Bev Vincent

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.

In a couple of weeks—on March 2^nd, to be specific—Hard Case Crime will publish their third Stephen King novel, Later. Although King is generally thought of as a horror writer, he has written numerous crime short stories, novellas and novels, giving them a unique twist. In Part 1 of a three-part series, I look at King’s earliest involvement with crime fiction. Next week, I’ll explore his more recent writings in the genre, including his previous two books with Hard Case Crime and the Mercedes series. Then, on publication day, I’ll review Later and look ahead to King’s next crime novel, Billy Summers.

So, as you may have heard, Texas (and other states) was hit by a massive winter storm that knocked out the power for millions of people in the midst of record-breaking cold temperatures. We received maybe two inches of snow/ice pellets overnight Sunday, and much of it will stick around for a couple of days, I think. The temperature got as low as 14° yesterday morning and, at a little after 5 AM, the power went out. And stayed out. For us, it was only out for 12 hours, but many people still haven’t gotten power back.

Fortunately, we have a gas fireplace. It doesn’t radiate its heat very far, but when we sat on the hearth we could get warm. We also have a Coleman stove that we used to make some meals, including one batch of killer burritos that used up all the things in the fridge we thought wouldn’t last the outage. To pass the time, we played half a dozen games of Yahtzee! (evenly split, three wins apiece) and did Sudoko and other puzzles.

I have a hand-crank radio that was sent to me as part of a publicity kit for the TV series Colony a number of years ago and we kept it fully cranked while listening to classic rock and then NPR. Good exercise. The little gadget has proven useful a number of times over the years.

The power came back at around 4:30 PM, just in time to save us from having to do a massive load of dishes by hand. The temperature inside the house had dropped to 55° by then.

Overnight it got colder still. It was a chilly 9F when I got up this morning. Our heating system has been battling all day to get the house up to 68°. We had one pipe freeze but it resolved itself shortly after noon without any apparent damage. We hope. We made it back to 32° by mid-afternoon, and some of the snow is melting from trees that are getting direct sunlight, but it’s still a winter wonderland out there.

Another storm is coming in this evening. It’s not going to be nearly as cold (overnight: 28°), but freezing rain will likely wreak havoc with the trees and, of more concern, might put another strain on the already fragile electric grid. We’ve got a few more cold days ahead, with below-freezing overnight temperatures but daytime highs in the upper thirties and lower forties. We just have to make it to the weekend–then we’ll be up in the sixties and seventies.

My most recent publications include a flash fiction story and a novella. The flash story is a touch over 1400 words (I’m not sure I’d consider it flash fiction at that length, but that’s what the publisher calls it, so I won’t quibble). The story is called “Tupilaq,” and it’s based on a longer story I originally wrote in 2013 for a themed anthology. It didn’t make the cut for that project, so the story has been sitting idle on my hard drive for the past eight years. I could never figure out quite what to do with it.

Then Cemetery Gates Media launched the Cemetery Gates Society, a monthly online publication with columns, reviews and a themed flash fiction contest. The theme for January was Arctic/Antarctic, which summoned to mind “Tupilaq,” much of which takes place in Greenland. The original story was nearly 4000 words, which meant that a lot of stuff had to go to get it within the 500-1500 word limit for the contest.

I started slashing. The opening section, set in Basra, went completely, and a lot of the ending sections in New Orleans and Galveston were trimmed with a machete. I wrote and rewrote. I converted it from past to present tense. I got it within the word count limit and I was very happy with the final result. This was the core of the story, with nothing extraneous. I entered the contest…and I won! I co-won, that is, as they decided to publish five stories. So, if you want to check out “Tupilaq,” you can read it at Cemetery Gates Society.

I’ve had another story kicking around on my hard drive since I wrote the first draft in 2000. It was originally called “Black and White,” and its gimmick was that a private detective is hired to go to a small town in Texas. En route, he passes through some kind of time portal that takes him into the past. His world goes from color to black and white, and he turns into a noir detective in the process. There were other writing gimmicks involved, and I was pleased with the outcome, but I was never able to sell it. It was on the long side (7000 words) and a touch unwieldy.

I revised it a number of times over the years and, at some point, I decided to strip out all the “time travel” stuff and make it a straight hardboiled story. There are places in Texas that feel like you’re traveling into the past without any kind of dimensional portal. I expanded the tale and turned it into a novella (21,000 words), which I submitted to a couple of contests over the years, without success. Contests are like that–you either win or you don’t!

