Bev Vincent

In November, 2008, I was contacted out of the blue by an editor at becker&mayer! (the exclamation mark is part of their name) to see if I would be interested in writing the text for a book commissioned by Barnes & Noble. That email led to The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was published less than a year later. It was a different kind of deal than traditional publishing. B&N ordered a certain quantity of books, so the entire run was delivered on publication and I was paid up front on a per-copy basis for the entire order. No returns, no royalty statements.

The book proved popular, and that initial order sold out, putting it out of print. Every now and then I’d reach out to b&m to see if B&N might be interested in a second printing. In February 2010, the bookstore chain placed a second order only slightly smaller than the initial one. Eventually, all those copies were sold, too.

A couple of years later, I pinged b&m again and they agreed to a new edition with additional text; however, due to the increased cost of paper and manufacturing, this second edition lost the pouches with removable content. Still, that edition sold out, too, after a while. There was also an Italian translation of the original version.

The book was garnering high prices on the secondary market but was no longer available in stores. From time to time, I’d query b&m, but nothing happened. I recently discovered the publisher had been acquired by Quarto, an international publisher with offices in the UK and the US, selling books into 50 countries. Last May, I queried Quarto through a general submissions email address. That was forwarded to someone from becker&mayer! and I got a response less than a week later. They wanted to revise and expand the book and I met with the editor via Zoom to discuss a proposal.

That is all preamble, leading up to the forthcoming publication of Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of his Work, Life and Influences. While this book contains the material I wrote for the Companion (some of it modified and updated), it has been greatly expanded. It has twice as much text and covers all of King’s books. Much of his oeuvre had been mentioned only in passing and—in some cases, not at all—in the earlier book. So, this new book, which is divided roughly by decade, is a much more complete exploration of everything up to Fairy Tale.

Here is the cover copy:

Explore the evolution and influences of Stephen King’s body of work over his nearly fifty-year career, and discover how the themes of his writing reflect the changing times and events within his life. Featuring archival photos and documents from King’s personal collection, this chronological history delves into the stories behind how his novels, novellas, short stories, and adaptations came to be.

With critically acclaimed titles that have also been turned into blockbuster sensations like It and Carrie, King’s work has stood the test of time across decades. This history of the writer’s struggles, triumphs, bestsellers, lesser-known stories, collaborations, and more makes the perfect addition to any Stephen King fan’s collection.

Celebrate the beloved author and King of Horror with this informational and entertaining look inside King’s most iconic titles and the culture they have created.

Some of the new material I wrote includes deep dives into the history and geography of Castle Rock and Derry, which was a lot of fun. Of particular note, this book is not a Barnes & Noble exclusive. It will be available wherever books are sold, in all of the English-language countries Quarto covers. That means it will be more generally available than the previous Companion, which delights me.

The book will be out on September 20, 2022—a highly significant date in the world of Stephen King—and it is available for pre-order now. You can see the table of contents on this page (Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of his Work, Life and Influences) together with a list of links to places where you can order it at the bottom.

Time flies when you’re having fun. (Even when you’re not, the corollary says, but that doesn’t apply to me.) I had been hoping to make The Big Announcement about my next book by now, but I’m still waiting on the finalized cover to do so. Some of you may have already heard about it via other channels, but the full scoop is yet to come. Soon, I hope. Very soon.

[Of course, less than half an hour after this posted, I received the final cover image in my INBOX. Stay tuned for an update!]

My wife and I got our second booster shots last Saturday. Feeling somewhat emboldened (but still masking), I visited a new local bookstore, Village Books, for the first time. The shop owner recognized my name from Facebook and took a selfie with me, the first time I’ve done that in years! I was in the vicinity of the store because I’d sold a book on eBay and it turned out the buyer was someone who lives in the same community so I met up with him at a coffee shop to deliver it in person rather than send it five miles by media mail. We ended up chatting for well over an hour, the first time I’ve had a lengthy conversation with someone in person other than my wife since I can’t remember when.

I’ve had a good run on short story acceptances lately. The biggest one is my second acceptance to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for a Benjamin Kane story called “His Father’s Son.” Ben also makes appearances in the forthcoming stories “Kane’s Theory” in Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume III: The Color of My Vote, which comes out in May and in “Kane’s Alibi” in The Book of Extraordinary Femme Fatale Stories, due out in July.

Yesterday, I was notified that my cop story “Something Strange” will be in the Land of 10,000 Crimes anthology for Bouchercon 2022, which is in September. I have a demented story called “Date Night” in the anthology Picnic in the Graveyard from Cemetery Gates Media due out in May and a noir story called “Double Play” in the forthcoming anthology Summer Bludgeon from Unsettling Reads. My sci-fi noir caper “The Lagrange Point” will be in Fans Are Buried Tales from Crazy 8 Press, which I think will be out in November. I have a few others in the pipeline — you can check out what’s coming at my Fiction page.

