Endings are hard

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Bev Vincent

Awoke this morning to news of another short story sale. This one is for a flash fiction piece that was one of the winners of a contest. The official announcement hasn’t been made yet, so I won’t say where until it has.

Today is also the day Ice Cold goes on sale in just about every format known to mankind. That’s the back cover over there. I’m about halfway through it (I received my contributor copies a while back) and I am impressed by all the various ways people approached the general theme of Cold War. It’s really an excellent anthology. I’m sorry I won’t be able to make it to They Mysterious Bookstore in NYC at the end of the month for the official launch.

So, a couple of days have passed since the season ending of The Walking Dead. My preliminary reaction to it: I removed the series from my DVR recording schedule. I gave it a chance and, in the end, I just didn’t care about any of the characters or what happened to them. Yeah, the bunch at Terminus are probably luring people to the site because it’s easier to have food come to you than it is to go out and get it. As for who among the cast of familiars might already have become barbecue, I really don’t care. The show has never really engaged me after Darabont left.

Last night was the series finale of How I Met Your Mother and I’m still processing how I feel about it. A lot of people hated it; I didn’t. I didn’t love the first half hour, mostly because it seemed altogether too real for a sitcom. I didn’t hate it, but it certainly didn’t provide the warm fuzzy feeling I was expecting from the finale. The second half was better. I loved the moment under the umbrella when they first truly met each other. I liked the stories of their lives in the future. Some people didn’t like what Robin turned into, but it made sense to me: that level of success was always her dream. It’s what she came to NY for in the first place. I have to say, though, that as cute and likable as the mother, Tracy, was, she seemed like an interloper in the future scenes, hanging out with “our five” like she belonged there. They didn’t show us enough of her for her to have earned that place, kidding Barney about “Number 31” and “where are you registered?” It was nice seeing her there, but we should have seen more of her to get to that point. This conceit of making the entire final season about Barney and Robin’s wedding wasn’t a good one, in my opinion, because the wedding was really only important in that it was the place where Ted met Tracy. Otherwise, it probably wasn’t as memorable an event in their lives as we were led to believe. However, the last five minutes repaid all, in my opinion, and it’s where the showrunners always meant to go. The final bit between Ted and his kids (the kids part, at least) was filmed eight or nine years ago so the actors would still be kids (the actress who plays his daughter is now 27), and it’s the way I always hoped things would work out. BTW: According to my calculations, Ted is my age in that final moment.

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Everyone sees him through your eyes now

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Bev Vincent

This is about Homeland, season 3. If you haven’t seen it, then you should probably quickly avert your eyes.

The theme of the season was redemption: Carrie’s for being right about Brody all along and Brody’s attempt to atone for some of the bad things he did in the past.

The entire season can be summed up simply: Saul and Carrie concoct a plan to turn a high-ranking Iranian official so that he can influence internal policy and open the country to the west. They will insert Brody into the country as an asylum seeker so he can remove an obstacle to this official’s advancement.

Of course, nothing is simple on Homeland. To get the Iranians to take the bait, Saul has to leave Carrie hanging after she has another meltdown. She has to seem vulnerable, and it has to be more than just a cover story. Saul keeps this plan so close to the vest that no one else in the agency knows what’s going on until the plan kicks into high gear. There are two catches. 1) Saul thought he was going to become the agency director, but it turns out that a senator has been picked for that spot, so Saul is something of a lame duck, with little power or leverage. 2) Carrie is pregnant with Brody’s child, a fact she does not reveal to Saul.

I was aware of a lot of muttering and murmuring about the third season on Facebook and Twitter as it was airing, but I didn’t look into it at the time. Binge-watching a show is a different experience. If you think things are going too slowly or that side plots are taking up too much air time, you only have to wait an hour for it to change, not a week, or weeks. Few people seemed interested in Dana’s story, which did take up a lot of the first several episodes and ultimately didn’t go anywhere meaningful, even after Brody gets to talk to her one last time. Might the season have gone better without all of the Brody family drama? Perhaps, but Brody was back on American soil and to totally ignore the family would have seemed strange. So I didn’t mind.

