Bev Vincent

My wife and I drove across the country bottom to top and back down again last week. We went from Texas to upper Michigan over the weekend before July 4th and returned on the weekend following, a grand total of about 2500 miles. Our daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter were over from Japan for our granddaughter’s third birthday. We contemplated flying, but since we were going to end up driving around a lot once we got up there anyway, we decided to make a trip of it.

We stopped overnight twice on the way up, in Arkadelphia, AR and in Holland, MI (the third or fourth Holland we encountered on the trip) in addition to meal stops at a place called Boomtown (world’s biggest fireworks mall) near Sikeston, MO and an Andy Griffith-themed restaurant in Manteo, MI. Our iPod was loaded with songs for the road, and we only got mildly disoriented once (each way, admittedly).

We stayed in a house on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan that had a northern view (see above). The amusing road sign in the image to the right was one of two we encountered not far from the house.

The sun was deceptively bright despite heavy cloud cover the first day and I managed to sauté my nose and forehead, which meant I spent the rest of the week lurking in the shadows.

One of our daughter’s suitcases went astray for a couple of days. They’d seen it in Chicago, so we knew it made it that far, but after that, puzzlement and confusion. American Airlines couldn’t say with any degree of certainty where it was. We were told on Sunday that it was on the next flight to Traverse City, an hour from where we were staying, so my wife and I went over to get it but…no joy. It was finally delivered to the house the next afternoon. Made us really glad we didn’t fly.

Lots of family time, including the big birthday party and a July 4th outing, although we didn’t stay up for fireworks. I also got to watch the first four episodes of season 3 of Stranger Things with my daughter. The first evening someone was testing out their fireworks and there were two amazingly percussive blasts that shook the house. The first time, we thought something heavy, like a fridge, had fallen over upstairs!

On the way back, we only stopped once, in Sikeston, MO. We encountered heavy rain near Chicago on day 1 and near Little Rock on day 2, both times when I was behind the wheel, as luck would have it. We also observed that we should compile a list of stretches of interstate where the washboard roads are rough enough to jolt kidney stones loose, as a cheap alternative to lithotripsy. Yes, Arkansas, we’re looking at you. We got home on Sunday evening, exhausted but exhilarated after spending time with family.

A couple of entries back, I wrote about a short story I’d conceived and executed in remarkably short order, and how it was written for so specifically themed a market that if it wasn’t accepted, I couldn’t see it ever getting published somewhere else. Fortunately, I won’t have that problem, as I received an acceptance letter for it a couple of days ago. By my count, it will be my 90th published story (not my 90th story publication as I have several stories that have been published more than once). Once I receive and sign the contract, I’ll announce more, but it’s a cool concept with some interesting names attached.

Hank Wagner and I have been doing tag-team reviews of Stranger Things for Dead Reckonings, and we’re getting ready to tackle Season 3. While we normally do this by email, this year we’ll get to talk about it at Necon, which starts a week from today. I have a lot of thoughts about the season, almost all of them positive, so I look forward to hashing it all out with Hank.

My panel this year is on Friday morning at 9 am: The Frank Michaels Errington Five Star Books Kaffeeklatsch. James Chambers, Frank Raymond Michaels, Melissa Sherlin, Madelon Wilson and I will discuss the previous year’s best books in honor of a reviewer and Necon alum who passed away recently.

Yesterday was my birthday. My wife like to tell people I’m 85 and dyslexic. We had a very nice day. Went to see Rocketman at a very early show, upgraded my cell phone, had dinner, watched a couple of episodes of Good Omens, talked to family on the phone. Clicked ‘like’ on several hundred well-wishing posts on Facebook!

We’re due to get a mini-monsoon midweek from the first tropical disturbance of the 2019 hurricane season. It should all be well past us by the weekend, which is good, since we are going into Houston for my Saturday afternoon signing at Murder by the Book.

As I mentioned last week, I wrote an essay for Steve Spignesi’s book Elton John: Fifty Years On: The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, which will be out around the same time as Elton’s autobiography, Me. It’s called “This Essay Has No Title” in tribute to a cool song from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I got on board the EJ train in the mid-70s, and have been a fan ever since. Saw him in concert for the first time in 1984 at Wembley Stadium and several time since, including on his Face-to-Face tour with Billy Joel and a couple of his solo performances with percussionist Ray Cooper.

