Ya gets what’s ya pays for

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Did some work on the short story this weekend. It now sits at 3000 words. I figure it will be 6000 by the time I finish the first draft and perhaps 5000 by the time I’m done editing it.

Texas weather time: today we have a high in the seventies, which is how it’s been all weekend. Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, the lows will be around 25° and highs only in the upper 30s. Brrrr.

I admit that I’ve never watched a Pro Bowl game before, but I was quite amused by what I saw yesterday. It reminded me of a flag football game. I know the game doesn’t mean anything, so no one wants to get hurt, but, seriously, what’s the point? That multi-lateral touchdown by the center at the end was funny, though.

I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes novels for the past couple of weeks. I downloaded the free versions for my Kindle via Amazon and, for the most part, they were okay. However, the free version of The Hound of the Baskervilles is a mess. Two of the most important documents in the book—the manuscript recounting the Baskerville legend and the news report of Charles Baskerville’s death, both in chapter 2—are missing. The previous paragraphs end with colons, and that’s it. I suspect that whoever converted the text files lost them because they were offset or in a different font or something, but it’s really hard to appreciate the book when the backstory isn’t there. I had to jump off to my computer to read them online before returning to the Kindle.

Looks like everything is reruns on TV tonight. No House, no How I Met Your Mother, no Two and a Half Men, no Castle. A night off for my DVR.

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To coin a word

Posted on January 30, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Received my contributor copy of Dead Reckonings 8 on Friday. It contains my review of Dan Simmons’ Black Hills, which I submitted for issue 7 but got held over. Mildly chagrined by the conspicuous typo on the cover.

I received a referral about a horror magazine (one I’d never heard of before, but apparently they have wide distribution in the US and Canada) who was looking for someone to write an article. Talked to the editor on Friday afternoon and we came to terms, so I’ll be doing a piece for them for an upcoming issue. Always nice to branch out into new markets.

When reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, I came across an interesting word: Feringhee, which is a Hindu term for Europeans. You know what it immediately reminded me of? Ferengi, the big-eared avaricious traders from the Star Trek universe. When I started looking into it, I found that I wasn’t the first person to make that connection. I wonder if that was on the creator’s mind when he came up with the alien species. Etymology fascinates me.

For instance, when Fringe fans started bandying around words to describe the versions of characters seen in the parallel universe, one that caught on quickly was “Walternate,” for the alternate Walter. Walter himself started using it recently. When it came to Olivia, there were all manner of phrases coined, but I first called her Fauxlivia in my post of September 24, 2010. Prior to that point I’d never heard anyone else use it. Much to my surprise, that’s the word Walter used to describe alt-Olivia in this week’s episode. I can’t take credit for coming up with the word—a google search reveals that it had been used by the show runners a month before that—but I still felt somewhat smug about it all the same.

This week’s episode was another one of those direction changers. The revelation of a mole in Fringe division had everyone pointing fingers at everyone else. How obvious was it that the cavalier doctor performing tests on Peter was involved? The fact that Walter didn’t take a shine to him was a strong indicator, and the lingering camera made it even more likely. Then when he “leaves work early,” it’s all but a certainty. It was a nice bit of quasi-misdirection, as the guy was definitely a plant, but he wasn’t the mole as we later learned, and it made us (me, at least) completely miss the huge clue of Peter’s lie to Walter about being out at night. Peter is suddenly far removed from the romantic who ordered his favorite book for Olivia to read so she might understand him better. Now he’s lying to her and destroying shapeshifters. His voice was cold when he said he wasn’t doing anything wrong because they weren’t human. Walter explains the change as reciprocity, and Peter doesn’t argue. “What are we going to do about it?” he asks, as if it was the most academic of questions.

This week’s levity came from Walter’s impulsiveness. “I’ve snorted worse,” he tells Nina after rashly inhaling the altered DNA, only to have it turn out to be the chimpanzee sample instead of his own. “It’s growing chimp DNA in your brain?” Astrid asks, aghast. “Just a bit,” Walter responds. “Are you sure it isn’t dangerous?” she replies. “No. But it will pass.”