The scenes in Caracas were interesting. I visited that city a couple of decades ago. I didn’t get into lawless areas like the Tower of David, but I was warned after the fact that I hadn’t been terribly smart in wandering around the city on my own. I didn’t run into any problems but I guess I might have. I liked the ambiguity of Dar Adal (F. Murray Abraham). I didn’t trust him for much of the season, and in truth it would be wise not to trust him as he operated with his own agenda, which sometimes aligned with Saul’s and sometimes it didn’t. I loved the scene where he and Saul locked Lockhart in the conference room so they’d have time to get Javadi out of the country. Despite Lockhart’s smug overconfident demeanor, he wasn’t often wrong. Seen impartially, his views usually made sense.

Javadi was a fascinating character. Not entirely evil but far from good, too. He was willing to murder two women to settle an old score but more importantly to stick it to Saul in the only way left to him before the boot came down. I liked him, most of the time. He was one of the few sane people amidst all that madness—certainly saner than Carrie most of the time. But, speaking of Carrie, don’t you think Saul would lend her theories a bit more credence after a while? After she’d been proven right time and time again?

There were some dropped ideas. Quinn’s angst and intent to leave the agency, inspired by his accidental shooting of the boy in Caracas withered on the vine. He’s still there four months after the operation ends, and all that stuff with the police over the Javadi murders had no real impact. I also thought they missed a huge crossover opportunity with the homicide cop, played by the actor who was Meldrick Lewis on Homicide: Life on the Streets.

What about the law firm that was acting on Iran’s behalf? What became of Fara, who clearly had issues with some of Saul’s measures? And what happened with the Mossad agent after he was arrested for spying on Saul (and sleeping with his wife)?

And it is rather incredible that Carrie’s baby is healthy after all the drugs and alcohol she consumed, not to mention the constant state of stress. Plus, I never really bought her as a pregnant woman in the last episode. She certainly didn’t walk like one.

I’m glad they decided not to rescue Brody at the eleventh hour. His death made sense. His earlier misdeeds “cast a long shadow,” and he himself realized that redeeming yourself for murder by killing someone else was twisted logic.

There were some really great tense scenes, although I guessed in advance that there would be a false scare with Brody and his ID card after he killed Akbari. By the end of the twelve episodes, the slate is wiped clean. The Brody mess is over, once and for all, and the show can move on. With or without Saul? That’s an open question. Dar Adal (he of the “old school” breakfast) thinks he’d come back in a heartbeat if asked, but I can’t seem him working with Lockhart. Carrie is moving on to a new opportunity to handle Javadi, with or without this daughter.

I was expecting a train wreck of a season, but it wasn’t bad at all. Glad I saved all the episodes and watched them in a few sittings. It’s no Breaking Bad, but that’s okay. Few shows are.

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The empress of ice cream

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Bev Vincent

I submitted a short story this morning to the Elmore Leonard tribute anthology. I had a good draft finished for a while but had some feedback from a first reader that I needed to consider. I ended up making some fairly drastic revisions and I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. This is a non-paying market (royalties-only anthology, which is pretty much the same thing), but I’m willing to make an exception in this case because I’m a big fan of Mr. Leonard’s work. Fingers crossed that I at least make the short list.

My review of the French King e-short “Sale Gosse” went up on FEARnet yesterday. I called it “Pardon my French.”

Last night’s NCIS was the first part of a two-part franchise spin-off for the New Orleans incarnation starring Scott Bakula. I’m not a huge fan of spin-off episodes. They try to hard, as a rule. There’s too much for them to do in too short a time. And this being New Orleans, they also tried to cram in everything associated with the city, which made it feel almost like a cliche or a parody. I’m not sure I’ll add the spin-off to my weekly viewing. I gave the L.A. version a shot and it didn’t work for me.

