Bev Vincent

The youngsters started arriving at around 6:45 last night and were all done by 8:00. We had maybe forty visitors or so in total, mostly in groups of four or five at a time. A fairly typical Halloween. Got rid of about 90% of the candy before I turned the lights off, which is always my goal. Not older teenagers or playful adults this year, though. But some cute as a button kids. One three year old fairy looked ‘way up at me and said “Thank you” as if she were absolutely thrilled.

We have a great horned owl somewhere on our street. My wife says she hears it when she’s up working late at night and I heard it for the first time the other night when I was getting ready for bed. The call is distinctive (Listen here!) and I really like listening to it, especially at night. The only other owl I’ve seen around here was one we encountered while walking along the bike path at night in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. Our power was still out, I think, but one of the nearby restaurants was open so we walked over to it. The owl was sitting up in a tree over the path as plain as day. It was shocking how big it was. However, we saw it again a couple of days later, dead on the street. Must have been hit by a car. Made us sad to see it.

The cool weather has arrived, at long last. Down to the forties overnight, sixties and seventies in the daytime, mostly.

My third article is now up at FEARNet. It’s called A Doorway to 1963, being a review of Stephen King’s new book, 11/22/63 prefaced by a brief observation about the appearance of magical doors in King’s work.

Michael Matheson at Innsmouth Review posted a lengthy and detailed review of Evolve Two yesterday. I was pleased by his comments about my story, “Red Planet.” He obviously gave it a lot of thought.

Brian Freeman writes about the 2012 Stephen King Library calendar on his blog. The cover is stunning, and photos simply won’t do it justice.

I’ve been conducting and transcribing interviews lately. My work in progress is now up to something in the vicinity of 57000 words. I received an extension through April 1, 2012, which is a great relief. The book is going to be so much better given the extra time to whip it into shape.

We watched the second half of the first season of the original Prime Suspect the other night. To be honest, I was surprised by how it turned out. I kept thinking it was going to turn out to be someone else. There were so many potential red herrings but some of the evidence was the real deal.

One of the last things I did before shutting down my computer before we headed to the airport to go to Paris a couple of weeks ago was submit a short story to the anthology The Spirit of Poe, which is raising funds to help support Poe House in Baltimore, which had its funding from the city cut.

I checked my e-mail en route to the airport and had a glowing acceptance letter from WJ Rosser, one of the editors. I read the contract and digitally signed a copy all before we got to the airport. Ain’t technology grand?

Mr. Rosser blogged about my story today at the Literary Landmark Press blog.

Here’s what he had to say:

We have received remarkable submissions for the anthology, and we’ll have a contributor list by Sunday. I want to highlight one, though.

There’s a little bit of comedy in almost all great horror, but it takes a wonderful writer to satirize Poe while still treating him respectfully. Thankfully, a wonderful writer undertook to do that. Bev Vincent wrote a remarkable and very funny story called The Case of the Tell-tale Black Cat of Amontillado (with Zombies and an Ourang-Outang), and although he offered up “profound apologies to EAP” he needn’t have. The story is wonderful, and we’re lucky to have it. The story has so many references to Poe’s work that we lost count! Look for a contest later on that challenges you to recognize them all. I’ll give you a little taste, though:

“Dupin is my name. You may have heard of me.”

The man didn’t respond. He retreated into the house as if expecting Dupin to follow, so Dupin did. The front room was large and lofty, but even after the man threw open the heavy curtains, light struggled to render distinct the adornments within. Several musty, overstuffed chairs were scattered haphazardly around the perimeter. The bust of a Roman deity, Pallas perhaps, stood on a pedestal next to a desk littered with manuscripts and papers. The room had an overall atmosphere of sorrow and gloom.

Dupin’s host produced a pair of wooden chairs that he placed carefully in the middle of the room, as if by some design. He paid special attention to the location and position of his own chair, and smiled to himself once he was satisfied.

How many so far? No fair counting all three Dupin stories as individual references!

We have other great works here as well, including poetry selected some time ago by the museum for a museum-sponsored time capsule. We have stories from five countries and three continents. We still have some submissions to get to as well.

Help us out, now. We would like thirty more pre-orders to ensure that every expense is covered prior to the book’s release. Pick one up for yourself or for a friend. Thanks again for all of the support.

Vignettes from Paris #4

While in Paris last week and the week before we walked. A lot. Occasionally we took the Metro. We never took a single taxi the whole time. We used the Air France airbus to get into the city from Charles de Gaulle and a shuttle service to get back to the airport at the end of the trip.

