It’s early days—there isn’t even a cover yet—but it’s never too early to pimp forthcoming projects. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for Volume 2 of The X-Files: The Truth is Out There anthology, which contains my short story “Phase Shift.” I don’t know the entire list of contributors, but these folks are mentioned on the order page: Kelley Armstrong, Jon McGoran, Hank Schwaeble, Kami Garcia, Hank Phillippi Ryan, David Sakmyster, Sarah Stegall, Glenn Grenberg, Tim Waggoner, David Farland. The anthology, edited by Jonathan Maberry, will be out in February 2016.
Event-filled days chez Vincent lately. Our daughter, who got married this summer, moved to Okinawa over the weekend, which meant a lot of organizing and re-organizing in advance of the Sunday morning flight. The biggest issue was the cat, which required a lot of special preparations and planning for the flight. My daughter and her husband hired a company to handle most of it, but there were still a lot of last-minute issues. The cat departed on Wednesday and arrived at her destination on Friday evening (local time).
It takes a long time to get to Okinawa. In general, about 24 real hours of travel time, plus the fourteen-hour time change. Our daughter left on Sunday morning and got to her new home on Monday evening, after three flights and a harrowing taxi ride. As a result of the big move, we inherited a lot of stuff, either for storage for the 4-5 years they’ll be overseas or to donate/sell.
One of the major items was her car. I decided that, since it was nearly a decade newer than the one I drive, I’d take it on and get rid of my 11-year-old Scion tC, which had less than 44,000 miles on it. I wasn’t looking forward to the process of selling it, though. Can be a hassle. If we took it to CarMax, I figured we wouldn’t get nearly what we could through a private sale, but I wasn’t relishing the though of having to deal with all that folderol. My daughter had sold a bunch of stuff through a community website, which I figured had less of a crazy quotient than Craigslist, so I decided to give it a shot. I took a few pictures of the car in the driveway and posted a 250-word classified on the website. Within a few hours I had no less than seven or eight inquiries about it. Apparently there’s a lot of interest in low-mileage cars, no matter the age. Made me think I should have asked for more!
Anyhow, I showed it to one family for their teenage son after work. They liked it but were going to look at another car. Then I heard from someone who really wanted it. They had cash in hand and wanted it right now! So I had them come over to look at it. I couldn’t believe it—just as I was about to start it up to demonstrate something, the battery chose that moment to kick the bucket. Fortunately, they were highly motivated buyers and we were able to swap out the battery and seal the deal. So, in just under 12 hours, I managed to sell my car. End of ordeal. They should all be so easy. (Well, it could have been easier if not for the stupid battery.) But my days as a huckster are over, I hope. I’m no salesman.
Now we just have to unload all the extra stuff stacked up in the garage and our house will be more or less back to normal.
I’ve been watching Narcos on Netflix during my morning exercise sessions. It’s a fictionalized account of a couple of DEA agents in Colombia during the time when Pablo Escobar rose to prominence. Interesting stuff. They dub in a lot of period news footage (Nancy Reagan and the “just say no” campaign, shots of the real people being portrayed). It’s quite good.
Then we started tearing through the fourth season of Longmire on the weekend. The move to Netflix means that the episodes jump from 42 minutes to pretty much an hour each, without the need to stage mini-crises around commercial breaks, and the show benefits from this. The third episode is especially harrowing. The camera angles are experimental at times, and the production values are quite good, giving the show a richer look. For some reason, though, I seem to have gotten a pretty good knack for identifying when a character is telling a big fat lie, even though the cops on the show don’t glom onto the fact until later. Still a decent show, worth a binge.
I also did a binge rewatch of Season 5A of Haven so I can prepare a recap essay for News from the Dead Zone and to refresh my memory of the show for the launch of 5B in a few weeks. I’m supposed to get a screener of the first two episodes this week, too, so I can help promote the final season. I’m glad to see that Kris Lemche will be back in his role as the Darkside Seeker. He was on the set when we visited last year and I had a lot of fun joking around with him. Unfortunately the nice long interview I did in the morgue that Lemche “crashed” has yet to surface, and I’m beginning to think it never will.
