Bev Vincent

Yesterday was interesting. I was interviewed by Anthony Brenzican a couple of weeks ago for an article he was writing about King for the New York Times. He used to write for Entertainment Weekly and is now working for Vanity Fair, but he had a few months between those gigs this summer where he freelanced, and this was one of his assignments. The article appeared in the New York Times yesterday, and I got mentioned and quoted a couple of times, as did Rich Chizmar, which was cool. It will also be in the Friday print edition of the paper.

My review of The Institute also went live yesterday morning. Then, last night I drove into Houston for a press screening of It Chapter Two. It was a the same multiplex as where I saw Chapter One a couple of years ago. The original screening then was cancelled due to Hurricane Harvey, and the rescheduled event was an odd late-morning thing with only a handful of reviewers in attendance.

Last night’s screening was in an IMAX theater, and the majority of the attendees were people who got there via Radio Now 92.1, which I confess I’ve never heard of before. So the theater was packed, which was nice. A row of seats in a prime location was reserved for press, which was also nice! There was a trivia contest at the beginning, and they gave out movie posters after the event. My review will be up at News from the Dead Zone tomorrow morning, but suffice to say I really enjoyed it, and I didn’t mind its 2hrs 48 min runtime in the least. In fact, I may go see it again this weekend when I can watch it without being in reviewer mode.

Over the holiday weekend, we watched a number of series and movies in between listening to music, reading and enjoying home-cooked meals. We started with an Amazon Prime series called Doctor Thorne, written by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey). It is based on a novel by Anthony Trollope, about whom we knew little, but we enjoyed the four-part 18th century melodrama, starring Tom Holland, enough to look for more. 

I found The Barchester Chronicles on YouTube, all 7 parts. It’s based on the first two of Trollope’s novels in that series, and stars Donald Pleasance in a rather sedate role as a minister who is also the warden of a care home for a dozen elderly men. He gets blindsided by a group of reformers (including his potential future son-in-law) who attack him as part of a barrage against the Church of England. Two episodes are based on The Warden and the other five are based on book two, Barchester Towers, about a new Bishop coming to town, along with his sniveling aide, played by Alan Rickman. The Bishop is played by Clive Swift, familiar to us primarily as Hyacinth Bucket’s beleaguered husband from Keeping Up Appearances.

Going back to the Julian Fellowes thread, we watched Gosford Park and then another film he wrote called The Chaperone, starring Elizabeth McGovern, a woman of a certain age who accompanies a 16-year-old dance student to New York for several weeks. While she’s there, she tries to track down her birth mother. This is in the 1920s–she was a product of the Orphan Train Movement that saw her adopted by a family in Kansas.

We also started on another series called The Aristocrats. Lo and behold, who should show up playing the family patriarch but…Julian Fellowes. And the King of England? Clive Swift!

One of the (many) great things about KillerCon in Round Rock, TX (near Austin) is that I can drive to it in under three hours. Traveling long distances isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be…and was it ever? We didn’t have to worry about delayed flights, missed connections, lost luggage or any of the other myriad potential problems associated with flying to a conference.

My wife has family in Round Rock, so she came with me to KillerCon. When I was off attending readings, panels and other Con events, she visited. So that was nice–we had breakfasts together each morning, then went our separate ways for the rest of the day.

I only decided to attend a week ago, just as I did in 2018, so I wasn’t on any of the scheduled programming events. That doesn’t mean I didn’t get to participate, though! While I had entertained thoughts of participating in the short fiction contest (judges supply five words and contestants have 20 minutes to write a 200-word short story using them all), my role changed when I was asked to be a judge. About a dozen people wrote some very good stories using our five words, then read them to the audience.

My judging duties were expanded when Brian Keene suggested that John Urbancik and I join three others to judge the gross-out contest, figuring, I guess, that there would be some entertainment value in having two of the unlikeliest people judging some of the grossest stories you’ve ever heard. It turned out to be a lot of fun. I don’t think I could ever write something as gross as what we heard, but they are entertaining even as you groan and moan.

I brought books to sell and sign at the mass autograph session and unloaded most of what I brought, to my surprise. Having one of those Square attachments for my iPhone so I could take credit cards helped a lot.

People attending from out of town were taken aback by the heat. It was as high as 102° during the daytime, with “feels like” temps near 110°, which is hot even by Houston standards. Even so, every now and then I felt the need to escape the air conditioning and bask in the warmth, like a lizard on a rock.

