Bev Vincent

The score was 17-13 at half time. I had to run to the grocery store for a few essentials. I figured I could do it without missing any of the game; however, by the time I got back, the third quarter had started and it was 24-13. All downhill from there. The Houston Texans put up a valiant effort in the fourth quarter, but it was all for naught.

I spent most of Saturday morning reclaiming my office. My parents never threw out empty boxes—they were relegated to a spot “behind the eaves” (our expression for an attic that ran the full length of the house on the second story) and pressed into service whenever something had to be boxed up. We all knew at Christmastime not to make any assumptions when we unwrapped something based on the box we found. It might be an old clock radio box that contained, I dunno, a fountain pen, or a shirt. I’ve inherited that gene. I think I have just about every box from every book that’s ever been sent to me. Generally I flatten them down, put the peanuts in a garbage bag and relegate them to the attic. However, for the past several months I’ve just been stacking them up against a bookcase and the mound was getting closer and closer to my desk chair. So I broke them all down, did some other sorting, actually threw a few of the more decrepit boxes out, and my office seems like a new place. I think I heard an echo in it when I said something yesterday.

We had to go shopping for a new exercise machine yesterday. I take it as a bad sign that the frame of the old one cracked while I was using it. The metal frame. Must have been some sort of structural flaw or metal fatigue. Even though I gained a few pounds over the holidays, I still weigh less than I have in the past 20+ years! I had to laugh at some of the upper-end models I perused: they’re now WiFi enabled with browser screens so you can surf the internet while you sweat off the pounds. Too much.

I finished my Cemetery Dance essay for issue #70 over the weekend, as well as my next Storytellers Unplugged essay, which will come out on Thursday. I’m trying to get my hooks into a short story for the next MWA anthology, but the deadline is less than three weeks away so I might have to skip it this time. First time I haven’t submitted since I joined, I think.

We finished the third season of Treme this weekend. Not terribly happy with the outcome of LaDonna’s story, but it couldn’t all be upbeat. Davis’s “final” single was a hoot. Good to see Toni and the cop played by David Morse work things out, as well as a happy outcome to Sonny’s story. Does anyone else think that his girlfriend’s father looks like John Mellencamp? Some characters became less likable in the second half of the season. I don’t know what to think about Annie. She expressed a lot of frustration with Davis for not remembering things she supposedly told him, but we were never shown the scenes where she said those things so we have only her word for it. Sure, Davis can be scattered at times, but I wonder if she wasn’t using that as an excuse to push him away. And what got into Jeanette? She turned into the same kind of jerk chef that she used to hate working for in NY. My wife was worried the journalist was going to get whacked, but he seems to have escaped New Orleans unscathed. I think I saw the roof sign from the hotel where we’re holding World Horror this year in one shot. I wonder what they’ll put the characters through in the final five episodes that will comprise season 4.

I’m still working my way through Hatufim, the Israeli precursor to Homeland. There’s a great scene in the fifth episode where the widow of the third kidnap victim is trying to get everyone to leave the house when she comes up with the idea of having them walk her numerous dogs. A spy-love interest storyline is starting to shape up, but still there’s no real parallel to Carrie.

I met Peter David at Jekyll & Hyde in New York City in 2006. I was in the city on a family vacation. One of our few pre-scheduled events was a trip to Radio City Music Hall for “Harry, Carrie and Garp.” A group of us, including Peter, his daughter, Jae Lee, Robin Furth and others, had dinner together prior to the event. I’ve never been a huge comics reader, not since childhood at least, so I didn’t really know much about Peter or Jae, and I’m not even sure I knew at the time that they were working on the graphic novel adaptation of the Dark Tower series at the time.

I interviewed Peter about his work on the graphic novels last year for The Dark Tower Companion. One thing that rang through louder than just about anything else is the fact that he was doing his work for an audience of one: Stephen King. He told a great story about meeting King for the first time backstage at New York Comic-Con. It’s a terrific anecdote, one that a person could whip out at dinner or on panel sessions and be assured of getting a belly laugh from people. I won’t spoil it here—I’ll let people read for themselves when the book comes out.

Peter had a stroke while on vacation in the closing days of 2012. Amazingly, he took to twitter and his blog to post a short message to that effect the following day. However, he’s now on the road to recovery, which could be a long and expensive process, even though he has insurance. His wife has been posting daily updates on his blog and today she wrote about how people can help out. The most direct way is to buy copies of his books from Crazy 8 Press. During my interview with him he described his Hidden Earth series as having the epic scope of the Dark Tower series and The Camelot Papers as a revisionist version of the King Arthur legend. Check ’em out, if you feel so inspired.