On the non-fiction side, my essay “New England Adjacent” appeared in Mystery Readers Journal Volume 38, No. 1, Spring 2022, the first of two issues on the theme of New England Mysteries. My interview with Stephen King & Richard Chizmar about Gwendy’s Final Task ended up at Fangoria in February.

Brian Keene and I were interviewed for the Writers on Wax podcast. The host, Joshua Marsella, lost power just as we were getting ready to finish and we thought the whole conversation had been lost. However, Zoom saved it all. We did return a few days later to do the wrap-up. It was fun talking about the influence of music on writing, with a focus on Dissonant Harmonies. Video can be found on YouTube and the audio-only version on Apple Podcasts.

Recent movies: I finally made it through The Power of the Dog, although I have to say it was a bit of a slog. We watched two Ryan Reynolds films, Free Guy and The Adam Project, both of which were delightful in different ways. As a longtime reader of Haruki Murakami, I was looking forward to Drive My Car since I first learned about it. It was quite good, as was Licorice Pizza, which also introduced me to the musical group Haim.

What’s not to love about a Michael Caine caper movie? For some reason I missed King of Thieves when it first came out, but it was entertaining. We saw Shanghai Noon when it first came out on video (probably on VHS) but we watched it again, following up with Shanghai Knights, which we hadn’t seen before. We got a big kick out of the interactions between Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. There has been talk of a third film for ages, but it’s hard to imagine Chan having the energy for all that action twenty years later.

I read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile many years ago, possibly more than once because I had a clear and vivid memory of whodunit and how. I probably saw the 1978 movie, although I have little memory of it. The new Kenneth Branagh adaptation brought those scenes to life. It also added a non-Christie backstory to Poirot that was interesting. Reportedly a third film is in the works, based on a lesser-known work and set in post-war Vienna, which doesn’t match up with any Christie novel I’m familiar with.

I watched the Norwegian series Borderliner (terrible title), which reminded me of A Simple Plan in that it deals with people who come upon something valuable and then proceed to make one bad decision after another. Archive 81 was a trippy, fascinating “found footage” series that ends with a cliffhanger but then the series was canceled so, hmm.

I really liked From on Epix. It owes a lot to Lost (so much so that I expected the characters to stumble upon a Dharma station at some point). Since it’s on a non-network channel, the level of gore and language adds to the show’s “reality.” They really went all-in, though, in expecting a second season. I’d definitely be there for that. I also watched Suspicion, about a group of strangers who are supposedly being framed for a kidnapping. Lots of intrigue, although it got a little muddled and preachy toward the end. I’m also working my way through a re-watch of The Shield–I’m up to the middle of season 3.

Most recent read: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, about an artificial friend and her human companion. Some books are guilty of information dumps–this one is the opposite. The near-future situation isn’t explained at all and readers are expected to keep up. Young characters are either “lifted” or not, and we don’t discover what that means until late in the book. Quite fascinating.

Currently reading: Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult, about a woman who gets stranded on one of the Galápagos Islands at the beginning of the pandemic. The island is effectively shut down (even the hotel where she had a reservation), she doesn’t speak Spanish and isn’t an experienced traveler. She was supposed to go with her boyfriend, but he’s a medical resident who couldn’t leave NY in the face of a growing onslaught of coronavirus patients. I’m pretty sure this is the first Picoult novel I’ve read and I’m enjoying it.

So, it’s only been five weeks since my last post, so I consider that an improvement over the roughly half-year gap in 2021. Where to begin? Ok, business. I have a short story called “The Lagrange Point” in the anthology The Fans Are Buried Tales, edited by Peter and Kathleen David. The book was supposed to launch at a science fiction convention this year, but the target convention isn’t doing COVID restrictions and Peter is immune compromised, so instead he switched to the Kickstarter model to pay his contributors. The fundraiser goals are essentially people buying copies of the book, and we’re already about 1/4 of the way to the target. If you’re interested, here is the link. The anthology combines the concept of The Canterbury Tales with cosplayers stuck in a convention hotel by a blizzard. It’s great fun!

“Lucifer!” by E.C. Tubb, one of the stories Stephen King and I included in Flight or Fright, will be adapted into a feature film called 52 Seconds, starring Morgan Freeman. Filming is set to begin in April in Louisiana. Although we played no part in this (other than maybe someone saw the story in the anthology), it’s very exciting!

