Bryce Moore's Blog, page 63

Coming Up with a Character: Behind the Scenes on The Perfect Place to Die

We’re coming up on a month to go until THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE comes out. Yesterday I got my author copies, and the book looks fantastic. The cover really pops, and the illustrations I commissioned turned out really nicely, as well. (They’re floor plans of the infamous Murder Castle.) Seeing the starred review from Booklist on there definitely gives me warm fuzzies. It’s in paperback, not hardcover, so it’ll be gentle on your wallet, as well. Now I need to figure out what to do with 25 copies of the book. I imagine I’ll hold onto them to give them away when I get to that halcyon day when I can actually visit classrooms again . . .

If you want to get a sense of the book beyond the synopsis, Daily Dead just posted an excerpt from the middle of the book. It’s exclusive to their site, so I encourage you to head over there to check it out.

In the meantime, I also wanted to give you something over here focused on the book today. I thought I might talk a bit about the main character. This was the first time I’ve gone back to a female protagonist in a good long while. It was also only the second time I’d ventured into historical fiction. Trying to get into the head of a 17 year-old girl in 1893 was an interesting experience, to say the least, and sticking with a first person point of view made that even more complicated. But I really wanted the first person for a couple of reasons: I feel like it’s a POV I excel in, and I wanted the immediacy you get with first person, especially since she’d be going up against a historical villain who many readers would already recognize.

(Reading over some early reviews, that aspect of the book hasn’t clicked with some readers. I get it: how do you write a suspense book when the audience all knows who the killer is, but the main character doesn’t? In the end, I decided to approach it like James Cameron’s Titanic. Yes, everyone knows the ship is going down. But we don’t know who might survive. Knowing the ship sinks is no reason to hold it against the people for getting on board. They don’t know that. Likewise, Etta (the main character in my book) only knows her sister has disappeared. Plus, she’s living in an era long before the grisly stories of murders and killers would become common place.)

Setting out, I had the premise of the book and that was about it. A teenage girl goes undercover at Murder Castle in Chicago to find out the fate of her missing sister. It’s a great premise, and it had a lot of promise, but there’s a whole ton to dig into before you can make an actual novel out of it. How much of the history was I going to follow? Who was the girl? Was she on to what was happening at the hotel, or didn’t she know. (As I said, I went with “she didn’t know,” because if she knows, then you have to ask how she knows. That implies proof of some sort, or at least her witnessing something first hand. If she’s got something that strong, then it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to have her just go to the police. End of story. Who wants to read that?)

One of the works that really helped me figure out how to approach this was actually Charles Portis’ True Grit. I first encountered the work in the John Wayne adaptation, which was fine, but I loved the Coen adaptation that came out in 2010 enough for me to want to read the source material. I adored the book, and I was blown away by the main character: 14 year-old Mattie Ross. The setting was 1878, but it was close enough to the time period I’d be in to give me some inspiration.

One of my favorite parts is the horse trading scene, hands down:

When I first watched the movie, I was convinced the Coen Bros. must have done the dialogue for the scene, but when I read the book, I realized it was practically all Portis. (I should have remembered the same scene from the Wayne adaptation in 1969, but on the other hand, it isn’t nearly as memorable.)

See what I mean?

With that in mind, it helped bring the rest of my book into focus. I actually began to think of it in terms of a western. Not that I’d be having shoot outs and horse trading, but this was set in the tail end of the Wild West. Just in Chicago, not rolling prairies. I wanted a strong protagonist, because any 17 year-old girl who was going to try and make her way through Chicago in 1893 was going to have to have a really strong backbone and plenty of persistence. But I didn’t want her to be too experienced, because I wanted this to be a challenge for her. I didn’t want her to be an ace detective, or to have extensive knowledge of the ins and outs of the city. I thought it would be better to have her be much more out of place.

At the same time, I was trying to come up with her name. I’m not a huge fan of naming things. It feels like such a commitment. And in this case, I had to have a name that was right for the period. What names were popular back then? When I was writing, I was also doing some family history work on the side, and it suddenly hit me: I could just check out what some of my ancestors from back then were named. In the end I settled on my great-great grandmother, Zurretta Eliza Palmer. (And I used her real life sister’s name (Ruby) as the name of the sister in the books as well.)

