Bev Vincent

I’m of a certain age. I guess that’s a figure of speech that means I’m not young any more. Not geriatric, not yet eligible for the early bird special at Denny’s. Probably middle aged, although I do not embrace that label.

The new TNT series, Men of A Certain Age, should more properly be called Actors Lying About a Certain Age, since according to the promo material they are all in their late 40s, like me, but the actors themselves are mostly in their mid-50s. Surprisingly, Scott Bakula is the oldest of the bunch, though he looks the youngest, and Andre Braugher is a year younger than I am, the only one who is as young as his character. Still, that quibble aside, this is a series that has a lot of fertile territory to explore. The three men have interesting problems. Ray Romano’s character is divorced, doesn’t relate well to his kids (though he tries), and has a gambling problem. Andre Braugher is overweight, burdened with family financial obligations, and still living in his father’s shadow, trying to impress him so that he will inherit the car dealership that bears the family name. Scott Bakula is an actor, though it’s not yet clear whether he ever really accomplished much, who resents having to go to cattle call auditions for Lifetime channel movies and who still trades on his good looks and charming demeanor. The first episode was pretty good — it had a couple of genuinely funny moments (Braugher’s faceplant during the drive to the hospital). Romano is a decent observer of men’s reality and so long as he can resist the goofier aspects he has the chance here to do something that men (of a certain age, especially) will identify with. Here’s hoping.

I got my H1N1 shot today. Now I have an unusual craving for pork chops and apple sauce.

The Closer is back for a three episode mini season. I’m not a cat person, but that is one seriously cute kitten Fritzy got for Brenda. It looks so fragile that I wonder how it withstands being manhandled that way. Though I know it is probably one of the realities of working homicide in L.A., I find the gang-related plots on this show less interesting than the typical episodes. Hopefully that won’t dominate the storylines.

I finally had a chance to get back to the story I’m revamping for an editor. I wrote a new beginning last week, and now I’m ripping the rest of the story apart, salvaging the good bits, and taking it off in a new direction for the final half. I’ve finally reached the stage in the creative process where the story is getting under my skin enough for me to think about it while I’m not working on it. I have some scrawled notes on a Post-It note, things that occurred to me after I finished work this morning. Questions that need to be answered–or at least should be asked by the characters. I hope to have a new first draft of the story done by the weekend.

I’m not sure if this is for real or not, but Barnes & Noble are showing the Stephen King Illustrated Companion to be sold out at their warehouses.  There are, no doubt, still many copies left in their stores, and the ZIP code search will let you find a store near you that still has it in stock. I e-mailed my editor to get clarification. Apropos of this–Locus had a nice little blurb about the book in their “Books Received” column this month. Not a review, but they clearly did their homework about what the book really is.

Only one episode of Dexter left, and it’s hard to imagine how they’re going to get from where Episode 12 ended to where Episode 13 must in only 50 or so minutes of screen time. There were a couple of improbabilities in this week’s episode. First of all, it’s hard to imagine that Deb would go alone into the lair of the person who she believed killed her lover and shot her. Sure, Quinn was tagging along out in the hall, but it was a dumb risk to take for no good reason. Secondly, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could get into Miami’s homicide division and just wander around that way. I’ve been inside the Houston Police Department headquarters downtown and it’s a little like going through Checkpoint Charlie. Not all the elevators go to all of the floors and people are kept very compartmentalized. All of that notwithstanding, I’m still enjoying the hell out of the season and I look forward to a rambunctious finale.

“Good thing he reads Russian literature,” the homicide detective on Castle said last night. “If he was a Nicholas Sparks fan, he’d be dead.” Another cliché of the genre–the mysterious man with amnesia who may or may not hold the key to the mystery. As with other episodes of the show, they take the cliché in a different direction. I totally expected “Amber” from House to be the killer, and then again I totally expected him to react to the dog, but they did none of those things. I liked the final exchange between Castle and his mother, where she confessed to being afraid of getting hurt in her rekindled relationship. “That’s the cost of living,” Castle says, which I thought was a great line.

That was the second time in a few hours that I heard the same sentiment. In The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith, a man who is about to be married muses that committing to marriage doubles his chances of being hurt. Since we’ve come to the end of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books (I’ve read all ten of them to my wife since June), we’ve moved on to another of his series, the 44 Scotland Street books. I received an ARC for the newest one so I decided to start with it. I feel like I’m missing a little bit of backstory on the characters from the previous three books, but I suppose that will come with time. I also have the ARC of the 11th Ladies’ Detective Agency book on the way. The author is supposed to be in Houston early next year, so we hope to meet him.

