Bryce Moore's Blog, page 21

A Family of Killers Cover and ARCs

I’ve known about this for a while, but I’ve been waiting to share it until we’ve been closer to the release date. At the beginning of the week, however, I got my advance reader copies (ARCs) for A Family of Killers in the mail, so I think the cat is well and truly out of the bag now. (Note: If you’ve been a supporter of mine on Patreon for a long time, and you’d like a copy of one of the ARCs, just shoot me a message, and I’ll get it to you on my dime. If you haven’t been a supporter . . . don’t you wish you had?

Here’s the description on the back of the book:

From the author of The Perfect Place to Die and Don’t Go to Sleep comes another chilling horror that explores the eerie story of America’s first serial killer family.

Warren Bullock always thought he was a decent person. But lately he’s been haunted by a sinister voice in his head urging him to commit unspeakable acts of violence against the people around him.

And then the rumors start… There have been a string of disappearances in southeastern Kansas, and his father’s friend is one of the missing travelers. When Warren’s father leaves to investigate and doesn’t return, Warren knows this is his chance to prove that he is stronger than his darkest impulses. 

As he makes his way through Kansas, he finds himself at a suspicious inn run by the Benders, a family with deeply unsettling mannerisms. They watch every move he makes, stand over him in his sleep, and the daughter seems to be able to see into both the past and future.

As he delves further into the disappearances, he realizes one or all of the Benders may be responsible for all the missing people—and might be the reason his father never came home. It’s up to Warren to set things right, even if that means giving into the voice he has been working so hard to ignore. 

This ended up being a tricky book for me to write, for a number of reasons that I’ll get into (or have already gotten into, though I’ll get into them again later). However, I just reread it for the fourth or fifth time, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I think it’s got one of my best endings, and possibly the best. Warren, the main character, is also a favorite of mine. It also helped that I’m a fan of westerns, and getting the chance to write one was a lot of fun, even if I sort of stumbled into the genre without realizing it at first.

And now, for those of you who have been waiting for the cover, here you go.

I’m a fan of it. I like how it’s in the same vein as my other covers, with a disquieting, eye catching image that hopefully makes browsers want to find out more. I didn’t come up with the name of the book (when I was writing it, I just referred to it as THE BLOODY BENDERS), but once we bounced it back and forth with my editor, I really like the one we settled on, even making some tweaks to the manuscript to lean into it in a way I hadn’t thought of before, but which really clicked when I did.

The book will be available for purchase August 6th, so you’ve got a long time to wait, unfortunately, but hopefully it’s worth it. (I’m also in the early stages of planning an actual release party for this one. Stay tuned on that.)

Exciting!

In Memoriam: PDQ Bach

I realize the slice of people out there who are amused by send ups of classical music is a very thin one, but I am definitely a part of it. (Much to the chagrin of my family, from time to time.) And if you’re one of the few and the proud, then the announcement this morning of the passing of Peter Schickele made you more than a little sad. In the field of classical music parodies, Schickele reigned supreme. (Come to think of it, how many other people are even in that category.)

For decades, he told the world all about his close study of the works of PDQ Bach, “the last and by far the least” of Bach’s children. And in those decades, he brought to light many different orchestral and choral arrangements of PDQ, all of them heavily plagiarized from other composers of PDQ’s time. Naturally (spoilers!) all of them were compositions of Schickele, but it was always such a fun cover story. He managed to win 5 Grammy awards over the course of his career, including four straight Best Comedy Album awards in the early 90s.

My father first introduced me to the fine art of classical music parody with a cassette tape of The 1712 Overture and Other Musical Assaults back in the late 80s. (That was the first Schickele album to win a Grammy.) The 1712 Overture itself is eleven minutes of pure joy, as far as I’m concerned. To really appreciate it, it’s fun to see someone actually get into the spirit of things and perform it live. Like this orchestra:

Then again, if you’ve always felt what classical music needed more than anything was a live commentary, you’re in luck!

Then there’s this duet between Schickele and Itzhak Perlman and the Boston Pops:

If you want to spend even more time with PDQ, there’s a wealth of other material out there. He even wrote an entire opera! (And if you’re wondering, no. I haven’t listened to all of it.)

