Bev Vincent

Every region has its ghosts and crypto-creatures and legends. One of those I know from New Brunswick, the province where I grew up, is called the Dungarvon Whooper. The Dungarvon River is in the Miramichi region of the province and the “whooper” is a kind of siren or banshee. A number of years ago, I wrote a short story inspired by the legend (in its many variations) and that tale has finally found a home. “The Dungarvon Whooper” will appear in Volume 5 of Nothing’s Sacred magazine, which will be published in on May 10. The issue will also feature stories from Julia Benally, David Greske, Michael H. Hanson, S. C. Hayden, Sharon Jarvis, Donna J. W. Munro, and Jonathan Edward Ondrashek. In addition, this issue will feature the article “Nightmares in Plastic” from Kevin Hoover. Poetry highlights come from Cindy O’Quinn, Anton Cancre, Marge Simon, Deborah L. Davitt, and Michelle Muenzler.

I’ll be at Northern FanCon in Prince George, B.C. from May 3 to May 5th. The schedule hasn’t been posted yet, but I’ll be participating in a Dollar Baby film festival and giving a talk, at a minimum. Should be fun! My first trip to Canada in five years.

I’ve also completed my travel plans for Necon, which I missed out on last year. Thanks to my trips to Japan earlier this year, I had enough air miles to get me there and back again.

Two stories that have had a lot of mileage in the past year or so will see new incarnations in 2019. “Zombies on a Plane,” and the anthology that I co-edited with Stephen King in which it appears, Flight or Fright, will be released in trade paperback edition from Scribner on June 4. Then in October, my story “Aeliana” will re-emerge in the trade paperback edition of Shining in the Dark from Gallery Books. I have a number of other short stories “on deck,” as it were, but I don’t have definite dates for their appearances yet.

My review of Pet Sematary went up at News from the Dead Zone last Friday. The remake didn’t quite live up to my expectations, alas. We did enjoy the new Netflix film The Highwaymen about the former Texas Rangers who brought down Bonnie and Clyde, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. We chased that with Unforgiven, which I haven’t seen since it came out. They make good companion pieces: the former gunslingers brought out of retirement for one last time.

I really enjoyed Babylon Berlin on Netflix, and look forward to that German series continuing in due course. Season 3 of Santa Clarita Diet was also hilarious and well written, although I have slight reservations about the final events of the last episode. I also watched Quicksand, a Swedish series about a teenage girl arrested for her part in a school shooting. As she goes through the interesting process of trial preparation (the Swedish system is quite different from ours), the story flashes back to see how she became involved with the main shooter. I was fascinated by how isolated Maja was in prison–she was allowed no visitors other than her lawyers and there were things her lawyer was legally prevented from telling her. The trial itself was more of a tribunal, and the way information was presented to the judge was interesting, too.

I’m currently reading The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith to my wife and The Lady of the Lake by Laura Lippman to myself. The latter is billed as a historical novel, which I find amusing since it is set in the mid-1960s. There is a main story, but every time the protagonist meets someone new, there’s also a short chapter from that character’s point of view. Also, the ghost of a dead woman pops in on occasion to offer her opinion. For some reason, it makes me think of Canterbury Tales.

On my way home from work last night, I noticed a sheriff’s marked unit parked in a cul de sac up the street. Not at anyone’s house, just parked, facing out, as if they were watching something. Since participating in the Citizen’s Police Academy last fall, I’ve been increasingly aware of our local police departments! I mentioned the car to my wife when I got to the house, but thought nothing more of it. Figured maybe the deputy was just taking advantage of a quiet, safe spot to do some paperwork.

A couple of hours later, my wife and I decided to take a walk around the block, something we do fairly frequently. We’d barely made it out of the driveway when we heard cars approaching from behind, moving quite fast. Powerful engines, by the sound. The vehicles swooped past us, fairly close, and then pulled to the side of the road between the neighbors’ house two doors down and our place. A couple of them were marked patrol cars, but the others were nondescript vehicles. A total of seven or eight converged. They didn’t park haphazardly, but instead lined the side of the road.

