Bev Vincent

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.

Only six more days to go until Flight or Fright is officially published, although Cemetery Dance has been sending out copies to advanced purchasers for a while now. I took a box to Killer Con in Austin last weekend and sold most of them, including to Patrick Frievald, pictured here, who seems to have frightened everyone else off his flight with it.

We went to a concert/rally in support of Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Senate, last Thursday. A few local bands got the crowd pumped up (we saw VODI and Wild Moccassins), then the candidate took the stage and spoke for the better part of an hour. It’s a standing-room-only venue, and it was packed. We were near the front and got to see O’Rourke up close. He’s passionate, energetic, and he’s running on a campaign that isn’t against anything or anyone (except, maybe Betsy DeVoss), but rather running for certain beliefs and tenets. He’s closed to within the margin of error of the despicable Ted Cruz, funded solely on small donations, no PACs, and he seems to be outraising Cruz by a significant margin. Here’s hoping all that enthusiasm carries into November.

On Friday, I drove to Austin for KillerCon, a convention that Wrath James White launched in Las Vegas that he has now migrated to the Texas capital. It’s a small, intimate weekend with a single-track schedule, which means you never have to miss something in favor of something else. I registered very late, so I wasn’t included in any of the programming, but I had a terrific time nonetheless. It was good to catch up with people like Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, Kelli Owen, Jeff Strand, Edward Lee, Joe, Keith and Kasey Lansdale, as well as meeting a number of new people. The two highlights of the programming for me were the “hot wing” challenge, in which several authors consumed progressively hotter sauces while doing things like coming up with alternate endings for their work or reading one-star reviews of their books. It was hilarious. Then there was the always entertaining “gross-out” contest, in which authors have three minutes to read a gross but funny story. Comedy gold. As with any con, though, the social aspect is the biggest draw. I ended up staying up really late on Saturday night talking to people in the con suite, fueled in large part by a killer Cuba Libre mixed by Stephen Kozeniewski. I haven’t been up that late in ages.

We watched  a couple of movies on the weekend. First was Won’t You Be My Nieighbor? the Fred Rogers documentary. He was an amazing, motivational, inspiring guy, and this film does him proper service. His life had a terrific trajectory and he remained true to his beliefs all the way through. Highly recommended. Then we saw Oceans 8, a decent caper film in the tradition of the Danny Ocean movies. The scheme is well crafted and executed. My biggest complaint is that there weren’t any significant wrinkles along the way that made them wing it. It was smooth sailing all the way through. There was a little surprise near the end, but I would have like more stress and trouble. Maybe even some double-dealing and deception within the group. I also saw the finale of Sharp Objects, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn. A difficult story, bleak and vicious, but well done. The ending was very much in keeping with the show’s dreamy, subliminal style.

Last night was the first night of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Civilian Police Academy. It’s running for 15 weeks, and we’ll get the inside scoop on just about everything that entity does. I did the Houston Police Department’s academy a number of years ago. It’s terrific research material for my writing, since I’m concentrating mostly on crime fiction these days.

That’s what we used to call them, back in the day when they were on tape. Massive folders stuffed full of cassettes. You could listen to them on your Sony Walkman, but you had to flip the tape every 30 minutes or so.

Then they went to CD audiobooks, and even those were quite big because you could only fit an hour or so on a disc. Finally, we arrive at MP3 discs, where you can put an entire book on a single disc, or MP3 downloads via Audible, iTunes, audiobooks.com, Google play and a number of other places. You can take the whole book with you without having to switch media or carry cumbersome tapes/disc sets. Isn’t progress wonderful?

