Alternate reality
Posted on | December 17, 2009 | No Comments
Today’s Storyteller’s Unplugged entry is called Alternate Reality and it’s about my experiences pretending to be the 13-year-old character Scarecrow Joe for a couple of months as part of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) associated with the release of Stephen King’s Under the Dome. Check it out.
I finalized my review of Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton and posted it at Onyx Reviews last night. It’s not a terrible book, but one has to wonder in what form it would have been published — if it all — had Crichton lived to be consulted about it. It has the feel of an early work, one of the books he published under pseudonyms to put himself through med school. The moral of the story, from the writer’s perspective, is: make sure you leave clear instructions about what you’d like done with any existing, unpublished works after you die.
Criminal Minds obvious scene of the week: Dangerous killer in the back seat of a car being taken into custody by two officers. The camera lingers on the car while it navigates a dark, lonely back road. You just know he’s going to escape. Still, the scene of his daring “rescue” was one of the tensest I’ve seen on that show in a while. The ending, though it was upbeat, felt poorly timed to me, though. Overlong and needing something more dramatic.
I made another revision pass through a short story I’m working on for a 2010 anthology. The editor provided some good notes on the last draft and I was able to incorporate most of them easily. I still have one more note to address that deals with the ending that’s going to take a little more thought before I’m ready to tackle it. Endings are hard — the pacing and the payoff. I have the latter, now I just need to play with the former a little to accentuate the latter.
It’s been rainy, overcast, soggy and foggy here for most of the week. Tuesday the fog hung around all day long, which is very unusual for this area. After suffering a drought this summer we’re pretty much caught up in terms of average annual rainfall.
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About
Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, From the Borderlands and The Blue Religion. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and a member of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging community. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews.
