bev_vincent's Journal

Life’s a Beach

Another balmy day here in southeast Texas. If Santa were on Galveston Island at the moment, he’d probably be decked out as in the accompanying picture. The temperature is supposed to drop 20° on us between today and tomorrow so it will be more seasonal for the holidays. This is my last day at work for 2009 — I won’t be back until 20010. That doesn’t look quite right…

Watched the third episode of Men of a Certain Age last night after catching my wife up with the first two. We both tend to agree that Ray Romano is the show’s weak link, although the subplot with Joe and his son was probably the least awkward and uncomfortable of all of Romano’s storylines so far. However, I really liked Owen and Terry’s respective stories this week. Best line to date: Monday I go back to making little girls cry.

Still working on short story revisions. Not sure if I’ll get back to them this year, but I hope to. I have about 9000 words of fiction to whip into shape for this project, with the possibility of revisiting a reprint, too.

Can’t wait for Doctor Who, part 1 of which will air on BBC America on Saturday evening (it airs in the UK on Christmas Day). Part 2 a week later and that’s that for the current doc.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

The End is Drawing Near

Unseasonably warm today — just a hair shy of 70° and it’s supposed to be even warmer tomorrow. However, we’ll dip into the 30s on Thursday night, so it might feel a little more seasonal by then.

It’s hard to believe that the first decade of the new millennium is almost over. I remember all the Y2K hubbub almost as if it were yesterday, although when I stop to think about everything that has transpired in the ensuing years it hardly seems that ten years could have held all of those developments. I got my first-ever acceptance letter for a short story almost exactly ten years ago. Of course, the market folded before the issue containing my story was published, but still…

Still working hard on the writing, and still getting acceptance letters and rejections and requests for revision. Today, for example, I received official word that my story “Zombies on a Plane” will be part of the charity anthology Dead Set, to be published in 2010 by 23 House Publishing. One of my earliest publications was a story in another of their charity anthologies, an eBook that benefitted the Make a Wish Foundation, so when I heard that they were putting something else together I decided to submit. I happened to have a zombie story kicking around, one that started as a title and turned into a plot, so it seemed like a good fit.

I’m continuing to work on two other stories under revision. I’m hoping to have them both up to snuff by the end of the year, but my writing schedule is going to become catch-as-catch-can after tomorrow so I’m not entirely sure that’s going to happen. We’ll see.

The Closer was pretty clever last night. I thought I had it all figured out as a collusion between the supposedly battered wife and the cop who arrived on the scene, but it turned out that the story was even more devious than that. Mary McDonnell always brings out the best and worst in Brenda. The evolving drawing of the Wicked Witch of the West was an amusing running joke. The subplot about Fritz’s potential new job made for a good motivator for both Fritz’s behavior and Chief Pope’s inexplicable anger as well.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through Don Quixote. Sancho Panza is deep in discussion with the Duchess, the one who is humoring him and Don Quixote because they are fans of their published exploits.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Several movies

Three more days of work for the rest of 2009, including today, which is almost over. Day job work, that is. I still have some work on fiction to do before December falls off the calendar. I also stumbled upon a character’s voice for another short story that I plan to work on in early 2010, so I need to cultivate that one for a while and come up with his story.

We watched a few films this weekend. On Saturday we went out to see Have You Heard About the Morgans? I’ll give that one the award for the lamest, most irrelevant title of the year. Sure, one of the characters utters that line, but it is hardly reflective of the story. Hugh Grant is his usual bumbling, self-effacing self, which is a good thing if you like him, which we do. Sarah Jessica Parker wasn’t annoying, which was about the best I could hope from her. Bonus, though, for discovering that the film also stars Sam Elliott as his gruff usual self and Mary Steenburgen as his wife, Wilfred Brimley as an even gruffer guy, and Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss as a modern incarnation of her character on that show. It’s light, amusing fare, entirely predictable but really funny at times. One wonders why New Mexico had to stand in as Wyoming, though.

Then we watched Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, which is based on the memoirs of the main character, the president of town council who managed to bring the Woodstock concert to town after its permit was killed elsewhere. Elliott is a young closeted gay man who is trying to break free from his domineering mother but who keeps getting sucked back in by the latest financial problem. The family owns a fleabag motel in a tiny, out of the way town, and the bank is about to foreclose. Elliott runs a festival every summer, mostly a record player set up in public, and there’s a traveling theatrical group living in the barn. The guy who comes to evaluate the terrain for the concert looks like a cross between Jim Morrison and Leo Sayer from Godspell. The concert is both a blessing and a curse, of course. Eugene Levy plays Yasgur, the farm owner who rents out his property, Richard (John Boy) Thomas is almost unrecognizable as one of the organizers, and Liev Schrieber is hilarious as the cross-dressing former marine who now goes by the name Vilma who is hired to head security. The concert itself is very much in the background in the film. At best we here a few strains of music in the distance. Mostly it’s about the people who come for the spectacle and the ones who are impacted by its arrival. I liked the motorcycle cop who came out to bust a few heads and ended up with a flower stuck in his helmet visor. I’m sure the real event was much more like bedlam–it comes off as a very mellow time for all.

