Bev Vincent

Better luck with the bread machine last night. The yeast in the old packet I’d used the night before had apparently moved on to wherever yeast goes when it dies. Bread and molasses for breakfast this morning. Yum! (My wife thinks it’s gross.)

I started a new short story this morning and wrote a thousand words. I expect it will be less than 2500 when I’m finished. I’ve been thinking about this story for a while. It features characters I’ve used a few times before, so there’s a certain comfort in returning to them. I think I’m overwriting it at this point, but I’ll trim the excess on revision. I have to wait until I get to the end to decide how much of what I’ve put down is essential to the story and how much of it is just stuff rolling around inside my head.

I’m almost finished reading The Dinner by Herman Koch, which will be out next week. The author is Dutch and apparently this, his sixth, is his breakout novel, selling over a million copies in Europe. The whole thing takes place during a five-course dinner at an upscale restaurant, the kind where the servers won’t leave you alone and the manager explains every course in detail. Four people are at the table. Two are brothers, the other two are their respective spouses. One of the brothers is a politician and a likely candidate for Prime Minister. The other brother is the narrator. The four have gathered to discuss some serious matters related to their sons, but it takes a while for them to get around to that. The book tackles some delicate subject matter, and doesn’t always espouse the PC viewpoint. The narrator starts out sympathetic (his disdain for his brother makes him seem like the better person) but flashbacks reveal much about him that might shift the reader’s attitude toward him. It’s being billed as a mystery in some quarters, but it really isn’t.

It’s nearly a year since I became a dual citizen but my Canadian pride shines through. Last night’s How I Met Your Mother was Canadian to the core. It was another Robin Sparkles episode, but it dealt with Robin’s darker days, when she decided to get out from under the “Sparkles” cloak and become…Alanis Morissette. In addition to the requisite video (which ran with a disclaimer on MuchMusic—yes, that’s a real channel), there was a “Behind the Music” piece that featured Geddy Lee, Dave Coulier (who had a close encounter with Alanis Morissette and starred on Full House with Bob Saget, who is the future voice of Ted Mosby), Paul Schaffer, Jason Priestley, Gino Vannelli, Dave Thomas (Bob and Doug McKenzie), hockey player Luc Robitaille,  Alex Trebek, one of the Barenaked Ladies, k.d. lang, and Alan Thicke, along with a healthy dose of Tim Hortons.

I went to the Montgomery County Book Festival on Saturday. I only heard about it a few days earlier thanks to a tweet from Murder By the Book, who ran the book concession. In the past, MCBF has been focused exclusively on YA, but they’re branching out to include adult readers and hope to expand the festival to an entire weekend. Jonathan Maberry was the opening speaker and Sherrilyn Kenyon was the closer. There were several author panels and signing sessions. I had a chance to say hi to Jonathan (I blurbed one of his books many years ago) and sit in on his speech and a panel, but had to leave before I managed to find Sherrilyn Kenyon. It was great, though, to see a lot of teens really excited about books and reading. They were buying books by the armload and talking about them over lunch among themselves. That’s encouraging.

I made a loaf of bread during the football game yesterday afternoon. I found an old packet of yeast in the deli drawer, so I decided to use that up. Bad move. Might as well have left the yeast out altogether. It’s amazing how heavy a loaf of bread feels when it’s unleavened. It felt like a boulder when I lifted it out of the breadmaker.

Yes, I watched the game. It proved to be vastly entertaining. The game itself started off looking like a blowout, then turned into a nail biter that went right down to the wire. Some people complained that the Ravens’ final play (the deliberate safety that chewed up the clock) was a low-down thing to do, but I’m of the opinion that if you can avail yourself of the rules, why not? It’s no worse than standing around and letting the clock wind down instead of making a play where you might inadvertently lose the ball to the other team.

There was only one controversial call (or, rather, a non-call), but there’s not much complaining about that one. The commentators felt that it could have gone either way, since pushing and holding offenses were committed by members of both teams. All in all, an exciting game. I didn’t have a stake in either team, so either outcome would have been fine with me.