In any case, I just wanted to take a moment to honor the man and say how much I appreciated his music. He’ll be missed.

The Apple Vision Pro: Buy or Pass?

Orders for the Apple Vision Pro go live on Friday, and you would think that for the price alone, I wouldn’t even be thinking about getting one. It’s over $3,000 for a VR headset, and I already have a Quest 2 that I use almost never. Why in the world would I want to get another one? If it’s anything like typical Apple offerings, the first version will be quite meh, and it will really start to come into its own with the second or third iterations.

So why am I actually considering it? A few main reasons. The first is that it would be very useful as a writing device. Not for doing the actual writing, but for visiting anywhere in the world through Google Maps so I can describe what it looks like. I mean, I just went to Kansas this past summer so I could look at it. Seen through that angle, being able to do the same sort of thing, repeatedly, without leaving home, begins to make me think about the price a bit less. True, I could do the same thing (ish) with the Quest, but I think the experience (and the picture) would be significantly better on the Vision Pro. The screens alone are supposed to be incredible, presenting 2 4k screens right in front of your eyes.

They’d also let me do away with two of the main limiting factors I’ve had with VR. First, I don’t like using it with glasses. I always feel like I’m bending my frames, and it’s just not comfortable. (The Vision Pro makes you get specially made corrective lenses that fit into the headset, instead.) Second, I get motion sick using the Quest. Supposedly that has to do with the lag that’s present between when you move your head and when the picture moves in the headset. The Vision Pro has no lag.

But the thing that’s making me consider it even more is something that I hadn’t really thought of much until I was reading reviews. It allows you to take and view 3D pictures and video. (You can also do this on an iPhone 15, though you can’t view them in 3D on the phone.)

Here’s the thing: I view family photos and videos as pretty much priceless. I’m glad that my kids will have so much from their childhood to look back on, and I love being able to look at the old pictures myself. I love having more of them now that I’m snapping shots left and right with my phone. Pictures from earlier are both less crisp and less numerous. What would it be like if I had 3D video from when my kids were babies? How much would that be worth to me now? As I’ve read about this new technology, I think it’s quite likely that these 3D videos become the standard. I only see VR/AR being used more and more in the future. The killer app may not have arrived for it yet, but it will. I’m certain of that. Make it cheap enough and ubiquitous enough, and suddenly everyone will have one, just like everyone has a smartphone these days.

Every day that I don’t have a way to film and take pictures in 3D is one less day I have of those pictures years from now. When my kids are all grown and gone. A decade or two from now, will I be kicking myself that I didn’t just cough up the extra money just so I could have had that many more memories? I think I might.

Now, I also could just buy an iPhone 15 and start taking the pictures and video now, before I can view them. That would be the cheaper way to go, as it would be about a third of the cost. However, that’s also not really something I can justify at all as a writing device. And I actually make real money as an author now. (Not Scrooge McDuck money, but enough to make a tangible difference in my life.) So perhaps some of that could be put to use on this.

Again, I’m on the fence, and I’m waffling back and forth on this. (Plus, I haven’t even talked to Denisa about it yet, and I’d want her green light before I spent that kind of change, writing money or no writing money.) What do you all think about it?

The Bear is Not a Comedy

The Emmys came and went last night with me forgetting they were even on. (That’s not a slam on the Emmys. I would have liked to have watched. I just forgot.) While it sounds like there were some interesting segments, the winners themselves were nothing if not boring in my opinion. Almost everything came down to Succession, The Bear, and Beef. (For the record, I watched the first season of Succession and the first episode of Beef, and in both cases I stopped watching mainly because it was a story about horrible people being horrible to other people. I don’t really derive any sort of pleasure from that, so I gave up. (And yes, I realize Beef ends up being a bit more nuanced than that, but . . . not nuanced enough for me to want to watch it.)

I understand that all three shows are well done and well acted. But when just three shows end up sucking all the oxygen out of the room, I can’t help but think the winning came down to a better PR campaign than to real acting, at least. This is even more egregious when The Bear ends up winning as Best Comedy, and then the entire Bear cast tries to gaslight us all into believing the show really is a comedy because it’s “about life” and “We’re all just trying to reflect the mess of being human, which is deeply hilarious and we’re all suffering.”

