Bev Vincent

It’s been a while since I posted here—a solid month. Not because nothing has been happening, that’s for sure! My wife got back from several weeks in Japan and our daughter and two-year-old granddaughter came with her. Our grand-daughter is an energetic and delightful little girl who can talk reasonably well and who sings almost all the time. She’ll be eating supper and, for no obvious reason, burst into the A-B-C song or, more likely, the Baby Shark Song, a simple ditty that gets into your head and is hard to shake off. They headed back to Okinawa a few days ago and I still hear that song.

We also enjoyed many episodes of Puffin Rock and Sarah and Duck, both shows that are surprisingly watchable for adults. I preferred Sarah and Duck of the two, but my granddaughter was apt to call for “puffin” in the middle of an episode of S&D. Fun fact: the “scarf lady” in that show is voiced by the actress who played Mrs. Patmore on Downton Abbey.

Hodder & Stoughton, the UK publisher of Flight of Fright, the anthology of scary flying stories I co-edited with Stephen King, released their cover design recently (see above/right). They went in a different direction from Cemetery Dance, aiming for something more restrained and artistic. It’s quite striking, I think.

I also spent an hour and a quarter in a sound booth at a studio in Houston recording my Afterword from the anthology for the Simon and Schuster audio edition, which was an interesting experience. I’ll write more about that in a few days.

In the Afterword, I put out a call for anyone who saw someone reading the anthology at an airport or, better yet, on an airplane, to snap a picture and send it to me. So far, even though the book is some ten weeks away from publication, I’ve received two photographs from people who received review copies of the anthology and chose to read them on long flights.

Because I knew my daughter wanted to see The Avengers: Infinity War when she got here from Japan, and because I’m woefully out of touch with the Marvel universe (I’d seen a few Iron Man movies and Black Panther), I binged to get caught up, watching The Avengers, The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Doctor Strange before we saw the new film. Very glad I did, or I would have completely lost. Now I’m in the camp of people who can’t wait for the next half of it to come out.

We also watched 15:17 to Paris, Clint Eastwood’s movie about the American soldiers and tourists who tackled a terrorist on a train in Europe. We’ve always enjoyed Eastwood’s movies, but this one was terrible. Terrible. Using the real people to portray themselves might have seemed like a clever idea, but they had limited range and depth, which made the film feel awkward and low budget. Also, because the pivotal incident is over in a few minutes, much of the film is backstory and a lot of it, quite frankly, boring and irrelevant. The older history was interesting, but the parts of the story about their trip around Europe leading up to them being on the train was over-long and beside the point. The boat trip where they meet a cute girl in Venice…we never see her again. The long scene in the Amsterdam disco…pointless. I hate to say the director has lost his touch based on a single film, but, boy, what a drop in quality compared to, say, Sully. Even the professional actors, like Judy Greer, turned in lackadaisical performances.

We binged through Season 5 of The Ranch in a couple of evenings. My wife is a big fan of Sam Elliott. It’s a show I could take or leave. I find a lot of the humor in it awkward and juvenile. It has a few good actors and a few who are clearly playing it purely for laughs. The season ends with the departure of Danny Masterson’s character, the actor having been fired after serious allegations were leveled against him. We wondered how far into filming they were when that happened, and how long they allowed his character to continue in the season after that. Trivia: I briefly met his brother, Chris, in Nova Scotia a number of years ago when visiting the set of Haven.

Oh, yeah, and I had a birthday since I last posted. 19×3.

Last fall, I was commissioned to write an essay about Stephen King’s poetry and his relationship to poetry by the Poetry Foundation. I wrote about that experience here. The essay itself came out today, the day before The Outsider is released, and also the day before King receives the PEN America Literary Service Award (the timing of the release of the essay, which can be found here, is not coincidental). My review of The Outsider also debuted today at CD Online.

My wife has been away for a couple of weeks, so I’ve been finding things to occupy all the free time I’ve had that we would normally spend together. Last weekend I went to a baseball game, my first in over 25 years. Texas Rangers vs Houston Astros…the home team won decisively. However, I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed myself. It was like going to a movie where people go to the concessions stands all the time, and the space in front of the seats is so narrow that you have to get up to let them by.  With the concessions as expensive as they are, I don’t get the draw. Sit down and watch the game, people. It was quite distracting.