I’m not a Beyonce fan. Don’t know any of her songs. Neither like nor despise her. I thought the halftime show was okay for what it was. I’ve seen worse. I was amused by the schism between opinions expressed via Twitter and those on Facebook, though. People on Twitter thought it was the most amazing thing ever and the general consensus on Facebook was that it sucked. I don’t know how to explain the split decision. Something generational?

The power outage was interesting, notably because of the jokes that it quickly spawned. My favorite was the one pictured here—the still from Airplane! Oreo managed to tweet an impromptu ad thanks to the fact that their marketing team and executive approvers were all in the same room during the game. It was free advertising, and it went viral. Good job. My favorite tweet was the one that said, “Ravens expected to resume playing in 7 to 10 minutes. No estimate on when 49ers might start playing.” At that point, the 49ers were way behind and had just been humiliated by an opening half 108 yard return for yet another touchdown. The tide shifted after the power came back on, though.

I remember the terrible commercials more than I do the good ones. None stood out like the little-boy Darth Vader ad from last year. The Bar Rafaeli ad for GoDaddy made me cringe. I liked the Big Bang Theory football promo. I thought they missed an opportunity in the Samsung Galaxy spot. As soon as I saw “Saul Goodman” from Breaking Bad, I remembered the scene where a cell phone went off in his desk and he opened the drawer to reveal dozens of burner phones. Well, maybe that’s not the message Samsung wants to send…

The “Jamaican” Volkswagen ad probably sounded better in the pitch room than what ended up on the screen. There was also the usual rash of ads where you don’t know who the sponsor is until the 29th or 59th second. Paul Harvey waxing philosophical about farmers. Nice, but what was it for? Some sort of truck, I gather. I think Gangnam Style has run its course, too. Other times, I just didn’t get the concept. The Black Sapphire beer ad: was that meant to appeal to people who drink like fish? The Tide commercial made me chuckle, as did a few others. The Willem Defoe car commercial was good. The one with Penny from Big Bang had its moments, too. The talking squirrels were funny.

Good teaser trailer for Iron Man 3, and for Star Trek: Into Darkness. The Fast and Furious one was boring. There was also a teaser for the Under the Dome series, but since they haven’t filmed a second of it yet, all they could do was animate the dust jacket.

I can’t remember the last time I went to the movie theater three times in a week. Three times in a month, even. My friend Danel Olson, editor of the Exotic Gothic series, asked me if I wanted to see Mama, about which I’d heard little other than generally favorable reviews, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

It might surprise you to learn that I’m not a particularly big fan of horror movies. I went through a phase in university where we watched every horror movie we could get our hands on (VHS was brand new, so suddenly you could see things when you wanted to), but over the past decade or two, my horror intake has been limited. I’m no big fan of the gross-out. The Walking Dead is about as far as I go in that direction these days.

I have to say that I was impressed by Mama. There wasn’t much grossness, and very few gratuitous scares. The tone was chilling and disturbing, and they did allow the monster to leap at the screen a few times, but mostly it was about a building sense of dread. Jessica Chastain (The Help) was in Joan Jett mode, with short black hair, tattooed arms and a rock-and-roll attitude. She plays a young musician who has no intention of having kids who finds herself in charge of two disturbed children. Her boyfriend’s brother went off the deep end and killed a few people. He also intended to kill his kids after he ran off the road and ended up in a cabin in the woods, but that didn’t work out so well for him. His daughters (1 and 3 at the time) spend the next five years in that cabin before their uncle’s search team finds them. They are feral, but resilient, especially the older girl. A psychologist puts this “family” in a nice house so he can observe the girls’ recovery.

I am in awe of the two little (Canadian) girls in this film. They are very young and the film demands a lot of them. They are focused and unaffected. It was a brave endeavor to build a film around such juvenile characters, and it could have been a disaster if the kids had been self-conscious or simply bad at conveying what was asked of them. They seemed so genuine, even when what they were asked to do was unusual. The creepiest part of the film was the way the kids scuttered around like animals after they were found.