Rocketman is an interesting re-conceptualization of Elton John’s life from the first time he sat down at a piano until he entered rehab in the late 1980s. Songs from his library (including a few deep cuts like “Rock and Roll Madonna” and “Amoreena”) are used throughout the film and often well out of sequence (A 2001 track illuminates a scene when the future rock star is still Reg Dwight in short pants). There are elements of fantasy (people floating in the air while listening to him perform) and familiar stories are re-imagined. And yet, all the touch points are there, including meeting and marrying recording engineer Renate Blauel. His “suicide attempt” becomes a swimming pool dive where he meets his younger self at the bottom performing “Rocket Man.” The film’s core is a rehab session where an in-costume Elton recounts all the reasons why he’s here. We really enjoyed it–good tunes, most of them sung by Taron Egerton (whose name always makes me think of a character from Game of Thrones). If someone isn’t already at work turning this into a Broadway play, they’re missing out on a great opportunity.

We’re four episodes into Good Omens, the six-part series based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. An angel (Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennant) become uneasy allies over the course of human history and are forced to work together to ward off Armageddon. It’s high camp, with a very definite Douglas Adams sensibility, and the two leads are hilarious. It’s like eternity’s greatest bromance. A fine supporting cast, too. You never know who is going to show up next, including John Hamm, Miranda Richardson, Michael McKean (with a Scottish brogue), Derek Jacobi, Mireille Enos and Benedict Cumberbatch, with the Frances McDormand playing the voice of God.

We also watched the Deadwood movie on Saturday evening. It was great to see the old gang back together a decade later, and to see old grievances bubble to the surface again. The dialog was even more Shakespearean than ever. Huge blocks of words that must have driven the actors to drink. My favorite moment involved Seth Bullock, late in the movie, when he almost stands aside to let something chaotic happen. Then he sees his wife watching him and his strong sense of conscience returns to him. And, of course, Al Swearingen got in the last punchy words. Rolling Stone has a great (and spoiler-filled) review of it.

One week from tomorrow, June 8, I’ll be signing Flight or Fright at Murder by the Book in Houston at 4:30 pm. The store’s event page is here and the Facebook event is here. Our anthology of turbulent tales comes out in trade paperback from Scribner (US) and Hodder & Stoughton (UK) on Tuesday, June 4. Of course, I’ll be happy to sign anything at the event, and I’ll be talking for a bit about how the project came about. We’re up to 13 translations now, with the recent addition of a Chinese edition.

Today is the last day to order Brian Freeman’s new LetterPress Publications’  Deluxe Special Edition of Revival. I wrote a “Historical Context” essay for the book, called “A Nasty, Dark Piece of Work.”

Last weekend, we watched a batch of movies. On Friday, we saw The Professor and the Madman, with Mel Gibson (not as the Madman) and Sean Penn (as the Madman). It’s based on the real-life story of a professor who tackles the huge challenge of compiling the first ever dictionary of English. He sends out a call-to-action to readers across the nation to read everything that’s ever been published and annotate all of the vocabulary. However, the project founders under its own weight until an inmate at a mental institution volunteers to contribute. After all, he has nothing but time on his hands and is a voracious reader. He’s a Civil War survivor with PTSD who thinks he’s being pursued by a scar-faced man. In a moment of hysteria, he accidentally killed an innocent man, which is why he’s in the asylum. It’s an interesting movie about words and sanity. Equally interesting is the story around the film: the director took his name off the movie and he and Gibson sued to stop it from being released because they’d wanted to film more scenes and the studio stopped them.

Our daughter had seen Monster when it first came out. We saw Charlize Theron talking about her physical transformation for that role on an episode of Graham Norton, so we thought we’d check it out. Then we found the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, made by a British guy who clearly didn’t want Wuornos to be executed. It revealed a lot about her background, the things that led up to events at the start of Monster. It’s a gruesome story, but there is a lot of conflicting information. Wuornos herself changed her story a few times, so who knows what the truth of any of it is?

Then we watched On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the beginning of her legal career, when she joined up with the ACLU to take the case of a man whose tax deduction for providing care for his ailing mother was denied because the law was designed for women. She saw it as a test case for equal rights that had the advantage of demonstrating gender bias against a man.