There were other things going on in the convention center. On Friday, there was a very misleading sign advertising McAllister’s Deli on the second floor, which had a few of us venturing upstairs to discover…no deli–the company was having a corporate meeting. And here we thought our food options had expanded! We didn’t have a mariachi band traipsing through this year, though, like we did in 2018. Also no memorial service attendees, who last year had to walk past the five-foot black cardboard coffin that contained donuts.

KillerCon is small and intimate. There’s never more than one thing going on at a time. Panels alternate with readings. The biggest drag about the con this year was that the hotel bar was closed the entire weekend. Apparently they didn’t have a bartender, which was poor planning on their part. With a hotel full of writers, they could have earned megabucks from the bar proceeds. It also meant that there wasn’t a centralized place to go to hang out with people between program events. Hopefully they’ll have that rectified by next year.

Hearty thanks to Wrath James White and his team of volunteers for putting together such an awesome con deep in the heat heart of Texas.

After I got home, I finished watching the final season of Orange is the New Black (they stuck the landing, although I was hoping for a different outcome with Zelda), and signed ⅔ of the limitation pages for LetterPress Publications’ edition of Revival. The box weighs in excess of 60 lbs, and there are nominally 1500 regular pages plus 52 lettered pages. Of course there are extras for damage and spoilage, so I signed at least 1000 pages yesterday and probably another 250 this morning. I timed myself for three minutes, during which I signed 38 times, so my optimal rate is about 13 pages per minute. I hope to be done this evening so I can ship the box to the next (and final) contributor in the morning.

Every few (or several) months, I update the online version of my Cemetery Dance column News from the Dead Zone. The latest post went live on Friday, with a summary of everything coming in September, in the final months of 2019, and beyond. There’s a lot! I’ll have a review of The Institute up during the first week of September.

The same week, I’ll review It Chapter Two. I just arranged to attend a press screening a couple of days before it premieres. The last time I went to one of those, for Chapter One, was in the days after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The west side of the city, where the screening was held, was like a ghost town, with military-style helicopters flying overhead. It was quite surreal. Almost post-apocalyptic.

I’ll also have something cool to do with Doctor Sleep, but I’ll hold off on announcing that until closer to the date.

This weekend, I’m going to KillerCon in Austin, my second year attending this intimate convention. It’s close enough to drive to, so that’s a big plus. It’s not exactly my genre (the focus is on extreme horror), but I know many of the people attending. Maybe I’ll try my hand at the Creative Fiction Contest, where we have to write a 200-word or less story using five keywords.

We’re in the midst of a heatwave, with daily temperatures flirting with or exceeding 100° and “feels-like” temps upwards of 110°. Like Friday at Necon, in other words.

When we got back from our mile-long round-the-block walk on Saturday evening, I thought the house seemed a little warmer than usual. We typically keep it at 77° during the day, when one or more of us is upstairs working, and 78° during the evenings when we’re both downstairs. The display showed 81°–even though the set point was correct.

I went back outside and checked the compressor unit. It was running. Checked the circuit breakers: ditto. Went back to the A/C unit and noticed snowballs accumulating on the hose into the house. That’s not right, I though.

When I went back inside, I realized no air was coming out of the vents. The poor A/C was working up a storm outside, but the blower motor in our attic had gone kaput, so there was no distribution. This was after 8pm on Saturday, so we decided to wait to call for service. I put in a call yesterday morning, requesting someone for today, figuring we could suffer through one hot day rather than make someone come out on Sunday.

By late afternoon, it was 85° in the house. Now, that’s only 7-8° hotter than normal, but we were sweltering. When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for supper, I said, “Go somewhere that has air conditioning!” Of course, the place we chose had it cranked up so high that we were chilly.

So, we got through a day and a half with only ceiling fans to stir the warm air. Oddly, it felt like the time during Hurricane Ike when we were five days without electricity, although that was in early September and not in the midst of a heat wave, so we didn’t suffer as much.

We’re now back up and running and in a while the A/C, which has had a two-day break, will get us back down to normal temperatures and all will be right with our world.

We watched Tolkien on Friday night, the biopic of the author of The Lord of the Rings. It dealt primarily with his experiences as a young boy, orphaned after his mother died of diabetes (his father died in South Africa before they moved to England). His care and education was left to a catholic priest. Tolkien managed to scrape up enough scholarships to get into Oxford and served on the continent during WWI before being invalided out. The movie ends at the point where he has decided to start writing The Hobbit, which I found disappointing because that was where things got really interesting from my point of view. Maybe they’ll do a sequel!

Lots of miles covered during the month of July. I was in Texas (of course), Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Washington D.C. (airport), Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Jersey (airport).