I’m still sitting on my big news about a book scheduled for September publication, waiting for the green light (and cover art) from the publisher. I have a couple of other short story acceptances that I’m reserving mention of until I get the contract or approval from the respective editors.

I signed up for a 30-day free trial of Showtime so I could binge through Yellowjackets and Dexter: New Blood. The former is like a cross between Lost and Lord of the Flies. A group of high school girls, members of a soccer team who’ve just won their state championship, are en route to nationals when their plane goes down in the Canadian Rockies and they aren’t found for over a year and a half. Only one adult survives the crash. Where Lost focused on the lives of stranded people before their plane crashed, Yellowjackets deals with the survivors 25 years afterward. The first season ends with many questions unanswered, and the most ominous possibilities for what will happen to the stranded girls have yet to be fully realized. It’s gripping, compelling and I want Season 2 now!

Dexter: New Blood is less compelling, alas. It takes place 10 years after the end of the series and Dexter is now living in upstate New York, working in a sports store in a small town, and dating the local sheriff (who bears a startling resemblance to his dead sister Deb). The son he sent off to South America has managed to track him down (everyone else believes he died in the hurricane), setting a series of events in motion. Of course there’s a serial killer in this small town, too. If we treat Dexter’s illness as an addiction, he has a major relapse. Now, instead of seeing visions of his dead foster father, he is haunted by Deb, which is probably the best part of the series. Deb and her creatively foul mouth. I also quite liked the sheriff, who turns out to be a perceptive cop, and could see her leading a series of her own.

I also watched the Danish series The Chestnut Man on Netflix, which is quite good, and caught up with the first half of Ozark, Season 4, which continues to be tense, brutal and compelling. Every now and then I watch an episode or three of Night Court, which is free on IMDb-TV. I loved that show when it first ran and it stands up pretty well considering its age. A season 2 episode features Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian as an eccentric judge hearing a complaint about Harry Stone’s performance in the courtroom. It is genuinely funny with an unexpected gut-punch of emotion toward the end, something the show always managed to do so well.

Last night we watched Carole King and James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name on HBO Max. King and Taylor went on tour in 2010 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of their first concert together, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. They’re both in their sixties but, boy, do they still have it. Such great, uplifting songs. They rounded up a few of their original band from the 1970 tour, including bassist Leland Sklar (you probably would recognize him from Phil Collins videos) and drummer Russ Kunkel. We enjoyed every second of it.

I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, starring just about everyone. It wasn’t all what I expected, and certainly the last 30 minutes went in a very different direction from what I was anticipating/fearing. Pure noir, with some great performances. Not a feel-good movie, though. Noir never ends well. You just never know how bad it’s going to get.

Last weekend we watched The French Dispatch. Interesting but challenging. Mind-bending. We also watched Norwegian Wood, based on the Haruki Murakami novel. I’m getting near the end of Killing Commendatore, his most recent novel, which I’m reading to my wife. “There’s some strange shit going on,” was one of her most recent comments about the book. It’s long but it’s engrossing. An artist who is caretaking a house once owned by a famous Japanese painter finds a painting hidden in the attic. As soon as he unwraps it, strangeness of the sort that only Murakami can create is unleashed. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to describe a book that has an animate Idea (also a Metaphor)!

I’ve done a couple of interviews recently. What is the Stephen King Universe? went up on January 9 and I did another interview for the same channel in which we discuss Billy Summers, although that one hasn’t been posted yet. Then I was on Dark Tower Radio Episode 120: Dark Tower III The Wastelands Palaver. Brian Keene and I will record an episode of the Writers on Wax podcast at the end of the month to discuss the influence of music on our writing and, in particular, Dissonant Harmonies.

I did a length update for News from the Dead Zone at the end of January. Next Tuesday, my review of Gwendy’s Button Box will go up there. I interviewed King and Chizmar about the book a while back, but I’m not yet sure where that will appear. Stay tuned!

I became quite delinquent in updating my blog last year. I’m going to try to do better in 2022.

I wonder how we would have reacted in March 2020 if we’d known that, two years later, we would still be in the heart of the pandemic and in more-or-less total lockdown. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been very enthusiastic about the prospect. And yet, here we are. Working from home is the new normal for me and, I have to say, I don’t mind it at all. Quite like it in fact. I’ll probably never go back to the office full time again. My physical office has been given to someone else and, although I still have a phone extension there, it’s all virtual.

When the weather was milder we occasionally went to some local restaurants if we could eat out-of-doors, but a cold spell descended upon us last weekend. I haven’t been out of the house this year except to go to the mailbox, which is basically in our front yard. We mask up to go to the grocery store, although I might go back to ordering online for car delivery until we get past this…what is it, the sixth wave? For some strange reason last night, my dream-mind kept trying to recite the Greek alphabet.

