A/C today, heater tomorrow?

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Bev Vincent

It’s over 80° today, and humid, but that’s fixin’ to change tomorrow night, as they say around here. Down to 38° then and 30° on Friday night. We expect to do lots of cooking over the next few days. I started off with a yummy ham soup. I won the bone in a drawing at work last week after our office party. It had a lot of meat on it, so it made a good broth. Had a lunch of it and then put the rest in the freezer in single-meal bags. I doubt we’ll get back to it in the coming days.

I was wrong in my suspicions of Liat on NCIS. Turns out she wasn’t the leak. I thought they did a decent job of making Leon look young for his flashbacks. I like the way a lot of the show’s lore was wrapped up. The old debt that Leon paid off back when he became director was probably for that Danish, the one under discussion just before McAllister sent Gibbs off to Paris to work with Jenny Shepherd. My favorite line of the evening came from McGee, to Ziva, who is pounding the remote on the desk: Whoa, you don’t have to Gibbs up the clicker.

Sons of Anarchy has some funny developments, but this one takes the cake. Tell me there’s more going on in the feud between Tig and Kozik than a dog. Seriously? Tig is willing to leave SAMCRO short because of “his girl.” Still, there were some surprising developments this week. SAMCRO needed Salazar alive to expose Hale, thereby keeping Charming P.D. running things. They were so worried about Alvarez killing him. Instead, they should have been worried about Jax, who executed the guy who had kidnapped his old woman. Then comes the biggest of surprise of all: Stahl killing her girlfriend. Whoa. Did not see that coming, but it made a twisted kind of sense when Stahl kept up her part of the bargain with Jax to free Gemma. Is there anything this woman won’t do? She’s stone cold. Funniest lines of the episode (other than Gemma’s R-rated description of how Lyla earns her money when talking to Opie. “I’m sensing that’s a problem for you.”): 1) Juice, defending his inability to speak or understand Spanish. “I’m a Puerto Rican from Queens. I speak better Yiddish.” 2) Bobby to Jax: “We just traveled halfway around the world to get your boy. Tara should be a walk in the park.” Kudos to Hale for acting when Jax created a diversion, though of course he milked it for all it was worth after the fact. Favorite scene: Gemma and Wayne sharing a joint and commiserations.

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Aw, man!

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Jorge Garcia was a guest star on How I Met Your Mother last night. He played “The Blitz,” an old college buddy of Ted and Marshall’s, a guy who always leaves just before something totally awesome happens. For the first half of the episode, all he said was “Aw, man” after he found out what he’d missed. Then his curse was lifted and he got to say more, including a couple of Lost shout-outs. When Zoey dares Marshall to send a photo of “his junk” to a total stranger, Barney asks people to shout out random numbers. “4, 8,15,16,23, 42,” Jorge says. Later, when Barney offers to bribe him into being “the Blitz” again, he begs off, saying he was trapped on “that island” for what seemed like an eternity.

I’m liking the new addition, Zoey (Jennifer Morrison from House), especially the way she is becoming integrated into the group and is now one of Ted’s friends. How things can possibly progress any further between them is a bit of a mystery, but there’s definite chemistry.

No new Castle last night. Bummer.

Is it a tradition that House has to challenge God at least once a season? We get it already that he already thinks he’s bigger than God. Probably bigger than John Lennon. And what a disaster of a wedding that was. All the couples got into pissing contests, and none of the attendees gave the happy couple’s marriage any shot of surviving.

One of the most devastating aspects of a zombie apocalypse is thinking about everyone you ever knew turned into one of those creatures. When the two sisters were in the boat at the beginning of this week’s The Walking Dead, the younger one speculated that maybe their parents had survived. The unspoken subtext is the unthinkable: their loving parents are now flesh eating dead folk. Ew. The whole mission-to-Atlanta-to-get-guns had me wondering about whether there were other, less dangerous sources of guns. Certainly there are gun shops out in the country, right? We don’t know how thoroughly things have been picked over already, but I’d at least explore that possibility. And the running gag about Rick’s hat was just too over the top. You don’t stop to pick it up when zombies are converging on you—especially not Glen, to whom it means nada. I like Glen, though. The man with a plan. A former pizza delivery guy who knows the importance of mapping out alternate routes. And what happened to the one-handed redneck? He stole the van, presumably, but he didn’t make it back to camp.