Another vehicle appeared from the side street (also a dead end) across the from us, as if he’d been waiting for a signal. Most of the people who emerged from the vehicles were dressed in suits or plainclothes. One fellow had a document in his hands, like maybe a warrant. None of them had weapons drawn, nor were they wearing protective gear. A couple of them had HSI on their jackets—Homeland Security.

A dozen law enforcement officers, if not more, approached and entered the house two doors down from us. Given the shootings during a police raid in Houston earlier this week, we decided it would be prudent to skip the walk. They stayed for at least an hour.

We hung out in the driveway like nosy neighbors for a few minutes. One funny thing happened: an officer returned to a vehicle parked pretty much in front of our house, the second-to-last in the queue. He pushed buttons on his key fob, but couldn’t get the trunk open. I heard the trunk pop open on the car beside me, the last in line. “Guess it helps if I’m at the right one,” he said, before retrieving something from the trunk. “It’s not my car.”

We know the family that lives there to say hello and exchange a few pleasantries, but not much more than that. Hard to imagine what Homeland Security would want with them. We came up with all sorts of theories about what might have been going on, but the fact that they didn’t go in with guns a-blazing squelched most of our suppositions. The fact that there were so many officers, though, was intriguing. I suspect the cop I saw on the way home was keeping tabs on someone at the house, maybe waiting for one of the residents to return home. Maybe they were waiting for a warrant to arrive. Who knows? Maybe we’ll never find out what happened.

A little excitement in the neighborhood. Funny thing is, because they all arrived with no lights or sirens, if we hadn’t decided to go out for a walk we mightn’t have noticed anything was amiss.

By my estimate, I traveled far enough to circumnavigate the globe and then some since my last post. At the end of December, my wife and I flew to Okinawa to visit with family for a week, about 7500 miles each way.

That was an adventure in many ways! We flew via Taipei on EVA, a Taiwanese airline. The fare was about half of what it would have cost to go via Tokyo, and EVA, although not many people have heard of it, is a nice and highly regarded airline. Our main issue was layovers. On the way there, we had less than an hour to make our connecting flight to Naha in Okinawa, and on the way back we had a twelve-hour layover!

Of course, our flight was twenty or thirty minutes late leaving Houston, so that really put the squeeze on in Taipei. We got to the gate and started deplaning only a few minutes before our schedule departure time. We didn’t think there’d be another flight that day, so we were stressed, to put it mildly.

However, when we got to the end of the jetway, there was a nice EVA employee there pulling aside the four or five of us who were supposed to be on the Okinawa flight. The fact that he had a laminated sign with the flight number and destination told us that this was a regular occurrence, and one of our fellow travelers confirmed that he’d done this a few months earlier when his plane was over an hour late and they held the flight for him.

We dashed through the airport, went through secondary security in a jetlagged fog, and ran to our gate, where we boarded a bus that took us to the Okinawa plane. Mission accomplished, and we were grateful to EVA for the extra measures they took to keep us from losing a day of vacation with family.

We rented a car in Okinawa. My wife was the only one with an international driver’s license, a prerequisite for renting a car there, so she drove (on the other side of the road) and I navigated. Google maps was another helping hand–not sure we could have survived without it.

The hotel we stayed in was on the beach and our room faced the East China Sea, so that was nice. We stayed for eight days and we’re pretty sure we were the only westerners in the hotel. The other guests were all either Japanese or Chinese tourists. There was a Radisson up the road that was probably the preferred destination for American tourists, but we quite liked being in the minority for a change.

We saw two local demonstrations at the hotel. First we saw them making mochi, which is a pounded rice paste. They are quite enthusiastic (and loud) about the way they slam the wooden poles into the big vats of rice, and the kids who lined up to take part seemed to enjoy it. On our last night, we got back in time to see the Okinawan drum demonstration, which was also fun.

