Bryce Moore's Blog, page 76
November 19, 2020
Copyright, Royalties, and Sausage Making
I woke up this morning to see my Twitter feed covered in something other than politics and COVID. Suddenly, the focus has switched over to Disney and its refusal to pay an author royalties. In a nutshell, Disney seems to be arguing that when it bought Lucasfilm, it bought the rights to print all the old Star Wars books, but didn’t need to take on the responsibility for honoring the contracts of the authors who wrote those books.
This is obviously more than a little distressing. If a company the size of Disney is able to get away with this argument, it sets such a terrible precedent for all writers. A company could just sell the rights to a novel to a sister company and then duck out of ever paying the author any royalties. If that were the case, authors would no longer have any incentive to sell any of their rights to anyone.
Book publishing seems really clean on the surface. Authors write the books, agents sell the books, editors help get those books ready for publication, and then the publishing houses pay for the books to be produced, and readers get to happily consume those final products. Readers pay for the books, and that money then gets shuffled around between everyone who was involved in the process.
But the longer I’ve been directly involved in this process, the more I’ve realized that often that chain breaks down. That when you look to see how the sausage actually gets made, it can sometimes turn you off eating it altogether. Do I have any company actively not paying me royalties at the moment for books that they’re selling? Well, I’m not going to say I do, but I’m also not going to say I don’t, and that’s about all I’ll get into at the moment. Let’s just say I can relate to what Alan Dean Foster is going through, albeit on a much smaller scale.
You write your book and put it out there, and you celebrate when it finds a home. But that home is sometimes temporary. Your precious book becomes a commodity that’s sold and traded as companies shift hands. It can be disconcerting and bewildering, and sometimes it stops making any sense altogether.
Which is why I’m very glad that writing books isn’t my main line of work. I’d love it if I could get to the point where it could be, but stuff like this just makes me happy to remember I get a paycheck as a librarian . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 18, 2020
Planning a Break
Here we are, halfway through November, and I still haven’t taken much in the way of vacation. (For a variety of reasons. There was just so much uncertainty around the future that I didn’t feel comfortable taking a vacation over the summer, and the ones I’d had planned all fell through. I wanted to hold onto vacation days in case something more extreme happened. Many higher education institutions had been implementing furloughs, for example, and I’d rather get paid for time off than not.)
In any case, the bottom line is that I’m going to be taking a fair number of days off in the next month and a half. Knowing myself, if I don’t do something special, there’s a good chance I’ll blow through all of those days and get to the other side wondering what exactly I did with all those days. (Not that I’m planning on just working non-stop through the break, but still. I know I will be disappointed if I do nothing other than play video games and dink around the house checking Reddit.)
Enter my innate desire to plan just about everything. I like to sit down ahead of a break or an event and picture what I’d like to be able to say about it after it’s done. My kids can confirm that I’ve frequently posed the question: “If we had an awesome day today, what would we say at the end of it that made it so awesome?” Once you can define that, then it becomes much easier to reach that goal.
I would like to get some things done this break. I want to clean the house and declutter a fair bit. I can picture it in my head: a house where there’s less clutter. It looks peaceful. Relaxing. So I’ve already sat down and made a big long list of all the rooms I want to declutter and clean, as well as a list of places in those rooms that need decluttering and cleaning the most. Will I get to all of them? Who knows. But I know that by having the list and working toward it, I have a better chance at getting to more of them than I would have if I didn’t have the list.
Of course, I’ve also made a list of other things I want to do. Treats I want to bake. Activities I want to do. I know those lists probably sound like torture to some of you, but I know I feel more accomplished when I’m actually getting things done. With these lists, I can now go through my days off and pick a few things to do from the list each day. Not so many that I feel overwhelmed, but enough to feel like Something Got Done. And then when I’m done with that something, I can rest, knowing full well that I’m making progress toward my ultimate goal. It’s the same way I get entire books written. Once I write 1,000 words in a day, I’m good to go. I know I’m on track.
