Bev Vincent

Happy New Year, everyone on this 1/1/11. Instead of watching the same dreary old countdown shows on TV (I can’t believe CNN keeps inviting Kathy Griffin back and that Anderson Cooper agrees to appear with her), we watched the Doctor Who marathon on BBC America.

My flash fiction story “Chain Reaction” was posted a few days ago on the New Scientist’s CultureLab blog. The theme for the story was “futures that never were.” And, yes, I did point out the error in the pronoun in the author bio.

The Stephen King Illustrated Companion is back on sale at Barnes & Noble’s web site. This time, the discount is 39%, which makes the price $14.99.

We had quite an adventure on our trip to eastern Canada. We left Houston at 6:00 a.m. on Boxing Day (Sunday, Dec. 26th) to fly to Moncton, N.B. via Newark. I knew the storm that had dumped all that rain on California was headed to the east coast as snow, but I figured we were ahead of it. In fact, we were. When we arrived in Newark, it wasn’t yet snowing. However, that didn’t stop them from canceling our flight to Moncton, the only one that day. We knew that if we stayed for the Monday flight we would be stuck. For a while we thought our only choice was to turn around to go back to Houston, but even’t that wasn’t a sure thing as the flights were either full or canceled.

Two disgruntled Continental employees at the customer service booth (they were supposed to be off but had been called in) managed to figure out a way to get us to our destination, flying to Montreal on Continental and Moncton on Air Canada. There was another couple in the same situation as us, and the two customer agents conspired to duplicate our itineraries. Through one of those odd bits of happenstance, we ran into that couple numerous times subsequently, and ended up on the same flights back to Houston later on in the week. (I later discovered that he’s a PRCA bareback riding champion named Clint Cannon, and was featured in a documentary film recently. The fact that he wore a cowboy hat should have been a tipoff.)

There were three flights from Newark to Montreal, but the first one was canceled already. While we were checking the monitors for our gate, the third one went red, leaving only ours. The flight was delayed by an hour so they could try to give people who were supposed to be on the third flight time to check in. Then we spent another half hour being deiced. We reached Montreal, but our luggage didn’t, even though the customer service reps had gone to great lengths to pass along our description to someone in Newark. (Another oddity—for the first time ever I wrote down the brand of our suitcase and made note of its color and defects while we were checking in at Houston. The Continental reps were impressed by how well we were able to describe it!)

We had to spend valuable time filling out paperwork and getting it stamped by customs in Montreal, then made a beeline across the entire airport to go through security again and make it to our gate. We got to the aircraft with seven minutes to spare. In Moncton, we had to fill out more luggage paperwork and wait on a mysteriously absent rental car booth clerk. By the time we set out on the two-hour drive to my sister’s house, it was nearly nine p.m. and we’d been on the road for sixteen hours. Thankfully, the roads were clear and the snow didn’t start until we were a couple of miles from our final destination.

Lessons learned: when you leave on a trip, make sure you’re wearing something you don’t mind having on for the next several days. We regularly checked the location of our bag, but it didn’t reach Moncton until Thursday morning. We picked it up at the airport after we checked in for our return trip.

There was a nice snowfall on Sunday night, only a few inches, just enough to turn the area into a winter wonderland. We awoke Monday morning to no power in the house, but it didn’t stay off long. Despite our lack of a change of clothes (I did laundry almost every morning), we had a nice visit with my siblings, nieces and grand-nieces and grand-nephews, some of whom I’d never met before. Ate wonderful, home-cooked food (including a lobster dinner). Defied the odds and gained no weight, so far as I can tell. Watched TV news about people stranded in New York and counted our blessings for not being included in that number—it was a close call. We were among the last flights to depart from Newark that day. Saw video of fields of luggage and despaired of ever seeing our bag again.

When we reached Moncton on Thursday afternoon for our return flight, we learned that it was two hours late because the inbound flight had mechanical problems. We would arrive in Newark around the time our Houston flight departed. We had no reason to rush back to Houston, so we weren’t distressed by the likelihood that we’d have to spend the night in a Newark hotel and return home the following afternoon (yesterday). We even joked about going to Times Square for New Years Eve. As I mentioned, we ran into the same couple at the airport. They had received their luggage two days earlier. We had a sort of Amazing Race vibe going on, a friendly rivalry for new routes. The young woman wasn’t happy to hear that we were booked on a 1:30 p.m. flight the following day because they were on one later in the afternoon.