Last night we watched Easy Virtue, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play starring Jessica Biel as an American who marries a younger English man from a landed family headed by Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Really lead by Thomas, as Firth is perpetually on the outs because he didn’t come straight home after the Great War but instead caroused around Europe until he came back with his tail between his legs. Larita (Biel) is thought to be a floozy by most and is instantly despised by Thomas, though not for the reasons that seem apparent at the beginning. The biggest threat Larita poses is in taking her new husband John away from the family home, which he is expected to save from financial ruin. Larita has a history (she’s a widow) and also likes to drive fast cars and was pictured “winning” a race in Monte Carlo until her gender disqualified her. It’s a costume drama with lots of UK/US humo(u)r and the usual friction between classes. Larita finds a sympathetic ear in Firth (and vice versa) and she relates better to the servants than her new family. Firth makes the movie, as he so often does.

Jeff Strand predicted the outcome of Survivor several weeks ago. I think it was pretty much ordained, too. Russell blustered his way through to the end, leaving corpses and mangled bodies in his wake. He couldn’t have gotten as far as he did without using the tactics he did, but in the end the ones who held his destiny in his hands were the ones he’d treated so poorly, so what did he expect? I don’t think I believe him when he says that he’s not like that in real life. I also thought he demonstrated poor grace as a loser, and the gag where he threw yet another pair of socks into the fire came off as feeble, too. I thought it was pretty funny, after watching the Ponderosa videos, to realize that Jaison was drunk during his first appearance as a juror, having just chugged a glass of wine from losing wine pong with Eric on top of several previous glasses! It was a pretty strong season, all in all, and I have little doubt that Russell will be one of the villains in the spring. I suspect that there are people out there studying his strategy and trying to solve the enigma — how do you scheme and backstab and plot and connive your way to the end and still have more than a couple of people willing to vote for you?

Funny moment of the reunion show: when one of the early contestants told Jeff that he made her break out in a sweat every time he spoke to her. His reaction was priceless. I wish the reunion show ran for two hours instead of just one.

Upgraded to Word Press 2.9. Cross your fingers it doesn’t go ka-blooey!

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

A Dark Matter

Publisher’s Weekly has a starred review of Peter Straub’s next novel, A Dark Matter. After comparisons (favorable) to Roshaomon, it ends: “Brilliant in its orchestration and provocative in its speculations, this novel ranks as one of the finest tales of modern horror.” I was fortunate to be able to read the book several months ago so I could review it for Cemetery Dance and I agree with the PW review completely. The title, by the way, has more meanings than I could possibly ever list.

Another editing round on the short story under revision. It has crept up from 3500 to 4300 words over the course of the past week or so. I hope to get it back to the editor tomorrow so I can focus on whipping the other short story he wants into shape. The current story was locked in my mind for a long time and now I’ve had to re-evaluate it and re-envision it, which has been a process with a learning curve. It’s hard to un-think the story.

Each season on Survivor it seems that someone emerges from the pack late in the season and it’s like: where did this guy/gal come from? This season, of course, it’s Brett (is that his name?) who has just been a face in the crowd until he became the last surviving member of Galu and all of sudden pulled off two immunity wins in a row to save his ass. I saw lots of eye-rolling among the jury member when they saw who was evicted this week, but I’m not sure if that was a reflection on their opinion of the vote or a reaction to having to share quarters with this particular evicted individual. Only one episode left, and this is where it gets interesting — where a long-standing alliance (although it seems much longer for us, where two days equals a week than for the players, probably) will be forced to make the difficult decisions.

CSI was just plain weird last night. The final shot seemed like a riff on an earlier episode that ended with a silly star-crossed lovers shot, except this time the stars were in a different alignment and the suicide pact had an unexpected outcome. I’m not sure exactly what was wrong with the episode, but it just didn’t work for me. Parts of it felt overly contrived, especially the shootout at the beginning. How many shots were fired before anyone was hit, let alone the dumbo standing in the middle of the crossfire hoping to get shot? It just felt totally off.

The Mentalist was okay. I’m not sure we really learned much about Jane that really helps us to understand him any better. Sure, he was able to use his own childhood experience to put the ball players’ ordeals into context, but it didn’t seem worth all that effort. I’m growing to like the exchanges between Van Pelt and Rigsby even more, especially now that Van Pelt is really starting to step up her game as a cop.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Alternate reality

Today’s Storyteller’s Unplugged entry is called Alternate Reality and it’s about my experiences pretending to be the 13-year-old character Scarecrow Joe for a couple of months as part of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) associated with the release of Stephen King’s Under the Dome. Check it out.

I finalized my review of Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton and posted it at Onyx Reviews last night. It’s not a terrible book, but one has to wonder in what form it would have been published — if it all — had Crichton lived to be consulted about it. It has the feel of an early work, one of the books he published under pseudonyms to put himself through med school. The moral of the story, from the writer’s perspective, is: make sure you leave clear instructions about what you’d like done with any existing, unpublished works after you die.

Criminal Minds obvious scene of the week: Dangerous killer in the back seat of a car being taken into custody by two officers. The camera lingers on the car while it navigates a dark, lonely back road. You just know he’s going to escape. Still, the scene of his daring “rescue” was one of the tensest I’ve seen on that show in a while. The ending, though it was upbeat, felt poorly timed to me, though. Overlong and needing something more dramatic.

