Bryce Moore's Blog, page 214

Broadway Bound: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder

It’s been three years since I last went in to see a musical on Broadway. Far too long. And so when the fam’s going down to Pennsylvania this Thanksgiving, I wanted to take the chance to head into New York. I debated taking the kids with Denisa and me, but in the end decided not to–we’ll be going to see Mythbusters Live in Philadelphia with them, instead. So it’s just going to be Denisa and me.

First question up was what to see. I went and glanced over the offerings online, but there were just so many to choose from. If I only get to see one show every three years, I want to try and be sure to make that one show count. Honestly, I probably would have gone to Book of Mormon the Musical if it were just me. I suppose that says something about me. But Denisa would hate hate hate it, so that one was out. I decided to check out last year’s Tony nominees, and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder immediately stood out to me–mainly because it’s an adaptation of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Also because it was the Tony winner. And after checking out the music on the musical’s site, I was hooked.

But then, a problem. Tickets were something like $150. Each. I love Broadway, but do I love it for $300′s worth of love? Alas, no. Were there cheaper ways of scoring tickets?

To the internets!

Yes. Yes there were. I could show up the morning of the performance and try to score discounted tickets. I could also use some discount codes listed online. Unfortunately, Gentleman’s Guide wasn’t discounted for the day I wanted to go–too close to Thanksgiving. I looked at some other options: Cinderella for $64, Matilda for $50 or so. But I was still hung up on Gentleman’s Guide. (That’s a problem I have: I get something into my head, and then I have a hard time letting go of it. Denisa will tell you just how hard a time I have.)

So I poked around Gentleman’s Guide some more. I’d noticed some $42 obstructed view tickets my first time there, and I’d dismissed them. They were up in the balcony, and I worried I’d be stuck staring at some pillar for the whole show. If only I knew just how obstructed those seats were, I’d be able to tell if they were still worth getting.

Thankfully, there’s this thing called the internet, which people love to post things on. And I found plenty of people who’d been to the show, sat in the balcony, and reviewed it. There were even pictures. The seats are high up, and some people were worried about falling to their deaths, but the views looked just fine from what I could tell. People who had seen the show from there said they didn’t feel like they’d missed out on much.

Sold!

So Denisa and I are heading into New York on November 24th to see the musical and catch up with my agents as well, hopefully. Looking forward to going back, and I’m thankful once again for research skills and the knowledge of when to use them.

Any of you out there already seen the show? I’d love to hear what you thought, though I’m going–whether you liked it or not. Them tickets ain’t refundable, yo.

Movie Review: The Firm

It’s been a while since I did a review on here for film, so why not visit a nineties thriller? I read The Firm when it came out in paperback–still remember the cover quite vividly. I missed the movie when it was out, but I’d heard good things. Good enough to have it still be kicking around in my head as a “film I’d maybe like to watch” years later. Then I saw it was directed by Sydney Pollack, and it officially made its way to my Netflix queue.

The only problem? That 154 minute running time. That’s an awful long time for a thriller to keep thrilling, and it’s too much for me to have time to watch in a single evening these days. (Busy man, am I.)  But I two nights in a row? I could swing that.

The movie was a pleasant surprise. Taut and tense throughout, with some fine performances. Not the best thriller I’ve ever seen, but it was twisty and turny and managed to keep me guessing for most of it. (It helped that I haven’t read the book in something like 20 years.) Tom Cruise plays the part of a young lawyer, fresh out of law school and at the top of his class, who’s recruited by all the top law firms. He accepts an offer that seems too good to be true.

And of course, it turns out to be just that.

Seriously, people. When are you all going to learn that offers that are too good to be true should just be turned down without further thought? I blame Cinderella and her fairy godmother. People see the credits roll on that Disney movie, and they all think that offer worked out for her. It didn’t. Think of the poor woman now: slave to a mouse in a suit, forced to sit in parade after parade chock full of gaping tourists.

Not quite a happily ever after, is it?

