Bryce Moore's Blog, page 74

Dismay at a Lack of Empathy

I’m behind on work, so I don’t have much time to post today. I did, however, want to step in to just offer one observation on something tangentially related to the [points wildly at everything that’s happened in the past year or more] that we’ve all been going through.

Like many of you, I’ve been shocked by much of what we’ve undergone as a country. COVID, Black Lives Matter protests, insurrection, quarantines, and more. In many ways, I feel like I’ve been walking through one long gauntlet of events that in any other year would have been considered THE defining event of the year, except they’ve all been rolled into one in a way that makes them all feel like par for the course.

And so I think it makes sense that I’m struggling. Struggling to keep a positive outlook. Struggling to help my children get through all of this and still stay sane. (Remember how horrid middle school was? Now think about trying to do it in 2020. My middle school years were a cake walk in comparison.) Struggling to keep my creative writing going. Struggling to maintain my friendships even during social distancing.

I’m trying to keep in mind that everyone in the country (and the world) is struggling as well, but there is one area where I’m particularly disappointed in what I see as a shortfall in far more people than I would have thought heading into all this.

It feels to me like many people have a severe lack of empathy. I don’t know any other way to put it. People who are looking at the almost 1.9 million people who have died of COVID this year (370,000 in the US alone) and dismiss them. Who look at the hurt so many people of color were (and are) feeling earlier this year, and dismiss the protests or condemn them. Who watched the insurrection at the Capitol yesterday and say that it’s no big deal and being overblown.

Because as upsetting as all of this has been to me, the gaslighting attitude that’s been pointed at me by some has only made it worse. The way some will casually shrug it off and tell me I’m overreacting, or worse yet, dismiss it with some pithy saying.

I understand many of these events have had political undertones, and that there are multiple ways to view them. I genuinely try to understand people who disagree with me on any number of topics, and I try to see things from their point of view. I’ll admit to being worn down to the point that my tolerance for this attitude has gotten much, much shorter lately. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get upset anymore when people continue to take that approach, whether it’s with me or my friends.

Yesterday was traumatic for me, even as far away from the events as I was. It was likely the same for many of you. And the one thing we don’t need in that situation is to have someone come by and tell us we’re wrong for feeling upset. If a child falls and scrapes a knee, do you comfort the child, or tell them there are plenty of people dying of cancer, so they should really suck it up?

I don’t know who my audience for this post is. The people who already feel what I’ve been going through already know all about it, and the people who have been casually dismissing all that pain seem to be past the point of caring. I always thought “being a kind person” was a pretty low bar. It doesn’t really cost me anything other than discomfort now and then. Sort of like putting on a mask when I’m out in public. It’s not a big reach. And I realize that we all have different capacities for kindness, and troubling times can use up those capacities much more quickly.

But I hadn’t expected them to wear out as fast as they did.

So maybe the next time someone is expressing how upset or hurt they are on social media, or how shocked or disappointed, if you’re tempted to speak up, ask a few simple questions:

Do I know this person well enough so that my words would really be helpful?Is what I’m about to say really going to help them, or is it only going to antagonize them?Am I posting to help them feel better, or to help myself feel better?

Almost all of the time, if the answer to either of the first two questions is no, then you shouldn’t post anything at all. If the answer to the third is yes, then ask yourself how good a friend or contact you are with that person to begin with.

This is one case where “literally saying nothing at all” is free, and it would actively help the other person far more than any one liner you’ve cooked up in the last five seconds. It might be about a topic you’re passionate about. It might be something you’re convinced you’re right on. But trying to engage people when they’re upset by leading with the argument that they’re actually not upset (or upset for false reasons) is far worse than just keeping your comment to yourself.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

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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.

Some Glimmers of Political Hope, Followed by Horror

I fully realize that there’s a lot going on in our country today, with many citizens convinced the election was rigged, others convinced Trump is doing his best to steal the election, and even more doubt being stirred up by the election in Georgia. Listening to Trump’s diatribe against the election and seeing all the protestors in DC right now really disappoints me, and would typically leave me feeling despondent.

However.

I also see some areas that actually give me hope. First, there’s the fact that Georgia held a run off election that essentially confirmed what had happened in the first election in that state (a state whose electoral votes are being accused as being rigged today). Sure, Trump tried to claim that Democrats just rigged the election a second time, because they got away with it the first time, and doubtless there will be a significant number of Trump supporters who believe him. But to me, the runoff election showed the country is still working and will continue to work after Trump is gone. (Though the process to have Trump leave is far rockier than I would like.)

But more than that election, I’m encouraged to hear Republican politicians finally speak out strongly against this charade of pretending the election is rigged. Mitch McConnell is far from my favorite politician. (Very, very far. I believe much of the harm Trump has done to the country couldn’t have been done without McConnell’s support.) But to hear him get up and call for this effort to be voted down was really encouraging. Toomey, Romney. and other Senators–seeing members of the party finally take public stances against all of this is at least something.

And yet.

Even as I was writing this, the debate on the Senate floor was interrupted as Trump protesters swarmed the Capitol. I literally watched as thousands of them flooded the grounds, with some of them even going into the rotunda itself. And sure, watching many of them makes them look like nothing more than bemused Americans, filming everything with their phone cameras and taking pictures of what they’re doing. But I also realize that all it would take in a situation like that would be for a few confrontations for it all to spiral out of control. It was deeply troubling to watch. Evacuating members of the House and Senate? Evacuating the Vice President?

Trump has consistently lied about the election, pushing people the believe things without any real proof. I worry what might happen today and even more what might happen tonight.

Can we just have this over with already? I don’t know what else to say. I’m speechless, and it’s happening on live television.

A Few Thoughts on Cancel Culture

I’ve got a big old jumbled mess of thoughts kicking around my head when it comes to cancel culture, and I’d like to get them down into some sort of an order. What better way to do that than with a blog post? This is in part inspired by my response that I wrote yesterday to Harry Potter. JK Rowling has become at least one of the focal points around cancel culture ever since she spoke out so strongly against trans rights. (Well, she insisted that wasn’t what she was doing/saying, but when the group you’re antagonizing is actively saying “What you’re saying is hurtful to us,” you don’t really have the right to say, “No it isn’t.” That’s not how hurt works.)

In any case, my mind started off on this train of thought with Rowling, and then it continued further down it with Ken Jennings of Jeopardy trivia fame. (Who has come out to apologize for joking on twitter about disabled people. Which was clearly a terrible idea in the first place, and no justification for it really passes muster, though yay for acknowledging it was a bad idea and apologizing for it, though more on that later.) Ken Jennings in turn came to the defense of a friend of his who was being criticized for the way he treated his nine-year-old daughter when she came to him asking for help using a can opener. (That seems like one of the stranger sentences I’ve written in quite some time, but here we are.)

