The Wire is successful for what it doesn’t say as much as for what it does.

The episode also has McNulty at his McNulty-est: berating Daniels for not being a better cop, all while being too blind to his own weaknesses. The thing is, as an audience, we’ve been conditioned to root for the McNultys of a show. They’re supposed to be the ones who are frustrated by the red tape. Who are only kept down because all their superiors are inferior. We’re trained to sympathize with them. And McNulty is smart, you have to grant him that. But as the show goes on, we start to like him almost in spite of who he is. He does so many things wrong, and causes problems for so many people by making those blunders . . .

Not trying to give Daniels an out here, of course. He has a bit of a different problem: trying to work from within the system to get good things done, although the system at times feels set up to be anything but efficient. Anytime someone wants to put too much focus on numbers and end results, I feel like maybe they should watch The Wire to see where that ends up.

A character I’m liking a lot more through this rewatch is Jay, McNulty’s homicide superior. The first time I watched the show, I just thought he was a random suck-up. Someone to do Rawls’ bidding. But as I watch it again, he seems much more: he’s trying to get good things done from within a broken system. He knows McNulty is a good cop, and he wants his help in the department. So he comes up with a way to have Rawls take him back. Jay is crude and very much limited in what he can and can’t do, but he is able to navigate those waters so much more successfully than other people. McNulty could learn a thing or two from him.

So by the end of the episode, we’ve got everything up and running. The wire is on, they’re getting information, and the game is afoot. Another strong episode for me. 9/10

What have you been thinking?

My Current Feeling on Guns and the Pro-Gun Lobby

I’ve written about this topic plenty of times before. The depressing thing is that mass shootings keep happening so frequently that I keep on having more things to say about it.

I’m not a fan of guns. TRC has a BB-gun, and that’s about the extent of the arsenal my household is ever going to acquire. I have friends who have guns. Some of them have an awful lot of guns. I know plenty of people who love shooting, merrily post Facebook videos of themselves shooting, and constantly defend their right to guns after each and every mass shooting occurs.

I get it, folks. You like guns. You’re certainly entitled to like them. But as I keep seeing these terrible events unfold, I’m steadily losing my ability to understand why people continue to believe their love of guns somehow trumps the right of people to go about their every day lives without fear of being shot to death by a random stranger.

You know what I like? Board games. I love me a good board game, and I will happily play one pretty much any day of the week. I have two closets full of board games. Enough board games that my wife probably thinks I’m crazy. I’m a board game fanatic. But if I started to see that board games were killing other people on a mass scale, would I be willing to give them up so that would stop?

You bet.

I know it’s a stupid analogy. Board games don’t kill people. But what I’m saying is that there comes a time to stop defending a right to do something you enjoy, if it’s in the greater national good. I’m not saying hunters need to give up their guns. But this national sense of need for pistols, automatic weapons, and other killing machines? Things designed for the simple, express purpose of ending human lives? Why do we need those things? And why do people defend their need of them?

Yes, there are going to be comments defending and rationalizing. This post will rub many of you the wrong way. And five or six mass shootings ago, I might have still cared. Now? Not so much. I’ve read all the defenses already. I’ve heard plenty about the 2nd Amendment. I’ve had people tell me that the only defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. I’ve heard the claim that our nation already has too many guns, and there’s nothing we can do at this point. Each mass shooting, the same tired excuses get dragged out of the gun closet, paraded around for a week or two, and then put away until the next mass shooting.

I’ve had it with them. Clearly those excuses aren’t doing anything to stop these mass shootings. How about we try something different for a change? The gun lobby has had its say, and it has been found wanting. It’s time to let the other side give it a shot. There’s a wide gap between “nothing we can do” and where we are now. You want to know why? Because we haven’t tried to do anything.

That’s the thing that infuriates me the most about this. We’ve had children gunned down at schools, and as a nation, we’ve done jack squat about it. Mass shootings happen almost monthly, and the general consensus is there’s no way to stop them. And we reached this conclusion by simply doing nothing.

