You can see the final lineup and order for the Damned Nation anthology here. My story “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is second to last.
I was going to say that I had an idle weekend and didn’t accomplish much from a writing perspective, but now that I look back on it, I didn’t do to bad, considering.
We watched two movies on Friday night: Beyond Borders with Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen. Parts of it I found very hard to watch, because of the gritty realism, but I thought it was a decent film overall, with some unexpected events at the end. Then we watched Sideways, last year’s indy darling. All I can say is ho-hum. Neither of us were terribly impressed. We came close to switching it off half way through. I can’t understand why they decided to make Paul Giamatti’s character a thief on top of everything else. His preachiness concerning Thomas Haden Church’s behavior was undermined by this, I thought.
I got the proof pages for “The Smell of Fear,” my story in the upcoming Corpse Blossoms anthology, so I read through those, made only a couple of notations, and will get them back to the publisher today. I hadn’t read the story in months, so was almost able to read it as if someone else had written it. Mere minutes after I finished doing this, Jeff Strand posted a review on Shocklines. He writes, “Okay, so, those of you who know me know that I’m going to gravitate to the quirky/funny stuff, and so Bev Vincent’s ‘The Smell of Fear’ was my favorite story in the anthology. It’s a clever, extremely amusing tale written from the point of view of a complete whack-job.”
I edited (again) my short story for the August Wee Small Hours contest at Hellnotes, and made only a few changes. I think I’m ready to send this one in. Stop me before I edit again, as I wrote at Storytellers Unplugged!
I finalized a two-page review/essay of Michael Slade’s upcoming novel, Swastika, which may get sent out with review copies of the book as a promotional insert.
I wrote book reviews of Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Matt Bondurant’s The Third Translation for a future issue of Accent Review and tinkered some more with an essay I’m doing for Allen Koszowski’s Inhuman magazine. Still got a way to go with that one. I worked some more on my next News from the Dead Zone column, which is due in mid-September. I also submitted a short story after resisting the urge to go back and tinker with it.
So, I guess it wasn’t that bad a weekend for writing after all. Bits and pieces that all add up.
