Bryce Moore's Blog, page 25

Television Review: Picard Season Three

So I discovered the best way to handle season two of Picard. Just don’t watch it. Not even a single episode. There’s nothing in the third season that connects to the second in any way. In fact, it seems like they purposefully ignore some of the most important elements of the second season, so even the writers just kind of waved the white flag and said they were sorry.

Was season three any better?

Yes-ish.

It was about as blatant fan service as you can get, but if you’re watching a show called “Picard,” something tells me you kind of want to see what they’re going to show you the third season. Basically, it’s as if someone got in the writers room and said, “Look, people. We need to come up with a plot that explains why it’s necessary to get as many of the original crew back together to have one last hurrah at saving the galaxy.”

Mission accomplished.

Did it always make the most sense? No, not really. Were there plenty of plot holes? You bet. Did I still enjoy it? Yes, I did.

I don’t want to give any more of the plot away (part of me worries that I gave away too much already, but . . . it’s kind of what they were doing in the first season anyway, so I’m not too upset about it.) Suffice it to say that if you’d like to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation: Older but Still Boldly Going, then this is the perfect thing for you. In fact, you could just completely skip the first season as well, if you felt so inclined. (I don’t know that I would, though. That one was fun enough.)

I can’t imagine they’ll do a fourth season of the show. There’s not a whole lot left for them to explore at this point. Never say never, I suppose. But I wouldn’t complain if they didn’t, and I honestly don’t know that I’d watch another season if they put one together. I feel like I’ve gotten what I wanted to see, and I can move on to other things.

In the end, a 7.5/10. Recommended for Trekkies, but I don’t think it’ll make any new converts.

5 Minute Baguettes

Long time readers and friends will remember that my wife, Denisa, used to be a baker. She made a variety of artisanal breads and would deliver them around town, across campus, and sold them in several stores. When she was baking, there were pluses and minuses. The pluses mainly boiled down to “fresh made bread all the time, literally,” though it also got her out and about and helped her meet a lot of people. The minuses were more varied: late nights baking, early mornings baking, and just a whole lot of time invested in it. Running a business isn’t for the faint of heart.

All of that ended years ago now. She doesn’t miss it at all (though I do miss the bread). Teaching as adjunct faculty makes much (much) more money in much (much) less time. Every now and then she’ll bake a batch of bread, but it’s few and far between, just because we’re busy doing other things now.

So when I came across a video early this week while sick in bed, I perked up a bit. “Homemade baguettes in five minutes,” it said. I watched it, thinking the video was five minutes. But no, it’s the amount of prep time to make them. It seemed straightforward enough, so I sent it to Denisa. She was intrigued enough to put it to the test.

It was a lie. It took more like 10 minutes. Twice as long! Maybe even more. (On her first try, which implies it could probably be done faster with practice, but still.) But they actually tasted really good. (Fantastic, even. Though I’ll say that eating them the next day isn’t quite as good. A big part of the appeal is the “freshly baked” part.)

So, dear readers, if you’re looking for an easy way to make some tasty bread, here’s you go. (The video’s only 2.5 minutes.)

To Tiktok or Not Tok?

I have, for the most part, completely and utterly ignored Tiktok. Most of my knowledge of the site is basically that it inspires teens to do idiotic challenges that often result in property damage, injury, or death. That’s a bit tongue in cheek, but not quite as much as you might think. I’ve seen some various posts on the platform. My niece has a pretty big following for music over there. But for the most part, I just decided it was one social media platform too far for me and so I washed my hands of it.

However.

Lately I’ve been reconsidering that notion, mainly because the book community over there seems to be so active. When I heard this, I randomly went over to the site and searched for Bryce Moore books, and there are multiple reviews posted over there of people talking about my books. In one I watched, they were kind of bummed I didn’t have a Tiktok page. This paired up with a presentation my publisher just did about effective marketing, and how big of an influence Tiktok seems to be able to have.

(It makes sense, I guess. If the platform can convince people to eat Tidepods, then it’s not too big a leap to think they might be able to convince people to read books. Maybe my book can be the next Tiktok challenge. “Eat a copy of PERFECT PLACE TO DIE in under 5 minutes!”)