What sort of an attitude is that? It’s like staring up at the moon at the beginning of the space race and shrugging our collective shoulders. “There’s no way to get there. Nothing can be done.” And so we give up and don’t even make an attempt?

People, if there were no way to avoid this, then every country would be facing the same crisis. We’d have regular mass shootings across the globe. But we don’t. So why don’t we swallow our pride as a nation, look to some of our peers, and see how they’ve handled these problems? Let’s try some solutions before we just throw in the towel.

And with that, I’ve pissed off enough of my friends for one day. Catch you tomorrow, when I’m hopefully in a less fed-up mood.

A Few Thoughts on LDS General Conference

This past weekend was General Conference (meaning 10 hours of talks by LDS/Mormon church leaders, for those of you who are wondering. It happens twice a year.) I listened to all of them. Well, some of them more than others. 10 hours is a lot of talks, especially when you’ve got kids running around and didn’t sleep too well the night before.

But I certainly tried.

As usual, there were a few talks that stood out to me more than others. I think this is a natural sort of thing. Everyone’s at a different place in their lives, and so some topics and speakers will resonate more with one individual than another. There weren’t any talks I actively didn’t like, which is a plus. (Just keeping it real here, folks. Sometimes some talks really get under my skin. That might say more about me than the talk, but there you have it.)

What stood out this time?

First off, President Uchtdorf’s talk about how simple the Gospel really is. Why did it stand out? Mainly because it sums up a lot of what I feel about the church in general, and how the church can and should be run. I suppose I’m a minimalist at heart when it comes to meetings and extra rules. I’m all for the essentials, but I think that there’s a real tendency to clutter things up with extra hoops too much of the time. This doesn’t just waste time for members; it makes things unnecessarily complicated. Being a Mormon can be hectic enough without people throwing in extra bells and whistles.

Second, and connected to the first, was the talk by Elder Larry L. Lawrence about how to become a better person: pray and ask God for what you should work on next, and then do that. This is another concept I’ve long tried to follow. It’s simple, and it’s tailor-made for each person. What I need to work on next is going to be different from what someone else needs to work on. The trick is to focus on myself and not get worried about what other people are doing. Just because something is important for me to do doesn’t mean it’s something everyone in the church should be focusing on. I forget that sometimes, but it’s great to remember it as often as possible.

Finally, to show I was paying attention beyond Saturday morning, there was President Nelson’s talk on Sunday afternoon about how awesome women are and how needed their input is in the church. Now, this is one that I’d like to listen to some more, because it was getting late, and I was beginning to lost focus, so maybe I’m off in what I took away from it, but to me it was a pretty key talk, and quite timely. Of course, I anticipate some dismissing it as a simple “don’t forget to listen to women in church” throwaway piece that’s promptly ignored and forgotten. A sop to Cerberus from the leaders of the church to the membership. I didn’t see it that way. To me, it was reemphasizing just how necessary women are in the church at all levels of leadership. How their voices need to be heard on various church councils. Not sure where things are going to go from there, but I’d be interested to see if other people took the same thing away from that talk.

Anyway. Those were the talks that stood out to me most. This is where you come in. What stood out to you? Which talks made the biggest connection with you personally, and why? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Being Your Own Biggest Fan

I’m in the middle of re-reading OUR LADY for the . . . third time? I’ve lost count. But I’ve read the book multiple times over the last year, and these days, my books are the only books I do that for. I reread a book each time I revisit it after a long hiatus, just to get a feel for the book and the point of view and to remind myself where I was with the novel and (most importantly) to see what’s working and what isn’t.

You’d figure that I would be able to remember pretty clearly what was going on, but that isn’t always the case, particularly with books I’ve done multiple drafts on. For example, one of my agents in his feedback for OUR LADY told me to maybe throw in an extra scene with Alexander. I looked at that comment and was completely stumped. My book doesn’t have any Alexanders in it. So in the end, I assumed he’d meant one of the other characters. Then as I’m going through the read through, I discover that I added in Alexander the Great as a character. (Because every book could use an important historical character or two, and this one only had William Taft in it so far.)