I’ve toyed with the idea of self-publishing it for a while, but I finally took the bull by the horns and figured out how to do it a few weeks ago. Turns out it’s really quite easy. I can see why people might be tempted to go straight to self-publishing without attempting the traditional route. My only expense was a couple of stock photos for the cover (one for the eBook and a different one for the paperback edition). I downloaded the layout software for the eBook from Amazon (free) and converted the Word document into that format. Lots of proofreading passes, design the cover and away it went.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a paperback edition as well, but I finally decided to make that available, too. That meant another design pass, since the eBook version doesn’t have things like page numbers and headers. My story has a couple of warning notes created by cutting letters from newspapers, and I found a great font that reproduces that. I was very pleased by how it turned out. I ordered a proof copy for a couple of bucks to make sure everything looked right in the print version and then I published that edition last week.

It’s now called “The Ogilvy Affair” (I’m smugly proud of that title and, if you read the story, you’ll see why). It’s available on Amazon globally as an eBook and in paperback. I hope you’ll check it out if you like hardboiled detectives who have to solve whodunits. Here’s my cover copy:

First came the warning note.

Then someone took a shot at Clifford Ogilvy, publisher of the Harrisville Dispatch. The would-be killer missed, but he or she will likely try again.

Enter Quentin Sawyer, a private detective from Houston who responds to Ogilvy’s request for an investigator to find out who’s trying to kill him. Sawyer is a fish out of water at the luxurious Ogilvy mansion and in small town Harrisville. He soon discovers that his problem isn’t finding someone who has a motive to murder his powerful client. Just about everyone in town has a reason to dislike Ogilvy.

Sawyer needs to narrow down the long list of suspects before the killer tries again.

We watched several movies since my last entry and enjoyed them all, to varying degrees. First was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is adapted from a stage play and looks it, with its set-pieces and long soliloquys. It’s difficult to watch at times, but worth it. Then we watched Soul, the new Pixar film, which is utterly delightful. My wife noticed the live-action Mulan on the menu, so we followed up with that, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

People haven’t exactly been overwhelmingly positive about Wonder Woman 1984, to say the least, but we decided to give it a shot and it wasn’t terrible. I think it helps that I have absolutely no foundation in the DC Universe and know nothing at all about Cheetah, so I couldn’t compare the movie to the comics. It was definitely far too long–I could have trimmed 10-15 minutes from it easily–but we liked it. Then we cued up The Midnight Sky with George Clooney as the lone-ish survivor of a global cataclysm attempting to communicate with a Jupiter expedition returning from a fact-finding mission. Again, the reviews have been unkind, but we enjoyed it. I have a hard time accepting a previously undiscovered moon of Jupiter that’s big enough to support life, but beyond that I was along for the ride.

Now, getting to the topic of today’s recap: TV series. We have watched a lot of TV during lockdown. My list has at least 70 titles, and some of those correspond to multiple seasons. We discovered The Good Fight early on, and watched the first few seasons, then went back to The Good Wife and watched all seven of those seasons, and then watched The Good Fight all over again, armed with our knowledge of who certain characters were now.

I have a few network TV series that I always watch (Grey’s Anatomy, Survivor, The Amazing Race) and my wife and I enjoy This is Us. We also enjoyed the Call the Midwife Christmas special, which featured a guest appearance from Peter Davison, aka the Fifth Doctor, and we’re looking forward to the end-of-year episode of Doctor Who tomorrow. I’ve also been gradually rewatching Columbo from the beginning. I’m up to the fourth season. Alas, one of the co-creators, William Link, passed away this week.

Beyond that, though, it was almost all streaming. We enjoyed Star Trek: Picard and are keeping up with Star Trek: Discovery and have watched about half of the latest Great British Baking Show. We continue to watch The Crown, although our attitude toward it has changed a little now that they’re into events that we remember first-hand. We liked Emily in Paris, too. One of our best vacations was the week we spent in that city, so there was a certain nostalgia attached to it.

The first lockdown TV series, Staged, was a lot of fun, and we watched episodes of Tales from the Loop every now and then until we completed the first season. We enjoyed the second season of After Life, and I get a kick out of Dead to Me. I’m keeping up with Westworld, too.

I saw current seasons of crime shows (many foreign) that I have been enjoying for a number of years. Top of that list would be Babylon Berlin (Germany, S3), but other favorites include Ozark, Bosch, Bordertown, Killing Eve, Marcella, The Sinner and Occupied, which is more of a political thriller than a crime series.