What am I going to do with all of the clutter? One of the things that’s been stopping me is that many goodwill stores aren’t taking any items right now. That’s been enough of a speed bump to stop me from making real progress. However, I know for a fact that each year at this time, I will begin to get boxes. Lots of boxes. So many boxes from so many places, bringing in things I’ve ordered for Christmas. Usually it’s a big pain to break all the boxes down. My current goal is to leave the boxes up and instead fill them with things I no longer want. Stuff I’m getting rid of. That way, it can all be packed and ready to be donated whenever places are taking donations again. If that’s earlier, great. If not, it doesn’t matter. It will all be tidied and ready for the future.
So wish me luck. Here’s hoping I get a fair bit off that list before January rolls around . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 17, 2020
A Tale of Two Pandemics: March vs. November
I’ve been reading accounts from doctors and hospitals about just how bad things are getting in many parts of the US (and the world), and it struck me today how stark a difference this November is compared to what we were looking at in March, and how that might affect our December, January, and February.
When the pandemic first really started ballooning out of control, there was a lot of panic. There were tons of unknowns, and so people responded as if it was the end of the world. Or at least the end of the toilet paper supply chain, in any case. Did we over-react in March? Well, yeah. Justifiably so, I’d say. The stories coming out of Italy and New York City were so bleak. We wanted to make sure that didn’t happen across the rest of the world. Remember what that felt like?
Compare that to today, where a lot of people are convinced the pandemic was just a big hoax, or at the least overblown. Where masks are viewed by many as more of a political theater as opposed to an actual safety measure. Where we’ve had plenty of time to acclimate ourselves to the concept that many people will die, and suddenly deaths are relative.
(I can’t imagine using the same rhetoric people use to dismiss COVID deaths to dismiss other events in history. 9/11 killed around 3,000 people. It affected just a couple of passenger planes. By COVID reasoning, we shouldn’t be worried about that at all. After all, way more people die of heart attacks or the seasonal flu. World War II? 85 million people. So what? That’s only about 14 million deaths per year. There are 40 million abortions every year, give or take.)
Now consider that on April 1st, the US had had 209,692 cases of COVID identified. We’d had 6,476 deaths. Total. (Even a month later, we were still “only” up to 67,229.) Italy? They’d had 110,559 cases and 13,195 deaths. Those were the numbers when so many people in the nation and the world were feeling hopeless and grim.
Compare those numbers to today. The US is averaging 1,170 deaths per day. We’ve had over 250,000 total. Italy is averaging 569 deaths. Its peak was 817 per day. Granted, those are across the entire country as opposed to isolated areas, but the trajectory is exactly the same.
Remember all the people cheering for the hospital workers on their way back from their shifts each day? These days, I don’t see nearly the same sort of respect for those people. Instead, I see more disdain for the demands people wear a mask. I see more dithering about the “right to not wear a mask.”
We can know with a fair degree of certainty how many people who get COVID in the US today will die in three weeks. 1.8%. Right now we’re averaging 158,000 cases per day in America. While our current death rate is 1,170/day, three weeks from now it will be around 2,844. (You can see all the math at the link I posted there.) That’s baked in. Statistically, those deaths have already happened, as bleak as it feels to say that. Our peak so far has been 2,259 deaths per day on average. So we’re going to blow right by that, no matter what we do. And it will get much much worse unless we all start really taking it seriously.
But look around. I just don’t see anyone taking it more seriously than they’re taking it right now. Not before Thanksgiving, at least. There will come a tipping point. There has to, right? A point where finally we as a country recognize this for what it is. But I’ve been reading both CNN and Fox News regularly since the election, just to see how two sides of the country might be viewing what we’re going through. CNN gives a fair bit of credence to this. Fox, much less. They’re much more concerned with Trump’s rallies, his legal challenges to the election, and what might happen in Georgia. Yes, they cover the vaccine news, but it’s presented in a “the cure is almost here” light.