It’s hard to believe that, after nine years, there’s only one episode of How I Met Your Mother left. I can count on the fingers of half a hand the number of sitcoms I watch, and losing HIMYM is going to reduce the number by half. The show is sort of Friends crossed with Seinfeld. Not exactly about nothing, but neither was Seinfeld, really. Great, memorable, funny characters, improbable, implausible situations, but a good, good heart. I still think Ted should have ended up with Robin, but that’s my only quibble. This final season has been erratic, but each episode always had at least one exceptional moment, and many of them had more than that.

So, Stephen King is going to get an invite to Castle & Beckett’s wedding. What does one get another author and his cop fiancee for a wedding gift? Kill them off in your next book?

Last week’s preview for Justified robbed the shooting scene in this week’s show of much of its tension. It was pretty obvious that it wasn’t Allison who was shot. There’s no way that could have happened given the geometry of the situation. Still, it was a good cheat, having Art not realize where the bullet went, as cheats go. I learned that the actress who plays Art’s wife is Nick Searcy’s wife. Keeping it in the family.

The big gag of the show, though, was Boyd’s cigarette, which I thought up until the Face Off moment was a bug. Famous last words: Shit’ll kill you. I think they’re going to have to pay that non-smoking room violation fine after all. “I may not know a lot about a lot of things, but I do know how to blow shit up.” Picker doesn’t need to worry about Tim getting on his case any more.

I loved the scene between Mary Steenburgen’s Katherine Hale and Vasquez. There’s a lot of history there, as evidenced by her description of him as a “smug little hobbit-looking beaner shitbird.”

Ever notice how people in prison on TV and in movies seem to be able to move around a lot and get up to stuff? The scene where Judith’s old gang dubbed Ava the Empress of Ice Cream was pretty cool. Hope she doesn’t let all the power go to her head. But she solved her problem and was richly rewarded for it. Except, can a person really eat all that ice cream in one sitting?

It was pretty obvious Kendel was lying. After all, his story didn’t match up with the way things happened at all. Raylan knows that intuitively but if Art recovers the lie will be exposed, too. Now it’s all down to Raylan vs. Darryl, which should make for an interesting final two episodes. Rachel’s in charge, and Raylan is doing his best to not be too Raylan-esque (he turned down Tim’s offer to go all Raylan on Darryl before he turned himself in). He promises not to kill Darryl but destroy everything around him. Which amounts to…what, exactly?

I’m binge-watching the third season of Homeland. Halfway through. I was aware of some grumbling about the season as it aired, but didn’t look too closely at what people were complaining about. Granted, after six episodes not a whole lot has happened. The kind of plot developments that Breaking Bad would probably have covered in two episodes at the most. I did like Esme, though. She reminded me of Nova from Planet of the Apes.

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The hand that launched a thousand signatures

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Bev Vincent

Maybe closer to 1500. I received the signature pages for the Cemetery Dance S/L of The Dark Tower Companion this weekend. It’s limited to 1000 copies plus 52 lettered. There are always extra sheets in case of spoilage and loss, so I probably signed something like 1200 or 1300 times. I didn’t count. It’s a mind-numbing process, out of necessity. If I focus on it too much, I start forgetting how to form my letters. Whenever I get to the point that I can’t remember how to write the initial B, I take a break. I did most of them yesterday afternoon in maybe eight or ten separate sessions. Now they’re all boxed up and headed back to CD.

I submitted a 1500-word review of Mr. Mercedes to CD this weekend, too. If all goes according to plan, it should be in an issue that comes out shortly before the book does in June.

I posted a couple of reviews this weekend, both for books that I really enjoyed: The Fever by Megan Abbott and Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd. This is my first Todd and I was really impressed by how well these two Americans, mother and son, capture the feel of an early 20th century England. Now I’m about ¾ of the way through The Leopard by Jo Nesbø. I’ve always enjoyed his books, though I wish he didn’t feel obligated to include these little italicized passages from the killer’s point of view. They don’t really contribute much to the story, in my opinion. I’m also almost halfway through Death Without Company, the second Longmire novel by Craig Johnson, which I’m reading to my wife.