Look. The Bear is a fantastic show. (I finished season 2 last week and loved it, though the ending of the season left a real bitter taste in my mouth.) But there is no way under the sun that it’s a comedy, and the fact that the Emmys and the Golden Globes have such awful definitions of “comedy” and “drama” that allows the Bear to run as a comedy is way funnier than anything in the Bear has ever been. Let’s go back and see what won Best Comedy for the last while.

Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso, Schitt’s Creek, Fleabag, Mrs. Maisel, Veep, Veep, Veep, and then Modern Family five times.

All of those shows are comedies. Yes, there are dramatic moment in Ted Lasso, but that doesn’t mean it should have ever run as a drama, not a comedy. When you go look at the actual rules of the Emmys, they state “COMEDY AND DRAMA SERIES are defined as programs with multiple episodes (minimum of six), where the majority of the running time of at least six episodes are primarily comedic for comedy series entries, or primarily dramatic for dramatic series entries.”

I don’t know who the producers conned into believing the majority of 6 episodes of The Bear was focused on being primarily comedic, but I do know that if I find out, I will never listen to a recommendation they make for a funny show or movie.

Why does this matter? A few reasons. First, it would have been much more intriguing to have the actors of Succession and The Bear pitted against each other. If both shows are just that incredible, let them fight it out on even terms. But beyond that, how in the world are you supposed to compare The Bear to other fantastic comedies? Arrested Development? 30 Rock? Ted Lasso? It just doesn’t work. So if there are going to be genres, then let the genres actually do their own thing.

(And yes, maybe I’m this ticked off about it because I’m a librarian, and we like to classify things, but come on! Everyone should be able to see this for what it is: a gimmick the producers of The Bear pulled to make it have an easier route to awards. It’s like Kramer fighting fifth graders in the dojo (except it isn’t, because that was funny.)

Oh well. Rant over. Still a great show. Just not a comedy. I guess I could have just left it at that . . .

Television Review: One Piece Season One

I realized yesterday that I really dropped the ball with my year in review post, because I left off one of the most original, fun TV shows that we watched: One Piece.

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a live action adaptation of the anime series of the same name. Typically when those adaptations have been done, they’ve changed themselves to fit the norms of whatever the new media is. In other words, anime has some zany characters and costumes and general design. Live action shows will tone those down to make the show feel more realistic.

One Piece is a show about a young man who is extremely stretchy, dreaming about being a pirate. How stretchy? He can get hit by a cannonball and bounce it back at whoever shot it. And the pirates themselves all have strange powers. One of them is a clown who can separate himself into as many different parts as he wants, still having complete control over all those parts.

In other words, this isn’t a show that you can really “tone down.” It’s all or nothing, and the creators decided to double down on “all.”

It works wonderfully. It’s zany fun from start to finish. They lean into the anime vibe, having characters look just as wonderfully odd as the original. It’s just a fun romp from episode to episode. Luffy D. Monkey (the main character) goes about building the dream pirate crew (for values of “pirate” that are “loves adventures and doing the right thing all the time.) He eternally optimistic, and the characters he gathers around himself are anything but. And yet somehow, that optimism spreads. It’s upbeat, and rated TV-14, so it’s even something you can watch with most of the kids.

I gave it a 9/10. It’s on Netflix, and very worth your while.

Upgrading My Apple Watch

I first got an Apple Watch about a year after it came out, just in time for the first redesign, as I recall. And it’s served me faithfully ever since then. In addition to just telling the time, I’ve used it primarily as a way to get notifications from my phone, track my exercise each day, check my heart rate, and occasionally serve as a timer. (Well, the biggest thing I’ve used it for is to ping my iPhone when I lose it, which is often, but let’s try to downplay that one.) The convenience of always knowing anything urgent going on is a big plus, though I really throttled down on the notifications, to make sure I only got one if it was something I cared about.

However, the watch was now seven years old, give or take, and it started to have a few issues I wasn’t happy with. The biggest was that it would run out of batteries each evening around 9pm. That’s less than useful, and at the edge of being downright inconvenient many days. Beyond that, it’s just been much slower than I’d like it to be. If I asked it to do something, I felt like it had to hold up a finger and then groan as it got out of the recliner before it could do as asked. There was a decent sale on a new Apple Watch 8 (a year old model, which was significantly cheaper than the newest version), so I decided to go ahead and get a new one.