But wait–I was writing a film review here, wasn’t I? Right. Other highlights of the movie for me were the score (sparse piano music for the most part, often used to great effect) and Wilford Brimley. Anytime you can have Mr. Quaker Oats play an evil security guard, you’re in for a treat. I like to think all the oatmeal shilling was just a cover for his spy escapades.

Anyway. It’s a good movie. Rated R for a fair amount of language, alas. Still, if that doesn’t turn you off, there are definitely worse ways to spend 154 minutes of your life. 7/10.

Thoughts While Jogging: Arbitrary Limits

[image error]I went out for another 5 kilometer jog on Saturday. It’s been over three months since the last time I tried it, if you can believe it. This time, I wanted to go slower–not push myself as hard. I’d proven to myself that I could jog for 5 kilometers without stopping, now I want to work to get to the point where I can jog that much without wishing I were dead at the finish line.

It’s good to have goals, right?

In any case, I started jogging and went for the first kilometer at what felt like a decent pace. Then I walked for a bit and started jogging again a little while later. TRC was out with me, riding his bike in circles around me as I tried to keep a steady pace. That’s when I made observation number one:

Once I choose to walk once, it becomes much, much easier to choose to walk the second time. And the third. And so on. When I was jogging before, I never stopped, and because I never stopped, it was easier to keep going. I know this isn’t rocket science, but it was amazing to me how hard it felt to start jogging again after I’d been walking for a while. In fact, by the end, I pretty much was walking the whole time. I would do a few sprints, just to try and keep my time to something less-than-completely-pathetic, but mostly, it was walk walk walk.

TRC’s bike chain kept falling off the gears, so I had to stop a few times and fix that, which was frustrating to me. Observation number two: when I have an exterior “thing” to put blame on, it becomes very easy to attribute all the problems I’m having to that thing. “I could be jogging more, if that darned chain hadn’t fallen off twice. Since I had to stop to fix it, I lost all my momentum. That’s why I’m going so slowly.”

I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good biking partner to TRC. I kept snapping at him to keep his chain on his bike. Which is observation number three: Bryce isn’t a very nice Bryce when he’s in the middle of jogging. Go figure.

But when I got back to the house and stopped my running tracker app on my iPhone, I came across an unexpected observation number four: even with all of the walking I’d done (pausing the app when I had to physically stop to fix the chain, of course), I was still only about 40 seconds slower than the last time I jogged 5 kilometers, three months ago.

That turtle-like pace I thought I was making the whole time? Most of that was just in my head. I was jogging faster when I was jogging, and walking let me recover some so I didn’t feel flat out terrible when I was finished.

Which all leads me to observation number five: Bryce makes way too many observations out of every day life occurrences.

In any case, it was a pleasant weekend. I went to Bangor for the fourth time, and I believe I don’t have to go back until the end of October. I finished the second draft of OUR LADY, I played some Magic with TRC, cleaned up the house some, and finished stacking the wood.

But I won’t tell you about any of the observations I made during all of that.

Welcome back to the work week, folks. Catch ya tomorrow!

Off to Bangor: Third Time’s the Charm

Well, fourth had better be, I suppose. Since I’m going to Bangor again on Sunday for a church meeting. People keep saying I should just get an apartment there and make things easier. If I have too many more weeks like this, I’ll start thinking they’re right.

That said, I love driving in Maine this time of year. The leaves are turning, and everywhere you look is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. There’s no rain today, there’s hardly ever any traffic.

It’s great.

When I’m driving by myself, I typically get some music going (on my old white iPod) and just enjoy the time to sit there and think. Life has been pretty crazy for the last while, and there’s no sign of the craziness ending before Christmas, so it’s nice to get some forced peace and quiet. I’ve got a lot of balls in the air at the moment, and some of them are close to coming down in some very nice places.

Nothing I can share with any of you lovely people, of course. But hopefully some good news is on the horizon.

