Bev Vincent

This is how crazy it can be in Texas. At the moment it is flirting with 80°. When I get up for my writing session tomorrow it will be on the way to the predicted low of 25° and it won’t get above 35° until noon on Friday. Yikes.

Some books stick with me more than others. One that did is The Night People by Jack Finney, author of The Body Snatchers that was turned into a film or two. Though it sounds like it might be about vampires or something of that ilk, it’s actually about neighborhood acquaintances who decide to have some nighttime adventures. It starts with one guy who has the irresistible urge to lie down in the middle of a road that’s busy in the daytime but mostly idle at night. Things progress. The friends have a picnic on the sidewalk at a strip mall. A cop gets onto their case: he is offended by their shenanigans, even though no one or nothing is being harmed. Things accelerate. The stakes are raised. I remember finding it utterly charming at the time. A paean to non-conformity.

This book came to mind as I was reading Sarah Pinborough’s magnificent The Death House last weekend. I’d heard many kudos about the novel, but I knew absolutely nothing about what it was about, by design. I went into it blind, and I loved every second of it. It’s been a long time since a book brought tears to my eyes, and this one did twice. I’m working on a full review for Onyx, but in a nutshell it’s akin to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, with shades of Lord of the Flies and maybe even a soupçon of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The narrator is a Night Person, roaming the eponymous house while everyone else is drugged asleep. But then he meets a kindred spirit, and the adventures begin. Charming, coming of age adventures under the shadow of a known, bleak future. I haven’t been getting much reading done this year, but I set aside Saturday and read the whole thing from cover to cover. It’s that good. It doesn’t come out in the US until the fall, but it’s available in the UK now.

I got Amazon Prime recently so I could watch Bosch (well worth the cost, by the way), so I’ve been browsing through the other available offerings, and I stumbled upon Oz, about which I’d heard good things. I’ve seen the first four episodes: I see it as a precursor to Orange is the New Black. More serious than OITNB most of the time, with a marvelously over-the-top narrator, the guy who played Michael on Lost. J.K. Simmons is a nasty piece of work as the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood. I can’t believe I’ve never seen a second of this show before.

I received my contributor copies of Dead Reckonings #16 last night. Hank Wagner and I teamed up twice this time, once to talk about two books recommended by King (Christopher Golden’s Snowblind and Nick Cutter’s The Troop), and again to discuss the latest two King novels.

As we get older, death becomes a more familiar companion. Certainly not a welcome one, but familiar all the same.

I didn’t come to Star Trek early in life, mostly because where I grew up we only had one television station and Star Trek wasn’t on it. There was no such thing as VHS back then, so if it wasn’t on the tube, it pretty much didn’t exist.

My first exposure to the show came in 1979 when I went to university. The TV lounge in our dorm had cable, and Star Trek ran every weekday at noon or thereabouts. We had lunch the moment the dining room opened at 11:30 and dashed up to our floor to watch the latest episode. I bought the James Blish novelizations and read them all. I went to see Gene Rodenberry when he came to the Student Union Building (a fact that I had forgotten until I recently stumbled across the ticket stub while sorting through old papers).  I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture on opening night.

Not long after I moved to Texas in the late 1980s, I heard about a Star Trek convention in downtown Houston, some 40 miles away. I considered myself a hardcore fan by that point. Then I stood in the registration line between two guys in costume who held an intense debate about what Spock had been up to between the first two movies. They had evidence. If their conversation had been written down, there would have been footnotes. I felt waaaay out of their league. I enjoyed the convention, though I was a bit miffed when I realized that most of the vendors there had no interest in Star Trek at all. They were just out to make a buck, selling photocopies of photocopies of scripts and badly produced fan fiction. I got to meet Jimmy Doohan and Marina Sirtis, so there’s that!

I was thrilled to see Leonard Nimoy as the villain of the week on Columbo, playing a doctor who killed a rival physician using dissolving stitches. And, all these years later, I’ve been following him on Twitter where, among other things of interest, he talked about his battle with COPD and how stupid it was of him to smoke.

He was taken to hospital last week after collapsing at home. His final tweet from a few days ago read, “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP”

Today, his grandson posted the following on his Twitter feed:

Hi all, as you all know, my Grandpa passed away this morning at 8:40 from end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was an extraordinary man, husband, grandfather, brother, actor, author-the list goes on- and friend. Thank you for the warm condolences. May you all LLAP. – Dani

P.s. I will be putting special shirts up on our site, SHOPLLAP.com , where all of the proceeds will go to the COPD Foundation. I hope to hear from you all.

You get a rejection letter where you were thisclose to cracking the table of contents. You have to withdraw another story from a longstanding project because it was starting to circle the drain. These things are part of a writer’s life.

