Bryce Moore's Blog, page 51

A Message from Quarantine

If you were following along on Facebook at all, you’ll know that I tested for COVID the second I got home from Texas, because safety. You’ll also know that I tested positive. Since that test (on Thursday at 6pm), I have been in my bedroom practically the whole time. I go outside now and then to get some sunlight and to walk around some in an effort to keep my legs from just completely wasting away, but when it comes to being inside, it’s one room, that’s it.

Since this is our family’s first bout with COVID, we didn’t know a whole lot about how long to isolate. Ironically, two other friends of mine caught it at practically the same time (none of us in the same state). So I knew from conversations with them and others that I was to isolate until 5 days after the first day of symptoms, and then wear a mask when I was out in public if I was symptom free. (If you’re not symptom free, no ending isolation for you!)

And . . . I’m still not symptom free. I’m also not completely sure when symptoms started, since I was on the road and had slept poorly at the hotel. So I’m just being cautious all around. That said, I will say that being stuck here by myself for what’s now my fifth day is . . . less than fun. I hadn’t seen my family since last Monday when I left, and now here I am more than a week later with no real contact with them other than when I’m feeling up for a chat outside. (We have been zooming during dinner and at other times, but it’s not really the same thing.) That said, I really don’t want to be the reason anyone in my family gets this. So they’re all staying in a different wing of the house, and we’re keeping a few empty rooms between us as a buffer zone.

The good news is that my symptoms are now down to minor. I’ve got a stuffy nose, a headache, a sore throat when I swallow, and I’m tired. For a while, I had a sore throat bad enough to wake me up multiple times a night, but a non-stop running nose and muscle aches. I’ve been taking Paxlovid since Friday, and I’m glad I did, since it’s taken a long time to recover as-is. (Noting that I realize some people take even longer, or don’t recover at all. I’m grateful this isn’t worse.)

I imagine I’ll still be stuck here tomorrow, but if the symptoms are mostly gone, I might begin venturing outside more, and then head back to work . . . Thursday? Here’s hoping. In the meantime, I’ve watched a slew of movies and an entire television series. I’ve played many digital games, and today and yesterday I’m finally getting back into work items. I think I’ll be able to start writing again today as well. For a while there, I just wasn’t up to complex thought.

Anyway. Thanks for all your well wishes and concern. I’m hanging in there, and looking forward to being back in the full swing of things soon.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

European Planning 2022 Begins

Now that we know where and when Tomas is going on his mission, we can actually begin planning our life some again. First up? One last trip to Europe. Yes, Tomas will be living there for 2 years, but he won’t be with us, and we didn’t get to go last year, so . . . why not bring him along for a preview? Of course, to do that, I need to get a handle on the many different aspects of another trip to Europe, and I’m discovering I’m woefully out of practice.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take a bit to go over what needs to happen when I start a planning process like this. That will help me remember, and it might come in handy for one of you.

First up is always the parameters. I need to know when we can leave and when we can come back. That involves looking at schedules with Denisa and talking things over with the kids. When our kids were younger, their schedules were much easier (since they were essentially set by us). Now that they’re older, the each have conflicts at different points over the summer. Looking at it all, it appears we’ve got from mid-June to mid-July. That’s a big enough window to work with.

Second, we always try to go someplace other than Slovakia on each trip. Might as well multi-task as long as we’re over in Europe, right? This time, the plan is to go see a bunch of Italy. But “a bunch of Italy” is pretty broad, so I took some time to look over the different cities of the country and decide how long to stay in each, and what route would work best. I knew we wanted to go to Rome and Venice, so that pretty much cut out southern Italy due to time constraints. Looking at northern Italy, it seems like checking out Milan and Florence and some of the western coast (Cinque Terre and Pisa) could make for a nice loop by car. We don’t want to run ourselves ragged, so I try to limit the number of hotel/house changes. Maybe 4 different places, over around 10 days? It’s a starting point, at least.