Last Wednesday, I went into Houston to meet up with Michael Koryta, who was in town to promote his new book, How It Happened (my review at the link). I first met Michael at a NECON several years ago, and always meet up with him for drinks before his event and for dinner afterward. This time, we were with the owner of Murder by the Book and another store employee. Always an enjoyable time.

On Saturday, I went into Houston for the MWA Southwest monthly meeting where the guest speaker was…the owner of Murder by the Book! Unfortunately, the meeting room in the restaurant had been previously booked, so we were in the main dining area and had to compete with the din of fellow diners. It was the first of these meetings I’ve been to in at least half a dozen years.

Speaking of Murder by the Book, I will be signing at their booth at Comicpalooza next Saturday from 1:30 to 2:30. Then I’ll be on a panel with Joe Lansdale from 3:00 to 4:00 and another panel from 6:00 to 7:00.

Yesterday, I cashed in a Fandango coupon I won in the grocery store Monopoly game that ended recently and went to see Deadpool 2 at the late-morning matinee for less than five bucks. Most of the trailers/previews didn’t interest me much (loud…hyper-kinetic…frenzied), not even the Sicario sequel. I really liked the first movie, but the second looks far less interesting, perhaps because Emily Blunt isn’t in it. I definitely want to see the new Oceans 8, though.  DP2 was pretty funny, with a decent plot that gave it some depth. I probably missed a lot of inside jokes because I’m not fluent in Marvel, but I still laughed a lot. And if you stick around to the very, very end, you’ll hear something that should become popular as a ringtone. Afterward, I went to a nearby pizza place and enjoyed a carafe of wine while watching an intense thunderstorm. A mellow afternoon!

Last night, I finally watched Get Out. I had studiously ignored anything and everything about the film, so I knew virtually nothing about it other than the basic setup: white woman takes her black boyfriend to meet her parents. It absolutely went in directions I didn’t expect, but i thought it was a decent horror flick. The alternate ending was probably more in line with reality, and I imagined an even darker, more realistic way it would have ended, given recent events in this country.

I was interviewed by Lilja and Lou for their Stephen King Podcast (#87) about Flight or Fright, the anthology I co-edited with Stephen King. We talked for over half an hour about how the book came about, how we selected the stories, etc. Check it out!

Last weekend we watched Molly’s Game, starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba. It’s the true story of a woman who started running high-stakes poker games that involved high-profile people (although not named in the movie, some of the characters are stand-ins for Toby McGuire, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck), who ultimately ran into trouble and was arrested by the FBI for money laundering and other crimes. Elba plays her at-first reluctant attorney and Kevin Costner is her estranged father. It’s a bit talky, but you don’t have to understand Texas Hold-Em to enjoy the movie, and it is quite a journey.

The weekend before that we spent in Surfside, down the coast from Galveston, at a rental house we like to hire once or twice a year. There’s only a dune between the deck and the beach, looking out on the Gulf of Mexico and the oil rigs and cargo ships and other traffic on the water, plus the surfers—the surf was high one day in particular. It was moderately cool but warm enough to sit on the deck, and we took quite a few long walks on the beach and enjoyed watching the families playing on the beach. Very relaxing!

Author Linwood Barclay and I had a DM conversation on Twitter earlier this week in which we diagrammed the finale of The Americans. We agree there will be no happy endings for most (maybe all) of the characters, but we came up with a finale scenario that we thought would be perfect. It’ll be interesting to see how close we come.

I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for most of the 1980s while I was a student at Dalhousie University, first getting a B.Sc. in 1983 and then my Ph.D. in 1988. During those years, and subsequently, I’d heard about the Halifax Explosion, and could probably have told you a few things about it, many of them, as it turns out, wrong.

The Explosion happened in December 1917, during World War I, and it devastated the north end of the city. The worst hit section was called Richmond, but by the time I went to Halifax that “neighborhood” name was never mentioned. My impression was that a munitions bought struck a grain ship and the explosion happen immediately. Nope. The munitions ship, Mont-Blanc, was a French vessel carrying unthinkable amounts of TNT, picric acid and other flammables and explosives overseas to support the war effort. Six million pounds of explosives. The aging vessel was heavily burdened, and the crew was forbidden from carrying matches, let alone smoke. The ship had been sent up from New York to Halifax to see if it could find a slow convoy across the Atlantic.