The Simon & Schuster audiobook version of Flight or Fright, which will be released on September 4th, the same day as the Cemetery Dance hardcover, is now available for pre-order, and the readers have been announced. They are: Stephen King, Bev Vincent, Norbert Leo Butz, Christian Coulson, Santino Fontana, Simon Jones, Graeme Malcolm, Elizabeth Marvel, David Morse and Corey Stoll. You’ll probably recognize a number of those names. David Morse, of course, from The Langoliers, The Green Mile, and other King adaptations. Elizabeth Marvel, who recently played the President on Homeland, as well as appearing on House of Cards and Fargo. Corey Stoll is also a House of Cards alum, but I know him better from Law & Order: LA. Norbert Leo Butz is a two-time Tony award winning Broadway actor, but I know him as Kevin Rayburn on Bloodline. Christian Coulson was in one of the Harry Potter films, playing young Tom Riddle. Santino Fontana voiced Prince Hans in Frozen and was on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Simon Jones has played Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy several times (and had a cameo in the 2005 movie version). Graeme Malcolm has done a lot of theater and audio books, and was profiled in AudioFile Magazine.

Steve is reading his introduction, his notes at the beginning of each story, and his own story, “The Turbulence Expert.” I did not elect to read my story (best leave that to the professionals), but I did agree to record my afterword, which was an interesting process. I have done readings at conventions on occasion, and I recorded “Harming Obsession” several years ago, but that was done the low-tech way. I also regularly read to my wife.

Photo Credit: Dorothy Chan

However, for the folks at Simon & Schuster, I had to go to a studio. This was back in early June, on a fairly hot day. S&S arranged a studio in Houston, so I drove into town, ending up very close to the theater where I saw the advanced screening of It last year, not long after Hurricane Harvey messed up the city. The studio was part of a house on a residential street. I guess I’d been expecting an office building of some sort, but Houston has lax zoning laws (if there are any at all), so running a business out of a home is a-ok.

I met the recording engineer, who escorted me into a small isolation chamber and fitted me with large headphones. I had a lectern for my reading material and a microphone and a bottle of water. I could have chosen to sit for the session, but I stand up most of the time when I’m at a computer (easier on the old back), so I decided to stand for the reading, too. I think that gave me a little more freedom to gesture with my hands, not that that will come across on the reading, but it helped, I think.

First, I read my story notes for “Zombies on a Plane,” my contribution to the anthology. It’s the only story where I wrote the header notes, at Steve’s suggestion. I don’t know if that will be used on the audiobook, though–this was mostly done as a warm-up and to let the engineer and Christina, the producer, determine the sound levels and other technical things like that. Speaking of the producer, she was in New York calling in by Skype, and she was my constant companion through this process, speaking into my ears.

I guess I thought I’d be reading the thing straight through a number of times, but that’s now how it’s done. I read and re-read (and, several times, re-re-re-re-re-read sentences and paragraphs. Christina was very hands-on. She would stop me and encourage me to try a different tone or approach to a sentence. It was a bit like being back in high school in drama club, taking direction on how to deliver my lines. In some places, she wanted me to break loose (the one-word sentence “Yippie-ki-yay” comes to mind). She looked for jauntiness in some sections, and a more serious approach in others. A building sense of excitement in some anecdotes. She was also mindful that I got every word right (it’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, not “Nightmares”).

My afterword is only a few pages long, but it took about 75 minutes to record it, and at the end of that session there must have been scores of audio snippets that would need to be reviewed, selected and spliced together to yield the final audio file. Very much like a movie editor’s job in selecting takes and splicing them together to make a motion picture.

Photo by Dorothy Chan

It was a fascinating process, and I can’t wait to hear how it all sounds. I have a renewed respect for people who narrate for a living or on a regular basis. It’s a demanding job. Once we wrapped the afterword, Christina asked me a few questions that will be used either to promote the audiobook or will be included on the audiobook itself. I think I was more nervous during that section because I didn’t have anything scripted out. Nothing to read!

Finally, to put a bow on the digital edition of the audiobook, Steve and I recorded an interview with each other by phone last week. We spent about 20 minutes discussing the project and related topics. There was no third-party interviewer, just us passing the ball back and forth. That was a blast, and pretty freewheeling, although the facilitator again asked us to repeat certain lines at the end of the session to make sure they had clean versions of them.

Less than a month until the book and the audiobook are unleashed on the public. I can’t think of a better way to spend a long flight, preferably a trans-oceanic flight with long sections over the water, than listening to the audiobook version of Flight or Fright!

ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) has been one of my bucket list groups for decades. Never thought I’d ever get the chance to see them in concert, but they announced a tour last fall with a stop in Houston. I bought tickets immediately. Since last November, it has always seemed like the show was far in the future, but it finally happened on Friday evening at the Toyota Center in Houston (home to the Houston Rockets basketball team).

We went into the city early to have supper after parking at the garage by the venue. We had to walk about eight blocks to the restaurant but, thankfully, I had brought an umbrella, so we didn’t get too wet when it started to rain halfway there. Lots of people around us did. One older couple (by older, I mean about our age!) were huddled in the bushes under the overhang from an office building. As we passed, the man said, “I’ll give you $10 for your umbrella!”

After a scrumptious meal, we made our way back to the garage to get rid of the umbrella (it was no longer raining and we only had to cross the street to get into the Toyota Center), we entered the venue and found our seats, near the edge of the upper bowl. The opening act was a Los Angeles-based group called Dawes, who are apparently quite popular in Houston. I’ve never heard of them before, but they put on a good show. At times they reminded me of Jackson Browne, at others CCR and the intro to one of their songs sounded for all the world like Pink Floyd. I’ll have to check them out.

At 9:15, the lights went down (subtle ELO reference) and the main event started with “Standin’ In the Rain.” From that point on it was pure bliss. Every song felt like an encore. Just about any ELO hit you care to mention was played (except “Xanadu”). They also did one Traveling Wilburys song (“Handle with Care”—they showed Lynne’s other band’s members on the rear-projected video) and one song from the most recent Jeff Lynne’s ELO album Alone in the Universe (“When I was a Boy”). Lynne looks and sounds terrific (he’s 70), and his band is fantastic. In addition to some guitars, a couple of keyboards and drums, there were two cello players and a violinist who recreated the orchestral parts of the classic ELO songs. The light show was great, with bursts of lasers, and lots of things projected onto the back screen and the stage. The audience was fully engaged during the entire concert, and my voice was raw from singing along to songs like “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Certainly one of the top five concerts I’ve ever attended. We had a blast.

Yesterday afternoon, we went to see the new Spike Lee film. We parked in the theater garage and went up the hill to our favorite pizzeria. When we left, it was pouring down rain again. I didn’t have any real reason to think it might rain, but I had brought along the umbrella, so we didn’t get soaked.  Well, not quite as bad as we would have without it, but it was a small umbrella for two people and the rain was really strong, so my back got wet, which didn’t feel so good once we got into the air conditioned theater. Still, it was in keeping with the theme of the weekend, I guess.

BlacKkKlansman is based on the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black Colorado Springs officer (played by Denzel Washington’s son, John David Washington) who manages to go undercover with the KKK using another officer, Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver). Stallworth ends up talking to David Duke a few times. Duke has political aspirations, but even Stallworth’s white colleagues think there’s no chance of someone like him ending up in the White House. It’s played for laughs, but it’s very definitely not funny.

Zimmerman—who is Jewish but non-practicing—pretending to be Stallworth, is offered the chance to become president of the local chapter. In parallel, the real Stallworth begins a relationship with black student activist Patrice Dumas without revealing he’s a cop. The movie is a fascinating look inside the Klan in the late 1970s, and it becomes more of a crime thriller as the story builds to a crescendo. Most of the cops are good guys doing their jobs, although there’s one bad apple amongst them and another scene involving Stallworth that will be familiar to anyone who watches the news these days. The resolution is quite satisfying. You feel good. Then there’s the punch in the gut that Lee uses as a coda to the movie: real-life footage from recent confrontations between American Nazis and anti-fascist demonstrators. What a powerful statement. Definitely a must-see movie, but it will leave depressed.

We’ve watched a number of movies that we enjoyed recently. The most recent was Tully, starring Charlize Theron as a mother struggling with a newborn and a son who is probably somewhere on the spectrum, although he isn’t officially diagnosed, plus another daughter. See this one without reading anything about it. The less you know in advance, the more you’re likely to enjoy it. Theron is impressive in an unglamorous role in which she is called upon to be brash and sarcastic on a regular basis. There is the requisite “didn’t see that coming” moment late in the game.

