Bev Vincent

I started a new short story today, my first of 2018. I’ve been busy working on The Project That Cannot Be Named lately, and that has been consuming most of my writing time. But I’ve been cogitating over this new story for a while and I have most of it mapped out in my head, so I went to the bagel cafe this morning for breakfast and hand-wrote over nine pages in my Moleskine journal, which amounts to about 2000-2500 words, I guess. Over half the story, although I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end yet. I have a pretty good idea, but there are some logistics I need to research first.

I also sold my first new short story of 2018, a tale called “Ray and the Martian.” I’ll announce more once the publisher gives the go-ahead. Swedish and British editions of Shining in the Dark have been announced as well. My story “Aeliana” is going to be well published this year!

I discovered that I am one of those offered Special Thanks at the end of an extra feature video on the Blu-Ray of It, which is pretty cool. There I am, crammed between the Thomas Hill Standpipe and Canadian actor Finn Wolfhard, who was also in Stranger Things.

I hear that Cemetery Dance #76 is showing up in mailboxes. I haven’t received my copy yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I have four pieces in that issue.

When I heard the news about Dallas Mayr (aka Jack Ketchum), I gasped. For real. I was self-aware enough to hear myself making that sound. I don’t know Dallas well, really, but I’ve known him for a long time and we’ve had some good times together. I know him from various Necons, of course, but my wife and I also sat with him at the Jekyll & Hyde Club in New York as part of a dinner organized by Stephen King’s office before the Harry, Carrie and Garp event. Rich Chizmar and I met up with him before the National Book Award banquet at which King cited Dallas as someone people should be reading more. And at the World Horror Convention in Austin, where I served as Guest of Honor Liaison, I had the pleasure of driving Dallas around in search of a liquor store so he could stock up on scotch. That was a fun outing. I always enjoyed talking with him. He took a lot of crap from people at Necon, all with good humor. I will miss seeing him. Maybe some day the book of essays about his work for which I have contributed a piece will see the light of day. That would be nice.

I just finished watching a French series called La Mante (The Mantis) on Netflix. It’s about a series of copycat murders many years after a crime spree committed by a young woman who killed reprehensible men. There’s an element of Silence of the Lambs to it, in that the investigators go back to the original killer for advice in trying to catch the new murderer, but the big twist is that she’s the mother of the guy in charge of the team, although only a couple of people know that. For the sake of the family’s privacy, the perpetrator’s name was changed and news reports declared that his mother had been killed in a plane crash, without connecting the two to each other. There are a few implausible moments and far too many people connected to the family show up as persons of interest, but it’s not bad, and at six hours, quite binge-able. The creators have obviously seen a lot of movies based on Stephen King books. There are a couple of really overt homages, including the use of a particular camera angle that rips off Kubrick. The actress who plays the Mantis reminds me a lot of Charlotte Rampling. She is an ice queen…until she isn’t.

I also enjoyed The End of the F***ing World on Netflix. It’s a British dark comedy about a teenage boy who thinks he’s sort of a young Dexter Morgan who tortures animals and doesn’t feel anything. The next logical move is to kill a person, and he picks a quirky girl. However, she’s the exact opposite of him: she feels everything, and he soon discovers he’s way out of his depth with her. They run away from home and make a series of increasingly bad decisions that puts them at greater and greater jeopardy. Each episode is only 22 minutes, which is just about right. Along with The Good Place, this is the only “comedy” I’ve enjoyed in recent years, and in this case there aren’t many laughs. It’s dark.

I binged through The Deuce recently, too. That’s the HBO series that takes place around Times Square in the 1970s, created by David Simon (The Wire, Treme) and George Pelecanos, with Megan Abbott on the writing team. If you’ve been missing The Wire, this is the show for you. Not only does it have that feel, it has a number of actors from that series. James Franco plays twin brothers, one moderately responsible, one not so much. The story involves pimps and prostitutes who walk the streets, the cops who police the streets and the gangsters who have interests in just about everything. It explores violence toward women, but also the change in the sex trade during that period, with pornography attempting to go mainstream (Deep Throat) and the migration of prostitutes into brothels and the creation of personal video booths at porn shops. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a prostitute who transitions into the porn movie making business. It’s also dark, although it has some pretty funny moments, too.