The other ship, Imo,  was empty, on its way from Europe down the US coast to stock up with relief supplies to take back across the Atlantic. After a stupid game of chicken in the narrows part of Halifax Harbour, Imo broadsided Mont-Blanc and a fire started on deck. The crew knew their cargo (although few other people in the region did) and immediately skidaddled. My impression is almost cartoonish when I imagine them leaping into lifeboats, paddling pell-mell for shore so fast they beached their boats and then continuing to run for the hills.

Mont-Blanc drifted toward the waterfront on the Halifax side and burned for ten or fifteen minutes before it finally blew up in what was the biggest man-made explosion in history, and it remained the biggest until decades later when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. About 2000 people died immediately, 9000 were injured (in a city of 60,000). Parts of Mont-Blanc—heavy parts like anchors—were found miles away in the aftermath. A big part of the city was leveled. People—including many children—who were attracted by the spectacle of the ship burning in the harbour, went to their living room windows to watch and were blinded by flying glass.

It was a horrific disaster, but one from which Halifax recovered, with the help of neighboring cities and provinces and, notably, the people of Boston, who sent medical supplies and personnel and, later, rebuilding supplies, much of it en route before they’d even received a request for assistance (the telegram lines were down). The relationship between Halifax and Boston is cemented today with Halifax sending an enormous Christmas tree to be raised in the Boston Commons.

I wish I’d taken the opportunity to visit many of the sites in Halifax that contain remnants and memorials of that incident when I lived there. I knew more about the relationship between Halifax and the Titanic disaster. I think a return trip to Halifax is in the calling one of these days. In the meantime, I read an excellent account of the incident and its aftermath: The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon.

I bought the book to do research for a short story I’m contemplating, but my wife took an interest in the story, too, and I ended up reading the whole thing aloud to her over the course of a couple of weeks, including while we were on vacation. Now we’re reading  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling. The introduction alone is fascinating in that it poses a set of thirteen questions about the world: how well people are educated, have access to medical treatments, etc. And most people get only two out of thirteen right, on average, because we have a negative and uninformed picture of the overall state of things. Most kids on the planet have access to vaccines, for example, and the majority of the world is not in poverty, as one might think.

Last fall, I was contacted by an editor with the Poetry Foundation, asking if I’d like to write an essay about Stephen King’s poetry. He felt there was a story there to be told that hadn’t been explored before. I was game, and it was the Poetry Foundation, after all, publishers of Poetry magazine.

The original brief was for 2500 words, which didn’t take me long to write. I turned my first draft in several weeks before deadline. The editor sent it back covered in red “track changes” marks and a request to expand it significantly. Include more quotes from the works, dive deeper. So I did. Second draft was 7500 words! Sent that in and, after a while, I got another copy back covered in red editorial ink. Maybe I went a bit overboard for an online essay. Draft three was around the 5000-word mark. Another round of revisions. I’ve never been so heavily edited in my life! But at last we were there, nearly. Off it went to the digital editor, who had a few cuts and changes. A new draft.

And then came a process I’ve never been through before: fact checking. I knew it was coming, but in my mind it was going to be an interrogation. What is the source of this fact? Where does this quote come from? However, what it turned out to be was a request for supporting documentation for every single fact and quote in the essay. I ended up sending along nearly 60 scans from primary and secondary sources and hyperlinks to online articles. I only missed out on three “facts,” which I was able to resolve. But still, quite a process!

The essay should be out late next month. I’ll be sure to advertise it when it appears.

Last night I saw A Quiet Place with my buddy Danel Olson. It was playing in the biggest theater in our cineplex, and it was virtually empty. No more than 20 people in attendance. Which was kind of good, because that meant the audience noise was low and for this movie that’s important. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a film where I’ve spent so much time either holding my breath or with my hands clasped over my mouth. It is an incredibly suspenseful film, one where even an errant nail is a Hitchcockian source of tension.