At times, the mood and tone of the film reminded me of The Shining. Later it started to make me think of Bag of Bones. One horror trope they adhered to was that, no matter what time of day someone set out to find the cabin in the woods, it was always dark when they got there. The monster (a ghost, in a sense, but a different interpretation of what ghosts are) stays in the shadows for a long time. When it finally appears, it’s decently done, though it loses some of its impact. I thought I knew where they were headed in terms of an ending, and they did get there, but then they went further, with a rather surprising development beyond that. I’m not entirely happy with the staging of the finale, but on the whole I thought the film was very well done. There’s a character who gets a comeuppance that no one in the audience minded, which only says to me that the character was drawn too one-dimensionally. We all were rooting for this character’s violent demise. A tad too easy. The dream sequences were fascinating.

Danel teaches English at the college where there was a school shooting a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how tender emotions still were after the event. Though the campus is in what might be termed a “bad neighborhood,” and people have been robbed at the bus stop near the campus, this is the first time a gun was fired on the campus and it stole the sense that it was a safe haven. He told me about one student who was in the bathroom when the shooting took place. The student exited the bathroom to find the halls empty, then returned to the classroom and it was empty, too, along with the adjacent ones. Very Twilight Zone.

Our new elliptical trainer wasn’t the only thing that arrived at the house last night. I received a box from my editor containing a few galleys of my forthcoming book, The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy, which will be published by NAL on April 2.

It’s always cool to finally see what has been until now either a bucket of bits on the computer or a messy stack of printer paper finally in book form, albeit incomplete. This version is based on the copy-edited manuscript, but it does not reflect the changes I requested after proofreading the manuscript, nor, presumably, the official proofreader’s finds as well. So there are some mistakes. (Probably some others that none of us found, too. That’s the reality of publishing. There are always mistakes that slip past everyone.)

To see a larger image, click on the cover over yonder. Click here to see the back cover.

Tonight’s delivery: our new kitchen table. Which will require some assembly on my part, but which hopefully isn’t nearly as complicated as the exercise machine was.

As we get older and more comfortable, we are sometimes willing to pay people to do things. We don’t have a maid and I still cut the lawn. However, when we ordered a new exercise machine recently and were given the option of free shipping “to the door” and paying extra to have it brought inside, carried upstairs and assembled, it was a no-brainer. These things aren’t light, for one thing. For another, I have better things to do than spend “half an hour” assembling things like this.

Turns out it was a wise decision. It arrived last night near the end of the promised delivery window (isn’t that always the case?). Two fellows brought it in a transport (two transports, for some reason). One guy looked like Chris Rock and the other like Gregory Itzin (Henry Wilcox from Covert Affairs and Minelli from The Mentalist). “Itzin” warned me that it normally took them a couple of hours. It took three. No wonder—I looked at the assembly instructions and the picture you see here is Step 4. That’s right, one single step that involves putting together several dozen pieces. The accompanying description is two sentences long. Leave it to the experts, I say.

When they left (at nearly 9 pm), I gave them each a tip. “Chris Rock” said that was very nice of me. The usual response they got was “now get the hell out” followed by the slamming and locking of the door. I hope he was exaggerating.

We’ve been without an exercise machine for most of 2013. I probably should have waited until I was over the cold that I’ve been battling for the past day or two before breaking it in. It kicked my ass this morning, and that was on the easiest settings. I’m very pleased with our purchase, though. It seems solid—much moreso than its predecessor—and has some great features.

I revised the first half of my work in progress this morning. As expected, I cut the 400 word backstory section, boiling it down to a single paragraph. Even that might not survive the first real editing pass. I still have a little more to write to get to a finished first draft, but given the topsy turvy way this story is being written, I decided it was time to start sanding it into shape.

