Bryce Moore's Blog, page 72

Netflix Review: Murder Among the Mormons

With a title like Murder Among the Mormons, how could I not watch? If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary that just came out last week, focused on the Mark Hofmann case. Directed by Jared Hess (of Napoleon Dynamite fame), you might expect this to be some sort of light-hearted, zany look at an historical event. If you’re at all familiar with what Mark Hofmann did, however, you’d know that’s anything but what you’re going to get.

How to review a documentary where I assume many of the readers don’t know anything at all about the subject, and it’s presented in a sort of mystery format? I think I’m going to lead off with a spoiler-free discussion of the three-part documentary, and then I’ll get into some spoilery details after those who want to go into the show “clean” have a chance to leave.

It’s a compelling documentary, and since it’s just three parts, it’s very accessible for anyone to watch. You could easily finish the whole thing in a long evening. Denisa and I watched it over the course of two nights. They actually did something in the same vein as I did with THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE, which is to treat the historical case like a mystery. Yes, a fair number of people might already know the specifics of the case, but a fair number won’t. More importantly, the people who were living back then didn’t have a clue what was really happening either. I think it’s more interesting to look at how things seemed at the time, rather than to view it all with perfect hindsight. One of the reasons noteworthy cases become so noteworthy is that they seemed unsolvable and unique at the time.

What do you need to know about the history going in? Back in the 80s, there was a man (Mark Hofmann) who specialized in digging up obscure documents out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ past. Documents that became more and more problematic for the church. And then pipe bombs started entering the mix. Police had no clue who was doing the bombing or why. Take it from there.

It’s well executed, and I found it very compelling. It doesn’t treat the church with kid gloves, though it doesn’t treat it really unfairly, either. I thought they found a good balance between the two extremes, something I was very curious to see how it was handled heading into it. All told, I gave it an 8/10, and I appreciated having something that was longer than a movie but shorter than a long series to watch. It would make an excellent show to watch in between shows.

With the spoiler-free part of the review out of the way, I want to dig in a bit more to the actual history of the case. So here’s your warning if you’d rather avoid those comments.

SPOILERS BELOW

So. Mark Hofmann. I’m always amazed at how easy it is for people to become really evil. I know he presented himself as just a normal guy, but I was astounded at how far he sank and how quickly. Justifying murder with the thought that “they might die in a car crash anyway” and “it’s really self-preservation, which is justified.” I don’t think Hofmann viewed himself as a terrible person, and I don’t think people who commit atrocities generally do either. You just get to a point where you’re able to justify it to yourself, and once you can do that, you reduce a lot of things down to a thought experiment.

People made a big deal in the show (and in some articles I’ve read around the case) about how the case proves Latter-day Saint prophets are phony. If they commune with God, then how come God didn’t tell them Hofmann was a murderer and the documents were fake? I tend to think people oversell the “commune with God” angle when they’re viewing religion. I don’t really believe God is just there with a red phone hotline that He uses to direct things. By and large, He lets us muck through things on our own, because that’s why we’re here on Earth in the first place. To figure out how to do things on our own. To grow and develop. If God intervened to keep the church from buying some phony documents, where does the line get drawn? Just my thoughts on the matter. (Richard Turley, the church historian interviewed in the mini-series, did a podcast entry about it here, which was interesting as well.)

I was really impressed with the investigation that went into the case. Proving Hofmann was a forger took a ton of hard work and persistence. That’s not easy to do when the common consensus is that all of that hard work is a waste of time. Hofmann’s discoveries were real, after all. They’d been verified by the FBI! But because of a few people’s persistence, it all began to unravel. (Also interesting to note just how quickly it all fell apart, once the story began to fray.)

Anyway. It’s a show that’s getting a fair bit of attention, or at least enough that I’m hearing a lot about it in the online circles I walk through. It was a fascinating look at the history of an event I knew something about, but which I’d never really taken the time to fully dig into.

What did you think?