We also climbed a lot of things. Everything we could. We walked to the top of the towers of Notre Dame, up narrow, windy stone stairs for our first great view of the city. We climbed more stairs to get to the top of l’arc de triomphe for a view of the Champs Elysees and l’etoile. We took the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower and walked from the second level down to street level on the return trip. (We also toasted the heights with champagne at the top of the tower.) We took the escalator through the madhouse that is Galeries Lafayette to the seventh floor where we got our closest look at Sacre Couer and enjoyed the relative calm compared to the chaos in the department store below.

One of the things my wife wanted to do in Paris was go to a revue. She suggest the Moulin Rouge and we also found out about the Lido on the Champs Elysees. However, when we read the online reviews of these places, we weren’t encouraged. They were quite expensive and most of the reviews called them tourist traps, cramped places with poor vantage points, cheap-o champagne and bad food, and performers who were just going through the paces. We read about another one, Paradis, in the Latin Quarter that was much better reviewed. However, on Saturday, after our trip to the top of Galeries Lafayette, we went to La Madeleine church and found out there was going to be a classical concert there that evening. Les Violons de Paris were going to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, along with some other pieces. The admission price was about 1/6th of what we would have paid for a revue show, and it was fantastic. First of all, the venue was terrific — this old cathedral that looks like a Greek temple from the outside. Then there were the musicians, four violins, two violas and two cellos. An opera singer did Ave Maria (two versions). And then the virtuoso violinist Frederic Moreau came on stage for the Vivaldi. Absolutely wonderful. We bought one of his CDs afterward.

The only thing that might have made it more amazing would have been if it had been in Sainte-Chappelle (picture above). Apparently they are going to be performing there in October. If you’re in Paris, check them out. I’ve always wanted to see Sainte-Chappelle (inside the Palais de Justice near Notre Dame), having heard raves about its stained glass windows, and this trip we finally managed to get there. When you walk through the door you see a few windows, nothing spectacular. Then you see these little staircases in the corner and you go up to the second level and…wow.

Vignettes from Paris #3

We had a great time on our recent 10-day trip to Paris, make no mistake about it. It was relaxing, adventurous, rejuvenating, invigorating, educational and fun.

We did have a couple of quibbles, though. The first was the fact that just about everyone in the city smokes. They don’t seem to have gotten the message that has been delivered with so much conviction on this side of the Atlantic. Most restaurants allowed smoking. In some cases they did have smoking and non-smoking sections, but there wasn’t much to separate them. For example, people sitting outside on the sidewalk could smoke and those inside couldn’t, but since these places usually had the windows open facing the streets, that didn’t isolate us from secondhand smoke very much. I jokingly twisted the city’s nickname into the City of Lighters and that stuck. We grew more tolerant of it as the week went on, but it still baffled us how the smoking rate could be so high.

The other thing that astonished us but didn’t affect us directly most of time was the pandemonium that is Paris driving (and the subset of this, Paris parking). While drivers were generally observant of crosswalks, they often dashed right up to them and slammed on the brakes at the last moment, which was a tad worrying. How far does a person trust their brakes or their reaction times? As the days passed, we grew bolder in crossing streets, learning when it was safe to jaywalk. There were also a couple of fairly large intersections–one near the Trocadero, for example–that didn’t have any crosswalk lights, so you had to edge out into the street and trust that drivers would eventually stop when you got far enough into the pavement. There, too, we grew bolder and more aggressive.

The most astonishing scene was the roundabout at l’arc de triomphe, part of which is pictured above from atop the arc. Twelve major roads run into the roundabout forming l’etoile (the star). There are no lane markers once vehicles enter the roundabout. Traffic entering the circle have the right of way, it seems, which means that cars going around have to stop to let them in. It was a little like watching ants crawling over a syrup spill. Cars went in every direction possible, darting across each other’s bumpers (front and back), stopping and starting. Amazingly, we never saw an accident there. It’s hard to believe that it works, but it seems to.

Most travel guides recommend tourists not to drive in the city, in part because of the manic traffic and in part because parking is so difficult to find. There are a lot of very small cars (SmartCars, little Fiats, Cooper Minis) and they are parked nose-to-butt along every street. Parallel parking skills are a must. We did see a lot of drivers using their senses of touch to park, by which I mean bumping into the cars parked on either side of the vacancy. Some of the SmartCars chose perpendicular parking instead: they’re small enough that they can pull in perpendicular to the sidewalk in a very narrow space and not jut out onto the street.