Finally, we saw The Mule, the latest Clint Eastwood film, based on the true story of a 90-year-old man who became a drug mule for the Sinaloa cartel. The story didn’t go the way I had assumed it would from the trailer: I thought he was going to get caught much earlier and have to go undercover for the Feds. There’s a great scene in a diner between Eastwood and Bradley Cooper (DEA agent who is pursuing Eastwood but doesn’t know who he is). They have a conversation about work vs. family and Cooper’s character says, “It’s good to talk to someone like you.” Eastwood says, “Like me?” Cooper responds, “Yeah, someone older, who doesn’t have any filters any more.” Eastwood, as he gets up to leave says, “I’m not sure that I ever had any.” Given the movie’s focus on how bad a husband and father Eastwood’s character was, and his regrets about that, I found myself wondering how much of it was Eastwood expressing his own regrets.

I enjoyed the series White Dragon on Amazon Prime. It stars John Simm as a university lecturer who finds out that his wife, who spends a great deal of time in Hong Kong, has been killed there. He goes to Hong Kong and discovers she’s been keeping many secrets from him. They make maximum use of the setting: lots of great shots of Hong Kong from all angles. I’ve been there twice, both times over 25 years ago, but I enjoyed seeing all that great footage of a fascinating city-state. It’s a decent thriller, too. I always enjoy Simm.

This weekend, I hope to see Rocketman, the Elton John biopic. His first Greatest Hits album was the first non-K-tel record I ever purchased and I’ve been a fan of his music ever since. I’ve seen him in concert numerous times over the years, and I wrote an essay for Steve Spignesi’s book Elton John: Fifty Years On: The Complete Guide to the Musical Genius of Elton John and Bernie Taupin, which will be out around the same time as Elton’s autobiography, Me.

I had a fascinating weekend attending Northern FanCon in Prince George, B.C. That’s about a 90 minute flight north of Vancouver, in the interior. A smallish mill town, where Dreamcatcher was filmed. I had to fly to Calgary and then to Vancouver before catching the final flight to PG, as they call it, so Friday was an early morning and a long day of travel. It felt so good to be back in Canada again, though, my first trip back to my native land in five years.

The first thing I did was visit a Tim Hortons in the Calgary airport. There’s something about the cadence and sound of the Canadian accent that blisses me out. I feel like I’m home. And I know people like to make fun of the Canadian predilection for apologizing, but I swear that if I had a nickle for ever time I heard someone say “sorry” this weekend, I’d be a wealthy man.

The third flight was on a small Bombardier Q400 turboprop. All the other aircraft on the runway dwarfed it. I saw a familiar person get on after just about everyone else was seated: Edward James Olmos from Battlestar Galactica and Miami Vice. Owing to a mixup with his route through customs in Vancouver, he ended up barely making this connection and his luggage didn’t, although it came in on the next flight.

One of the cool things about being an invited guest of a con like this is that I got the full star treatment. I had a driver (not a specific driver, and not exclusively mine, but any time I wanted to go somewhere, there was always someone to take me) and a liaison who made sure I was happy, and I got to hang out in the Green Room with the A-listers. In addition to Olmos, there was Lou Ferrigno (The Hulk), Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Amy Acker (Angel), to name a few. The promoter, Norm Coyne, is a bundle of energy, always on the phone or the radio putting out fires, but always present, too.

I had a presentation on Saturday morning. At first I thought I was going to be talking to myself or one other person, but an audience gradually formed and I ended up talking to maybe twenty people in total. Seemed like it was well received. I skipped a few of the after-hours events (karaoke, for example). I watched some hockey games instead, and rediscovered the yummy goodness that is brown gravy on French fries.

My favorite workshop of the weekend was Marc Bernardin’s — he was one of the writers for Season 1 of Castle Rock. To show us how things go in a writers’ room, he had us “break” an episode of the “classic” TV series Knight Rider. He gave us the basic rules (four-act structure, certain beats that had to be met, the rules of the Knight Rider universe) and then we brainstormed a plot, which he mapped out on the white board, as below. It typically takes a week to break an episode, so obviously our process was accelerated and condensed.

It was a lot of fun but also instructive. A writers’ room is democratic, except the showrunner is the person who has the final say, so it’s like a benign dictatorship, too. Everyone throws out ideas and the good ones survive. I’ve always said I’d love to be a fly on the wall in a writers’ room some day, and this may be as close as I ever get. Here is how our episode turned out. When everything is in place, he said, Act 4 essentially writes itself as you solve all of the things set up in the first three acts, which is why it’s blank here.

I attended the VIP reception on Saturday evening, where we got to chat with the A-listers. Amy Acker, when she found out why I was there, said, “Oh, you probably know my neighbor,” who turned out to be Mick Garris (director of The Stand, etc.).