So . . . yeah. I’ve begun to contemplate thinking about figuring out if I might possibly want to consider having a presence on Tiktok. I do like me some memes, and I think I might be able to do some fun things over there, but as an absolute ignoramus, I thought I might turn to all you who might be Tiktok professionals to get some sage words of advice.

Worth it? Anything I should watch out for? Do tell.

Revisiting Horror Classics

Okay. So I get that “classics” is definitely in the eye of the beholder, so maybe it’s not exactly the right word, but I’ve been on a bit of a horror binge for the last while, watching movies that I’ve never seen before. I decided to start off with the originals of long running series. I watched Scream and Friday the 13th, and I’m going to move on to A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and others. Horror films have generally been something I’ve avoided, for the simple reason that I don’t enjoy being scared.

However, watching Scream was kind of eye-opening for me. The film is very meta. It’s a horror movie that acknowledges other horror movies. That actively talks about the tropes in the films, even while a killer is stalking innocent high schoolers. Once you’re looking at the formula, it no longer really packs the same punch in many of these cases. People do and say things that make absolutely no sense. Or we’re expected to believe that the killer has superhuman planning powers, to know just how to lure each victim into their web, one by one.

These movies are the film equivalent of a rollercoaster. Designed to give you some thrills and deliver mostly the same experience, time and time again. (Note that I’m not saying all horror movies are like this. The Shining is just a fantastic movie, period. But I think that’s because it was approached as a film, not a “horror movie.”) Now that I’ve finally accepted the fact that I’m a horror author, I’d really like to know some of the most famous tropes out there, to make sure I approach things using the right touch.

So Friday the 13th. The original. (Spoilers ahead, but if I’m spoiling a movie that’s more than 40 years old, that’s kind of on you.) It was . . . pretty underwhelming, honestly. The pacing was quite slow (and not in an edge-of-your-seat sort of way), and the killings were gruesome, but only briefly glimpsed. (That’s not a complaint. I don’t need there to be tons of blood in a horror movie.) But my biggest gripe was how weak the film became as soon as the murderer was revealed.

Jason’s mom.

She’s not some unusually strong mom, either. She’s a 54 year old woman in a knit sweater.

I get that you can argue a killer who looks like someone so unexpected might be more frightening than someone who really looks evil, but this isn’t that kind of a movie. This woman has gone around surprising people and attacking them with knives, arrows, and axes. And then the Last Girl Standing is facing her down and . . . really struggles to put her away. The movie lost me there. I had a hard time accepting the villain as actually threatening once she’d lost the element of surprise.

Maybe some of it is that I grew up with the Friday the 13th movies. Not that I ever saw them, but I saw posters for them. Ads on TV. Jason in a hockey mask, attacking left and right. And so I went into the movie expecting that, and . . . Jason called in sick and had his mom do the work instead.

The movie was . . . okay. Not necessarily one I’m going to revisit anytime soon, though I’ll probably give some of the sequels a shot. Because that’s the thing with this kind of movie: I wasn’t really expecting or demanding a masterpiece. I got what I wanted, more or less. Some scariness. Some jump cuts. Some startles. I’m going to have to watch a bunch more to start really being able to tell if there’s anything more to these movies than that, but judging from its Rotten Tomatoes scores, the Friday the 13th series doesn’t get better.

The OG is the only one with a fresh rating. They go down from there. And yet the franchise has definitely been successful to the point that it’s entered the canon in a way many other characters never come close. This, in turn, led me to another question: does a movie or book have to be good to be successful? I still think the answer is yes, but I also realize now that it all comes down to the definition of good. If horror movies provide good scares, does it matter that much if the plot isn’t perfect?

Not so much, it seems . . .

NyQuil Coma

One of the advantages of being older is that you know how your body works a lot better than you do when you’re younger. When I was in high school, I was on antihistamines for a while for a bad cold/flu or something. The whole time, I was really tired and just out of it, but I never thought to pause and figure out what the thing was that was making me so different. It took my mom wondering what was up with me to make me pay attention and figure out it was an allergic reaction to the antihistamines.

Ever since then, I try to avoid antihistamines altogether. If I take them, I’m almost guaranteed to be out of it for the next 24 hours. Dizzy. Tired. Loopy. You’d think I’d never take them, then. But the fact is, when I’m sick enough, it becomes a decision of whether I’d rather be dizzy, tired, and loopy for 24 hours or unable to sleep and miserable for the same time period.