We had a quiet holiday break. Back when it looked like the pandemic was easing up, we’d thought we might go to California to visit family, but once Omicron took hold we decided to stay put. We cooked meals, watched streaming, teleconferenced with family, and got some work done. I wrote and submitted a few short stories and did research for others. I also had to set up a new writing PC, which was a pain, but at least I don’t have to worry about the noises my 10-year old computer was making any more.

My to-do list for the first part of 2022 includes three more short stories to be written and two novellas, including one for Dissonant Harmonies II. I also hope to have some exciting news to announce next week.

A couple of nights ago, we watched Anxious People on Netflix. It’s based on the novel of the same name by Swedish author Fredrik Backman. At six 30-minute episodes, it makes for good binge-ing. It’s about a bank robber who flees the scene and takes a group of people attending a realtor’s open house hostage in a small Swedish town. The police force consists of a man and his son. When the hostage situation is resolved, the kidnapper has mysteriously vanished and the former hostages seem unusually reluctant to provide any details. It’s a heart-warming comedy about trying to do the right thing despite what the rules tell you to do. Quite charming.

Our major binge over the holidays was the 16-episode Korean melodrama Crash Landing on You. Sixteen 90-minute episodes, so it was quite a commitment. It’s about a Korean woman named Yoon Suri, head of her own fashion business and daughter of a wealthy businessman who has to assign a new head of his company after he’s released from prison for financial crimes. Shortly after he makes his decision (in addition to Suri, he has two older sons), while testing out a paraglider for her business, Suri is caught in an unusual storm and blown all the way into the DMZ between the Koreas, where she encounters a North Korean army captain. For various reasons, he decides to hide her from the government and try to get her back home. It’s a high-stakes dramedy (people can die) with lots of humor, too. The captain has four underlings who are terribly amusing, and the women in his village are hilarious. There are tons of complications to fill the 24 hours of the season, including a terrific villain we grew to loathe. It was interesting to see something set in that culture, about which we know so little. North Korean defectors served as consultants to help them get the details of their country as right as fiction will allow. The storytelling style was interesting, too. Flashbacks occurred without warning, which meant it took some time to orient ourselves to when something was happening, and they often revisited a scene we’d already seen, but either with more detail or from another character’s perspective. It was campy at times, and occasionally too repetitive, but we enjoyed it, often watching four or more episodes in a sitting. A number of scenes take place in Zurich, Switzerland, where I lived for a while in the late 1980s, so it was fun to see places I recognized in that city, as well as the familiar blue-and-white trams.

Publication news: My short story “The House of Sad Sounds” is now available in the anthology Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 6  and “Kane and Averill” came out this week in Black Cat Weekly #18. As the title indicates, the latter features my series detective Benjamin Kane.

I recently finished reading two books, one just after Christmas and one last night. They were The Man From Mittelwerk by M. Z. Urlocker, which comes out in April, and The Joy and Light Bus Company, the latest #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel by Alexander McCall Smith. I met Zack Urlocker (the Z. in M. Z. — M. is his brother Michael) at Bouchercon in Dallas in the beforetimes and we had a nice time chatting at dinner during one of the events. The novel is an interesting blend of war story, noir, cosmic horror and whodunit. I provided them with a blurb, something I’ve only done a few times in the past.

My sorriest list for 2021 is the one for the books I’ve read. I only managed to read 29 thus far (although I do hope to get one or two more in before the end of the year. A lot of my “free” time was taken up with writing projects and the rest was mostly watching TV and movies, as the previous two posts demonstrate. Over a third of the books I read this year were “bedtime books” that I read to my wife (the bold ones below). I read a lot more in 2020, when I was judging the YA Edgar Awards.

My list of reviews is, naturally, quite short as well. The reviews are linked in the list below. I did manage to read half a novel on Christmas Eve, so maybe 2022 will be better. In every respect!

• Never Far Away by Michael Koryta
• Later by Stephen King
• Sleeping Beauties, Vol. 1 (Graphic Novel) by Rio Youers and Alison Sampson
• Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• Find You First by Linwood Barclay
• Lola On Fire by Rio Youers
• Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
• Billy Summers by Stephen King
• When a Stranger Comes to Town, edited by Michael Koryta
• How to Raise an Elephant by Alexander McCall Smith
• Where They Wait by Scott Carson
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Home Stretch by Graham Norton
• The Peculiarities by David Liss
• How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook by Mystery Writers of America, edited by Lee Child With Laurie R. King
• The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir by Graham Norton
• My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop by Fannie Flagg
• Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay
• Arizona Dreams by Marsha DeFilippo
• Daughter of the Morning Star by Craig Johnson
• Silverview by John Le Carré
• In a Time of Distance: And Other Poems by Alexander McCall Smith
• Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen
• Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
• The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly
• The Man From Mittelwerk by M. Z. Urlocker
• The Joy and Light Bus Company by: Alexander McCall Smith

The last movie I saw in a theater was 1917 in January 2020, and I don’t expect that to change soon. We are perfectly content to enjoy new movies as they become available on streaming platforms. I know a lot of people are missing out on the experience of seeing things on the big screen, but we aren’t prepared to take that risk yet. More than anything else, we’re missing out on movie popcorn!

