Bev Vincent

There’s something liberating about working on a longer piece by hand. I’m writing this novella, which should hit around 40,000 words when I’m done. I picked up a nice leatherette journal that’s been kicking around the house for a while and started my story in it, never fully intending to write the entire thing longhand. And yet, here I am, three weeks later, halfway through the story and, as luck would have it, halfway through the pages of the journal.

Yesterday, at the midpoint of the novella, my pen ran out. It was brand new when I started, a Tul gel pen, and I’ve used it for nothing else, so now I can say with confidence that it was good for 20,000 words, more or less. I’m still a bit sketchy on the actual word count, since I don’t have that handy, dandy counter in the corner of the screen to confirm it, but it’s in the ballpark.

One thing I really like about working this way is that I can write at different times and places than per usual. If I go to the bagel shop for breakfast, I can write there. I write during my lunch break at work. I write at the kitchen table when I get home from work while awaiting my wife. My productivity has been impressive—a solid average of 1000 words per day. At this pace, assuming no loss of inspiration, I should have the first pass done by the end of February.

I do feel a little vulnerable, though. There’s no backup at the moment. If I lose the journal, a lot of work will be gone. I did dictate the first 10,000 words, so they’re safe and sound, although in bad need of proofing and tidying up, but the more recent work exists only in streaks of ink pulled across sheets of paper. Makes me nervous enough that I may dictate the next 10,000 words this weekend. That’s an interesting process, too. At first, I read like I was reading to entertain. But then I realized that the software had no interest in my inflection or my pacing. I got the same results if I spoke in a typographic monotone. If I do this too much, my next public reading could be painful.

Rich Chizmar mentioned on Twitter and Facebook yesterday that he is starting to work on his part of a round-robin story for the Cemetery Dance Collectors Club. I’ve done this a couple of times in the past, and it’s always an interesting process. This time, Ray Garton got the ball rolling. He passed his opening to me, and I handed it off to Kealan Patrick Burke. Rich is batting clean-up, given the task of bringing it all home. I’ll be interested to see where the story went after I wrote my part.

All in all (owl in owl), it was a mighty fine game. I didn’t really have “a team,” but I was mildly favoring the Patriots. Wouldn’t have been terribly bent out of shape if Seattle had won. It was an exciting game. Tied at the half and then all that stuff that happened in the final few minutes. Thrilling. Even my wife, who never watches football ever, stuck with the game to the end.

I also didn’t mind the half-time show. Not Katy Perry’s biggest fan, but she put on a show that pleased the masses. Not enough Lenny Kravitz. Was he really just there to put a male spin on “Kissed a Girl” to placate the homophobes, as some suggest? I’m also not a terribly big fan of rap, but Missy Elliott put on a decent performance. The dancing sharks and beach balls were funny. “Hey, look Ma, I’m on TV!” you can almost hear them saying.

The commercials were all over the map. A few made me chuckle. I liked the Liam Neeson one, and the Brady Bunch one, which I’d already seen. How can a free app game afford to advertise during the Super Bowl? Those in-app purchases must be adding up.

I’m nearing the halfway point of the WIP. Approximately 18,000 words as of this morning. Haven’t hit a wall yet. I hope I don’t end up writing myself into a corner…

I have a nostalgic recollection of what it’s like to be in the midst of a blizzard. As a kid, I used to love to go outside and play in the snow. There’s a particular kind of quiet in a snowfield. Sound is dulled and amplified at the same time. I love the sound snow makes when you step into it or ski across it. However, I don’t envy people having to deal with the 12-36″ of the stuff that’s due to come down over the next couple of days, or the complications it will cause with travel, both local and long-range.

As for what it’s like here—I sat outside on the back deck while I was writing yesterday afternoon so, quite nice thank you very much.