(Side note to Ken: when you’re already in hot water for things you’ve done and said in the past, perhaps playing the white knight to come to the rescue of someone else in similar water temperature isn’t exactly the bestest idea. Kind of like someone who can’t swim jumping in to help someone who’s drowning . . .)

So those news stories have all been banging around in my head for a while. And here are some of the current conclusions I’ve made. (Note: these might end up changing as I think more on the subject. That’s where you might potentially come in.)

First, I am against the idea of giving up on art because of the nature of the artist. In other words, I don’t feel obligated to evaluate the character of every artist, musician, director, etc. before I decide whether I can like a piece of work. Likewise, I don’t feel obligated to like a piece of work simply because I like the artist, musician, director, etc. That said, there are clearly limits I have for this. I am, for example, unable to really enjoy the Cosby Show anymore, despite the fact that I once enjoyed it, and a lot of talent and effort went into it. The actions and allegations against Bill Cosby just make me unable to watch a light hearted sitcom and have a good time doing it.

On the other hand, I still have some of the old Bill Cosby stand up routines, and I have listened to them and continue to enjoy them, though not quite as much as I used to, because at the back of my head there’s the constant “what was he doing then?” question playing over and over. This is similar to the way I still listen to Michael Jackson songs and enjoy them, even though I don’t enjoy them as much because of the fallout with Jackson later in his life. (For that matter, it counts for the Jackson 5 songs, too.)

Basically, my knowledge of an artist/creator’s personal history might inevitably bring down my evaluation of their work (or bring it up, I suppose). If I liked the original enough, I might still stick with it. Something that was a 10/10 might still be worth consuming now that it’s an 8/10, for example. It all depends on the case in question. Who made it, what it is, and what else that person did. I will likely still continue to recommend Harry Potter to my kids, because it’s a fun series (though we’ll likely have a conversation about Muggles and how they’re treated . . .)

This is a personal decision, and I would never hold it against someone who made a different decision. I can totally understand other people who were hurt enough by Rowling or Cosby or Jennings or anyone to feel like they can no longer enjoy whatever those people made. And that’s perhaps where cancel culture really loses me as a supporter. The call for people to stop watching or buying or enjoying or having anything to do with something someone else made because of actions people deem to be reprehensible.

I guess some of it comes down to what’s reprehensible. Date raping a series of women over decades definitely seems to fit the definition. Making jokes in poor taste on Twitter? Not good, but also not in the same ballpark as the other. And yet somehow the online mobs end up calling for the same pitchforks in both cases. That doesn’t seem to match up to me.

Worse yet, people who have made mistakes and publicly apologize for them seem to be in a no-win situation. If they apologize, they’re accused of only apologizing because they want something else out of it. That Jennings is only saying he’s sorry now because he wants to host Jeopardy, for example. As far as I’m concerned, people deserve to be forgiven for mistakes they’ve made. (Though they should suffer the legal consequences of those mistakes, because that’s why we have laws.) In other words, Jennings has apologized publicly, and so I think he should be given another shot. However, if he continues to make jokes in poor taste, then one can very easily give up on him. At that point, he would have proven his apology was nothing more than hot air.

Then again, even then, it might be a case where he just is clueless about what is poor taste. I don’t like using specific examples, because I don’t know all the specifics of each example. But I do believe people should be allowed to try and improve and become better. That’s not something that can happen if “The Internet” decides someone’s irredeemable no matter what they do.

Still, there are cases where people are forgiven. James Gunn (of Guardian of the Galaxy fame) made terrible jokes online about 10 years ago. When they came back to light, Disney fired him, despite the fact that it seemed like he had truly changed since then. Since that firing, many came to his defense, and he was eventually rehired. But that simply shows what a mess this can be. Who’s to say if someone’s changed? Is there a statute of limitations on when you’re still accountable for what you’ve said online?

There are certainly times I wonder if something I’ve written will come back to bite me eventually. I write enough that I’m sure there are things I once thought that I no longer agree with, even though I did at the time. It can be tempting, with that looming over your head, to never saying anything to anyone about anything, for fear that what you say will eventually be used against you later on. Obviously I don’t fear it enough to stop writing, and I’d like to think that anyone who comes to point fingers at me will find plenty of self-doubt and “I’m struggling through this problem” thinking to show that I’m changing all the time, and that I’m honestly trying to be a better person through that process.

If I believe I need that benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t that same benefit be extended to other people?

That’s why for me, I will let the individual circumstances of each case decide if a work still works for me or not, in light of the actions of the creator. But I don’t have any plans to publicly call for anyone to be ignored or canceled.

And that’s all I have time for today, though I’m sure there are tons of things I’m forgetting. It’s at least a start. I’d be interested to hear other takes on this subject, especially by people who disagree with me.

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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.

Some Harry Potter Thoughts for the New Year

Hey! I’m back from vacation! Miss me? Over the break, the movie marathon we chose to go with this year was all 8 Harry Potter movies. (We’ll be watching Fantastic Beasts and its sequel in the next bit, as well, but we ran out of time to fit them into the schedule. Too busy eating metric tons of fudge . . . ) This was the second time I’d seen many of the movies, having watched them opening night in the theater and then not getting around to watching them again. And, as you might expect, I have thoughts.

First off, this is how I’d rank the 8 movies, from worst to best:

Sorcerer’s Stone–5/10Chamber of Secrets–5.5/10Deathly Hallows Part 1–6/10Order of the Phoenix–7/10Deathly Hallows Part 2–7/10Half-blood Prince–7/10Goblet of Fire7.5/10Prisoner of Azkaban–8.5/10

Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets are significantly worse than the others, with Deathly Hallows Part 1 near by. Prisoner of Azkaban is easily the best, and it’s not close. The others are . . . a mixed bag. Enjoyable, with some flaws the drag them down here and there.

After watching the first two in the series, I began to seriously wonder if I’d made a big mistake committing to watching the whole series. They were just . . . blah. I think a large part of this is that the first two movies were made primarily from a “I wonder what that would look like in a movie” perspective. So they show pretty much as much of the stuff in the books that they can. Nearly Headless Nick? You betcha! And while it might have been cool back in 2000 to see what those things look like, these days, we’ve all grown accustomed to just what sort of things can be done with computers, and so the neat-o factor just isn’t there anymore. What we’re left with is just a bunch of bloated fluff desperately in need of an edit.

Thankfully, Cuaron came along with Prisoner of Azkaban and showed what a great Harry Potter movie could be like. Phew! Not a slave to the book, but definitely paying attention to it. It’s a genuinely good movie. The rest of the series, as I said, is a mixed bag. Some of that is because of the source material (the books after Goblet of Fire began to suffer, in my opinion, and Deathly Hallows really needed an edit), and some of it is Hollywood mucking around with the plot to make it flashier.