And then there was the dark humor when Peter was tussling with his last victim, who got the upper hand and threatened to harm him. Apparently Peter isn’t to be killed, but maiming him isn’t off the table, as he would serve them just as well with nine fingers. Peter turns the table with a meat clever and wallops off a handful of the other guy’s fingers. Nice touch.

We watched Secretariat on Friday evening. I’m old enough to remember when he was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the excitement surrounding the Triple Crown. A nice, feel-good movie. It took me about half an hour to recognize Diane Lane, and it was great seeing John Malkovich in an offbeat role as the horse trainer. The movie lacks any real suspense whatsoever, because we all knew how it was going to turn out from the beginning, but it was fun playing along all the same. Had to wonder, though, about the risks she took with the family, both emotionally and financially, risking it all on a few horse races. It could have been a disaster, and her absence from her four children for all that time was glossed over as if it had little or no impact on them.

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What happens in Vegas

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Wrote 1000 words on the short story in progress this morning and have a very good idea of where it so going to go next and where it’s going after that. Not quite sure how it’s going to get wrapped up yet, but that will happen in good time. I was surprised when I checked the word count at the end of the session. I didn’t think I’d managed that much.

Another funny anecdote from yesterday’s CSI lunchtime talk. An audience member asked the two CSIs if they were able to watch forensic TV shows without minding all of the oversimplifications and errors. The younger of the two said that she couldn’t. She preferred real-life shows like The First 48 and Forensic Files. The veteran said that he liked the shows and could enjoy them without over-analyzing. While in Las Vegas on vacation, he found a “CSI Experience” at the MGM Grand, sort of a murder mystery dinner theater with a CSI theme. He took part in it and was told at the end that he took it way too seriously and tried too hard. However, he seemed pleased that he had received his CSI certificate signed by Gil Grissom.

Hey, it’s just three months until World Horror in Austin. Are you going? There are currently over 220 people registered. It promises to be a great event, my first WHC in a few years. It’s going to be a fairly cheap con for me, since I’ll be driving instead of flying. My car’s odometer just turned over to 30,000 miles yesterday, which isn’t bad considering it’s six or seven years old.

So, Javier Bardem as Roland Deschain in the Dark Tower adaptation. He hasn’t accepted yet, so far as we know, but the part as been offered to him. I quite like the idea, but it’s clear from early reactions that it is a polarizing choice. Some people can’t see it at all.

Last night’s Criminal Minds was one of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. It was a modern day Bonnie and Clyde story, but so much attention was given to the perps that the regulars got pushed into the background. We saw the two of them interacting for a good chunk of the episode, then the behaviorists gave their profiles and it was like that act caused the two villains to crystallize into the roles that had just been assigned to him. One’s a psychopath and the other’s a sociopath. It’s funny how in some shows all it take is one or two bullets to bring down the driver of a fleeing vehicle and in others it takes a hail of bullets. Very Bonnie and Clyde-esque. And what was the deal behind the angelic vision at the end. Boy, did that ever seem to come out of left field and seem horribly cheesy.

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Not as seen on TV

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Wrote the first 750 words of a new short story this morning after two false starts. It’s a little slow going because I’m still finding my way in this historical context, but it’s coming together. And there’s a positive omen: I picked up a fortune cookie in the lunch room today and it said, “Good ideas will spring forth naturally from your mind in the coming week.” I like the sound of that.

A fine episode of Castle this week, one that moves Beckett’s investigation into her mother’s death one step closer to the truth. At first I wasn’t very happy with the direction that investigation was going, when it seemed like it was going to simply be a drug turf thing, but it got more interesting after that. Though it was a cliché, the shooting of the man who is just about to reveal important information took me by surprise. Beckett was splattered by blood. “It’s different when it happens right in front of you, see the lights go out.”

Naturally, Beckett is taken off the case, and Castle is banned from the squad room. “I don’t need you playing Nancy Drew on this,” the captain says. Not Frank Hardy, Nancy Drew. Naturally, they don’t give up. As Castle said, “All the best cops do their best work after they’ve been booted off the case.” This gives Ryan and Esposito a chance to show that they really are cops who can take the lead, even though that didn’t work out so well for them in the long run. The trajectory to “the kiss” was nicely done. Beckett asks Castle for “a stupid idea,” and he has no problem coming up with one. The kiss is a diversion, and then it isn’t. It’s clear they both reacted strongly to it and were almost swept away. They’ll have to deal with this in the future, no doubt, though I like that they didn’t spend a lot of time at the end of the episode processing or denying it.