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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: WandaVision

There aren’t many appointment television shows out there for me anymore. Shows that I make time to watch as soon as I can, week after week. But one highlight of the pandemic has been Disney’s Friday night offerings on Disney+. First with the second season of The Mandalorian, and just barely with WandaVision, I’ve looked forward to having something new and fresh to watch with the family. (Well, MC doesn’t watch, but Tomas and Daniela really enjoy it, and Denisa generally tolerates it.)

WandaVision was a very strange concept that I wasn’t sure about heading into it. Some sort of a strange adaptation of sitcoms throughout the last six decades combined with a Marvel superhero plot? I had no idea how it was going to work, and how they would tie things together. I know Marvel movies have gotten criticism in the past for all of then blending together. This hasn’t really been a complaint of mine, since I’ve felt like they’ve done a solid job at differentiating them all by style and tone. Thor Ragnarok vs. Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Dr. Strange vs. Iron Man? They’re all different types of movies, though all still definitely superhero movies. (Maybe the complaint might be “too many superhero movies,” but I still haven’t reached that point. At least not for Marvel. DC, on the other hand, tried to differentiate itself by having the “serious” superhero movies. The end result is that, outside of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, they’re almost all broody and one note and just blah.)

WandaVision continues that exploration into different territory, and I think it really succeeded. I loved how they blended comedy into mystery into action, though admittedly I’m already the sort of person who really likes some genre bending. In the end, the whole series felt like a uniquely Marvel-flavored experience, and it gave me a lot of the same vibes I used to get seeing Marvel movies in the theater. A very wise move in the middle of the pandemic.

I know some have criticized it for being things it wasn’t. For not having huge character reveals. For not setting up enough Marvel franchises for the future. For not being explosive enough. I didn’t really connect with any of these complaints. For one thing, I realize WandaVision was never meant to be the next big step for Marvel. It had that role thrust upon it due to the world going crazy. I’m impressed that Marvel is able to consistently deliver great characterization and plot development into characters I didn’t really know a whole lot about before the movie or show. Wanda and Vision? I mean, they’re fine and all, but they always struck me as third fiddle to the other characters. Now that they’ve had a better chance to shine, it’s great to see that they polish up so nicely.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but I’m still excited for it, and happy that we have some time for continued experiences like this. For me, this was an 8.5/10. A much needed breath of fresh air for my evening viewing experience. What did you think?

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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: The Crown Season 4

I’m not sure if I’ve reviewed older seasons of The Crown. I don’t review everything I watch, even the shows I quite enjoy. I’ve stuck with the Crown through all these seasons because I like the way it presents different slices of history. Each season deals with a decade of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, and the shows I like the most are when they get away from the royals themselves and focus on what the royals were doing. What events were happening in that decade. It’s fascinating to see what they choose to fill each of the 10 episodes with.

So while many might have been really looking forward to Season 4, which focuses on the 80s, I wasn’t terribly enthralled with the idea. I expected it to be dominated by Prince Charles and Princess Di, and indeed it was. I understand why’d they do that: there likely would have been many people who would have been upset if they hadn’t given a lot of attention to the couple, since the couple was a focal point of the royals for the 80s. But man oh man was it a downer of a storyline. The show presents it as a miserable, failed marriage almost from the beginning, and it’s very hard to have any sympathy for anyone other than Princess Di coming out of the season.

(That actually makes me question just what things were really like. I know this is all a dramatization of historical events, and I know the royals are famously tight lipped about what they do and who they are. The Charles/Diana storyline seemed almost 100% in favor of Diana, to the point that Charles comes off as some sort of fairy tale troll. Perhaps they thought that all the goodwill they tried to earn for Charles in Season 3 would help offset that. Provide context for why he acted the way he did. It didn’t. He comes off as an entitled boor the whole time, gaslighting and manipulating this poor innocent wife. I hope it wasn’t really as bad as that.)

In any case, I wasn’t a fan of the Charles/Diana plot. Each time they were on the screen, I just felt physically drained. Too much baggage for a pandemic audience. Then again, Gillian Anderson did a tremendous job as Margaret Thatcher, and I really enjoyed seeing that arc unfold, even though it was also a bit of a train wreck, historically speaking.

