Bryce Moore's Blog, page 241

Book Review: The Raven Boys

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t get as much time to read books these days as I’d like to, so I’ve widened my available reading time by opening up to the wonderful world of audiobooks. I found myself with a long drive ahead of me and nothing picked out to read, so I went to my library and checked out a digital audiobook. Time was short, so I didn’t have much of a chance to research what I wanted to read.

Which is a long way of saying I wasn’t quite sure of what I was going to get when I picked out Maggie Stiefvater’s THE RAVEN BOYS.

Going into it, details were sketchy. I knew it had a 4.05 on Goodreads–with over 22,000 reviews–so clearly it had some appeal. I knew it was about a girl and some boys, and that’s all I really had time for before I downloaded it and started listening.

I didn’t love this book, but if I’d started a relationship with it, I would have given it the “It’s not you, it’s me” talk. Because I’m not the target audience, I soon discovered. This is very much a teen fantasy romance novel, and . . . I’m far from a teen fantasy romance reader. Despite this fact, I still finished the book, mainly because there were some fantasy elements in it that were strong enough to get me through the lovey-dovey stuff.

Blue Sargent comes from a family of psychics, and for as long as she can remember, her family has been telling her that if she ever kisses her true love, he’ll die. Interesting premise. Add to that a plot of a rich teenage boy hunting the grave of a long lost Welch king, some cool fantasy world building, and well-drawn characters, and you’ve got a recipe for success on your hands.

Just not a book that I’m going to love. – See more at: http://elitistbookreviews.blogspot.co…

View all my reviews

The Requisite First Day of School Post

It’s true. That time of year has come again. School’s started up, and my two school-aged kids are off learning who knows what. They were both very excited to be starting a new school year. TRC is in fourth grade, which means he’s at a whole new building. Exciting times. And DC is now in Kindergarten–full day, every day.

It was fun listening to TRC advise DC about the tips and tricks he’d learned for how to handle Kindergarten. About how it really wasn’t hard at all, and how they pretty much just let you play the whole time. “Not like in Fourth Grade, where we have to work.”

Those slave drivers in Fourth Grade. You have to watch out for them.

Very pleased my kids look forward to school still, and I wonder how long that will last. TRC hasn’t really been pushed or stretched beyond his abilities just yet. Will this year be the year? No clue. He’ll be doing violin, which will be a new experience. Not that I want him stressing out too much over school, but I also tend to think that he’s developing a tendency to coast through things and not push himself, just because he can.

Then again, I distinctly remember doing the same thing, all the way through . . . college? So maybe there goes my leg to stand on. That said, I was very good at learning what the minimum I had to do was to get an A. And isn’t that what school  is all about?

In any case, it’ll be an adventure. DC has the same Kindergarten teacher TRC had, and Denisa and I are very happy about that. She’s super, and DC had already heard tons of good things about her. So yay for that.

Here’s to another exciting school year!

Your Weekly Dose of Diet Update

The diet’s a work in progress, but I did drop down to 193.8 this week (down from 194.2 the week before). Actually, I was a fair bit lower than that, but then there was some unforeseen stress this week, and I’m afraid the diet went right out the window. Such is life.

But like life, so much of success just boils down to picking yourself up after you fall off the fiftieth time, brushing yourself off, and getting back on whatever just bucked you off.

I might not always make the right choices, but at least I’ll get an E for Effort.

And that’s all I have time for a post today.

No Concept of Time

I’m off to Bangor today for an MLA Board retreat. Or something like that. What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means the head honchos of the Maine Library Association are going to get together and talk turkey for six hours or so. Future of the association, how to stay strong, keep libraries vibrant–big picture planning sort of stuff. I’m actually looking forward to it a fair bit, to be honest. I’m a big believer in libraries, and I like having the chance to try to help them succeed.

It also means a four hour round trip to Bangor. But hey–now that I do that whole audiobook thing, it’s 4 hours of reading time.

Multitasking for the win, eh?

Anyway. No real time for a real post. So instead I’ll leave you with an observation. I’ve somehow lost my concept of time.

Bonus points if you can name the connection between that clip and losing your concept of time.