Then comes the tricky part, which has proven especially tricky this time around: Figuring out how to get between Slovakia and Italy most economically. Right now, it appears we have two viable options. The first is to take a plane, but the only carriers that have seats right now are Wizz, Ryanair, and Austria Airlines. Wizz and Ryanair generally treat you like packages, and their reliability often leaves much to be desired. Austrian Airlines doesn’t exactly have uniformly glowing reviews either, and they’re more expensive. But on the other hand, the other choice is to travel by train, which will take something like 14 hours. There’s a sleeper car option, and that’s fairly intriguing, but it’s even more expensive. Not sure yet what I’m going to do about it. Currently the thought is to fly into Vienna on a one way ticket, then to Rome on another one way, and finally back to Boston on a one-way. But price is definitely going to matter, because money.

We debated traveling around the countries by car or train this time, as well. Trains can be pretty slick, and you get to avoid having to navigate strange cities and figuring out where in the world to put your car when you get where you’re going. But if you don’t have a car, your options to see the countryside are very limited, and you’re generally stuck staying in the city. We’d love to get a villa outside Milan or Florence for at least some of the time. Again, in the end it will depend on how much the car will cost, to see how much that compares with the train. My gut says we’ll get a car, but I’ll compare before I commit.

We’ll need places to stay, so I look into all of those in each city. I usually avoid hotels, but I’ll price those out just in case. (Traveling with 5 puts us out of the range of almost all European hotels, which generally only sleep 4. Paying for two rooms makes them anything but economical.) I check Booking, AirBNB, and VRBO, though if anyone knows any Italian-specific sites to look at, I’m all eyes. (The Slovakia side of things we have much more experience with.)

I really won’t worry about things to do and places to eat until all the rest of the pieces are in place, though I can’t wait that long, because if we want to do anything special that needs tickets, those can sell out if we’re too slow. But I do poke around online a little just to see what those things cost. (Again, I need to know a ballpark range to make sure I can afford everything.)

These days, we also need to look into extended dog sitting. Know anyone local who’d love to have a golden retriever with them for a few weeks this summer? As lovable as he is energetic . . .

I think the biggest problem I have with all of this is how much each piece ends up depending on every other piece. Instead of just being able to go through and buy one thing at a time, I need to get the big picture down so that I can know what options to make on each smaller choice. If I’d had more time to prepare for this, it would have been easier, but there’s the added “fun” of a time constraint now. Mid-June is less than two months away. Plane tickets will get more expensive, event tickets will get more scarce, and VRBOs will get snatched up the longer I wait. I’ve already put in many hours of research, and I have many to go.

Wish me luck.

(And as always, if you have any pointers for things I’m forgetting or ignoring, please speak up!)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Movie Review: The Adam Project

A few nights ago I found out at the last minute that the older kids wanted to watch a movie with Denisa and me. Yay for that, but when I know I need to pick something quickly, I can go into a bit of a decision lock. So many choices, and it feels like it’s up to me to find something everyone will like, despite all their different tastes. I dithered for a while, and finally just picked the first thing that came up that looked remotely good. The Adam Project is a Netflix movie by Shawn Levy (of Stranger Things fame). It had a 6.7 on IMDB, so I hit play.

The premise starts out pretty solid. A man from 2050 travels back in time to try and prevent a catastrophe. Plenty of room for cool in that, right? His spaceship is somehow “DNA locked,” which means it will only fly if he’s in it and he has “healthy DNA.” And since he got shot in his escape from the future, somehow that makes it so his DNA isn’t healthy. (Yes, this is strange. They could have just gone with “you need to be totally healthy and not going to die anytime soon to be able to fly,” but I guess DNA sounded cooler?) In any case, he finds his younger 12 year old self, who has the same DNA and is (you guessed it) healthy, and he ropes him into coming with him so he can fly his ship.

And to save the future, they have to make sure their dad’s research in the even-further-past gets messed up, since their dad invented time travel. Granted, the premise of the plot is getting thinner and thinner the farther along we go, but hey! Time travel! This could still be cool, right?

Unfortunately not. My biggest complaint with the movie is that it played so loose with the science when it was convenient, only to use it as the “deus ex wrench” when it needed problems to come up for plot reasons. Characters kept talking about how dangerous it was to have people travel back in time and interact with their past selves, except we see zero evidence of that at all, and they keep doing it again and again and again, except when they decide they can’t, because reasons. Case in point? Toward the end, we’re supposed to believe that even with all of the shenanigans that have gone on, a character is still going to die in the future because of a car accident. That makes absolutely no sense. The amount of circumstances that have to come together to have someone be in a car accident are astronomical. Even if they’re five seconds late or early, they miss that accident.