In the end, you have a wonderfully produced, directed, and acted season about a subject that is very much not what I was in the mood to watch. It says something that I watched it anyway, which is why I gave it a 7/10. If I were being more impartial, that score would likely be higher, but I just didn’t have a fun time watching it. I understand that’s a petty complaint. I wasn’t supposed to have a fun time watching it. But there it is, nonetheless.

If you’re a fan of Charles and Diana and want to see one version of how it might have played out, or if you’re just into star-crossed marriages destined to go wrong, then have I got a show for you. If you’re not, then this might be a season you can skip. It’s rated TV-MA, but I think that’s more for the series as a whole. I don’t recall anything content-wise in this season that would call for it, short of the depiction of Diana’s experiences with bulimia.

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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.

Board Game Review: Jaws of the Lion (Gloomhaven)

I bought the original Gloomhaven shortly after it was released a few years ago. It’s a mammoth of a game: tons of components with a sprawling storyline, designed for a playgroup to explore the game over many, many sessions. I enjoyed playing it, but I had a hard time really getting a feel for the rules, and it always felt like I was just sort of winging it the whole time. After 5 sessions or so, we just kind of stopped playing. I wanted to play again, but it seemed like too much work to set it all up.

Queue Jaws of the Lion, a standalone Gloomhaven game designed to provide a better introduction to the rules than the original had. (It’s also much, much cheaper.) I read over the description and reviews, and I decided to give it a shot. Tomas and I started playing it just after Christmas. We’ve now played about 16 sessions and are rapidly approaching the end of the storyline (which for all intents and purposes implies the end of the game, though we could go back and play it through with different characters, should we choose. The game comes with 4, and we’ve only played 2 of them.)

It’s a much, much better way to get to learn the game, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who has a core group of gamers they’d like to experience an entire story arc together with. (It can do single player straight on up to 4 players.) We’re planning on going straight from the end of Jaws of the Lion into the actual Gloomhaven set, though I haven’t decided yet what we’ll do about the games we’d already played before. (Should we just start fresh? Get new characters? I don’t know.)

What is the gameplay like? It’s basically a role playing game where the game is the dungeon master, and the players are all discovering what’s going to happen next together. There’s not a whole lot of room for actual role playing (though you could probably get away with some, if you wanted to). You level up your character, playing them from one game to the next to the next, unlocking new cards and abilities as you go. You face off against monsters in a variety of scenarios, using strategy and teamwork to meet the scenario objective.

You build a deck of ability cards and then use that deck to perform actions each turn. The rules remain constant, though your skills will get better as the game goes on. Then again, the monsters get more difficult too. It has felt challenging the whole time. We’ve lost some games (which is a real downer), but we’ve had some really close games we managed to eke out, which felt great.

One session takes around an hour to an hour and a half, though it would probably take more with more players. There are a lot of bits to fiddle with and keep track of. (Though Tomas has 3D printed a great set of organizational tools to make that easier for us.) It’s not an easy game. There’s a lot of rigid strategy involved, but it does such a better job of introducing the rules that I never felt too bewildered.

For $38, I think it’s a pretty solid deal. As I said, we’ve gotten around 30-40 hours of entertainment out of it so far, and we likely have about 10-15 hours to go (as long as we don’t suffer a huge losing streak).

If any of this sounds remotely up your alley, I definitely think you should give it a shot. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed 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 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.

Canceling Dr. Seuss?

If you follow children’s books at all (or even just the news in general), you likely saw the story yesterday on the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing 6 Dr. Seuss books due to racist imagery contained in them. In a nutshell, the publisher decided those 6 books crossed a line it was no longer comfortable crossing, and so they’ve voluntarily stopped publishing those titles.

First, it should be noted that this is a sort of self-censorship. No one asked the company to stop publishing the titles. The government didn’t require them to do this. True, you could argue the company decided simply to preemptively censor itself because it was concerned about what the fallout would be if it chose to keep the status quo, but at that point, you might as well start complaining when fast food chains stop offering fare that isn’t as popular or is causing financial headaches for it. Also, it’s important to note this was a decision the Dr. Seuss folks came up with on their own. Random House didn’t force them into it.