The novella I’m working on is set in a New England winter, so maybe this storm will provide fodder and inspiration. It’s coming along very well. I crossed the 10,000 word mark this weekend, which isn’t bad for a week’s work. It’s the most I’ve written in such a short period in ages. As I mentioned before, I’m doing this longhand, also something I haven’t done in ages. I wasn’t looking forward to transcribing it when I was finished, though. However, my wife mentioned some free dictation software for the iPad (Dragon Dictation). Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I dictated all of the work to present and got it converted into Word. It didn’t take long to fall into a rhythm, saying things like “new line,” “begin quote,”  “dash,” “new paragraph” as I was reading along. There are a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings to be corrected, but it’s a big step forward without having to do all that typing. I also validated my estimated word count. I was a touch high, assuming 250 words per page when after 44 pages the real average is 236. I’m hoping to be done with the first draft by the end of February, if not sooner. Every morning I wake up knowing what comes next, which is always good.

I finished the second season of The Fall last weekend. This is the British crime drama starring Gillian Anderson as an English police superintendent in Belfast to perform a review on a murder case that has had little traction in a month. She soon discovers they’re dealing with a serial offender (Jamie Dornan), who is one sick puppy. The two seasons are really one long season with an interminable break between them. Season 1 ends on a cliffhanger and the story picks up straight away in Season 2 in the same place. It’s a slow, deliberately paced series that doesn’t gloss over the processing of crime scenes or the minutia of interrogations. Anderson’s character is quite interesting, strong, forceful, unflappable, and Dornan’s is twisted, controlling, and ingratiating. Though Anderson and Dornan are almost never together in scenes, the show is mostly a cat-and-mouse chess match between them, with some other good characters thrown in, including a saucy fifteen-year-old babysitter who is emotionally seduced by Dornan’s character. I hope there’s a third season.

I have finally embarked on a long writing project, a novella that is part of something I’m doing with Brian Keene. I thought I had the germ of the idea a few months ago, but I got sidetracked with other things and a new, fresh idea came along. I started yesterday and have about 3000 words as of today. I say “about” because I can only estimate. Thus far, I’ve been writing longhand in a spiral-bound journal and I’m guessing about 250 words per page. I’m not quite sure why I’m going about it this way, but it is working, so I’m not going to second guess the process. I don’t have any idea where this story came from or where it’s going, exactly, but I keep thinking about it even when I’m not writing, so that’s encouraging.

My latest essay at Stephen King Revisited is up: Graveyard Shift looks at the historical context of King’s first short story collection, Night Shift. Rich Chizmar’s thoughts about the collection also went up today. Speaking of CD, I received my contributor copies of issue #72 of the magazine on the weekend. In addition to my regular column, I have the featured review of Revival, which I am now listening to on audio and appreciating it even more the second time around.

I’m not a huge football fan. I could fill a book with the rules I don’t understand. I couldn’t even name all of the positions or what their responsibilities are, but I do enjoy watching a game from time to time, especially during the playoffs when there’s so much at stake. I particularly enjoy the offbeat plays, like the faked punt or the one where the entire team shifted position to turn an unlikely player into an eligible receiver who then lumbered down the field unmolested to catch a touchdown pass (this might have been in a college game). The two games on Sunday couldn’t have been more different. Green Bay dominated and lost, and New England dominated and won. I couldn’t believe the turn-about by Seattle so late in the game after looking incredibly drab and listless for 58 minutes.

I just finished re-watching the five episodes of the first series of The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan. Anderson does a passable (to my ears) British accent in her part as a Detective Superintendent sent by Scotland Yard to Belfast to conduct a 28-day review of a stagnating homicide investigation. She links up a couple of other crimes and comes to the conclusion there’s a serial killer at work, played with creepy delight by Dornan. Anderson’s character makes others uncomfortable because she is cold, calculating and because she is sexually aggressive. If she were a man, no one would blink at her having a one-night stand with someone she met only briefly, but because she’s a woman, her colleagues and superiors are outraged. It’s an interesting mirror on contemporary sexual politics. Season 2, consisting of six episodes, is now up on Netflix.

If I lived closer to Houston proper, I’d probably be at Murder By the Book at least once a week. MBTB is a fantastic bookstore that specializes in crime fiction and murder mysteries. They bring in authors for signing events on a regular basis; in fact, there’s hardly a day goes by when they don’t have someone there. Big name authors, too.