The scene with the Vatos had its charm. The world hasn’t really changed (“same as it ever was”) and old tensions, animosities and hostilities remain. I liked that the old woman took Rick’s hand as she guided him through (the valley of the shadow of death) to the guy with asthma, and the three mean, killer dogs were a hoot. What did it all mean to the show, ultimately? It delayed them from getting back in time, I guess. They were the cavalry that showed up just a minute or two too late to save everyone. Question: do we really need to have another post apocalyptic story where someone inexplicably becomes prescient? And, following up, I think we could have done without Jim’s parting shot. “I remembered my dream and why I had to dig all those holes.” We got it. The shot alone told us everything.

My favorite character is Dale (Jeffrey De Munn), the philosopher who keeps up the RV lookout station, winds his watch daily and quotes Faulkner. “Had I been informed of the impending apocalypse, I would have stocked up,” he says when someone upbraids him for not having any wrapping paper. The carnage at the end was brutal, though. Carnage, I say.

Posted in House, The Walking Dead | Comments Off on Aw, man!

Needles and Pins

Posted on November 22, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Another nice review of Thin Ice. It says, in part, “More than a few twisted endings will make the whole thing even more enjoyable. In particular, the first story, winner of the Al Blanchard Crime Fiction Award, The Bank Job by Bev Vincent, is an excellent example of compelling reading. So too, and somewhat parallel in tone and subject matter, comes near the end with Ray Daniel’s Communion. Each revolves around friendships, loyalty, and gritty circumstances with less than angelic characters leading the way.”

I think Brook is having the best time of just about any contestant on The Amazing Race, and the preview for next week looks like that isn’t about to change. I was afraid she and Claire were going to get bounced last night, but they managed to squeak in ahead of the Chad and Stephanie, the other team that got U-turned. I’m still not sure why so much time appeared to elapse between when Kat and Nat checked in. The sun went down and it was full dark by the time they arrived, but Brook seemed to finish the bicycle assembly task not so long after Nat did. Did it take them that long to find the pit stop?

Time can be rewritten—people can’t. The first official trailer for the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special is now out. It stars Michael Gambon and includes Amy Pond, which is a bit unusual at it seems to me that in recent times the companion wasn’t in these specials. I think they missed a better version of the final line in the trailer. He should have said, “I’m the ghost of Christmas past, present and future.” Tomorrow is Doctor Who day on Facebook, too.

I had my first session of acupuncture this morning. I wasn’t sure what to expect, exactly. One of my coworkers recommended this particular practitioner. I’m not the biggest fan of new age or alternative medicine, but I was willing to give this a try as a way of resolving some of my lower back problems. A few of the needles stung briefly, but for the most part it was a painless process. They went into some unusual places, including my ears and ankles, and they stayed in a lot longer than I expected: 23 minutes (an unusual number, to be sure). I was face down in a room with new age instrumental music, so I was able to drift around in my thoughts while I waited for my Qi to restore itself to equilibrium. I didn’t have a eureka moment of instant healing, but I’ll go back for a follow-up next week.

Speaking of eureka, I hear there will be a Eureka Christmas special in early January. A Global Dynamics staff holiday, and a welcome return by Matt Frewer.

Dexter is coming to the end of the season, with just three more episodes to go. Johnny Lee Miller is upping the evil ante, now that he knows Dexter is after him. The single word “Lumen” at the end was ominous. When I saw the vial of blood he carries around his neck, I thought of Angelina Jolie, who he was once married to, who did the same thing with Billy Bob Thornton.

There were some interesting developments this week, most notably the return of Astrid, his step-daughter, with friend in toe, drunk and made up like a raccoon (not one of Dexter’s finer parental moments when he made that observation). Tell her about something you did as a teenager, Lumen advises. “I killed the neighbor’s dog,” he replies. “Well, don’t tell her that.”