Ugh.

Beyond the loosey goosey science is the plot, which felt very paint by number. It’s got the time travel stuff, and then it jams in the heart warming father/son/past self vibes. You could almost see the Mad Libs they were working with in the script. The characters are by and large cookie cutter as well. Look! Ryan Reynolds playing . . . Ryan Reynolds. (Is he just the same character all the time now? Because that’s what it feels like. Daniela says he’s always cast as Buddy the Elf, and she’s not really wrong.) 12 year old kid playing . . . 12 year old Ryan Reynolds! Mark Ruffalo playing . . . Bruce Bannister! Except no Hulk.

In the end, I was quite disappointed by the movie. It was one way to spend two hours of my life, but it wasn’t a particularly engrossing way. It’s a big let down, because with the budget and the premise, they could have done much more. But instead, they have this. 3/10 Feel free to miss it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Tomas Has His Mission Call

[Yes, I’m going to bury the lede here. Sue me.]

Tomas got his mission call this morning, quite out of the blue. Well, not entirely out of the blue, of course. This is something he’s been working on for months, if not years. Putting in your mission application involves multiple interviews with church leaders, doctor visits, and dentist visits, not to mention the big question of “do I really want to do this?” Missions are a two year commitment. You don’t get to say where you go, or when. They’re largely an act of faith. You trust God will send you to the place where you can do the most good.

Tomas put his papers in last week. Typically we understood that it takes about 2-3 weeks to get the call, and that when it comes, it comes on a Wednesday. This morning at 11:00am, he got the email that his call had arrived. Many people do livestreams of themselves opening their call these days. Tomas had told us ahead of time he wasn’t interested in that. We’d already decided he’d open it up when he wanted, whether or not Denisa and I were there.

Heading into this, all three of us really wanted him to go to Slovakia, though it was sort of an unspoken rule in the house not to say that out loud. Denisa’s from there, obviously. All her family is still there. We’ve gone multiple times over the years. Denisa’s worked to make sure to teach him Slovak since he was born. It made a whole lot of sense for him to go there, and if he did, he’d have two years living in a culture that’s always been somewhat removed from him, even though it’s half his heritage. He’d come back really fluent in Slovak, with a much better understanding of what it’s like to be there. I served in Germany, and I still feel a strong connection to the country more than 20 years later.

But . . . just because something seems obvious when it comes to a mission doesn’t mean that it is. One of Denisa’s Czech friends had two sons serve: one to Poland, and one to . . . Brazil. Or he could just as easily be called somewhere stateside. St. Louis. Tampa. There are 404 church missions out there. Only 1 of them speaks Slovak. And so I was steeling myself to give Tomas the “it’s okay, all missions are wonderful” talk. This reminded me a lot of when I was finding out where I was going to go on my mission. I really wanted to go German speaking, and I worried that just wasn’t going to happen.

So when Tomas texted to say he got his call and had opened it, I was quite nervous.

Where’s he going? Czech Prague Mission. Slovak speaking!

And there was much rejoicing.

He’s scheduled to leave on September 19th, which was a bit of a surprise. He’d put July 5th as his availability date, with the thought of coming home before BYU’s fall semester starts in 2024. This means he’ll likely miss that semester, but no worries. It’ll work out. The good news is this means we’ll also be able to fit in one last European vacation before he goes. (Which means I need to start planning that yesterday.)

But for now, a hearty congrats to Tomas. T-minus 5 months and counting . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Revisiting The Wheel of Time

After I watched the first season of The Wheel of Time on Amazon, I couldn’t help but try to remember just how much had changed from the source material. It had been nine years since I’d read anything of the series, despite having read the earlier books many many times. (I would guess I’ve read the first book, Eye of the World, around ten times, since I’d typically reread the whole series before each new book came out.) These days, I’m much more hesitant to reread books, simply because there are so many other books out there. Rereading the whole series (14 books plus the prequel) means about 12,000 pages of reading. 4,410,036 words, according to Wikipedia. When would I ever feel like reading that much of something again? Something that I’d already read so many times?

After the first season of the TV show, I decided the time had come. Yes, this meant I’d be reading beefy books, which might put my “1 book a week” goal in peril, but in the end I wanted to read the series again, so I did. I started it in January, and I finished it on Saturday. It took three and a half months, though during that time I also read two non-fiction books as preparation for my current novel, and Don’t Go to Sleep one more time for the page proofs.