However, beyond just the adaptations, I had a couple of thoughts watching the movies brought to mind. The first is a general observation of frustration with plotting in the books. Time and time again, Harry and the gang are saved through deus ex machina. Dobby shows up to rescue them from the grasp of Bellatrix. The magic car shows up to save them from the giant spiders. Hagrid shows up to save Harry from the Dursleys. Fawkes shows up to give Harry a magic sword. In all of these cases (and many more), nothing Harry does is really earned. He just sort of stumbles his way from victory to victory, relying (it seems) much more on luck than anything else. Once or twice over the course of a seven book series is understandable. But for it to happen so often, so consistently, was more than a little frustrating. I’ll have to reread the books sometime to see if it’s a problem there as well, or if it just came up in the adaptation process.

My second, somewhat deeper observation, is more over-arching. Rowling has gotten in a lot of hot water lately over her very public statements against trans rights. I’m not going to delve into that here (Google will bring you up to speed easily), but I will say that one of the first things that struck me about the series was how racism/classism is inherently baked into Rowling’s world. You’ve got goblins, which are all greedy little monsters. Even Dobby can’t stand to not be serving when he’s freed. House Elves just want to serve. It’s what they’re bred to do. But more than all of that is the underlying problem of “Muggles.”

It’s a pejorative, plain and simple. The wizarding world looks at Muggles as very other and very inferior. And it’s not just vile people like Voldemort (wanting to rid the world of Muggles) or Malfoy (using Mud-blood as a slur). Even the “good” wizards like Mr. Weasley view Muggles as different, more worthy of study than of treating as actual people. Muggles are stupid, ignorant, and full of themselves. They’re unwilling and unable to figure out what’s really happening in the world.

As I thought about it, I wondered if this were just part of the nature of fantasy in general, where the “normals” are treated as less than across the board. I don’t think that’s the case, however. Narnia doesn’t share that sort of belief system, for example. You don’t have it happening in Tolkien, either. (Yes, you’ll have orcs and Uruk-hai which are clearly evil, but I’m talking about classes of humans. None of them are inherently “better” than others, regardless of their abilities.) As I look through the other big names in fantasy, I still don’t see it. Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, etc. You’ll have individuals in a society that are terrible. You’ll have people who are racist. But there are exceptions, and it’s clear from the viewpoints that those individual beliefs are just that: individual.

So should it be that surprising that Rowling, years later, has proven to be less than sympathetic across the board to people who are different? Even the way she treated homosexuality and race in the books (insisting after the fact that Dumbledore was gay, despite not including textual evidence in the actual books, and saying Hermione might be Black, just because she never explicitly stated her race in the books) rubs me the wrong way. It always felt a bit to me like she wanted to have it both ways: not cause a stir with the books themselves, but also gain the accolades from the progressive left.

When I first read the books, I thought the idea of Muggles was funny and charming. Now, 20 years later, it doesn’t read that way to me at all. Am I alone in this? And I wonder if it’s just because so much has happened in the world since Harry Potter came out, or if I’m just more sensitive to the topic at this juncture. I’d be interested to hear what other people have to say about 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.

A Very COVID Christmas

I mentioned earlier this month that I usually do an annual newsletter that I called off this year. Part of that tradition is that I write a Christmas-themed short story and include it as the centerpiece of the newsletter. Well, while I might not have felt up to reflecting back on what happened in 2020, I did have an idea for a short story that I wanted to compose in honor of the year. And the good news for you is that, since I don’t have a newsletter to share it in, I’m just going to share it with you all, instead.

The core concept behind it is simple: all this pandemic stuff has affected our lives pretty drastically. What has it done to the North Pole over the course of the year? And with that kernel of an idea, this is what I came up with.

(And as a parting note, I’m on vacation for the next two weeks, and so I’m going to step away from the blog for the most part as well. It’s easier to feel like I’m really on vacation when I cut certain normal activities out of my life, and the blog is definitely one of those. If something comes up that I just can’t keep my mouth shut about, I’ll pop on to post, but if not, then I wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy holidays. Catch you in 2021. I hear the sequel to 2020 is much better . . . )

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A Very COVID Christmas

JANUARY

Buddy was twenty minutes late when he finally rushed into the conference room. “Wipe that look off your muzzle, Dasher. Just because you call a meeting in January doesn’t mean I don’t have a thousand things more pressing than meeting with a quadruped.”

I scowled at him even more. “Please. One of us just finished pulling a billion-ton sled through the sky for more than two hundred thousand miles in one night. The other supervises some woodworkers. The fact that I called this meeting instead of taking another long nap should be all the notice you need that it’s important.”

He plopped his cocoa on the table, sat down, and cranked the hydraulics on his chair to whiz him up to my height. Having a reindeer and an elf meet in the same room wasn’t the easiest thing to maneuver, and not just because of the logistics. Reindeer and elves hadn’t gotten along since the Great Snowball Incident of 1894. All reindeer knew elves were fussy little busy bodies, and all elves were convinced reindeer were nothing more than thick-necked grunts. But why should we care what pointy-eared little helium huffers had to say about us? Buddy stayed silent, sipping his cocoa and thumbing through his phone as if I wasn’t even there. He was two feet tall, overweight, and always full of himself. A weak attempt at a beard, and half-moon glasses that made him look a century or two older than he really was.

I took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly. The less I had to do with elves, the better. “I think we can both agree there’s too much bad blood between our kind over the centuries to hope to have any real cooperation here.”

Buddy barked out a laugh, but still didn’t look up.

“You’ve been following the news?” I asked.

“What do you think I’m doing now?” he said. “Swiping right on Tinsel?”

“If you’d put that phone down for five minutes, we could be done with this meeting, and I could go back to my bed, and you can go back to . . . whatever the elf it is you all do in January.”

“See?” Buddy snapped, jabbing at me with his finger. “It’s exactly that kind of attitude that makes me want to—We’re making things, Dasher. All day. Every day. We don’t have time for dashing and dancing and prancing and that thing with her eyelashes Vixen does all day. You don’t hear anybody singing about elf games at Christmas, do you?”

“Please,” I said, unable to keep the derision out of my voice. “You’re making toys, Buddy. Toys. And most of them these days come preassembled from Asia. If you want to pretend you haven’t outsourced three quarters of your workload, then fine. But don’t think for a moment I haven’t been keeping an eye on your monthly reports.”

“Reindeer shouldn’t even have access to our monthly reports.”

“It’s the law, Buddy. You want to change it, take it up with the unions.”

He started to say something, then swallowed it. “What’s the use of arguing with a reindeer? Now what is it about the news that’s so important?”