This time last week, I was at Necon. I believe it was my 13th time attending. Something like that. Had a hassle-free journey. In fact, thanks to my trips to Japan earlier this year, my airfare cost a whopping $12 for the round trip and on the leg from IAH to Dulles I was in first class. Metal cutlery and ceramic dishes and everything. First time I’ve ever been in Boarding Group 1 instead of 6 or 9 or 42.

It was sweltering hot when I landed in D.C. but in Providence it was only 65 and it started raining heavily when I turned of 195 onto Highway 24. I stopped at the same small-town liquor store where I go every year, in Fall River, MA. Always the same people working at the place. I wonder if they recognize me and think: must be time for his annual binge! It’s a more convenient stop for me than 1776, the liquor store in Bristol, RI, for which Necon weekend is probably their Black Friday.

The weekend alternated from cool and rainy on Thursday to sweltering hot on Saturday. I had a panel on Friday where we discussed books we’d read recently. It was good catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t go to Necon last year. Hank Wagner and I spent a lot of time talking, and nearly 80 minutes discussing Season 3 of Stranger Things for our Dead Reckonings tag-team review, which I now have to transcribe into something sensible.

I was also the “fake nominee” for the Necon roast. Apparently Mike Myers had a blistering speech to roast me, so imagine his chagrin when the victim turned out to be him! I was half-prepared for a double-fake out, but I was reasonably sure I was safe. If Brian Keene had been there this year, I would have been less confident.

I had to get up at 3:30 am on Sunday to get to PVD for a 6 am flight. Those early morning flights always seem to be a good idea when I reserve them. On the plus side, I was back home by about 11 am, and the flight to IAH was almost half an hour early arriving.

Three forthcoming publications I can mention: I have a story called “The Patience of Kane” in the anthology The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods, edited by Michael Bracken from Down & Out Books, due to be published on October 21, 2019. I have a sort of review slash essay about the Angel episode “That Old Gang of Mine” in Outside In Gains a Soul, and my short story “Game Seven” will be published in the anthology Across the Universe later this year. This latter one is kind of fun: the anthology speculates possible alternate realities where the Beatles aren’t the Fab Four but instead something else. In my tale, they’re from Liverpool, NS and play for the Liverpool Beatles hockey team.

I also received my copy of Cemetery Dance issue 77, which contains my 40th News from the Dead Zone column. This one has been a long time coming and I was amused to see that I stated with near certainty that by the the time it appeared, we would still be waiting on It Chapter 2. True, but only just!

The other night when were getting ready to turn in, the outdoor A/C unit (like the one pictured here) came on. It’s been hot lately, so that didn’t come as a surprise, even in the late evening.

What was surprising was the clattering noise it made. It’s not a quiet appliance, but it usually doesn’t clang. Once upon a time many years ago, in a similar situation, the A/C came on, sounding like an F-14. After a minute or so, my wife said, “I wish it would stop making that racket,” which it promptly did a few minutes later…and forever. Dead unit.

Fearing the same situation, I got dressed, found a flashlight and went outside to investigate. The unit is in a small passage between the wall of our house and the fence that ensures we are good neighbors. There’s barely room to squeeze past it to get into our back yard. The noise was still occurring.

The top of the unit has a grating to keep falling branches and leaves from landing on the fan at the top that pulls air into the system. I could see something spinning around like a marble in a roulette wheel and figured it was a pine cone or branch segment that had somehow squeezed through. Upon closer investigation, I realized it was a mouse who had made the worst decision of its life. Round and round it went; where it would stop, no one knows. Before coming out, I had reset the A/C temp so it would click off, but that takes a couple of minutes, so it was still running. Eventually, Mr. Mouse ended up–thanks to centrifugal force–lodged between the wires of the grating.

And then there was a splat and some piece of its innards went flying against the wall of our house. Luck of the draw–it could have hit me, which would have been bad. Then I pried the remains out of the grating and let them fall to the ground for some scavenger to take care of.

I told my wife later that I knew the last thing that went though its head…the fan. (groan)

Music video of the day: Sheryl Crow, featuring Joe Walsh. That’ll get your foot tapping.

I’m enjoying the second season of Dark, the German crime/sci-fi series on Netflix. It’s one of the most confusing shows I’ve ever seen. The time travel element means that two and sometimes three different people play the same character as kids, teens, adults, elderly people, and part of the challenge is mapping who is who. I was so lost when I started watching S02E01, I stopped after 10 minutes and found a couple of videos that recapped the first season, which I watched over 18 months ago. I still felt confused, but after a couple of episodes I think I had it under control.