Did I fall behind in my reading goal? Nope. I’m actually about 4 books ahead of where I need to be at this point in the year, which goes to show just what a difference reading a book you really love makes versus reading just anything. I finished the last two books in three days a piece. Plenty of times I was reading instead of doing pretty much anything else.

I realize that the series gets a fair bit of flack from some corners. There’s a popular perception that the middle of the series is particularly weak, with a lot of time spent doing a lot of nothing. Reading through the whole thing all at once helped me to see the series as one long work. There’s a weak spot indeed in Crossroads of Twilight, which almost felt like an experimental book to me. A “What if we just looked at a few days in the life of all of the characters for an entire book” sort of thing. There are a few scenes that do fine, but by and large the book could be skipped over without a huge impact on figuring out what’s happening in the book.

But other than that one, I enjoyed my time with all the others, giving them at least a 7/10. In the end, the series is noteworthy to me for a few reasons. First off, it actually has an end, and the payoff is worth it. So many of the looong series these days feel like they just sort of sputter or else spiral out of control. The Malazan Book of the Fallen is hailed by many as an excellent series, but to me, its writing is so dense as to be almost incomprehensible at times. I love the beginning five or six books, and then it just gets bewilderingly sloggy. Game of Thrones is still not finished and likely never to get finished. But with Wheel of Time, you’ve got a beginning, middle, and an end.

The final book is almost all payoff. It’s essentially one very long action sequence as all the different plots of the earlier 14 books come to a head.

People try to lambast the series, saying the writing is too simple, so I suppose if you’re in the market for high literature, this isn’t the place to come. But if you’re looking for page-turning epic fantasy that tells a great story, this is a great place to come. Perhaps that says something about me, but by and large, when I’m reading, I want to escape. I want to be entertained. If I want to think, I’ll read pieces online, but almost always reading is what I turn to for fun.

In the reread, I thought I’d notice the change from Jordan’s prose to Sanderson’s prose more than I did. I remember in my first read through that I felt like Matt became a different character. This time reading, that didn’t stand out to me. The story just kept rolling along, and I didn’t notice much in the way of differences. In many ways, I think allowing someone else to finish the series did a lot for The Wheel of Time, and it makes me wonder if George RR Martin wouldn’t be better served just hiring someone else to do what’s proving so difficult for him. Having someone else who’s both a fan and an excellent writer come along and tie things up allows the series to refocus itself. Back before Jordan passed away, the word on the street was there was just one book left to write. When Brandon signed on to write that one book, he looked at all the material and said it would be impossible to pull off. He’d need three books. Judging by how much happened in those final three books, he was very right. (This isn’t to say George RR Martin has to do anything. It’s his series, and he can write it or not, as he sees fit. But I’ll be stunned if we see another book out of him, let alone the rest of the series. So if fans want an actual resolution, they either need to watch the TV show or write their own. I’m confident some of them could do it.)

In any case, I got to the end of the final book, and I just sort of stared off into space. I’d been reading the same continuing story for so long, switching to something else was going to feel strange. In the end, I’m very glad I reread the series. I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but I’d never read the whole thing straight through, and that’s a different experience than reading it one book at a time.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Top Ten Ice Cream Flavors

Look. Sometimes a topic comes up on a Facebook post, and there’s just not enough space there to give it the sort of attention it deserves. Yesterday, I tried to write a simple post about how you learn to handle rejection. Naturally, my sister ruthlessly hijacked the thread to turn it into how good vanilla ice cream is. Suddenly, I’ve got family members popping up to talk about how lobster is good, as well. All it’s missing is to have someone bring up Grape Nuts, and the thread’s downfall will be complete.

Brothers. Friends. Countrymen. There comes a time in every blogger’s life when he has to stand up and speak the truth to power. Even if that power is older than you by two years. And I might be fine with an analogy about how some people might–might–theoretically like vanilla ice cream, but when it comes time for a prolonged debate about the strengths of the ice cream ouvre, then the time for vanilla is well and truly done. Because what is vanilla but the blandest of the bland? You take cream. You add sugar. You throw in some vanilla extract.

The end.

That’s not a flavor. That’s a failure of effort. Vanilla isn’t ice cream. It’s a step to making ice cream. It would be like calling a cake “eggs,” because it has eggs in it. Come on, folks! This is grade school stuff.