“I’m worried about this thing in China. The virus thing.”

Buddy leaned back from the table and lolled his head around. “Suzy Snowflake! You mean this is just about that? It’s a regional outbreak of some coughing. We’ve had way worse over the years. If Ebola didn’t slow us down, I don’t think we need to spend more than three seconds worrying about one more flu strain.”

“But in 1918 when the—”

“1918! Can you hear yourself? The humans might be full of themselves, and they might be pretty dense, but even you and I can agree that their health care has improved quite a bit in 100 years. Paying for it might still be tricky for those Americans, I’ll grant you, but—”

“So you haven’t heard of anything that causes you any alarm?” I cut in. I had no time to debate politics with a candy cane addict.

“No, Dasher. I haven’t. Stop looking for excuses to get out of next year’s deliveries. Even if something ‘bad’ were to really happen, I’m 100% positive it would all blow over by next Christmas. Frosty in a frying pan, but you reindeer can be a pain to deal with sometimes.”

“Fine,” I said, then left the room. The less I had to interact with Buddy, the better. And he was right. I’d only called the meeting out of caution. Worrying in January about something like this was taking it way too seriously. If I’d been operating on something like a real rest, I wouldn’t have even blinked at the news. I needed at least two more weeks of sleep before I was really ready to face the world again.

That flu thing would all be done by the time I woke up.

MARCH

Buddy was waiting for me when I came to the conference room. The little elf had his elbows perched on the table, his eyes drilling holes into me as I took my time getting situated. I was just back from a two-hundred-mile jog with Comet, and I was in too good of a mood to let an elf bring me down.

“So you finally decided to make a meeting,” he said as I poured myself some oats.

“It’s the middle of March, Buddy, not October. Let’s keep the drama down to a bare minimum, shall we? Plenty of time between now and the Big Night for whatever has you elves all a twinkle.”

“Hey. This was your big concern before it was mine, okay? So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to brush this off as if—”

“What the elf? This is about that Cornea thing?” I asked, spraying some oats across the table as I spoke. Maybe I should have swallowed more first.

Buddy pressed his lips together and flicked the few flakes that had gotten close to him back at me. “Corona, not cornea, and things have gotten a fair bit worse since we last talked about it.”

“There’s like thousands of miles between us and the rest of humanity, Buzzy-bud. Are you worried the big bad disease is going to come in on a shipping container or something? We’re going to be fine.”

“That’s the problem with you reindeer. You’ve got no head for numbers. If this thing goes exponential, then all it’ll take is one little—”

“It’s March. Christmas is nine months away, as you yourself pointed out back in January. Sure, I might have been a bit worried at first, but that was just because it was so new. I took what you said to heart, and I’m good now. This will all be long gone by the time we really have to worry about it, and I’ve got more important things to worry about for now. Like my vacation to Canada to see relatives.”

Buddy about exploded off his seat. “Canada!? Relatives?! You can’t just go to Canada in the middle of a pandemic. What if you get sick while you’re away? What if you bring it back?”

“I’ll quarantine or whatever. But that’s not going to happen. No need to chit bricks about it. Or are you saying my family is diseased? That’s what it always comes down to with you elves, isn’t it? Just because we’ve got fur all over our body, we’re somehow magically dirtier than the rest of you. Well we happen to like our fur. It keeps us warm, and we’re never naked, as opposed to some creatures I can think of . . .”

“It isn’t safe, Dasher.”

“It’s a cold, Buddy. I think I can handle a few sniffles, even if I catch it. Which I won’t, because my family isn’t diseased.”

“You can’t go.”

“Watch me.”

END OF MARCH

“It wasn’t me,” I said to Buddy on the phone.

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” his tinny voice answered back. “But it doesn’t really matter at this point, does it?”

“It matters to me,” I said. “I never got COVID, and I certainly didn’t bring it back to the North Pole.”

“You could have though. You went to Canada.”

“I heard Link to a trip to some temple in Nepal. You don’t see me pointing any antlers at him.”

“And it doesn’t matter,” Buddy repeated. “The disease doesn’t care who brought it. It doesn’t think anything about anything. We just need to make sure it doesn’t spread. No more in-person meetings. We’ll do everything remotely.”

“Right,” I said. “That doesn’t sound too hard. And it’ll just take a few weeks, right? We can handle that.”

“Right. Though we’d better lock down the stores as well. Limit how many of us can be in there at the same time. That kind of thing.”

“Easy peasy,” I said. “We’ll be done with this in no time.”

“Let’s hope so. We elves can’t afford to get behind on our quotas.”

“And we reindeer need our regular exercise.”

“So let’s follow these rules to the letter,” Buddy said. “We don’t want this to get out of hand.”

“Definitely not,” I said, then hung up.

APRIL

I cleared my throat. “Thanks everyone for coming to the—”

“SO I SAID TO MY DOCTOR, WHAT DO I DO IF THE DIARRHEA DOESN’T STOP?”

The entire Zoom room was shocked into silence for a full second.

“Uh, Blitzen?” I said. “We can hear you.”

A few members of the elf council chortled. They always loved seeing a reindeer make a false step.

“I KNOW,” Blitzen kept going. His screen showed a close up of his name tag, though it was somewhat blurry. “AND THIS WHILE I WAS TOTALLY OUT OF TOILET PAPER. I FINALLY FOUND SOME OF THE STUFFED BEARS THEY KEEP DOWN IN—”

“Blitzen!” I shouted.

He kept talking, going into detail about things no stuffed bear should have ever had to experience. Several of the elves in manufacturing looked visibly green, and one of them turned off her camera.

“He can’t hear you,” Buddy said. “You’re going to have to mute him.”

“Mute him?”

“You’re the one who insisted on being the host.”

I squinted at the screen, trying to navigate the tiny menus and wishing I hadn’t made such a stink about being the host in the first place. It had been a two-hour debate. The elves were always insisting they were better equipped for running new technology, but the union had been pressing me to stay strong and start pushing back against losing ground to the pointy ears. This pandemic is going to put the whole world into a tailspin, Donner had said. That’s going to mess up the supply chain, and we might fall behind quotas. We’ve been struggling with the belief index for decades. Imagine what’ll happen if hundreds of thousands of children wake up to a weak Christmas morning. It might push us over the edge. The Big Man will have to start looking for corners to cut, and the elves have been pushing for an electric sleigh for the past decade. We need to show we’re providing more value than just one night of sleigh pulling.

Easy to say when you weren’t the one hosting the Zoom meeting where one of your own was talking about just what condition he’d left the toilet in for the last week.