Everyone (including Deb) is trying to figure out the dynamics between him and Lumen, who he’s passing off as his tenant because, well, anything else would be just freaky. Of course, they all think he’s banging her, when in fact they’re putting the screws to other people. “What are you, some kind of psycho?” Astrid’s friend’s stepfather asks just before Dexter delivers an anatomically correct ass-whooping. “Not today,” he says. “Just a concerned parent.” Astrid’s friend sums it all up: “My family’s pretty weird, too.”

The revelation that he is willing to put himself out there for someone else comes as a surprise to himself and to his alter ego, Harry, who rides along comfortably as Dexter’s Somewhat Dark Passenger. “If only I’d seen what you were capable of, maybe I wouldn’t have led you down this path.” Gee, thanks, Dad. Terrific time for an epiphany.

According to the preview, Peter Weller’s Geddy is going to see everything about what Dexter and Lumen are up to, which probably means he isn’t going to be a repeat star next season. “Beer is good any time,” he tells Quinn at 7 a.m.

Quinn spills his guts to Deb (except the bit about Geddy) after LaGuerta outs him for stalking Dexter. The talk didn’t go well. I loved Deb’s “Detective Scapegoat reporting for duty” line, but if the whole shooting/cover-up plot was just to get her into records to re-investigate the barrel bodies, well, that was a touch lame.

Masuda’s quip of the week: “If I tell LaGuerta, I may as well put my balls in a vice—and not in a hot way, either.”

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Only the Shadow knows

Posted on November 20, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Just finished an interview about The Stephen King Illustrated Companion for an Italian publication. I expect it will get translated, so I’m looking forward to re-translating it to English to see what route my words take.

I started Against All Things Ending (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3) and observed two things: First of all, the opening few pages is a crash course in how to write a synopsis. Eight long novels, probably amounting to a few thousand pages, are summarized in four or five pages. Summarized thoroughly and comprehensively, so as to bring entire novels back to life in my mind. Second: I don’t think I’ve had to reach for the dictionary so many times in so few pages as I did reading the first chapter. My vocabulary is decent, I like to think, but I am humbled by Donaldson’s. I was pretty sure I knew what “carious” meant, relating it to “caries” as in dental cavities, and I associated “frangible” with “fragile,” which was close but not exact, but I was baffled by “bedizened,” “surquedry,” “minatory” and “orogeny,” though the context of the sentence explained the latter, which is the action of plate tectonics that causes mountains to form.

When I was writing my one-line summary of “The Bank Job” for a press release, I called the main characters “schmucks.” I was advised by the person preparing the release that the Word Police did not approve since that word means “penis,” so I ended up having to call them bunglers, a perfectly serviceable word, but one without the chewiness of “schmuck.”

New things we know about the alternate universe in Fringe: Manhattan is spelled with only one “t” over there, and there’s a place called New Yonkers. There are three major political parties in America and two of them strongly favor a law to limit the number of children each family produces (though it’s not a popular stance among the public). Red Vines licorice was just introduced. Ronald Reagan starred in Casablanca. The FBI was disbanded 10 years ago, The Shadow is still on the radio, and the Peter Bishop act of 1991 means that all child abductions are treated as Fringe events.

This was a nice Broyles episode. Fake Broyles, in fact. Over there, people seem to call him Philip more than just Broyles as they do “over here.” He has a wife and a son who was taken by the Candyman. He may wield an iron fist at Fringe division, but his wife can over-rule him at home, as she did when she allowed Olivia to interview their son. And he’s a good man, despite some of the things he’s been forced to do. When Olivia brings the abductors to justice, she earns serious brownie points with him. Enough to encourage him to overlook her little slip about the FBI, a slip that told him she knew exactly who she was. Maybe enough to help her out next time, too, now that Walternate has her. I didn’t realize before that it was the Liberty Island gift shop Olivia was jumping to. Guess that’s why the camera lingers on the statue when they transition from one universe to the other. Good to see Henry the cab driver again. Funny guy. “Cast off? What? Oh, yeah, do that.” That was a helluva hole left behind Olivia when the first culprit shot at her. Now that Peter got the message from the cleaning lady, wonder what he’s going to do. Unfortunately, we have to wait two weeks to find out.