The Big Bang Theory continues to be one of the funniest shows on TV at the moment and by far the best exchanges are those between Penny and Sheldon. They must have an absolute blast making that show. There are times when they seem to be genuinely laughing at each other’s reactions to things.

So that was winter, I guess.

We were released early from work on Friday because of freezing road conditions. When I left at about 3:15, I drove through the most wonderful blizzard. The snowflakes were large, I could hear them when they hit my jacket, and they were numerous. However, they never quite made it to the ground. In parts of Houston, the snow did actually accumulate for a while, but not up here. By about 3:45 it was all over and though it was cold overnight, I don’t think we got the severe hard freeze they were anticipating, and today it’s back up in the 60s and rainy. It was cause for excitement, but that’s probably it for us as far as real winter goes.

Yesterday was a lost day. I woke up with a stomach virus that took the wind out of my sails most of the day. I don’t get sick very often, and this was mild as far as these things go, but I had no appetite and no ability to focus on anything other than football games, which means I got no writing work done.

I was glad to see the young couple that had done so well throughout the entire race pull it out for a victory at the end of The Amazing Race. I thought they were screwed when they went to the wrong casino and ended up arriving at the roadblock in third place, but they focused on the task (counting out $1 million in chips) and beat the teams who had a head start. Frustration and bickering was the downfall of the other two teams.

We watched an advance screening of Wonderful World, starring Matthew Broderick, this weekend. He plays a former Raffi-like children’s entertainer who became disillusioned with the music business and the world in general, dropped out, got divorced and took up a mundane job copyediting for some un-named firm, shares a small flat with Ebu, a Senegalese man. His young daughter hides when he goes to pick her up for his regular visitation because he’s such a buzz kill. He spends most of his time smoking weed and haranguing the unfairness of it all. When Ebu goes into a diabetic coma, he meets the man’s sister and, through her, learns that he’s pretty much an asshole and the world isn’t a terrible place all the time. Thus begins his path back to the real (wonderful) world.

We also watched Nothing Like the Holidays, standard holiday fair about a dysfunctional, bickering family getting together for what might be their last Christmas together because their mother (Elizabeth Pena) has just dropped the bombshell that she’s divorcing their father (Alfred Molina) because he’s been cheating on her. It’s a big, bawdy, Puerto Rican family with the usual issues and the obligatory outsider (Debra Messing) and a Shane-like tree that provides some comic relief. The putative affair turns out to have a different explanation, of course, and there are other conflicts that find resolution, though not always in the idyllic way of seasonal films.

I’m reading Pirate Latitudes, the new, posthumous Crichton novel. The completed manuscript was found on his hard drive, but there’s been no indication from the publisher when it was completed. Since it’s a period novel, there are no clues in the text as to when it might have been written either. No pirates with cutting edge nanoparticle sails or anything like that. I also finished Part 1 of Don Quixote, so I decided to take a break with some pirates before getting back to the knights-errant.

So far all I’ve seen is a few flurries, but the snow is starting to accumulate in parts of Houston. We’re expected to get 1-4″ over the next several hours, and a hard freeze overnight. This is the earliest in recorded history that Houston has seen snow on the ground. When I was outside a few minutes ago, it was about 40 degrees and the mercury is headed lower in the coming hours. It’s definitely a grey day. People are covering plants and the roads were treated against icing last night.

I received a royalty check for On Writing Horror last night. Since there is such a large group of contributors, the royalties get divvied up into a fairly small share per person, but the book has continued to sell since its release and this year’s check is about 25% larger than last year’s. Enough to buy a Happy Meal, at least.

I’m not sure that Survivor would have been this interesting without Russell, but it’s turned into a fun season. The look on John’s face last night when he got two votes was priceless. He had just finished talking about the two people whose names would be written down that night, and his wasn’t one of them. Turns out that outside of him and Shambo, everyone voted for John. Jaison was worried that this would flip Shambo back to vote with the others, and I suppose that’s a possibility, but the best that would lead to would be a 4-4 split of votes. Besides all of them voted for John, too, so it would be flipping from one bad bet to another. At some point, though, this group of four+1 is going to start looking at Russell very carefully. I wonder if he’ll have to whip out the idol again next week.