One of my favorite discoveries this year was the Spanish series Money Heist. I binged through all four seasons of that one in fairly short order. The show I like to talk about the most, though, is Dark (Germany). The third and final season came out this year and, after I watched it, I went back and re-watched the first season. It is an incredibly complex and dense show, with a huge cast and characters who are depicted by different actors at different ages, so you almost need a scorecard to keep up, but it is so well done. Compelling, fascinating and definitely binge-worthy.

HBO was a good source of new material this year. I enjoyed Watchmen, The Outsider, Perry Mason, and got a kick out of The Flight Attendant. On the documentary side, I was fascinated by I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which documents obsession with finding a serial killer. I started Lovecraft Country but got sidetracked by other shows, so I have to get back to that one at some point. I’m also in the middle of the third and final season of The Deuce.

For new series on Netflix, I liked The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Queen’s Gambit would qualify as one of my favorite three series of the year, and my most recent discovery was the Brazilian crime drama Good Morning, Verônica, which can be a little hard to watch because of the violent content, but it’s a decent show.

Finally, I heard the buzz about Ted Lasso, so we checked it out. A heart-warming, positive, uplifting series that’s definitely worth watching.

According to my movie log, I watched on average a movie per week during 2020. The last one we saw in a theater was probably 1917 and boy does that seem like a long time ago.

The long list includes documentaries and a few streaming plays like Hamilton and Phantom of the Opera.

As I’ve said previously, I’m not very good at Top X lists, but I was able to winnow down the list of 50+ films to my top fifteen. In order seen, not in order of preference:

• 1917
• Joker
• Parasite
• Ford v Ferrari
• Harriet
• Just Mercy
• The Vast of Night
• Da 5 Bloods
• Hamilton
• Greyhound
• Radioactive
• The Old Guard
• Enola Holmes
• My Octopus Teacher
• The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

We’ll probably see some more before the end of the year (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, News of the World, Promising Young Woman and the new Wonder Woman are our radar).

If you’re interested in the whole list, you can find it here.

Seriously, who wants to remember 2020? It’s a year that we’re looking forward to seeing only through the rearview mirror where, as everyone knows, objects may be closer than they seem. I have high(er) hopes for 2021, what with the forthcoming change in administration and the availability of two coronavirus vaccines. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll even get out of the house for more than a few minutes at a time, something I haven’t done since March except to buy groceries or walk around the block with my wife.

Nevertheless, it’s time to look back at some of my lists, and I’m starting with publications.

It has been a productive year in terms of getting things into print. I don’t know if there’s been another year when I’ve published as many short stories.

Here’s the list:

• Aeliana, Shining in the Dark, several translated versions including Swedish, Brazilian, French, and Japanese
• Expiration Date, The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths, Mango, June 16, 2020
• Kane and the Candidate, Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, July 4, 2020
• The Hound of Bracketville, Places We Fear To Tread, September 2020
• Halloween Funeral, Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020 (published momentarily and then summarily unpublished!)
• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, October 2020
• Special Delivery: Unnerving Magazine #14, October 24, 2020 (reprint)
• Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
• Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn Vol. 1: 21st Century Noir, December 14, 2020
• The Lobster Trap, Masthead: Best New England Crime Stories, Level Best Books, December 15, 2020
• An Invisible Christmas Spectacular, Halldark Holidays, Cemetery Gates Media, December 2020

Oh, and “Zombies on a Plane” (as “Zombis en el avión”) from Flight or Fright was nominated for an Ignotus Award, which Locus magazine describes as “the Spanish equivalent of the Hugo Awards.” Category:  “Cuento extranjero” (foreign short story). A high honor. I watched the virtual ceremony, which was fun.

In addition to my regular columns in Cemetery Dance magazine and at News from the Dead Zone online, I published my first article in a gardening magazine in 2020! “Bamboozled” appeared in the July/August issue of Texas Gardener. I also wrote an afterword for the SST Publications limited edition of Richard Chizmar’s Gwendy’s Magic Feather.

A little light on reviews this year, for reasons I can’t divulge at this time! However, I did manage to write a few.

• The Outsider (TV review), CD Online, January 10, 2020
• If It Bleeds, CD Online, April 20, 2020
• Of Mice and Minestrone by Joe Lansdale
• Into the Black Nowhere by Meg Gardiner
• The Chill by Scott Carson
• Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill
• A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin
• Fool Me Twice by Jeff Lindsay
• Creative Types by Tom Bissell
• Just Like You by Nick Hornby
• Cry Baby by Mark Billingham
• Plunge by Joe Hill and Stuart Immonen
• The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Turnout by Megan Abbott