I made another revision pass through a short story I’m working on for a 2010 anthology. The editor provided some good notes on the last draft and I was able to incorporate most of them easily. I still have one more note to address that deals with the ending that’s going to take a little more thought before I’m ready to tackle it. Endings are hard — the pacing and the payoff. I have the latter, now I just need to play with the former a little to accentuate the latter.

It’s been rainy, overcast, soggy and foggy here for most of the week. Tuesday the fog hung around all day long, which is very unusual for this area. After suffering a drought this summer we’re pretty much caught up in terms of average annual rainfall.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Papa Gibbs

Christmas takes a pretty sound thrashing on most TV shows. It’s easy prey, especially when there are dysfunctional families involved. Carl Reiner’s appearance on Two and a Half Men was one instance where the family ended up munching on turkey and not speaking to each other while Reiner’s character makes passes at Berta and jokes about incontinence. “Fa-la-la-la-la” became one of the punch lines on Big Bang Theory, an ironic comment on the lack of Christmas spirit by one character or another.

NCIS did it right, in my opinion. It brought family together, in the form of Gibbs’ father, played by the ultimate TV dad, Ralph Waite from The Waltons. This is his second appearance in the role. The episode wasn’t schmaltzy or trite–there are real issues between father and son, years of distance that can’t be bridged in one hour of TV, but they made inroads, especially after Papa Gibbs told what happened to him. Normally vapid Tony’s secret Santa gift to the dragon lady in HR was another moment. Abby is like the spirit of just about every holiday in existence and her Gingerbread Abbies were absolutely typical of her joie de vivre. The video conference that McGee set up was perhaps the only trying-too-hard part of the show, but it wasn’t too overboard. Plus they managed to cram in a whole plot about religious intolerance and family honor. Not too shabby.

Still working on Don Quixote. I’m up to the scene where our intrepid knight-errant challenges a couple of wild lions.

I wrote my Storytellers Unplugged essay for tomorrow and posted it on the dashboard so it will show up morning. I also received a good set of notes on a short story I’m revising for a 2010 project. I revamped the story completely in a second draft and now have only a little more tweaking to get it into shape. I have one other story that’s in about the same condition–have to get them both ready by the end of the year, which isn’t all that far off.

Issue 63 of CD magazine is special for one particular reason: I believe this is the very first time that my name appears on the front cover.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Belle Bridges, but not all that belle

This week’s episode of The Closer was much better than last week, getting away from gang plots and into transgender issues and black widows. Both of these have been done before, many times, but getting Beau Bridges into a dress and high heels made for a hilarious episode. The former George, now Georgette, came to terms with his self identification after leaving the police force but now he makes a rather unreliable witness in an old homicide case (if he’s uncertain about his gender, how can he be certain about anything, a defense lawyer would argue). George refuses to commit purjury by appearing as his former male self on the stand, but he’s not against going undercover as a man to try to get the all-important confession. His old friend, Lt. Provenza, of course has serious issues with George(tte)’s new appearance, and he’s even more incredulous to discover that Georgette still likes women. “You went through all that to become a lesbian?” he shrieks.

I’m still on the edge with Men of a Certain Age. Both episodes so far have had some excellent moments and some tedious/awkward ones. I think, though, that the awkward moments come from uncomfortable truths. The funniest scene is the one where Scott Bakula throws his cup at a guy who ran a stop sign and then ends up stealing the guy’s car when he gets out for a confrontation. I don’t know enough about gambling to know if Ray Romano’s character won or lost his bet. He seemed excited about the 3-pointer at the buzzer, but then he punched out the Hulk, so I’m thinking he’s down $2 grand.

I wrote the first draft of my review of Pirate Latitudes last night and should get it posted sometime later this week. I’m working on revisions to another short story for a 2010 project that hasn’t yet been announced and I have to write my essay for Storytellers Unplugged. Never a dull moment. I’m almost 1/4 of the way through the second part of Don Quixote, where the Don and Sancho have a run-in with another deluded knight-errant in a grove after encountering “Dulcinea” among a group of homely village girls.

Big Bang Theory was pretty funny last night — the appearance of a parental unit is always a source of high comedy. In this case, Leonard’s mother, played by Christine Baranski, who brings with her a lot of news that Leonard hasn’t heard, her peculiar and offbeat insights, and an untapped fondness for shots of tequila.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Wild Turkey

No, not the bourbon. I saw one of these critters strolling across the road this morning after I dropped my wife off at the park and ride lot. At first I thought it was a turkey vulture (buzzard) because we have a lot of those around here, but they normally fly away when you drive near them and this guy just strutted across the road, bobbing his head back and forth. He was huge, too. I’ve never seen a wild turkey around here before.

We saw Invictus, the new Clint Eastwood/Morgan Freeman film about Nelson Mandela and the South African World Cup of rugby. Great movie — a feel-good kinda film. You don’t need to know much about rugby to enjoy it (though a passing knowledge of US football helps). Matt Damon is very good, especially in his delivery of the South African accent. Morgan Freeman is Nelson Mandela. You never question it for a moment. Some of the film’s most poignant elements are little nuanced side stories, many of them without dialog. The little boy playing near the police car in the parking lot outside the stadium, for example. There is an entire drama told in snapshots. The evolving relationship between the black security guards and the white guards who used to work for DeClerk. The game itself is filmed in all its grit and glory. The ball whistles through the air when passed. You can feel the bone-crunching tackles. The game is much like US football except no one wears any protective gear–not even helmets. It’s hard to imagine the damage done to their bodies on any given day.