One of the clues in the episode came by lifting a fingerprint from a living witness who encountered the hit man. Pure hooey, as I discovered today. Two CSIs gave a lunchtime talk at the local community center. A lot of the talk was about how different their jobs are from the ones depicted on television. They don’t drive Hummers. In fact, they recently upgraded from Crown Vics, standard police cars, to Ford Expeditions, which was a boon because the sedans were too small for all the gear they have to carry, which filled their trunks, back seats and, in some cases, their front passenger seats, too. They can’t tote everything in one tidy case. Fingerprints are scanned and entered into AFIS, which then returns a set of possibilities that have to be examined by a person. No automatic match with a photo of the perp. It does happen fairly quickly, though.

The CSIs spend most of their time in the lab or doing paperwork. They do not interrogate suspects or investigate crimes, although in some jurisdictions they do. They each take a week on call as the person who responds to all calls requiring a crime scene investigator. Like on TV, they do fire weapons into a water tank. However, the investigator said that bullets never reach the far end of the 10′ tank. Any movies showing people firing shots underwater that travel large distances are also hooey. Navy SEALS have modified guns that expel the gas from the discharge through the barrel ahead of the bullet so it doesn’t touch water for several feet, which extends the range a little.

They do use fuming super glue to stabilize fingerprints on non-porous objects like beer cans, and they grant that the process could be used to lift prints from a corpse. However, fingerprints consist of body oils, so anyone who grabs another person simply mixes their body oils with the other person’s, so finding a print would be, as the CSI said, like trying to find a piece of hay in a haystack. Sorry Castle writers. No can do.

It was a fascinating talk, and I now have a CSI’s card if I want to tour their facility or if I need research assistance on some project.

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Falling into place

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Many inexplicable things take place during the writing process. That zone you get into when the story is just flowing out of you when you aren’t even stopping to think of what comes next, for example.

For the past several days, I’ve been doing research for a new short story. It’s a period piece that starts with a historical incident and then goes off in a different direction. I like to get the details right, so I’ve been tracking down illustrations from the period, reading reports and first-person accounts. I made two false starts to the story already, both of them about 500 words long, including the one I wrote this morning. Then, after I was finished for the morning, I saw the light. It came to me out of the blue. I wasn’t even thinking about the story any more, except in some unknown fashion I guess I still was. I grabbed a piece of foolscap and a pen and wrote down a full page of notes, essentially an outline to the opening scene that feels perfect. It makes use of absolutely none of the two false starts, although some elements might get cherry picked when I actually write the scene. And all that research, well, very little of it will get used, either, though if I find myself in need of a little detail that will inform the story, I won’t have to go looking for it. It’s all there, crammed into my head and in the downloaded images.

Sometimes I have to plow ahead to find my way. The path is muddied. I have an idea of what I want to accomplish, but I’m not sure of the proper vehicle or the right trajectory to take. I flounder around, lost, looking for something to latch onto. And then, all of a sudden, there it is. The sky opens and everything becomes clear. I have no idea how that happens or why. I am loath to research it too closely lest I spoil the magic. But I love it when it happens.

In this week’s episode of House, the subplots were way more interesting than the main story. Funniest was Chase’s quest to find out who punked him by posting humiliating photos on his (Facebook) profile. I like continuity stories, so the call back to the wedding reception where he bedded multiple guests was good. And House training Cuddy’s little girl like a dog: inspired.

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Where was the flux capacitor?

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Bev Vincent

I wrote a 600-word short story this morning for NPR’s three-minute stories competition. I only found out about it a few days ago, thanks to someone’s link on Facebook, and it took me until today to come up with an idea that fit the guidelines. Woke up with the story in my head and it was then mostly just a matter of writing it down and then tweaking it to death. Six hundred words is only two pages, so there wasn’t a lot of room to play around. Word choice becomes important.