As soon as that connection was made, I made another. I could have my main character come from Utah. I was familiar with what life was like there at that time period (generally), and it would certainly make for a good fish-out-of-water background for the main character and her sister. (In the course of writing the actual book, I began to feel progressively guiltier for everything I was putting my great-great grandmother’s namesake through. (Imagine if Stephen King decided to name Wendy Torrance in The Shining after a family member. Yikes.) Nothing about the character was based on her other than the name. Hopefully she understands.

In any case, once I had those pieces in place, the book began to move forward. Knowing where a character starts and where they are later on in the book does a lot to give you a sense of trajectory. I might write about that later, but that’s all the time I have for now. The book comes out August 3rd!

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

A Very COVID Timeline

Not that we haven’t been open already to the university crowd, but starting Thursday (July 1st), Mantor Library (where I’m the director) will be back open to the public to use, with no phone call or reservation needed. This is the last major step toward “reopening” that I think we’ll take (well, aside from the university lifting its mask mandate at some point.)

In honor of the occasion, I thought it might be interesting to see just what the timeline has been for me over the pandemic. A little waltz down memory lane, to remind myself of how far we’ve come. In some ways, I’ve been trying to resist thinking about all of it. But I think it would be a good activity to review just what happened when. And lucky me, I keep a daily journal (beyond the blog), so reconstructing all of it shouldn’t be too hard . . .

Ready? Deep breath. Here we go.

January-February 2020–I watch with growing concern as more and more reports of this new disease start to circulate. I remember reading Reddit posts when it was just in China. Someone had supposedly smuggled out a video of Chinese hospitals overwhelmed, contrary to what most reports were claiming. I wasn’t sure how accurate the video was, but it was alarming to say the least. I watched it move from China to Europe and over to the US, though it had yet to actually affect me in any immediate way other than general anxiety.March 10, 2020–The first time “coronavirus” appears in my journal. Tomas had a robotics meet in Massachusetts that was cancelled due to it. He was bummed, to say the least. So was I. March 11, 2020–The university tells us all students will be in quarantine when they return from spring break, which was slated to run from March 16th-March 20th. I scramble to try and figure out what that’s going to mean for the library.March 12, 2020–The university changes course, deciding students will leave for the semester and not come back to campus after spring break. We’ll be switching to remote learning for the rest of the semester, instead. (Also, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cancels all in-person meetings worldwide. There was a fair bit of scrambling to figure out what that was going to mean for me and my family.)March 13, 2020–We find out our school district intends to close for “a couple of weeks” to do some deep-cleaning. (As a side note, this really illustrates how up in a tizzy everyone was about COVID at this point. The disease was almost non-existent in Maine (we were averaging two cases/day). True, that wasn’t nothing, but in all likelihood, there was nothing in the school to deep clean. (Well, not from a COVID viewpoint, at least . . .) Still, things were very upsetting, and we were definitely in the “something must be done, and this is something” mindset. Taking two weeks to figure stuff out made a lot of sense.)March 18, 2020–We close the library to everyone. This is my first day of working from home. The library is still staffed with workers to keep the books moving (requests, orders, interlibrary loan, etc.), but the doors are locked to everyone else. I decide to stop trimming my beard until I have to go back to work in person.

Please note the huge gap that now comes in the timeline. About four months of just staying at home, day in, day out. That was . . . unpleasant. One of the worst things was being uncertain when, exactly, it would be over. At first I thought we’d be able to make our planned trip to Disney World over July 4th, no problem. Then that seemed like a 50/50 shot. Then . . .

July 9, 2020–We break down and buy a dog, even if we won’t be able to pick him up until August. Thus, our “typical American COVID summer” is complete.July 15, 2020–In preparation for in-person church coming up (and because I had long since discovered that yes, Virginia, there is a beard length Bryce really doesn’t want to have to deal with), I trim my beard again. There is much rejoicing.July 19, 2020–I go back to church in-person for the first time. Meetings are capped at 25 people. We had been doing Zoom church up until then, having switched over a week or two after the in-person meetings shut down. For the next while, we go to church in-person once or twice a month. No singing. Face masks required.August 12, 2020–My first day back in the library in-person. August 15, 2020–We pick up Ferris and bring him home. Puppy!August 17, 2020–The library opens up via keycard to all UMF students, staff, and faculty. The public can call and get curbside checkout of materials, and they can make a request to come into the building for specific reasons. In practice, this meant around 5 people from the public ended up coming in over the next academic year. Each one came to use our microfilm collection, which had to be used in person. I didn’t turn down other requests; I just didn’t get any. Most people seemed reluctant to come to campus for fear of COVID. Most employees thought we had slim chances of having the semester last past the middle of October. The plan is to have the semester run until Thanksgiving, and then be remote after that. September 8, 2020–The kids go back to school in person. Tomas is there every Monday and Tuesday (remote the rest of the week). Daniela and MC go in person every other day, and are remote the other days. For Tomas and Daniela, “remote” means “sitting in front of a computer in a Zoom meeting.” For MC, it means “no school.” (Practically speaking. I think she had a few “assignments” every day, but nothing that really took MC longer than a bit to complete.)