Overall, I’ve been very happy with the update. The watch is peppier all around, doing anything and everything that’s asked with nary a peep. It’s got a larger screen, which allows for more complex watch faces. The current one I’m using shows me the weather for the next five hours, the time and date, my exercise goals, and let’s me start a workout or check my pulse at a touch. Better yet, the battery is much better, going for around 36 hours. This has allowed me to wear the watch while I sleep, which in turn makes it so it can track my sleep and tell me how I’m doing with it. (I’ve averaged 7.5 hours a night over the last week. A smidge lower than I’d like, but pretty good.) (And yes, it still pings my iPhone.)

So while it’s nothing mind blowing, it fixed a minor problem that was becoming more irritating, and it’s made some of my day to day things smoother. I’ll take it. Should you get one? The good news for that is you probably already know the answer to that yourself without me telling you. Nothing here that’s so life changing it demands an eWatch, but if your watch is getting long in the tooth, it might be worth swapping it out.

Getting Ahead of Things?

I don’t think it’s an overstatement for me to say that I’ve felt off balance to one extent or another ever since 2020. Between COVID and the kitchen renovation and Tomas heading out on his mission and disruptions over at the university, I’ve just not felt like I’ve been on firm footing. One of the ways I usually do that is to organize things. (There’s a reason I’m a librarian, after all.) I don’t pay as much attention to things being spotlessly clean, but clutter can really weigh me down over time, despite the fact that I’m content to live in a fair bit of it. (Just ask anyone who’s seen my office lately . . . ) But I seem to get to a point when life feels too much up in the air that the only way I can really ground myself is to straighten things up. Throw out stuff I’m not using. Find a place for everything.

However, since the kitchen renovation, we’ve perpetually had at least one room in our house that was a borderline disaster zone (or a full on disaster). It would move from time to time. Sometimes it was the loft, sometimes the sun room, sometimes the family room, sometimes the office. Usually a combination of those. My bedroom would also get out of control more often than not. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying to keep things ordered, but it just felt like I had too much to do to be able to give it all the attention it needed so just get things done.

(I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, if I leave any part of a room cluttered, then that part will inevitably begin to grow until it takes over the whole room. The only success I ever have in holding the clutter at bay is to keep it out with an iron fist. It’s like rot. You get rid of the rotten areas and don’t let it get another toehold.)

This Christmas vacation, I sat down and made a list of all the things I wanted to do in order to have a great holiday. The usual suspects were on there, from fudge to eggnog to board games to movie marathons to Christmas music and more. But I also added one overarching goal: before the end of my break, I wanted every single room in the house (other than the girls’ bedrooms which would be beyond my ability to just make clean) to be clutter free. My hope was that if I could just get ahead of all it at last, I could finally feel that grounded sensation again. The feeling that yes, I’m on top of things, and no, I don’t need to worry about anything.

And so I got to work. It was a long process and took a lot of time. Pretty much a constant push over about three weeks, that I only had time for because I’d taken so much time off. Decluttering at that scale is very draining (or it is for me, at least). It’s not something I can just do for hours and hours on end. But Monday, on my last day of time off, I finally finished. For the first time since we moved all the cabinet boxes into the office when the kitchen renovation was beginning, every single room in my house was, if not pristine, satisfactorily tidy.

It’s a great feeling, and I’m happy to say it’s done the trick (for now, at least). I do feel like I’m more on top of things than I’ve been in a long time.

So what am I going to do to keep it that way? We’ve recommitted to our most recent cleaning scheme, as a family. Each of us have assigned common areas that we’re in charge of keeping clean. (Divided out through a weighted point system based on how hard each area is to clean, to make sure each person had an assignment equal to their abilities.) Each of us is tasked with spending 15 minutes a day cleaning up those areas. Vacuuming. Decluttering. Dusting. Mopping. Whatever it takes. 15 minutes. Each day. Sundays are days off.

We had a bit of success with this a few months ago, but then I think I got sick for a few weeks, and the wheels fell off. Hopefully they stay on this time. If we can just stay ahead of it all, the job isn’t that hard. 15 minutes a day for four people a day is six hours of cleaning a week. It should be more than enough.