And then there’s the spontaneous email from a first reader who tells you he was tempted to call in sick to work that day because he wanted to stay home to finish reading your work. Or the random post that you stumble upon from a total stranger who says very nice things about a short story you published many moons ago. These things, too, are part of a writer’s life. A couple of the latter is worth far more than a barrel of the former.

Odd coincidences: Several days ago, I finished a work in which mysterious tunnels play a major role. Then I look at my favorite news site (CBC news, if you’re curious) and see a blazing headline about a mysterious tunnel of unknown origin and purpose. Cool, you think. But my tunnel is more mysterious.

I’m getting close to the end of Bosch, the 10-episode Amazon Prime series based on the novels of Michael Connelly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Los Angeles look so good on film. It almost looks like a nice place to live. Titus Welliver is good, although I have to keep reminding myself he’s Harry Bosch. I can’t articulate how I pictured Bosch over the years, but it wasn’t like him. The season is based mostly on the novels Echo Park and City of Bones, though some liberties are taken. Bosch’s ex-wife and FBI profiler Rachel Walling are blended together into a single character, for example. I’m enjoying it, but I wish there was an easy way to cast it to my TV. Watching on the iPad is okay, but just okay.

The second season of Broadchurch has wrapped up. Apparently it’s been renewed for a third. Nothing is neat and tidy in life, as the season demonstrates. I wish I hadn’t watched Gracepoint, because that canceled series polluted my memory of Broadchurch’s first season a bit and it took me a while to sort out who was who and what was what again. The season comingles two cases and involves the characters from season 1 along with some new additions. I enjoyed it.

Very close to the mid-point of Justified’s final season. The addition of Jeff Fahey to the cast is welcome. His Zachariah is a crusty old miner and Fahey throws everything into portraying him. He’s the only actor I’m aware of who can laugh “heh heh heh” and make it sound like a real thing. A couple of good lines. Ava saying, “Anyone but me just plain tired of the bullshit burdens of southern hospitality?” The prostitute saying, “You’d be amazed how many guys think that if they talk fast enough no one will realize they’ve got nothin to say,” which could be applied to a couple of the show’s characters. And Raylan telling Tim, “Wonderful things can happen when you sow seeds of distrust in a garden of assholes.”

Seven or eight years ago, Brian Keene and I first bandied about the idea of collaborating on a project. Our motivation was a shared habit of listening to music while we write and writing about listening to music while we write. I once wrote an entire novel (unpublished) listening only to Supertramp albums.

Brian and I observed that, though our tastes were quite different in many ways, there was also an overlap region that includes groups like the Alan Parsons Project, Supertramp, Pink Floyd, Styx, Kansas, ELO, etc. We wondered what it would be like to write something to the other person’s music. At first we considered a short story collection, but ultimately the project converged into a pair of novellas, each in the 30-40,000 word range, that would be published together. Cemetery Dance liked the idea, so that’s where this thing will end up eventually.

But it took us a long time to get to this point. We’d raise the subject every now and then. I even made a subtle dig about it in a very short story I wrote a number of years ago. Finally, we got to the point where we established our ground rules about the playlists. I delivered a CD to Brian at NECON last year and he sent me a Spotify playlist shortly there after. Even so, it took us another six months to get to the point where we were ready to write. And we did. As of yesterday, we’re both done our first drafts. Still plenty of work ahead, so the book isn’t on anyone’s publication schedule, but we’re getting there.

To commemorate the event, Brian posted our combined playlist on his website in the form of a Spotify plugin. He had to take a few liberties, because not all of the songs I chose were available on Spotify, but it will give you an idea of what each of us listened to while these stories came together.

Brian says his story is “about soul-mates, unrequited love, and how sometimes doing the right thing means doing the wrong, all seen through the prism of the Labyrinth’s multiple realities and alternate universes).” Mine is about the brother who left and the one who stayed behind, a series of mysterious disappearances, and the mother of all blizzards that heralds the arrival of something most definitely wicked.

There’s something liberating about working on a longer piece by hand. I’m writing this novella, which should hit around 40,000 words when I’m done. I picked up a nice leatherette journal that’s been kicking around the house for a while and started my story in it, never fully intending to write the entire thing longhand. And yet, here I am, three weeks later, halfway through the story and, as luck would have it, halfway through the pages of the journal.

Yesterday, at the midpoint of the novella, my pen ran out. It was brand new when I started, a Tul gel pen, and I’ve used it for nothing else, so now I can say with confidence that it was good for 20,000 words, more or less. I’m still a bit sketchy on the actual word count, since I don’t have that handy, dandy counter in the corner of the screen to confirm it, but it’s in the ballpark.