I hear via the grapevine that there will be a fourth season of Torchwood, perhaps a full 13 episodes. That would be great!

Now we have to wait until September 2010–we being those who watch Dexter. I’m not going to offer up any spoilers here at the moment other than to say that the ending was a punch in the gut and a kick in the nethers. This season we saw Dexter reinvented as husband and father. Next season, he’ll be something entirely different. Perhaps a suspected killer? That would be a switch!

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Nutty As

Russell survives to scheme another day on Survivor. Whip out that hidden immunity idol and wear it proud! How audacious. Of course, it was a poorly kept secret that he had it, so why not flaunt it? Monica did well at the end to get in some parting cracks at the big R, but she might have hauled out this unspoken nature earlier in the contest to keep herself in the game longer. Only two more episodes to go, I think they said.

I think fruit cake gets a bad rap. I even made one myself a few years ago when I was feeling nostalgic for the kind we used to have when I was a kid. My sister just sent me a supply to get me through the holidays, three different kinds (dark, light, and light without nuts). Yum.

Shades of Fried Green Tomatoes on C.S.I. last night. They managed to combine one of the occasional funny episodes with the lab rats getting out into society with the more serious plot of the killer who surgically alters people. The entire roadhouse story was hilarious, starting with the guy with the racoon stuck to his face. The Mentalist took a lighter tack this week, too. Not as uproarious as C.S.I. but witty.

I finished Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes last night. A fun book that starts out a bit like a caper of the Ocean’s Eleven variety, where the captain goes around to gather together a crew with the particular talents needed to pull off the gag. Then there’s the marine stage, the island invasion, the getaway, more marine battles, the requisite storm scenes and the reversal at the end. Not as serious or as intricate as some of his other works. It’s hard to guess exactly when it was written. It has the sure hand of his mid-career books but the frothiness of his med school books.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Night Court

I received the proofs for “A Murder of Vampires,” my story in the Evolve anthology. Need to go over them and get any changes back to the editor asap since the book will be launching at World Horror. Though March 2010 seems like a long way off, it’s really only three months away. I finally bit the bullet and bought my plane tickets yesterday. I’d been waiting for a more favorable airfare, but the prices have been all over the map and don’t seem to be trending downward at all. I wanted to fly into Gatwick, but Heathrow will have to do.

Criminal Minds has been concentrating on some emotionally difficult material lately, what with the death of a secondary character last week and its repercussions this week, though it seems like the official period of mourning will last for only one episode. Hey, at least CBS is still cranking out new episodes at this time of year–there’s even another new one next week–when most other shows are on hiatus. I suspect that at some point the writers will explore Emily Prentiss’s backstory. It’s clear from the way she reacted to the perp at the end of this week’s shows that she has some serious issues bottled up. Gun pressed against forehead to accentuate proclamations of delight at the perp’s future behind bars as someone else’s bitch.

It’s always good to see John Larrouquette, who was a guest star on Law & Order: SVU this week. He had a neat role on Boston Legal in its last season or so, and I’ve enjoyed watching him since the days of Night Court, when he was another smarmy lawyer, Dan Fielding. He played that part with panache. On L&O he got to trot out his southern drawl and range from advocate to outrage. The show needs to get rid of its unfortunate tendency to turn every episode into a protracted public service announcement. As an aside, I caught an old episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets this weekend and Munch hasn’t changed a bit in all those years.

Double elimination week on Survivor. Can’t wait to see if/how Russell manages to make it through.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

A Certain Age

I’m of a certain age. I guess that’s a figure of speech that means I’m not young any more. Not geriatric, not yet eligible for the early bird special at Denny’s. Probably middle aged, although I do not embrace that label.

The new TNT series, Men of A Certain Age, should more properly be called Actors Lying About a Certain Age, since according to the promo material they are all in their late 40s, like me, but the actors themselves are mostly in their mid-50s. Surprisingly, Scott Bakula is the oldest of the bunch, though he looks the youngest, and Andre Braugher is a year younger than I am, the only one who is as young as his character. Still, that quibble aside, this is a series that has a lot of fertile territory to explore. The three men have interesting problems. Ray Romano’s character is divorced, doesn’t relate well to his kids (though he tries), and has a gambling problem. Andre Braugher is overweight, burdened with family financial obligations, and still living in his father’s shadow, trying to impress him so that he will inherit the car dealership that bears the family name. Scott Bakula is an actor, though it’s not yet clear whether he ever really accomplished much, who resents having to go to cattle call auditions for Lifetime channel movies and who still trades on his good looks and charming demeanor. The first episode was pretty good — it had a couple of genuinely funny moments (Braugher’s faceplant during the drive to the hospital). Romano is a decent observer of men’s reality and so long as he can resist the goofier aspects he has the chance here to do something that men (of a certain age, especially) will identify with. Here’s hoping.

I got my H1N1 shot today. Now I have an unusual craving for pork chops and apple sauce.