One of the series’ most interesting concepts is the notion that something can be sent from the future into the past, so that it ends up in the future, where it can be sent back into the past…and it’s never really been created. It’s called the Bootstrap Paradox, and it has been featured in time-travel fiction before, but it’s quite cleverly implemented here. Also, because certain characters are jumping through time in 33-year bites, you end up with the situation that a boy can go into the past and get stuck there, so he grows up and ends up fathering a friend of the boy who was with him when he vanished. Or an old woman who visits her father during a period when she is still a pre-teen. It’s all very twisty and clever, and it’s not obvious any more who is doing the right thing to prevent an apocalyptic event.

I rarely write short stories the way I wrote my most recent. Usually I dither over them for ages before I’m ready to start. In fact, I was in mid-dither over a different story when this one popped into my head. Not quite fully formed, but formed enough for me to write three quarters of it a couple of days ago and the rest of it yesterday morning.

It was for a themed anthology that I’d been aware for months, but I couldn’t come up with anything for it. It’s such a specific theme that if the story isn’t accepted, there’s no possibility that it will ever be publishable anywhere else. So, in that eventuality, maybe I’ll post it here.

The inspiration for the story arose when my wife and I were watching the final game of the NHL playoffs the other night. Although I truly enjoy watching hockey games, I rarely see one. I caught the tail-end of a few games early in the playoffs, but I decided to watch this game seven, thinking it would be exciting, and it was. During the game, there was a commercial–Geico, I think–featuring a team whose goalie was a sea lion. Dumb idea, but it struck a chord. Before I went to bed that night, I scribbled about a dozen bullet points that arose from that idea and by the next morning I had the story well in hand. Yesterday morning, I woke up every 30 minutes or so with my mind refusing to stop working on the rest of the story, and when I got up I was able to finish it.

It’s quite short, 2100 words, so I was able to edit, revise and proof it a number of times in a single sitting before submitting it this morning, right on the deadline.

Last Saturday afternoon, I was hosted by the Houston mystery bookstore Murder by the Book for a signing to celebrate the trade paperback release of Flight or Fright from Scribner.

I probably signed thirty or so books, including stock for the store. I had a good time talking with the small but avid audience and fielding their questions and comments afterward. I also read a few pages of “Zombies on a Plane.”

We had dinner downtown afterward and then went home to finish watching Chernobyl. In retrospect–and especially after watching this series–I find it astonishing that I voluntarily spent a week in East Germany only a few months after this disaster, which had people in West Germany keeping their kids indoors after the meltdown was revealed. Although it is an engaging and extremely well done series, it contains a lot of fiction and scientific misinformation. For example, the firemen who were exposed to radiation while trying to dowse the fire would not have been radioactive themselves after they removed their gear and were washed down. Radiation isn’t contagious. In fact, the fireman had more to fear from being close to his wife than vice-versa. He would be severely immune compromised and she could have given him something that shortened his life.

I remember a number of years ago when one of my coworkers thought she might have stuck her hand in front of the X-ray beam from one of our scientific instruments. When she went to the ER, they treated her like she might have been radioactive instead of suffering from a potential burn from ionizing radiation.

I’ve never been much of a Bob Dylan fan. I respect the songs that he wrote (although I hope to never hear “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” again so long as I live), but I don’t care for his voice and many of his songs sound repetitive to me in tone and rhythm. In part, I attribute my dislike of his music from the fact that my introduction to him was “Gotta Serve Somebody” in 1979, at a time when my musical horizons were expanding…exploding, really…after I went to university. I hated that song with a passion (although this live version from the Grammy awards is actually pretty good).

I heard some discussion on Twitter this week about Rolling Thunder Revue, the new Netflix “documentary” about Dylan’s infamous, financially disastrous tour from 1975-76. What’s really strange about this movie is how much fictional material has been included in it, and there’s no way to tell what’s real and what isn’t. All that Sharon Stone stuff is made up, as is the fictional filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp and supposed congressman Jack Tanner. I came away from the movie feeling like I didn’t know much more about Dylan than I did before I watched it. Inscrutable would be a good word to describe him.

We also watched Now More Than Ever, the history of the band Chicago. Although I have at least fifteen of their albums, I didn’t know much about them and couldn’t have named anyone in the group beyond Peter Cetera. This rock-doc went back to the beginning and took them all the way through their induction in the Rock and Roll hall of fame. Cetera declined to be interviewed for the documentary, so it only presents one side of the story, and it really glossed over some things I would have been interested to see: how the horn sections worked in the recording studio for example. The creative process. Still, it was interesting and, unlike with the Dylan pic, I feel like I learned a lot about them in two hours.

Subsequently, I listened to their Carnegie Hall live album, where they debuted “A Song for Richard and his Friends” in which they beseech Nixon to resign. In 1971!