That said, is Dr. Seuss being canceled, as so many people have started to claim? And should this move have been made? First, seeing how popular Dr. Seuss books are, and how this is a fraction of the books in his catalog (less than 10%), I think you’d be hard pressed to say he was being canceled. Because of the announcement, Seuss books rocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, taking up half of the top 20, for example. I don’t think anyone should really worry about Seuss suddenly disappearing from the shelves of bookstores.

Should the decision have been made? The books in question contain blatant stereotypes, and they’re aimed squarely at very young children. If you’d like to stop perpetuating those stereotypes, a good way to begin is by doing your best to have children stop being exposed to them at an early age. That said, if they hadn’t been stopped being printed, I also wouldn’t have been calling for their elimination. I would have just . . . not bought them.

But then again, I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to what should and shouldn’t be published. Calling for any one thing to stop being printed is a good way to put other things you want printed at risk. In other words, censoring things you don’t like might feel good at first, but then it starts spreading into people censoring things you do like, and it’s all downhill from there. I don’t think Huck Finn should be banned. I don’t think Dr. Seuss needs to be banned. But this isn’t a banning of Dr. Seuss. This is a decision by Seuss folks to stop publishing some Seuss books. Does that make it sound better?

I wonder if all the people clamoring against it would be clamoring quite so hard if the item being cut were something else they already didn’t like . . . I think of all the furor over books like And Tango Makes Three, for example. It’s hard to make the argument that a book about gay penguins can’t be put in front of impressionable young minds while also saying that a book containing blatantly racist caricatures can, though the reverse of that is also true. The key difference here is that it’s a publisher and the entity in charge of Seuss’s books making the decision, not a library or a school or the government.

All of that said, this does highlight once again the simple fact that people are human, regardless of their professional or public role. Theodore Geisel made some flagrantly racist political cartoons. He also wrote a slew of beloved books for children. If we start to limit what we’ll watch, read, or listen to based solely on a purity-of-the-artist test, I tend to think we’ll end up with nothing to watch, read, or listen to. But sometimes there are cases where the art itself is questionable. We always have the option to not watch, read, or listen to it, whether it’s about gay penguins or kids running a circus. Likewise, a company has the option of deciding not to print it, just like an artist can decide not to create it.

This is fairly easily translated over to other areas of pop culture. If a person is making inflammatory remarks on Twitter, the person’s employer can choose to stop employing that person, especially if they work in a position where image is key. That’s not canceling. That’s a business decision. That person is free to go find someone else to employ them, and if enough people want to hear what that person has to say, they’ll still find a platform to say it.

But the more I write on this topic, the more something’s feeling offf to me. I read this piece in the Deseret News this morning that essentially calls out both sides for creating an environment where people feel unsafe to question anything that might deviate from the popular norm. I’m still not sure what my thoughts are around it. For a long time, it seemed like censorship was a favored tool of conservatives and right. McCarthyism comes to mind, and the fear that went along with it. I said earlier in this post that what the Seuss Foundation was doing was self-censorship, and Bari Weiss, the author of that article I just linked to, cited self-censorship frequently as well.

If people refuse to speak because they’re terrified that they’ll say the wrong thing, how is that different from not being allowed to speak in the first place? There are nuances there, true, but is the end result the same? I’m sure there are some on the left who say people should self-censor. That there are things that no one should say, because they’re wrong-headed, out-dated, or whatever.

To me, the more I think about it, the more this sort of self-censorship is dangerous ground to walk on and encourage. As long as it’s in line with what you don’t agree with, then it might feel appropriate or warranted, but once that path is well-worn, it becomes much easier for things you want to protect to be deemed worthy of self-censorship as well.

Is “cancel culture” a new phrase for “censorship”? When they’re both viewed in that light, do we see any similarities between the two that make us uncomfortable?