If I’m sick enough, I go with dizzy, tired, and loopy.

So last night I broke out the nighttime gel caps, and today . . . I’m out of it, as expected. However, two nights ago I woke up every 2 hours with a splitting headache. Last night? I woke up briefly once. It’s hard to get better if you can’t sleep well. So here we are.

I’m hoping to avoid taking them again tonight. Maybe in a few hours they’ll wear off, and we’ll see what I actually feel like. Until then, I’m just going to lie in bed and watch the room spin.

Have a good Tuesday, folks.

New Bryce Moore Books Incoming!

I’ve been sitting on this news for a good long while now, waiting for the chance to finally talk about this, but it only got officially announced recently. (I actually didn’t know it had been announced yet. You can’t find it on Google, though it seems it appeared in Publisher’s Marketplace. That’s as good an excuse as any to talk about it!)

I have two new books coming out from Sourcebooks! The first one, A FAMILY OF KILLERS, is planned to come out in August, followed by another book a year later. Here was the news as it went out to PM: “Bryce Moore’s (The Perfect Place to Die and Don’t Go to Sleep) A Family of Killers, a new historical horror. When a young man hears of a string of disappearances in southeastern Kansas, he goes to investigate and stays the night with the unsettling Bender family. As he learns more about them, he makes a grisly discovery that will change his world forever. To Annie Berger at Sourcebooks Fire, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2024, by Eddie Schneider at JABberwocky Literary Agency (World).”

So a few things. First, yes, it’s another historical horror. (I mean, it just says it right up there.) The second book will be another one as well. Both of them are based on serial killers. The Bloody Benders were a family (Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter) who killed people who stayed in their roadside inn in southeast Kansas from 1870-1873. I’m actually in the middle of copy edits for it as we speak. I’ll have those done by the end of the week, and then the book is pretty much ready to go.

The second book I’ll codename BLACKOUT for now. It takes place in WWII during the bombing of Britain. I’m about 25,000 words into it, but I keep getting interrupted to work on FAMILY OF KILLERS.

FAMILY was actually one of the hardest books to write I’ve ever done. I was approaching it in the same manner I’d written my other two historical thrillers, only to realize 2/3rds of the way through that my main character was riding around the frontier on a horse, and that actually, this was a western. You’d think this would have occurred to my earlier, but I’m pretty slow sometimes it seems. So I had to hit the pause button while I read a few really good westerns to make sure I had a sense for what I was doing. Not that this is your typical cowboys vs. ranchers novel. It’s still very much a Bryce Moore book, if that makes sense. But it required a different approach than anything I’ve done before.

Anyway. It’s done, and I’m very happy with the result. I can’t wait for it to start to see the light of day. This is my third historical thriller/horror, and I feel like I’m getting better at the pacing and the nuances of the genre.

If you’ve ever wondered why it’s hard to have things to celebrate as an author, it’s because there’s few pieces of news that you get to celebrate with everyone all at once. When you’re trying to sell a book, you find out that a publishing house is taking it to acquisitions, but there’s no guarantee they’ll buy it. They make an offer, but there’s no guarantee the negotiations will go smoothly. You sign the contract, but there’s still no guarantee the book will get printed. You get printed, but you don’t know how well the sales are.

I know this sounds like a real First World Problem complaint, but it means the celebration comes in dribs and dribbles. So I generally celebrate pay checks.

Writing historical thrillers wasn’t what I would have guessed I write the most of, back when I was starting out, but they’re a good blend of things I like to do: research and writing. I’m excited to share some new books with you all soon.

Household Chores Strike Back

Maybe there will come a day at some point in the halcyon future where chores around my house are a thing of the past. Where everything magically cleans itself, and no one makes messes anymore. Where the floors are spotless, the dust is in hiding, and windows are all clear as crystal. (Clean crystal, mind you.)

That day is not today.

But until that day arrives, I will valiantly continue trying to come up with new ways to keep everyone involved in the cleaning of the house. We’ve had chore charts, chore assignments, and chore strategies. Most of them work for a while, but sooner or later, they run out of juice, and we’re back to the old reliable “Denisa ends up doing most of it” approach, which has obvious issues. (Note, I’m not just throwing my kids under the bus here. I’m getting some wheels on me as well. Cleaning is often a big game of chicken, and I’m a pro at not flinching first. My tolerance for clutter is a bit lower than Denisa’s, I think. My tolerance for dust and dirt? Much much higher.)