I finally got around to seeing Thor: Ragnarok on the weekend. I’m still working on my MCU movie catch-up, but this one was a decent entry. A cheeky sense of humor. Especially liked the scenes between Thor and Doctor Strange, and Jeff Goldblum was a hoot. The director voiced one of the funnier minor characters with a full-on antipodean accent.

We also saw Like Father, the new release on Netflix starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic bride-to-be and Kelsey Grammer as her long-estranged father. Improbably, they end up on a week-long cruise together in one of the honeymoon suites while they attempt to ignore each other (at first) and get past their long-standing issues. Lots of cute scenes, and it’s a low-risk film, a rom-com without the rom, really. Seth Rogan plays an awkward Canadian divorcé, and his wife directed the movie. It has the hugest and most pervasive instance of product placement of which I’m aware: the Royal Caribbean cruise ship that is almost a character. Not a very demanding film, but we liked it well enough.

Final Portrait is a Geoffrey Rush showcase written and directed by Stanley Tucci. Rush plays real-life tortured artist Alberto Giacometti, who asks a friend (played by Armie Hammer) to pose for a portrait at his Paris atelier. It’s only supposed to take a couple of hours, but it stretches into days and then weeks, with Giacometti occasionally painting over much of what he’s accomplished in a fit of pique and artistic melodrama. Rush throws himself into the role and at first you wonder whether he’d be an interesting person to know but later you’d probably decide he’d be tedious to be around. He was a conspicuous philanderer, to boot. The big question is why the friend, James Lord, would put up with Giacometti’s behavior for so long, especially when he had pressing business in America. Tony Shalhoub (Monk) is almost unrecognizable as Giacometti’s brother, who has seen this all before. It’s a rare dramatic turn for him, and he’s quite good in it.

I was surprised by Red Sparrow, the Jennifer Lawrence Soviet spy thriller. Based on trailers from back when it was first released, I expected her to be more of a femme fatale. Instead, it turns out she was forced into the sparrow program by her lascivious uncle. There is a decent amount of ambiguity to the story: which side is she really playing, and is she an agent, a double agent, a treble agent or what? We enjoyed the unexpected turn of events at the end. Also stars Charlotte Rampling, Mary-Louise Parker (briefly, as a ditzy and drunken US politician), and Jeremy Irons. It took a critical drubbing, but it wasn’t as bad as we were led to believe it might be.

We also saw The Leisure Seeker, with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as a couple of a certain age. She decides to dust off the old Winnebago (which bears the same nickname as the film) for one last long vacation trek with her husband, who has dementia. Her goal is the Florida Keys, because Sutherland was a big fan of Hemingway. They have numerous adventures along the way, and Sutherland’s character swims in and out of awareness. He’s well enough to drive (if she gives directions), but a lot of the time he doesn’t know where they are or, indeed who they are. Mirren’s character is frustrated when he suddenly recognizes a student he had many years ago, everything about her, but then a few minutes later can’t recall their children’s names. It’s a poignant film about a difficult situation that has an ending you might see coming…or maybe not. Two great actors doing their best with a road movie for the ages.

On the TV front, I watched La Forêt (The Forest) on Netflix, a French crime series that reminded me a little of Broadchurch. The local police gets a new boss on the same day that a teenage girl goes missing. The disappearance calls to mind a similar incident from a decade earlier when two girls went missing. All the signs point toward the culprit being someone from the village, which makes long-time friends and acquaintances suddenly suspicious and wary of each other. There is a vaguely supernatural air to the story, which also involves a French teacher who was a foundling who may have lived in a cave in the woods for some prolonged stretch when she was six or seven years old. Not quite as well done as Broadchurch, but I enjoyed it, and it’s a breezy six episodes.

I also saw The Rain, a Danish series that starts off with a misguided scientist seeding rainclouds with a virus that he thinks will “fix” humanity. Instead, it kills off almost everyone. His two children, a teenage daughter and her younger brother, spend years in a bunker until they’re forced to emerge, where they join up with a group of other young people. The rain is still deadly, so they have to take cover every time the clouds grow dark, and there are various groups of people they need to be wary of, including paramilitary guys in armed vehicles scooping up survivors in search of someone who might be immune. There are some real surprises from episode to episode, the individual characters have interesting back-stories and it’s definitely open for a second season. I liked it a lot.

