Bev Vincent

I’ve been lax about updating this blog lately. Terribly busy on many fronts, as I’m sure many people are. I finished my fifteen-week stint with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Citizen’s Police Academy in early December, which has provided me with plenty of interesting insight to use in future writing projects.

My wife and I participated in the Blue Elves program run by the MCSO and the CPA alumni. The organizers reach out to guidance counselors at local area schools to identify underprivileged youth who might not get much for Christmas. They then seek the parents’ approval to add them to the program and then they are queried about what they might like to receive. Last year the Blue Elves provided gifts to some 700 kids. This year, they doubled the number. Our part in the project was helping to wrap gifts. A defunct furniture warehouse was provided for this project. We showed up at 6 pm one Thursday evening to find dozens of other elves wrapping everything you can image. I opted for rectangular objects, whereas my wife took on some of the more challenging items, like footballs and soccer balls! We wrapped for nearly three hours. All for a terrific cause.

As the year draws to an end, it’s time for everyone’s favorite: best-of lists! In subsequent posts I’ll tackle books, films and TV series, and my year in writing. Today I’ll tackle new music I listened to during 2018. My wife and I saw two terrific concerts: Jeff Lynne’s ELO and The Alan Parsons Live Project.

I don’t buy a ton of new music. I seem to be stuck in the 70s and 80s for the most part. These are my favorite “new” albums I acquired in 2018:

• Kaleidoscope Heart – Sara Bareilles
• Brave Enough: Live – Sara Bareilles
• Hymn – Sarah Brightman
• Egypt Station – Paul McCartney
• Let Me Fly – Mike + The Mechanics
• Platinum 1, 2, 3 – Deep Purple
• Mascara & Monsters – Alice Cooper
• S&M – Metallica
• Codex VI – Shpongle
• Out of Silence – Neil Finn

I was familiar with Sara Bareilles from her “King of Everything” hit single, but after I heard her live performance of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” I decided to pick up a couple of her albums. She has a terrific voice and writes savvy songs.

Before going to KillerCon this fall, I decided I should broaden my exposure to heavy metal music. I delved into Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Metallica and listened to nothing but as I drove to Austin and back. I added Alice Cooper to the mix, only to discover that he’s more of a pop singer than metal. Very good, though. My wife went to see him in concert this year with a friend, but I didn’t get to go.

In 2019, I’m hoping that Dissonant Harmonies, the music-inspired project that Brian Keene and I have been working on for a decade, sees the light of day. I’ll have more to say about music in the introduction to that volume.

As long as I’ve had a cell phone that allows you to customize the ring tone, I’ve used “Sirius” by Alan Parsons. You know the one, the lead in to “Eye in the Sky” made famous by the Chicago Bulls for the lineup introduction at home games.

Last night we got to see the Alan Parsons Live Project in concert at the Stafford Center, 22 years after we saw the original Project live. The venue is a long way from us, on the southwest side of the city, and it was raining very hard, so it took us well over an hour to get there. That didn’t leave us with much time to eat before the show, so we went to Whataburger, the first time I’ve been to that famous Texas institution. It was o-kay.

I bought the tickets for the show long enough ago that I didn’t remember where our seats were, so we were pleasantly surprised to be ushered to the fourth row from the orchestra pit. The venue was really nice, a small arts theater probably more used to symphonic music or stage plays. Reminded me a bit of the Rebecca Cohn Arts Center at my alma mater, Dalhousie University, which is where I first discovered Alan Parsons’ music thanks to my next door neighbor, Rob Levings, during freshman year in residence.

The show started only a few minutes after the designated time, 7:30, and there was no opening act. The band consisted of a drummer who probably burned 5000 calories during the show (no joking, the guy was a maniac), a keyboard player, a percussionist/saxophone and recorder playing vocalist, a bass player, two guitar players, a lead singer and Mr. Parsons himself, who played keyboards, strummed guitars and sang lead on a couple of songs (including “Don’t Answer Me” and “Eye in the Sky”). The sound engineer served double duty by emerging in the audience (behind us) during one song to play the violin.

We were pretty much the average demographic. There weren’t many people much younger than us, although there were quite a few who were older. A lot of people around us were Alan Parsons experts. A couple behind us was related to the lead singer (P.J. Olson).