Mostly, though, we visited with our daughter, son-in-law and 2-1/2 year old granddaughter, who was endlessly entertaining. We ate out a few times and made meals at home the rest of the time. There was a New Years Eve party for 2- and 3-year-olds on the afternoon of the 31st, though none of us stayed up to usher in the new year in at midnight. Instead, we celebrated the following day when it was midnight in Houston, at a respectable 3 pm in Japan!

The only down side to the trip was that both my wife and I came down with bad colds and/or flu. My wife bore the brunt of it, and it took her a while to bounce back after we returned to Houston. The twelve hour layover in Taipei wasn’t as much fun as it sounds, either. We had scheduled to take the free four-hour tour the airport offers, but we were miserable enough that we decided to give that a miss. The ensuing jetlag made things worse. We had half-heartedly toyed with the idea of trying out this “dry January” concept this year, and we ended up doing it, mostly because we wanted to get better and not do anything that might cause a setback. We’re looking forward to having our first glass of wine in a month with dinner on Friday!

Two weeks to the day after I got back, I had to return to Japan on business, another 6500 miles each way, for a grand total of about 28,000 miles. This was a briefer trip — I left on Monday and got back on Saturday — and it was in Tokyo this time. Mostly in the Shinjuku, Sendagai, Roppongi area, although there was one trip to the west side, to Haijima, which is where I normally go on these trips.

I had three hectic days of meetings and presentations, plus some late nights eating out with coworkers. It was fairly cold when I was there, in the thirties and forties mostly. After I boarded the plane on Saturday afternoon, I saw precipitation outside the window. Rain, I thought at first, but it was actually snow flurries, and the snow was wet so it built up on the plane fast. Which meant they had to de-ice the wings, which meant an hour delay in departing.

I did something right on this trip, though. I slept a few hours early in the return journey, off and on, in one-hour bursts. Arriving in Houston in the late afternoon, I soldiered through the rest of the day and my jetlag has been minimal. I’ve been sleeping when I should be and awake when I should, too. I wish I knew a reproducible formula for that!

During the first trip, I watched several movies. On the outbound flight I saw Antman and the Wasp and Searching. While in Okinawa, we watched My Neighbor Tortoro with our granddaughter, and on the return flight I watched Bad Night at the El Royale and Life Itself. After we got back, I finally got around to Bird Box.

I watched the final four episodes of the Netflix series You on the way to Tokyo last week and the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery on the way back. (It’s available on Netflix outside of the US, so I was able to download it to my iPad.) Since getting back, I’ve watched the first four episodes of the new season of True Detective. I really hope they stick the landing on this one, as I’m enjoying it so far. The pacing is leisurely and they’re holding their cards close to the vest, but I like it.

I have a new book project in the early stages of development, so most of my reading has been research for that. I won’t be able to say more about it for some time, as it’s still in the hypothetical stage, but it’s going to be a lot of fun if it works out.

According to my tally (you can see the whole list here), I saw 58 feature-length movies this year. Many of them are current–to within the last year or two–but others date back decades, with the earliest being the 1943 vampire film Dead Men Walk. One big chunk of my film watching consisted of Marvel movies that I had missed as preparation for Infinity War.

I plan to watch a couple of additional movies before the year rings out (possibly Bird Box, and Roma), but this will be my last blog post before 2019 arrives, so I’ll limit myself to what I’ve actually seen as of today.

One movie we enjoyed recently but which won’t quite make my top ten list is The Christmas Chronicles, starring Kurt Russell as Santa. It was a thoroughly nice little movie, with a good story and strong performances, especially by the little girl.

Without further ado, here are my top ten movies seen in 2018 (in no particular order). Catch y’all in the new year!

• The Post
• Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Black Panther
• A Quiet Place
• The Shape of Water
• Tully
• BlackkKlansman
• Annihilation
• Bohemian Rhapsody
• The Favourite

Publishers Weekly, the premiere trade magazine for the publishing industry, reviewed over 8000 books this year. Today they released their list of the top ten most-read reviews of the year and, guess what? Flight or Fright appears in the #5 position. More people read the review than reviews of books by Michael Ondaatje or Reese Witherspoon! I think that’s pretty cool.