We also took a deep dive into the seventies by watching Battle of the Sexes and The Post. We followed this with The Final Year, a documentary about Obama’s last year in the White House. It’s a fascinating look behind the curtain, not only at Obama but at some of his most trusted team members. Finally, last weekend we saw I’m Not Your Negro, the documentary based on James Baldwin’s outline of a project he wanted to do about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. It’s eye-opening, to say the least. For me, one of the most profound lines came when Baldwin said that black people knew white people far better than any white person knew black people because black people have had to watch and be acutely aware of white people all their lives.

It’s been a winter for the record books. We had significant snowfall in early December, recordable snow a few weeks later and then we got winter. We knew it was coming: the forecasters were predicting a hard freeze with sleet and freezing rain, but we didn’t really know how bad it would be. Southeast Texas was essentially closed for business yesterday when the roads became impassable. Overpasses and bridges were too hazardous for most drivers and there was ice on the roadways across the metro area. I worked from my home office.

The first precipitation was probably sleet, but there was enough of it to make a white coat over everything. Unlike our December snowfall, it was cold enough outside for the precip to stay…and it kept getting colder. We were in the teens most of the day, with wind chill temps in the single digits. More freezing rain and sleet in the afternoon, followed by some big fluffy snowflakes. A hard freeze overnight and for the first time since we moved into our house 22+ years ago, the water pipes froze.

It was a bad moment when I was getting ready for work this morning and turned on the shower faucet…and nothing happened. I discovered that some varmint had chewed away a chunk of insulation on the pipe going into the house and I speculated that the freeze happened there. My father would probably have gotten out the butane torch and hit the thing with a direct flame, but I opted instead for the hair drier method. But, boy, was it ever cold out, and after fifteen minutes with no obvious progress, I went in search of another option. My wife suggested the heating pad she uses when she has back pain. I wrapped the pipe with the heating pad and we wrapped that in turn with a big towel and let it run. An hour later, the water started flowing. No burst pipes, fortunately, and I plan to re-wrap the pipes tonight to keep that from happening again. We are barely above freezing now, and it’s going back down to the low 20s again tonight, with another hard freeze warning.

Schools remained closed today. This weekend it will be high 60s and low 70s. Can’t wait. But this must be the longest we’ve had snow on the ground in this region in a long time: over twenty-four hours.

When my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter were home for the holidays, we had family photos taken. It was a chilly morning (not as chilly as this morning) but they turned out quite well. I don’t normally post pictures of my granddaughter to social media, but her back is to the camera in this one and I got special dispensation to use it! My daughter says it’s adorable, the elbow-patch pals. I think so, too!

We’ve been having fun entertaining our daughter, son-in-law and 18-month-old granddaughter for the past couple of weeks. We see them every other week on Skype, but this is the first time they’ve been here in person for many months. The last time I saw our granddaughter in person, she was barely crawling and now she’s toddling and babbling and very, very active. We now know everything about our house that isn’t childproofed.

Now that the visit is over, we set about putting everything back in place from where it was hidden to keep the little girl safe.

The temperature has been all over the map. We had another flirtation with flurries a couple of weeks ago. Snow was recorded at the airport, but nothing like what we saw in early December. The temps have been down to the 30s, up to the 70s (earlier today) and back down to the 30s (tonight).

Over at News from the Dead Zone, I posted a year-end summary and a look forward to the year in Stephen King news. I signed my first short story contract of 2018 (the project hasn’t been announced yet, so I’ll hold off on more details until it is) and am getting very close to signing another contract for something that will be out toward the end of the year. I’m awaiting the editor’s feedback on the second draft of an essay I worked on late last year, so I’ll have that to play with next week, more than likely. I also have a new short story I’m contemplating before launching fully into novel-writing mode for 2018.