Played around with the proposal I plan to send to my agent tomorrow morning. We’ll go back and forth with it a few times, no doubt, before he’s ready to take action on it.

We watched The Man Who Wasn’t There on Friday night. I picked up the DVD on Amazon to bump my order up to the level required for free shipping. I hadn’t even known there was a movie—I read the book in school, probably grade nine. It’s about Operation Mincemeat, a real operation during WWII designed to mislead the Germans into thinking the Allied invasion from the south was going to be via Greece instead of the real target, Sicily. The movie was made in 1955, only 13 years after the incident it was depicting. The war would be fresh in the minds of the audience. It’s an interesting story, how they created a fake officer, gave him a full history, and then dumped his body (a corpse donated by a grieving father) into the Mediterranean from a submarine so it would drift to a Spanish city known to have active and intelligent German spies, who would get their hands on the “secret papers” in his dispatch case.

Because it’s been on Friday nights, I’ve been ignorant of the new series Blue Bloods, starring Tom Selleck. It moved to Wednesdays, so I watched the newest episode. It’s okay. I’ve always liked Selleck, who has grown from the smarmy, roguish Thomas Magnum into depicting characters with gravitas. Here, he’s the police commissioner. To me, the show’s only weak link is Jennifer Esposito, who played Christina Applegate’s friend on Samantha Who? I just can’t take her seriously as a cop.

Great to have Fringe back, and what a treat to have Christopher Lloyd show up as a guest star. He played a former musician (Violet Sedan Chair was his group), a particular favorite of Walter’s. Their paths crossed in a very unexpected way 25 years ago. A different rendition of the butterfly effect. Of course, given Christopher Lloyd’s past, there was time traveling involved in this plot. (Aside: has there ever been a more appropriate soundtrack for Walter than the one that opened the show—Ma na ma na? Walter is, of course, “a bit” high at the time, waiting for a 2 a.m. delivery of pizza to deal with his munchies. Perhaps “If I Only Had a Brain,” which ran later in the episode.)  The minute Walter put the bottle of experiment-laced milk in the fridge, I knew it would end up in the wrong hands stomach, but I thought it would go to Roscoe (Lloyd) instead of where it did. I wonder if that will have long-term repercussions.

Maybe Peter and Olivia will work their way back together again before too much time passes. The delivery of a book purchased for Faux-livia was an “ouch” moment. After having so much time in the spotlight, Olivia was definitely in the back seat in this episode. Had to grin at Peter reassuring the nurse that he “had experience with crankies” when she gave him Roscoe’s medications. This week’s misnomer for Astrid: Ashram. And Kelly (thanks to Roscoe). Okay, so the show was moved to Friday night, but was it necessary to rub it in by titling the episode Firefly? That seems to be tempting fate.

Question regarding The Mentalist: how many consultants does the CBI need? One seems too much some of the time, and this week they were burdened with yet another? And where was the guy who’s investigating the murder of a suspect in CBI custody? I knew Patrick wasn’t going to be able to throw away that report without at least considering that it might contain some new insight. And good to see that Cho doesn’t hold a grudge…for long.

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A very noiry CSI

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Bev Vincent

This morning, I wrote the first two paragraphs of a new short story I’m still developing in my mind simply because I wanted to get them out of my head, where they’ve been bouncing around for a couple of days. I still need to do a fair amount of historical research before I go farther.

I also wrote at least half of a proposal that I want to get finished by the end of the weekend. It’s not as detailed as some of the other proposals I’ve done in the past, but my agent tells me it doesn’t need to be. We’re baiting the hook—let’s see what we’ll catch.

I posted my review of The Silent Land by Graham Joyce on Onyx Reviews last night. I hope he sells a kajillion copies when it comes out here in the US.