Another huge break in the timeline here. In a way, so much happened in these six months. In another way, almost nothing did. Reading over my journal entries for this period is actually kind of traumatic. You can see things deteriorate in a way I just was unable to recognize at the time. Maybe I’ll write more about that at some point, but I’m not up to it right now.

The good news was that the university had its classes as scheduled, and we made it the whole time with that plan. It worked for the next semester as well. The kids’ school also went off without a hitch (more or less). We were doing Zoom church still, though at some point they raised the cap to 50 people. (I forget exactly when.)

March 20, 2021–Denisa and I get our first vaccine shots. March 21, 2021–We have our last Zoom church. The Maine CDC raised its cap on people in a building to a point where anyone who wanted to come to church in person, could come to church. Zoom broadcasts would still be happening, but my family and I would be able to go in person each week. (Still masked, still socially distanced in the building, still no singing.)March 28, 2021–We had our first “no cap” in-person church. About 75 people showed up, more people than I’d been around in a good long while.April 16, 2021–Denisa and I get our second shot. Two weeks until we’re “fully vaccinated”!May 10, 2021–With the semester over, the library “opens” to the public. People can now come for any reason, though they do have to make an appointment ahead of time to come. Masks are still required.May 9, 2021–Our trip to Puerto Rico, which really represented the end of the pandemic for us in many ways. Things began to feel more and more normal.May 30, 2021–Mask mandate is now lifted for church. Singing resumes, as well as in-person second hour meetings.July 1, 2021–The library doors go back to being unlocked to everyone (during our open hours). In preparation for this, the furniture returns to its normal positions throughout the building. (Thanks, Facilities!) The library feels like it’s largely back to normal as well, even though masks are still required. (And there’s no sign of that being done away with any time soon at the moment.)

This list is in no way comprehensive. There are definitely some events I’ve left out, but it gives a good general overview of the arc of this whole thing. It’s a good reminder that even in world-changing events, a family still finds its equilibrium and hammers out a new normal. Looking back on it all, I’m impressed we managed to do as much as we did. I finished the final draft of one book (coming out in a bit more than a month!) and the first draft of another, then did two more drafts of that book to get it ready for my editor to see. The kids came through everything with all A’s in school, even. Incredibly proud of the whole family for banding together and barreling through.

Here’s hoping the next while sees more bright days ahead. It’s going to take some time to get over all of this. Right now, I feel like I think I’m back to normal, but every now and then I’m reminded of just how abnormal things were, and how “normal” now is really just a codeword for “better than things were a year ago.”

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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 Board Game Arena

About 6 months ago, I blogged about a new-to-me online service I’d come across: Board Game Arena. At the time, I’d just started using it for a while. It was a great way to connect with friends across the country and play any number of games with them. I felt it had a wide variety of games, even if some of their implementations could be a little clunky from time to time. There’s a free version that lets anyone play a selection of free games or any of the games, as long as one member of the group is a subscriber. A year subscription costs a bit under $30, as I recall.

Here we are, 6 months later, and I’m still using it fairly regularly, and I’m still pleased with the service. In fact, I’d say it’s only gotten better. Asmodee bought the site back in February, which gave me some consternation, as I worried they might just be buying it to get rid of one of their competitors. But instead of killing it off, they’ve devoted more attention to it. You might not recognize Asmodee if you don’t play a lot of board games, but it’s a big mover and shaker in the industry, second only to Hasbro. It also includes Fantasy Flight Games and Days of Wonder, and there are a slew of great games under its umbrella.