I don’t want to take hope away from anyone, and I am very happy good vaccines are in the pipeline. But that’s all the more reason to take the next few months as seriously as we can. The pandemic is running on a big portion of individual exceptionalism right now. The thought that if I do something different, it’s not a big deal, because it’s just me. I can decide to not wear a mask or go to a party or have a Thanksgiving dinner with “just a few other families,” and it’s going to be fine. But you take that approach and magnify it millions of times, and you’ve got serious problems.
In so many ways, our past determines our future. I understand why people aren’t taking COVID as seriously now. It’s more familiar. It’s been around, and so it doesn’t seem as scary. But the numbers we’re facing now would have shocked us into much more action eight months ago. I’m hoping they spur us to more action today sooner rather than later.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 16, 2020
My Orange Juice Approved List
Call me a purist, but when it comes to orange juice, there are only a few ways that I think you should consume it. In fact, it would be easy to assume a post like this doesn’t even need to be written. But then I come across people who are using orange juice in decidedly unapproved ways, and I just can’t remain silent. It is my obligation–no, my duty–to speak out.
Case in point: Saturday, I came into the kitchen to see one of my children eating granola. Nothing wrong there. Good old fashioned crunchy goodness, right? Except they were eating their granola . . . with orange juice. I realize a number of you still don’t quite grasp the horror. After all, multiple sugary cereal commercials reminded us all growing up that orange juice is part of a complete breakfast, right? Nothing like having some granola and maybe some sips of orange juice from a glass next to your granola.
Except this child was eating orange juice with granola. Meaning, taking a nice bowl of granola and milk. Now take out the milk and replace it with orange juice. I apologize to those of you with weak constitutions, but that child isn’t the only one with such flagrant orange juice violations. On my mission in Germany, one of my companions would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches . . . and then dunk them in orange juice.
No, my friends. This sort of food abuse simply won’t do. What’s next? Pouring orange juice over pizza? Spaghetti and orange juice? Chocolate cake with orange juice? A tuna fish orange juice smoothie?
Not on my watch. If you want to safely consume orange juice, here are the approved ways to do so:
In a glass. By itself. In some sort of a smoothie. This smoothie may contain fruits and possibly some vegetables if you’re feeling particularly healthy. No solids shall be added to the smoothie that is not fruit or vegetable based. Additional juices or milk is allowed, but don’t go crazy.
And that’s it. It’s a short list, so it shouldn’t be that hard to master. Any time you’re tempted to veer off the list and add something funky to your orange juice, don’t. End of story.
Friends don’t let friends abuse orange juice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 13, 2020
A Socially Distant Thanksgiving
There’s a string of articles appearing online right now, saying that if you’re going to get together with family for Thanksgiving, then you all need to start quarantining . . . yesterday. I’ll be honest: I don’t think getting together with family who don’t live in your actual house is a good idea at this point, period. Denisa and I had been thinking about going down to Pennsylvania like we usually do, but in the end after discussing it with family, we all decided it just wasn’t for the best.
But what if everyone who was coming agreed to quarantine first? I don’t think that’s realistic. Working in a library and talking with public library directors across the state, I just know full well how mask usage and social distancing is being handled by different people. I would not want to rely on someone else’s definition of what “quarantine” means when it comes to this.
Now, I realize that there are many of you out there who disagree with me on this. There’s also probably a number of you thinking about getting together “just with close family,” somehow thinking that limiting it that much will be enough. However, all the research I’ve looked into on the subject indicates getting together in small groups for hours in the same indoor location is exactly the sort of setting for prime COVID spread. Sure, it might seem at first glance that if it’s just you getting together, it’s no big deal, but if you expand that “just a couple very close family members getting together” to a national level, then it becomes much more concerning.
So what will we be doing? Making Thanksgiving dinner on our own this year. Yes, it won’t be nearly as much fun as all the other Thanksgivings we’ve done, but this is one time when missing out on some fun seems worth it, when the cost if we do it another way is potentially infecting and killing our loved ones. Things are looking good for getting a vaccine more widely available in the spring. At this point, it seems to me the main goal shifts to getting through the winter in as good of shape as possible.