They performed all the hits fans would recognize and, to our delight, they played the entire I Robot album straight through. At first, I wondered at the wisdom of this, as there are some challenging, experimental  songs (notably the final “Genesis Ch.1 V.32”), but it was awesome. For the song “Breakdown,” which features a huge choir in the background, the audience became the choir. We were coached in our two lines and belted them out with gusto:

Freedom, freedom, we will not obey
Freedom, freedom, take the wall away

Sounds like an anthem for today, doesn’t it? After a beautiful rendition of “Don’t Let it Show,” Parsons said, “This is place where you used to have to get up and turn the record over. Now we’ll play Side 2.”

I’ve heard a lot of Alan Parsons concerts before, but this is the first one I know of where the band got to do solos, showcasing their impressive skills. This is also the first concert I can think of where I was close enough to the stage to hear the drummer live rather than through the sound system. He was amazing. At least twice I saw shards of his drumsticks go flying over his shoulder.

Before the song “Limelight,” Parsons paid tribute to his former colleague, the late Eric Woolfson, saying that the song reflected Woolfson’s thoughts about being and not being in the limelight. He had us turn on the lights on our phones during the chorus (which I captured in the slideshow below). He also admonished people to not take video of the concert. Photographs were okay. Not only did recording video violate their copyright, he said, the songs will sound crappy, which to a sound engineer is probably the greater offence.

They played for a solid two hours without intermission. With a revolving group of singers, it’s probably easier for them to do that, although I feared for the drummer, who was casting off sweat at an amazing rate. After a brief gap for an encore demand, they came back to play “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather” and a rousing version of “Games People Play” to wrap up the night. It was a fantastic show. Here are a few highlights:

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Photo credit: Lauren Grandinetti

An interesting weekend. For one thing, I received two short story acceptances within about an hour of each other. That’s always nice. One of the stories is about ten years old and has been out the door over a dozen times. Finally, it sold to a pro-paying market, so the moral of the story is: stick with it!

The second story has a slightly shorter lifespan, but it was written four or five years ago. It didn’t get submitted as frequently because there weren’t many markets where it would fit, but I finally found the perfect one. The other unusual aspect about this submission is that I sent it in to the market a little over a year ago, and then forgot about it. When I was revisiting my submission log a few weeks ago, I decided to query the market, only to discover that they had no record of ever having received it. So I sent it in again and had my positive response within a couple of weeks.

All very cool.

I spent most of Saturday role-playing at the Montgomery County Sheriff Office Citizen’s Police Academy. We were given a number of scenarios that were fairly common in the life of a police officer, and we had to be the cops and decide how to handle them. To add realism to the situations, we were given “air soft” guns that are virtually identical to real Glocks and other hand guns. They have CO2 cartridges in the magazine area and fire pellets hard enough to raise bruises. (Yes, we wore eye protection.) To get us comfortable with the guns, the first thing the deputy running the event did was ask for a volunteer to shoot him. I stepped up.

I think I’m the only person in the class who does not own a firearm and has rarely shot one. The last time I fired a gun was when I attended the Houston Police Department’s Civilian Police Academy a number of years ago. They took us to the firing range one evening and we got to shoot a clip at a target. I did surprisingly well that time. I still have the target, with a decent narrow spread. This time I took aim at the officer’s chest from about 10 feet away…and shot him in the arm!

The first batch of scenarios were domestic violence calls, which are among the most dangerous and unpredictable situations in which police officers find themselves. Very often, we were stumped at how to proceed once things went in a difficult direction. In the afternoon, we acted out “routine” traffic stops, most of which were anything but. Armed suspects, people who decide to flee, people who act unpredictably. It was fun, but it was also enlightening. Here are a few photos from the weekend and earlier sessions we had with the Crime Scene Investigators (where we saw some real-life lifted fingerprints that look nothing like what you see on TV) and the bus that took us off to tour the jail.

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Crime Scene Investigators

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Crime Scene Investigators

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Being driven to jail

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Simulated traffic stop

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Air soft guns

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Play-acting police call-out

On Saturday evening, we saw Patton Oswalt (pictured above) “in concert.” The opening comedian didn’t get a formal introduction, and he only called himself Richard, so I have no idea who he was. My favorite part of Oswalt’s show is when he turns his attention to the people in the front row. He usually picks three, and the final one was pure comedy gold, a professional wedding singer that he got a lot of mileage out of. I guess I’ve been to a stand-up show before (my wife says we saw one back in the 90s), but I don’t recall it at all. This one was quite memorable. In the picture above, he suddenly noticed the strange backdrop on the stage and invited people in the audience to take a picture and tweet them at him.