Whoops.

The good news is that I love my books. I write exactly the sort of book that appeals to me most. Of course, I can’t very well say “me” when someone asks who my favorite author is, but that’s just propriety won’t allow it.

And why shouldn’t I be my biggest fan? Why in the world would I write books that I didn’t like? Writing is a long, drawn out process. You’re stuck writing revision after revision of books, often to the point where you forget what you’ve done in a previous revision. If you’re going to be investing that amount of time in something, I hope you really love it. And if you don’t love your own writing, who will?

That isn’t to say that there aren’t problems to this approach. I’m also one of my worst critics, meaning one of the people worst equipped to seeing the flaws in my own writing. For that, I need to depend on outsiders. There are books my beta readers and agents just didn’t like at all. I loved them too. After they point out the flaws to me, I can see them and recognize them, but I still really enjoyed the books. Does that make sense?

Anyway. The good news is that I’m reading an awesome book at the moment, by an author I absolutely adore. It’s important to be able to take criticism and work objectively and all that, but it’s also really important to be able to love your writing. There will be plenty of people who will tell you everything wrong with what you’ve written. Make sure there’s at least one out there who can come up with a whole long list of the great things about it.

(Plus, being your own biggest fan avoids all sorts of run-ins with Kathy Bates. Always a plus.)

 

Seven Months and Counting: Still Sugar Free

It’s been a while since I posted a sugar update, and I thought I’d just check in with all of you to report on how it’s going. There are still ups and downs, but I definitely consider myself to still be sticking pretty closely to my goal.

Europe was a bit of a departure, I have to admit. I decided that I’d take a break for those three weeks, and I ate a fair bit of the sweet stuff. (My favorite? Chocolate eclairs in Paris. Those were worth every bite.) My hope and theory was that when I got home, I’d be able to go back to “normal,” which meant the new normal of not eating sugar.

It worked like a charm.

I also noticed myself not feeling as good in Europe as I usually do. Some of that is probably because of the sugar, and some of it was due to not being able to exercise regularly. Those are the two things I’ve done to change my health, and they both definitely have a big impact on me.

Honestly, the biggest struggle I’ve been having recently with sugar is seasonally-based. I’ve never lived through an autumn like this, and I find myself really hankering for a lot of foods that I love to eat this time of year: apple crisp, pumpkin treats, orange rolls, cinnamon rolls. Fall has always been a big baking time for me, and nothing cuts through my goal like a warm batch of brownies. I also had my birthday, and I had a few too many pieces of chocolate cake for me to be able to say I was really only giving myself one or two treats a week.

Still, there’s no doubt I’m eating a whole lot less sugar than I used to, and that’s one of the main purposes of this goal in the first place. It’s also why I don’t have some generic goal of “eat less sugar.” When the battle line is drawn around “1 to 2 treats a week,” the worst case scenario (so far) is that I end up having 3. Maybe 4. When the goal is nebulous, it’s too easy to convince myself that I’m following it. (Which is why I always end up gaining weight when I go off my diets. The goal shifts from “don’t eat more than 1800 calories a day” to “don’t eat a lot.” Way too much wiggle room.0

It remains to be seen how Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years go with this goal. I’m planning on cutting myself some slack, but I certainly don’t want to return to my pre-goal self. The good news is that I find myself feeling physically unwell when I have too much sugar now, a phenomenon I never encountered seven months ago. So my body is doing a fair job at regulating sugar when my willpower ebbs. Yay for that.

I still heartily recommend this to anyone looking to get healthier, though I don’t typically actively preach it to the masses. It’s a personal choice that has worked very well for me, and I leave it at that.

And on that note, I shall leave you. Thanks for reading!