It’s also a lean movie—no messing around with backstory or exposition. We don’t see the family in their life before the invasion. We don’t even see the invasion: we’re dropped into the story months after things go bad. We learn about the new reality by seeing it in action—and a little bit by reading some headlines posted on a basement wall. The family doesn’t congratulate themselves on surviving because they have a deaf daughter and thus they are better equipped to communicate silently. We just work that out ourselves. The early scene on the bridge shows the stakes: no one is safe. It’s a cleverly written movie that trusts the audience. Tight, intimate, chilling and devastating. The final shot is perfect.

My only question was: why didn’t they find somewhere noisy to live or create a noisy environment around them so they didn’t have to walk on “eggshells” all the time? They understood the concept, so why not put it into practice more on a daily basis? Still, I enjoyed the hell out of this film.

I have the first draft of a 5000-word story finished. It’s the one I wrote about in my previous entry, the one I got up in the middle of the night to write notes about. It ended up being pretty much like I envisioned it during the wee small hours, although I added a new character and expanded some parts slightly. I dictated it into the computer on the weekend and have made a couple of passes to touch up the transcription errors. Now comes the hard work: whipping it into shape. I read a quote that said the first draft is where you tell yourself the story, and I find that increasingly to be true. I was figuring it out as I went along. Now I have to take what I discovered and turn it into the best possible representation of that found object.

I found a nice review of Halloween Carnival Volume 4 the other day. In discussing my contribution, “The Halloween Tree,” the review concluded, “Vincent weaves a beautiful yet terrifying tale from the eyes of children that finds it true power after the final word. This is a very well written story that has a strong literary feel that I enjoyed. While it was more a coming of age story than a simple horror tale, it is still a four-star addition to the collection. ” I’ll take that.

File this under: we’ll never really know for sure. On Sunday afternoon, my wife and I were sitting in the driveway sipping wine, as we do when the weather is fair and the mosquitoes scarce, when I saw a woman coming down the cul-de-sac across from us. She was carrying bamboo stalks. She was about five feet tall; the bamboo fronds were about six feet long, and she was clutching them in her hand like she meant to joust with them. When she reached our street, I noticed a man a ways behind her. Her partner, I assumed. He trailed along, but at a guarded distance. Like he thought something was going to happen, something he was helpless to stop but needed to witness.

The woman strode to the front door of the house diagonally across from us. We’ve often noted the fact that this neighbor has some healthy and hearty bamboo behind their house, tall enough that we can see it over their six foot fence. I thought I could see where this was going. She knocked or rang the bell—they were far enough away we couldn’t tell, nor could we hear the words that were spoken once the door opened. Certain kinds of bamboo have a tendency to spread like wildfire, so I figured this woman—whose back yard, we assumed, butted up against our neighbor’s—was complaining that the bamboo had spread into her yard, and she was none to pleased about it. Meanwhile, the trailing guy stayed at the intersection, a good hundred feet away from the action. I suppose he would have leaped into the fray if things had gone badly, but he definitely did not look like he wanted to get involved.

A few minutes later, the woman left, bamboo stalks still clenched firmly in her hand. She strode past our house and never gave us so much as a wave or a smile. The man beat a hasty retreat ahead of her. Last seen walking toward her house. I don’t know what she planned to do with the bamboo. A little domestic drama on a Sunday afternoon. It takes little to entertain us.

I watched a three-part British serial called Trauma over the weekend. It starred one of my favorite actors, John Simm (The Master from Doctor Who, also from Life on Mars) as a working class guy who’s had a very bad day already, when he finds out his teenage son has been stabbed and sent to the emergency ward. The surgeon handling the case assures him that everything’s fine, the boy’s stable—and then he isn’t. In a flash, the situation goes south. The doctor, tall, fit, dignified, is an affront to the father, who believes the doctor is lying to him, based on some behavioral tics. He thinks the doctor made a mistake, and he makes it his mission in life to get to the truth. He has little interest in blaming the miscreant who stabbed his son—it’s the doctor and his conspicuous wealth and standing that offends him. It’s difficult to watch at times. Some brutal confrontations, and Simm’s character goes full out wacky stalker. I’m not sure I was completely happy with the way it was wrapped up. There seemed to be a slant in favor of the middle class versus the wealthy class. The truth does all come out in the end, and a lot of damage is done in the process, but (despite a terrific performance by Simm), I thought the father got off lightly for what he did. Worth seeking out, though.