So I decided to give this topic the attention it’s due. To set straight once and for all the true hierarchy of ice cream. Let it be known from now until forever that this is the One True Ice Cream Post. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

If an ice cream flavor doesn’t appear on this list, then I don’t need follow up questions wondering why, or trying to persuade me I’m wrong. It’s not on the list because it didn’t break the top ten. You might like it, but you probably also like vanilla, so I don’t have to listen to you. Fact.

Ready? Here we go.

10–Chocolate. All ice cream lists must start with chocolate, for it is the ur-flavor. The flavor from which all other flavors inevitably get judged. The darker the better, but we’ll go for anything chocolatey, really. If you’re at one of “those” ice cream places, and there are only like three flavors to choose from, one of which doesn’t count, and the other of which is strawberry, then you go with chocolate. (Note: strawberry is a fruit, not a flavor. If I want fruit, I’ll eat fruit, but keep your nasty fruitses away from my ice cream.)

9–Chocolate Chocolate Chip. How do you improve upon chocolate? By adding more chocolate, of course. Everyone knows that. ‘Nuff said.

8–I couldn’t think of a #8, so we’re going to go with nothing, instead of putting vanilla anywhere near this list. That’s the sort of dedication we need to keep vanilla at bay.

7–Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. What a world we live in! The wonders of cookie dough in ice cream have long been apparent, even if it’s typically fallen under the awful spell of vanilla’s siren song. But this is the 21st century, friends. We have the technology and the capability to cast off those vanilla chains and bring a true flavor to this pairing. There’s serious potential for this flavor to move up the ranks, but for now, it’s just too new for us to really know. Ice cream scientists must continue their studies and get those papers peer reviewed.

6–Cookies and Cream. No. I know what you’re going to say, and just stop right there. This is not vanilla. It’s right there in the name, calling it what it is. Cookies. Cream. Not vanilla. Cream. All ice cream is cream. This is cookie ice cream, and it’s a testament to the power of oreos that those wonderful cookies are able to combat the blandness that would otherwise be vanilla. Of course, they use the power of chocolate to get there, so I guess we could have all seen that coming.

5–Chocolate Brownie. Sure, you can (and should) eat ice cream with brownies, but this flavor recognizes that fact so much that it just brings the brownies with it, wherever it goes. It’s like that friend of yours you had in grade school who had a Super Nintendo and brought it over to your house to play. Who doesn’t like a friend like that?

4–Mint Chocolate Chip. Yes, it’s not chocolate based, but if there are enough chocolate chips in there, then that makes up for it somewhat. This doesn’t score higher, mainly because it’s typically neon green, and you don’t know where that ice cream has been. But then again, if it’s white, it might be vanilla, and you have to do everything you can to stay away from even the appearance of evil, right?

3–Rocky Road. How can you go wrong with this? It’s like a sundae in every scoop! You’ve got your cronchy nuts, you’ve got marshmallows, you’ve got chocolate. It’s the complete package deal, and it sits so close to the top.

2–Peppermint. This doesn’t score higher, because it’s really just a seasonal thing, and it is only to be consumed in winter, ideally between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But for those months, it reigns supreme over the ice cream world, scoffing at all lesser flavors. Yes, you have some small pockets of vanilla when pie is involved, but in those cases, the ice cream is a plus one, essentially. It didn’t get the invite to the Dessert Ball. It just came in on the arm of Pumpkin or Apple.

1–Chocolate Peanut Butter. Not just peanut butter cup. (For one thing, sometimes you get peanut butter cup ice cream, and it turns out to be vanilla based. OH THE HUMANITY!!!) In this case, I’m talking about the ice cream with the ripples of peanut butter spread throughout each scoop. It really doesn’t get better than this.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Handling Rejection

Today in my psychology class, we talked about overcoming anxieties by repeated exposure to those anxieties. One of the specific examples used was the fear of rejection. We talked for a while about how people overcome that fear, and it got me reflecting on what experience I have with it.

Looking over the blog, I’ve talked about rejection a lot. I’ve written about getting rejected by schools, by girls, by libraries, by publishers, and by readers. (It was interesting to go back and read some of the posts I’d written way back when–before I’d had much experience blogging–about getting rejected for Vodnik and being quite down about it.)

