I joined Twitter 15 years ago, about three years after the “microblogging” platform came into existence. In that time, I have tweeted (or retweeted) 326,000 times, liked nearly 300,000 posts, blocked 6700 accounts and muted 600 other. I acquired over 10,000 followers, making it my most successful social media platform by far. Yesterday, I downloaded all of my data from the site (31 MB, including message conversations) and today I started the process of deleting everything. DeleteTweets has been running for well over an hour and it’s only removed 3000* tweets, so, this is going to take a while.
My new primary social is BlueSky, where I’m @bevvincent.bsky.social. I joined that site when it was still invitation-only, but in the past week or so the site has exploded, adding a million new users a day, and my followers list is getting up there. Still only a tenth of my Twitter following, but it’s a work in progress. I’m also on Threads as bev.vincent, but I haven’t figured out how to make that site work yet. If anyone has a newbie orientation video or site, that would be greatly appreciated.
Today it’s raining, and I’m feeling quite smug about it. Why? Because I wanted to do some yard work this weekend in preparation for fall (mulch the leaves on the lawn, for example), and I actually did it yesterday, whereas today it would have been impossible. So, yay me for getting off my ass and getting it done.
Last Friday, I submitted a short story that I’ve been working on for a few weeks, off an on. My ability to focus on writing took a serious hit during late October/early November, and I made several false starts on this story. I knew what it was about, generally, but I didn’t know how to dig it up. I hand-wrote at least three different multi-page sections that I abandoned before finding my way in. Ultimately, I was able to use several pieces of the early efforts, so all was not lost, and I was quite pleased by how it turned out. However, it was a crime story without an identifiable crime. Something nefarious definitely happened, and two characters knew exactly what that was, but the detective didn’t, nor would readers, which the editor didn’t think would work in the anthology. The editor gave me the chance to take another stab at it, but I declined.
Twenty years ago, I would probably have done it, so eager was I to get stories out there. However, in this case, having finally captured the story the way I felt it had to be told, it seemed that I would be untrue to the story to change it in that way. The editor understood when I decided to withdraw, and encouraged me to submit to future anthologies, so all was not lost. And I still have story. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.
More and more people are learning about the forthcoming anthology (August 2025) called The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, which involves a few dozen writers contributing stories set in the universe of The Stand. My story is called “Lockdown,” part of the section that takes place during the events of the novel. Some stories are set after the book ends (some long after!). It can’t wait to read everyone else’s contributions.
I made one of my rare trips into Houston last month to meet up with Richard Chizmar and his wife at Under the Volcano before his signing at Murder by the Book, where he was paired with Johnny Compton. The Chizmars and a couple they knew from the area and I also went out to dinner afterward, which was nice. The couple live in the same community I do, and she teaches at the same school my daughter attended back in the 90s—small world. It was nice to see Rich—we have an ongoing dialog by text, but we only get together in person on rare occasions.
I picked up a few books while at the bookstore, including Compton’s Devil’s Kill Devils, which I haven’t started yet, but seems like good fun. I also got Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin and Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, both of which I’m currently reading, the latter to my wife. We just finished The Great Hippopotamus Hotel by Alexander McCall Smith (the latest in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series). I also read a galley of The Folly by Gemma Amor and read most of The Waiting by Michael Connelly, while waiting, ironically, for the event I participated in at the River Oaks Theater last month with Daniel Kraus, where we chatted before watching Creepshow. The latter two books are reviewed at the respective hyperlinks.
After watching the documentary Music by John Williams on Disney+, I remembered that I’d never seen E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Ever. When it came out, I was an undergrad at Dalhousie and it only played at a theater that was somewhat difficult to get to if you didn’t have a car, even though Halifax had a very good bus system. For some reason, I never got around to watching it subsequently, although I knew the story and have seen countless snippets. I may even have read the novelization. Anyway, we rectified that oversight finally, watching the film on Amazon. It holds up quite well, but seeing those young, young actors…wow! We also watched My Old Ass on Amazon, starring Aubrey Plaza. Terrible name for a movie, but it’s really quite charming. It’s about an 18-year-old girl on the verge of leaving home (a cranberry farm) to go to university in Toronto. High on mushrooms, she encounters her 39-year-old self (Plaza) and they begin a weird kind of dialog over the course of the next several days or weeks. We liked it a lot.
Last night, we watched the final episode of Season 2 of The Diplomat, and all I could say was “holy fuck” after the final twist. I knew something big was coming, but I had no idea what to expect, and I would never ever have guessed that. Highly recommended. I also watched Teacup (Peacock), which is based on the Robert McCammon novel Stinger. It’s a pretty good sci-fi horror series, with some decent shocks and scares, but I was hoping for a better ending rather than a setup for a second season. It’s hard to say that I enjoyed Disclaimer (Apple TV+) because it’s a difficult, unsettling story. Also, it’s told out of sequence, so it takes a while to piece together what’s happening when, and a lot of the story is based on a book written by a character who wasn’t present when the focal incident happened, and wasn’t able to talk to anyone who was there, so the viewer has to separate fact from fiction. It’s Cate Blanchet and Sacha Baron Cohen (who plays her hangdog husband) with Kevin Kline, who is the “villain” of the piece. It’s definitely worth watching, but not if you’re feeling at all depressed—which a lot of us are these days, I fear. A good antidote to it is Season 2 of Shrinking, which is delightful and uplifting even when dealing with some harsh truths. Seeing Harrison Ford do full-on comedy is worth the admission ticket by itself.
*update — in the time it’s taken me to write this, DeleteTweets has deleted another 800 posts. This is definitely going to take a while.