But it’s true. I come into work on Mondays, and people ask how my weekend was, and I’ve already forgotten. Denisa mentioned a few days ago that something was happening in November, and I literally couldn’t remember what month it was, and if November was far off or in a week or two. I’m living in this day to day zone, where all I can really pay any attention to is what’s happening that day–maybe the next day, as well.

Thankfully my goals keep me going. Keep my time parceled out so that I don’t go crazy.

I’m sure it’ll work out fine for me.

How about you–do you ever feel like this? What have you done to fight that feeling? Do share!

Bryce vs. The Dentist

If someone had asked me years ago when I started this blog if dentists would be a big thing I wrote about, I never would have believed him. And yet here I am, composing what’s at least my eighth post about the profession. I don’t have time to read the others over, but I *did* have to go to mine again this morning, and when you write a blog, and you’re there sitting still for an hour or so, you have time to think. “What am I going to blog about today?”

It’s been a while since I did a dentist post. Why not another?

Why not, indeed.

The thing is, I like my dentist. He’s a really nice guy. A stickler for flossing, just like you want your dentist to be. And yet, I’m terrified of going to the dentist’s. Like, I’d been worrying about this visit since I found out I had a small cavity a few weeks ago. I was seriously stressed about it. Stressed as in, I’m watching The West Wing, and in the middle of the show, I start thinking about the dentist’s.

That doesn’t usually happen to me.

And what’s worse is that I don’t even have a real reason to fear the dentist. I’ve never had a root canal. Never had an extraction. Just some cavities filled. (I was blessed with very deep grooves in my teeth, I guess. Hard to brush there.) I even still have my wisdom teeth.

So why do I fear dentists?

I think it’s because my teeth were too good growing up. I brushed too much. And because I brushed often, I never had a cavity. Denisa has so many cavities, she’s practically ready to start as Jaws in the next Bond movie. (Pro tip–when joking about your wife’s teeth, make sure to mask it in pop culture references she won’t get. This is what she gets for not watching all the James Bond movies. What’s that you say? There’s this thing called Google? CURSES!)

He’s got a lovely smile though, right Denisa?

Anyway . . . where was I? Oh right. I brushed too often. And so since I never actually experienced pain at the dentist’s, all I had to go on was the rumor of pain. Pop culture scenes of people being in horrific pain at the dentist’s.

That’s right. I have a phobia based on Steve Martin. But something about sitting in that chair, staring up at the yellow light, hearing the high pitched whir of the drill as this person does something you can’t see in a place you can’t touch, while you’re forced to have your mouth gaping open and let another person jam a hose and a vacuum down your throat . . .

Something about that is less than enjoyable, right?

Or is that just me?

Good news is that I can stop worrying about it now. Until the next deep groove needs to be cavitized . . .

Happy Friday, everybody!

Writing Update: The Memory Thief and Get Cupid

Yesterday I finished the second draft of THE MEMORY THIEF, a middle grade contemporary fantasy. It’s off to my agents now to see what their thoughts on the book are at the moment. They saw the first draft and liked it, and this second draft incorporated the changes they suggested, as well as the input I’ve gotten from some alpha readers and my writing group. I cut a fair bit, but I added a fair bit more, bringing the total from 40,000 words to 47,600. The book’s still in rough draft condition, though. What I mean by that is that I haven’t gone through and worked on polishing descriptions, taking out clunky phrases, trimming down the fat that goes into a book. Right now, I look at drafting in the same way I look at wood carving. You work on getting the rough shape in place before you start turning to fine details. I see no point in tweaking up a second draft if I find out there was a bunch of stuff in that draft that had to be massively overhauled, anyway.

And besides–I have my GET CUPID revision to return to. A revision I’m less than enthusiastic about, not because the book is bad, but because I was right in the middle of it when I set it aside to revise MEMORY THIEF. So now I know I have to find my notes, reread a bunch of material, and remind myself where in the world I was before I stepped away from the project.

Talk about a momentum killer.

That said, I’m glad I did it. I feel like THE MEMORY THIEF is a much stronger book now than it was fifty days ago when I started the actual second draft. (Ironically, it took me longer to revise the book than it took me to write it the first time. Conferences, work duties, and life got in the way from time to time.) I completely cut a major character, totally rewrote the denouement, expanded two or three scenes, and did a bunch of reworking throughout the book. We’ll see what ze agents say. In an ideal world. this books goes out on submission before the end of the year.