I finally got to see The Last Jedi last weekend, and I managed to avoid all spoilers before doing so. It wasn’t that hard–I just looked away from any articles or posts that mentioned Star Wars. I was amused by the way the gung-ho pilot who always breaks the rules was relegated to the role of dinosaur in this film and the level-headed women were the voices of reason, even when it seemed like they weren’t. The female characters in general ran the show in this film, and I’m completely okay with that. I found it interesting that a significant part of the movie dealt with a side-mission that not only didn’t accomplish what it set out to do, it ended up making things significantly worse. If those characters had done nothing at all, things would have been better for the “good guys.” I thought the porgs were cute, and I laughed at the scene where Chewie is trying to have his dinner of roast porg while the others give him big sad puppy eyes. They were good comic relief inside the Millennium Falcon, too. I patted myself on the back for figuring out the clue about the red earth under the salt during the big battle at the end. I had no issues whatsoever with the resolution of Luke’s story. I thought it was a good, solid addition to the Star Wars saga. Not OMG good, but good.

I’ve been watching the series Travelers on Netflix. It’s about time-travelers who come from the future to try to correct things that have gone terribly wrong. They enter the bodies of people at the moment of their deaths and take over their lives moving forward. The focus is on a team led by FBI agent Grant MacLaren (Eric McCormack). His colleagues include a young woman who traveled into the body of a mentally handicapped individual, an old man who inhabits the body of a teenager, another guy who has the misfortune of being hosted by a heroin addict, and “MacLaren’s” partner in the future, who is now a single mother with an abusive police officer ex. So they have to try to save the future while blending into these complicated lives in a world that they only know about in theory from far in the future. It’s an interesting premise, and their personal problems are as interesting as their missions. I finished the first season and will move on to Season 2 shortly. It’s produced in Canada and a lot of familiar Canadian actors appear in it, including McCormack, who was born and raised in Ontario.

We finally saw the Doctor Who Christmas special last night. [mild spoilers ahead]

The story hearkens back to the beginning with the appearance of the first Doctor and it is the swan song for the twelfth, as well as the end of the Steven Moffat era. New things are in the offing with the appearance of the first female Doctor, although we’ll have to wait until the fall to see how it all plays out. It was nice that, for once, the alien incursion was not hostile, and it was good to see the Doctor a little befuddled by that discovery. It had a few good cameos, although at times it felt overly drawn out, like the parody of how an actor stretches out his death scene in an old Western. I liked the interplay between the two Doctors, especially the way #1 made fun of some of the things that had evolved with his character and “ship” in the intervening 1500 years. (It’s also funny to consider what an utter bastard David Bradley played in Game of Thrones.) I absolutely did not recognize Mark Gattis as the soldier until I saw he after-show scene with the table read for the episode. And the scene of the legendary World War I Armistice was terrific. And I loved the 13th Doctor’s first word, her reaction to the revelation. Brilliant!

2017 was a pretty good year for publications. This collage above contains the covers of all the physical venues where my work appeared this year. I had six new short stories come out this year: “Truth or Dare?” in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, “Aeliana” in СИЯНИЕ В МРАКА, the Bulgarian translation of Shining in the Dark and my first publication in that language, “The Halloween Tree” in Halloween Carnival: Volume Four, “Sticky Business” in Snowbound: The Best New England Crime Stories 2017, “The Illusion” in The Shadow Over Deathlehem and “Pain-Man” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a market I’ve been trying to crack for many years.

I wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Godsend by Bernard Taylor from Centipede Press and my interview with Richard Chizmar and Stephen King has appeared in multiple venues, including Where Nightmares Come From. My essay on King’s crime fiction appears in Reading Stephen King from Cemetery Dance Publications. I contributed several items to Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories that Speak to Our Deepest Fears. Hank Wagner and I discussed Stranger Things in Dead Reckonings #21 and I reviewed Sleeping Beauties in DR #22.