I guess for me the conclusion (as it’s always been for me in the past) is “it’s complicated.” And anyone trying to reduce it to a simple black and white issue is being overly reductive. Hopefully this post has shown that I’m still stuck in the middle on this topic. I’d really love to hear some other points of view, though I ask that they remain cordial. (Am I asking people to self-censor? If that’s what it takes for people to treat each other kindly, then yes.)

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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.

Paying for Quality Information

For the first long while of the internet, the push for everything seemed to be toward making everything free. Companies were happy just to have their pages used, so the content there was free. Bloggers popped up by the thousands overnight, with all of them happy to push out their own content, gratis. File sharing was enormously popular, with platforms like Napster letting users swap music files back and forth, much to the consternation of media conglomerates.

After those first wild west years were behind us, everything seemed to shift from “free” to “monetized.” Google was happy to let you use its service for free, as long as it could embed ads in its search results. Facebook did the same. YouTube has followed suit, and it’s fairly ubiquitous at this point. The saying went, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” and that’s still largely true.

But what I’m beginning to see is a swing in a new direction. A swing back to paying for content, because it’s worth it. There are a ton of free books out there right now you could buy. Amazon has gobs of them on Kindle. But people are still ready and willing to pay for books. Why? Because they’ve seen a difference in quality. There are great free books out there, sure. But finding them, sifting through the tons of other books, is a real slog. It’s worth it to pay some money for a book that someone else has done that effort for you.

Likewise, there’s a whole ton of free information out there. Many, many people are ready and willing to tell you just about anything you want to hear, when it comes to the news. Yes, much of the free stuff is biased (and so is much of the paid stuff), but for the last long while, that hasn’t seemed to matter. Free beat out quality.

These days, I’m thinking quality beats out free, and that’s why news organizations have been able to start charging for subscriptions. The Washington Post. The New York Times. The Atlantic. Places with trained editors and paid staff. Because you can get much better information when people do something professionally, by and large. (We can have a different conversation around organizational bias by different institutions, but that’s not for today’s discussion.)

I expect to see this trend continue for the next few years at least, as we finally begin to reach a sort of balancing point between what people are willing to pay for quality information. The problem is, because quality information will continue to cost more than nothing, there will be an uphill battle persuading people who don’t pay for information that the things they’ve been reading might not be as accurate or informed. In other words, taken to its extreme, free and abundant shoddy information is a big threat.

What can we do about it? I’m honestly not sure. On the one hand, you could get around it by having a state-sponsored information channel, but that makes me skittish for clear and obvious reasons. It’s all fine and good while the state is trustworthy, but what if that stops being the case? I suppose you could somehow enact some kind of legal protections around that subsidized information source, but again, those are only as useful as the enforcement behind them.

You could argue information should just be free, period. But that’s not how it’s been able to work in our society. Reporters need to eat, and they need time to really investigate different issues. They should be compensated for the time they spend on investigating, so that they can eat. The better compensation they get, the more likely we are to get quality information in return.

I’m not sure I have a conclusion here. Just the general observation of a problem, and the statement that, while I used to be obsessed with getting everything for free, I’m believing more and more there are some things that are just worth paying for. Information is one of those.

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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.

Time for Implants

I realize there’s a fair chance a number of you read that and thought of a certain kind of implants, and wondered what in the world I was writing about today. Those aren’t the kind of implants we’ll be discussing today. Rather, I went to the dentist on Friday for my checkup, and I mentioned that a tooth had been giving me some problems on the lower left hand side of my mouth.

Not huge problems, mind you. A year ago it was sensitive to cold twice in the space of two days. And then that flared up a bit here and there over the course of the year. During the Super Bowl, it hurt when I was eating Doritos, of all things. But that’s about it.

So they decided to take a look. This is generally not followed by happy news when you’re at the dentist, in my experience . . .

First of all, they noticed that I had a huge hole in my wisdom tooth on that side of my mouth. (I’ve got a big mouth. I still have all my wisdom teeth, and they all pretty much fit fine.) Not a cavity. A hole. There’s no decay around it. It just looks like a chunk of tooth decided that it didn’t want to be there anymore, and so it went away. But it needs to be filled, just like a cavity.