They rushed us through customs in Newark like I’ve never seen before. They even skipped my fingerprinting. Our bag made it this time. We’d been told to drop it off at the transit lounge, but we figured we’d hold onto it since we we figured we’d be spending the night in a hotel. However, when we got to the customer service counter, they had us on a flight at 8:45 p.m. that very night. The other couple had been planning some sort of complicated route via Austin. Nevertheless, we all ended up on the same flight again and in adjacent rows on the plane, as had been the routine through the entire trip. Got our bag onto the same flight, too and we got back home around midnight.

At least we didn’t have much laundry to do after our trip.

Our daughter decided we should watch Meet Me in St. Louis last night. Haven’t seen it for years. I’d forgotten how creepy and strange the Halloween scene is. And that long tracking shot when Tootie is walking away from the fire to play a prank on the old man. In my opinion, Tootie steals the show. Weird kid, with her death obsession and fondness for knives.

I posted two reviews on Onyx Reviews today: I Still Dream About You by Fannie Flagg and Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson.

When I was digging around for details about Umberto Eco’s forthcoming novel, I discovered a tie-in book he published after The Name of the Rose in which he discusses how he came to write the book. Not what the book is about—he no longer feels entitled to speak to that (the text speaks for itself)—but his process. The idea started with a vague desire to murder a monk, but he originally planned a contemporary setting. He tracks his logic through to the medieval version and then what preparation he felt he had to do before he started writing. He had the settings so well mapped out that he knew how much dialog could be exchanged when characters walked from one place to another. He explains the origin of the labyrinth and the very concrete reasons why it is set in a particular month and in a particular year. The layers of abstraction between the narrator and the story and who is actually narrating: an older version of Adso who is trying to recreate his innocent impressions as a young man filtered through at least two other people. His alternate choices for the title and the Italian aversion to book titles that represent the main character’s name. Fascinating stuff. He also talks about how writing is a discussion between the author and the text, and reading is a discussion between the text and the reader. The author’s not part of that equation any more. Another interesting part is the bit about how his friends and editors wanted him to prune the first hundred pages because they were difficult going. Those pages created readers who were capable of handling the rest of the book, he argues.  It’s a short volume—I read half of it while one eye was on the TV screen last night—but enlightening.

Our Japanese parent company often contributes a page to our monthly intramural newsletter. This is a chatty document that discusses local weather in our various sister companies’ territories, pets, parties, etc. This month, their article was on bonenkai, which is an annual tradition of having parties in December with your co-workers where you forget all the troubles of the year behind. This generally involves a lot of drinking. Also, since the definition of “co-workers” is rather loose, a person can end up attending several bonenkai parties. I found this amusing essay on the topic.

Last week I mentioned that I made the short list in the New Scientist flash fiction contest. Today I found out that the list consisted of just 10 stories selected from among over 700 entries, so I’m feeling pretty good! Judge Neil Gaiman wrote the following about the entries: “I really enjoyed reading the shortlist, and was impressed by the way people folded huge stories, even things that felt like novels, into 350 words or less, just as I was impressed by the sense of wonder that the writers generated, and the clash between the way we see the world now and the ways we’ve used to make sense of the world in the past…My congratulations to the finalists. You all have a great alternate past ahead of you.” The winning entry was posted today. The two runners up and remaining seven finalists to follow.

The publishers of Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads are giving away five hardcover mystery novels to two lucky people who sign up for their newsletter between now and Saturday.

The Closer was a strange affair this week. I didn’t realize it was going to be a two-part story until I saw that time was running out with a lot to yet be resolved. The kid was super creepy but I think we can eliminate him as the perp because he was e-mailing someone who was already dead. Unless he was canny enough to suspect that he was being watched. At first he just seemed strange, ignoring some questions completely and answering others. I tried to see if there was some rhyme or reason to it, but couldn’t. The smile he gave Brenda when his uncle was taking him away was scary. I suspect that the DNA tests will be surprising and that the 911 calls will be key, once they’re translated. I suspect Brenda is going to have a full house for Christmas dinner. Maybe they’ll have a bonenkai party.