I got a kick out of the audience warning before this week’s episode of Hannibal. It had the usual advisory about mature content, but expanded it to say that there were flashing lights with strobe effects, which I guess can cause seizures in some people. They didn’t warn us, though, that a psycho lady was going to stick big pointy things into people’s eyes. That almost gave me a seizure.

We finished the last four episodes of the second season of House of Cards this weekend. We could tell that he was manipulating the president and his wife into something all season long, but it wasn’t until the end that the whole scheme fell into place. So many things could have gone wrong along the way that it’s hard to fathom how anyone could plot out such a byzantine scheme and hope that it would work, but it did. Alas, Frank’s going to have to proceed without his henchman, Doug, from the looks of things. One of the season’s biggest surprises was the menage-a-trois with the Secret Service agent. Of course, it solved the problem of trying to get up to stuff while being under constant surveillance, but Frank’s participation felt unmotivated. There didn’t seem to be any precedent. He and Claire sure did leave a lot of damaged individuals in their wake. Can’t wait to see where the next season goes.

We have a bunch of old Graham Norton shows on the DVR, so we picked one at random and it was hilarious: Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Hugh Bonneville promoting The Monuments Men. I’ve always had the impression that Murray could be a tough interview, but he warmed up quickly (after downing a couple of flutes of champagne), and the trio had good chemistry together. At one point Damon said, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had on a talk show,” and he seemed to mean it.

Only one more episode of The Walking Dead left, thankfully. I decided to stick with it to the end of the season, but then I’m done. I quit once before, got talked back into it, but it’s been a slog. None of the characters seem terribly real, and the dialog is just plain bad most of the time.

I thought for a while they were going to send Rigsby out of The Mentalist with a real bang, and they sort of did, but not in a final way. He took a couple to the chest but was still able to save the day.

Tough challenge on The Amazing Race. It was fun to see the Harlem Globetrotter entertaining the workers while his partner labored away, and to see him toss the b-ball to Phil at the mat. Alas, a missed flight put one team so far behind they could never get back in the game and, as they said, there wasn’t anything they could have done about that once they decided to go standby. Them’s the brakes.

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Sprung

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Bev Vincent

It’s easy to tell that spring has arrived. Yesterday afternoon my car was absolutely covered in greenish-yellow pollen. When I pulled out of my parking spot, it flowed across the windshield like snow pellets.

Working on essays and book reviews this week. I turned in a piece to FEARnet the other day and now I have a review that has to go into CD by the weekend, although I plan to finish it tomorrow if possible. I have a short story that I need to revise and a stack that I’m going to hunt down new potential markets for, and then it’s off to novel land again. The more I think about this book (and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking but not much writing on it), the more layers I come up with.

Keith Carradine on NCIS reminded me of Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP.

I saw three shows in the past day or so where the last five minutes (or less) were amazing. On The Americans it was really the final minute when the attempted kidnapping of the physicist goes so very, very wrong. How many times can you slam the trunk on a guy’s hand? For a while, it was the women who were kicking butt, and it was the woman assailant who got the last laugh by driving off and leaving our “heroes” standing gaping in the street. I find it interesting how they’re fighting the battle for the motherland on the grand scale and then the battle for their children’s souls (well, not exactly souls, that’s sort of the issue, but that’s the essence of it) on the home front.

Then there was CSI, where the creepy daughter turned everything on its head in the last couple of minutes. How much of what they thought they knew already was true? In any case, that was one messed up family. And then on Survivor, the newly merged team pulled off a brilliant blindside. It’s not unusual to see the evicted person gape with surprise, but jaws dropped on either side of him, too. It was hilarious to see, and it looks like the implications of that vote may create an interesting and novel situation next week.

You had to be a blind person not to guess that Rizzoli might be pregnant on this weeks Rizzoli & Isles, the first episode to not feature Lee Thomas Young. They haven’t written him out of the show yet, but they did cut the spring season to only a handful of episodes while they figure out what to do about the loss.