But even if we fall behind, it will take some other huge disruptions for me to ever get that far behind on the house again. Thank goodness. (And the best news is that today is another snow day, and I don’t have a list of places in the house I need to tackle. I just have to work for 15 minutes. Huzzah!)

More Artificial Intelligence Issues

Not to continue to harp on Artificial Intelligence, but as time has progressed, I’ve had a couple new observations to make, and I wanted to share them with you.

The biggest issue I’m seeing is how much AI seems to be used by so many different websites. Whereas before, someone on the staff might have made their best stab at writing up content for a website, now I’m increasingly seeing content I’m almost positive is written by AI. I understand why someone might choose to do this. AI writing is definitely competent, and likely better than many people can do on their own. It’s well phrased, with proper grammar and spelling. And it takes people almost no time to come up with it. So easy and better and free? No wonder people are turning to it in droves.

How do I know if something’s written by AI? This is a bit harder for me to explain. I think a large part of it comes from writing so much myself. I’ve got a sense of voice, and AI almost always sounds the same. It’s formulaic. (Which makes sense, because it follows a formula to generate itself.) It’s as if someone learned about the five paragraph essay in grade school and always wrote everything in that format from then on. An introduction with a thesis statement and summary of what’s going to be argued, then the actual argument, and then a conclusion to tie things up.

Does that work? Sure it does. Does it make for riveting reading? Nope. And if that’s all it was, then perhaps it wouldn’t matter that much. Yes, many websites would sound the same, but eventually I’d think sites would start turning back to actual people, in an effort to differentiate themselves again. (Writing by writers for the win!)

Beyond that, however, is the simple fact that AI doesn’t always tell the truth. Sometimes it gets a few details wrong, and sometimes it just flat out lies. And yes, theoretically there’s a human reading over all the AI generated text to make sure it’s accurate, but it’s hard for me to be 100% confident that anything I’m reading written by AI is worth reading. (And this is while AI is based on actual human writing. Very soon, it will be based more and more on writing that was written by AI, and things could really start to get messy.)

I have started to simply stop reading something if I have a reasonable suspicion it was AI generated. I’ve seen this on how-to sites, healthcare sites, and recipe sites, off the top of my head. (Recipe sites are a particular nuisance, since recipes can’t be copyrighted. So all you need to do is take someone else’s recipe and write your own thing about it, and you’re good to go.) For better or worse, people make actual decisions based on things they find online, because they’ve typically assumed most of the information is accurate. All it takes is for enough people to begin getting burned, and that all falls apart. (How many times are you actually happy with the answers Alexa gives you when you ask it a question?)

So in the short term, I expect this to only get worse. Long term, it will either go away (as people give up on AI) or AI will improve demonstrably and somehow manage to fact check itself. I suppose we’ll see how it plays out, but I’m beginning to be pretty skeptical of AI, primarily because there’s no actual intelligence involved. It’s just a text generator that looks at probabilities. Calling it “Artificial Intelligence” makes it sound like something it most definitely is not.

Time will tell . . .

TV Review: The Bear Season One

I had heard great things about The Bear (streaming on Hulu) for a good long while. That said, I’d never actually paid much attention to what it was about. I knew it was somehow classified by the Golden Globes as a comedy (though I’ve never really understood what makes a comedy vs a drama to the Golden Globes, and this hasn’t helped at all), and I knew it was about a chef running a restaurant. That’s about it.

So maybe it’s not surprising that it took a long time for me to actually watch the show. I’ve got a streak of “You Can’t Make Me” in me that sometimes means I’m reluctant to watch things just because everyone says I should. I love finding things on my own, and not just always following the crowd.

But eventually, a big enough crowd can wear me down, and I decided to finally give The Bear a shot last week. Denisa and I finished the first season in about three days, and we’re already halfway through the second season. (There are only two seasons thus far.) The show is absolutely incredible, and I shouldn’t have waited this long to watch it. It was an easy 10/10 for me.

