Bev Vincent

My Storytellers Unplugged essay went live this morning. It’s called Are you ready? Well, then, let’s begin, and it talks about what it takes for me to be ready to begin working on a short story.

We watched three more episodes of Six Feet Under. There was one bit of contrived nonsense that was just plain bad writing. David dumps his excess ecstasy pills into the Aspirin bottle he’s handling because he’s afraid of getting caught with them, but there was no real reason for him to do so. He could just as easily have shoved them in his pocket. It just felt false. However, it led to an interesting scenario, especially when everyone in the house seemed to come down with headaches, starting with Clair, who dodged the bullet. Which led to the trippy scene with Mom out on her camping expedition hugging trees. Question: Does Ed Begley Jr. insist that every character he plays is a recycling, battery-car driving, environmentalist? Or does it just seem that way. I’m enjoying seeing a much younger Eric Balfour (Duke from Haven), though his last sighting (leaving a “goodbye” phone message) was ominous. Ileana Douglas was hilarious as the over-sharing, boundary-lacking mortician.

Here’s what the weather forecast looks like for the next four days: 101°/76° |  101°/76° | 101°/74° | 101°/74°. Chance of rain: 0%. We are now 15″ behind on annual rainfall to date.

When you boil hockey down to the basics, it’s all about putting the puck in the other guy’s net and keeping it out of your own. Vancouver didn’t do that. Boston did. Congratulations to the Bruins for a strong series and for taking the big trophy back home. Shame on Vancouverites for acting like cavemen (sorry Geico guys) afterwards. Though there was one cool photo on the CBC site of a couple lying on the ground in the middle of the street kissing, surrounded by rioters and riot police. Make love not war, I would have captioned it.

Look for my latest essay at Storytellers Unplugged tomorrow.

I posted my review of Robopocalypse at Onyx Reviews today. Though I enjoyed reading it, I found it somewhat slight and superficial, so my review is pretty critical, I’m afraid. Next up: The Five by Robert McCammon.

Instead of subjecting myself to hypertension (by watching the hockey game), we watched three more episodes of Six Feet Under last night. On House they have a patient of the week, whereas this show has the corpse of the week, and the deceased seems to have a message for one of the Fisher brothers or both. I’m finding certain things a tad predictable. I knew the cat was going to knock over the curling machine long before it happened. When the guy got into the industrial blender, well, you just knew how that was going to end. And I knew that Mr. Jones’s wife was going to be dead in bed and, later, that he was going to be dead in the funeral parlor. Still, we’re liking the show well enough. I could do without the shrill divorcée who has designs on David, and Brenda’s family would send me running for the hills, screaming. I like how seriously they are taking the mother’s grief and need to find a new life as a widow, and Claire is an interesting, quirky character with an emotive face. Got a big kick out of seeing the normally staid Sandra Oh (Christina from Grey’s Anatomy) as a fledgling porn star. Interesting, too, how Nathan is learning more about his father in death than he ever knew in life.

If we had six fingers on each hand and had adopted a base-12 numbering system, today I would be 42. In binary, I’m 110010.

Yes, it’s one of those dreaded “significant” birthdays. The kind that ends in a zero. And, no, I don’t mind, though I was mildly amused by the fact that I received a membership pitch from the AARP in yesterday’s mail!

My main gift was an upgrade. I’m now part of the smart phone generation. iPhone 4, to be precise. Means I no longer have to carry around both a flip phone and an iPod Touch for total connectivity. Plus a camera. Look out world.

Also a nice flower delivery at work (where I’d been keeping a low profile about the birthday.) Because of scheduling conflicts, we went out to dinner last night instead of tonight. Had a lot of fun and made our server’s evening with our jolly good time.

Still reading Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson, which thus far reminds me of a cross between Stephen King’s “Trucks” and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. The book is about the rise of technology and the subsequent war with humanity. I like the “pejorative” term for the enemy: Robs, as in “short for robots.” At the time the uprising begins, robots are used for a lot of things, from servants to laborers (this is the PotA comparison) to love surrogates.

I’m also reading a galley of Satori by Don Winslow on my iPad. This is a prequel to Trevanian’s classic 1979 novel Shibumi that is sort of an origin story for Nicholai Hel. I’m very pleased that I’ve found a way to get electronic galleys. Better for everyone involved, in my opinion.

Yay Canucks. Excellent use of foreshadowing, dramatic tension and a twist at the end that no one saw coming.

The long weekend is over and I feel like I got a lot accomplished. We cooked some great meals on the grill, though it was two flocking hot to eat outside (flocking is a euphemism I picked up from the novels of Frank Delaney that I’m currently reading to my wife). Big honking steak on Saturday and hamburgers on Sunday. My wife cooked a wonderful Copper River sockeye salmon filet yesterday to complete our culinary weekend.