It’s rarely funny when a character dies, but Danny Crowe’s swan song on Justified was drop dead hilarious. All season long he’s been going on and on about his 21 foot rule and just when he was about to put it to the test, he goes and falls into his dog’s freshly dug grave and impales himself with the famous knife. Apparently the scene was inspired by something from an Elmore Leonard novel, where a bad guy falls down and accidentally shoots himself. According to the showrunner, Timothy Olyphant could barely stop laughing the whole time they were filming the scene. I also liked the scene where “Officer Buzz Kill” wormed the information out of the two prostitutes.

So, Dickey Bennett was back for a bit. Looks like he’s getting his hair styled at the Boyd Crowder Salon. I loved the way Raylan plunked down on the bench, put his head on his hands and just watched as Dickey spun out another long-winded yarn. There are as many inept crooks in Leonard’s works as ept ones. Take Dewey (“I got your heroin. Well, I got half of it, but it’s the whole half.”) Crowe, releasing his Gremlin on a hill and having to chase after it, running over the same big stone that rips the muffler from the car. “A lot of confidence for a guy who wears shorts with combat boots.”

The Crowe gang is diminishing and now they’re in-fighting. And Ava tried her best not to stab Judith in the prison but ended up having to do it anyway, while at the same time Boyd failed in his quest to get Albert to recant. That’s one twisted little dude. It will be interesting to see how Mary Steenburgen’s character whips things into shape.

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The English are landing

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Bev Vincent

I did something last weekend that I haven’t in a while: I read something quite long in French. The work was “Sale Gosse,” the French translation of the Stephen King novella “Bad Little Kid,” which at present is only available in French and German. I’ve read a few French books in the past and was quite pleased by how little I had to rely on the dictionary. Even the metaphors and idioms came through, although I was at first befuddled by a couple of instances of a phrase that translated literally as “the English are landing.” I had to resort to Google for that one. I learned that it is the way the French refer to a woman’s time of the month. Apparently something to do with the redcoats and the long-running history between the French and the English. I wrote an article for FEARnet about the story, which should appear soon.

Last night, I received a box of contributor copies of Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War, the MWA anthology edited by Jeffrey Deaver and Raymond Benson, which contains my short story “The Honey Trap.” The book comes out on April 1. I’m really looking forward to reading the other contributions.

Banshee finished its second season with a record-breaking viewership. Paltry by most standards, but it was the largest viewership Cinemax has ever had for its original content. The show has been renewed for a third season. It’s an over-the-top show, pulpy to the max, with impossible violence orchestrated like ballet and soft-core porn-level sex, but it’s interesting, too. They went a tad overboard this season with the concept of parallel structure: similar things happening to different characters at the same time. It was as if they thought they had discovered it, and they almost hammered viewers over the head with it, but that was my biggest complaint. It was an interesting choice to go back in time with Ana, Rabbit and “Hood” to see the things we’ve only heard about in passing until now. I liked the exchange between Ana/Carrie and Hood where he’s talking about his military experience. “How many lives have you lived?” she asks, to which he responds, “None, really.” Give ten bad guys machine guns and they can’t hit crap, but Job and a few other guys hit the mark every time. Rabbit’s final benediction: Somewhere in the future there’s a bench like this waiting for you. Probably true for a guy like “Hood.”

After strewing the church with empty casings and turning the pillars into Swiss cheese, and then dispatching Rabbit once and for all, what was there left to do? Plenty, as it turns out. We got to see the albino once more, in flashback, then Rebecca had the strangest sexual encounter on the show to date (and that’s saying a lot) with Chief “Thunder Man.” What a little sociopath she’s turned into. And then Emmett heads across the border to Maryland, content in thinking he’s out of the fray, only to find himself on the wrong end of a machine gun. Deva drops buy to visit her newly discovered Dad, Rebecca cuddles up with her naked uncle, and the Incredible Hulk decides it’s time to head back to Banshee, setting up next season. Oh, and Hood has a meaningful moment with Siobhan. A lot of the past has been wrapped up, which could open things up for Season 3.