One thing I really like about working this way is that I can write at different times and places than per usual. If I go to the bagel shop for breakfast, I can write there. I write during my lunch break at work. I write at the kitchen table when I get home from work while awaiting my wife. My productivity has been impressive—a solid average of 1000 words per day. At this pace, assuming no loss of inspiration, I should have the first pass done by the end of February.

I do feel a little vulnerable, though. There’s no backup at the moment. If I lose the journal, a lot of work will be gone. I did dictate the first 10,000 words, so they’re safe and sound, although in bad need of proofing and tidying up, but the more recent work exists only in streaks of ink pulled across sheets of paper. Makes me nervous enough that I may dictate the next 10,000 words this weekend. That’s an interesting process, too. At first, I read like I was reading to entertain. But then I realized that the software had no interest in my inflection or my pacing. I got the same results if I spoke in a typographic monotone. If I do this too much, my next public reading could be painful.

Rich Chizmar mentioned on Twitter and Facebook yesterday that he is starting to work on his part of a round-robin story for the Cemetery Dance Collectors Club. I’ve done this a couple of times in the past, and it’s always an interesting process. This time, Ray Garton got the ball rolling. He passed his opening to me, and I handed it off to Kealan Patrick Burke. Rich is batting clean-up, given the task of bringing it all home. I’ll be interested to see where the story went after I wrote my part.

All in all (owl in owl), it was a mighty fine game. I didn’t really have “a team,” but I was mildly favoring the Patriots. Wouldn’t have been terribly bent out of shape if Seattle had won. It was an exciting game. Tied at the half and then all that stuff that happened in the final few minutes. Thrilling. Even my wife, who never watches football ever, stuck with the game to the end.

I also didn’t mind the half-time show. Not Katy Perry’s biggest fan, but she put on a show that pleased the masses. Not enough Lenny Kravitz. Was he really just there to put a male spin on “Kissed a Girl” to placate the homophobes, as some suggest? I’m also not a terribly big fan of rap, but Missy Elliott put on a decent performance. The dancing sharks and beach balls were funny. “Hey, look Ma, I’m on TV!” you can almost hear them saying.

The commercials were all over the map. A few made me chuckle. I liked the Liam Neeson one, and the Brady Bunch one, which I’d already seen. How can a free app game afford to advertise during the Super Bowl? Those in-app purchases must be adding up.

I’m nearing the halfway point of the WIP. Approximately 18,000 words as of this morning. Haven’t hit a wall yet. I hope I don’t end up writing myself into a corner…

I have a nostalgic recollection of what it’s like to be in the midst of a blizzard. As a kid, I used to love to go outside and play in the snow. There’s a particular kind of quiet in a snowfield. Sound is dulled and amplified at the same time. I love the sound snow makes when you step into it or ski across it. However, I don’t envy people having to deal with the 12-36″ of the stuff that’s due to come down over the next couple of days, or the complications it will cause with travel, both local and long-range.

As for what it’s like here—I sat outside on the back deck while I was writing yesterday afternoon so, quite nice thank you very much.

The novella I’m working on is set in a New England winter, so maybe this storm will provide fodder and inspiration. It’s coming along very well. I crossed the 10,000 word mark this weekend, which isn’t bad for a week’s work. It’s the most I’ve written in such a short period in ages. As I mentioned before, I’m doing this longhand, also something I haven’t done in ages. I wasn’t looking forward to transcribing it when I was finished, though. However, my wife mentioned some free dictation software for the iPad (Dragon Dictation). Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I dictated all of the work to present and got it converted into Word. It didn’t take long to fall into a rhythm, saying things like “new line,” “begin quote,”  “dash,” “new paragraph” as I was reading along. There are a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings to be corrected, but it’s a big step forward without having to do all that typing. I also validated my estimated word count. I was a touch high, assuming 250 words per page when after 44 pages the real average is 236. I’m hoping to be done with the first draft by the end of February, if not sooner. Every morning I wake up knowing what comes next, which is always good.

I finished the second season of The Fall last weekend. This is the British crime drama starring Gillian Anderson as an English police superintendent in Belfast to perform a review on a murder case that has had little traction in a month. She soon discovers they’re dealing with a serial offender (Jamie Dornan), who is one sick puppy. The two seasons are really one long season with an interminable break between them. Season 1 ends on a cliffhanger and the story picks up straight away in Season 2 in the same place. It’s a slow, deliberately paced series that doesn’t gloss over the processing of crime scenes or the minutia of interrogations. Anderson’s character is quite interesting, strong, forceful, unflappable, and Dornan’s is twisted, controlling, and ingratiating. Though Anderson and Dornan are almost never together in scenes, the show is mostly a cat-and-mouse chess match between them, with some other good characters thrown in, including a saucy fifteen-year-old babysitter who is emotionally seduced by Dornan’s character. I hope there’s a third season.