But it’s a 45-minute drive and the weekday events start at 6:30, which means going into the city during rush hour, which isn’t my favorite thing to do. But I make exceptions from time to time, and when I heard that Amber Benson, who I met at NECON last year, would be here to promote her fine novel, The Witches of Echo Park, I made the trip. This was the last stop of her whirlwind tour and she was a bit punchy by the time 6:30 roll around, but it was good to catch up with her. She read the book’s opening chapter, and then did a Q&A with the audience.

Someone asked if she was part of a critique group, and I was fascinated by her answer. She works with a group of creative people dubbed the Shamers. They all work together in the same place at the same time, each doing his or her own thing. But if someone notices that someone else is spending too much time on Twitter, they call that person out. On the flip side, if someone hits a wall, he or she asks advice from those assembled. So, not a critique group, per se, but a support group and a peer pressure group, shaming each other into working. I like that idea.

I turned in the short story I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks to Tesseracts Nineteen, a couple of weeks ahead of deadline. The theme for the anthology is superheroes and I kind of played fast and loose with that concept, so they’ll either love it for being so creative or hate it for completely missing the mark, I figure. I quite like the way it turned out. It took me a while to capture the tone that I discovered halfway through the first draft. Irreverent, in a way.

As one window opens, a door closes, or so they don’t say: after submitting this one, I got a rejection letter from another market. Ah, well. So it goes.

Now it’s on to the novella, which will be the longest piece of fiction I’ve written in quite some time. I feel like I’m about to enter a cavern with a candlestick and a handful of matches.

Over the course of the past week or so, I’ve listened to all 12 segments in the Serial podcast from the creators of This American Life. They range between half an hour to a full hour in length and, over the course of three months, reveal the outcome of a year-long investigation by Sarah Koenig and her team into a fifteen-year-old Baltimore murder case. A high school student was convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend on very little physical evidence.

She had full access to the convict, serving a life sentence, via telephone (I don’t think she ever met him face-to-face), but the victim’s family refused to cooperate, so the picture is a little one-sided. The defense attorney has since died. The first trial ended in a mistrial. Stories changed. New evidence appeared. Koenig and her team are dogged in the pursuit of information without apparent agenda: they aren’t trying to get the convicted killer off, but they agree that there probably wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty. It’s quite fascinating, the way a cold case is investigated journalistically. Was there a pay phone at the Best Buy, as a friend of the convict claims? It seems like a minor point, but it’s part of a house of cards that could come toppling down if there isn’t.

After listening to it all, I can’t say I’m convinced of his guilt or innocence, but there were two damning details. First, someone confessed to helping the convicted killer dispose of the body. He knew where her car was (which supports this claim), and he knew a lot of other “facts” of the case. Now, it’s possible that this guy was the killer and he used his friend as a patsy. The other detail was the fact that the man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend did not attempt to call her or page her once after she disappeared, even though they had remained close following the break-up. A few weeks elapsed between the last time anyone saw her and the discovery of her body (an event that has its own mysterious aspects to it), but he never once tried to find out where she was by simply calling her. To me, that says he knew she was already dead, so why bother. He hemmed and hawed and offered a weak explanation for this behavior to Koenig, but I didn’t buy it. He had an aggressive way of bulldozing through certain details, and he’s had fifteen years to learn how to deal with his situation. That failure to call, like the dog who didn’t bark in the night, speaks volumes to me. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you have it.

There’s also the matter of his being unable to account for much of his time on the day in question. The girl’s new boyfriend, when called by the police to see if he knew where she was, made a point of figuring out all the details of his movement on that day because he knew he’d be a suspect if she were dead. The convicted killer did not, and he was very wishy-washy about the day. He claims he lent his car and his cell phone to the friend who would ultimately blame him for the crime, and it all seems a little dodgy.

If you’re interested in true crime reportage, give it a whirl. I quite enjoyed it.