Bev Vincent

I have finally embarked on a long writing project, a novella that is part of something I’m doing with Brian Keene. I thought I had the germ of the idea a few months ago, but I got sidetracked with other things and a new, fresh idea came along. I started yesterday and have about 3000 words as of today. I say “about” because I can only estimate. Thus far, I’ve been writing longhand in a spiral-bound journal and I’m guessing about 250 words per page. I’m not quite sure why I’m going about it this way, but it is working, so I’m not going to second guess the process. I don’t have any idea where this story came from or where it’s going, exactly, but I keep thinking about it even when I’m not writing, so that’s encouraging.

My latest essay at Stephen King Revisited is up: Graveyard Shift looks at the historical context of King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. Rich Chizmar’s thoughts about the collection also went up today. Speaking of CD, I received my contributor copies of issue #72 of the magazine on the weekend. In addition to my regular column, I have the featured review of Revival, which I am now listening to on audio and appreciating it even more the second time around.

I’m not a huge football fan. I could fill a book with the rules I don’t understand. I couldn’t even name all of the positions or what their responsibilities are, but I do enjoy watching a game from time to time, especially during the playoffs when there’s so much at stake. I particularly enjoy the offbeat plays, like the faked punt or the one where the entire team shifted position to turn an unlikely player into an eligible receiver who then lumbered down the field unmolested to catch a touchdown pass (this might have been in a college game). The two games on Sunday couldn’t have been more different. Green Bay dominated and lost, and New England dominated and won. I couldn’t believe the turn-about by Seattle so late in the game after looking incredibly drab and listless for 58 minutes.

I just finished re-watching the five episodes of the first series of The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan. Anderson does a passable (to my ears) British accent in her part as a Detective Superintendent sent by Scotland Yard to Belfast to conduct a 28-day review of a stagnating homicide investigation. She links up a couple of other crimes and comes to the conclusion there’s a serial killer at work, played with creepy delight by Dornan. Anderson’s character makes others uncomfortable because she is cold, calculating and because she is sexually aggressive. If she were a man, no one would blink at her having a one-night stand with someone she met only briefly, but because she’s a woman, her colleagues and superiors are outraged. It’s an interesting mirror on contemporary sexual politics. Season 2, consisting of six episodes, is now up on Netflix.

If I lived closer to Houston proper, I’d probably be at Murder By the Book at least once a week. MBTB is a fantastic bookstore that specializes in crime fiction and murder mysteries. They bring in authors for signing events on a regular basis; in fact, there’s hardly a day goes by when they don’t have someone there. Big name authors, too.

But it’s a 45-minute drive and the weekday events start at 6:30, which means going into the city during rush hour, which isn’t my favorite thing to do. But I make exceptions from time to time, and when I heard that Amber Benson, who I met at NECON last year, would be here to promote her fine novel, The Witches of Echo Park, I made the trip. This was the last stop of her whirlwind tour and she was a bit punchy by the time 6:30 roll around, but it was good to catch up with her. She read the book’s opening chapter, and then did a Q&A with the audience.

Someone asked if she was part of a critique group, and I was fascinated by her answer. She works with a group of creative people dubbed the Shamers. They all work together in the same place at the same time, each doing his or her own thing. But if someone notices that someone else is spending too much time on Twitter, they call that person out. On the flip side, if someone hits a wall, he or she asks advice from those assembled. So, not a critique group, per se, but a support group and a peer pressure group, shaming each other into working. I like that idea.

I turned in the short story I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks to Tesseracts Nineteen, a couple of weeks ahead of deadline. The theme for the anthology is superheroes and I kind of played fast and loose with that concept, so they’ll either love it for being so creative or hate it for completely missing the mark, I figure. I quite like the way it turned out. It took me a while to capture the tone that I discovered halfway through the first draft. Irreverent, in a way.

As one window opens, a door closes, or so they don’t say: after submitting this one, I got a rejection letter from another market. Ah, well. So it goes.

Now it’s on to the novella, which will be the longest piece of fiction I’ve written in quite some time. I feel like I’m about to enter a cavern with a candlestick and a handful of matches.

Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve listened to all 12 segments in the Serial podcast from the creators of This American Life. They range between half an hour to a full hour in length and, over the course of three months, reveal the outcome of a year-long investigation by Sarah Koenig and her team into a fifteen-year-old Baltimore murder case. A high school student was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend on very little physical evidence.

She had full access to the convict, serving a life sentence, via telephone (I don’t think she ever met him face-to-face), but the victim’s family refused to cooperate, so the picture is a little one-sided. The defense attorney has since died. The first trial ended in a mistrial. Stories changed. New evidence appeared. Koenig and her team are dogged in the pursuit of information without apparent agenda: they aren’t trying to get the convicted killer off, but they agree that there probably wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty. It’s quite fascinating, the way a cold case is investigated journalistically. Was there a pay phone at the Best Buy, as a friend of the convict claims? It seems like a minor point, but it’s part of a house of cards that could come toppling down if there isn’t.

After listening to it all, I can’t say I’m convinced of his guilt or innocence, but there were two damning details. First, someone confessed to helping the convicted killer dispose of the body. He knew where her car was (which supports this claim), and he knew a lot of other “facts” of the case. Now, it’s possible that this guy was the killer and he used his friend as a patsy. The other detail was the fact that the man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend did not attempt to call her or page her once after she disappeared, even though they had remained close following the break-up. A few weeks elapsed between the last time anyone saw her and the discovery of her body (an event that has its own mysterious aspects to it), but he never once tried to find out where she was by simply calling her. To me, that says he knew she was already dead, so why bother. He hemmed and hawed and offered a weak explanation for this behavior to Koenig, but I didn’t buy it. He had an aggressive way of bulldozing through certain details, and he’s had fifteen years to learn how to deal with his situation. That failure to call, like the dog who didn’t bark in the night, speaks volumes to me. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you have it.

There’s also the matter of his being unable to account for much of his time on the day in question. The girl’s new boyfriend, when called by the police to see if he knew where she was, made a point of figuring out all the details of his movement on that day because he knew he’d be a suspect if she were dead. The convicted killer did not, and he was very wishy-washy about the day. He claims he lent his car and his cell phone to the friend who would ultimately blame him for the crime, and it all seems a little dodgy.

If you’re interested in true crime reportage, give it a whirl. I quite enjoyed it.