I remember a time when you set your VCR / DVR and it did exactly what you told it to do, and nothing else. If a show was delayed starting because of an overlong basketball game, you missed part of the program.

Now, DVRs are smart. If something is delayed, it knows. And if something random comes along that’s associated with a series you record, it grabs that, too. Thus, we ended up with a recording of a “lost episode” of Doctor Who that I would have otherwise missed. The episode, titled “Shada,” was written by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) during the Tom Baker / Romana / K-9 era.

As with these things, there’s a story behind the story. Apparently Adams wanted to write a series where the Doctor decided to retire from traveling, but the BBC didn’t want that. Adams decided to procrastinate writing the show (something for which he was famous), thinking that if he waited long enough, the producers would have no choice but to allow him to write what he wanted. That strategy didn’t work, and he was forced to write a new story, which is this one.

They started filming it, but because of a strike by technicians, it was never completed. Last year, someone decided to get it ready for presentation. The actors, of course, have aged a tad in the intervening decades (it was originally supposed to air in 1980), but they were still around, so the missing footage was animated, and the original actors provided the voices. I’d say about a third of the 3-hour (including commercials) show is animated. A lot of it was filmed in Cambridge (scenes of the Doctor punting on the River Cam were used in The Five Doctors when Baker declined to participate in that project). Most of what was animated takes place in various space ships.

It’s an okay story, dealing with a guy who has come to Earth to recover a Gallifreyan book he needs to locate a Time Lord penal colony that all the Time Lords have forgotten about. There’s an old, forgetful university professor with the very obvious name Chronotis, and a student who borrows books, and a floating sphere that can suck a person’s mind dry. The usual Doctor stuff. A few scenes are very Adams-esque, especially one near the end where a don of the college tries to convince a bobby that someone has stolen a room from the university, to which the bobby responds that the number of times a room has been stolen is very low…in fact, it is zero, he concludes. Apparently Adams recycled some of the characters for his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It’s been a long time since I read that book, so I didn’t realize that.

In modern hands, the whole thing would probably have been an hour long. A lot of time is spent twiddling knobs and turning dials, but that was the era, when they weren’t wibbledy-wobbly and talking a hundred miles a second.

The show ends with a funny cameo by 83-year-old Tom Baker, who plays the Doctor again, with a wink and a sly nod to the passage of time. It’s fun to see something new from that era, so if you get a chance, check it out!

I learned late last week that Flight or Fright is already going into a second printing with Cemetery Dance, and publication is still six weeks away. So that’s pretty cool.

In other publishing news, Simon & Schuster audio is going to release Shining in the Dark as an audiobook next February. I received my Czech copy last week. (Or, as I told my wife, the Czech was in the mail, har-de-har-har.)

Normally, I would be writing about my NECON experiences right about now, but this year I had a scheduling conflict that prevented me from attending. Turns out, if I had opted for NECON, I would probably have had to cancel because of a day-job obligation. As it was, I was able to duck out mid-day on Friday and catch a plane for Bangor. A group of friends who know each other through Stephen King’s message board held their annual King Kon in that city this year, and a few people were invited, including Robin Furth, Glenn Chadbourne and me.

I got in late (very late) on Friday. So late that all the traffic signals in the city were flashing. It was a little disconcerting and disorienting, driving down Stillwater Avenue. Most of them were flashing yellow, but the odd one was flashing red and with my limited color perception, I had to look very carefully to make sure I didn’t cruise through one of the latter. I was driving a Kia Niro, my first time behind the wheel of a hybrid. It was a little strange, driving something that is so quiet. At times I wasn’t sure if the car was running.