At last I found the mute option just as Blitzen was going into bowel movements that I never wanted to hear about, let alone experience. The room went blessedly silent, even though Blitzen’s camera kept showing him talking. Who was he even calling at this hour? Probably his uncle, Schwitzen.

“Now,” I said, clearing my throat again. “The next few months are likely to be challenging, but we’re confident we can make it through with some minor adjustments to our workflow. We’ll be meeting remotely on this platform once a week with department heads, just like we’re meeting now. Remember, we’re not sure just what this disease is capable of, but—”

“I heard it doesn’t even affect elves.” That was Legolas from security. Typical elf manners.

“Our scientists are still looking into that,” I said, proud I was able to keep my voice so level. “For now, it would be best if we all just stayed remote. Wash your hands, and don’t forget to sanitize everything anyone else might have touched.”

“What about masks?” someone asked. I wasn’t sure if it was an elf or a reindeer. How were you supposed to know when everyone was so small?

“Masks?” Buddy asked, incredulous. “This is the North Pole, not Asia. Masks don’t do a snowball-throwing thing against this. It’ll just keep all the Corona right around your face, and then you’ll touch it and get it anyway. Leave the masks to the doctors, and just wash your hands.”

“Buddy and I will be checking in with each other,” I said, not wanting the elf to take control. Perceptions mattered still, even in a pandemic. “So if you’ve got questions in between meetings, run them by us, and we’ll iron it out.”

“That’s right,” Buddy piped up. “We’ve got to come together and make sure we get through this. Our biggest concern is keeping the supply chains moving forward and positioning ourselves so that once this is past us in a few months, we can go back to normal as quickly as possible. We’ll just be shut down for a few weeks.”

“Hang in there, everybody,” I said.

JUNE

I stared at the wall of my stall. To think, there had been a time when I looked forward to lowkey days in the office. Days when I didn’t have to worry about any business trips or long range runs. I would personally wash a snow yak with my tongue right this instant if it let me go on a business trip. Even a business trip to the Southern North Pole would have been better than this.

Day after day after day of the same thing. The same place for breakfast. The same place for dinner. The same 43 knots on one stall wall, 38.5 on the second, 13 on the third, and 72 on the fourth. The same wondering why there were so many more on the fourth than the third. The same debate about whether I should just have facilities come in and paint the walls so I stopped counting the knots. The same worry that I might miss the knots after they were painted over.

I didn’t eat out. I didn’t go to the gym. The cutting-edge treadmill had seemed so cool when I first got to try it out, but now using it just reminded me of all the places I couldn’t be running. Couldn’t be exploring.

The days blended together. I spent my hours poring over webpages, trying to make sense of the science behind this disease. I went back and forth debating whether it would be better to just get it and be done with it or do my best to avoid it. Both options seemed terrible, though there were more than enough people online arguing each side.

And that was the other thing: the arguments. Over and over and over around the same thing. Even the scientists seemed unable to make up their minds. Masks good or masks bad? Drugs good or drugs bad? Airborne or droplets?

I needed a hug. A good run through the forest with the rest of the team around me. The last time I saw Vixen in a Zoom meeting, I could have sworn she’d put on a hundred pounds, even if she said it was just the camera angle. I hadn’t gotten on a scale in weeks. I probably had done the same thing.

Stress eating my way through the alpacalypse.

Wondering if there would ever be an end to it. When the debates start focusing onto “Number of Acceptable Deaths,” you know you’re living in one of the worst timelines.

But the not knowing . . . that was maybe the hardest thing about all of it.

Would we ever be able to go back to normal? And what did “normal” even look like?

It had been so long, I was worried I had forgotten.

JULY

“You have to put that swab where?” I asked, the statement not quite lining up.

The elf sighed and put her hands on her waist. She was dressed in a full body suit with candy cane striping and a little slit for her to see out of. Every time she moved, it sounded like squeaky sneakers. “It goes in your nose. Don’t be such a baby.”

“If it’s just going in my nose, then why is it a meter long?”

“We have to go deep enough to get a good sample size.”

“Of what? My brain?”

She practically growled at me, and I flinched back. Elves could be vicious when they didn’t get their way. All I needed was to have to get rabies shots on top of COVID tests. “You’re the thirtieth reindeer I’ve had to test. None of the rest of them took this long to get it done.”

“I’m just saying, with a swab that long, you need to be using a whole different preposition. It’s not going to go in my nose. It’s going to go up it. Waaaay up.”

“Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts, and it’ll all be over before you know it.”

“That’s supposed to calm me down?” I asked. “That’s what the vet told my great aunt before she was put down when she went all Rankin and Bass on us. Where’s Buddy? I want to talk to him.”

“Buddy’s dealing with union issues, and that’s all I’m going to say about it. Now get that nose down here before I call for the tranq gun.”

AUGUST

I got to the conference room fifteen minutes early, taking my time to make sure everything in it was wiped down with disinfectant. The table. The chairs. The door knobs. If we were going to have a hope of getting back to normal, then we had to be sure every single surface was spotless.

The floor was lined with candy cane stickers marking off 6 foot increments. Sugar glass panels had been erected all over the place to keep everyone in their little compartment. Everything we could do to keep everyone safe.

Buddy came in right on time, though he hesitated when he opened the door. “Are we sure this is safe?” he asked.

I stared at him for a moment. It was so strange to see anyone in person again, even for a little. He was still the same elf. Not even two feet tall, pointy hat and pointy ears, and the same green and white and red striped suit he always wore. The mask was new, though. He had one decorated with a mistletoe pattern.

Mine had a series of crossed antlers printed on it. It was also big enough that Buddy could have used it for a blanket if he needed to.

“It’s as safe as we can make it,” I said. My mask had a tendency to ride down when I opened and closed my mouth, and it was a struggle to keep it in place. Not for the first time, I envied Buddy his opposable thumbs.

After some hesitation back and forth, we were both sitting at the conference table. It felt like I was breaking the law. Like I was going to get put on the Naughty List any moment.

“This is silly,” Buddy said. “How can we expect the rest of the North Pole to get back on track if the two of us can’t even sit here and have a simple meeting together?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I know you’re right. Still, it’s strange.”

He grimaced. “These masks are going to be the bane of elven existence.”

“They seem to be staying on your face okay.”

“Sure they are, but over half of us need glasses to see what we’re working on. It takes all of four seconds for your glasses to start fogging up when you’re wearing a mask. What are we going to do about that?”

I grunted. That was certainly something I hadn’t thought of. Magical reindeer didn’t get bad vision. “Do you think we’ll need to wear them when we’re out for a run?”

“Write the question down,” Buddy said. “There’s a Return to North Pole Safety Committee that’s tackling all of those. A bunch of scientists advising them what they can and can’t do.”

“I should have invested in Red Tape Company before all this kicked off.”