Fringe was good last night. Those critters were nasty — especially when Walter yanked that one out of the victim’s throat. Yech. Unlike other shows of its ilk, Fringe has a humanizing element, and that’s Walter. Sure, Peter can let his hair down and play basketball with a suspect’s son, but Walter is suffering at the same time as he’s enjoying himself. We sympathize with his plight — of course he’s an adult who should be allowed some freedom and independence, and yet at the same time we know that he’s not quite capable of looking after himself, and it’s not always him who bears the repercussions.

At least one show will have new episodes next week (Fringe). I was surprised to see that Flash Forward is going off until March. I guess they have to make way for the return of Lost in February but boy are they going to lose the fragile momentum they have going for them now. The show still hasn’t gripped me as completely as Lost did. I often find myself listening to the show while attending to other matters, whereas with Lost, I’m glued to the screen.

When I was a kid, one of the treats that we got around Christmas was something called “barley toys.” I guess they were called toys because they were in the shapes of people or other seasonal objects: Santa Claus, snowman, Rudolph, things like that. Sometimes they came on sticks, like suckers, but mostly they were just standalone figurines. Too large to pop into your mouth all at once — you had to crack them into pieces to enjoy them. I discovered recently that the “barley” reference is because they were made from barley sugar. They had a unique flavor, even though they were little more than pure sugar. I think I’m going to get to resample some this year, so I’ll see how well my memory of them stands up.

When I was at the gym yesterday, I saw the middle section of a Bruce Willis movie on USA Network. I didn’t recognize it, so I looked it up and discovered it was Hostage, which I’ve never seen. Last night I checked to see if it was available on our On Demand system, but it wasn’t. However, while in the H listings, I noticed that Hard Candy was available. I remember hearing good things about it at the time, and I’ve been impressed with everything I’ve seen Ellen Page do so far, so I decided to check it out. Of course, I already knew the basic premise, so the reversal 1/4 of the way into the film was anticipated from the opening shot, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the movie. Page is so good–and she was only 17 at the time. I half expected her character to end up being older than the fourteen she said she was. It’s a pretty intense movie, all the more so because there are only the two characters from 95% of it.

Addendum: Bummed to hear about the death of Eric Woolfson from the Alan Parsons Project.

I had strange dreams last night. In one I dreamt that there was an artist whose work consisted entirely of potato chips mixed with water. I seem to recollect that modifying the amount of water was the secret to his varied works. In another dream, I was on an airplane and there was something to do with terrorists and an envelope that signified their presence. They were unusually vivid.

I received the new Michael Crichton novel last night and hope to get to it soon. I’m a little over 1/3 of the way through Don Quixote, at just about the point where I put the book down the last time. I finished the section where the travelers read the novel manuscript found at the inn, the tale of the ill-advised curiosity that features a character named Lothario. I find it interesting that most online etymologists track the use of the word Lothario back to a 1703 play without giving much credence to this earlier character. The word is defined as “a man who seduces women,” and that’s just what Lothario does in Don Quixote, though he does it at the bidding of his best friend. It’s a strange little interlude story, and you know that Anselmo’s proposal is a bad idea from the beginning, and Lothario does a good job of outlining all the reasons why it’s a bad idea, but it goes forward nonetheless.

It’s odd when the same conceit arises in two different TV series. Meredith gave a part of her liver to her estranged father on Grey’s Anatomy and this week Wilson gave a lobe of his liver to a friend/patient on House. In the former case, the plot was introduced to explain the actor’s maternity leave, whereas in the latter case it was a point of characterization.

One of the keys on my work keyboard has worn itself blank, so the character it represents can no longer be distinguished. Two others are partially worn away. The rest are pristine. I wonder what it means. The blank key is the C. The curved part of the D is mostly missing. The only thing left on the E key is the top horizontal and about 1/8 of the vertical descending from it. It does not escape my attention that these three keys are adjacent to each other, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what I must be doing to this keyboard to achieve that pattern.

They’re still tossing around the idea that it might snow here on Friday. Given the fact that I only half believe them if they say it’s going to rain today, I have my doubts, but it would be neat. It would be the earliest recorded snowfall here ever, I do believe. It’s a crisp 48° outside right now, but it promises to get colder in coming days.

I’ve been discussing revisions to a short story with the editor who solicited it for the past couple of days. This is the sort of give-and-take that you rarely get in the small press, so I’m enjoying it greatly. Typically, an editor accepts a story, possibly suggests a few grammatical changes, and then prints it. Not so here. The editor is looking at the story in its context with the others in the collection and also making some interesting observations about my writing in general (how violent incidents almost always happen “off screen,” for one) and challenging me to try something a little different. It’s harder to do with a story that has been on my desk for a while, as this one has, because the chronology of events is firmly fixed in my mind and now I’m having to mess around with that. However, overnight I dream-plotted a new beginning to the story that puts some of the editor’s suggestions into effect and I wrote that passage in very rough draft this morning, about 600 new words. It’s the first new material I’ve written in a couple of weeks.