Interestingly, one of the things I haven’t written about is the first thing that came to mind to me in class today. I might have been rejected now and then over the years, but there was definitely a time in my life when I dealt with rejection every single day, for much of each day.

Two years as a missionary. Going around asking people if they’d like to hear a message about Jesus Christ. As I’m sure you can imagine, you get many (many) more no’s than you do yes’s. And when that’s just a steady occurrence, the fear of rejection goes down dramatically. You also begin to learn how to handle it better. Here are a few of the takeaways I had from my two years:

Having someone to share your rejection helps. A lot. On my mission, I had a companion at all times. When someone was rejecting me, there was someone next to me getting the same rejection. Someone I could talk to about it after it happened. Someone who understood exactly what I was going through. More than that, I had a whole friend group (all the other missionaries) who were also sympathetic. I didn’t feel like I was alone. Sometimes, we’d even share stories about the most brutal (or funny) rejections we’d had. When rejection is normalized, it doesn’t feel so sharp.I realized people weren’t rejecting me as a person. They were rejecting the thing I was trying to talk about. Maybe that seems like a small difference, but it’s one of the big ways that softened the blow for me. Those strangers couldn’t be rejecting me. They didn’t know me. Their rejection ultimately didn’t affect who I was or how I lived. (Though obviously it still hurt from time to time.)You really can develop a thick skin, and it helps if you get in the right mindset. Just because I was getting rejected all the time didn’t mean it never felt bad, but I found that if I could just get that first rejection out of the way each day, the others weren’t really that bad. Fear of rejection is largely in your head. For me, it came down to the fear of feeling like people thought I was foolish. Or the fear of looking like an idiot. If you have a strong self-esteem, that rejection fear drops significantly. I guess this is a no brainer, but the more confident I grew as a missionary, the less concerned I became about those no’s.Fear of rejection also never really goes away. Even with all that rejection, there would still be times that it would really make me hesitate and want to avoid doing certain things. Acknowledging it and then moving forward anyway is a skill that gets better with time.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have any fear of rejection anymore. As far as I can tell, that isn’t going anywhere. But knowing how to handle it can make all the difference. How about you? How have learned to deal with rejection? Any tips?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Television Review: Gilded Age Season 1

For all its frustrating flaws, I remain a big Downton Abbey fan. When it was really at its best, it was a delight to watch how different classes lived and interacted in areas that seemed commonplace to them, but were anything but to me, a middle-class white guy in 21st century Maine. (Of course, there were the other plot lines that focused instead on bizarre things like murder investigations, which always just seemed so idiotic. But let’s not talk of those.)

So when I heard Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, had created a show around late nineteenth century America, I was intrigued to say the least. The Gilded Age was on HBO, though, and I wondered it they’d just take Downton and give it an “adult” twist. It was TV-MA, after all, but Denisa and I decided to give the first episode a shot. We blazed through the rest of the season soon after, finishing the final episode last night.

Like Downton, it follows people of multiple classes, from servants to the middle class to the noveau riche and the established families. It adds in a Black character as well, allowing the show to explore race relations back then. The central plot is how the Russell family moves to New York City and tries to insert itself into the established upper crust circles. The Russells are filthy rich. The husband is a railroad tycoon, and quite ruthless in business, though he’s much nicer when it comes to personal matters. His wife, on the other hand, is desperate to be accepted by the upper crust, and the upper crust are just as set on ignoring her. Drama ensues.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the show. The TV-MA rating is a bit baffling. Over the course of the entire season, there was one risque scene, and one scene with brief nudity that had no real reason to be there. It was almost like HBO told Fellowes they wanted the show to have a TV-MA rating so that people would take it seriously, so he threw in a short scene to justify it. You can skip those parts easily and not miss anything significant.

It’s well plotted, avoiding some of the obvious lines that it could have taken, so that you’re never entirely sure what will happen with any of the stories. I won’t go into spoilers, but there was one plot that seemed very clear would go one way, but then when the time came to go that way, it veered off in an unexpected, refreshing direction instead.

It’s well acted, though most of it is “stuffy nineteenth century,” which feels a lot like Downton. Trying to convey the whole range of emotions in people who made it a point never to show emotion is a trick and a half, but the show pulls it off.