The Closer is back for a three episode mini season. I’m not a cat person, but that is one seriously cute kitten Fritzy got for Brenda. It looks so fragile that I wonder how it withstands being manhandled that way. Though I know it is probably one of the realities of working homicide in L.A., I find the gang-related plots on this show less interesting than the typical episodes. Hopefully that won’t dominate the storylines.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Russian literature

I finally had a chance to get back to the story I’m revamping for an editor. I wrote a new beginning last week, and now I’m ripping the rest of the story apart, salvaging the good bits, and taking it off in a new direction for the final half. I’ve finally reached the stage in the creative process where the story is getting under my skin enough for me to think about it while I’m not working on it. I have some scrawled notes on a Post-It note, things that occurred to me after I finished work this morning. Questions that need to be answered–or at least should be asked by the characters. I hope to have a new first draft of the story done by the weekend.

I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but Barnes & Noble are showing the Stephen King Illustrated Companion to be sold out at their warehouses. There are, no doubt, still many copies left in their stores, and the ZIP code search will let you find a store near you that still has it in stock. I e-mailed my editor to get clarification. Apropos of this–Locus had a nice little blurb about the book in their “Books Received” column this month. Not a review, but they clearly did their homework about what the book really is.

Only one episode of Dexter left, and it’s hard to imagine how they’re going to get from where Episode 12 ended to where Episode 13 must in only 50 or so minutes of screen time. There were a couple of improbabilities in this week’s episode. First of all, it’s hard to imagine that Deb would go alone into the lair of the person who she believed killed her lover and shot her. Sure, Quinn was tagging along out in the hall, but it was a dumb risk to take for no good reason. Secondly, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could get into Miami’s homicide division and just wander around that way. I’ve been inside the Houston Police Department headquarters downtown and it’s a little like going through Checkpoint Charlie. Not all the elevators go to all of the floors and people are kept very compartmentalized. All of that notwithstanding, I’m still enjoying the hell out of the season and I look forward to a rambunctious finale.

“Good thing he reads Russian literature,” the homicide detective on Castle said last night. “If he was a Nicholas Sparks fan, he’d be dead.” Another cliché of the genre–the mysterious man with amnesia who may or may not hold the key to the mystery. As with other episodes of the show, they take the cliché in a different direction. I totally expected “Amber” from House to be the killer, and then again I totally expected him to react to the dog, but they did none of those things. I liked the final exchange between Castle and his mother, where she confessed to being afraid of getting hurt in her rekindled relationship. “That’s the cost of living,” Castle says, which I thought was a great line.

That was the second time in a few hours that I heard the same sentiment. In The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith, a man who is about to be married muses that committing to marriage doubles his chances of being hurt. Since we’ve come to the end of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books (I’ve read all ten of them to my wife since June), we’ve moved on to another of his series, the 44 Scotland Street books. I received an ARC for the newest one so I decided to start with it. I feel like I’m missing a little bit of backstory on the characters from the previous three books, but I suppose that will come with time. I also have the ARC of the 11th Ladies’ Detective Agency book on the way. The author is supposed to be in Houston early next year, so we hope to meet him.

The Big Bang Theory continues to be one of the funniest shows on TV at the moment and by far the best exchanges are those between Penny and Sheldon. They must have an absolute blast making that show. There are times when they seem to be genuinely laughing at each other’s reactions to things.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Wonderful World

So that was winter, I guess.

We were released early from work on Friday because of freezing road conditions. When I left at about 3:15, I drove through the most wonderful blizzard. The snowflakes were large, I could hear them when they hit my jacket, and they were numerous. However, they never quite made it to the ground. In parts of Houston, the snow did actually accumulate for a while, but not up here. By about 3:45 it was all over and though it was cold overnight, I don’t think we got the severe hard freeze they were anticipating, and today it’s back up in the 60s and rainy. It was cause for excitement, but that’s probably it for us as far as real winter goes.

Yesterday was a lost day. I woke up with a stomach virus that took the wind out of my sails most of the day. I don’t get sick very often, and this was mild as far as these things go, but I had no appetite and no ability to focus on anything other than football games, which means I got no writing work done.

I was glad to see the young couple that had done so well throughout the entire race pull it out for a victory at the end of The Amazing Race. I thought they were screwed when they went to the wrong casino and ended up arriving at the roadblock in third place, but they focused on the task (counting out $1 million in chips) and beat the teams who had a head start. Frustration and bickering was the downfall of the other two teams.

We watched an advance screening of Wonderful World, starring Matthew Broderick, this weekend. He plays a former Raffi-like children’s entertainer who became disillusioned with the music business and the world in general, dropped out, got divorced and took up a mundane job copyediting for some un-named firm, shares a small flat with Ebu, a Senegalese man. His young daughter hides when he goes to pick her up for his regular visitation because he’s such a buzz kill. He spends most of his time smoking weed and haranguing the unfairness of it all. When Ebu goes into a diabetic coma, he meets the man’s sister and, through her, learns that he’s pretty much an asshole and the world isn’t a terrible place all the time. Thus begins his path back to the real (wonderful) world.

We also watched Nothing Like the Holidays, standard holiday fair about a dysfunctional, bickering family getting together for what might be their last Christmas together because their mother (Elizabeth Pena) has just dropped the bombshell that she’s divorcing their father (Alfred Molina) because he’s been cheating on her. It’s a big, bawdy, Puerto Rican family with the usual issues and the obligatory outsider (Debra Messing) and a Shane-like tree that provides some comic relief. The putative affair turns out to have a different explanation, of course, and there are other conflicts that find resolution, though not always in the idyllic way of seasonal films.