Kind of a downer, but I think it’s necessary this time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
If you’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.
November 12, 2020
When Do You Hit Peak Family?
Sort of an introspective post today. Tomas has a little over a year and a half left until he graduates and can go on a mission. I have a niece out on a mission now, and quite a few other nieces and nephews who are already out on their own. So it’s becoming increasingly clear that this family Denisa and I have spent sixteen years putting together is going to spend the next while getting scattered to who knows where.
Which is the point of having kids. I get it. I’m not living with my parents anymore, after all. Denisa’s not even in the same country as her family. You have kids and do your best to give them a good childhood and a good base to launch themselves off into whatever it is they want to do. But it’s still definitely bittersweet. This pandemic time has been a great opportunity to spend time together as a family, and I think we’ve at least used it well for that purpose.
But it all has been reflecting back on when I was growing up, and what time of my life I’d consider “peak family,” meaning the gang was all assembled, and things were clipping along at full speed, without any slowing down for the upcoming departures ahead.
At first, I would think peak family is reached right before the oldest child heads off to college or out of the house or wherever. After all, that’s the point in time when everyone is as mature as they’re going to get when they’re all under one roof. But the more I think back on my time growing up, the more I’m not sure that’s right. Kids don’t leave the house all at once. They become increasingly independent, so that they’re out of the house on their own more and more as the years go by. School activities. Jobs. Hanging out with friends. Until this pandemic hit, Tomas was out and about as much as Denisa or I was. Maybe more. Daniela was also getting a pretty full schedule, between sports and music and time with her friends.
So is the peak earlier than that? Maybe it’s when everyone’s still mostly one unit, doing everything together at all times? In that case, it would probably come when the oldest child’s in middle school or junior high. Still too young to be left alone for long swathes of time. Especially not when there are very young children at home to be watched. Sure, they might go out to a birthday party now and then, but for the most part, it’s all for one and one for all.
But that doesn’t really feel entirely right, either. Part of the real joy of being a parent (for me) has come from watching my kids grow up. Getting glimpses of who they’re going to be when they’re adults. Younger kids have their own personalities, no doubt, but they’re also really dependent on what you want and like. Case in point: Tuesday night we let Tomas and Daniela choose what they wanted to do. Tomas played some computer games with his friends, but Daniela decided she wanted to watch a movie. “An old movie. Something really good, like His Girl Friday.” She’s really developing into a movie buff on her own. We watched “Bringing Up Baby,” and she thought it was fantastic. Because it is. Seriously.
So can you really feel like your family is at its peak when the kids are still dominated by the parents?
The more I think about the question, the more convinced I am that “peak family” is an illusion. A family is always in flux, and trying to hold on to any part of it and think of it as “Well, this is it. This is the peak, and it’s all downhill from here” isn’t just depressing. It’s wrong. But you feel like it’s right, because as a kid, your family can feel like it’s a constant. Like it’s always been there and always will be there, and so when it starts changing, that can be kind of disturbing. But as a parent, you know that it’s always been changing. First it was just Denisa and me. Then we added Tomas four years later, than Daniela four years after that and MC five years after that. Heck, even adding Ferris to the mix has been a change for our family.
And has the family I grew up with even reached its peak yet? That’s so hard to define. We’ve lost members along the way. Uncles. Step mothers. Grandparents. But we’ve also added members through marriages and births. I’m not as close to all of them as I have been in the past, but when we get together, there’s still that real bond, and social media, for all its flaws, does a pretty good job keeping us all connected.