I’ve been going to Necon off and on for a decade. Necon is the name for the Northeastern Writers’ Conference, one of the most enjoyable and unique conferences I’ve attended. People call it Camp Necon, and because there’s a hard cap on the number of attendees and because it is somewhat informal, many of the same people go year after year after year. Going to Necon is the next best thing to going on vacation. I’ve made some very good friends at Necon over the years. Bob Booth was the chairman of the conference for decades. By the time I started going, he had turned over the reins to his son, Dan, but he and the rest of the Booths are always a strong presence, no matter who’s chairing. To us, Bob is Papa Necon.

I can’t say that I know Bob really well, but I’m a morning person and so, apparently, is he (at least at Necon), so I would often run into him in the courtyard outside the dorms in the hours before most of the other campers rolled out of bed. We’ve had some nice chats over coffee and donuts. A few years ago, he told me about working with Donald M. Grant (who was part of establishing Necon), laying out the text of the first hardcover edition of The Gunslinger by hand.

Alas, the news concerning Papa Necon is not good these days and the family (by which I mean his family and the Necon family) are asking for good wishes to be conveyed. Check out the link at the beginning of this paragraphs for addresses to which cards and letters can be sent, or leave a post for him on that message board.

Back to reality today. The notion of not shaving for over a week seems like a good idea at the time, until the day of reckoning and all that growth (scary how grey it is!) has to go.

After the hottest year on record in the Houston area, we seem to have settled in to a nice cool phase. We’re experiencing highs in the forties and fifties with overnight lows in the thirties. Thus far, 2013 has been a rather grey and overcast year. It rained hard on New Year’s Eve. Valiant and determined (and probably drunk) people hung out down town to listen to music and await the fireworks. We opted for the comfort of the living room. Yesterday it was cloudy and overcast, with sprinkles of rain when I took down the outdoor lights.

My first English interview about The Dark Tower Companion, which hits stores three months from today, was published in two parts at Talk Stephen King. You can read Part 1 here, and if you’re sufficiently enthralled, continue on to Part 2 here.

Goodbye to 2012, which was a pretty good year, and hello to 2013, which already has one thing going for it: it’s the first year since 1987 where all four digits are unique.

On the reading front, I started 76 books. If you’re interested in all the gory details, you can find the list here. I’m still working on two of them, so they’ll also be the first books of 2013. I reviewed over thirty of them for Onyx Reviews. I also wrote reviews for a couple of other markets (Cemetery Dance and Dead Reckonings). Cemetery Dance collected all of my reviews of Stephen King works published since 2000 into a nifty little signed chapbook called Twentieth Century King, which is available at their website. I also worked with Brian Freeman to revise and expand The Stephen King Illustrated Trivia Book, which will be out early this year.

I spent the first quarter of 2012 working on The Dark Tower Companion, which will be published by NAL on April 2, just three short months from now. Large parts of the rest of the year were spent working on the copy-edited manuscript and, these past two weeks, on the page proofs.

It hasn’t been a banner year for short story publications. I had a chapter in The Crane House round robin novella from CD. My story “The Case of the Tell-tale Black Cat of Amontillado (with Zombies and an Ourang-Outang)” appeared in The Spirit of Poe from Literary Landmark Press, though the book was fraught with delays and issues. “Sitting Up with the Dead” was in Appalachian Undead, but that book, too, had behind-the-scenes issues and has been declared out of print, though, like any good zombie, it will arise and lurch forward once again in a different form. I already have a few stories in the queue for 2013 publication, though, several more in submission to various markets, and hope to slip a few more in as well, including one I hope to write in the next week or two.

This was a good year for reprints. “Therapy,” my award-winning story from 2006 was reprinted in Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper. “In a Country Churchyard” (2008) was reprinted in Tales to Terrify, Volume 1 and “Silvery Moon “(2010) was recorded for the Tales to Terrify podcast.

I published four essays at FEARnet and had another four News from the Dead Zone essays in the print issue of Cemetery Dance, the most since 2004. That’s in addition to six lengthy updates to the online version. I had one essay in Screem (I had to skip an issue because of my work on The Dark Tower Companion), two short pieces in the 2012 Stephen King Library Desk Calendar and a bunch of snippets in Graphic Horror: Movie Monster Memories. I haven’t missed a monthly contribution to Storytellers Unplugged since we launched in July 2006.

My plan is for 2013 to be the year of the novel, so I probably won’t be writing as many short stories. We’ll see. The best laid plans of mice and writers.