I spent a fair amount of time at my booth, talking to the occasional person who stopped by. There was a lot of cosplay, and I especially enjoyed seeing the tiny tots dressed up like some sci-fi or Marvel character, absolutely agog at everything going on around them.

I had lunch with James Douglas on Sunday. He directed the Dollar Baby “The Doctor’s Case,” which is a really good adaptation. They got Denise Crosby and William B. Davis to star in the wraparound section, and it was filmed in a wonderful castle-like mansion in Victoria, so the setting is spectacular. We’re discussing the possibility of adapting “Zombies on a Plane,” my story from Flight or Fright. James hosted a Dollar Baby Film Festival at Northern FanCon but unfortunately I was only able to squeeze in “The Doctor’s Case” due to scheduling conflicts.

Chris Dias wandered the show floor interviewing people and he cornered me for nearly ten minutes. It was completely unplanned, but I think it turned out pretty well.

https://www.facebook.com/northernfanconpg/videos/651134275308388/

Although it’s a fairly small convention, I had a great time at Northern FanCon. Got to talk to some cool people and make some connections that someday may pan out into something. You never know about these things. I like to joke that if I’d been in the bathroom when Steve came up with the idea for Flight or Fright instead of sitting next to Rich Chizmar, someone else might have ended up as his co-editor! It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.

Yesterday was another travel day. I left PG at 9 am and got home last night at 10 pm. En route I wrote notes for a review of Ted Chiang’s fascinating story collection Exhalation and watched several episodes of the new Netflix dark comedy Dead to Me starring Cristina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. I spent the rest of the time avoiding spoilers for Game of Thrones because the hotel where I was staying didn’t have HBO!

This Saturday, I’ll be at Comicpalooza at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. My only scheduled event is a panel called “World-Building for Short Stories, Novelettes and Novellas” at 10:30 am with moderator Tex Thompson and co-panelists Michelle Muenzler and Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

My wife’s away for a while, so I had a lot of free time on my hands this weekend. I got quite a bit of work done, especially yesterday, when I did another draft or two of a couple of short stories, wrote a book review and finished my presentation for Northern Fancon, which I’m attending next weekend. I’ll be checking in with the Dollar Baby Film festival at that event from time to time, but I have a Content Creator panel on Saturday morning at 10:30.

I checked the weather in Prince George this morning…brrr! When I looked at 6 am it was around freezing and it’s only a couple of degrees above that now, although it will get into the fifties later in the day. It’ll be at or below freezing at night when I’m there, and there’s the possibility of flurries. I sure hope they told the talent coming from Los Angeles what to expect!

On Friday evening I finished watching Season 5 of Bosch on Amazon. This one is based on Two Kinds of Truth, and although there are numerous differences from the source novel, the spirit of the book is captured very well. Unlike some crime drama series, this one has several different things going on at the same time, mostly unrelated, and they spend a significant amount of time setting up the events that will transpire in Season 6.

At noon on Saturday, after successfully dodging spoilers, I went to see Avengers: Endgame. The Ironman Triathalon was taking place near the movie theater, so I had to do some circumnavigating to get there. I hadn’t realized I’d signed up for a 3D showing. I tend to avoid those because, as a glasses-wearing person, the 3D glasses are an awkward addition, but it wasn’t bad and I appreciated the extra depth of field the 3D effect created. I’d put myself on a liquid-free diet for several hours before the movie, since the running time is 3 hours and there’s always half an hour of trailers beforehand. I’m not as conversant with the Marvel Cinematic Universe as many of my friends and colleagues, but I’ve watched at least half of the previous films and re-watched Infinity War on Thursday to prepare myself for this event movie. It was well done. Not as many deaths as I’d expected. The ending was like the curtain call from a long-running play as everyone who’s anyone is trotted out for a few onscreen seconds.

So far I’ve seen a grand total of about 10 minutes of the NHL playoffs. We saw the final 5 minutes of the penultimate game between Toronto and Boston last weekend and I saw the final 5 minutes of the Columbus/Islanders game yesterday. I need to track down more. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to watch a good hockey game.

One of the songs featured on Killing Eve this week was “Where Evil Grows” by the Poppy Family, a Canadian act from the 70s that consisted of Terry and Susan Jacks. Haven’t heard that song in many, many years. Terry Jacks was on the radio all the time when I was growing up with his “Seasons in the Sun” dirge. I wonder if Sandra Oh was the one who came up with that song for them. Aside: I saw Jodie Comer on Graham Norton this week and was amazed by her normal accent. She sounds like one of the Beatles.