At Cemetery Dance Online (aka News from the Dead Zone), I reviewed The Dark Tower, It, Gerald’s Game, 1922 and Sleeping Beauties. I got to attend my first movie premiere (The Dark Tower, in Bangor) and my first press screening of a film (It, in Houston, a week after Hurricane Harvey). I also made my first appearance on Sirius XM satellite radio when Robin Furth and I spent the better part of an hour talking about all things King with Anthony Brenzican of Entertainment Weekly.

All in all, as I said, a pretty good year, and I already have a number of things cued up for 2018, including one huge project about which I’m terribly excited but can say absolutely nothing about. If the stars align, my novella project with Brian Keene might see the light of day next year, too. Here’s hoping.

In some aspects, this was a dismal year, though. Let’s hope for better in the New Year.

Within a few minutes of each other I received what I assume will be the last acceptance and rejection letters of 2017. The rejection was for a story that I really like that’s been out for a long time, so I look forward to taking another pass through it and finding it another home. The acceptance is for an anthology that won’t be out until 2019, so at least I have something queued up for the year after next!

My short story “The Illusion” is included in the new charity anthology Shadows over Deathleham. This is book four in the popular holiday anthology series to benefit the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. It is available as a print edition or for Kindle.

Issue #76 of Cemetery Dance magazine is shipping soon. I have four articles in this one: my usual News from the Dead Zone column, a book review (Sleeping Beauties), an interview with Mike Flanagan (director of Gerald’s Game) and a reprint of my interview with Richard Chizmar and Stephen King about “Gwendy’s Button Box.”

I watched a series on Amazon called Tin Star. It stars Tim Roth as a British law enforcement type who becomes sheriff of a small town in Alberta, Canada. The town is becoming home to a plant extracting oil from the tar sands, which is bringing money and trouble. Christina Hendricks plays the PR wonk who tries to get the town to swallow the bitter pill. It has a number of recognizable Canadian actor, including the old sheriff from Haven. The series reminds me of a blend of Banshee, Justified, Ozark and Sons of Anarchy. The sheriff is a recovering alcoholic and something happens at the very beginning of the first episode to push him into a dark place. The tall Quebecois who is head of security for the oil company is a dangerous force. Plus the sheriff has a teenage daughter. And someone’s trying to kill him. In one of my favorite scenes, he stirs up trouble with a biker gang. They catch up with him and he knows he’s in for a beating. They tell him he’s in for a beating. So he voluntarily lies down on the sidewalk, gets into a tight crouch and lets them kick the crap out of him. It stars with a bang and ends with a bang. Stay tuned for season 2.

Last night I started Department Q, a Danish series of three noir movies, adapted from novels. The scripts are by Nicolaj Arcel, who adapted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the original version) and directed The Dark Tower. The main character is a former homicide cop who makes a bad call and gets busted down to a newly formed division, located in the basement, where he is expected to read cold case files and file closure reports at the rate of three a week. Of course, he finds a case that intrigues him and he goes well beyond his mandate, dragging his unwilling but affable Muslim partner along with him. This guy is about as emotion-free as they come, but he’s a good cop. The first one is called The Keeper of Lost Causes. One way it differs from the usual cold case show is that the viewer is supplied with more information than the cops, via flashbacks to the scenes of the crime, as it were.

OK, yesterday it was my top books of the year. Today, let’s move on to top films and TV series. I watched a goodly number of both in 2017, and the full list is here, if you’re interested. Boy, it sure seems a long time ago when I saw Manchester By the Sea in the theater.

Again, in viewing order, my top 15 films of 2017

TV series is much harder list, so I’m going to go with 20:

My buddy Glenn Chadbourne pinged me on Facebook earlier this month to verify the name of the device used in King’s novel End of Watch. He was working on the Christmas card design for King’s office. Yesterday, I was rewarded with the fruits of his labors: a card from that very office with Glenn’s creepy characters enjoying their equally creepy presents. I do believe I see Gwendy’s button box, as well as a Pennywise ornament and an eerie recumbent figure, in addition to other familiar gift items.