Buddy laughed at the joke, which showed just how desperate we were for anything even resembling humor.

“Let’s get down to business,” I said. “We’re through with the worst of this pandemic, and good riddance.”

“No kidding,” Buddy said.

OCTOBER

“No,” I said as soon as Buddy walked in the room. His mask was dangling from one ear, not even making the effort to cover his mouth at least, let alone his nose.

He rolled his eyes and looped the mask back over his other ear. “Jingly Jehoshaphat! Happy now?”

“Happy? No, I’m not happy. What happened to the Buddy I knew who was so worried about me heading off to Canada?”

“He caught wise to the fact that this virus was overblown to begin with. All those statistics are just a lie they’re using to control us. And what happened to the Dasher who was fine going on that trip, anyway?”

“He spent two months in the same room and got his head on right,” I said. “If we’re going to have half a hope of staying open and avoiding another shut down, then you elves are going to have to wear your masks. All. The. Time.”

“What do you mean ‘You elves’?” Buddy asked, his face clouding over in anger. “Do you know I almost got trampled by a reindeer on my way to this meeting? You all stomp around like you own the entire North Pole. Well we’re sick of it, and next month, we’re going to let you know just how we feel once we’re in the election booth.”

“The elections? You’ve been watching too much news from down south. These are union elections, Buddy. They’re aren’t going to change a thing.”

“Well—well—well—that’s what you think! You reindeer are just using this COVID thing as a way to grab more power for yourselves. Masks? Please. Scientists have gone back and forth on masking so much over this ‘pandemic’, I’m half tempted to start wrapping them and giving them to kids who asked for yo-yo’s.”

“They’re trying their best,” I said, “the same as any other sane being. But when you anti-maskers go around ignoring the advice, it just means this disease gets a bigger foothold. It makes it harder for everyone. So why don’t you stop just thinking about yourself and start thinking about everyone else for once?”

“Why did you even call this coal-blasted meeting?” Buddy asked, literally getting on top of the table and marching over to look me straight in the eyes.

I backed up a few feet. Had to keep the social distancing. “It’s October, Buddy. Or did you forget? We’ve got the entire North Pole complex resting on us keeping things going, and we have to—”

“Isn’t it amazing that whenever there’s work to be done, suddenly it’s ‘us’ and ‘we,’ but whenever decisions are going to be made, it’s all about ‘I’ and ‘you.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He folded his arms and lifted his chin. “It means the preparations for Christmas can wait until we elves have a bigger seat at the planning table. Until the elections are over and you reindeer are put back in your place. And until that happens, I’m not wasting my breath talking to you for one more minute.”

True to his word, he stormed out and didn’t look back.

DECEMBER

“How are you holding up?” Buddy asked. He’d changed the last month. The fight was out of him, and his suit hung on him like a he was a turtle in a shell two sizes too big.

I gave him a half shrug, all I was really able to muster at this point.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s about where I am too. You remember the Keebler family down in baked goods? One of the youngest went to a Thanksgiving party with a few of her friends and brought it back. Now five hundred twelve of them are down with a fever and more. The numbers just don’t look great, and Dobby in accounting said we don’t have enough vaccines ordered to cover even our first responders. But even with all that, I still have half the union complaining about the other half, either thinking they’re not wearing their masks enough or whining about having to wear the masks at all.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “The reindeer games were canceled for this year and next, and half the herd is protesting it, saying this whole thing is just made up.”

We sat in silence for a full minute, neither one of us really having the desire to do anything other than exist.

“So why’d you call this meeting?” I asked.

“Oh,” Buddy said. “Right. It’s about the Big Man.”

“What about him?”

“What do you mean, what about him?” Buddy snapped, a little of the old edge back in his voice. “He’s a two hundred and fifty-year-old senior citizen who started watching 24-hour news stations from around the world to keep up to date during the pandemic. He liked the BBC for a while, but it was too gloomy, so he settled on Fox News, instead. I’ll give you two guesses what I’m worried about.”

My jaw dropped, though Buddy wouldn’t be able to see that behind my mask. “He’s not a—a—”

“COVID denier? You bet your twinkle toes he is. Here the entire North Pole has been bending over backwards the whole year to make sure he and the Mrs. keep safe from all of this, and now he’s insisting on going out for the Big Night. Says he wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I scrambled to wrap my head around it. “But we developed all those backup plans. The elves and the reindeer were going to go in shifts, and . . . He doesn’t care, does he?”

Buddy shook his head slowly.

“And so he’s going to go out anyway.”

Now Buddy nodded, his elf face grim. “We’ve got as much chance of stopping him as the Keebler family has of getting better by tomorrow.”

I shoved back from the table, kicking over a potted candy cane plant and ramming my antlers into the wall three times in quick succession. I roared in frustration. “I’m so sick of this year. Every time I think it’s gotten as bad as it can get, something else comes along and proves me wrong. It’s torn my family apart, it’s ruined my job, it’s taken over my life, and now it’s even threatening the Big Man. If he goes out there, there’s no way he’s not going to get it. All that time in everyone’s actual house?”

Buddy got up and came to stand next to me, putting his hand on my forelock, though he couldn’t even reach past the first joint. He didn’t say anything. Just patted me a little and waited.

And somehow, that was enough. Maybe it was the physical contact after being apart from everyone for so long. Maybe it was the way the pandemic had worn me down. But for the first time, I looked at Buddy not as an elf, but as a person. Someone who was like me. Facing the same figgy pudding and dealing with it as best as I could. Buddy wasn’t my enemy. Why would I want to find another enemy when I had so many to deal with already, from COVID 19 to phony stories posted on Glitter and more? My breathing slowed and I got myself more under control. I stepped back to the conference table. “Sorry about the damage to the wall.”

Buddy got back in his chair and came back up to table level. “It was getting old anyway. We’ll have it patched back up and better than ever by tomorrow. You know us. We’re elves.”

“Thanks, Buddy.”

“No,” he said. “I need to thank you too. This year has been hard on all of us, and I guess there’s some things I’ve said and done that I’m not too proud of. I know I shared some things online that weren’t very nice, and I don’t think I’ve been doing much to solve the problems.”

The two of us stood in silence for a while, both of us lost in our thoughts. But when the meeting resumed, somehow it was different this time than any of the thousands of meetings I’d had with Buddy over the years. Not just in a pandemicky sort of way, either. The two of us were talking and actually coming up with ideas for solutions. The Big Man couldn’t deliver presents if he wasn’t conscious, for example, and between the two of us, we could arrange for his eggnog to be a little “special” this year. Once he was passed out in his sled, the reindeer could take care of the driving, and the elves could handle the delivering.