I dropped Bates Motel off my DVR recording schedule. I just don’t care about 85% of what’s going on, and the remaining 15% isn’t enough to keep me hanging around. There are  good ways to handle prequels (e.g. Hannibal) and bad ways. Hannibal is stylistic and it focuses on the central characters. It doesn’t need to go off in 75 directions all at once. There’s Will and Hannibal and everything else arises naturally from that conflict.

We’re about 2/3 of the way through the second season of House of Cards. It probably takes people like Frank and Claire to succeed in that environment, sad to say. Ultimately, everyone is dispensable, a means to an end.

The challenges on The Amazing Race seem really hard this season. The simultaneous martini trick was a real doozy, and the rival DJ scratching seemed just as hard, and impossible of course for the deaf contestant.

The Walking Dead finally did something to make me sit up and pay attention. The end of this week’s episode was quite shocking. Goes to show that characterization trumps horror and special effects. I still am not a huge fan of this fragmented 2014 season in general, though.

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The dark has a lot more territory

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Bev Vincent

True Detective ended its eight-week first season on Sunday night and it seems that a fair number of people aren’t all that happy with how it turned out. There are two major camps on that side, as far as I can suss out. One group doesn’t like it that the top guns got away: the politicians and the well connected. Well, that’s life in a nutshell, pretty much, so it should come as no surprise that the series reflected that. The other group wasn’t keen on Rust’s epiphany. Some aren’t even pleased that he survived at all.

Okay, so maybe the ending was a little Pollyanna-esque. The scales fall from the curmudgeon’s eyes and the universe isn’t as terrible a place as he thought for the past 50 years. I can buy into that, or not. Rust’s been having waking visions all his life, so why should an unconscious one have that much effect on him? Shrug. Because it apparently did, I guess. None of that vitiates my appreciation for the show. It dared us to look in a very dark place and, more importantly, it made us look at people who are looking at a very dark place. We don’t see the video: we see how it makes Rust and Marty and even the shifty cop react. And we get to see Carcosa, the manifestation of a seriously mangled mind. We don’t understand everything that happened to that guy to make him the way he was. At times he seems juvenile, but his James Mason voice was creepy and very much a man’s voice. He’s been left alone for far too long, though. How long would it take to create a twisted, mangled maze like the one he built? Wild stuff. Hoarders would have had a field day with that house, which would never be a contender for Good Housekeeping. There simply aren’t enough air fresheners in the world to make that place tolerable.

If I was disappointed with anything in the finale, it was the fact that apparently Marty can no longer shoot worth a damn. He took several shots at the killer, who was no shrinking violet, and only managed to wing him. That hammer claw to the chest was icky, especially since it didn’t seem to make a sound when it went in. I will say this: Rust’s threat of a random sniper ready to take care of the cop if he went against them was a lot more effective than Walt’s threat against Gretchen and Elliott on Breaking Bad. All in all, it was a worthwhile experience, and I look forward to watching it all again very soon.

There’s only one episode of Banshee left for the second season, and once again we’re gearing up for a big confrontation with Rabbit. The question asked by the second season seems to be: Who is Hood? Or, rather, who is the guy who adopted Hood’s persona? It was challenged in early episodes when the real Hood’s son showed up, and in more recent episodes people have been asking him to his face, “Who are you?” That was answered, in part, in episode 9. The secret’s out: He’s Dayva’s father. There’s an ID he can hang his hat on. I loved the scene between Proctor and his mother.

The interesting thing that’s happening on The Americans this season is that, for the first time since we met this happy little spy family, they are in peril, and they have no idea where the danger is coming from. Who can they trust? They’re becoming paranoid, but with good reason.

That river challenge on The Amazing Race is one of the most brutal I’ve seen in a long time. They had to make their own raft and then navigate through some impressive rapids. It’s a wonder no one was seriously hurt. As is often the case, a taxi was the main culprit in a team being eliminated, but in this case it was because they forgot to tell their driver to wait for them at their remote location.