So when we were driving home from Acadia, we had some family time in the car, and I got to talking to Denisa again about what we might do to keep the house clean. Our family’s in a different place than we were the last time I made a concerted chore chart effort. Back then, the kids were all younger. MC was too young to really be a full member of the cleaning crew. Now? Everyone’s old enough to get something significant done.

For the last while, our approach has often boiled down to “Fifteen Minute Cleanup,” where we’d take a Saturday and devote a few 15 minute rounds of everyone going around and cleaning something on their own. The alternative to this was me gathering the family and making a list of everything that needed cleaning. Then we’d go through the list, picking tasks that each of us would take care of. (It was like picking teams in gym, only with more elbow grease.) Everyone liked that for the most part, I think, mainly because they knew exactly what they needed to do, and could get it done on their own time.

So why not make a whole, consistent system around it?

I had Denisa make a list of all the spaces in the house that needed to be cleaned. (I was driving, so I wasn’t writing anything down.) We then ranked each of those spaces on a scale of 1-5 for how difficult it was to clean it. Adding that all together, we came to a total of 36. (We forced it a bit, to make sure the total was divisible by 4.) That meant each person had to take charge of 9 points of it. We went through picking, the same way we did occasionally, only this time it was for keeps. (Before we did that, we had a discussion as a family to make sure everyone was on board. The girls realize this is a problem, and they liked the proposed solution.)

So now I’m in charge of the loft, the movie room, and the office. Each day, I’m committed to spending 15 minutes cleaning one of those areas. Everyone else is doing the same thing. 15 minutes a day. (You’re allowed to clean for 30 minutes one day, if you want to get ahead of things, but no more than that.) We all know who’s responsible for what, so if things start to look shoddy, we know who to talk to. The bottom line is that we’ll be spending 6 hours a week (Sundays are off) as a family keeping the house clean. If we stick to that, we’ll be doing a much better job than we’ve been doing to date, and Denisa should have much more free time. It’s a win win win.

We’re four days into the new plan right now, and it’s survived well so far. 15 minutes feels very doable, even on a busy day. The house is already showing the difference. The real test will be if we can keep it up for a few months. I’m optimistic, since Daniela’s about as good at routines as I am, and with two of us on it at that level, the odds of them staying shoot up.

But wish us luck, regardless.

On Israel

I’ve been watching the war in Israel unfold in horror. Having spent a semester abroad in Jerusalem (traveling across Israel during that time), it connects with me in a way other conflicts don’t. I don’t quite know what to say about it, but I also didn’t want to blithely traipse along in my blog (where I often discuss current events) and simply ignore it. So . . . here goes.

During my time in Israel, I met many Israelis and many Palestinians. They were all lovely people. Welcoming and cordial. Walking through the streets of the Old City is still one of my favorite experiences, seeing so many people from so many backgrounds mix and mingle and interact. It felt more full of humanity than any other place I’ve been. The place breathed history.

To see this all spiral into violence and chaos is tragic. Tragic that it got to the point where some people felt that the only way they could get what they needed was through acts of terror. Tragic for the innocent people who have been murdered. Tragic for the people who will be affected by this, as water and aid get cut off and so many will suffer.

Anyone who tries to paint this situation with a black and white palette is being obstinately ignorant. This has been a situation that’s been problematic for decades. Centuries, really, if you study the history of the area. And yet you have groups like the Harvard student clubs, who released a signed statement saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A friend of mine pointed out on Facebook yesterday that in the aftermath of 9/11, there were some who really wanted to lay the blame for the attack on America. Were American policies to blame? They certainly played a part. Was it helpful at all to point that out?

Nope.

I wish there were some easy solution to this entire mess, but we’ve been trying for years to broker a lasting peace deal, and it just hasn’t worked yet. I’m praying for a quick end to the hostilities, and for a better future for the Palestinians. But I also can’t condone the sort of acts that Hamas unleashed on civilians. Nothing justifies that.

And I guess that’s all there is for me to say about the matter for now. Feeling very discouraged.