Sure enough, since buying the site, they’ve brought some of their games over to it. Splendor is there now, and Pandemic was just released in beta not too long ago. I tried it out, and the implementation is just as robust as an iPad app, which is really impressive. In some ways, I enjoyed the virtual board game more than the real life flavor. It was much easier to get an overview of what was going on, and it’s wonderful to not have to constantly shuffle cards. (Though for some games, I really miss having the bits to fiddle with when it’s not my turn . . .) In Pandemic’s case, it was also great that there was literally no way to just show the other person what cards you have. Too often with Pandemic, it devolves into one person telling everyone else what they need to do, so that it’s nothing more than a game of spectator solitaire. When the information is hidden, that makes that less likely.

Anyway. Just wanted to poke back on here to give an update. This is in no way a sponsored post. Just wanted to pass along more good impressions from a service I use often enough to really appreciate its existence. Happy playing!

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

What Does It Mean to Forgive?

Last Sunday in church, we had a discussion in Sunday School around forgiveness, and it’s still been kicking around in my head. It centered around this scripture in Doctrine & Covenants 64: 9-10:

9 Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin.

10 I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.

The part that I really stumbled over this time was the bit about the person who isn’t forgiving having the greater sin. That works totally fine when the act you’re supposed to forgive is something minor. Someone said something mean to you. Someone got in a fight with you. Forgiving something like that seems doable, and I could see that if the person who said or did something to you is there asking for forgiveness, and you decide to be angry at them for forever anyway, how you might be the person with the bigger issue there.

But what if it’s something bigger? What if it’s someone who killed your dog by accident? What if they killed your dog on purpose? Or something worse? Or what if they aren’t even asking for forgiveness. Do you still have to forgive them then? And does the “greater sin” still rest with you?

As I’ve continued to think about it, it’s helped for me to look at this transaction in economic terms. The action of the person who hurt you is a sunk cost. It’s done damage to you, and that damage is already inflicted. At this point, what you choose to do in response to that damage might make things better for you or worse for you. If you choose to harbor a grudge permanently, who is that hurting more. You, or them? If the definition of sin is knowing the will of God and not doing it, which action is bringing you further away from God? Perhaps the “greater sin” is focused on you, not on them. On the impact that action will have on you.

That angle of thinking helped somewhat with my conundrum, but it led to another question: What does it mean to forgive? Are you supposed to forget about the harm that person caused you? You shouldn’t have to put yourself back into the position where you were harmed before, should you? You don’t have to be BFFs with that person anymore, right?

To answer this, it helped me to think about the contractor who walked off with $3,500 of my money, never to be seen again. I was most definitely angry with him for months. Denisa and I had a private investigator track the guy down in hopes of getting our money back. We discovered he was in prison for possession of heroin, and we had to decide what we wanted to do. We could push forward, trying to get some of our money out of him, but it would take a lot of time and effort, with no guarantee that it would work.

In the end, I decided to just forgive him the debt. What did that mean? I never talked to him. I never had this big scene where I said, “I forgive you,” and the music swelled, and we all hugged. I most definitely would never hire him for another job, and I would warn anyone I heard of who might be thinking of hiring him to stay well away. Instead, it meant that I stopped wanted to get back at him. I decided to forget about the urge for retribution. I went from thinking about what he’d done to us often, to not thinking about it at all. Five years later(!), I still remember everything that happened, but I no longer feel much of anything but pity for the contractor. He was in a bad spot. His marriage crumbled around him. He went to prison. Googling him just now, I see he’s been up to no good since then as well. Illegal fires, more drugs, forgery, and more. It looks like someone’s getting money from him, and good luck with that.

But in the end, I felt like the grudge I was harboring against him was doing me far more harm than it was doing him. He never asked for forgiveness, and I doubt he would if he saw me. (I have no desire to see him again, if for no other reason than I know he’s perpetually doing things I don’t want to be around.)

In the grand scheme of things, $3,500 is still not a whole lot of damage, compared with some of the things people do to each other. I don’t know how I’d navigate worse things, and I pretend to be in a position to advise others how to do that. But it makes sense to me to do what we can to minimize the damage terrible things can have on us, and making the conscious effort to move forward is often the best way to do that.

After all this thinking, I still believe that scripture is a whole lot deeper than the surface level it seems at first glance, and discussion of forgiveness and what it means likely changes depending on each circumstance. It’s much more nuanced than you can get with a group discussion of thirty people, especially when you never know what sort of “sins” each person in the room is thinking about in the discussion.

What does forgiveness mean to you?

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

Surprise Home Improvement

You all know the big project of the summer is renovating the kitchen. The cabinets are ordered and on their way. The layout is set. The time is blocked off. The budget’s there.