I was getting ready to pull the plug on The Walking Dead if this episode didn’t impress me. I know that we’re supposed to be getting to know some of these more minor characters better, but they’re like the folks from the tail section on Lost as far as I’m concerned. They entered the story too late for me to want to get to know them. This week was marginally better than last, and there are only three episodes left in the season, so I guess I’ll stick it out to see if they all end up at this magical Terminus, which has a rather fatalistic sound to it rather than an optimistic one.

I’d almost forgotten that The Mentalist existed, only to have it pop back up again this week. Took me a while to remember what all was going on, especially the bit back in Sacramento with the bugged phones. Poor LaRoche. Hope he pulls through. An oddball character, but an interesting one. Maybe they’re trying to tie up any loose ends back in California. Rigsby and Van Pelt are supposed to be off the show, too.

Bates Motel is one seriously creepy show, and it’s all thanks to Vera Farmiga. The ways she can mess up her son are legion. And then she pulls off this Patty Lupone showstopper of a performance at the auditions. Whoa.

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Move me onto any black square

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bev Vincent

Yesterday I posted about two unusual writing places: the elliptical trainer and the shower. When I started writing seriously, I was an avid cyclist. I used to go out for 15-mile rides each day, 30- or 45-miles on the weekends, and I used to do some of my best troubleshooting on those rides.

Nowadays, I write until 7:00 am, then I do 30 minutes on the elliptical and then I get in the shower. This week I’ve been working on a new short story. Each morning I’d write about 800-1000 words and then finish up at a point where I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen next. During my exercise session, I’d let my mind wander and invariably I came up with the next scene. Before hitting the shower, I’d go back to my PC and enter 50-150 words of notes to cue me for the next morning. I should finish the first draft tomorrow morning. It’s been fun, and it’s fairly typical of how I work when I’m writing fiction.

It was good to see Ron Glass (of Barney Miller and Firefly) on CSI last night. Of course, when you see a familiar face like that, you can’t help but think he’s the perp, but they fooled me this time, despite The Who’s admonishment. Special kudos for the use of Yes’s “I’ve Seen All Good People,” which has the subject line as part of its lyrics.

On the other hand, I thought Criminal Minds was a tad obvious in the identity of the perp. Sure, they tried hard to make it seem like the putative leader of the group was “talking to Jacob,” (as in Lost) but it came as no surprise that he wasn’t.

Poor old Raylan. He can’t win for losing. He has this nice getaway planned to go visit his kid in Florida with his girlfriend and he gets called away by Wendy Crowe because her “nephew” has been kidnapped by his “uncle.” Raylan wants to give her the old “You’ve mistaken me for someone who cares” line but Allison convinces him he needs to get out there and find the kid. Which he does, with surprisingly little trouble and no fisticuffs or gunplay. We never did find out how Michael got there first, but in the end it didn’t matter much. Raylan tried to bond with Kendell, telling him about how he’d had trouble with his kin growing up, too, but didn’t gain much traction, even after he gave away his ill-gotten radio gains. Then, having fallen for Wendy’s promise of evidence against her kin, he ends up with bupkis. Maybe now that he’s a free man again, he can explore Wendy’s apparent interest in him.

Boyd’s still in Mexico, trying to get a truck full of drugs and dead bodies into Texas. I told myself, after the cops drove off with the truck, that I bet he had moved the drugs to the car that was requested by the contingent that had to sit in the back of the truck with the bodies. Dewey wisely asked for A/C. And, lo and behold, I was right. Remains to be seen, though, what the next play is, as it appears the Crowes aren’t on the up and up. Surprisingly. Are you sure  you want to be considered my family, Boyd asks, considering I just executed the last blood relative that I have.

If he messes around in Mexico too long, though, Ava might be in big trouble when it comes time for the next expected heroin shipment.

Posted in CSI, Justified | Comments Off on Move me onto any black square

Where I write

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Bev Vincent

Some people write like this:

Others still write like this:

I imagine there are a few people who even do this:

For all I know, there may even be some of this going on out there:

I do some of my best writing here:

And here:

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Where I write

Nothing grows in the right direction

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Bev Vincent

On Saturday afternoon it was 80°. This morning it was 26°, and there’s a freezing rain alert out for tomorrow morning. The kind that could, depending on how the thermometer swings, end up in ice on power lines and trees. In March. In Texas.