Meanwhile, I have to finish this second draft of OUR LADY. Very close to the end, and at the point with the book that I desperately need fresh eyes. I get to a spot where it all just looks the same to me. Where I no longer know if the changes I’m making are any good or not. Thank goodness for ace agents who can take a look at it for me. I just need to make sure the climax is consistent with everything else I’ve written up to this point, and then I’m hitting “send.”

Which means I’ll have to decide what to work on next. I’ve got several unfinished drafts. I’ll probably pick one of those up and give it a gander to see how much promise it’s holding.

In any case, I’m out of time at the moment. Got to get ready and go off to Bangor. Have a great weekend everyone, and I’ll catch you on Monday!

Do You Believe in Any Superstitions?

It’s funny. I don’t really believe in superstitions–not in any sort of a way that would get me to change my behavior significantly. I don’t go out of my way to avoid black cats, for instance. And I don’t have any real hangups about breaking mirrors or walking under ladders. But I do have a few things I do out of habit.

The biggest one is probably knocking on wood whenever I say something that I don’t want to come true. “I’ve never been in a car accident,” for example. If I make a statement like that, I just can’t help looking for something wooden to knock on. Failing that, I knock on my head.

Why in the world do I do this? When bad things happen, I never go looking for a time when I forgot to follow this routine. I don’t believe that it wards off anything at all. Whatever’s going to be will be in those cases, and it’s not like the universe is watching me, waiting for me to stumble in my knock on wood ritual, just so it can dump misfortune on my head.

At the same time, I’m a religious person. I believe in the power of prayer–which I do regularly. And so my unbelief in superstition isn’t casual. It’s doctrinal.

And yet there I am, knocking on my head each time, just like an idiot.

Some of it is probably due to low level Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I have some other routines that I regularly follow, and I just don’t feel right if I don’t do them. For example, checking my alarm three times before I go to bed used to be one–something I no longer feel compelled to do, since I just tell my smartphone when to set my alarm, and for some reason that’s enough different that I don’t need to check it to make sure it’s set.

But I don’t know if the superstitions I somehow follow (even though I don’t believe them) are things other people do too, or if its something that’s more on the unique-to-Bryce side of things. (Much in the same way that’s it’s hard to know if the way I perceive color is the same way you perceive color. How do I know that the color I see as red isn’t the color you see as green? Or am I the only person who wonders those things, too?)

In any case, superstition seems to be an area where it should be easy to find out what other people are doing: just ask. So, all you people out there, are you at all superstitious? If so, how? And do you really believe it, or do you just follow it without believing anything.

Inquiring minds want to know . . .

(And I just can’t write about this topic without including this video:)

Book Review: The Black Prism

The Black Prism by Brent Weeks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t read as many books at the moment as I’d like to. It’s more than I used to before I got my Kindle PaperWhite, but it’s still not as many as I’d prefer. (How many books? I’m right around 2-3 a month at the moment. I’d like to be at 1 a week or so.) In any case, I try to make the books I *do* read “count.” I don’t want to blow my reading time on something I won’t enjoy.

Thus, I will often put a book down if I’m not loving it, and I rarely get the second book of a series. I’m always on the hunt for something that will wow me. Something I’ll want to lose sleep over. And the sad truth is that more often than not, I’m disappointed. It’s one of the reasons I don’t write many book reviews–I try to only review the ones I really love. (Movies are more disposable for me. A 2 hour time commitment is so much less than 20 hours or however long it takes me to read a book. I can watch 20+ movies a month easily. Since I’m not a filmmaker, I don’t really feel any need to pull punches when I’m reviewing movies. But as an author, I’m never sure when the person who I’m asking for help (or a cover blurb) will turn out to be someone who I trashed in a review a year or two ago. Better to bite my tongue, methinks.)

This is just a long way of leading up to one fact: as soon as I finished The Black Prism, I bought the sequel and kept reading. It was that good of a book. Huzzah!