Well, a part of my roof decided it had other ideas about all that.

Seven years ago, we paid to have that part of the roof redone. It was a process that wasn’t without its pitfalls, as you’ll see if you go to that post. Those pitfalls really ought to have been a red flag to us about who we were dealing with. We ignored them, and we’ve been paying the price for that again and again in the years since as we’ve paid to redo the things that contractor did wrong. This is just the latest incident of that.

The roof really should have lasted another 5-10 years at least. Instead, it’s been shedding shingles left and right. The shingles themselves are in fine shape, but they weren’t nailed properly to the roof. Instead, too little space was left between the edge of the shingles and the nails, making it so that the shingles can get ripped off in a strong wind. We also discovered that the roofers from 7 years ago failed to put any sort of underlayment on the roof. Again, something I should have caught back then, but I was much newer in the ways of the roof, and I just didn’t see it.

In any case, we can’t have a big part of our house stuck with a roof that’s failing constantly, and we don’t want to have to continue to pay people to come and fix it, so . . . we’re getting it totally redone. It’s frustrating, and it’s not cheap, but I just don’t see another choice. It’s very high up there, so it’s not something I’m willing to do myself or with a group of friends. I want someone insured, and we have someone lined up already, which worked out well. It should be totally done by tomorrow. Yay for quick, straight-forward projects.

The good news is that thanks to all the government COVID stimulus checks, I think we’re still on track for the kitchen. Here’s hoping nothing else major breaks anytime soon, though. That extra padding only goes so far.

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

Defining Other People

I don’t have a specific event to blog about today. It’s more of a snowballing thought that’s been gathering momentum in my mind as I continue to watch so many aspects of American society roll around in the dirt. I continue to (try to) maintain friendships on both sides of the political spectrum, but that’s something that’s becoming increasingly difficult. Not because I don’t want to be friends with people, but because it feels like more and more, people on either side are insisting we live in a polarized world where it’s clear what’s right and what’s wrong.

It’s not enough to just define yourself these days. There’s a tendency to define people you disagree with, and more and more, some corners seem to want to define themselves by defining other people. The tendency to insist on defining others is something I’ve had a fair bit of experience with, having grown up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Mormons” were often referred to as being cult-ish and strange and deluded. When I went on my mission to Germany, I met with many people who insisted they knew my religion better than I did.

One of the more bizarre things I routinely ran into over there were the people who had confused us with the Amish somehow. I was told it was due to the Harrison Ford movie Witness. When they’d done the German translation, they’d figured not enough people knew who the Amish were in Germany. But they had heard about Mormons, so they just translated it as Mormon instead of Amish. I still haven’t seen the movie in German, and I can’t help but think that story is way off, but the fact remains that I had multiple conversations with Germans who were convinced I couldn’t use electricity.

It’s a humorous example, but it serves to illustrate my point. I know full well what my religion believes and doesn’t believe, but there was no arguing with people who were not of my faith and yet were convinced they knew better than I did. The defined me as Amish, and nothing I could say to them would persuade them otherwise.

From a religious perspective, this is something that definitely continues to day in pop culture and society at large. People who would vehemently attack anyone who would disparage someone for being Jewish or Muslim will casually deride Latter-day Saints without a second thought. You only have to dip a toe into any Reddit post that touches somehow on the religion to see the throngs of people showing up to throw stones. According to them, it seems all members of the religion are either completely duped or deluded or bigoted or sexist or [insert another slander]. As a faithful, practicing member of that religion, I can both see why some would accuse it of those things and still be hurt for having people blithely claim I’m a simpleton or a con-artist, without ever having met me.

I know my religion is not alone in this. There are people on both the left and the right who do the same thing with any religion. Evangelicals. Muslims. Catholics. Jews. What’s the result of all this name-calling? Speaking as a Latter-day Saint, it definitely has a tendency to drive believers closer together. Yes, some leave the faith, but many dig in deeper, bristling at the attack.

This post isn’t about religion, however. I see this same principle at work in the political spectrum right now. Liberals define conservatives, claiming they’re all bigots or (at best) bigot-enablers. Soulless hypocrites bent on oppressing women and minorities. Angry, sad, white people who cling to guns and religion and the empty memory of an ideal country that never existed in the first place. And what’s the result of all this defining? I only see conservatives digging in stronger. Insisting that they aren’t trying to take the vote away from minorities. They’re trying to protect free elections.