When I moved to Texas 25 years ago, I went to a lot of concerts. A new pavilion opened close to where I lived and a lot of great acts played there, people I’d always liked but never had a chance to see live. Then I went through a phase where I hardly went to any shows. In the past six months, though, we’ve gone to three concerts, and they couldn’t be any more different from each other. First there was Sarah Brightman last fall. She was the original star of The Phantom of the Opera and combines opera with classical and classics. Then a couple of weeks ago we saw Gordon Lightfoot.

Saturday night, we experienced Shpongle, in the person of Simon Posford. I discovered Shpongle after Posford collaborated with Alan Parsons on his album A Valid Path. They’re a trance band, heavily drug influenced, mostly instrumental, and I love to write to them. To my surprise, my wife likes them, too, so when the concert was announced last fall, I snapped up a few tickets. They played at the House of Blues, a place I’ve never been before, and the price was right: $20 per. I’ve seen a few of their concerts on YouTube with the whole band: it’s quite a show. Here’s one song: Dorset Perception. I was hoping for a big performance like this, but it was a one-man DJ band, which was okay in its own way. The opening group, Desert Dwellers, consisted of two guys with laptops and a whole mess of cables. At one point I thought one of the DJs was checking his email or, perhaps, his twitter feed. They were okay, but they didn’t quite have the musicality of Shpongle and their hour-long set outstayed their welcome by a good 30 minutes. 

Posford came on at something after 10 pm in his Shpongletron, which looked something like the ELO space ship from way back. His DJ station is in the midst of it (see photo), and the periphery is a screen upon which things are projected that look like a cross between the cartoons of Monty Python and the weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch. There were growing mushrooms and floating molecules and snakes and all manner of things going on. The music, much of it could be a playback from one of their recordings with some improv thrown in, but it was an experience unlike anything we’ve ever had before. We splurged on a VIP table, which put us in a restricted area with a table and a server, whereas the rest of the audience was in front of us in an open standing area. Part of the experience was in watching these people, including one guy who was dressed like a dog or a sheep or something. There were a surprising number of people approaching our age, but they mostly hung out on the periphery. By the time the show ended (after midnight, well past my normal bed time!) we were well and truly Shpongled.

I didn’t watch the Academy Award presentations. I’m sure they were fine, but I’m content with a list of winners and a clip of the best moments that can be watched in five minutes or less. Instead I watched The Amazing Race. I’ve never seen a pile-up like that on the mat. Often teams have no idea in what order the others arrived or when, but everyone was there to see the Kentucky team go home after they forgot a backpack and had to go back to reclaim it. Tough call.

Was it just me, or was that one of the worst episodes of The Walking Dead ever? The poor actress who plays Beth isn’t terribly good, something I noticed before, and to have to carry a two-person episode, well, she wasn’t quite up to the task. Normally Darryl-centric episodes are the bomb, but this one just bombed.

So, we’re down to the final True Detective episode and we have at last seen the face of evil. It’s good to see the two guys becoming friends again. Talking. They’re both lonely men, so I think the chance to talk to another human being is welcome to them. Marty proves his mettle as a detective. I’m always amazed by those scenes where someone is shown a storeroom full of file boxes and then the skip-cut to later, with the results. Seldom do you get to see the drudgery in between. More philosophizing: Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing, so you have to be careful what you get good at. And Rust’s observation about the backwaters of Louisiana where they end up at the heart of the case, which forms the title of today’s post.

Only two more episodes of Banshee, too. Hood’s war with Proctor is heating up. “We’ve all been living in the dark long enough.” And then there’s Emmett and his test. And another crack at Rabbit. It’s gonna be tough to beat last season’s rocket launcher finale, but I’m sure they’ll give it a shot.

Posted in The Amazing Race, The Walking Dead | Comments Off on Nothing grows in the right direction