I’m reading Pirate Latitudes, the new, posthumous Crichton novel. The completed manuscript was found on his hard drive, but there’s been no indication from the publisher when it was completed. Since it’s a period novel, there are no clues in the text as to when it might have been written either. No pirates with cutting edge nanoparticle sails or anything like that. I also finished Part 1 of Don Quixote, so I decided to take a break with some pirates before getting back to the knights-errant.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Oh the weather outside is frightful

So far all I’ve seen is a few flurries, but the snow is starting to accumulate in parts of Houston. We’re expected to get 1-4″ over the next several hours, and a hard freeze overnight. This is the earliest in recorded history that Houston has seen snow on the ground. When I was outside a few minutes ago, it was about 40 degrees and the mercury is headed lower in the coming hours. It’s definitely a grey day. People are covering plants and the roads were treated against icing last night.

I received a royalty check for On Writing Horror last night. Since there is such a large group of contributors, the royalties get divvied up into a fairly small share per person, but the book has continued to sell since its release and this year’s check is about 25% larger than last year’s. Enough to buy a Happy Meal, at least.

I’m not sure that Survivor would have been this interesting without Russell, but it’s turned into a fun season. The look on John’s face last night when he got two votes was priceless. He had just finished talking about the two people whose names would be written down that night, and his wasn’t one of them. Turns out that outside of him and Shambo, everyone voted for John. Jaison was worried that this would flip Shambo back to vote with the others, and I suppose that’s a possibility, but the best that would lead to would be a 4-4 split of votes. Besides all of them voted for John, too, so it would be flipping from one bad bet to another. At some point, though, this group of four+1 is going to start looking at Russell very carefully. I wonder if he’ll have to whip out the idol again next week.

Fringe was good last night. Those critters were nasty — especially when Walter yanked that one out of the victim’s throat. Yech. Unlike other shows of its ilk, Fringe has a humanizing element, and that’s Walter. Sure, Peter can let his hair down and play basketball with a suspect’s son, but Walter is suffering at the same time as he’s enjoying himself. We sympathize with his plight — of course he’s an adult who should be allowed some freedom and independence, and yet at the same time we know that he’s not quite capable of looking after himself, and it’s not always him who bears the repercussions.

At least one show will have new episodes next week (Fringe). I was surprised to see that Flash Forward is going off until March. I guess they have to make way for the return of Lost in February but boy are they going to lose the fragile momentum they have going for them now. The show still hasn’t gripped me as completely as Lost did. I often find myself listening to the show while attending to other matters, whereas with Lost, I’m glued to the screen.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Hard Candy

When I was a kid, one of the treats that we got around Christmas was something called “barley toys.” I guess they were called toys because they were in the shapes of people or other seasonal objects: Santa Claus, snowman, Rudolph, things like that. Sometimes they came on sticks, like suckers, but mostly they were just standalone figurines. Too large to pop into your mouth all at once — you had to crack them into pieces to enjoy them. I discovered recently that the “barley” reference is because they were made from barley sugar. They had a unique flavor, even though they were little more than pure sugar. I think I’m going to get to resample some this year, so I’ll see how well my memory of them stands up.

When I was at the gym yesterday, I saw the middle section of a Bruce Willis movie on USA Network. I didn’t recognize it, so I looked it up and discovered it was Hostage, which I’ve never seen. Last night I checked to see if it was available on our On Demand system, but it wasn’t. However, while in the H listings, I noticed that Hard Candy was available. I remember hearing good things about it at the time, and I’ve been impressed with everything I’ve seen Ellen Page do so far, so I decided to check it out. Of course, I already knew the basic premise, so the reversal 1/4 of the way into the film was anticipated from the opening shot, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the movie. Page is so good–and she was only 17 at the time. I half expected her character to end up being older than the fourteen she said she was. It’s a pretty intense movie, all the more so because there are only the two characters from 95% of it.

Addendum: Bummed to hear about the death of Eric Woolfson from the Alan Parsons Project.

I had strange dreams last night. In one I dreamt that there was an artist whose work consisted entirely of potato chips mixed with water. I seem to recollect that modifying the amount of water was the secret to his varied works. In another dream, I was on an airplane and there was something to do with terrorists and an envelope that signified their presence. They were unusually vivid.

I received the new Michael Crichton novel last night and hope to get to it soon. I’m a little over 1/3 of the way through Don Quixote, at just about the point where I put the book down the last time. I finished the section where the travelers read the novel manuscript found at the inn, the tale of the ill-advised curiosity that features a character named Lothario. I find it interesting that most online etymologists track the use of the word Lothario back to a 1703 play without giving much credence to this earlier character. The word is defined as “a man who seduces women,” and that’s just what Lothario does in Don Quixote, though he does it at the bidding of his best friend. It’s a strange little interlude story, and you know that Anselmo’s proposal is a bad idea from the beginning, and Lothario does a good job of outlining all the reasons why it’s a bad idea, but it goes forward nonetheless.