Last night we watched “Rosa,” the latest episode of Doctor Who. We were greatly impressed by it. Although there was an alien entity acting as the bad guy, the worst villains in the episode were human.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. Busy times–have to prioritize, and blogging hasn’t been high on the list. I’m working on a new short story that required quite a bit of research, but also trying (as always) to get my desk clear so I can devote time to working on a novel. The perennial chase for time.

Keeping busy with Flight or Fright-related stuff, too. Scribner will be publishing the anthology in trade paperback next June. You can see all the details here, including their cover. New edition means more proofing, etc., which I expect will land on my desk shortly.

I’ve done a few interviews lately, including one that was translated into French for Club Stephen King (English and French versions available here), a long podcast interview with Eddie Generous for his Unnerving Magazine podcast (available here) and an interview with Justin Hamelin for Mangled Matters’ 50 Days of Halloween (online here).

Anthology readers continue to take me up on my suggestion that they send me photographs of the book on airplanes. The most recent one was from a pilot who snapped a photo of Flight or Fright in the cockpit of an A321. He assured me that he didn’t read while flying the plane. Here’s a slideshow of the images people have sent me so far. Keep ’em coming!

Captain Brandon Turner

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Matthew Jernigan

David Cook

Joseph Carro

Harry Collins

Stephen Bickers

Jakob Johansson Jørgensen

Karen Rosier

Tatiana Rokou

Chris Stevens ForF

AndreasPeifer

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Teresa KAng

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Odio Volare Rome-London

Chris Subcide

Magdalena Latapi

Steve Sarner

Janet Schwartz

Nikoletta Farkas

Faye Calnan

Ben Eyler

Robert English

94-year-old reading ForF

Dominika Wrzosek

Cestep

Jorge Capote

Joseph Ferrara

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Rose in Israel

Captain Don Olsen

David Rodriguez Acosta 02

David Rodriguez Acosta 01

Debra Danforth

Cris Morris

Claire Giraudin (Paris)

Katy Miller NZ688

Rich Smith

Tiffany Britt-Hooker

David Strassler

David Strassler

Ari01

Ari02

Tina McGill

ForF-in flight

barclay-forf

Patrick Freivald ForF

Mike Noonan

Kathryn Hanson

Annette Kreuger2

Annette Kreuger

Bulgarian Flight or Fright

Jason Bodak

Matt Weston

Michael Boulerice

Marco Lammers

Speaking of Halloween (which I was, a couple of paragraphs back), Amazon has put together a series page for last year’s Halloween Carnival eBooks, edited by Brian Freeman. Volume 4 contains my story “The Halloween Tree,” and ’tis the season, after all.

A week from today sees the launch of Fantastic Tales Of Terror: History’s Darkest Secrets, edited by Eugene Johnson for Crystal Lake Publishing.  The theme of the anthology is that there supernatural events occurred around many of our most famous incidents and people. My story, “Ray and the Martian,” reveals that Ray Bradbury had a close encounter with a Martian in Roswell, NM (he really did live there, briefly, long before Area 51) that inspired his fascination with the red planet.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been participating in the Citizen’s Police Academy offered (for free) by the Montgomery Country Sheriff’s Office. Each week we get presentations from all of the different divisions that are part of MCSO. Most recently, we heard from the Homicide and Violent Crimes division. On other weeks, we heard from Crime Scene Analysts, Narcotics and Organized Crime, Livestock Division, and we spent one evening touring the county jail. I’ll write more about this adventure in my next post: tomorrow we are spending the day doing shoot/don’t shoot scenarios where we get to play the cops and the cops get to play the bad guys. We’ll be using toy guns that should pellets, but these toys look like the real thing, with magazine and slides and safety switches and all that. Should be fun. Then we’re off to see Patton Oswalt in Houston. Other than the time we went to a driver’s ed class run by Laugh Stop, I think this is the first time I’ve ever gone to a live comedy show.

Today marks my 29th year working for the same company. Granted it’s gone through a couple of name and regime changes over the years, but it’s still much the same place and there are a few people who were here when I joined up in 1989 who are also still here now.