We watched the Christmas special last night. No, not that one. Call the Midwives, which featured a story from the end of 1962 and early 1963, a time during which London endured the Big Freeze, one of the coldest on record in the United Kingdom. This meteorological event had numerous consequences (people dying, waterworks freezing, travel impeded) that are used to good measure in this story. It’s not without tragedy and heartbreak, but it’s the Christmas special, so everything’s all right in the end. Except for the dead people. I have yet to see Doctor Who. Maybe tomorrow night.

We watched Victoria and Abdul the other evening. It’s the fictionalized story of the real-life relationship between Queen Victoria and a Muslim from Agra, India who became part of her inner household for the last fifteen years of her life. Judi Dench reprises her role from Mrs. Brown with panache, although I saw some presumably valid critiques of the story in the way it whitewashes and minimizes the effect of England on India at the time. Still, we enjoyed it in the same way we enjoyed The Crown: recognizing that it is, for the most part, a work of fiction with historical characters.

Tomorrow, I look more in depth at the movies and TV series  I watched in 2017. Today is about books. By my tally, I read over 60 novels and novellas this year. The number is a little imprecise because I read some books more than once, for purposes of review, and I read some things I can’t yet talk about. If you’re interested, the full list (with aforementioned caveats) is here.

I’m rubbish when it comes to top-X lists. I would spend too much time quibbling with myself over whether this is #7 or #8. So I present here my top fifteen books from 2017 in no particular order. Or, rather, in the order in which I read them, which is about as random an ordering as I could come up with:

I posted 21 reviews at my book review blog, Onyx Reviews. The list of reviews with links to them can be found here.

Reports of snow in Texas started coming in yesterday evening. I saw comments on social media from Laredo, Austin and San Antonio. The forecasters said we might get flurries in the Greater Houston area, and when I went to bed the precipitation was decidedly thick. Sleet, at the very least, but it wasn’t accumulating.

So imagine my surprise when I looked out the back window at 5:00 am and saw: a very confused and irate possum. Oh, yeah, and snow all over the ground and trees.

For perspective, the fence behind it is six feet tall and that big black thing to the right, with the snow all over it, is our gas barbecue. This possum was big! At least as large as a cat.

I took a few pictures then went up to my office to work for a couple of hours. I looked out the window later, after the sun was up, and realized how beautiful it looked outside, so I went out and snapped some pictures.

The ground was warm enough to melt the snow, but it was still 32° out, so the snow stayed on the trees and bushes. The grandson of our neighbor across the street built a little snowman. Overpasses and bridges froze, so there were plenty of accidents in the area. No one around here knows how to drive in the winter. School openings were delayed to give the roads a chance to clear. Surprisingly, by mid-morning, there was still snow on the trees and car rooftops. No doubt it will all be gone soon enough, but it was a pleasant surprise. Alas, there’s no way to hold onto it for Christmas, when family arrives for vacation.

My binge viewing this week was the new German series on Netflix, Dark. Some people are referring to it as Darker Things, and there are a few comparisons to be drawn to Stranger Things, but it is very much its own thing. As much as I liked the Duffer Brothers’ series (and I liked it a lot), I think I liked this one even more. I never knew what was coming next (although I did guess one of the major mysteries early on). Other comparisons have been made to Twin Peaks, but it’s not quite that weird, and to Lost, which I think has merit. I see a strong connection to 11/22/63. It takes place in 2019 in a small German village that benefited from the building of the first nuclear power plant in Germany in 1960. That plant is about to be decommissioned. A boy has been missing for nearly two weeks and by the end of the first episode another one will disappear. There are ties to events from 33 years earlier (and, ultimately, to 33 years before that). It’s a creepy mystery with dead sheep and mutilated bodies and plummeting birds.

The default play mode on Netflix is to overdub the audio with English voices, but that is terrible, in my opinion. Play around with your settings and switch to German audio (not German descriptions, which is also an option) and English subtitles for a far better viewing experience. My biggest problem with the series was the fact that there’s a very large cast of completely unfamiliar actors, and some characters appear as younger versions of themselves played by different actors. The director takes some steps to help viewers link up who is who, but it can still get somewhat confusing. I feel like I need to watch it all over again, now that I’m more familiar with the characters.