My writing music this morning was Tubular Bells II. I usually listen to the live concert performance of this album but I clicked on the studio version by accident. When it came time for the announcements of the instruments, I realized that I recognized the voice. It took a while to come up with it: Alan Rickman. Apparently he was only credited as “a strolling player” on the album liner notes.

After some unseasonably warm weather (not complaining), a cold front is descending upon us, and there’s even a chance (they say) that we’ll get some snow on Friday. Not totally unheard of, but I can count the number of times there’s been real snowfall in the past 20 years on my fingers. Maybe even using just one hand. Last year we had one snowfall where there was accumulation on the trunks and roofs of cars, which is indeed rare.

I’m not a big fan of football. I’ve only ever attended one professional game, back when it was the Houston Oilers. I don’t know the names or the responsibilities of most of the positions, and I could fill a book with the rules that I don’t know. And yet I often watch a game with one eye while doing other things. I watched part of the Houston vs. Indianapolis game on Sunday, mostly because it looked for a while like Houston might win. Tuned out shortly after Indy disabused me and everyone else of that notion. Since most shows were reruns last night, I found the New Orleands vs. Patriots game and watched the Saints run roughshod over New England and read Poppy Z. Brite’s enthusiastic tweets. Concurrently, I edited and posted my review of John Grisham’s Ford County.

The Stephen King Illustrated Companion was just nominated for a 3rd Annual Black Quill Award. Members of Dark Scribe Magazine’s website can vote in each category. There will be both Reader’s and Editor’s choice winners.

I read yesterday that Raising the Bar has not been renewed for a third season. Apparently ratings dropped significantly in the second season and that the show lost a considerable chunk of The Closer’s lead-in audience. I thought the second season was better thant he first, but these things happen. By the way, there will be three week Closer mini-season starting this coming Monday.

Only two episodes of Dexter left to go, and the showdown with Trinity is bound to be a big one. Lots of surprises this week, including an expansion of Trinity’s pattern (does that mean he should now be called Quarternary?), and an unexpected arrest. The season’s theme is fatherhood and its effect on Dexter. I’m still waiting to see what happens when Matsuka tells Dexter what he saw at Thanksgiving.

House is House, but what happens when Wilson becomes House, too? Or at least sort of. This was an unusual episode of the show, with House in the background, his team running around like extras on an episode of Monty Python, and Wilson front and center. We rarely get a chance to see Wilson practicing medicine. We see him in the office, delivering good or bad news, but not very often making diagnoses. We suspect he’s probably a good doctor, but this week we got to see him in action, picking up clues from patient behavior and making difficult (and occasionally erroneous) decisions based on the evidence at hand. As House said at the end, small steps, especially after he outbid Cuddy for the loft.

Still reading Don Quixote. I’m determined to make it to the end this time.  I’m up to the point where Dorothea is telling her sad tale in the presence of the barber, the priest and Cardenio.

I didn’t quite stay offline throughout the long weekend, but I didn’t do that much with my website or LiveJournal or any of my other usual haunts. Kept up with e-mail, read a few message boards, that was about the extent of it. Starting today I am a doctoral research widow for the next three weeks as my wife begins the final phase of her data collection, so I wanted to make as much of our four days together as possible. I took her to the bus stop this morning and I’ll see her again just before Christmas.

We cooked meals and ate too much (and yet, I somehow lost weight, much to my astonishment this morning — three pounds!) and watched movies and played cards. I also read John Grisham’s short story collection (review to come) and about 1/4 of Don Quixote. I started the book before, a couple of years ago, and I put it aside for one reason or another and never got back to it. So I found a version for my Kindle and I’ve been reading it before bedtime. It’s a fascinating concept, willing something into existence through sheer force of belief. I’m up to the part where Sancho Panza is returning to bring Don Quixote’s message to Dulcinea while Quixote deliberately “goes mad” in the mountains.

I sent out several press releases to the usual suspects when my new book was about to be released, and another one of them paid off today. I spent 10 minutes on the phone with the editor of the arts supplement of a newspaper and they want to do something about the book before Christmas. It wasn’t exactly an interview today, just a touching of bases as a preamble to whatever it is they decide to do.