I suppose, in the end, a family is very much like the seasons. There are definite stages to it, though there will be cold days in summer and warm days in winter, and the boundaries between those stages can really be muddled. So maybe you can have “peak autumn” and “peak spring,” but there will be other peaks in between and afterward. If you get too tied up in trying to identify which stage you’re in at any one time and worrying about it going away, then you miss out on actually enjoying where you are in the moment.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 10, 2020
Creativity in the Time of COVID
I’m tired, folks. I know I’m not alone in the feeling, but there are definitely days that I just feel totally worn out. Like the only thing moving me forward in all of my different endeavors is the elaborate system of daily goals I’ve got worked out for myself. But there are definitely days like today, where I know I have a goal (write a blog post every weekday), and I just come up to that goal and stare at it for a good long while before I actually muster up the gumption to get it done. And that’s with something as straightforward as a blog post. (Seriously. I have so many things to say about so many different things, usually it’s not that hard to take ten minutes to jot down some ideas about something or other.)
Creative writing? Yikes. That can be really rough. When you’re already battling depression for yourself, concerns about your family, troubling news in the world, worry around your job, election results and the emotional fallout of that with your friends, trying to push forward and get 1,000 words written each day can feel daunting to say the least. Often because I’m my biggest critic. I’ll write something, and then I’ll just see all the reasons it’s bad. There are many voices in my head, and sometimes most of them are telling me to stop what I’m doing.
So yeah. Tired. And again, probably something most of you are also dealing with.
There are blog posts that I’ve started to write and just given up on, mainly because I don’t have it in me to police the comments that would come out because of them. It feels like the coward’s way out, but I have to make some concessions for my sanity.
While I’m generally pretty good at giving other people advice, in some ways I’m very bad at taking my own advice. I know I would be telling me to go easy on myself, for all the reasons I’ve already listed. But at the same time, what are my other options? I already took a few weeks off from writing at various points over quarantine. I don’t like not writing. It makes me feel like I’m failing. (In many ways, writing is like exercising. I don’t like the act itself, but it feels great to have done it each day.)
This post doesn’t have much of a point, other than to complain. Though wait. Strike that. I think my point would be to remember two things. First, that we are all going through different difficult stages of this pandemic, often at different times. We’re all getting worn out, for a variety of reasons. And at the same time, we’re also all perhaps less patient with each other than we might be under normal circumstances. This makes it doubly important to push through that knee-jerk inclination to tell people exactly what we think of what they’re doing or saying, and instead treat everyone with a softer touch.
Including ourselves.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 9, 2020
2020 Election: Rigged or Not?
So here we are. As someone who has been vocally against Trump since the Republican primaries in 2016, I’m naturally more than a little pleased that he lost the election. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. I’m also not shocked that he’s not conceding. That’s never really been in his nature, and I think it’s fairly likely that he will go to his grave insisting the 2020 elections were rigged, and that the Democrats cheated to get him out.
The real question for me is what Trump’s supporters will do about it.
Again, for many of them, I think they’re going to continue to believe the election was rigged, regardless of what happens. And let me be clear: I have no interest in having Biden win due to shenanigans. I believe in a fair and free election. I also believe that’s what we had in 2020, but I am open to any actual evidence that comes to light indicating this wasn’t the case. Note, however, that I’m looking for actual evidence. Not conspiracy memes. Not claims. Not hearsay. For Trump really to have lost due to a rigged election, what would have had to happen?
In Arizona, there’s a 20,000 vote difference at the moment.In Nevada, it’s 35,000 votes.Georgia has about 10,000 more votes for Biden.Pennsylvania has around 45,000.In Michigan, 145,000.In Wisconsin, 20,000 votes separate them.
So let’s assume for the moment that the Democrats really did decide to rig the election, and that they conspired to turn multiple states against Trump using fake ballots or voting in the name of dead people. They’d want to do it in multiple states, mind you, because it’s not as if they’d know ahead of time just how many fake ballots they’d have to submit to overcome the deficit. Then again, I suppose they could have churned out new fake ballots to overcome the deficit after the fact? Do that in key states, and then voila! Biden wins.
I think it’s likelier that they’d rig the election after the fact rather than ahead of time. It would be simpler and more likely to succeed. So let’s say, as Trump is saying, that as the election results came in, the Democrats decided to submit phony ballots in just enough states to make Trump lose. It would have to be in the close states, since they were the ones that were still up in the air for days. The easiest would be Pennsylvania, right?
