As of mid-September, I will have lived in Texas for 28 years, during which time I’ve seen one hurricane (Ike, 2008) and a couple of very damaging tropical storms (Allison, 2001 being the worst). Now we have Harvey headed vaguely towards us. Ish. He’ll either be a tropical storm or a Category 3 Hurricane, depending upon who you believe. Landfall will occur hundreds of miles away from us, far down the Texas coast, but we’ll be on the wet side of the storm, so a lot of rain is forecast. When I say “a lot,” I mean anywhere from 12″ to four feet.
The strengthening might be good news for us. Not so good for people in its direct path. The first predictions were that it would come ashore and then sort of amble east and sit on us for a few days, pulling in moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and dropping it on us. I don’t see that eastward jag on any of the current maps, so I think that’s good. If it speeds on through, so much the better. The real trouble comes when storms like that—like Allison—stall. We’re doing minor storm prep, making sure there’s nothing in the yard that will go airborne, filling the car gas tanks, getting a few supplies so we don’t have to venture out if it rains hard. Our part of the community doesn’t flood, as a rule, and we don’t have to go anywhere this weekend, so we’ll be fine, I figure.
My work has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian and, now, Bulgarian. I received word this morning that the anthology Shining in the Dark, which contains my new story “Aeliana,” will be published by Pleiad Books in Bulgaria in late November. The anthology title in that language is СИЯНИЕ В МРАКА and my name is written on the cover thus: БЕВ ВИНСЪНТ.
We’ve been watching Call the Midwife on Netflix lately. It’s set in East London in the late 1950s, the story of a handful of nurses who work as midwives in conjunction with a group of nuns. It’s based on the memoir of a real midwife and the stories are charming but they also delve into social issues of the era: poverty, abortion, mixed marriages, incestuous relationships, abuse, etc. There’s one old nun, Sister Monica Joan, who is suffering from bouts of dementia, often prone to quoting philosophers or poets, but who occasionally becomes properly lucid and can cut straight to the heart of an issue thanks to her many years of life experience. She’s a delight. We’re in season three of five, and it has been renewed to run for a few more years.
I also finished Ozark, which I quite enjoyed. It’s been drawing some comparisons to Breaking Bad, but it’s not quite as artistic as that earlier show, and it has a few stumbles and mis-steps, but I’ll be back for season two. We went out to see An Inconvenient Sequel last weekend. A lot of it focuses on Gore’s behind-the-scenes efforts during the negotiations over the Paris Accord, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a State of the Union statement on how things have changed—and how they haven’t—in the years since An Inconvenient Truth. Well worth seeing, but I doubt any climate deniers will bother, so it’s hard to gauge its real impact.