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The Tao of Maddy

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I received a very nice check in the mail last night from my agent for the second printing of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion. The neat thing about the way this project worked was that B&N bought all the copies from the printing, so there are no returns, no earning out of advances. Sweet deal.

I found the first review of Thin Ice today, on the blog Connie’s Reviews. She has some nice things to say about my story: “‘The Bank Job’ by Bev Vincent is a very cleverly written plot with the story centering on the power of loyalty and friendship among men. Vincent’s story is one of my favorites and I thoroughly enjoyed the humor he injects in his cast of characters. The story sound so ‘Jersey’ I loved it! A quite unusual story.”

I heard today that AMC isn’t going to renew Rubicon. Bummer.

It’s rare for something to happen on a TV program to make me jump, but I admit I jumped when Ray touched the two women in the bed on CSI last night and they came to life. They never really explained the amount of blood on the bed to my satisfaction. I know head wounds bleed, but not that much. The second storyline, with Sylvester and Tweety as the culprits, was funny. I had a hunch Tweety made the 911 call, but I liked the way it played out.

Some programs seem to have general thematic repetitions this season. With NCIS, it has been fathers. With Law & Order: SVU it’s been women that Elliott Stabler can’t stand. Last week it was Marcia Gay Harden as the FBI agent who keeps blowing him up and this week it was Christine Lahti as the recovering alcoholic D.A. He absolutely cannot help himself from bringing up her drunken past when he’s frustrated with her. He works for a division that handles sensitive cases, but he’s never been terribly sensitive. I liked the idea of a club called The Library near campus, so students could call their parents and tell them honestly that they were at the library. Elliott’s daughter schooled him on legal procedures. Lahti’s character got off the zinger of the night when the perp tried to say he was using a drug as an alternate to Viagra, calling it a “limp cock and bull story.”

Simon Baker directed this week’s episode of The Mentalist. Other than a couple of unusual cuts, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, so I guess he did a good job. I had to laugh at Lisbon’s reaction to the deer they encountered: Does it bite? I’ve seen that sheriff’s office before on this show in a different context. Must be part of the TV company’s backlot. Having the guy who used to be Neelix on Star Trek: Voyager play a fake psychic trying to out-Patrick Patrick was fun, right down to the familiar pats on the shoulder. The episode featured another Star Trek alum, too. The fire at the end was a huge surprise. I half expected the guy to have cut his own throat and painted a Red John smiley face on the wall, but not that. Tiger, tiger, burning bright indeed.

The wisdom of Sam Axe: I ever tell you you’re the reason I drink? Plus, “You know what always cheers me up? Stealing a chemical weapon from a bunch of crazy South Americans.” But the quotable moment of this week’s episode of Burn Notice came at the end when Michael’s mother Maddy set him and Jesse straight about their little feud. “I’m not talking about closure. I’m talking about good old-fashioned gutting it out. You know what families do when people lie and betray each other? They suck it up and they move on. If you’re good, shake on it. If you’re not…too bad. Shake anyway.”

Posted in Burn Notice, CSI, Law and Order: LA, Mentalist, Rubicon | Comments Off on The Tao of Maddy

Done listening to dead men

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Bev Vincent

One of the fun things about traveling is the pot-luck you get with change in airport concessions. After my trip to Boston I discovered that instead of a nickel I’d received a 5 centavos coin from Ecuador.

I wrote and revised my 350-word story and got it off to the contest a day early. Turned out pretty well, I think, but now it’s in the hands of the judges.

One of the cameramen or producers on Survivor must have a thing for snakes. It seems like every cutaway this season features some kind of snake. Maybe they’re trying to be metaphorical. I liked Brenda. She seemed smart, up until the end. I can appreciate her rationale about not looking weak by scrambling but when all is said and done your strategy should never be “I hope X will give me an immunity idol.” That had to be the longest pause ever when Jeff asked if anyone wanted to play one. NaOnka coined a neat new word tonight when she said she was pissed off to the “highest point of pisstivity.” I’m going to use that in my next novel. You’d think at least one person would have made the connection between “wooden chests” and “kindling,” though. I wonder why Jeff didn’t raise their little conflagration during tribal.

I finally caught up with last week’s episode of Fringe, and it was a good one. Faux-livia is starting to make enough mistakes that someone’s bound to catch her out before long, and Olivia is getting messages from the beyond about returning home. Hugo thought he had it bad with his six numbers, but that number stream sure had an ominous effect.  Walter was in fine form, digging at Peter about his interest in the device. “I knew my Jimi Hendrix wah-wah pedal would come in handy,” he said. LOL at him and Nina sitting on a bench in the campus smoking dope. “I have a prescription,” he said. “Me, too.” My favorite Walter line: “If you end up breaking the universe, this time it’s on your head,” followed closely by “I remember hours spent ripped out of my gourd listening to Beatles albums backwards for secret messages. There weren’t any.” I like the way the show’s mythology is evolving, and the deviousness of the alt-universe cabal. Draw attention to something by going to heroic lengths to try to cover it up. They want Peter to find the parts of the First People’s device. And Walter saves the day by making one of the sandwiches that he devised to provide clarity of thought. It worked on Astrid. Maybe he should munch on a few himself when he gets foggy.

A more traditional episode of Criminal Minds this week. I wonder where a person goes to buy cage doors like the ones in the underground cave. I wasn’t convinced that you could fit them in through that narrow tunnel. I also thought that Reid’s leap from one body to a mountain man stalking the trail was pretty broad.

Finally, after how many episodes, Jax is reunited with Abel. I was really mad at him (via the writers) for having him walk away from the son that he’s moved heaven and earth to find. How many people have died in the cause of this reunion? I know Father Ashby got inside his head a bit, but still. Gemma was the fierce momma bear, and she wasn’t giving up, no way, no how. I liked how Clay told her “not to kill anyone” when they went to the orphanage and five minutes later she has a gun to the head of a screaming baby threatening to go all Samson on him. Famous last words from Jax: “Me and Opie can handle the nuns.”

Meanwhile, Tara has another body on her conscience. That’s two, now, right? The whole deal with Salazar was muddled, from the abysmal way the money drop was handled (if a couple of kids can bollix up a situation, it probably wasn’t well conceived). Then when Tara and Salazar were in the standoff, I found myself wondering why one of them didn’t just pull the trigger. Is it a given that if you shoot the other person will have time to shoot back? I wonder. And it seems to me that at some point while Salazar was carrying his girlfriend out to the car that Tara should have been able to either get his gun from him or get away.

Getting Jimmy O back to northern California means that Jax will have a chance to keep up his end of his agreement with Stahl and possibly kill Jimmy, too. Into whose bag did Maureen put the letters from John Teller? Jax or Gemma? I wonder what she’s hoping to accomplish by doing that. Anyhow, as today’s subject line indicates, Jax is done listening to dead men.

Posted in Criminal Minds, Fringe, Sons of Anarchy, Survivor | Comments Off on Done listening to dead men

The truth is out there

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Bev Vincent

My Storytellers Unplugged essay Contests? No Contest is now live for your reading enjoyment.

There’s a new review of On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association at Famous Monsters of Filmland today. The book continues to sell well and we all get royalty checks every six months lo these many years after publication. My essay is called “For Love or Money: Six Marketing Myths.”

My goal this morning was to get started on a 350-word flash fiction story for a contest. It took me a while to come up with a concept, but then I started noodling around with a situation. I figured out who the main characters are and their complication. I wrote by hand, with plenty of strikeouts, one full page. Didn’t worry about word count, as I was still figuring things out as I went along. Then, while I was doing my morning stretching exercises, the story kept percolating in my mind, and a new character spoke to me. That sounds creepier than it really is. It was loud and clear and gave me the framework for the story. I love it when that happens.

Fathers and sons, fathers and daughters—that’s been the theme of the past few episodes of NCIS. Ziva is estranged from her father, who left her for dead, but is now in the position of having to be his bodyguard, along with her own director. Three terrorists are after Eli David, but by the end of this two-parter we are left with the impression that there might have been someone else involved. An insider who knew where the safe house was. My bet is on Liat, the female Mossad agent, the “new Ziva,” played by Israeli model turned actress Sarai Givaty. She’s the one who shot one of the terrorists three times and then said perfunctorily, “Drop your weapon.”

Castle took on The X-files this week, and it’s an apt fit. Beckett is a perfect Scully to Castle’s Mulder. He so much wants to believe in incredible explanations and she always looks for the mundane. There was a nice bit of misdirection in the episode when the secretary at the place where the murdered woman worked looked nervous and guilty. Lyle Lovett (“I’m going to have to put you on my Friends and Family list”) was fun as the agent from an unknown agency. When Castle asked him where all the expected dramatics were (predator drones, black helicopters, SWAT teams rappelling down ropes), he deadpanned, “Budget cuts.” Funny Bat-phone reference when Beckett talked into a box of bugs that had been removed from her car to communicate with the agency, and a great Close Encounters scene in the stalled car, and the ensuing hilarity surrounding their “hickeys.” We learned, too, that Castle has half a million followers on his Twitter account. My favorite bit, though, because I’m a geek, came when Castle started spouting Firefly-sounding Mandarin. (“My partner is crazy and may start firing at any second.”) Beckett turned to him and asked, “Semester abroad?” to which he answered, “No, a TV show I used to love.” And the closing shot of them strolling off together was perfect. They could have been holding hands.

Of all the gin joints in all the survivor camps near Atlanta, Rick had to walk into this one (on The Walking Dead). The very one that his wife and son were in. What are the odds? Pretty good, apparently. I wonder how long it’s going to take him to find out that his best friend, Shane, told his wife he was for-sure d-e-a-d dead and was keeping house with her. Shane’s not taking the new status quo all that well, working out his frustrations on the redneck wife-abuser. I like Jeffrey DeMunn’s character, especially his philosophical ruminations on the inadequacies of words. “There goes them words, falling short. Paltry things.” I’m still trying to figure out why Rick went to such lengths to get all the way back to camp, only to turn around and take most of the group back into town again. Shouldn’t he have had those second thoughts earlier? The post-apocalypse new social order in the camp seems to have very quickly gone south. “I’m beginning to question the division of labor,” one of the women said as they pounded laundry with rocks in the stream while Shane and the boy frolicked. The unlikeable character quotient in this series is pretty high. Sure there are bound to be some hillbilly bigots, but where are all the nice folk? The closing shot was a good surprise, though. I know they made some comment last week about how long it would take to saw through the metal pole, but still.

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Two Beavers Are Better Than One

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Bev Vincent

My interview at Level Best Books went up today. Check it out. I talk a bit about setting stories in New England and about writing in general.

Isn’t that one of the most handsome covers you’ve ever seen? I think so. Click on the image to see a larger version. This is Deena Warner’s artwork for the collection of Hitchcock-inspired poems that will be out next year from Dark Scribe Press. It features my first-ever published poem, “24 Hour Psycho.”

People in the UK are reporting seeing the Stephen King biography that features interview segments with me. It’s on the Bio channel over there.

Today’s title is the name of one of Robin Sparkles’ songs on How I Met Your Mother. They make fun of the TV show she was on as a teenager, picking out all the lewd undertones, which is reminiscent of a real-life show from the sixties that was covertly very naughty. Alan Thicke was a guest star as the show-in-a-show’s host.

I forgot about this project, but apparently it is filming. Rise of the Apes, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, comes out next year. Based on the description it looks like a riff on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I also understand that most of the apes will be motion capture and CGI. Andy Serkis is performing as Caesar, the role created by Roddy McDowell. Some photos here.

I wrote my Storytellers Unplugged essay this morning. It will appear in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning.

I was amazed that a team on The Amazing Race could oversleep by a whole two hours and end up winning the segment. I think that’s the first time since I started watching the show that’s happened. Luck was on their side: the thirty minute penalty the other team sustained was enough to get them in first place. The bit about not paying taxi drivers to show them the way is a relatively new rule. It’s getting down to the wire now. I hope an all-girl team wins just to spite the volleyball team members, who are adamant that they don’t want any all-girl team to win this year if it couldn’t be them.

I don’t think I liked last week’s episode of Criminal Minds very much. It was one of those pastiche episodes that riffed off Psycho and Sunset Boulevard, but it didn’t work. Garcia being outed as a closet stage actress was lame, too, especially when she got stage fright about a press conference. The funniest part was Reid stuffing his face while entertaining the possibility that the unsub had eaten the victim’s lips.

This week’s House was good, with the possible smallpox case. House doesn’t often have a patient die on him. New kid on the block saves the day. She adds an interesting dynamic to the show. Based on the number of movie previews I see featuring Olivia Wilde’s name, I’d hazard a guess that she ain’t coming back any time soon. House’s quip of the evening: “I saved you from the horrible post-differential traffic jam.” And Wilson told one of his patients that he had to go see “a very sick man,” and we had no doubt who that was. Getting tired of the Cuddy drama, though. Talk it out, get over it.

Fi had an interesting way of storing her phone on Burn Notice. The cleavage pocket. She was also irked by the fact that some (other) psycho would be the first person to bring explosives into her new house, instead of her. Guess she didn’t have to worry about that long, given the fate of said new house. Jesse seems a little hotheaded and bitter. Maybe a loose cannon now. Michael’s mom, in response to why he did the things he did: “Whatever. Maybe you’ve got some repressed crap.” And when he asks her how she found a replacement set of sunglasses exactly like his old ones: “It’s called shopping. We all have our strengths.”

People are wondering whether Dexter and Lumen are going to get romantic. I think they got as intimate this week as any couple. “Stay the night,” he tells her, and he isn’t hitting on her. Instead, they prepare the room for the kill together. He has a partner, a good one (not like Jimmy Smits). And then when Lumen was traumatized by the screamer next door, Dexter didn’t try to comfort her in the traditional way, he put his hands over her hands over her ears and helped her block it all out. It was such a good moment that I wish they would have mirrored it at the end of the episode when Dexter killed the security guy. I was waiting for her to put her hands over his over the knife hilt. “Death was the only kindness you showed them” was the guy’s epitaph.

Lumen now knows him better than just about anyone else, except perhaps his father. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she asks. “How quickly you can get used to the supremely weird.” She knows that he would be in the room killing the bad guy even if he’d never met her. Dexter wonders if she can make him whole, which probably means that she can’t or won’t. “Can anyone live with the truth of what I am?” Maybe Deb (see below), but I fear that Lumen won’t.

I found myself wondering where (and when) Dexter gets his enlargements done. CVS? He always has big pictures of his victims’ victims. And where did all the suitcases come from? The ones he used to export the body from the hotel.

Dexter is fascinated by Deb’s lack of emotional response to shooting a bad person. “I’d empty a fucking magazine into him…okay, maybe that something worth talking [to the shrink] about.” I wonder if Deb is going to find out Dexter’s secret at some point, like she does in the books. Laguerta throwing Deb under the bus bodes ill for her job and for her marriage, especially since Angel grew a pair and plans to side with Deb. “You’re like my kid sister…but better, because I actually like you.” Deb has been falling behind on expletives this season. She caught up this week.

Liddy (G. Gordon? aka Peter Weller) plus telephoto lens equals Oh My.

Posted in Burn Notice, Criminal Minds, Dexter, House, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Two Beavers Are Better Than One

Thin Ice

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I spent most of Friday evening lying through my teeth.

I was in Boston/Dedham for Crime Bake, and people were wondering why I came all the way from Texas for a New England conference for crime writers and readers. I dissembled. I deflected. I told them I’d been offered free pizza if I came (which was true, but so was everyone else).

The real reason I was there was because I was the winner of the 2010 Al Blanchard Award, which was to be announced the following morning. I had known about this for a long time, some number of months, but I wasn’t to say anything until it was announced at the conference. I didn’t get a chance to say anything during the presentation, but if I had, I would have apologized to all the people I’d misled the previous evening!