45,000 votes don’t just magically appear out of nowhere. That’s a substantial chunk of ballots you’ve got to fabricate. And then you have to do it in a way that you won’t get caught. Because all those voters are on record as having voted. You can go back after the fact and check to see if they’re, you know . . . living.
And from what I can see, the Trumpers are out in force, trying to find proof of just that. That’s their right. I’m skeptical they’ll be successful, for a couple of reasons:
If the Democrats did, indeed, “fix” the election, they did a horrendous job of it. They fell short of controlling the senate in a few key races. If they have the wherewithal to influence the presidential vote, why didn’t they fix the senatorial vote while they were at it?All the claims of voter fraud that have come forward at the moment have been disproven. I have yet to read of a single case of it actually happening this year.All the claims of shady counting have been disproven as well. The Trumpers have brought the cases to court, and the cases have been uniformly dismissed. The closest they’ve come to a whiff of evidence is that counters in Philadelphia weren’t as close to the actual counting as the Trump team would have liked. Six feet away instead of closer. Why six feet away? I don’t know. Six feet apart. Where have I heard that before? Maybe the counters didn’t want to have to risk their lives more than they had to, just so they could process some ballots.The root of most of these allegations come from people who have generally played loose with the facts (to say the least) for the last four years. I see no reason to suddenly start giving them the benefit of the doubt.
But fine. They claim fraud. I say prove it. Voter fraud is illegal. If it’s happening, there will be evidence, and they can (and should) take the weasels to court. In the meantime, we’ve got a pandemic that’s raging even more out of control. One that didn’t disappear magically when the election finished. So excuse me for being a bit more concerned about the future of my country than I am about something that so far is nothing but hot air.
We’re getting over a hundred thousand COVID cases a day in America, with a positivity test rate of 8% nationally, with some states over 15%, and some way higher than that, according to Johns Hopkins. South Dakota is at 53%! The fatality rate worldwide for identified COVID cases is around 3%. (Yes, some have pointed out it’s actually lower than this, because we don’t find everyone who has COVID, but that goes both ways. The fact is, 3% of the people who tested positive for COVID and had an official “result” have ended up dead. If those numbers hold for America, then 3,000 of those 100,000 people are going to die in a few weeks. Each day. Yes, there’s positive results coming out about some of the vaccine potentials, but remember, those are months away from being widely available.
We don’t have time to be dilly dallying with more puffed up accusations. If there’s such rampant voter fraud, then drag out the evidence and let’s move on. But remember, Trump claimed millions of people voted illegally in 2016. He created an advisory commission to look into it. They ended up finding nothing.
Democrats have (most likely) lost their shot at controlling the Senate. They performed much worse in many races than they hoped to. And yet all these Democrats are accepting defeat, acknowledging their losses, and moving on. There are no claims about illegal votes in Florida or other places where the results were surprising.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 6, 2020
My Life as a Loud Speaker
I’m not sure when, exactly, I became a loud speaker, but I do know that from at least post high school on, I’ve always seemed to talk louder than average. I didn’t really become aware of it as a steady sort of thing until I married Denisa, who is not as loud of a speaker.
The thing is, I just always speak “normally,” and I didn’t even think that my normal speaking voice would be anything to take into consideration. Of course, when you start speaking around a sleeping baby, you quickly are reminded of the fact that maybe you might be talking a few decibels louder than your wife. Especially if your wife worked really hard at getting that baby to sleep in the first place . . .
Of course, the question becomes why I speak so loudly. Some of it is possibly because I was in drama as a kid, so I learned how to project. But I think a lot of it is that I just tend to increase the volume whenever I get into a discussion that I care about. It’s not that I’m getting angry (at least, not that I realize), but the more passionate I am about something, the more likely it is that I’ll be more . . . “easily heard,” shall we say? Yesterday Denisa and I were talking about the pronunciation of Kamala Harris and comparing it to the pronunciation I’d used on my blog (“Comma-la”). You get two linguistic majors going on a debate about vowel sounds, and apparently you better be ready for some real back and forth. (Long story short, I realized there’s a dialectic difference in the way Denisa and I pronounce those two words. One that I can’t hear but she can. Go figure.)