Pick any of the arguments liberals make against conservatives, and conservatives have a simple explanation for why they’re doing what they’re doing, and why they’re being unjustly accused by the other side.

This goes the other way, of course. Conservatives insist liberals are baby-killing maniacs hellbent on ripping apart the entire American way of life, tarnishing our heritage, turning us toward Communism and Socialism in an ill-conceived effort to take money away from those individuals who have earned it and give it to people who want to sit around and do nothing all day and be paid for the privilege. And once again, the liberals bristle at being defined this way, pointing out that each of those arguments is misguided and unfair.

I believe stereotyping people is wrong, and that includes stereotyping political parties. I sometimes wonder why I even try to keep writing these posts that go down the middle. They’re not generally well-received by either side, and when the posts are even tolerated, it’s not like they make a change. But when I’ve had real conversations with people on either side of the aisle, I’ve often found there are many similarities between each side. There are genuinely good people in each political party, no matter how easy it may be to want to paint with a broad brush.

The sooner we can all somehow remember that, the sooner we might start making real progress again. Until then, I worry we’ll just be caught in a never-ending loop of name calling.

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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: For All Mankind (Season One)

The premise behind For All Mankind intrigued me right away. What if the Russians had been the first to walk on the moon instead of the Americans? What sort of an impact might that have had on history? Ronald Moore (creator of Battlestar Galactica) poses that question in the first episode, and then proceeds to play out the what if from then on. The result is an intriguing season, bogged down occasionally with too much melodrama.

The show shines when it can have fun with the premise, showing both how some things might have changed and how some things would have stayed the same. In a fairly non-spoilery example, the Chappaquiddick scandal in Ted Kennedy’s life was avoided, since the Russians landed on the moon the same evening Mary Jo Kopechne died in our normal timeline. Kennedy left that party before the death occurred, and voila, he was then scandal-free, letting him win the presidency in 1972. (Of course, since Kopechne was still alive in this new timeline, he was then bogged down in a sex scandal later on, when the affair came to light.)

On the other hand, sometimes I felt like the series got hung up on the lives of its characters, to the detriment to the plot. I know that sounds like a pretty lame reason to critique a show (the characters are too important!), but when the main engine of the show is running on “what if,” taking the time to explore universal issues like the stress of the space program on the families involved feel like the show spinning its wheels. I can get that in any number of shows about the space race. Give me more of that sweet alternate history action, thank you kindly.

But thankfully, that bogged-down feeling is generally kept to a minimum, and the show moves forward quite quickly. (Yay for binge watching.) It’s rated TVMA for a bit of language here and there, but nothing that should cause too much of a hangup for most audiences. (A number of episodes are actually TV14. The show seems to want to appear more “mature” than it really is, as if audiences don’t want to watch a TV14 show. I do wish they’d just trim the content to be more squarely in the TV14 range, since that’s what the show feels like it wants to be.) Honestly, the biggest strike against it is probably that it’s on Apple TV+, which just isn’t that widely used as of yet.

Overall, I gave it a 7.5/10. There’s plenty to like, and I’m intrigued enough to move on to season two, but it isn’t complete bliss. Season two might well make or break the show. We’ll see. If the premise seems interesting, or you’re a sucker for space exploration or light science fiction or alternate histories, this is one I’d definitely keep an eye on.

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

A Virtual ALA Event

This will be the second ALA in a row that I’ve missed due to the COVID pandemic. It’s a conference I always enjoyed going to: a great fusion of my work as a librarian and my work as an author. I got to catch up with librarians and publishers from across the country, going to presentations, doing author signings, and have a grand time. I’m hopeful next year I can go back with a vengeance, especially since this year, I would have been able to go and promote THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE.

Thankfully my publisher, Sourcebooks, arranged for a virtual event in an effort to replace at least some of the hobnobbing. Last night I and four other Sourcebook authors got to go to a virtual dessert party with around 50 librarians. We each had a chance to talk about our books, and then we went to a series of breakout rooms, meeting with smaller groups and answering questions. It’s easily the most authorly I’ve felt in years.

There were a lot of compliments on the book’s cover, so huge props to the Sourcebooks folks for putting that together so nicely. All of the librarians in attendance had received an Advanced Reading Copy of the book (as well as some gourmet popcorn and other goodies), and many of them had already read it. I heard good things all around, with people excited about the book’s setting and crossover appeal with The Devil in the White City. Being able to tell them about the starred review in Booklist certainly didn’t hurt, either.