I upgraded my message board from version 2.2 to 2.4 today. It’s not an easy process, nothing so slick as how WordPress gets updated that’s for sure. I had to do a clean install in parallel with the old version, set all the file permissions manually (thankfully I’m a UNIX wonk from ‘way back), migrate the configuration, users and old messages to the new install, decommission the old board and commission the new one so that any old hyperlinks to the MB still work. It took several hours and I was sure at two or three points in the process that I had absolutely screwed it up. But it seems to be working just fine. Remains to be seen if I have all of the anti-spam features configured properly.

I was sorry to see the Harlem Globetrotter duo get eliminated from the Amazing Race last night, but the minute they decided to take a 4 hour penalty I was pretty sure the writing was on the wall for them. Four hours is an eternity in this race. All because one guy couldn’t figure out how to make a word out of the letters AFNRZ. I was hoping the brothers were going to get dinged for breaking the gollem’s arm. Jeez, they’re annoying.

I received editorial feedback on a trio of stories that are going to be published next year. One of the stories required minimal revision, one requires a moderate amount of reconceptualization and the third one is going to take a fair amount of work to get it into shape for the editor. I tidied up the first one and got it back to the editor this morning. Should be a neat project, but it hasn’t been formally announced yet. I’m also expecting to receive the proofs of my story for Evolve this week, which I’ll have to review post haste.

When I saw the previews for this week’s Big Bang Theory, I thought they were making a test tube turkey. Though the episode had some very funny moments, I thought it was a little less well focused than most. Sheldon getting helium voice during his NPR interview was hilarious.

TV shows handle Thanksgiving in many different ways. Some simply ignore it, whereas others twist it around, as on How I Met Your Mother, which had more “slap” puns than you could shake an open hand at.  I sided with Lily and thought Marshal was out of line. And the whole “slap happy” game wrapper will probably come back to bite them on the butt. Not one of their best efforts. The “you’re dead to me” clips were well done, though, including the falling coffee pot in the bodega.

And then there’s Dexter, which turns the whole affair into a hundred different kinds of awkward. One of the show’s strengths is the suspense that the writers consistently generate by putting Dexter up against the clock. When “Kyle” is having dinner with Trinity’s family, viewers know that he has to get back home to his real family, so when Trinity says, oh, but we have to watch the football game first, you feel that tension increase automatically. There have been many televised Thanksgiving meals, but I doubt that there’s ever been one like that. Ugh. With only a few episodes left, it’s only natural that things should be heading to something big…but how is it all going to play out? And the final two words of the episode changed the game dramatically. Who saw that coming?

Something happened to the video on ABC last night during Castle, but the sound came through so I listened to the episode while doing other things. The old “more than one wife shows up to claim the body” gag has been done before, but they managed to do something a little different with it, bringing in the corporate espionage subplot. The best moments of the show, though, involve Castle’s interactions with his daughter, and you can just feel him beaming with pride whenever he observes her.

Has any other member of House’s team gotten away with punching him in the mouth before? It’s funny that Chase’s stated motive was simply to get the others to stop bugging him about Cameron, and that House was okay with that. The whole three-hour diversion was a little bit mean, but given House’s intentions I guess Cuddy can be forgiven. Hopefully House will give up this futile quest and move on. That subplot is starting to wear a little thin.

I had a lazy weekend. Watched way too much television and accomplished little of substance. Vantage Point was on one of our free movie channels so I decided to watch it, because the idea had intrigued me at the time. In fact, it’s an interesting premise but poorly executed in this case. The same scene is played out multiple times from the perspective of different characters, so that each time through we learn a little bit more about what’s happening. However, I think the failure in the concept is that the individual perspectives on events are all essentially the same. There are no unreliable witnesses, no faulty memories, no skewed perceptions. So the movie boils down to about 20 minutes of plot and a few twists. The linear story itself is moderately unremarkable, but it has some surprises. Unfortunately, there is little real screen time available to explore the source of these surprises and one character in particular is left as a gaping enigma. We never get to find out his motives. Not a terrible movie. It has some genuinely tense moments. But on the whole I would consider it a failed experiment.

I stumbled across The Rocky Horror Picture Show playing on Fuse so I decided to leave it on while I worked on other things. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the historian’s dialog before. Any time I’ve seen the film in theaters–and it’s been a loooong time–he is drowned out by the audience shouting “Boring!” Tim Curry really is very good in this film. He does a lot with eyebrow twitches and the shape of his mouth.

I found another potential market for my 10,000 word novelette, so I got it back into circulation this weekend. Probably my most significant accomplishment of the weekend. I really was lazy. It felt good!