Of course, I don’t always live in an ideal world . . .

In the meantime, check out the page for THE MEMORY THIEF to get an overview on how the writing process has gone for the book thus far. Interesting stuff, although I’ll admit I’m biased . . .

Separating the Art from the Artist

So yesterday I came across this post. For those of you who don’t want to click over, allow me to summarize: a publishing company agreed to publish a book. The book’s about ready to be published–all that’s left is to finalize little things like the authors’ bios. One of the authors mentions that he lives with his wife and children. The other’s bio includes a tidbit about how he lives with his boyfriend. He changes that to “partner” when the publisher has a hissy fit, but that doesn’t appease the publisher. They want all mention of a partner or boyfriend left out of the bio. The author refuses.

The publisher cancels the novel.

Why? Because the publisher is Cedar Fort, a Utah press that sells primarily to Mormons–and they’re freaked out about alienating Deseret Book, a church-run bookstore in Utah that’s a prime place for books to be sold.

Um . . .

Yeah. How is this not grounds for a huge lawsuit? How is it possible that a publisher does something like this? The book wasn’t promoting homosexuality. It’s a YA fantasy, for crying out loud. One of the authors is gay. So what? To withdraw from a business agreement because the author wanted to mention that he lived with his partner? That boggles my mind.

Of course, the sad truth is that there is no doubt a not-insignificant number of people for whom seeing “lives with his partner” in a bio *would* be a deal breaker. And that’s just wrong to me.

But let’s talk about the flip side of this argument. Orson Scott Card. Here you have a Mormon saying some very hurtful things about gays, and you have a not insignificant number of people who want to boycott Ender’s Game because of it. Never mind that the movie is done through Hollywood. That the book has nothing to do with being anti-gay. That hundreds of people worked on the thing who no doubt have nothing against gay people at all, some of whom have publicly said so.

The Ender’s Game example doesn’t come close to approximating the problems at issue with the first example, but I do see them as sides of an idea I’ve been rolling around in my head for quite some time, and that is:

Should you separate the art from the artist? Can you?

I know of plenty of people who seem unable to do so. They hear about what an actor or an author has done outside of his acting or his writing, and they decide they’re never going to see another movie or read another book from that person.

I don’t do this. Why not? For many reasons. First of all, if I avoided the art of every person who has done something I disagree with or which I find morally reprehensible, then there’s not a whole lot of art I’d be allowing myself to see. Actually, likely no art at all. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. Or things we *are* proud of, but shouldn’t be. Artists are mortal and full of flaws. That’s part of what makes them able to make great art.

What about outspoken gay-rights actors? Or anti-gay authors? Or artists who cheat on their wives? Or–or–or–

Or how about this. How about the idea that my personal views on morality and right and wrong might be different than what other people believe? Should I hold other people to my same standards? I think drinking coffee is a sin. Does this mean I should stop talking and associating with all coffee drinkers?

Of course not.

My standards aren’t your standards. I don’t get to decide what your standards are. As long as its legal, who am I to throw stones? (And speaking of legal, is breaking a contract because of sexual orientation really legal?)

Here’s an excellent article in the New York Times that goes over all the awful things famous artists have done.

For me, art is art, and people are people. I can’t go around doing a Wikipedia search before I read or watch anything, to make sure that the creators did or did not live a certain lifestyle. Nor would I want to. The art should stand on its own. If Ender’s Game is an awful movie, let it fail on its own shortcomings. If Woven was a great book, it should have had the chance to get out in front of the public and fly–regardless of partners or boyfriends or whatever.

Ah well. For now I’m just disappointed in Cedar Fort for what they did, and sad that it’s going to reinforce the stereotype that all Mormons are anti-gay. My hope is that a different publishing company picks up their book and uses this free publicity to launch it to even greater success than it would have had at Cedar Fort, but publishing is a fickle beast, and you never know what it might bring next.

What are your thoughts on the connection between artists and their art? Does it make a difference to you? Why or why not?

Diet Update: Week Something or Other

So. The diet. I’ve been dinking around enough this summer, and I’ve come to face the cold hard truth: I need to be back on this diet. Now. In fact, I started up officially yesterday. Why did I go back on the strict diet?

Because so far I’ve been terrible at watching what I eat otherwise.