Maybe I have a tendency to want to be right when I’m having a debate, and maybe my natural inclination is to speak louder when I think my rightness might be threatened . . .
But it’s not just speaking louder in person. When I’m on the phone, I’m a notorious loud talker, even when I try to lower my voice. (I’m also a pacer on the phone. I will wander all over the house, talking and talking in my phone voice, and disturbing all sorts of family members in the process. Aren’t I considerate?)
This isn’t to say that I’m right and everyone who thinks I speak too loudly is wrong. It’s to observe that sometimes we do things without meaning to that end up affecting others in ways we can’t immediately understand. When those tendencies are brought to our attention, we have a choice. We can ignore other people and do what we’ve always done anyway, or we can try to change.
Honestly, there are probably some areas where I would continue doing what I’ve always done. But how loud I speak? That’s just not that important to me. I’m doing it without even thinking about it in the first place. So I would gladly lower my voice, but I’ve also discovered that willfully trying to change in areas like this is about as easy as deciding not to slouch. It doesn’t come easily.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion for today is this: there are things many of us do that affect others. If they’re making life more difficult for others, it’s worth assessing them to see if we could stop doing those things. On the flip side, we should also be understanding that changing some things is difficult for the person who’s making the effort, and so we need to be understanding that it’s a process. (Note: I’m worried this is coming off like Denisa and I had this huge argument about how loud I talk yesterday. That isn’t the case at all. Just another instance of something happening in everyday life sparking a thought in me, and me blogging about that thought, trying to reach a conclusion._
What other areas do you see this happening, whether in yourself or in others?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
November 5, 2020
Things More Worthwhile than Refreshing the News
This might be more a post for me than for you, though I’m guessing some of you could use the reminder as well. As I sit here fighting the urge to compulsively refresh the voting totals in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada, I’m reminded that up until today, most people would scoff at anyone who became seriously invested in watching a snail race. And yet here I am, doing essentially that and somehow feeling like if I turn away, I’m going to miss some thrilling action.
I might as well start watching paint dry, for all the good this is doing me. What good is knowing what happens five minutes before my friends if it comes at the cost of being glued to results for three solid days or more?
Of course, it would be easier for me to step away from the results if I didn’t have a job that required me to be online most of the time. Especially since we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and I’m still working from home as we wait for Tomas to get out of precautionary quarantine.
Think about how much good we could get done as a nation if we stopped worrying about the results and instead devoted all that time to something else. It’s been around 42 hours since the polls started closing. In that amount of time, we could have
Binge watched the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy more than three timesRead the whole Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit around 1.5 timesBe three quarters of the way through all the James Bond movies, in honor of Sean ConneryHiked almost a sixth of the Appalachian TrailBaked more than 3,000 chocolate chip cookies (a dozen at a time)Eaten more than 5,000 chocolate chip cookies. (Then again, I might have done that and watched the results at the same time. Don’t judge.)Done more than 84 crosswordsStacked about 42 cords of woodGotten the majority of the country to understand how to pronounce Kamala Harris’s name. (It’s Comma-la, folks. Comma-la. Think of the punctuation mark, and you’re halfway there.)Listened to Stairway to Heaven over 300 times
And those are just off the top of my head. The bottom line is that maybe I should cut back from refreshing every minute to something more healthy, like refreshing once an hour, or even once every couple of hours. (The horror!)
Then again, I also recognize it would be in my best interest to floss every day, get a full night’s sleep, avoid candy all the time, and sit up straight instead of slouching. My track record with those hasn’t been stellar either, so maybe I just need to lower my expectations.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been at least fifteen minutes since I checked the tallies in Georgia. They might have counted four more ballots already, and I won’t know until I go check!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