On Saturday late morning, I meandered into downtown Bangor, where I took the above picture, which reminded me of a certain scene from It. No floating balloons, though. That would have been awesome/creepy. I only went a few blocks when I met Gerald Winters, owner of the King bookstore in town. We chatted a few minutes (he was also invited to attend) and I went a few blocks farther, where I encountered Glenn Chadbourne. He and I decamped to a nearby pub for a little fodder before the main event, a panel at the Arts Exchange. The four of us (Robin, Glenn, Gerald and I) signed stuff, answered questions, told tales, took pictures, etc. for a couple of hours. Then Robin, Glenn, Marsha (King’s executive assistant) and I hung out at Denny’s for a while, waiting until it was time to go to the Oriental Jade restaurant, location of a pivotal scene in It. We had a nice buffet dinner, there were door prizes, swag bags, etc. The conventioneers had other things planned, including a trip to Dysart’s (Maximum Overdrive) the following morning, but I had to get back to Texas. Those 5:30 am flights always seem like a good idea when I book them, but getting up at 3:30 wasn’t my favorite thing to do!

Of course, the flight was 90 minutes late departing. First, the navigational computer on our plane was misbehaving and it was going to take an hour or more just to get the repair crew on site. Fortunately, the pilots were able to convince the airline to let them swap to another plane. We were on the taxiway when they were told that they couldn’t take off because of a hold at Philly airport, where we were heading. So we had to sit there until 7 am, Fortunately, I was able to rebook my connecting flight while we waited. After that it was smooth sailing, and I was back home by early in the afternoon.

It was a nice time. Always fun to catch up with old friends and make new ones. My only disappointment was that I discovered, after I was back in Texas, that there are Tim Horton’s restaurants in Bangor. Three of them! And I didn’t get to go to one. No timbits for me! Ah, well. Next time.

I received the above postcard in the mail today. Note the return address! If you haven’t checked out my Castle Rock preview, you can do so here. The first three episodes drop on Wednesday on Hulu.

I finished watching Season 2 of Goliath (Amazon) en route to Bangor on my iPad. Billy Bob Thornton plays a hard drinking lawyer who ends up taking on high profile cases, playing David to various Goliaths. It’s a very good series. Season 2, stylistically, reminds me a lot of Breaking Bad. Episode 7 is very, very strange (in a good way).

Publishers Weekly, the highly respected trade magazine, released their advanced review of Flight or Fright this week. I’m very happy with what they had to say. In part, “This entertaining anthology of horror, mystery, and literary tales about aircraft (most reprinted) will have the reader thinking twice about flying. This is a strong anthology full of satisfying tales.” Click the hyperlink to read the whole thing.

Last week, I was interviewed by a newspaper from northern New Brunswick, where I grew up. Alas, the interview is behind a paywall, but the people for whom it will mean something will be able to see it. The interviewer (also the editor, chief-cook-and-bottle-washer) is someone I knew in school. He’s a year older than I am, so we crossed paths a little, and his mother was a substitute teacher that I had any number of times over the years. It was fun talking to someone from “back home,” to hear the regional accent again.

I have only a sketchy memory of the original Lost in Space. I no doubt saw some of it when I was a kid, in reruns, but I couldn’t remember whether most of the story took place on a planet or whether they flitted around from adventure to adventure. Turns out, both are true. In the first two seasons, they were crashed on two different planets, but in the third they traveled from place to place.

We finally got around to seeing the new incarnation of the show on Netflix last week, watching all 10 episodes over a four-day period. We quite liked it. It’s not as gritty as the Battlestar Galactica reboot, but they’ve added some depth and breadth to the characters, giving them interesting backstories and mysteries that are revealed over the course of the season. The biggest change is to Dr. Smith, who is a conniving, identity-stealing schemer whose motivations aren’t always clear. Not the comic relief like he was in the original, where he ended up being the focal character, along with Will and the robot. The robot, too, is vastly different from the tubby, harmless, arm-waving original, adding an ominous tone to the story. The kids are great, acting pretty much the way kids do. It’s not perfect, but it was enjoyable, and we’ll no doubt check out Season 2 when it becomes available.

I feel bad for the people who spent a lot of time planning, organizing and arranging events for Independence Day yesterday. In the greater Houston area, most of these things were canceled on account of the torrential rain we received, starting in the early morning hours and lasting until late afternoon. It wasn’t terrible where we live, just several hours of solid rain of the sort we rarely get around here. It typically pours for 15 minutes instead of raining gently like that for hours. With the attendant thunder and lightning, parades and concerts were all canceled, although the fireworks went off. One of the best metaphors is this image from the Houston Chronicle, where the letters spelling “Houston” float away from the concert grounds in floodwaters.