Second, there’s some gum soreness in that area, which indicates I’m probably grinding my teeth on that side even more than normal. (I’m a grinder. I wear a nightguard every night, and I actually chewed through the first one I got.) Apparently the pandemic has been causing a real spike in grinding across the board, so that’s not too surprising.

Third, they took an X-ray of the tooth. The one I was complaining about seems fine, but the one next to it is still a baby tooth. (I never had a real tooth in that spot to replace it.) And it appears that its root has finally cracked. They’re going to double check it, but if that’s the case, then I have to start looking at, you guessed it, a tooth implant.

I’ve now made the mistake of googling what, exactly, the process is of getting a tooth implant. For a person with a mild phobia of dentists, this does not look like a Fun Experience. It’s enough to make me start wondering if I couldn’t just give that baby tooth a pep talk to get it to work with the team for a while longer. (Especially since I’ve got a baby tooth on the other side that might start getting ideas as well.)

So I wondered if any of you fine folks out there have gotten dental implants. If so, care to share your experience? Should I just settle down and accept the fact that I’m getting older, and more and more parts of my body are going to begin to fail on me? Are there any other alternatives I should look into? (To implants, not to getting older.) Any info from real people I know would be greatly appreciated.

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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.

Mid-Maine Youth Orchestra

Back in . . . September? October? I can no longer keep my dates straight. In any case, back in the fall, Tomas and Daniela decided that they’d like to try out of the Mid-Maine Youth Orchestra, on the off chance that the group would actually be able to do something this year. It’s a regional ensemble that Tomas had tried out for once before, but this time they had more time, and they figured they could put more work into the audition pieces.

After much practice and recording of their auditions, they were accepted into the group around December, as I recall. And in January, it was decided they could actually get the group together, though this year it would only be strings who could play. (Sorry, woodwinds.) Now, two months of weekly practices later, they’re set for their one performance, which will happen tonight at 7pm Eastern time on Facebook. (You can watch it here, if you’re so inclined.)

I’m glad they were able to do something, and I’m looking forward to watching and hearing how it all comes together. They had to follow COVID guidelines for Maine, which meant fewer than 50 people in the space at any one time, six feet apart, and lots of cleaning. But it’s been wonderful to have something approaching normalcy (and amazing to realize just how little it takes for that to qualify these days). I believe they’ve enjoyed it as well. At the very least, it’s given them something to do that’s not skiing, and it’s not like they can ski all day every day (no matter how much Denisa and they might wish that were otherwise.)

Anyway. Just thought I’d spread the word. Tune in with me tonight and watch for Tomas on violin and Daniela on cello. Great job, guys!

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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.

My Current Take on Plotting a Novel

I’ve had a pretty wide range of approaches to plotting over the years. Back when I was first starting out, I avoided plots almost completely. I’d start off a new book with a general idea of what I wanted it to be about, almost no concept of the main characters at all, and I’d just discovery write my way through the entire novel. I felt like this kept the feeling of spontaneity for me. One of the main motivators I still have while writing is to find out what happens next. You’d think, as the author, I would already know, but I almost never did for the first 8 or 9 books I wrote.

On the one hand, this method got 8 or 9 books written, so it was successful in that measure. On the other, it meant that I had to revise those final books a whole ton to get them in any sort of shape where they were ready for other people to read them. VODNIK went through something like six or seven huge revisions, for example. Not that I mind the revision process (I actually think it’s one of my strengths, taking what’s already there and making it better), but that’s still a very inefficient way to write.

These days, I’ve come around on plots a great deal, to the point that I almost always write a general outline before I dive into the book. I try to have a better idea of who my characters are, what the main conflicts are, and what the shape of the book is going to be before I start the real writing. It’s a very broad description, however. Then, I’ve been treating each chapter like a new discovery writing exercise. I’ll sit down to write the chapter and check my notes to see what was supposed to happen in the chapter. Then I’ll free write about that, trying to figure out where it should happen, what else is going on in the background, who’s there, potential conflicts with what I’ve already written, etc. That usually ends up being about 2,000 words or so, and can take a day or two. Once I’ve got that in place, then I write the chapter itself and move onto the next one.