I’ve been working on a short story for a week or so, mostly doing research, although I made a first stab at what I thought was going to be the opening section, and in a sense will be, although somewhat modified.

Then, at about 1:30 this morning, I woke up knowing exactly how I was going to write the story and the voices of the characters involved. Afraid that all this inspiration might be gone come morning, I had to get out of bed and write myself a couple of pages of notes. The handwriting is shaky but legible, but I needn’t have feared: it was all still there this morning. Although, what’s to say that the act of writing it down wasn’t what helped me to remember it when I awoke. Inspiration like that is always nice; however, it would have been nicer if it had happened at 1:30 pm instead.

In any case, I had a very productive writing session this morning. Since I write by hand, I can’t say exactly how much I wrote, but it was nine Moleskine pages, so I’m guessing something around or a little over 2000 words. That’s a lot for me in one sitting (although I have done a lot more on rare occasion). The funny thing is that I’m not writing the story beginning to end—what I wrote this morning was the middle, in three sections, and the sections will probably end up in a different order than I wrote them. Now I have to write one more “middle” section, the beginning and the end. I know them, more or less, I just have to commit them to paper. Then it’ll be time to dictate the story into the computer and edit the crap out of it. That’s a technical writing term, by the way.

Hodder & Stoughton hasn’t yet revealed their cover art for the UK edition of Flight or Fright. They have a web page up for it, though. I received the final missing pieces for the manuscript, so now the book is in the proof-reading phase. All very exciting!

For the past several months—since last August, in fact—I’ve been working with Stephen King, editing an anthology of scary stories involving flying. Cemetery Dance Publications announced the book today, so I can finally talk about it!

The anthology contains sixteen stories and a poem, all reprints except for new stories from King and Joe Hill. Some of the authors and/or stories you may be familiar with (Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Dan Simmons, Richard Matheson), while others will likely be as new to you as they were to me. Oh, and I have a story in it, too, a reprint called “Zombies on a Plane.” We came up with a terrific lineup of stories and I’m very proud of what we’ve done with this book. We think it should be stocked in every airport bookstore on the planet so that airline passengers will have something to help them pass the time as they rocket across the atmosphere, miles up in the air, inside a metal tube held up by physics and thin air.

Cemetery Dance is releasing the hardcover and eBook on September 4, while Simon and Schuster is doing the audiobook. Hodder and Stoughton will be publishing Flight or Fright in the UK.

Here’s how the book came about: I was sitting next to Rich Chizmar in a Bangor restaurant when Steve came up to us with this idea for an anthology of horror stories involving flying. The fact that we were across the street from Bangor International Airport was especially apropos. Steve and I dug deep to come up with this collection of stories—some of them I’d read before but many of them I hadn’t. It was a delight to find tales by some of my favorite authors that fit the loose theme and also to be introduced to several new-to-me writers who had published some chilling tales. Then there’s the new stories by Steve and Joe Hill, both of which are terrific and disturbing contributions to this sub-genre. I spent 24 hours total on two flights to and from Japan while working on this project and I spent a lot of time…a LOT of time…thinking about all the things that might go wrong when I was 35,000 feet up hurtling through space at 500 mph in a torpedo with wings. Is it a little twisted that we hope this anthology makes a lot of other people equally nervous the next time they board a flight?

Hope you’ll check it out. It’s been a fascinating experience. I’ll never look at an airplane the same way again.

Be sure to visit this page next Monday, when I’ll have some exciting news to announce. You’ll probably hear it somewhere else before you visit, but check in, anyway! It pertains to a project I’ve been working on for the past several months, and it’s really (really) cool.

Also cool: the number of languages in which I’ve been published has expanded by one. My story “Aeliana,” which is in the Shining in the Dark anthology, will be translated into Czech.  That’s the cover you see here, for Osvícení v temnotě. If you’re keeping track, my work has appeared in Russian, Italian, Dutch, French and Bulgarian, and by the end of the year I can add Czech, German and Swedish. Maybe more.

I was interviewed recently by Soraya Murillo Hernandez, and the article is now available (in English) at the Truth in Fiction blog.