The Wire 1:3 and 1:4

The first four episodes were sent to reviewers at once, back when The Wire was just getting going on the air. It makes sense: four episodes are the minimum you need to really begin to get an idea about what this show is focused on and what its approach will be. Even by the end of these episodes, you’re still only seeing a little sliver of what’s at play. But enough with the introduction: on to the episodes!

Season 1, Episode 3

We’re still squarely in the “set up” phase of the show, but some things begin to rise to the surface. One of my favorites is the chess scene, with D explaining to his underlings how to play chess, contrasting the game with checkers. The Wire is chess. Law and Order is checkers, plain and simple.

I love the way characters are allowed to develop in this show. They aren’t presented with neat, tidy categories that they consistently follow week after week. Freamon, for example, comes across at first as just some lazy guy who likes to work on dollhouse furniture. But if you’re rewatching the show, you clearly see how the creators were dropping hints about who Freamon really is and what sort of a policeman he can be all along.

We also get to meet Omar for the first time, another character who’s just sort of dropped in there with no introduction, and it’s up the viewers to make sense of who he is and what his game is. During my first watch of the series, a whole ton of this just completely slipped by me. It wasn’t until halfway through the season, or the last half of the season, that things really began to come together and make sense. I don’t have that “aha” moment on this watch through, but I’m still having plenty of surprises as I see ways they set up things that come up again much later on.

But the episode, for the most part, still works on laying foundation. There are still elements that seem pure police procedural. Drug busts. Flash. The interesting thing is that those are the things the higher ups are calling for, because they know they’re the things the public want to see. Why does the public want to see them? Because that’s what’s portrayed in pop culture. So you have a show commenting on a type of show by playing to that show type while having characters in the show follow the show type to make the overall commentary on that show type.

That made a whole lot more sense in my head before I typed it out, but hopefully you get the point.

In the end, it’s not a stellar episode. There are some flashes of brilliance (like the chess scene), but little to really dig into.

Rating: 7/10

Season 1, Episode 4

Ah, the infamous f-bomb episode. If you talk to people about The Wire, they inevitably remember this episode, and for good reason. It’s almost as if the writers decided to spoof what a stereotypical HBO cop show would be like. Nothing but f-bombs for the whole scene. But if that’s all the scene had going for it, I honestly don’t think most people would remember it. Instead, the scene is all about how two good policemen can go into a room months after a murder, armed with nothing but pictures and their own logic, and recreate a crime scene to the point that they can uncover significant new information.

One of the things I love about the scene, however, is how it’s understandable what happened. It’s not that McNulty and Bunk are geniuses. It’s that so many murders are going on in the city, and homicide is so overworked, that some murders don’t get the attention they deserve. The scene works because we’ve seen McNulty and Bunk’s coworkers, and it’s easy to picture how they would rush through a crime scene that “didn’t matter.” And because of that, it’s understandable and believable that once a couple of police show up and actually care and pay attention they can discover new things. The scene works because of the scenes that have come before it.

That sums up so much of what is at play in The Wire. As I said before, the show’s in it for the long game, and it expects a lot out of its viewers. So much that I’m surprised it got away  with it when it came out. This was before the days of binge watching, when a tv show could assume its audience had just watched earlier episodes days if not hours before. The Wire gives very little in the way of explanations. There are so many characters and so much going on, that it’s easy to forget what’s happened and who’s who.

Payoffs begin to emerge already, though. The scene with McNulty bringing Bubbs with him to the soccer game, for example. These characters have lives that intersect and connect in surprising ways, and the writers aren’t afraid to put those characters out of their element and see how they respond. Bubbs is such a great character: one of the wisest people in the show so far, and yet the one who’s also a druggie. Not trying to read too much into this, but I couldn’t help think of Shakespeare’s fool when I rewatch Bubbs. Some of the best lines are given to him, and he has the freedom to make commentary on things that go on around him without fear of getting in hot water.