I was pleasantly surprised on Friday when I received a Google alert to the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction listing, where Flight or Fright appears in the #17 position. Some interesting details about that appearance. First, the book was published by a small press, so it’s fairly rare for one of them to appear on any kind of list like this. Back in the day, the Donald M. Grant edition of Wizard and Glass made it into some brick-and-mortar stores and it became the first-ever small press edition to appear on the NY Times list. Also, this is only for hardcover sales, not for audiobook or ebook sales. And, more importantly, this is only for sales from retail stores that report to PW. The entry pictured here shows about 3300 copies sold. However, Cemetery Dance reported advanced orders of over 30,000 copies several weeks ago. If those had been taken into account, the book would probably have appeared in the #1 position. The J.D. Robb novel in that position sold 28000 copies for the week.

I had a nice, wide-ranging 90-minute chat with Jeremy Lloyd of the Dark Tower Radio podcast on Saturday afternoon. Here is his description of the broadcast, which you can listen to here:

On this episode Jeremy is joined by author of The Dark Tower Companion, The Road to the Dark Tower, The Stephen King Illustrated Companion and the co-editor of the new anthology Flight or Fright the one and only Bev Vincent. They discuss Bev’s history with the works of Stephen King, the new King renaissance and the new anthology he worked on with Stephen King, Flight or Fright. So hunker down fasten your seat belt and return your seat and tray tables to their upright positions and tune your dial to Dark Tower Radio and enjoy the palaver.

We watched The Children Act on the weekend, based on the Ian McEwan novel of the same name. It stars Emma Thompson as a judge who must decide whether a 17-year-old (who is only a few months from 18) can be forced to accept a life-saving blood transfusion despite his Jehovah’s Witness belief that it will pollute and damn him. Stanley Tucci plays her husband. There’s one thing in the story that isn’t well explained: she decides to visit the boy in the hospital before making her decision. Everyone agrees it’s highly unusual, and it sets the rest of the story in motion, but in retrospect we couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation for why she might have done it. Except for that puzzler, it’s a good film.

The past couple of days have been exciting. Previously when I had a new book out, things were fairly low-key. We celebrated with a dinner or something, but there wasn’t a whole lot of fanfare.

Things are completely different with Flight or Fright. For one thing, three different publishers are involved: Cemetery Dance, Simon & Schuster audio and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK.

Yesterday, I was stunned to receive a floral arrangement from my co-editor. Truly bowled over. Then, when I got home last night I found a package from the group at Hodder & Stoughton (see picture). It contained an oversized congratulatory card (about 12″ x 8″) signed by editorial and marketing, together with a trade paperback of the H&S edition (for Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and airside at UK airports), cleverly packaged in an airsickness bag.

Today, Simon & Schuster audio has been releasing excerpts of the audiobook all over the place. You can hear (and see) Steve read from “The Turbulence Expert,” hear an excerpt of Corey Stall reading Joe Hill’s “You Are Released” and another of him reading from my story, “Zombie’s on a Plane,” Santino Fontana reading from Cody Goodfellow’s “Diablitos” and Christian Coulson reading from Roald Dahl’s “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Finally, there’s a YouTube video of Norbert Leo Butz (Kevin Rayburn from the Netflix series Bloodline) greeting people from the Simon & Schuster studio as he’s reading “The Flying Machine” and “The Fifth Category.”

Also, new reviews, including one from Mike Ripley at SHOTS eZine in the UK. Thus far, the response has been terrific. Everyone seems to be enjoying our collection of turbulent tales. We did get a 1-star review on Amazon from someone incredulous that anyone who flies regularly would want to read scary flying stories, without commenting on the stories at all.

Corey Stall reads “Zombies on a Plane”

Oh, yeah, and there was also this article at The Ringer called The King Chroniclers, for which I was interviewed a while back.

We didn’t even get to have a celebratory dinner last night, though, because I spent the entire evening at the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Citizen Police Academy. We’ll rectify that tonight.

I finally got to the end of Season 2 of Jessica Jones. I enjoyed the season, perhaps even moreso than Season 1, but I kept getting interrupted by other things. And I saw the final episode of Castle Rock, which I’m sure will have people talking. I’m looking forward to seeing how people respond to it.

I also managed to get a few book reviews done recently, all for books that are either just out or soon to be out:

• The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman
• Transcription by Kate Atkinson
• Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly
• Depth of Winter by Craig Johnson

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.