What makes it shine? First and foremost for me was the magic system. The book is epic fantasy, and the magic is color-based. Basically, magic users can tap into colors to do different things. Create objects. Change their bodies. Do cool things. It was such a nice shift from the typical magic you might encounter–fire or ice pellets. Wizards with pointy hats. It reminded me very much of Brandon Sanderson’s magic systems, and that’s a big plus in my book.

But it’s not all just about the magic. The book follows several viewpoint characters throughout the course of the novel. The characters are distinct and engaging, and the plot moves quickly and in unexpected directions. Weeks (the author) isn’t afraid to break away from the mold and do things that haven’t been done before.

What’s the plot? The book jacket does a fine job encapsulating it:

“Gavin Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. But Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live: Five years to achieve five impossible goals. “But when Guile discovers he has a son, born in a far kingdom after the war that put him in power, he must decide how much he’s willing to pay to protect a secret that could tear his world apart.”

That’s enough to give you a taste, but the plot itself involves so much more than that.

Now, there were some fairly violent scenes in the book, and a few steamy situations (nothing graphic, though), so it’s not a book for the younger crowd–but it’s also not a book full of George R.R. Martin shenanigans. There’s a learning curve involved in the book–expect to be confused for the first while as you’re reading. It’s okay. It will all become clear by about a third of the way through, and then it’s off to the races.

If you’re looking for an engaging read that’ll keep you turning the pages and you’re in the market for epic fantasy, look no further.

Anyone else out there already read it? Let me know what you thought.

View all my reviews

Time for the Root Canal

If you’ll recall, TRC knocked out his front tooth last January. Since then, he’s been bouncing back and forth between dentists as they decided how best to treat it. From what I understand (which, admittedly, isn’t much when it comes to dentistry), the tooth still was growing, and so they wanted to let the root live for as long as it could before they killed it with a root canal.

Well, last week his lip swelled up like a balloon. The tooth had gone into abscess, and so after going to two more dentists, the verdict was clear at last: root canal time.

I feel really bad for TRC. It’s been really rough for him as he’s geared up for this procedure time and time again, only to have the sentence commuted at the last minute. All that meant was that it gave him more time to think about what this was going to be like, and to worry about it more.

Last night, he couldn’t sleep because of nerves. He came down to talk to me, and I chatted with him for a while about it. He talked about how he wished there were some other way to fix things, but I just had to tell him the truth: sometimes life is hard. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, or things we really wish we could avoid. Our choices have consequences.

The thing is, a lot of the time we like to talk about those consequences when the choices that were made were bad ones. But the truth is that often we have bad consequences from choices that never deserved them. TRC was just going out to go ice skating for an afternoon. He wasn’t monkeying around. Wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t. He had an accident, plain and simple.

And now he has to deal with the consequences.

Part of me really wishes I could intervene for him somehow. I think if I could, I would. But in a way, I’m quite glad that I can’t. Life has plenty of things that we have to do that can’t be avoided. I’m not saying it’s absolutely necessary that a 10 year old learn this, but at the same time, I can think of some harder ways to learn it. Yes, this is going to hurt, I told him. Yes, it won’t be fun. But the good news is that it’s something a lot of people go through. It’s something that can be fixed.

(Please don’t remind me of this post when the time comes for me to get a root canal. I’ve never had one, and I think I’d be just as nervous as TRC.)

In any case, if you have a second to send some good thoughts or prayers TRC’s way around 2pm EDT, I’m sure it would be much appreciated. For that matter, some thoughts and prayers my way would be appreciated too. I’m quite nervous for him, myself.

Looking forward to 3pm, when it’s all completed.

Writing Update

It’s been a while since I gave you all one of these, so I thought (since I’m off to Bangor again today) this might be an opportune moment to catch you all up to date.

For the last few months I’ve been steadily making my way through OUR LADY, working on the second draft. I haven’t been focused on too many fine details at this point–I do my drafts in passes, usually. What I mean by that is that I’ll do each revision with a few goals in mind. The first draft is all about getting the thought down on paper in some form. The second draft, then, is focused on refining that thought and making it consistent. The first draft will have all sorts of bumps and errors. Places where I changed my mind about how a character behaves, or what plot elements are important. In order to avoid losing my forward momentum, I just keep writing through the rough spots. I don’t go back to revise anything unless it’s really problematic.