Overall, I really liked this episode. There are much greater to come, but this was a solid 8.5/10 for me.

I’m out of time for today’s post, so I’ll wrap this up, although there’s plenty more that I could discuss. Anything any of you saw in these that you wanted to discuss? I’d love to hear some other viewpoints. Comment here or on Facebook.

How Can You Win When You Keep Moving the Goal?

I finished the fifth draft of THE MEMORY THIEF yesterday and sent it off to my editor. Denisa and the kids all wanted to celebrate me being done with the revision (mainly because it’s been occupying a lot of my spare time the last month, no doubt), but I found myself hesitant. Why celebrate something that isn’t actually finished? I’ll be getting new edits in a few weeks, and then I’ll have to work on those. That process will likely repeat a few more times before I’m “done” with the book. And the thing is, each iteration of it becomes easier (hopefully), as the book gets closer and closer to finished.

By the time the book is actually done? It will have been a copy edit that got it there, and those aren’t typically too straining. (Knock on wood.) So at that point, there doesn’t really feel like a reason to celebrate. You might as well celebrate having successfully showered in the morning, or eaten your breakfast.

That’s the thing with writing. So much of it is a process that it’s hard to have times to really celebrate or congratulate yourself on it. (This feels like a post I’ve written before. I tried to find it, but couldn’t. Oh well. It bears repeating.)

I write a first draft, but I don’t celebrate that. Why bother? It might be crummy. I stick it in a drawer and wait for three or four months.

I write a second draft, but I don’t celebrate that. Why bother? It still might be crummy. I send it to the agents.

The agents give feedback, and I write a third draft, but I don’t celebrate that. Why bother? Better to wait to hear if they liked the revisions.

The agents give more feedback, and I write a fourth draft, but I don’t celebrate that. Why bother? It wasn’t much of a revision to start with.

We send the book out and wait. And wait.

I get a potential nibble of interest, but I don’t celebrate that. Don’t want to jinx it.

The offer turns into a probable offer. Still no celebration. Nothing’s been signed yet. Don’t want to jinx it

The offer turns into a solid offer, but I don’t celebrate that. We have yet to hear back from all the other editors. Also, don’t want to jinx it.

I sign the contract, but I don’t celebrate that. Too much work to be done on revisions.

You get the picture?

Writing is a continual process that just keeps churning. You need to pick points to celebrate, or else you never have a chance to feel some accomplishment. So today I’m very happy to be done with the fifth draft, even if it still needs more work. Even if I’ve already turned to OUR LADY to see what the fourth draft for that should look like.

Then again, I don’t write to be able to celebrate. I write because I just love writing. True story.

Lunar Eclipsing with the Fam

A bit more tired today than on a usual Monday. Staying up later with excited kids can do that to a guy. However, there are way too many times when these eclipses come along, and the sky’s covered in clouds, or I forget about it entirely, or something comes up and we miss it.

This time, DC and TRC both came home from school on Friday, brimming with excitement about the eclipse. Their teachers had really hyped it up as something they shouldn’t miss, so they were very excited when Denisa and I confirmed we’d be watching it. Excited enough that they even took naps during the day on Sunday so that they could stay up late for the big event.

I’ll have to admit: I wasn’t too impressed at first I’d heard it was supposed to start around 8:10 or so, and so I watched and watched and saw a whole lot of nothing happening. Once it kicked into gear, though, it was well worth the wait. I don’t remember watching one like that before.

The kids had a blast. We had the telescope out, and I kept it tracked on the moon throughout the evening. DC said it was the “Best Day Ever,” though to be honest, she tends to say that a lot. It’s code for “I’m having a really fun time.” So that’s good. TRC became really contemplative about the moon and how big everything is.

Anyway. Glad we had a chance to catch it, and it was fun following along on Facebook as I saw so many other people doing the same thing. And look! The “Blood Moon” has come and gone, and the world hasn’t exploded.

Good job, world! I’m proud of you.