It’s odd when the same conceit arises in two different TV series. Meredith gave a part of her liver to her estranged father on Grey’s Anatomy and this week Wilson gave a lobe of his liver to a friend/patient on House. In the former case, the plot was introduced to explain the actor’s maternity leave, whereas in the latter case it was a point of characterization.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Back in the Saddle

One of the keys on my work keyboard has worn itself blank, so the character it represents can no longer be distinguished. Two others are partially worn away. The rest are pristine. I wonder what it means. The blank key is the C. The curved part of the D is mostly missing. The only thing left on the E key is the top horizontal and about 1/8 of the vertical descending from it. It does not escape my attention that these three keys are adjacent to each other, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I must be doing to this keyboard to achieve that pattern.

They’re still tossing around the idea that it might snow here on Friday. Given the fact that I only half believe them if they say it’s going to rain today, I have my doubts, but it would be neat. It would be the earliest recorded snowfall here ever, I do believe. It’s a crisp 48° outside right now, but it promises to get colder in coming days.

I’ve been discussing revisions to a short story with the editor who solicited it for the past couple of days. This is the sort of give-and-take that you rarely get in the small press, so I’m enjoying it greatly. Typically, an editor accepts a story, possibly suggests a few grammatical changes, and then prints it. Not so here. The editor is looking at the story in its context with the others in the collection and also making some interesting observations about my writing in general (how violent incidents almost always happen “off screen,” for one) and challenging me to try something a little different. It’s harder to do with a story that has been on my desk for a while, as this one has, because the chronology of events is firmly fixed in my mind and now I’m having to mess around with that. However, overnight I dream-plotted a new beginning to the story that puts some of the editor’s suggestions into effect and I wrote that passage in very rough draft this morning, about 600 new words. It’s the first new material I’ve written in a couple of weeks.

My writing music this morning was Tubular Bells II. I usually listen to the live concert performance of this album but I clicked on the studio version by accident. When it came time for the announcements of the instruments, I realized that I recognized the voice. It took a while to come up with it: Alan Rickman. Apparently he was only credited as “a strolling player” on the album liner notes.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Awards season

After some unseasonably warm weather (not complaining), a cold front is descending upon us, and there’s even a chance (they say) that we’ll get some snow on Friday. Not totally unheard of, but I can count the number of times there’s been real snowfall in the past 20 years on my fingers. Maybe even using just one hand. Last year we had one snowfall where there was accumulation on the trunks and roofs of cars, which is indeed rare.

I’m not a big fan of football. I’ve only ever attended one professional game, back when it was the Houston Oilers. I don’t know the names or the responsibilities of most of the positions, and I could fill a book with the rules that I don’t know. And yet I often watch a game with one eye while doing other things. I watched part of the Houston vs. Indianapolis game on Sunday, mostly because it looked for a while like Houston might win. Tuned out shortly after Indy disabused me and everyone else of that notion. Since most shows were reruns last night, I found the New Orleands vs. Patriots game and watched the Saints run roughshod over New England and read Poppy Z. Brite’s enthusiastic tweets. Concurrently, I edited and posted my review of John Grisham’s Ford County.

The Stephen King Illustrated Companion was just nominated for a 3rd Annual Black Quill Award. Members of Dark Scribe Magazine’s website can vote in each category. There will be both Reader’s and Editor’s choice winners.

I read yesterday that Raising the Bar has not been renewed for a third season. Apparently ratings dropped significantly in the second season and that the show lost a considerable chunk of The Closer’s lead-in audience. I thought the second season was better thant he first, but these things happen. By the way, there will be three week Closer mini-season starting this coming Monday.

Only two episodes of Dexter left to go, and the showdown with Trinity is bound to be a big one. Lots of surprises this week, including an expansion of Trinity’s pattern (does that mean he should now be called Quarternary?), and an unexpected arrest. The season’s theme is fatherhood and its effect on Dexter. I’m still waiting to see what happens when Matsuka tells Dexter what he saw at Thanksgiving.

House is House, but what happens when Wilson becomes House, too? Or at least sort of. This was an unusual episode of the show, with House in the background, his team running around like extras on an episode of Monty Python, and Wilson front and center. We rarely get a chance to see Wilson practicing medicine. We see him in the office, delivering good or bad news, but not very often making diagnoses. We suspect he’s probably a good doctor, but this week we got to see him in action, picking up clues from patient behavior and making difficult (and occasionally erroneous) decisions based on the evidence at hand. As House said at the end, small steps, especially after he outbid Cuddy for the loft.

Still reading Don Quixote. I’m determined to make it to the end this time. I’m up to the point where Dorothea is telling her sad tale in the presence of the barber, the priest and Cardenio.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Upgrade

I didn’t quite stay offline throughout the long weekend, but I didn’t do that much with my website or LiveJournal or any of my other usual haunts. Kept up with e-mail, read a few message boards, that was about the extent of it. Starting today I am a doctoral research widow for the next three weeks as my wife begins the final phase of her data collection, so I wanted to make as much of our four days together as possible. I took her to the bus stop this morning and I’ll see her again just before Christmas.