Being an author is often a solitary endeavor, so when there are opportunities like this to actually talk to people who are excited about books (and my book in particular!) is very invigorating. Leading up to it, I realized that I’m woefully out of practice speaking to groups, as I had much more “stage fright” ahead of time than I usually would. You’d think after all the hours and hours (and hours) of Zooming I’ve done over the pandemic, one more Zoom would have felt like nothing, but I did stress about it. Thankfully it all went off without a hitch.

A month and a half to go until the release!

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

Ocean’s Eleven: Twenty Years Later

We watched Ocean’s Eleven the other night with Daniela. In my head, it’s a movie that’s still pretty recent. I mean, it didn’t come out that long ago, did it? But then when I saw all the actors, I realized it must have been a while. Even knowing that, I still figured it was maybe 10 years ago.

Nope. It’s been 20 years. It came out in December, just a few months after 9/11.

The great news is that it still very much stands up to the test of time. I’ve loved this movie since I first saw it. It’s such a great mixture that operates well on so many different levels. The actors, the plot, the soundtrack. The movie just oozes with cool. I love a good movie where the plot itself is a heist, setting the audience up for something and making them think they know what’s going on, only to leave them all bewildered at the climax, thinking everything can’t possibly turn out okay now, and then twisting a final time to show what’s really going to happen. The Sting is another movie that does that supremely well.

Of course, Ocean’s Eleven is an interesting case, because it’s a remake of an earlier movie, done forty years later. I’ve seen both, and the new one resonates better with me. That actually leads me to a good question: what makes a movie fair game for a remake? I know Hollywood is in love with taking something that’s already there and just redoing it, and I know it gets a lot of guff for it. Which movies should be considered off limits, and which shouldn’t?

Funnily enough, I’m not at all opposed to remakes. I’m just opposed to bad ones. And often you don’t know if a remake is going to be good or bad until you see it. That said, the hallmarks of a bad remake are usually easy to spot. I’d say the biggest one would be what’s motivating the remake. If it’s really nothing more than just wanting a quick cash grab, it’s almost certainly going nowhere. Take the remake of Psycho, for instance.

Done in 1998 (just 3 years before Ocean’s), and a remake of another 1960 movie. But Gus Van Sant mimicked the original to a fault, using the same shots, the same camera movements, the same editing. He basically made a modern copy of Hitchcock’s. It was in color and with different actors, but . . . why in the world did anyone think it was a good idea?

With Ocean’s Eleven, they took the core conceit of the original. Vegas heist. All-star cast. And they updated it. Changed the plot. Modernized elements. Brought in a new sense of style and coolness, and so it all worked very well. To make a successful remake, you can’t just photocopy. You have to bring something new. Something of yourself.

Could they remake The Sting? Sure. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, but I’d go check out a new version. If that new version had ragtime music, took place in the 30s, and just treaded water in the wake of the original, I’d pass, but if they saw something in that original and wanted to do their own thing with it? I’d give it a shot. The biggest trick is reminding yourself that a remake doesn’t replace the original. It doesn’t erase anything.

There are some movies that I think would be very difficult to remake and bring something new. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example. It’s a work that so sprawling and involved, I just can’t imagine a movie studio funding something like it again. But never say never. I would love to be shown up by Hollywood, and while the industry excels at pushing out a fair bit of drivel, it also can make some really great stuff in the process.

In any case, back to the original topic. Since the movie is now older than quite a few college students, if you haven’t seen it and want an excellent example of how much fun a heist movie can be, I encourage you to check it out.

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice . . .

After my article yesterday gushing about In the Heights, I was taken aback to read about some of the blow back the film has been suffering from in certain circles. Not because it’s too diverse or too woke (which I cynically expected), but rather because it isn’t diverse enough. Specifically, that it doesn’t adequately represent the Afro Latinx community. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jon Chu have both publicly apologized for this now, and when I read about it, my reactions were mixed. I wanted to parse those reactions out a bit to see what I’m thinking, why I’m thinking it, and if those thoughts were justified.

A warning in advance: I’m going to be blunt, to try and show both where I started and where I ended up. Please read to the end, and please keep the whole of the post in mind.