I was up in the 196 range, and we all know what comes after that: the 200 range.

So as of today, I’m back at 194.2, just a hair under the line so I’m “Normal” and not “Overweight.”

Clearly I still need work on the whole “maintenance” lifestyle. It’s just that ice cream and cookies and s’mores and brownies and cake are all so . . . good. And I love baking. And eating. It’s a bad combination.

I also need to do better at exercising regularly when I’m not dieting. I feel better when I do. I know that–and yet I don’t do it. This all actually brings to mind a thought experiment I read about the other day (which I unfortunately can’t find to quote exactly at the moment). There is a discomfort scale from 1-100. Everyone starts at 1, but if they move up one notch on the scale, they get a certain amount of money–say $100,000. However, they can only move up the scale–never down it. Basically, it becomes an experiment where people decide how much discomfort is worth. And when you get down to it, that’s what this whole diet thing is for me. I know it’s healthier for me to eat well and exercise regularly–but it’s more relaxing and enjoyable to just pig out and be lazy. And yet pigging out and being lazy come with long term health risks . . .

So anyway. This is just to say that you can expect me blogging about my lousy weight again each week, even if I don’t really want to.

How to Write: Bump, Set, Spike

I’ve been working more on THE MEMORY THIEF–getting close to being done with the second draft. But over the weekend, I’d run into a problem. The book felt good to me–right up to the climax. The ironic thing is that the climax also felt good. But something was off. Something was missing. Everyone who read the climax loved it, but they felt like it hadn’t been climactic in the right way once it was over. In other words, it was *a* climax, but it didn’t feel like *the* climax.

This is not how you want your climaxes behaving.

So I’d revised up to the climax, and it was time to tackle that problem. All that was left was 5000 words or so of text between me and being done with the main part of the revision. But I stared at that climax, and stared at it, and stared . . .

And got nowhere.

So I called up one of my author friends who has already read the book. She’d been one of the ones to note something was off with the climax, and I was pretty sure that if I could just talk the problem through with her, I’d be home free.

As usual, it was tremendously helpful. The problem snapped into focus, and all became right with the world. How did the fix come about?

Bump, set, spike.

Yup. It’s time for a volleyball metaphor.

As you likely already know, when playing volleyball, each side gets three touches of the ball before the ball has to be on the other side of the court. The best approach to handling the ball is to usually go through three steps. The other team has just spiked the ball straight at your side of the court. So step one is to get the ball slowed down and just bobbing up into the air. That’s the bump. You tackle the immediate problem, without worrying so much about where exactly the ball is going to go next. Then comes the set. Someone rushes beneath the much-slower-moving-ball and puts the finesse on it, setting it up perfectly so that someone else can come up, leap into the air, and then spike that ball straight down the opposing team’s throat.

Writing is like that.

The beginning of a novel is the bump phase. You take your reader and catch her attention. They might have been coming in from any direction, but you field them and get them more or less in order. Next, you’ve got to prep the spike. You need to make sure to put the finesse on the story so that when that spike–the climax–comes, it’s just the best thing to hit them since chocolate peanut butter ice cream. And then of course is the spike itself.

I think a lot of the time, we focus on getting the spike just right. In movies or books, it’s a part we like to talk with others about afterwards. “Could you believe it when _______.” And so when we’re writing–or when I’m writing, at least–I can tend to focus on that spike, too. Making sure it’s the spikiest spike to ever spike a spike.

The problem I’d had with THE MEMORY THIEF is that everyone had noticed the spike wasn’t ending up in the right spot. And so to fix that, I was focused solely on the spike. What I discovered through my talk with my friend was that the spike was just fine. It was the set that was off. I hadn’t put in the groundwork earlier in the novel to set that spike up.

Let’s use an example. In The Lord of the Rings, the spike is pretty clear. Frodo’s got to get take ring and chuck it into Mt. Doom. When the ring finally goes down down down, we all feel great. Yay hobbits! But that spike only works because the set was there. We know early on that the ring can only be destroyed by fire. We know there’s only one fire that can destroy it. We know that fire is in the middle of a place where no one can get to. Tolkien made destroying the ring difficult enough so that when it’s finally destroyed, we appreciate it. If you had LOTR, but the ring could just be melted down for gold in Rivendell . . . a scene where Frodo dramatically hurls the ring into a fire in Rivendell wouldn’t have nearly the oomph. Even if Rivendell had a volcano.