We weren’t enough to get the job done on our own, but together, we’d be able to manage it all. Was the meeting perfect from start to finish? Did we never argue once? No, but the best sort of meetings aren’t about agreeing on everything. They’re about spreading your thoughts out for the group to pick them over, so that the end result is stronger than what you could have come up with on your own. It wasn’t about one side winning or one side losing. It was realizing we were all on the same side, and we’d win or lose together.

Did Buddy and I become lifelong friends after that meeting? No. A simple pat on my leg wasn’t enough to change centuries of bickering. But we were able to see each other in a different light. Able to recognize that we’d always been on the same team, and we always would be. And when we disagreed and traded barbs just for the sake of seeing the other embarrassed or lessened, it hurt the whole process.

In the end, we survived that Christmas. I’m not going to say we flourished, because nothing that came out of 2020 could be said to do that, other than COVID19. But the presents got delivered, and Christmas morning came with most of the happiness and squeals of delight it usually did.

Of course, it also came with a very grumpy Santa Claus who had to be reassured he delivered all the presents the night before without remembering any of it. Did we feel good about gaslighting Santa? Not entirely, but at least he was still around to be gaslit.

And while the whole process hadn’t been perfect, looking back I could definitely see a difference in what life was like before COVID and what it was like after. We had all been changed by that year. Some of it was from all the time we spent alone. Some of it was due to all the changes we’d had to make at the North Pole and elsewhere. The pandemic didn’t finish as soon as Christmas was over, of course. It took much more time than that. But once we’d made the shift in mindset from us vs. them to just plain us, it became so much easier to deal with.

The elves might have still been shifty eyed little tricksters, but they were my shifty eyed little tricksters, and that made all the difference.

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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 Late Can You Sleep In?

Man. I remember the heady days of college, when I could sleep in until 10 or 11 easy. (I could also stay up late and not really pay the price for it later, but we’ll ignore that for now.) These days, I don’t have to set my alarm, because I feel lucky if I can sleep until 7am without waking up.

Some of that is due to having a much more regular sleep schedule, I realize, but a whole lot of it is probably more due to a general feeling of unrest and anxiety I have. (One I assume many of you share, though I hope it hasn’t affected your sleep routine as much.) I wake up each morning around 6am, and the first thing I think about is why I can’t sleep any longer than that.

It’s not that I’m not tired. I’ve got plenty of tired to go around. My eyes burn and I really want to take a nap most of the time. It also leaves me with a much shorter temper than I usually have. Frustrating.

The good news is that I generally don’t have a problem falling asleep (as long as I manage to get to bed before 11pm or so.) Insomnia used to be a big problem for me, and speaking from experience I’d much rather waking up early than just lying in bed wishing I could fall asleep in the first place . . .

Honestly, if it weren’t for the bit about being so tired, I’d be pretty fine with waking up early each day. (A far cry from earlier feelings I used to have around it.) When I wake up early, I can get a lot done. It feels like I have a head start on the day. It’s quieter, and I think more clearly. If I were sleeping until around 6:45am, I think that would be just fine. On the few times I’ve managed to sleep until 8am or so, I’ve felt like my day was just way too short. In an ideal world, I think I’d go to bed each night at 11 and wake up at 7.

How about you? Are you still able to sleep in, or am I not the only one who’s having trouble getting a full night’s rest?

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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.

Today’s Project: Family Keepsake Letterpress Drawer

When I was growing up, my mom bought an antique letterpress drawer one day. She used it to glue in keepsakes from across our family’s history. It still hangs on the wall in her house, and I always thought it was a really good idea. So back in around 2008, I bought one of my own at an auction. It was already equipped with a glass cover and hooks to hang it on the wall, so it was pretty much good to go right off the bat.

Since then, we’ve been buying small keepsakes from whatever trips we go on as a family. Souvenirs that would fit into one of the compartments in the drawer. We’ve got pins from Niagara Falls and Nauvoo and London, keychains from Paris and Hershey, a small stained glass owl from Krakow. That sort of thing. We’ve also held onto things that would fit from our family’s history. For example, a few of Ferris’s puppy teeth.

It’s worked out very well, with one serious flaw: any time you bumped the cabinet, all the pieces would fall out.

Now, this wasn’t a really big problem, because it’s on the wall, and so it generally didn’t get bumped. However, it was to the point where even opening it up to add something new risked having it all come Jenga-ing down on you, so we were stacking new things on top of the cabinet instead of putting them on display. (Not nearly as effective for the supposed purpose.) Plus, we had begun to run out of room for new items.

For two or three years, it’s been on my list to hot glue the items in place (something my mom did right away with hers). But it never really rose very high on the list, and so it didn’t get done. Tuesday, I fixed that. I took the drawer down, took out all the items, separated out the ones we couldn’t remember what they went with (there were a lot of “keepsake rocks” my kids had compiled over the years), and glued into place the rest.

It was fun going through all of them and remembering where we got them, and the finished product looks much, much better. Now I’m going through and making a guide for the display, so other people can easily see what we got where and when. (Nothing a few hours with Excel can’t solve!)

Anyway. I’ve always been pleased with it, and no more so than now that it’s all neat and orderly. It makes getting souvenirs both cheaper and easier, and we actually have a spot to put them all and remember them, rather than sticking something on a shelf somewhere and dusting it every week. If you’re looking for a way to keep your family’s memories in some sort of order, I heartily recommend this one.

Sorry about the glare, but you get the idea.

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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.

Keeping Things in Perspective

I’ve written in the past about the importance of taking a measured response to challenges in life. One essay I wrote about the importance of avoiding digging in too deep around certain arguments (particularly religious ones) still resonates today with me. (Though perhaps I wouldn’t say I’d like to backhand certain people these days . . .) I’ve also written about the danger of conspiracy theories. So I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised and disappointed me when I read about both those issues coming together the past few days in my own religion.

The inciting incident seemed (to me) to be fairly tame: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a message Monday congratulating Joe Biden on his win and thanking Donald Trump for his service. This is pretty boilerplate in terms of language, and they released similar messages in 2016 and 2012 (and another in 2009 right when Obama was sworn in.) Probably in recognition of how divisive this election has been, they waited to release that message until the Electoral College had voted, rather than doing it soon after the election’s end.

No big deal, right?

Except Donald Trump has continued to bang the “This election was rigged!” drum as hard as he can since the morning after the election. He has constantly claimed he had incontrovertible proof about it, and that he would ultimately prevail. However, in practice, that proof has failed to pass muster in practically every single courtroom it’s been heard. Let’s just say that for an election that’s supposedly so blatantly “rigged,” there’s a shocking absence of real evidence of that rigging. (Setting aside the absurdity of the Democrats going to the trouble of rigging an election and then failing to wrest full control of the government, though I suppose you can feed that into the conspiracy theory to say that’s what they’d do to make sure they didn’t get caught. There’s no reasoning with conspiracy theorists. Period.)