After watching “The City on the Edge of Forever” for the first time in a long time (it holds up reasonably well), we dove into the new Lost in Space. We only saw the first couple of episodes, but we’re enjoying it. I like the way they reimagined the story, giving the characters some new backstories and treating the teenagers like real (but exceptional) teenagers.

Our daughter posted about Hannah Gadsby’s standup show on Netflix, so we decided to watch. It’s an experience we won’t soon forget. Gadsby talks about discovering she was “a little bit lesbian” while growing up in very conservative Tasmania, and the problems she’s had throughout her life, in part because of the guilt she was immersed in during her formative years, when homosexuality was both a sin and illegal. Her hour-long set starts out mostly funny, but then it transitions into something quite different. At first it becomes a meta-analysis of stand-up comedy. How comedians like her get laughs by deliberately creating tension and then releasing it with something funny. However, she came to believe that her self-deprecating form of humor was damaging, trapping her ideas about herself in an unhealthy state. She refers back to one of her earlier jokes, a story about how she stood up to a homophobic guy, and reveals that that story was incomplete. The rest of the tale is not in the least bit funny. She is angry and bitter, and the audience experiences a new kind of tension. It’s all designed to make a point (and, perhaps, announce her plans to retire from standup, although he has, admittedly, given that a bit of re-think after the attention her show has garnered), but the anger is real. Definitely recommended (fair warning: the language can curl your hair).

We followed that up with Ali Wong’s first Netflix show (Baby Cobra), which is a very different creature altogether. She’s crude and outspoken and pretty hilarious.

Today is my granddaughter’s second birthday. Well, it’s actually July 3, but where she lives it’s already July 3. It’s all rather confusing. Time zones. What’s the point of them?

At the end of the afterword of Flight or Fright, the forthcoming anthology I co-edited, I ask readers who see anyone in an airport or on a plane with the book to send us a picture. Reviewers have taken up the challenge. So far, I’ve received three photos from people on long flights reading the anthology. The most recent is Larry Fire, who is shown here reading it on a flight to Hawaii. Brave souls.

We don’t often give up on movies, especially ones that star the likes of Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu, but we were bored to tears by Let the Sunshine In  (Un beau soleil intérieur) and turned it off after 45 minutes. It’s one of those films the critics loved (RT: 86%) and viewers like us didn’t (RT: 21%). To me it felt like there wasn’t a script, that the actors were placed in scenes and told to just talk. Ramble, more like—there’s one scene where Binoche’s character tries to ask her new coworker an uncomfortable question that goes on forever. It was almost farcical. Horrible, banal characters.

We were luckier on Saturday, when we watched Woman Walks Ahead and The Shape of Water. The former is based on the true story of an artist (Jessica Chastain) who travels West to paint Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes). She arrives when the military is trying to force the tribes to sign an accord that will have them giving up more of their land. Sitting Bull is mostly content to grow potatoes, but the artist helps him rediscover his former glory and he makes an impassioned speech when the tribes are called to vote. It’s a good film, but apparently it plays fast and loose with a lot of facts, especially concerning Catherine/Caroline Weldon, who is portrayed as a widow with no political motivations when she arrives. In reality, she was divorced twice, and had a 12-year-old son who she took with her to the Indian Territory who isn’t mentioned in the movie. Neither are Sitting Bull’s two wives. In the real world she had previously corresponded with Sitting Bull and was an active member of the National Indian Defense Association. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, I guess! And the film has Sam Rockwell, which is always a plus.

I’ve been wanting to see The Shape of Water for a long time. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of film my wife would enjoy, but we both loved it. I didn’t know anything about the story going into it beyond the trailer, so it was all fresh and exciting and new. Such great characters—even the supporting characters had entire little stories of their own. It’s the second thing I’ve seen in the past year where the monster eats a cat. Yes, Stranger Things 2, I’m looking at you.