I binged through quite a number of television series this year. My Flight or Fright co-editor and I are always exchanging recommendations. The full list can be found here. I say “full,” but it doesn’t include network shows I watch year-to-year, like Survivor or NCIS, and there’s only one network show on my top ten list.

This past week, I finished season 3 of Travelers, a cool science fiction series on Netflix that has a mostly Canadian cast, including Eric McCormack from Will and Grace. It’s about people from our dismal future who have come back in time to try to fix all the things that went wrong to create their dystopia. After three seasons of making changes without success, the group decides to take a radical approach, which will only pay off if there’s a season 4, which I hope there will be. There’s one guy named David, a social worker from the present, is one of the most terrific characters I’ve encountered recently. He’ll break your heart and make you laugh at the same time.

We also finished the sixth season of The Ranch (really? Six seasons already? According to some tabulations, this was the second half of season three, but still), which isn’t my favorite show but my wife likes it. I find the humor somewhat broad and the laugh track overbearing, but Debra Winger is good in it. The way they wrote out Rooster was really clumsy and we were glad when they got beyond the third episode and they put that mostly to rest.

Here is my top ten list of series I watched last year, in no particular order. It was hard to whittle the list down — there’s been a lot of good stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime in particular.

• Travelers
• The Good Place
• The Deuce
• Star Trek Discovery
• Bosch
• Castle Rock
• Jessica Jones
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
• Ozark
• The Haunting of Hill House
• Little Drummer Girl

The four-day weekend is over and I’m back to the “real world” for the next few days. We cooked a lot of great meals (our first attempt at beignets worked out well, although we discovered they don’t reheat very well), drank some wine, listened to non-stop Christmas music, worked on a jigsaw puzzle, and relaxed.

On Christmas Eve, I received my contributor copy of the SST Publications edition of Shining in the Dark, the anthology containing my short story “Aeliana.” This is one of two very-well-published stories from 2018. Although I haven’t seen every edition yet–and some won’t be out until 2019–the anthology has been published in English (US & UK editions), Bulgarian, Italian, Czech, German, Swedish, Serbian and will appear in audio next year as well.

The other “well-published” story, of course, is “Zombies on a Plane,” which appeared in Flight or Fright, the anthology I co-edited with Stephen King. The story–and the anthology–has also been published in English (US &UK editions), on audio, and a dozen translations are in the works.

My only other short story to appear in 2018 was “Ray and the Martian” in Fantastic Tales of Terror from Crystal Lake Publishing. Several stories were slated to appear this year, but it looks like they’ve all been pushed into 2019, which is fine. There’s no rush. Things happen when they happen. Earlier this week, I received am acceptance for a story that will appear in a 2020 anthology. The funny thing about this particular story is that I wrote it in 2003. According to my records, I only submitted it twice, both times in 2003 and never again thereafter until I decided to give it a look as a candidate for the anthology. Turns out, I liked it quite a bit. Gave it an update and tweaked it a little, and now it will be published nearly two decades later. That’s cool.

In addition to fiction, I had my usual run of non-fiction pieces come out in 2018. The coolest was “The Dead Zone,” written for the Poetry Foundation. I received a lot of feedback for that one. I contributed an essay to
Stephen King American Master and another to It’s Alive: Bringing Your Nightmares to Life. Several articles and reviews at News from the Dead Zone, too. I’m hoping we’ll get Stephen King Revisited up and running again in 2019. Right Rich?

On the reading front, I averaged nearly a book a week throughout the year. The final tally was 48 books begun in 2018, although I’m still reading four of them. You can find the complete list here. In no particular order, here are the top ten:

• How It Happened by Michael Koryta
• The Outsider by Stephen King
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara
• Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
• Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
• Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
• The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos
• Transcription by Kate Atkinson
• In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin
• Becoming by Michelle Obama