Valley of Fear is a strange Sherlock Holmes novel. It introduces Moriarty, but makes almost no use of him except to conjure him as a bogeyman, which I guess was the point. The first half of the novel is a fairly traditional Holmes crime investigation, with the usual clever deductions. Then, halfway through it branches off to a long flashback that takes the story (but not Holmes or Watson) to a California village during the gold rush. The local lodge members run the town, murdering anyone who doesn’t see things their way. They have a deal with neighboring lodges to exchange assassins to remove the killer from the motive. I think I’ve figured out what’s going on, but I still have a couple of dozen swipes left to go (I’m reading it on my iPod, so I can’t really say pages). One of the best things about the book is that the local police in the first half of the book aren’t depicted as buffoons. It’s traditional for Lestrade be slow and lumbering and thick, but the cops in this one are decent at their jobs. They analyze the facts and come up with reasonable assumptions, even if they don’t have the cosmic brilliance of Holmes. That makes them more interesting than idiots.

CSI was fun last night. At first it seemed like they were recreating “The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix.” The killer was driving around with a portable electric chair in the back of a box truck. His first efforts didn’t work out so well because he used a synthetic sponge instead of a real one, which set his victim’s head on fire. The recreation in the lab was very much like what happened in The Green Mile. The killer improved with each murder, though. However, the story was also very noir, reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, hearkening back to the days of Bugsy Siegel. The woman who flirts with Greg reminded me a lot of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, especially at the end. At least Greg didn’t promise to wait for her when she got out. Her parting line revealed the depth of her craziness: For what it’s worth, I’ve loved you since Tuesday. And I liked Greg’s comment to Catherine: Why do the rotten ones smell so good? Jumpy moment when the “dead” guy proved he wasn’t. That’s been done a few times, including on NCIS, but it almost always works. And it was Nick’s fault that Greg got tangled up with her in the first place, goading him to get her number when she showed some interest.

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About Time

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Yesterday was my lucky day, I guess. I won a free tire rotation by answering a trivia question on my local car dealer’s Facebook page, and when I got home I found a package containing both the hardcover and audio versions of Full Dark, No Stars, which I won by tweeting something in Scribner’s Twitter contest a couple of months ago.

The cold front is starting to move through. Down to 47° en route to 31° this evening.

Michael Bracken pointed out this detailed, somewhat spoilerific review of Specters in Coal Dust. The reviewer says: One of the creepier ones, “Centralia Is Still Burning”, is written by Bev Vincent and is definitely one of my favorites.

I posted my review of Laura Lippman’s I’d Know You Anywhere last night. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award yesterday. Richly deserved, I’d say.

I finished reading H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine last night, too. I was surprised at how short it was. Barely more than a novella. However, I was impressed by his concept of time travel, which isn’t often used. Wells’s Time Traveler saw time as a literal fourth dimension in which one could travel, the same as the other three. He didn’t set a date on his time machine and get there instantaneously—he traversed the time dimension until he got somewhere, passing by everything that happened in the intervening years along the way. As he went faster and faster, it became more of a blur, but he was cognizant of the fact that he might stop somewhere inconvenient. His xyz coordinates weren’t changing, so it was possible that he could stop at a time where there was something physical occupying the same space. He didn’t explore the possible repercussions of doing so, but it was a clever notion. I guess Weena must have been the one who told him the names of the Eloi and the Morlocks, though that particular conversation is never related. Finding matches in the museum was a bit convenient, but there was less of that kind of thing than in the Jules Verne novel at least. Not a bad story, though I did kind of skim over the part where he jumped into the far future, as it seemed anticlimactic after what happened in the year 802,701.

Has anyone noticed that for someone who is as geeky as Reid is on Criminal Minds, he sure seems to go through a lot of different hair styles? The priest’s outburst while in the interrogation room was a tad overblown, I thought, and it seemed to me like they were trying to imply that Reid was having precognitive experiences by having him flash on the house where he ultimately confronted the killer. I thought it was funny when I wrote a story about a guy who tries to capitalize on the fact that his book tour seems cursed in “Knock ’em Dead” (When the Night Comes Down), but this guy went the extra step, becoming a mass murderer to promote his forthcoming book!

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A Class Act

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Bev Vincent

I love talking to my agent. I always feel inspired and motivated after I get off the phone with him. He always has time for me, and it’s not unusual for our conversations to go on for the better part of an hour, which is unusual for me, since I am usually not very fond of talking on the phone.