We cooked meals and ate too much (and yet, I somehow lost weight, much to my astonishment this morning — three pounds!) and watched movies and played cards. I also read John Grisham’s short story collection (review to come) and about 1/4 of Don Quixote. I started the book before, a couple of years ago, and I put it aside for one reason or another and never got back to it. So I found a version for my Kindle and I’ve been reading it before bedtime. It’s a fascinating concept, willing something into existence through sheer force of belief. I’m up to the part where Sancho Panza is returning to bring Don Quixote’s message to Dulcinea while Quixote deliberately “goes mad” in the mountains.

I sent out several press releases to the usual suspects when my new book was about to be released, and another one of them paid off today. I spent 10 minutes on the phone with the editor of the arts supplement of a newspaper and they want to do something about the book before Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an interview today, just a touching of bases as a preamble to whatever it is they decide to do.

I upgraded my message board from version 2.2 to 2.4 today. It’s not an easy process, nothing so slick as how WordPress gets updated that’s for sure. I had to do a clean install in parallel with the old version, set all the file permissions manually (thankfully I’m a UNIX wonk from ‘way back), migrate the configuration, users and old messages to the new install, decommission the old board and commission the new one so that any old hyperlinks to the MB still work. It took several hours and I was sure at two or three points in the process that I had absolutely screwed it up. But it seems to be working just fine. Remains to be seen if I have all of the anti-spam features configured properly.

I was sorry to see the Harlem Globetrotter duo get eliminated from the Amazing Race last night, but the minute they decided to take a 4 hour penalty I was pretty sure the writing was on the wall for them. Four hours is an eternity in this race. All because one guy couldn’t figure out how to make a word out of the letters AFNRZ. I was hoping the brothers were going to get dinged for breaking the gollem’s arm. Jeez, they’re annoying.

I received editorial feedback on a trio of stories that are going to be published next year. One of the stories required minimal revision, one requires a moderate amount of reconceptualization and the third one is going to take a fair amount of work to get it into shape for the editor. I tidied up the first one and got it back to the editor this morning. Should be a neat project, but it hasn’t been formally announced yet. I’m also expecting to receive the proofs of my story for Evolve this week, which I’ll have to review post haste.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Talking Turkey

When I saw the previews for this week’s Big Bang Theory, I thought they were making a test tube turkey. Though the episode had some very funny moments, I thought it was a little less well focused than most. Sheldon getting helium voice during his NPR interview was hilarious.

TV shows handle Thanksgiving in many different ways. Some simply ignore it, whereas others twist it around, as on How I Met Your Mother, which had more “slap” puns than you could shake an open hand at. I sided with Lily and thought Marshal was out of line. And the whole “slap happy” game wrapper will probably come back to bite them on the butt. Not one of their best efforts. The “you’re dead to me” clips were well done, though, including the falling coffee pot in the bodega.

And then there’s Dexter, which turns the whole affair into a hundred different kinds of awkward. One of the show’s strengths is the suspense that the writers consistently generate by putting Dexter up against the clock. When “Kyle” is having dinner with Trinity’s family, viewers know that he has to get back home to his real family, so when Trinity says, oh, but we have to watch the football game first, you feel that tension increase automatically. There have been many televised Thanksgiving meals, but I doubt that there’s ever been one like that. Ugh. With only a few episodes left, it’s only natural that things should be heading to something big…but how is it all going to play out? And the final two words of the episode changed the game dramatically. Who saw that coming?

Something happened to the video on ABC last night during Castle, but the sound came through so I listened to the episode while doing other things. The old “more than one wife shows up to claim the body” gag has been done before, but they managed to do something a little different with it, bringing in the corporate espionage subplot. The best moments of the show, though, involve Castle’s interactions with his daughter, and you can just feel him beaming with pride whenever he observes her.

Has any other member of House’s team gotten away with punching him in the mouth before? It’s funny that Chase’s stated motive was simply to get the others to stop bugging him about Cameron, and that House was okay with that. The whole three-hour diversion was a little bit mean, but given House’s intentions I guess Cuddy can be forgiven. Hopefully House will give up this futile quest and move on. That subplot is starting to wear a little thin.

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

Vantage Point

I had a lazy weekend. Watched way too much television and accomplished little of substance. Vantage Point was on one of our free movie channels so I decided to watch it, because the idea had intrigued me at the time. In fact, it’s an interesting premise but poorly executed in this case. The same scene is played out multiple times from the perspective of different characters, so that each time through we learn a little bit more about what’s happening. However, I think the failure in the concept is that the individual perspectives on events are all essentially the same. There are no unreliable witnesses, no faulty memories, no skewed perceptions. So the movie boils down to about 20 minutes of plot and a few twists. The linear story itself is moderately unremarkable, but it has some surprises. Unfortunately, there is little real screen time available to explore the source of these surprises and one character in particular is left as a gaping enigma. We never get to find out his motives. Not a terrible movie. It has some genuinely tense moments. But on the whole I would consider it a failed experiment.

I stumbled across The Rocky Horror Picture Show playing on Fuse so I decided to leave it on while I worked on other things. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the historian’s dialog before. Any time I’ve seen the film in theaters–and it’s been a loooong time–he is drowned out by the audience shouting “Boring!” Tim Curry really is very good in this film. He does a lot with eyebrow twitches and the shape of his mouth.

I found another potential market for my 10,000 word novelette, so I got it back into circulation this weekend. Probably my most significant accomplishment of the weekend. I really was lazy. It felt good!

Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.

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