Bev Vincent

The promised chill in the air arrived yesterday afternoon. It made it up to the mid-sixties this afternoon, but it’s back down to the forties tonight. The Houston Chronicle has a sidebar title that says, “Just seems wrong: It’s warmer in Toronto than Houston.” We have an outdoor workday planned for tomorrow, so I don’t mind at all that the day is going to start off cool. Should keep the mosquitoes subdued, too.

I’ve finally gotten around to fulfilling my self-made promise to start working on a novel again. I have one complete chapter from a couple of years ago that I workshopped with a group of fellow writers at a session in San Antonio that generated positive feedback and lots of notes, but I haven’t looked at it since. However, I haven’t stopped thinking about  it, either, and recently took a research trip to the setting and recorded an hour of video for reference.

I’ve decided to use Scrivener this time out, and after reviewing the tutorials I’m quite excited about the prospect. Scrivener allows you to write in scenes that you can manipulate like index cards, which is cool. However, it also allows you to attach all of your research into a single workspace instead of in random printouts or documents. I can link in my video, for example, and pull it up without leaving the program. If I find websites that have research info, I can just pop the URL into the research folder and there it persists.  You can build out character profiles and notes and attach photographs of inspirations from the web or elsewhere. They don’t have to be orderly cards, either. You can create one of those haphazard corkboards that you often see on conspiracy shows where pictures and notes overlap. Simply importing the existing chapter this morning and assembling the workspace has me feeling very enthusiastic about getting down to work again.

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as bemused to be evicted on Survivor in a long time as Andrea was this week. She was blindsided, but she took it well. Seeing as how she was trying to orchestrate her own blindside, it seemed particularly fitting. The only truly strategic player left in the game is Cochrane, but he’s got a big target on his forehead. If he makes it to the end, he wins. If he doesn’t, though, it becomes anyone’s game and it means that the final two or three is going to be made up of people whose strategy was mostly to not have a strategy, and it seems odd that that will be rewarded. Erik has been playing well, but he doesn’t have a plan. Brenda is the only one of the remaining group other than Cochrane who I’ve actually heard discussing strategy, but even her not so much. Unless Eddie can start winning some immunity challenges, he’s doomed, too, I think.

I thought they were going to cast F. Murray Abraham as Moriarty on Elementary but he turned out to be merely another minion. I almost skipped the show based on the teaser trailers but I’m really enjoying it. I’m also thinking about checking out a new show starting in a few weeks called Motive. It’s a Canadian show that uses a similar format to Columbo. It stars Kristin Lehman from The Killing and Lauren Holly from NCIS.

Hannibal is fascinating, too. They’ve made some interesting casting choices: Laurence Fishburn as Crawford, for example. They turned Freddy Lounds into Freddie, a woman. Raul Esparza, the district attorney from Law & Order: SVU, is the smarmy and smug Dr. Chilton. This week, we got a look at the cell that Hannibal will ultimately occupy—the current resident is a delightful Eddie Izzard—and met a proto-Clarice played by Anna Chlumsky who was just a tad too smart for her own good. The show certainly doesn’t flinch when it comes to the violence, and I’m starting to enjoy Dr. Lecter’s little dinners, where he feeds the catch of the week to the protagonists. Gina Torres had an impressive episode or two, too, helping to ground the show in human interest.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was an anthology called The Appalachian Undead that contained my story “Sitting Up With the Dead.” For a variety of reasons, that book was forced out of print by the publisher. Like any good dead thing, it has risen once more as Mountain Dead. It contains most of the stories in the previous anthology, along with four new ones. The cover uses the same, fine illustration by Cortney Skinner, and once again you will find my story “Sitting Up With the Dead” within. According to Apex, it should be available in June.

I rarely put down a book without finishing it. However, I almost did that with The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling. I was almost halfway through it in December when I put it aside to read something that I needed to review. I didn’t pick it back up. It sat on the coffee table, its bright yellow-trimmed red cover screaming at me. I finally decided it was time to tackle it again last week. At first I was afraid that I’d be lost and have to go back to the beginning, but that proved to not be the case. Finally finished it yesterday. Would I recommend it to anyone? Not likely. I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books, so I don’t have anything to compare it against, but it’s a dreadful novel. The characters are all reprehensible and many of them are stock images who are primarily defined by their most conspicuous flaws. The death of a town councilman is the story’s motivator. Everyone else in town has an opinion about who should be his replacement and what should be the stands he takes on a couple of issues. Problem was, I didn’t care who got elected. I could never figure out who I was supposed to be championing, and I couldn’t see what the major crisis would be in the book’s climax. Just didn’t care. Didn’t like any of the characters. However, I finished it and can put it up on a shelf somewhere so I never have to have its loud cover chastising me again.

Books seldom take me by surprise as early on as did Naoko by Keigo Higashino. I’ve read two of his recent crime novels and tracked down a copy of this earlier work. I didn’t read the back cover copy. I assumed it would be a straight crime novel, especially since the cover says it won Japan’s top mystery prize. A man learns that his wife and daughter were on a bus that plummeted into a ravine and they were grievously injured. He rushes to the hospital. His young daughter is in a coma and not expected to survive. His wife was badly injured. Her face is covered with bandages. Then she dies and is buried. Aha, I think. It’s not really his wife. The guy is going to think his wife is dead but she really isn’t. Mistaken identity or, perhaps, a deliberate act of subterfuge on her part. An opportunity to escape the marriage. After all, the book is named for her character. However, that’s not what it’s about at all, and the revelation just a chapter or so later took me very much by surprise. I’m curious to see how it will turn out.

So the master spy got burned on Survivor this week. It’s funny that Michael, the previous evictee, in his Ponderosa video, singled out Phillip as the one person he didn’t want to see eliminated next because he didn’t want to have to deal with him without someone else there as a buffer. That tribal council will go down in history as one of the most entertaining. I was glad to see that Eddie and Malcolm actually did get votes after Malcolm produced not one but two immunity idols and declared the three amigos safe and that they would be voting for Phillip. And thus began the scrambling. For a moment I thought Malcolm wasn’t going to use his idol, which he might have gotten away with, but he would have looked pretty silly if he’d been eliminated. Probst seemed to be enjoying himself, trying to keep up with all the mini-dramas going on at once, using his imaginary clicker to try to pause and capture what was happening. Question is, can the three amigos leverage this into a shift in the balance of power? Without Phillip around to tell people how to vote, they might be able to swing things their way. It won’t take much.