The Edgar Award nominees were announced today, which also happens to be Poe’s birthday. I was hoping for a Thin Ice nomination but then I realized there’s no anthology category in the Edgars. Judith Green’s story “A Good Safe Place” from the anthology was nominated, though. Also nominated was Thrillers: 100 Best Reads, edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner. Delighted by that one, as it contains my essay on Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.

Took a brief diversion in my reading last night to start The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Got it for free on my Kindle. I must have read this at some point, but my memory of it is vague. Did you know that Professor Moriarty appears in only two Sherlock Holmes stories? It’s easy to think of him as Holmes’s perpetual nemesis, but he wasn’t really. He’s mentioned in a few stories after Reichenbach Falls, but he’s an active participant in only this novel and “The Final Problem.”

How do you class up an already classy and fun show? Insert Bob Newhart, who appeared as a guest star on last night’s NCIS as Ducky’s predecessor. At first he was his usual droll self, making a typically complex, long-winded phone call to Willie Wong’s Wok, a Chinese restaurant long supplanted by a burrito stand. His character’s wife shares his real wife’s first name (and NCIS is her favorite show). The comedic side turned serious when Magnus was revealed to have Alzheimer’s and Newhart had a strong turn as the angry man who feels his memory slipping away from him. Well done. The episode also handled “don’t ask, don’t tell” and may be alluding to the possibility that Vance won’t be director much longer.

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In Da House

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Bev Vincent

Had another set of anthology guidelines added to my to-do list. This one doesn’t have a set deadline, which means I better not mess around or else it might fill up. However, I need to do some reading and research before I attempt a story. Oh, yeah, and I have to come up with a story. Fortunately the characters are already taken care of.

A mild, misty day today. We’ll be in the sixties until Thursday, when the high temp will be 67° and the low 31°. Can you say “cold front”? One time we were having breakfast at an IHOP. From where I was sitting, I could look out the window and see the digital temperature display on the bank next door. While we were eating, it started falling, visibly. I said to my wife: that must be a glitch. When we went outside, though, we discovered that the temperature really had fallen by about 15°.

I found out in the newspaper today that we have a new crime lab on the same street as my office. Just opened. I’m hoping they’ll let me tour their facility to get some insight into the way such a facility really works. TV forensics has painted a colorful but mostly fantastic version of what the job is like. As a chemist, I’m interested in the science, but as a writer I’m interested in the procedure.

I finally finished Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island yesterday. It took me the better part of a year to read it. I had the eBook on my iPod Touch and would read whenever I was stuck in line somewhere, or in a waiting room. The book would have been pruned by about 60% in today’s world, as it goes into excruciating detail about everything. However, it would make a handy book to have with you if you were ever stranded on a remote Pacific island. Too much coincidence for modern readers, especially the rescue at the end, but I couldn’t help thinking that Lost was influenced by this book more than people might realize. Next up on my long-term reading list: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Another one of those books that I’ve always wanted to read but never got around to.

It’s been fun watching Candice Bergen mature over the years. I knew her first as the daughter of Edgar Bergen, and then as Murphy Brown, of course. Then she showed up as one of Denny Crane’s exes on Boston Legal and then, last night, on House as Cuddy’s mother. Her characters have always had this acerbic, biting way about them, and it was never more true than on her House appearance. In one of the funniest scenes in the show’s recent memory, she got so bad that House doped her drinks during dinner with Cuddy and Wilson to knock her out. And then, coup de grace, he did the same thing to Wilson because he’s been whining of late. The patient-of-the-week almost got lost in all of the drama with Taub, but that’s okay. The patient is usually just a metaphor anyway.

Two and a Half Men was funnier than usual. Ironic turn-around in Charlie and Rose’s relationship and the dumb-ass secondary plot was stupid enough to be hilarious. How I Met Your Mother (also known as It’ll Be a Miracle if He Ever Meets Your Mother) was serio-comic. Robin’s bottomless purse reminded me of Felix the Cat. I didn’t exactly connect with the “last words my father said to me” idea. It never occurred to me at the time to wonder what those words might have been, and too much time has passed now, but I liked the way it worked out for Marshall. Really good last words, followed by more potty humor.

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