And I know people have claimed Trump should have his day in court, and that he was entitled to protest as long as there was some question about the result, but the fallout from the Church’s statement illustrates the sort of harm Trump continues to wreck on this country. You had church members on the Church’s Facebook page posting pictures of their ripped up temple recommends in protest. Things got so bad the Church disabled comments for the post completely, removing all of them. People accusing the leaders of being part of the conspiracy and saying they were done with any church that would support Biden in any way.

Basically, you’ve got people who, when asked to choose whether to believe their church leaders whom they’ve followed for decades or Donald Trump, chose to go with Trump. Although note that they weren’t really asked to follow their church leaders. It was just the low bar of “moving on with post-election life and conceding defeat”.

I do hope that after some time has gone by, cooler heads will prevail, and these dramatic stands and online diatribes will quietly be deleted and backed away from. Certainly there’s something to be said to waiting to make ultimatums until you’ve had a while to process whatever you’re wanting to ultimate about, if you know what I mean. Though I’m also fairly certain Trump will be conceding nothing and will continue to be an active force in politics for the near future. He was already into conspiracies with the birther movement, and that was before he’d had four years of being president.

So perhaps these church members really will decide to leave the church for good. I hope that isn’t the case. I’ve already had some people unfriend me on Facebook, I assume due to the stances I took over Trump and the election. (It was one of those “I thought we were friends” situation where I didn’t find out they’d unfriended me until I went to search for them and discovered that was the case.) I’m sorry to see them go. I may disagree with people around many issues, but it’s very rare that I’m ready to terminate a friendship due to a disagreement. (That only has happened when the disagreement has morphed into nastiness and name calling and continued sniping, which I don’t have time for.)

Time will tell, I suppose.

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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.

The Perfect Place to Die: Cover Reveal!

When does it start to feel like publishing a book is going to become a reality? Definitely when the book finally has a cover. Before that, it all feels like a big abstract exercise. You work on editing and bounce ideas back and forth, but there’s something about seeing the cover all come together that makes everything click into place, right?

People, I have a book coming out in August. How do I know? Because I’ve got a cover to prove it!

THE PERFECT PLACE TO DIE is YA horror/thriller. So this is definitely not in the same vein as either of my previous books, outside of the audience. How’s it being described? Here’s what’s on the back:

Stalking Jack the Ripper meets Devil in the White City. In order to save her sister, Zuretta takes a job at a notorious house of horrors–but she might never escape.

Seventeen-year-old Zuretta had resigned herself to a quiet life in Utah. But when her younger sister, Ruby, travels to Chicago during the World’s Fair, and disappears, Zuretta leaves home to find her.

But Chicago is more dangerous and chaotic than she imagined. She doesn’t know where to start until she learns of her sister’s last place of employment…a mysterious hotel known as The Castle.

Zuretta takes a job there hoping to learn more. And before long she realizes the hotel isn’t what it seems. Women disappear at an alarming rate, she hears crying from the walls, and terrifying whispers follow her at night. In the end, she finds herself up against one of the most infamous mass murderers in American history—and his custom-built death trap.

And with a plot like that, what better way to introduce it than a cover like this?

It’s up on Goodreads now if you want to add it to your reading lists. I can’t wait for you all to read 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.

Upgrading My Home Theater Speakers

It’s been 12 years since I first got a surround sound system. Back then, it was a huge leap for me, and I found a good deal on a quality Onkyo system (something sort of like this one, though mine was a 7.1 system.) And for those twelve years, things have been good. My AV receiver had to be replaced about six years ago (and I expect to have to upgrade it again at some point), but it was great to have the surround sound going for my media viewing experiences.

That said, when we switched the movie room to a larger space, I noticed that the small speakers I’d gotten back in 2008 were no longer really cutting it. Especially for the voice track on films (which runs through the center channel): I had to have subtitles on for almost everything to be able to always understand what people were saying. Also, the subwoofer wasn’t as woofy as I really wanted.

So I started looking into ways to upgrade the sound. From my research, bumping up just the center speaker wouldn’t be a good idea, since it would create a really bad conflict with the front left and front right speakers. You want those paired if at all possible, so that the sound at the front of the room (where most of the sounds come from) is balanced. A bigger subwoofer is easier to get on its own. So I started looking into potential speakers and deals (because who wants to pay full price on anything?)

For a lot of the research I do into things like this, I use Reddit pretty heavily. Reddit does a great job of connecting people who are interested in the same topic, giving you a place to ask questions and read FAQs that aren’t influenced by paid reviews and salespeople. Is it perfect? No. But it’s an easy way to find quality information quickly. There’s a Home Theater reddit with a great FAQ that gives a number of recommendations around speakers.

Once I started looking at the actual recommendations, however, I discovered it was much more complicated than I initially assumed. I didn’t want bookshelf speakers–I wanted tower speakers that would be more robust. But when I looked at the actual dimensions of those suckers . . . they’re huge. Some of them are more than two feet deep and a foot wide, and the idea of having such big speakers in my room was . . . less than ideal. (Funny side story: I kept seeing the abbreviation WAF, and I had no idea what it meant. People talked about how important it was, and how it was necessary to make compromises in some cases due to WAF, but no one said what it actually meant. After some googling, I discovered it stood for “Wife Approval Factor.” Which makes a ton of sense . . .)

For a while, I was thinking I’d have to compromise with nicer bookshelf speakers, just because of size issues. But in the end, I went through all their recommendations, paying attention to the dimensions. I found some potential speakers that would work, and then checked their Black Friday deals. (Checking out the subwoofers, as well.) Long story short (too late), I found some tower speakers I liked (these, with the accompanying center speaker), as well as a subwoofer, that all were on a good 30%+ off sale, and I pulled the trigger.

Actually installing the speakers was pretty straightforward. The wiring was all there, and I just had to take off the old speakers and hook up the new ones. The difference (to me) is remarkable. The sound is much fuller and I no longer need subtitles for everything I’m watching. (Huzzah!) The subwoofer really shakes the room now when it’s called for, and it’s made my home theater feel more like a real theater.

This essentially bumps up my speaker system to “mid-range” for the primary speakers. (I’m leaving the surround speakers as Onkyos for now, because I just don’t feel like they need the extra kick.) It’s hard for me to believe I’d ever want to go to high end speakers. The cost would be 5-10 times what I just paid, and I don’t think I’d get that sort of use out of them. So for now, I’m happy to have my system where I’d like it to end up, from an audio perspective. (Ultimately, I see myself upgrading the AV receiver to an 8k model and getting a new projector at that time, as well. But that’s for the future . . .)

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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.