But really, the star of the show is the set design and costuming. It’s simply a pleasure to look at, one scene after the other. The time period comes alive in a way Downton Abbey never really was able to pull off. We see different parts of New York, and the city itself feels far more alive than Downton ever really got. In that show, you’d have the village life come up now and then, but the city plays just as much a part of this as the characters do.

Overall, I gave it a 9/10. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but if it’s for you, you likely already know it after reading this, and you should give it a shot if you have HBOmax. Any of you already seen it?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Tax Time!

Oh joy. Time for us to submit our taxes again. I got mine finished over the weekend, after starting them about a month ago. I typically do that to get a rough estimate on how much I’m going to owe (or get back), so that I can be sure to be prepared when the time comes. But then my inherent laziness steps in, and I wait until much closer to the deadline.

And as my friend Dan always points out, the Simpsons say it best:

Then again, the yearly ritual of doing my taxes is also a great time to take a look back and see how things are going on the whole, financially speaking. For a good long while during COVID, I was worried about the stability of my job and the future in general. (I’m still worried about my university, mind you. There are plenty of signs about just how much trouble we’re in. That’s not unique to my institution by any means. I think higher education in America has a whole slew of problems coming up, but that’s a topic for a different post.)

So when I took the time to actually run the numbers, I was surprised and more than a little grateful to discover 2021 actually turned out to be the best year for Denisa and me ever, from a financial standpoint, this despite the uncertainty at times over whether she’d have classes to teach. In the end, she taught 5 classes and took on several additional responsibilities at the university that compensated her more. I taught a class myself, and I had the best year I’ve ever had as an author.

Mind you, this doesn’t mean I’m just sitting over here in Maine, swimming in my Scrooge McDuck money pool. My grand total of authorly earnings this year, once you take out taxes, paid for . . . about 1/4 of my kitchen renovation. True, the renovation ended up being more expensive than I thought it would be, but I made more money as an author than I thought I would have, so that kind of balances out.

However, I also think it’s important to look at the good things that are happening, and making an honest-to-goodness profit off my writing is definitely a very good thing. There was a long time when I wondered if writing would ever do anything for me. It was a hobby with aspirations. Now it’s a trumped up side hustle with big dreams.

So while this all means that I had to pay a fair bit more in taxes than I’ve paid in previous years (say goodbye to any hope of a refund), I’m much more focused on the cause of that, rather than the effect. All my problems are not magically solved, but I’m grateful they aren’t worse than they could have been. If that’s not the most 2020’s-ish thing to say, I don’t know what is.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Texas Bound for the Texas Library Association

I’ll be heading off for Fort Worth the week after next, off to speak at the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. I’m excited for this for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s the obvious “getting a chance to talk to a bunch of librarians.” I might be a tad biased, but librarians are, on the whole, awesome. They’re well-read, open-minded, and fierce supporters of reading and learning. If the world were full of more librarians, it would be a better place.

But this is also going to be an in person conference, and that makes me happy for many other reasons. It’s a step back to how life “used to be.” (As an aside, I recognize that we’re never really going to go back to how things “used to be,” but the more I’ve thought about, the more I realize that’s always the case. The 80s were different than the 90s. The 2010s were different than the 2020s. There are some who long for the times when things were “better,” but so far, all I’ve seen is the selective memory of folks who focus on the things that were good and ignore the things that weren’t. When people say they want things to be how they “used to be,” they’re generally just expressing nostalgia. That said, the pandemic made things change drastically, quickly. And returning to at least some elements of how things were in 2019 and before is a welcome change.)

Where was I?

Oh yes. In person conferences. The Maine Library Association is having an in-person conference in May, and I’ll be going to that, as well. I’m considering going to ALA annual in DC. The thought of having all those book lovers in one place is pretty compelling.

For the TLA’s conference, I’m just going to be on one panel. It’s titled “Blast From the Past: YA Historical Fiction,” so it’s definitely right up my alley. If you’re in Texas April 25-28, and you’re near Fort Worth, and you’re a librarian, then come on down! I mean, technically you don’t have to be a librarian. It’ll be a fun booky conference any way you slice it, but a lot of the panels might not exactly be up your alley. “Partnering with Your Principal to Support the School Vision,” for example, or “Thinking of Changing Your Integrated Library System?”

See what you’re missing out on? Maybe you should enroll in a library studies program. Just sayin’ . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.