That past influences the future, but the future also influences the past. It’s cleverly constructed and they obviously knew the ending when they started or else none of it would hold together. I have no doubt it will get picked up for a second season, and I cannot wait.

I don’t often have a hard time naming short stories, but the one I just finished is giving me fits. Often I have the title before I start writing, but something usually comes to me during the writing process. Not with this one. I wrote it longhand, dictated it into the computer this morning and made one complete proofing pass on it and so far, nada. The story is due on Thursday, so I’m hoping inspiration will strike. I do have something to fall back on, but I don’t like it very much.

The weather was really nice here in Southeast Texas for the four-day weekend. Unseasonably warm. We were able to dine outside a couple of times and hang out in a driveway with a glass of wine a couple of others. On Sunday we went over to Market Street (I got the show time wrong, so we had the better part of an hour to kill) and stroll around the park, watching all the families with little kids enjoying the warm weather, too. We saw Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf as daughter and mother. The story takes place during Ronan’s character’s senior year in Sacramento, California. She attends a Catholic school and is determined to go somewhere interesting on the east coast for university, although her grades and the family finances limit her possibilities. She’s a bit of a wild child, and has a lot of conflict with her mother, while her father is a calm, stabilizing influence, despite his own issues. It’s warm and witty and pretty funny at times. My favorite bit was when the school coach is enlisted to take over directing The Tempest and he uses a blackboard and football strategy to block out the play. The movie has the feel of a letter from the screenwriter to her own mother. It currently has the best Rotten Tomatoes score of all time: 100% from over 160 reviews.

We saw a rather bizarre movie on Saturday evening. Capturing Mary stars Maggie Smith and Ruth Wilson (Luther, The Affair), who plays the younger version of Smith’s character. Smith stumbles into an old mansion in NY, maintained by a young caretaker, and proceeds to tell him about her misadventures there as a young woman. She met up with a mysterious man played by David Walliams who, to me, was an avatar of doubt. He liked to go around to famous people at parties and say things to them that seemed complimentary at first but ended up coming off as back-handed. He unsettles Wilson’s character’s by telling her some terrible secrets about people he’s learned over the years, and the phrase “living rent free in her head” comes to mind. He manages to destroy all of her confidence and her promising career as a writer fizzles. Apparently part of a loose trilogy of films. We weren’t quite sure what to make of it when it was over.

We’re almost to the end of Longmire. Just one episode left to go in the final season. There was one monumental surprise involving a semi-major character about halfway through the season, and one character from Season 4 is getting a chance to redeem himself. We’ll be sorry to see it come to an end.

On a whim I decided to reread Murder on the Orient Express last weekend. I couldn’t tell you when I last read it. Maybe as much as 30 years ago. It holds up remarkably well. It’s a fast read, but it’s fun to see how Christie lays out the clues and the red herrings so deftly. It’s an amazingly well plotted story despite how convoluted and unlikely it is.

I also read A Legacy of Spies, the most recent by John le Carré, which takes an aging, retired spy back to some of Smiley’s most infamous cases. Also recently IQ by Joe Ide, which has a strong Walter Mosely vibe. Winner of the Edgar for Best Debut Novel.  And Damaged by Pamela Callow, which is set in my old stomping grounds of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which added a layer of interest for me.

Сияние в мрака, the Bulgarian translation of the anthology Shining in the Dark, containing my story “Aeliana,” was published today. This is the first time one of my stories has debuted in a foreign language. The English edition is forthcoming, as is an Italian translation, and perhaps more, too.

The first grown-up movie I ever saw in a theatre was the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Poirot. This was at the Capitol Theatre in Dalhousie, New Brunswick. I was 13. After cutting my teeth on the Hardy boys, I was in the midst of an Agatha Christie binge when the film came out. I don’t think I’ve seen it again since then, but my memory of it was that Finney disappointed me as Poirot. I far preferred David Suchet, from the BBC TV series.