We saw Black Panther recently and really enjoyed it. As with most people, the standout character for us was Shuri, the younger sister and technical genius. At times she reminded me a little of Q from James Bond. I really appreciated the fact that you can enjoy this movie without knowing anything at all about the greater Marvel universe. The only part that left us scratching our heads and firing up Google was the second post-credit scene. I’m still not sure I get the significance of it, but it doesn’t really matter. The movie was sweeping in scope and yet intimate in concept. A lot of hand-to-hand combat, but plenty of characterization and a “villain” whose motives and issues were completely relatable. He wasn’t the usual supervillain megalomaniac out to conquer the world to boost his ego.

I also watched the Netflix series Everything Sucks!, which I’m describing as The Wonder Years for the 1990s. It’s light and whimsical, but there are some relevant issues handled with care. Some terrific performances by the two young leads.

On the reading front, I’m well into I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. The author is Patton Oswalt’s late wife, a lifelong true crime aficionado. The book is as much about the nature of obsession as it is about her pursuit of this horrifying criminal who committed dozens and dozens of rapes and murders without ever being identified or caught. The nature of his crimes are guaranteed to creep you out, and you may have a few sleepless nights after you read this one.

So, I’m back from a week in Japan, except my mind still thinks I’m on the other side of the planet, refusing to let me sleep at the usual time. I was over there just long enough to almost get adapted to their time zone, only to turn around and come right back.

The outbound flight was roughly 14 hours. I left in the late morning on Saturday and got into Narita on Sunday afternoon. During the flight I read the first 450 pages or so of The Outsider, King’s forthcoming novel. Slept a little, but not a lot. Took the Narita Express in to Shinjuku, where I spent the night in a little hotel that was apparently on the edge of one of Tokyo’s red light districts. It’s hard to tell. There’s no shortage of sex parlors in that city. Monday was a national holiday, so I spent the day wandering around until it was time to head out to the western side of the city, where I spent the next three days in meetings.

It was cold over there. Below freezing at night and barely above in the day time. I saw the remnants of their recent snowfall on some streets. We were entertained by our hosts one evening at a Korean Shabu-Shabu restaurant. You get a pan with two different kinds of boiling liquid (one mostly flavorless, the other sesame) and racks of very thinly sliced meats (we got marbled beef and pork, thankfully none of the tongue that seems to be popular at these places) that you cook in the boiling liquid. Vegetables, too, so that ultimately you end up making a kind of brothy soup.

I knew from my daughter that Star Trek Discovery, the new series set before the original Star Trek, which is only available in the US if you pay to subscribe to CBS’s online service, is free on Netflix, so I binged through the entire season, often at 3 am when I was wide awake due to the time change. The final episode of the season dropped a few days before I left, so I was able to see the whole thing.

It’s an interesting show. Much, much harder on its main characters than any of the other series. There’s a lot of duplicity. You never know who to trust, nor who is going to survive. Main characters get killed. Main characters commit treason. Main characters cause galactic wars. My biggest problem with the show was in wrapping my head around the technology. Because film has progressed so much since the original series, everything looks much more modern than it did, but some tech was used in ways that Captain Kirk and his team never did. There was a fair amount of teleporting within the ship, for example, and I don’t remember ever seeing that on TOS or TNG. The computer and one character have a debate about the ethics of her instructions, which seemed more advanced than the older shows. In some ways, the show felt more like Doctor Who than Star Trek. But I liked it and look forward to seeing where it goes in season 2. I just hope I don’t have to go all the way to Japan to see it.

At the end of meetings on the third day, I relocated to the hotel airport, and what a pleasant surprise that was. I got upgraded to a junior suite for free (huge, massive, compared to most Japanese hotels), got free drink and meal discount coupons, and they let me check out late, which was good because my flight was late in the afternoon. On the eleven hour flight back (gotta love those shorter return journeys), I watched videos rather than read, and slept a fair amount. I watched War for the Planet of the Apes, which I’ve been trying to get to for a while. I’ve been enjoying these reimagined films, and like seeing all the places where they call back to the original films, in this case mostly Battle for the Planet of the Apes. All the little echoes from that earlier film. Then I watched most of Season 1 of Veep, which I’ve never seen before. Obviously satire, but it demonstrates how impotent the role of the Vice President can be…until it isn’t.