Random observation: you can stream the new Journey album for free today. It’s not bad but so far only one song has leaped out and grabbed me as distinguishing itself.

I also finished the novella I’ve been working so diligently on for the past month or two. The first draft came in at 17,000 words. I printed it out yesterday (59 pages) and did a full read-through/long-hand edit and got most of the changes keyed back in before the salmon arrived on the scene. Then I finished the manual changes and did another thorough read-through on the screen. To my surprise, the story ended up slightly longer after revision: 17, 500 words and 61 pages. Usually I trim about 15% on revision, but not this time. Maybe it’s different with longer works. In fact, this is the longest thing I’ve ever written that didn’t go all the way to book length. Printed out a nice, pristine copy and got it in the mail just before the deadline, which is midnight tonight.

I finished Pacific Heights by Paul Harper, the pen name of crime writer David L. Lindsey and am about to begin Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson, which looks intriguing and fun.

This weekend we stumbled upon a good movie, more by accident than anything else. It’s called Mao’s Last Dancer and is the true story of a young boy, Li Cunxin, who was selected from his country school (fairly arbitrarily) and sent to Beijing to learn how to be a ballet dancer. It’s based on Li’s memoir of the same name. He isn’t a very strong boy, but he is determined to make his impoverished family and his country proud, so he works harder than everyone else and excels. He is chosen by the director of the Houston Grand Opera (played by a mincing Bruce Greenwood) to be a visiting student (this was during the 1980s), where he learns that much of what he has been indoctrinated to believe about America is wrong. However, his request to stay is denied, which sets off an international incident when a group of Americans is detained inside the Chinese consular offices in Houston and are surrounded by FBI while diplomatic negotiations ensue. Kyle Mclaughlin plays his immigration attorney. Lots of impressive dancing and a good story well told.

We’ve gotten hooked on the Graham Norton show. Our OnDemand system has three full past seasons available, so we’ve been picking the ones that have people we’re familiar with as guests. Last night it was Dame Helen Mirren, Janet Jackson, Tyler Perry and Stephen Fry. I often wonder if North Americans who get signed to appear on the show have any idea what they’re getting themselves in for. Jackson looked mortified half the time. Norton is just so wildly over the top and energetic. My wife wouldn’t believe me at first when I said he was about our age. She thought he was about 35 based on his energy level. Fun show.

Wrote another thousand words of the story in progress and I have the rest all mapped out in my head except for one piece. One connection that the detective has to make and act on before the big reveal at the end. Not quite sure how that’s going to go, but I can keep on writing until it comes to me. And I have faith that it will come to me. It always does.

When I was living in my first apartment—this would be in Halifax, Nova Scotia in about 1985—my roommate and I detected an unpleasant smell in our fridge. We looked through everything and couldn’t find the source. The days passed. The smell lingered. Maybe it got a little worse. Finally I picked up a margarine tub that I assumed (silly me) contained margarine. When I pried off the lid I was introduced to one of the nastiest smells known to mankind. A raw chicken breast well past its expiration date. Man, that was foul. (Pun only intended in the sense that I realized it was a pun when I typed the word.)

We had chicken last weekend. On the grill. Good chicken. I always seal the leftover bits, both raw and cooked, in a freezer bag with a ziplok closure. I guess the seal must have broken, or else something landed on the bag and popped it open. When I went out to take the dumpster to the road last night, it was like something from C.S.I. First I noticed the swarm of flies around the lid and the buzzing. When I opened the lid to put in the last of our trash: hoo boy. There it was again, with the added bonus of all those flies. Nasty. Nasty. Nasty. Small wonder the neighbors didn’t call the police thinking that we’d killed somebody and dumped them in the trash.

With nothing else to watch, we queued up from OnDemand a couple of older episodes of Graham Norton, a British chat show that airs after Doctor Who on Saturday nights, which is how we first discovered him last year. We don’t always watch, but usually get a good chuckle when we do. He often has on visiting performers from the US and Canada as well as local favorites. I often wonder if the North Americans have any idea what they’re getting themselves into. At the end of each episode he has “stories from the red chair,” where some random people get the chance to tell “entertaining” but brief stories. Norton has his hand on a lever and if the story is less than compelling he dumps the person over backwards. It’s sort of like The Gong Show without the gong. One of the stories told in the episodes we watched last night was by a woman who came home to find her house surrounded by the cops. The neighbors had smelled decomp (it was a dead rat in the walls of her house, apparently) and suspected foul (there’s that word again) play. It all ties together, you see. TV and real life.