Television Review: Wheel of Time Season 2

The first season of the Wheel of Time on Amazon was a mixed bag. There were some aspects of it that I really loved. Seeing so many of these characters brought to life at last was really satisfying, and there were some parts that were fantastic. I loved the first episode, for example, with the Trolloc attack on Two Rivers. Other aspects were bewildering, like an entire episode devoted to Lan being sad, and random sexiness thrown in for seemingly no reason. (Did we need Lan and Moiraine in a hot tub? Who came up with that idea?) And then the finale rolled around, and it was just . . . blah. They significantly changed so many things, which doesn’t usually upset me, but in this case, they did it and the changes made no sense. I’m still scratching my head over that finale, and it left me feeling very meh about season two.

However, I began to hear rumblings that the second season was a strong recovery over the first, so I finally decided to give it another shot, and I’m very glad that I did. Really, it was almost everything I was wishing the first season had been. Yes, they made changes to the plot. They kind of have to, unless they’re going to make 20 hour seasons. But they managed to hit the high points of The Great Hunt, and when they made changes, they usually made sense (and even when they didn’t, they managed to recover for the most part.) Was it perfect? No. But it was good television.

(Perhaps the highest praise I can give it is that Denisa and Daniela, both very much non-WoT series readers, wanted to keep binge watching each night, and they were both very satisfied with the finale of the second season. It was a lot of fun for me to hear them talk about how much they liked Mat as a character, for example. (In contrast to the first season, where Mat was one of the biggest issues.) They’re invested in the show now in a way they weren’t really after the first season. That’s great news for the future success of the show, assuming they can get through the actors’ strike now.

Look, if you’re a long time fan of the series, I’m not promising that you’re going to love this season beginning to end. I know there are still fans out there who hate what they’re doing to this. But if you’re willing to set aside a “The Show Must Remain Absolutely True to the Books” mentality, you could really enjoy this. It’s quite brutal in some scenes, and overly bloody in others, but it’s fun to watch, and it would be a lot of fun to talk over the changes with other fans of the show.

In the end, I gave it an 8.5/10. Any show that can make me want to lose sleep is by definition a great show, in my book. I really do think it’s worth a watch.

A Tropical Stormy Getaway

Denisa and I generally go away with the family for the long Indigenous Peoples Day weekend. We rent a house somewhere a couple of hours away and just try to reset for a few days. The start of the semester can often be really stressful, so it’s nice to take those three days and catch our collective breath. This weekend was no different, or at least that was the plan.

To mix things up a bit, we decided to get a place on the ocean over near Acadia. (Not the popular side of Acadia, as we didn’t want all the crowds. We went for the Schoodic Peninsula.) A small cabin with three bedrooms, so everyone would have their own space, if they wanted it. We loaded the car with board games and snacks, and even brought along Ferris this time. His first real family vacation.

We got off to a later start on Friday than we would have liked, so we didn’t get to the house until well after dark, but Saturday went pretty well, all things considered. The weather had said the remnants of tropical storm Philippe would dump around three inches of rain that day, but the rain didn’t really start until 3 o’clock, giving us time to get out, look at the ocean, go for a long walk, and make sure Ferris didn’t have too much energy in him. Once the rain started, we broke out the board games and the movies, and we had a very nice time. (Even though the board game the girls wanted to play was Monopoly . . .)

At 11:30, the power went out.

We’re used to having some power outages, but our home is right by Walmart and the hospital, which means that the power gets restored in a few hours, almost always. This rental was on the coast in a very remote part of the area, and 16,000 other people had lost power around us. It didn’t come back over night, and when we checked in the morning, it wasn’t supposed to be restored until 10pm. Having no power at home isn’t all that fun. Having no power on vacation, when you know you’ve got power at home?

Yeah. No.

We stayed the day. The girls went for a bike ride. We played some more games. But by 4:30, it was getting dark in the house. (The trees all around it were beautiful, but they blocked what little light we had.) And we still had no running water. So we packed up the car and headed home. We got there in time for another movie, and we focused on ignoring chores yesterday so it still felt at least a little vacationy.

Was it perfect? No. This wasn’t a vacation that will go down in the record books. But it was definitely memorable. Ferris thought the whole thing was the Best Thing Ever. It took him a day to calm down enough in the cabin to be bearable. He just wanted to run all over the place nonstop, and Lick All the Things. But by the end, even he seemed to be relaxing.

Vacation’s done now. I’m back at work. But I do feel a little more centered, and here’s hoping the semester continues smoothly.