My knee-jerk response was an eye roll, to be honest. Come on. Not diverse enough? One of the things I found so encouraging about the movie was its diversity. It made a point to show how people in the neighborhood came from all over: Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and so on. There’s even a song and dance number about it. If a movie like In the Heights is getting yelled at for not being diverse enough, then it feels like there’s just no pleasing some people. They should be happy with the progress that’s being made, and quit being so impatient all the time to have every single teeny tiny group represented. What are film makers supposed to do? Run a statistical analysis of their work to make sure it accurately portrays the actual racial and socio-economical make up of the setting of their work? Stories are about different people. It doesn’t make sense that the story should need to come second to the race or gender or whatever of the characters involved.

So. Once I got that initial thought out of my system, I took some time to think about what’s going on, and why it might be upsetting to some. In this case, there’s a film being made that’s supposedly celebrating diversity. Where everyone’s going to have a place at the table. And so members of that community head into it expecting to find themselves in there somewhere, only to walk away feeling excluded yet again.

How are they not supposed to feel disappointed? Back pre-Fellowship of the Ring, I was typically disappointed whenever a fantasy movie came out, because they generally stunk. Was I supposed to just suck it up and be happy they were making any fantasy movies at all? If I was upset back then over something as frivolous as “is this fantasy movie any good?” then how can I begrudge someone for feeling like they’ve been left out of a movie that, when you think about it, really doesn’t have many dark-skinned actors in it?

But then I waffled once again. “Criticism like this is exactly what’s keeping people from speaking up online about anything remotely related to race or any potentially sensitive topic,” I thought. If you say one thing out of line, then the twitterati will show up to yell at you and tell you all about how you’re wrong and how dare you. And indeed, I’ve talked to numerous people who have expressed just that sentiment. They don’t express any opinions online for fear of saying the wrong thing.

That’s clearly not something that’s held me back over the years, for better or for worse. But at the same time, it has kept me from doing some things that I’ve wanted to do or say. I recognize that I don’t fully understand the meaning of some words or some causes or some ideas, no matter how much I may try to. And so I’ve been hesitant to wade into those waters, for fear of saying the wrong thing. For example, I wasn’t going to write this post today, because I was unsure how it would be received, and I didn’t really feel like it was my place to speak up on the topic. In the end, I decided to write it, mainly to illustrate how I’m trying to navigate issues like it. (The biggest issue being my ignorance, and the fact that I consistently want to default to a “what’s the big deal” mindset that’s so dismissive and potentially hurtful to minorities.)

What else have I shied away from? Another example would be putting up a rainbow around my picture on social media in support of the LGBTQIA+ community. I worry that I don’t fully understand the statement I’d be making with that, and so I do nothing out of fear of making the wrong statement. This despite the fact that I believe members of that community deserve protection, support, and love. Despite the fact that I voted in favor of gay marriage and consider myself very sympathetic to their cause. But am I sympathetic enough? I don’t know the answer to that, and so it feels duplicitous to try and interject myself into the conversation.

Where am I trying to go with this? I suppose I’m trying to say to all the people who roll their eyes at some of these issues, “I see you. I get it. I understand why you might feel that way.” But at the same time, I’m trying to explain why it’s important to get over yourself and understand it’s not all about you and the way you feel. That just because things have changed from how they used to be doesn’t mean that they’ve changed enough, and people in the majority don’t get to tell people in the minority when it’s time for them to shut up and stop being heard. Not if people in the majority really think of themselves as compassionate allies.

If there’s one thing I know about feelings, it’s that no one gets to tell you how you feel. If you tell me you’re upset, I can’t say, “No you’re not.” Only you know how you feel. And if I care about you at all, telling you to suck it up or stop being so sensitive or insisting that there’s no real reason for you to be upset is pretty cold-hearted.

So where do I end up after I go through all those thoughts sparked by one simple article? I conclude that the people have a right to feel upset, and that the creators of In the Heights were right to apologize and express a desire to keep improving. If you’ve been failing a subject for year (centuries!), and you finally get your average up to a C or a B, you can be congratulated, even as you can also recognize you still have work to do to really master the material. Sure, you might feel like those are laurels you’re resting on, but if you find out they’re really just dandelions, stomping your foot and insisting they’re not won’t really help anything.

When it comes to these sensitive issues, I try my hardest to listen to the people who are actually being hurt, and then adjust my actions accordingly. Those knee-jerk reactions are my own shortcomings in action, and demanding the world conform to them is short-sighted, egotistical, and kind of a jerk move.

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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 the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That 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.