My friend Linwood Barclay described this week’s episode of Game of Thrones as “World War Z meets Saving Private Ryan. The most ambitious ep of TV ever.” I couldn’t agree more. It was amazing from beginning to end. I found it interesting that the writers understood that prolonged battle sequences can get boring, so they found interesting ways to break them up and change the mood/tone. As with Endgame, there were fewer deaths of major characters than I expected, but there are still battles to come.

That looks like the sun rising in the image above, but it’s actually the full moon climbing out from beneath the Gulf of Mexico. My wife and I spent a four-day weekend at a vacation rental in Surfside Beach, a place we’ve been to numerous times over the years. It’s a nice close getaway, less than a two-hour drive, but it feels like we’re in another world when we’re there. We don’t go completely off the grid, but we do minimize our time online, so it is quite relaxing.

We left on Thursday afternoon. We had torrential rain the morning, but that packed it in around noon and from that point on, we had nothing but sunshine. It wasn’t oppressively hot, in the seventies for the most part, so that was nice. Despite taking precautions, we did catch a bit of sun, mostly in the face. Nothing serious, but enough for people to take note of the fact that I’ve been in the sun. Of course, I tend to burn if I get too close to a 60W light bulb…

The rental house is right on the Gulf, behind a protective dune. It has a big deck where we sit and listen to the water crashing in and watch the people who are visiting the beach for the day. Unlike in most places, people are allowed to drive on the beach in Surfside, so the beach is lined with cars parked perpendicular to the waterfront. Every so often, vehicles get stuck in the sand, which is always a source of amusement for us watching.

As the sun moves across the sky, we scoot forward on the deck to keep on the edge of the roof’s shadow. Close enough to feel the warmth but out of the direct sunlight. You could almost set your watch from our position on the deck. It was the long walks on the beach that did us in, I think, even though I was wearing my Indiana Jones hat. Light reflected from the sand, probably.

The moon was quite full when we were there, too, which was nice and atmospheric. We had some great meals, drank some wine and some Surfside Tea (their version of Long Island Iced Tea) and read. I finished The Pandora Room by Christopher Golden, Lord of the Flies (first time I’ve read it since junior high) and Cold Paradise by Stuart Woods. I found the latter as a battered paperback on a bookshelf in the vacation home and it looked like a good beach read. It was–I zipped through the 400+ pages in a single day. I was rather bemused to find a passage early in this novel, first published in 2001, where the main character is being given a tour of Palm Beach, FL. “That’s Mar a Lago over there – the home of Marjorie Meriwether Post, now owned by the awful Donald Trump.” Yes, nearly 20 years ago, we knew. We knew.

Some stories take a long time to germinate. I’ve had this idea–only a title really–for nearly two years, and it finally turned into something. I’ve always been interested in hearing how Stephen King has, at times, worked on story ideas as he goes to sleep at night. Telling himself the story, a little more each night, until it either demonstrates it can work or fizzles. I remember him saying that about The Green Mile, and I recently read he did that as early as The Long Walk, the first novel he finished writing.

I do that every now and then, although I generally fall asleep quite quickly, so I don’t get far. But I decided it was time to take this story title idea out for a test drive. I got a little way with it, but it wasn’t until I actually put pen to paper that the story came to life. I wrote a couple of pages yesterday morning and a few more today and, in the process of telling myself the story, I discovered what it was really about. It is so cool when that happens. Things popped out from wherever details come from that I didn’t at all anticipate when I started writing it.

I enjoyed Black Summer on Netflix. It’s yet another zombie flick, but it does some interesting things with how the story is told and the direction is intriguing, too. A neat King cameo in one episode in a library (Rich Chizmar cameo, too). The episodes are of different lengths, dropping down to a mere 25 and 20 minutes for the last two. Yhere are instances of people doing dumb things to serve the plot, but on the whole I quite liked it. The last couple of minutes made my jaw hit the floor, but I have a theory about that.

I have my ticket to see Avengers: Endgame on Saturday. I just might watch Infinity War again in preparation for it. The following weekend, I’m off to Prince George, BC to attend Northern Fancon. It’ll be a quick trip, but I’m very much looking forward to it. I’m also booked into NECON and, for the first time, Bouchercon at the end of October, which is in Dallas, a mere three-hour drive away, which in Texas terms is as good as next door.