In other words, Tolkien could have taken the exact same ending but switched how the protagonist arrived there, and instead of being awesome, that ending would have stunk.

Bump, set, spike.

Once you’ve got this concept down, you start seeing it everywhere. You’ll be watching a movie and see the screenwriter moving things into position for the final spike. You’ll know ahead of time what that spike is, because of what went into the plot ahead of time. It’s the reverse of Chekov’s Gun (the rule of thumb that basically states if you introduce a rifle in chapter one, it had better go off by the end of the story). Except in this case, if you’re going to have a rifle go off at the end of the story, you’d better be darn sure you introduce that rifle in chapter one.

Strangely enough, this is something I rarely end up noticing when I’m plotting a book or writing the first draft. During those phases, it seems kind of self-explanatory. Of course you’d set things right so that your spike is just spikalicious. No–where this concept comes in really handy is during the revision, where you’re wrestling with a part that just doesn’t feel right. And then you realize that instead of needing to revise the whole climax, you just need to pepper the right 500 words across the rest of the book in the right places–and voila! Problem solved.

And that’s my writing advice for you today.

Sometimes the Answer’s Staring You in the Face

Yesterday I posted all about how distressed I was that I wasn’t reading more. I just didn’t have the time! Something else was going to have to go! I needed to make drastic life changes to make sure I started upping the number of books I read! I really felt upset about it, and so I blogged those frustrations out.

It took all of about two minutes for one of my many wonderful friends to point out the solution: Audiobooks. (Thanks, Nissa! That’s why you’re the president, and I’m the president of vice. Or . . . something.)

I’ve had all sorts of other things I need to get done other than reading, which is why reading hasn’t been getting done. But because I was so set on looking at reading in a “face in front of book, can’t do anything else” light, I missed the great opportunity to multitask. So I went on Overdrive before I left work yesterday, downloaded a book (Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys) and listened to it on my way home and then while I worked on cleaning the house. I’ve now listened to 47 minutes of it.

And there was much rejoicing.

I love me some multi-tasking. I like a clean house, but I hate the time it takes for me to do it. I like having exercised, but I dislike how it takes a chunk out of my life each day. But if I can clean and exercise AND read at the same time? Suddenly I feel like a model of efficiency, and so it becomes a lot easier to do both.

Of course, this all leads me to another thought: that the ability to take advice from others is a learned trait. There’s so many times when we could improve our lives if we just listened to what other people had to say. Of course, the trick is that a fair bit of those other people have no clue what they’re talking about. So it’s not like you can go around listening to everybody, ya know?

I’d like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at taking advice. Or at least listening to advice and then evaluating if it’s advice that’s helpful to me or not. I remember when Denisa and I were expecting TRC. We were really worried about having our first baby. How would we manage it? How could we be sure not to mess things up? There were tons of books written on the subject, tons of opinions expressed to us. A lot of the advice conflicted with other advice.

We came across the Babywise series. Some of our close friends vouched for them. We read them. I remember the books saying essentially, “If you follow this method, you will constantly be told that you were blessed to have such well behaved children”–that people would all attribute it to luck or genetics or whatever. It was basically promising that our kids would be awesome. We both thought it sounded like a good approach, so we stuck to it. It’s worked wonders for us. And yes, many people have told us exactly what the book said they would tell us. Is it because the book was right, or were we really just lucky? Frankly, I don’t really care. I just care that my kids are awesome. I do know that following the advice of the book wasn’t always easy, but we did it even when some people said it was stupid–because that’s what we believed we should do.

I don’t know. This post is kind of derailing. But I’ll end up with a cooking analogy. Another friend mentioned that people always tell her how great her cookies are and wonder how she can make them so good. She always says she just follows the recipe. She doesn’t make any substitutions. Doesn’t cut down on the butter or the sugar or the chocolate chips. Just follows the recipe. Sometimes, I think life’s a lot like that, too. Find a recipe, and follow it.

The trick is finding a good recipe.

For today, I’m just happy for my blog, for the powers of the hivemind, and for the fact that I can get back to my reading roots. Thanks everybody!