Is it perfect? No. In my latest book (I’m 54,000 words into THE AXEMAN at the moment), I’ve gotten to the point where what I had plotted out ahead of time no longer feels right to me. (Hard to describe that feeling. I just know that if I were to continue to stick to the plot, then I wouldn’t be happy with it. The characters don’t want to do that. It feels too contrived, etc.) So I’m free writing my way out of it. The good news is that I have a much better idea of the plot and the characters by now, so it’s much easier to know what the general ruleset is that I have to follow. (A plot, in the end, is the solution to a problem, constrained by restrictions put in place by the novel itself. It’s a puzzle: coming up with a satisfactory conclusion taking into account everything that’s come before. Thankfully, you can cheat. You just go back and fix things earlier in the book to make the ending match the beginning . .)

Anyway. That’s my general approach for now, and I’m happy with it. It still lets me feel like I’m discovering new things along the way, and it’s cut down on the number of revisions I (typically) have to make. Any of you writers out there want to share your own approaches? I’m always interested to hear everyone’s current takes.

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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.

How Do You Treat Social Media?

I’ll admit I still don’t really understand the motivations behind the way some people use social media. The whole concept of trying to be an “influencer” eludes me, a fact that’s likely reflected by my very modest following on the blog and social media in general. I’ve never been one to try to aggressively market myself, even while I’ve seen other successfully do so to the point that they’ve been able to transition away from their full time jobs and make all their money from their blogging or podcasting or what have you.

Naturally, there are times that I question my reluctance. Maybe I should be more assertive. Maybe I should do more to try and get more people to read what I have to say. But each time I think about that, I follow it up with, “That sounds like way too much work.” It also goes against how I generally view social media.

To me, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are places where I can go and interact with good friends. I can find out what they’re doing, and they can see what I’m doing. We can discuss topics we each care about, and have a free exchange of ideas. When social media sticks to that level, I almost never have a problem with it, mainly because the people I’m good friends with aren’t the sort of people to be obnoxious on social media about things. They might disagree with me about something, and I might disagree with them, but we generally let people be how they’re going to be, unless we’re really passionate about something. (Of course, the past few years have given plenty of reasons to be really passionate about various things, so that’s broken down now and then, but it’s still largely true.)

The best real world comparison I can make is to a party where a bunch of my friends are in the room. I can go around, listen to what they’re saying, and join in if I feel inclined. But it stays friends talking to friends. If I see a friend talking to someone I know, I might listen in for a bit, but I’ll leave them be unless I’m introduced or something.

At the same time, I know there are many people who treat social media differently. To them, it’s a party where everyone’s talking, and everyone’s invited to come on up and speak their mind about a topic. I see more popular people on Twitter have to deal with strangers basically telling them what they feel they should be doing, or how they’re wrong about something, or foisting their opinions about X, Y, or Z on them. I can’t imagine putting up with that for too long, just because that’s not what social media has ever really been about for me. I’m not interested in hearing what the general public thinks about something. I’m not trying to make new friends. I just want to keep the relationships I already have.

(This also explains why I’ll hide someone from my feed if I feel like social media is making for a less positive relationship with that person. I don’t want Facebook or Twitter to make me like a person less than I would have otherwise, so I remove myself from that conversation if that’s the way it’s trending.)

Some of the more problematic interactions I’ve had on Facebook have come up because my posts are public. And the people involved in those interactions have justified them by saying, “Your post was public. If you didn’t want strangers commenting, you shouldn’t have it be public.” Which I can understand on the one hand, but I’ve always resisted for a number of reasons. First, I write what I write in the hopes that it’s read, obviously. I want it easily shareable, and setting it as public does that. Second, just because something’s public doesn’t mean I wash my hands of the ability to edit the comments. My wall, my rules. My blog, my rules.

None of this has ever really caused a problem for me, likely because I’m just not that big of a presence for it to matter. (Definitely a silver lining, there.) But I do wonder now and then if my perception of social media’s place is the common one, or if I’m in the minority. So . . . how do you view 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 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.