We averaged about a movie a week throughout the year. This doesn’t include the seventeen times I watched Yellow Submarine with my granddaughter, who grew briefly obsessed with it. I’d never seen it before, but now I know it inside and out.

Ironically, the first film we watched was called Death to 2020, and if we’d known what 2021 had in store for us we might have given it a pass. A few of the films we watched were second viewings inspired by fondness for a particular movie experience. We really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou when it first came out, so we enjoyed it again. We took a trip down memory lane with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I re-watched The Dead Zone to get ready to contribute a 5-minute segment to the DVD commentary of a new edition. We’d never seen The Whales of August, but have since rectified that situation.

Do we consider Get Back a movie? Or three?

Some of the movies were documentaries or comedy specials. One was a filmed production of Come from Away, which I’ve always wanted to see. I introduced my wife to Attack the Block, which I’d seen for the first time in 2020 and to The Maltese Falcon, which one of my all-time favorite films. We got a kick of out The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, especially the way Sslma Hayek went thirteen-letter-curse-word to thirteen-letter-curse-word with Samuel L. Jackson.

If I had to narrow the list down to a top 10, it would look something like this, in chronological order:

• Promising Young Woman
• The Dig
• Nomadland
• Minari
• The Father
• Ammonite
• Nobody
• CODA
• Pig
• Belfast

but I’m really bad at making this sort of list, so I’m not sure I believe it myself! Here is the full list.

Before I get into my overview of TV, I have an addition to make to my publication list for 2021. Today is publication day for the anthology Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 6, which contains my story “The House of Sad Sounds.” The paperback edition is available now from Amazon and the eBook edition will follow shortly.

I watched a lot of TV this year. Usually it was in the evening with my wife, or in the early morning while I was burning off some calories on the elliptical trainer. Some of it was on weekend afternoons after I’d put in the hours on whatever I was writing.

I revisited some old, familiar, favorite series this year. I watched all six seasons of Lost and the same number of seasons of Justified and I am currently on season 3 of my rewatch of Fringe. There are several broadcast series I always watch, including The Rookie, NCIS, Survivor and Grey’s Anatomy.

My wife and I watched all three seasons of Ashes to Ashes, which I’d seen previously, and I caught up on two seasons of Shetland, bringing me current. I’d also somehow managed to not see the final season of The Deuce, but I rectified that.

My wife and I enjoy PBS series like All Creatures Great and Small, Atlantic Crossing, Miss Scarlett and the Duke and Call the Midwife. We also watched The Mandalorian, the original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the latest season of Last Tango in Halifax, The Good Fight, 63 Up, all three seasons of The Kominsky Method and both seasons of Staged. We watched the first three seasons of Mozart in the Jungle, but got distracted. We just finished the latest (and last) season of Lost in Space and are keeping up with Star Trek: Discovery. We also enjoyed Bridgerton, Behind Her Eyes, Mare of Easttown and Hacks and got a great kick out of Only Murders in the Building.

My favorite discovery of the year was the British crime show Line of Duty. Watched all six seasons of that one. Liked the final season of Bosch and loved the final two-part season of Money Heist. The final season of Goliath was also very good. I was taken by surprise to discover there was a new CSI: Vegas, which was decent. Not groundbreaking in any way, but it was good to see some old characters again.

Although I am not terribly well educated in the Marvel universe, I liked WandaVision. I was intrigued by Midnight Mass–it was such an inspired concept, well executed. A series that took me by surprise was Chapelwaite, inspired by the King story “Jerusalem’s Lot.” I went into it not expecting much and was very pleasantly surprised at how good it was.

We still have the rest of Doctor Who to watch, as well as season 2 of The Morning Show.

There were other shows and series. You can find the whole list here if you’re interested.

It has been a long time since I posted to my blog. I keep intending to, but there are so many other shiny objects out there to occupy my waking hours, that I kept putting it off. As the end of the year approaches, I feel inspired to do my annual recap posts, starting with a vanity post about what I’ve written and published this year.

After a somewhat lackadaisical writing year in 2020, I had a pretty productive year. I started off by dipping my toe in the world of self-publishing. I had a long crime story that didn’t seem to fit anywhere commercial, so I decided to figure out how to format it for Amazon Kindle as an eBook. Turns out it’s a lot easier than I thought. The hardest part was creating a cover–I’m no one’s graphic artist. Still, I found a great stock photo and put together something that satisfied me. “The Ogilvy Affair” went up as an eBook in early January. Then I decided I’d like to have some print copies, so I reformatted the book, got a slightly different cover image and published it in trade paperback a week or two later.

Can I retire thanks to the revenue stream that novella generated? Not quite–but it did earn enough to pay for the stock photos I purchased for the cover and then some. More than a number of my short stories…and it does continue to trickle in a few sales every month. I’d probably do better if I promoted it more, but I haven’t had the time or inclination to give it a big push. I am fond of the story, though, and I’ve had a few good notices about it.

My other major fiction publication was my horror novella “The Dead of Winter,” which appeared in a collaboration with Brian Keene called Dissonant Harmonies. This is the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever published. We got a nice writeup/interview in ITW’s The Big Thrill when the book came out. I read a section of the book on Clubhouse and I posted the excerpt on YouTube.

The book was based on an idea Brian and I bandied about for a few years, inspired by the kinds of music we like to listen to while writing. We each made up a playlist for the other author to listen to exclusively while working on a novella. After a bit of a kerfuffle with another publisher, the book came out from Cemetery Dance in April, issued as a hardcover for their collectors’ club and as a paperback and eBook for the general population. I’ve been gratified by the reception for “The Dead of Winter,” and Brian and I recently decided to write Dissonant Harmonies 2 in 2022, so I’m busy assembling songs for Brian to listen to for that project.

My story “Tupilaq” was one of five winners of the Cemetery Gates Society’s first monthly flash-fiction contest (defined as 500-1500 words). The contest’s theme was Arctic/Antarctic.

One of my more interesting writing experiences resulted in the story “Blaze of Glory,” published in Voices of Varuna, a Renegade Legion Universe anthology. I’m not a tabletop gamer and I knew nothing about the RLU, but I put together a pitch for a story and was gratified to have it accepted so I could work with this cool group of people. For a while I thought maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew, the project was so daunting. I’ve written stories in the Doctor Who, the X-files and Sherlock Holmes universes, but in those cases I was already pretty knowledgeable about the background details. Here I was at sea for a while. But the creators of the game had an amazing amount of research material available for us writers and were available to answer any of our questions. We collaborated on a Discord channel, so it really was like a group effort. The final draft of my story was vastly different than my original pitch, but I was gratified to hear that a concept I’d created for it would be adopted by the game-makers as part of their bible. It was an intense project, but I’m really glad to have had the opportunity.

Other short stories that came out in 2021:

• Superspreader, 99 Tiny Terrors, Pulse Publishing
• The Vacuum Gang, Die Laughing: An Anthology Of Humorous Mysteries, Mystery Weekly
• Escape Velocity, Autumn Noir: An Unsettling Reads Anthology
• The Vengeance, Smoke in the Stars, Hawks Barrow Press

“Aeliana” from Shining in the Dark was also published in Russian, Polish and Greek this year.

I submitted a story to the LeVar Burton Reads “Origins and Encounters” Contest and was notified that I’d made it into the top 100 and then the top 25, but that was as far as I got. Still, I’m pretty pleased to have made it that far.

I published a few pieces of non-fiction this year, too:

• The Green Mile and alt.books.stephen-king, The Stephen King Catalog 2022 Calendar
• 2021: A Year in Review–plus what’s coming in 2022, The Stephen King Catalog 2022 Calendar
• Texas: A State of Crime, Mystery Readers Journal, Volume 37, No. 3, Fall 2021.
• The Dead Zone Blu-ray, Shout Factory Collector’s Edition, commentary track with Dr. Steve Haberman and Constantine Nasr
• Untitled, How to Write a Mystery, Scribner, April 27, 2021

The entry in the MWA Handbook was only a few dozen words, but it was nice to be included in this project. Also, my contribution to the commentary track of the new edition of The Dead Zone was a first for me that came about because of my friendship with Constantine Nasr, who I first met on the set of The Mist.

I also wrote a three-part essay about King’s crime fiction for News from the Dead Zone and reviewed Billy Summers and the streaming series Lisey’s Story and Chapelwaite.

I spent October putting the finishing touches on a non-fiction project that will be released late in 2022, but I can’t say anything more about it until the official announcement. I’m very pleased with it, though!

One of the more favorable repercussions of the pandemic is the increase in online interviews and podcasts. I think I can safely say that I was interviewed more often in 2021 than at any other time in my writing career. Here is the list, with links:

• Two Old Farts Discuss Science Fiction: Season 2, Episode 4: On Writing (November 2021)
• The Magic of Stephen King (October 2021)
• The New Panic Room Radio Show (October 2021)
• Kingcast podcast (Patreon), August 2021
• The Dark Tower Series – Explained, August 2021
• Stephen King Archives Vol. 1: “Jhonathan and the Witchs”, The Aftermath, and “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” The Losers’ Club®: A Stephen King Podcast,  July 2021
• Two Old Farts Discuss Science Fiction: Season 1, Episode 7: The Dead Zone (June 2021)
• Voices of Varuna Author Panel, June 2021
• Dead Headspace, episode 88, May 2021
• The Big Thrill: Up Close, May 2021
• Stephen King Rules, April 2021
• Abstract Transmissions, April 2021
• The Stephen King Podcast, March 2021
• Stephen King-Italia intervista Part 1, Part 2, March 2021
• Kingcast podcast, February 2021
• Out for Blood podcast, January 2021

So, all in all, a pretty decent year, I have to say, coronavirus notwithstanding.

My wife and I received our second Moderna vaccine doses on Sunday morning. Out of an abundance of caution, I decided to take yesterday off from the day job, as I’d heard there was a strong possibility of side-effects on the day following the injection. After the first dose, my only issue was tenderness around the injection site.

Turns out, I didn’t have anything more significant than that from the second dose, either. A little ringing in my ears when I woke up yesterday morning and a mild headache. Maybe a little less energy than usual. My wife, though, woke up a little after midnight shivering from chills. I dug out her heating pad and that seemed to help, although it took a good half hour for the tremors to subside. She experienced flu-like symptoms (fever, muscle ache, general malaise) for most of Sunday morning into the afternoon, but not bad enough to keep her out of circulation.

Today, two days out, all seems to be fine. In a little less than two weeks we will be fully immunized and ready to, perhaps, emerge from hibernation a little. We’re not going to go to the movie theater or dine indoors at restaurants, but we might go see dentists and eye doctors and all the other routine things that we’ve been shunning this past year.

Cemetery Dance Publications announced the release of the trade paperback edition of Dissonant Harmonies this week. This is my collaboration with Brian Keene, a two-novella collection that includes my story “The Dead of Winter.” It’s in-stock at CD now and can also be ordered from Amazon. An eBook edition is also forthcoming.

Inspired by specially curated mixtapes, Bev Vincent and Brian Keene present two new spine-chilling novellas…

As a blizzard descends upon the sleepy town of Bayport, Rhode Island, brothers Joey and Frank Shaw investigate the mysterious disappearances of several townsfolk. After the discovery of strange tunnels, tunnels that only Joey can see, the trio suspect something is lurking beneath the snowbound town. Something burrowing. Something hungry. And it looks like Joey might be next in The Dead of Winter. 

Did you imagine the world vanishing to a flood or a comet, the hand of God or nuclear war? What if it started with something as innocuous as the Berenstain Bears, and something known as the Mandela Effect? Barricaded in a seedy motel room, one man makes sense of love, loss, and life as the end of the world looms. Do you see what he sees? Do you know what he knows?

Since the book was inspired by our respective playlists given to each other for inspiration, I set up a Spotify playlist featuring many of the songs that inspired this book. The first 24 tracks are the songs I gave to Brian (plus a few B-sides that didn’t make the cut), although there are a few substitutions because not all the songs I picked are on Spotify. The last 16 tracks are the ones Brian Keene sent to me.

I’ll be reading from my novella at Brian Keene’s Clubhouse on Monday, April 5 at 7 PM Central. Check out my Facebook or Twitter feeds for links as we get closer. You have to have an invitation to this new social media platform and I’m not entirely sure how that works yet.

I recently did a podcast interview with Lou Sytsma, which you can listen to here, and a two-part video self-interview for Stephen King Italia that you can find here: Part 1 | Part 2.

Recent movies: We enjoyed (with subtitles) Attack the Block, the British alien invasion movie from a decade or so ago. Then Minari, which is a terrific “American Dream” film about a Korean family who move to Arkansas to fulfill the father’s dream of growing Korean vegetables for fellow immigrants. It’s full of the ups and downs of ordinary life and is thoroughly charming. Then we saw The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. A very disorienting film told essentially from the perspective of a man suffering dementia. It’s hard to say we enjoyed it (I don’t think we were meant to enjoy it), but the performances are terrific.

Streaming: I finished WandaVision, which was highly entertaining and I’m well into Season 3 of Lost. We enjoyed the second season of Staged (Hulu), and finally got to see 63 Up (Britbox) and the companion documentary 7 Up and Me (Amazon). We’ve been following the series since 42 Up and have been waiting for the most recent installment to make it to America. Last night we watched the first two episodes of Ginny and Georgia, which is like The Gilmore Girls if Rory and her mom didn’t have wealthy benefactors.

Reading: finished two terrific thrillers (Find You First by Linwood Barclay and Lola On Fire by Rio Youers) and currently well into Dream Girl by Laura Lippman. The latter will ring some bells with Stephen King fans — I’m thinking particularly of Misery and “Secret Window, Secret Garden.”

The last time we went to a restaurant was on March 12, 2020. We had pizza at Bellagreen, one of our favorite neighborhood establishments. We’d been out to eat three other times earlier that month. Since then, other than ordering food to be picked up or delivered on five or six occasions, we’ve been making all our meals at home. I haven’t gained a pound!

On March 16, my boss told our group he was giving permission to anyone who wanted to do so to work from home for the foreseeable future. I packed up my laptop and everything I thought I might need and went home that morning, stopping at Best Buy on the way to pick up a terrabyte drive. I have only been back to that building a few times since then, always on weekends, to pick up things I needed from my office and, ultimately, to pack up completely and move everything to my home office. Our remote-working tenure has been made permanent.

My wife, too, has been working from home since then. We’ve only gone out to get groceries or other necessities. We’ve converted out grocery shopping to online/pick-up, which has worked out better than expected for us and we might continue to use that when the world returns to whatever will be considered normal. I’m still using the same tank of gas I bought a year ago. No kidding!

A couple of weeks ago, we received our first coronavirus vaccination. At the end of the month, we’ll get our second shot. By mid-April, we’ll be considered fully immunized. We might loosen our lockdown protocols a little after that…but not much. Not planning on going to restaurants or movie theaters any time soon, but we’ll consider going to the dentist, for example. Depends on how bad the next wave is a few weeks from now, when the stupid decisions of Texas politicians play out. Spring break, 100% occupancy, no mask mandate…how dumb do you have to be to get elected governor of Texas, anyway?

I have a brief contribution in How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America. My advanced review copy arrived last week, and I look forward to spending some time with it.

I was a guest on the KingCast podcast a few weeks ago. It was recorded the weekend before the big freeze. We joked a little about staying warm, little realizing how cold things were fixin’ to get. You can listen to it wherever podcasts are distributed, including here.

Here’s the “blurb” for it: Frequent Stephen King collaborator and author of The Road to the Dark Tower, Bev Vincent, chats with the boys about his long history with King, what it was like to read the final three Dark Tower books a full two years before they were published, fields some truly nerdy Dark Tower questions and has to explain to the dumb-dumbs that host this podcast what “orthogonality” means.

My three-part exploration “King of Crime” is now up at News from the Dead Zone (Cemetery Dance Online), culminating in my review of Later. Part I | Part II | Part III

I should probably mention again my novella at Amazon, The Ogilvy Affair, which is available as an eBook and a paperback.

Movies we watched recently: Nomadland, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, I Care a Lot, News of the World. I Care a Lot is bad people doing bad things. Wasn’t sure who to root for, but it was fun watching Rosamund Pike go up against Peter Dinklage. News of the World has Tom Hanks coming to the rescue of a young girl who was raised by Native Americans. The Civil War has just ended and everyone in Texas is too concerned about figuring out the new status quo to worry about one lost little girl. Nomadland is about a woman whose husband and the town they lived in both died, so she packs up a van and hits the road, joining the ranks of other nomadic people. The United States vs. Billie Holiday wasn’t easy to watch. What a hard life she had, and the government didn’t make it any easier.

I’m continuing my re-watch of Lost. I’m now about halfway through the third season. I’m continually amazed by how much of that show I’ve forgotten about. It’s good–I can be surprised by certain turns of events. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see things mentioned and know how they’re going to play out. First mention of Jacob. First time Nikki and Paolo emerge from the background. Knowing what Kate and Sawyer are being forced to do.

I’ve also dipped into WandaVision. I’m four episodes in and it’s just starting to make sense. I was a full episode in before I made the complete connection between the two main characters and the MCU movies I’ve seen. My wife and I enjoyed the adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes. I had the advantage of having read the book, so it was fun to hear my wife’s guesses about what was going to happen. We also checked out the excellent four-part 2006 adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Ruth Wilson, and we’re five episodes into Bridgerton, which takes place in an alternate universe where mad King George married a Black woman.