I saw the new version, directed by Kenneth Branagh, this weekend, and I was impressed by it. Branagh manages to disappear into the role to the point where I seldom marveled that it was Branagh playing Poirot. His mustaches were legendary and his peculiar mannerisms handled in earnest. I thought the film was a tad over-directed, with stunt-angled camera shots that didn’t lend much to the picture, and there were a couple of times when the score seemed at conflict with what was happening on the screen at the moment, but on the whole I thought it was very well done. I wonder how many people who went to see it had no idea of the mystery’s solution. The cast was terrific—I was especially impressed by Daisy Ridley—and, all in all, a fine film. The teaser for Death on the Nile at the end was encouraging, too.

In keeping with the weekend’s theme, I embarked on a journey through The Midsomer Murders on Netflix. I’ve never seen an episode before, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect. Because they’re based on a series of novels, the characters are fully realized from the first scene. They’re serious who/how-dunnits, but they have a light touch, too. The DCI’s wife can’t cook, although she thinks she can and regularly attempts recipes from Delia Smith and other gourmands. That’s a running joke. The episode where the DCI has a couple of edible marijuana cakes without realizing it is pretty funny, too. Colin Firth shows up in the final episode of the first season, but is dead almost before the opening credits. I also recognized Sonia Walger, who played Penny on Lost, who has a 30-second scene as a local journalist in one episode. I’m quite enjoying them: I watched six over the course of two days, and they’re about 100 minutes each.

I did try The Punisher, but I guess I wasn’t in the right mood for that show. I only lasted fifteen minutes into the first episode. A lot of my friends are raving about it, so I’ll probably give it a second chance at some point. I’m also enjoying The Orville, although I have no idea how on earth this show is being made without being sued for plagiarism. It’s not nearly as funny as I expected it to be (I thought it would be more in the vein of Galaxy Quest, but it’s not in that league at all), and what little humor there is mostly falls flat for me. My favorite character so far is Lieutenant Alara Kitan, who plays it virtually straight. The most recent episode, which showcased her character, was really quite good.

I met Alexander McCall Smith at Murder by the Book the weekend before last. I’ve been reading his books to my wife ever since we first saw The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency miniseries on HBO. He was only scheduled to sign at the store, but he decided at the last minute to talk and he entertained us for nearly 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. He’s quite a storyteller. He spun out a shaggy dog story about being forced to rent a bulldozer in Italy when his original reservation was canceled and all cars were hired out due to it being a holiday weekend. It was almost a credible tale, but during the Q&A someone asked how fast a bulldozer could go and Smith grinned, saying, “That’s the sort of detail that I would probably know, if the story were true!”

How long does it take to find a market for a short story? As long as it takes. Most short stories don’t have a shelf life. If you don’t find a market for it after X months or years, it doesn’t go bad. I’ve published any number of stories that were submitted many, many (many) times.

A story I wrote shortly after the massive blackout in the northwest United States in 2003 has finally found a home. My submission list on it reveals probably a dozen outings, maybe more. It’s a bit of an oddity in that it’s only a little over 1000 words, so a tad short for most markets. Glad to discover this morning that it will see the light of day. More news to follow.

I also found out this morning that I won a Limited Edition Stephen Gervais Christine print on Twitter, thanks to the folks at @ChristineMovieCar. Pretty cool. It’s one of my favorite limited edition covers. The project of reproducing the cover art to King’s books was initiated by Suntup Editions.

I turned in the essay I was commissioned to do recently. It wasn’t due until the end of the year, but I got it finished over the weekend and am awaiting the editor’s feedback. It was a fun one to write, and the pay is terrific!

ELO is high up the list of bands I never thought I’d get a chance to see in concert, but that’s about to change. Their North American tour was announced last week and I was able to get tickets during the pre-order period this morning. The concert isn’t until next August—I think that’s the farthest in advance I’ve ever purchased tickets.