American Horror Story: Asylum concluded last night. I tried out the show in its first season with some trepidation. I don’t watch much horror in general, and most TV horror is hokey and derivative. AHS turned out to be derivative to the max (they threw in just about every horror trope in existence), but it all held together wonderfully. They shifted gears completely for season two, doing a Desperation/Regulators thing where most of the same cast played completely different and unrelated characters. Again, the show was a whirlwind tour-de-force effort that kept viewers completely off balance. You never knew what was going to happen next. Aliens! Exorcisms! Angels of Mercy! Mad Santa! And yet, for the most part, it was delightfully madcap. I don’t think the alien subplot contributed much, though it led to some nice grace notes in the finale, but otherwise season 2 was fun.

Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson were the glue that pulled the whole thing together. Lange ran the gamut, from incensed to insane to content, and if she doesn’t win awards then life isn’t fair. In the first season she mostly channeled A Streetcar Named Desire, and she did have her over-the-top moments in Asylum, but all in all she was brilliant. Lana Winters was the through-line, connecting the past to the present. I like how they tied the opening scene of episode 1 into it all. It makes perfect sense in retrospect that Johnny was in the asylum in the present. That was where he was conceived, metaphorically,after all. I did not anticipate the outcome of the scene when he finally met his mother, but it had the kind of symmetry that makes sense. I wonder what insanity they’ll come up with next season?

I’m really enjoying this new short story I’m working on. I’m coming at it from all angles and writing it in a non-linear fashion. I don’t feel like I’m spinning it out from beginning to end. Instead, it feels like I have a ball of modeling clay and I’m shaping it.

This morning, I rolled the tale back a little further in time and wrote about a thousand words that met up with where I originally started the story, borrowing pieces from later on and then smoothing into the transition. I thought I was done for the day. I had breakfast, watched Castle, took a shower and then had an extra half hour during which I thought I would read. However, my mind had been rolling the story around, squeezing here and pushing there, so I went back to my office (this is something I never do during the week) and jumped down to the end, tossed out everything I’d written there and wrote another four hundred words or so to set up a kind of parallel conclusion for the two main characters.

I have about 3500 words at present, and there’s still one small section that remains to be written, about 2/3 of the way through the tale. I also have a fairly large chunk, perhaps 400 words, that is backstory for one of the characters. I don’t think that will endure, but it was necessary for me to write it out to get it into the proper shape in my mind so I could use it to inform the character. I might steal bits and pieces of it, but I suspect most of it will go.

I figure it will end up being about 3500 words once I’ve finished the first draft and gone through one solid edit to smooth it over. And I still have 10 days to work on it before it’s due, so things are looking up. I know I’m not going to get stuck, since I know how it’s going to end already, so that’s encouraging.

I’ve never written a short story in this manner before, or have it take over my waking thoughts to the extent this one has. I really understand these two characters, and have a sense of the era, too. I hope that’s a good sign.

I watched The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton novel, starring Michael Caine. I have to say that I wasn’t as impressed overall as I hoped to be. The origin of the word “Ipcress” was in particular a rather rough stretch. A quasi-acronym that used random letters from a book’s title, with the book itself ending up something of a red herring since Harry never got to read it. Also, since Ross was in Funeral in Berlin, it was pretty obvious he wasn’t the double agent. It was all rather muddled, I thought. A nifty cold opening, but one that was more elaborate than necessary. Why brainwash instead of murder? Why the “substitute” for the kidnapping victim on the train? Why the rather low-key reaction when Harry accidentally kills a CIA agent? And the campy brainwashing didn’t wash with me, either. The best parts were Harry going about his business in his own particular way. And I liked the cynical ending: that’s what you’re paid for, Harry.

Are Castle and Beckett still dating? You’d never know it from this week’s episode. They were behaving like they used to, back in the old days. It felt like a filler episode while they wait for February sweeps, where they revisit the murder of Kate’s mother. It feels like an idle week in general for TV. Anyone check out the new Kevin Bacon show? American Horror Story finale tomorrow, so that’s good.