First off, this is not a comedy by any stretch. Yes, there are funny parts in it, but just because something makes you laugh now and then doesn’t make it a comedy. It’s squarely in the drama category for me. The premise is straightforward: a world-famous chef quits his job when his brother commits suicide and leaves him the struggling family restaurant in his will. (Laughing already, right?) The restaurant is in real hard times, and it’s a struggle to get it to stay afloat, let alone prosper. To make things worse, no one cares about his qualifications as a chef. This restaurant is a little sandwich shop. It’s not high cuisine, so what does it matter if he knows how to use a sous vide?

First and foremost, the series is incredibly well written. Look, I have no idea what it’s like to run a restaurant, so maybe this is way off, but the show definitely feels like it really knows what it’s talking about. Like you’re getting an inside glimpse on what it’s like, in a way that reminded me of The Wire’s inside view of drug dealing. The dialogue is superb, the pacing is relentless, and the characters are all very well drawn. The fact that the acting is top notch is just icing on the cake, but it really is fantastic.

Honestly, I can’t think of anything to nitpick about this one. It was riveting from start to finish, with enough humor thrown in to keep the tense scenes still feeling tense. A great balance. Yes, the show has abominable language (as do so many fantastic shows these days, it feels like. As if people somehow think it’s impossible to show true drama without throwing in at least three f-bombs per sentence), but if that’s not an auto-turn off, then you owe it to yourself to watch this show. I don’t know how else to put it. The episodes are short, so it’s not a huge commitment.

Give it a shot, if you haven’t.

Hair Update

Now that the holidays are over and I’m out in public more again, more people are noticing that my hair is much longer than it used to be. This has led to a few explanations about why I’m growing it out, and naturally a few comments over how it looks.

(Though this is something I’ve never really understood, I realize that from a linguistic standpoint, “changes in hair” is deemed a socially acceptable topic to bring up. And for some reason, there are many who feel their opinion on hair is something that demands attention. Maybe one of the reasons this doesn’t really click with me is that someone has to have drastically changed their hair for me to notice it’s different. We’re talking, dyeing it a bright purple, or shaving it bald. Anything less isn’t something that registers with me for some reason. And so I don’t really care what people do with their hair. I might find some styles better looking than others, but I can’t remember ever telling someone what they should or shouldn’t be doing with their hair (or clothes). Maybe I’ve made comments to my kids once or twice? Or given my opinion if someone asked for it? But even then, it would have come with a big disclaimer that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

So when people tell me they think I should cut my hair, or that my hair looks too long, or that I need to dye my beard or cut my beard or shave my beard, I just kind of scratch my head, smile and nod, and then ignore whatever it is they’ve told me to do. I don’t see that my hair is anyone’s business but my own.)

With that said, I’m definitely noticing how long my hair is getting, and at times I feel like a sheep that really needs some shearing. If I didn’t have the end goal in mind, I likely would have waved the white flag and cut my hair weeks ago. There are just things about long hair that I didn’t realize would ever be a thing. The way it gets in my eyes all the time, blocking my vision, or making it difficult to look down at something without constantly pushing my hair back so I can see.

I’ve taken to wearing some hair clips at home when I really need to concentrate on something in front of me, but I don’t know that I’ll ever feel comfortable wearing hair clips out and about. Maybe if I got some cool Batman ones or something.

People who have longer hair have told me that it gets easier. That right now my hair isn’t heavy enough to weight itself down, so it’s just poofing more and more out, but that this isn’t something that goes on forever. That’s good, because my head’s big enough already without my hair helping so much. However, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it once it’s even longer. Maybe a pony tail? A bun? (Librarians are always supposed to have their hair in a bun, right? Does “librarian bun” outweigh “man bun”? Braid it? I don’t know. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

How long is it right now? Probably around . . . 4 inches on the top? But probably more like 2.5 on the sides, where it had been cut the shortest. Which means I likely need to grow another 11 or so at least to get to the point where I can donate 12. That’s another 22 months of hair growing, folks. In other words, get used to it.

I haven’t changed my mind about the decision at all, in case you were wondering. Yes, it can be a pain (and washing it is becoming more and more of an ordeal), but it’s been fun to see the changes as time goes on. It beats stamp collecting as a hobby, that’s for sure. Maybe I’ll have to get a new author photo at some point. We shall see . . .

And because enough of you have asked, here’s a picture of the present length: