Bev Vincent

Our new ChromeCast gadget arrived on Friday. Cool thing. Plugs into the HDMI port and USB port on the back of the new flatscreen TV and allows you to broadcast from Netflix and YouTube. Setup was simple and when you pick a video on Netflix you get the option of showing it on the iPad or Chromecasting it. It doesn’t tie up the iPad, either. In fact, you can turn it off once the video is running. Or play Angry Birds. I’m pleased.

I wrote a couple of book reviews this weekend: The Hunter and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett and The Abominable by Dan Simmons. I also did an “end of season 1” essay about Under the Dome for News from the Dead Zone.

The first thing I watched with our new Netflix account was the five-episode UK series The Fall. Gillian Anderson plays a DSI (superintendent) from the Met who is detailed to Belfast to conduct the 28-day review of a stalled, high-profile murder investigation. She isn’t there long before she wants to tie the case to another, though the local officials resist her efforts to do so. She is quite naive about Northern Ireland politics, and she also has a couple of interesting personality quirks. On the other side of the equation is the killer, Jamie Dornan (from Once Upon a Time). He’s a family man with two young kids, a BTK sorta guy where no one suspects him. He’s also a grief counselor and fairly good at it, though his mind tends to wander. It’s an interesting study of the way people can have two separate personalities, but it’s not multiple personality disorder, rather a kind of compartmentalization that begins to fall apart. The ending isn’t quite a cliffhanger, but almost, and the show has been picked up for a second series. Highly recommended.

Then I plowed through the seven episodes of Derek, written and directed by Ricky Gervais. Derek works in a senior citizens home and is kind of slow, but he is the kindest person on the planet. Like many British comedies, it is a combination of pathos, bathos and crudity. Some shows have “comic relief” and others, like this, have “crudity relief.” It’s set up almost like a documentary and it’s guaranteed to tug at the heart strings of even the most stolid viewer. A little manipulative, but, all in all, tender.

Twitter was full of wailings and gnashings of teeth over the final episode of Dexter. I don’t know what kind of ending would have satisfied everyone, or even most people, but clearly this one wasn’t it. I would have been satisfied, I think, if it had ended with the cut-to-black in Argentina, but I understand what they were aiming for. Over the course of the past eight years, Dexter has come to understand and develop his feelings. He began to enjoy them—even revel in them, especially when it came to Hannah. Suddenly he was acting on them, giving everything up to follow true love. But then he discovered the flip side of feelings. They aren’t all good, and some of them will wrench your heart out. Too high a price to pay, he decided. He moved as far away from Miami as he could get (and still be in the US), to as remote a place as possible, where he wouldn’t have to interact with people any more. He’s not likely to stumble upon anyone who needs killing there, either. His eyes were dead and cold at the end. Everything he’d gained was lost. I think it will take some time to settle in, but it wasn’t a terrible ending, just a sad one.

Poor Jesse Pinkman. He did so good to get himself free of his chains and out of his pit, only to find himself recaptured a few seconds later. Dude is seriously desperate and not thinking things through, as Todd so clearly demonstrated. The guy is such a sociopath. He says the things he thinks he needs to say (“sorry for your loss” to Walt, “this isn’t personal” to Andrea). He’s smitten by Lydia and does not get her cafe spycraft notion of sitting back to back, so he ended up talking to the back of her head, which was even more conspicuous than if they’d shared a table.

Was it just me, or did Saul’s suitcases look lighter than air when he left the vacuum repair shop? Was that his farewell from the series? If so, I’ll miss him. And then Walt ended up alone in New Hampshire with his barrel o’money, dollar store glasses and do-it-yourself chemo. He tried to be the man and stick his own vein, but he couldn’t do it. Here’s my take on the ending. After his catastrophic call to Flynn, he decided to turn himself in, but when he saw his former colleagues from the billion dollar pharma company disavow his contribution to their enterprise, he saw red and went back into full Heisenberg. Though he’s clearly after the Nazis, I wonder if he’ll pay them a visit on the way back to show them his idea of fun with chemistry.

The finale is next week. Title: Felina. What the hell is that? An anagram of “finale,” or something more?

Very sad to hear of the passing of Bob Booth, aka Papa Necon, this weekend. He was an author, an editor and the founder of my favorite horror writers’ convention. He had been battling cancer all this year, but he got special dispensation to go to Necon in July and was even granted permission to have a drink a day.

I can’t say that I knew him well, but we were both “morning people,” at least at Necon, so I often met up with him out in the courtyard at the RWI campus long before most other “campers” were up. We talked about this and that during these quiet moments. One year he told me about his work laying out The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger for Donald M. Grant.

This year I only got to sit with him for a few  minutes during a break in the action as he talked about some of the issues he was having, but I’m glad I changed my mind at the last minute and went. He was well-loved by his family and by his Necon family.

Have you ever fallen out of love with a short story while you were working on it? That happened to me recently. I had a story that was going along pretty well. I had most of it in my head. I knew where it was going, and what the final line was. But I got to a certain point and couldn’t even bring myself to open the document and look at it any more. This went on for days.

The main problem was that it had gotten way too convoluted. I wanted this to be a punchy story. In and out in 3000 words or less. All of a sudden I was faced with writing a scene that I knew was going to be at least 1000 words on its own. The story was tying itself into a Gordian knot and I didn’t like it any more. It felt plotted and stiff.

I ignored it for several days last week and again on Saturday. I found other things to do. Yesterday, however, I decided to at least read it through and figure out if it was salvageable. I started rewriting from the get go. A lot of the original material either went out the window, was trimmed considerably, or reorganized. Then I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I found a way to combine two scenes, simplifying the plot immensely. I made it to the end, and the first draft came in at 3000 words.

I went through it twice this morning and made some changes, but I’m much happier with it than I’d been recently. Another editing pass or two and I’m going to send it out into the world.

I finished The Double by George Pelecanos, which starts out as a Travis McGee novel before morphing into a Pelecanos, full of his trademark attention to such details as what everyone wears, what music they listen to, the names of every street and landmark they pass, and a violent finale. I was a bit bothered by something stupid Spero Lucas did late in the book that had violent (and, to my mind, foreseeable) repercussions, but it was a swift tale well told.

I started The Hunter and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett. The stories in this collection are either previously unpublished or uncollected, and most of them represent a significant difference from the better-known tales. One of them is very strange indeed, about a young detective (11 days on the job) summoned to a house where inexplicable stuff is happening and he sort of fumbles his way toward a resolution of sorts. I guess it’s supposed to be a parody of the detective genre. I like the one about the jewelry heist.

We watched the final episode of Season 2 of Longmire this weekend. In the final minutes we learned that much of what we thought we knew about the death of the guy who killed Long­mire’s wife was wrong. Even better, the characters learned that their various assumptions about what happened were wrong, too. Long­mire thought Henry killed the guy and Henry thought another guy killed him, but it wasn’t any of the above. I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know if any of this plays out in them, but it was a good cliff-hanger way to end the season.

I haven’t been saying much about Under the Dome, but we’re still watching and I’ll probably do a season-end summary for FEARnet or somewhere. My wife hated Natalie Zea’s character with a passion and was very pleased by her fate.

My wife is not going to be happy about this week’s episode of Dexter. She likes Vogel (and Charlotte Rampling) a lot. Unlike with Breaking Bad, things aren’t ramping up to a fever pitch yet. The addition of a storm is an interesting touch, but it looks like it’s all going to come down to a race for the gate at the airport instead of a bloodbath. I don’t know why they don’t take a boat to Cuba or some other place manageable and go on from there. I’m glad Quinn and Deb are getting back together. That gives Deb some continuity after whatever happens next.

Telephone calls like the one Hank and Marie had near the end of Breaking Bad last night are usually bad omens. I can’t see how Hank and Gomez are going to make it out of the desert alive. Did neither of them have a badge to show? Not that it would have likely done them much good. I really liked the way that all came together. Walt trying to draw Jesse out, not realizing that Hank had his cell phone, and then Jesse turning around and getting Walt’s goat big time. Hitting him where he lived. The money was what it was all about, after all. Knowing that he’s going to die (and that seems clearer than ever now), he couldn’t bear losing the one thing that had gotten this ball rolling in the first place. He blurted out all kinds of incriminating statements. I hope that was recorded somewhere if Hank and Gomez go down in flames. And what about Jesse? Can he slink off while the bullets are flying? And if he does, then what? The con job they played on Saul’s guy was brilliant, too. “Hank, why are there brains in the garbage can?” Poor Saul, trying to de-drug his car. He didn’t even get a friends-and-family discount.

It is surprisingly difficult to deem a short story “finished” and to send it out into the world. My writing progress for the weekend consisted of taking a 4300 word short story and turning it into a 4000 word story. This is part of writing: unwriting, or editing, or revising. I don’t know how many distinct drafts I created over the weekend. At least three in print and maybe six or seven on the computer. I finally decided I had reached the point where it was time to set it free, so I submitted it. It went to a cool “tie-in” project, so fingers crossed.

I’m working my way through The Abominable by Dan Simmons. It’s a big, dense books, so it’s taking a while. I’m about 400 pages in (out of ~650). Like The Terror, it is a “cold” book. Frostbite cold, at times. I’m working my way up Mount Everest at the moment. The detail of what it’s like to climb a mountain is amazing.

I’m not sure my heart can withstand five more episodes of Breaking Bad and three more of Dexter.

The big events out of this week’s Breaking Bad were the “confession” and Jesse’s awakening from his trance. Of course Hank’s “interview” with Jesse went nowhere (too soon). This led to the most awkward double date ever and the handing over of the damning video, which has just enough truth in it to make it hard to refute, even if Marie thinks the optimal solution is for Walt to kill himself. Of course Walt had to figure out what Jesse told Hank and of course he’d try to play him like a violin, but finally Jesse said, “enough” and called Walt on his BS.  It’s impossible to tell whether the hug was real or not. The bit with the cigarette pack was a little too subtle, if you ask me. Confused a lot of people, judging by online commentary, primarily because the connection between Saul’s bodyguard and the ricin cigarette has never been underscored. Still, Aaron Paul had two of the best scenes of the series, one with Walt and one with Saul. And yet I think he’s not going to strike the match. Walt’s house didn’t looked burned in the semi-season’s cold opening. Speaking of cold—I’d be afraid that vending machine gun would blow up if fired.

I was hoping Dexter and Hannah would make it to Argentina, but now that they’ve stated that as their plan with three episodes to go, I doubt that’s going to happen. I loved the dinner scene between Hannah and Deb. That was priceless. I had my suspicions about his neighbor’s boyfriend, but never made the connection to the brain surgeon. The preview that contains scenes from the last three episodes is dizzying. It looks like everyone is going to be involved, including Deb’s boss, who has been floating along without having much import through these first nine. It looks like U.S. Marshall Curtis Lemansky (sic) wandered in from an episode of The Shield.