Flight or Fright was born in a diner across the road from Bangor International Airport thirteen months ago, almost to the day. By the end of 2017, we had a mostly complete manuscript, although there were still some pending revisions to make, and it took us a few months after that until all the contracts from the contributors were in hand.
Now it’s a reality. Well, it has been for a little while, with Cemetery Dance shipping copies for the past couple of weeks. But today is the official publication day for our anthology of turbulent tales, tales to take your mind off a bumpy flight. The reviews so far have been overwhelmingly positive, and I’ve heard from a number of readers who have enjoyed the stories we assembled.
Not only has the book been published in the US and the UK, in hardcover, ebook and audio, we have ten foreign translations already nailed down with, hopefully, more to follow.
It’s been a helluva ride so far. I’m tempted to make all sorts of flying/air travel puns, but I’ll restrain myself. With a seat belt.
It was my wife’s birthday this past weekend. We had a quiet time of it, but we watched a bunch of movies. The only one in the cinema was Juliet, Naked, based on the Nick Hornby novel. It stars Rose Byrne as a woman whose long-time live-in boyfriend (Chris O’Dowd) is obsessed with an American musician who only ever released one album. When the boyfriend receives a copy of the original demos and can’t stop going on about it, she posts a scathing review on his message board and receives a reply from the musician himself (Ethan Hawke), the man to whom O’Dowd’s character has built a shrine in her basement. They become penpals. Hilarity ensues. A nice rom-com with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns.
We watched Book Club, starring Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Diane Keaton as four long-time friends who meet monthly to discuss books. When Fifty Shades is introduced, they all begin wondering about the current states of their love lives and make some decisions that surprise themselves and/or each other. We finally got to see Annihilation, based on Jeff Vandermeer’s novel. The book is somewhat recognizable in the film, but a lot has been left out and changed, particularly toward the ending. We both enjoyed it, although I found myself missing some of the bits that didn’t make it into the film. Our least favorite film of the weekend was called Breaking and Exiting. It stars Mel Gibson’s son and Jordan Hinson, the latter of which also wrote the script. It’s about a burglar who breaks into a house only to find a woman attempting to commit suicide in the bathtub. For some reason he decides (after pointing out that she’d taken the wrong kind of pills and supplying her with some that would do the trick) to stick around and talk her out of killing herself. It’s a weird movie that defies explanation time and time again. You might recognize Hinson as Zoe from the SyFy series Eureka, which explains why Colin Ferguson (who played her father) shows up in a cameo as a cop. We almost turned the movie off during the first 30 minutes. Finally we saw Jeremy Irons in An Author Prepares as a self-absorbed famous actor who has a heart attack and is forced to drive from L.A. to N.Y. with his semi-estranged son to his daughter’s wedding. En route, he does all the things he’s not supposed to do, including drinking, eating unhealthy foods and carousing. It’s a lighter than usual role for Irons, and we got a kick out of it.
I also read Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard novel Jackrabbit Smile. It forms the loose basis for Season 3 of the Sundance series, although only very loosely. I found it fascinating to pick out the framework of the novel as distilled into the show and the creative decisions they made in “adapting” it.