That’s what the second draft is for.

After the first draft is done, I set it aside for a month or two at least. Then I print it out and read the thing through from start to finish, marking up the draft as I look for big issues. Sure, I’ll tweak word choice here and there, but all I’m really concerned with is seeing if the original thought is working, and making sure what’s on paper represents that original thought as closely as possible.

Once I’m done with the second draft, I send it off to my agents. In the past, I’ve tried to work on it even more, but I’ve found that’s often a bad idea. There might be some big issues they find with the novel, and any extra time I’ve spent on the book could well be time wasted. While my agents are reading it, I also send it off to some beta readers–people beyond my writing group who I turn to for second opinions.

Based on the feedback I get from my beta readers and agents, I either making huge structural changes (if necessary) or move onto the next phase: refining the descriptions and language. Trimming the book down, tightening it up, making sure everything’s more consistent. The kind of stuff most people usually associate with revising.

So anyway–for now I”m on the second draft. I personally am feeling quite good about this book. That doesn’t always mean the book is good, unfortunately. I thought GET CUPID was awesome, and in the end it was just too much awesome for one book, perhaps. Too busy. I’m hoping I’ve done a better job this time with keeping focused on a few things instead of using the shotgun approach.

Anyway. I hope to be done with this revision by the end of the month or beginning of next at the latest. At that point, I’ll turn my attention back to a first draft of a novel I’d set aside a long while ago–reread it, get a feel for where I was, and then resume writing.

Meanwhile, I continue to have two books out on submission–meaning they’re on the desks of editors for consideration for publication. I don’t say much about that process while it’s ongoing, but just because I don’t talk about it publicly much doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Really, I just feel good to have settled into a rhythm for a bit. Sometimes I feel like I still have so much to learn about writing. Other times, I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of it. You’d figure that after doing it every day for thirteen years, I’d be getting used to it.

That’s all I’ve got for you for now. Happy Monday, all. Catch ya tomorrow.

Off to Bangor

No time no time no time today! Sorry folks. I’d hoped to have time to write a quick blog post this morning, but my writing time bled over into my blogging time. (There’s a lesson, folks: writing comes first for me. Always. Blogging’s fun and games, but writing’s where the passion is, and you have to make sure to put your passion first.)

So have a lovely weekend. I’m in Bangor again Monday. And then next Friday. And then next Sunday. The glamorous life of a librarian, I know. But I’ll try and write up some posts ahead of time and be a bit more on top of things for next week. Busy days and all that.

TTFN.

Patience. Wearing. Thin.

I’ve said before that it takes energy for me to be out schmoozing and talking to people in public. It’s like a rechargeable battery for me, and if I don’t get the time away from people I need to be able to let it recharge, my ability to smoothly navigate all social situations begins to degrade.

My rechargeable batter is running on empty. More than.

What does that mean? It means I’ve got a shorter temper than normal. I say things out loud that the reasonable Bryce would never come close to saying. I have little patience for mistakes–in me or in others. And the problem is that I know this is happening, and there’s not much I seem to be able to do to stop it.

What do I need to be able to let that battery recharge?

Some time without having to deal with other people’s problems all the time. Some time I can have no one else at my house other than family. (I love that the construction workers are taking care of business, but knowing I might have to talk to them at any moment is a constant drain. I know this sounds whiny. Sue me. I stress over silly things. It’s something I’m trying to get better at, but this is where I am now.)

I could go on and whine for a while more, but I don’t have the energy to do it, and I don’t see what good it would do. Just know that if you’ve had to deal with me the last week or two, and I’ve seemed distracted or just generally grumpier, there’s a reason for that.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that for now. Because if I type one more sentence, I’m going to turn into this guy.

That about sums it up for me at the moment. Maybe tomorrow will be better.