Which segues into the movie we saw last weekend after I got home: LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson as Lyndon Johnson, directed by Rob Reiner. Who would ever have imagined casting Woody as Johnson, but it was a good choice and it was probably Harrelson’s best performance ever. He disappears into the part, mostly. I confess I didn’t know that much about LBJ’s presidency, not even what his legacy was, so I found the film interesting from that perspective. They only skimmed over some of his more colorful aspects (his habit of consulting with his staff while sitting on the toilet with the door open) and didn’t get into the Vietnam war issues. It focuses mostly on the JFK assassination and Johnson’s decision to embrace Kennedy’s initiatives and see them through. Decent film.

I finished the first few drafts of my new short story. It took two days to write the first draft (longhand), which ended up being 4900 words. It’s funny how many of my stories end up being close to 5k. This was probably one of the easiest stories I’ve written in a long time. All the beats came right where I thought they needed to, and I felt like I was taking dictation as I scrawled on the pages of my notebook.

I dictated the story into Word on Saturday and spent the rest of the weekend’s writing sessions cleaning up the transcription errors and researching a few points that I’d annotated in my holographic manuscript. Two or three passes through and I have a solid draft that I’ll let sit for a couple of weeks before I take another pass at it and then turn it in to its prospective home. I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever written.

We saw Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri on Saturday. I missed it during its initial release, but it came back to theaters after it was nominated for a bunch of awards, so we got to see it on the big screen. It’s a remarkable film for a number of reasons. The performances are top notch. The story is compelling, and the choices they make in telling the story aren’t the obvious ones. It’s easy to feel compassion for Frances McDormand’s character, because who wouldn’t feel compassion for a mother whose daughter was murdered? But she’s a challenging individual in a lot of other ways. Was she a good mother? She said some terrible things to her kids before the tragedy, things that come back to haunt her. She speaks her mind, even when it’s not necessarily in her best interests to do so. Then there’s the racist deputy played by Sam Rockwell. One of several characters who are as dumb as bags of rocks. I know there has been some push-back against the movie because of the transition his character makes, which some people feel was undeserved and unearned. And Woody Harrelson is charming as the cussing sheriff.

The movie never goes where you think it will. It looks like it is headed for a tidy ending in which everything gets neatly resolved, but then you get to the end and it looks like the movie is designed for a Thelma & Louise style sequel. There are a lot of things you have to swallow—there is an exaggerated set of incidents where, in the “real world,” one hopes the consequences would be more severe for the perpetrators. But even with all that, it is a helluva film. Highly recommended.

I wish Absentia on Amazon Prime were better than it is. I had high hopes. I’m a big fan of Stana Katic from Castle, who is always interesting to watch because you always feel like she’s present in scenes. Re-acting as much as acting. Her character, an FBI agent, vanished six years ago and was presumed dead. Her husband remarried. Her little boy is now a bigger boy. But she returns with a splash, upsetting all manner of apple carts, and there’s growing evidence that perhaps her disappearance wasn’t what it seemed and that she might be involved in shady things. Or not. The script probably looked good to Katic, but the execution is weak. It was filmed in Bulgaria, but it’s supposed to be Boston, but they didn’t go to many lengths to Americanize the staging and things feel off. Many of the secondary cast members speak accented English, and it ain’t Bah-ston English. It feels like a run-of-the-mill TV series compared to some of the stellar streaming series we’ve been treated to lately. I’ll stick through to the end, but it’s not as good as I’d hoped.

I’m not a huge football fan. We went out to dinner when the Superbowl was on (the restaurant wasn’t completely empty, but almost), returning home mid-way through the third quarter. Decided to watch the rest, and that was pretty exciting. It occurred to me that football is basically a sport in which two different teams play two other teams. There’s the quarterback and the offensive line against the other team’s defense, and vice versa. The two quarterbacks never play against each other. When one of these team leaders is in command, the other guy is on the sidelines, looking on helplessly. It’s a strange configuration, and not the head-to-head challenge its often portrayed as. Still, exciting finale. I think a lot of people expected Brady to pull off a miracle as if it was par for the course (to mix sports metaphors). He tried.