My short story, “The Bank Job,” was selected as the winner out of some 160 submissions to the contest, so I’m quite pleased by the achievement. I’ve been entering the competition for a number of years now, and some of my stories have made top-10 lists before, but that’s the best I’ve done. One of my submissions was ultimately published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which gave me an idea of how strong the competition was.

Level Best Books has been publishing an anthology of New England crime fiction in conjunction with Crime Bake for eight years, and they always include the Al Blanchard Award winner, so that’s where you can find “The Bank Job” if you’re interested in reading it. This year’s antho is called Thin Ice. My story is a humorous caper about five schmucks who plan a bank job to help one of them get out of trouble with a loan shark. I know it’s humorous because I read it to my wife last night and she laughed. Level Best is also doing interviews with the Thin Ice contributors. Mine should appear in a day or two or three.

Crime Bake was a very good conference. Charlaine Harris (Sookie Stackhouse series, adapted as True Blood on HBO) was the guest of honor and Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone) was also present. In fact, getting Lehane to sign Moonlight Mile only to have him congratulate me was one of those surreal moments that seem to crop up in my life from time to time.

Getting to Boston wasn’t bad. I used a mobile boarding pass for the first time, on Continental, which worked out just fine. I caught the Silver Line bus from Logan into South Station and climbed the stairs and crossed the station in time to see that the next Franklin Line train to Dedham left at 4:20. It was 4:19. I ran out to the train and got on just as it was about to leave, otherwise I would have had to wait an hour.

After the free pizza, there was a screening of an episode of True Blood, which I’d never seen before. It’s hard not to like something that has Anna Paquin frolicking around naked for large chunks of time, but beyond that I wasn’t really hooked. Michelle Forbes, who played Ensign Ro Laren on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is also on the show. There was nothing in that particular episode that would have told me Sookie Stackhouse was telepathic, which I only learned the next day. I’ve never seen or read Twilight, but I understand that it shares some of the same traits as Harris’s series. Not planning to subscribe to HBO any time soon, anyway.

Saturday started with my moment in the spotlight, the Al Blanchard Award presentation, and then went into panels and signings. There was a very energetic young guy who was an expert on lock picking. His love of his topic was infectious. They had a large group of editors and agents who sat for pitches and Q&A sessions, and quite a few series authors and regionally published authors. It was a great group. Everyone was so friendly—even though they classified themselves as reserved New Englanders. The fact that I came from New Brunswick gained me admission as an honorary New Englander by extension! One great idea they had as an ice breaker was a scavenger hunt. You got a card (sort of like a bingo card) that had a different type of person in each slot. You had to find someone to sign your card that applied. Has written about werewolves. Published by Level Best. Derringer Award winner. Has edited books. Someone you don’t know, etc. People had most of the weekend to fill out the card, and there were prizes, so that was an incentive. It got people talking to each other right off the bat.

We had a signing for Thin Ice after lunch that was very well attended. Many contributors and the editors were present. We all sat in a line like wallflowers at the school dance and people passed along in front of us as we signed. There wasn’t a break in the entire 30 minute time slot. I don’t know how many copies I signed, but it was a considerable number. If you’re on Facebook, you can see some photos of the award presentation and the signing on my page there. Lehane was on an afternoon panel about thriller writing that gave him the opportunity to utter some bon mots about writing, some of which I tweeted. My favorite two: “The first job of storytelling: When in doubt, tell the effing story.” (yes, he actually said “effing”) and “I came out of a literary tradition, an MFA, and it took years to scrape it off.”

Saturday night was the Vampire Ball, which I skipped since I was there by myself. I’m not much of a dancer at the best of times. I need two ingredients: alcohol (which was not in short supply) and my wife (who wasn’t with me). I did go to the pre-ball cocktail party to see everyone in costume. I spent the rest of the evening in the bar talking to another writer. On Sunday I went to the breakfast, praying I wouldn’t win one of the book baskets from the raffle because I had no idea how I would get it home if I did. I was traveling very light, just a handbag, and that would have derailed my plans. I had to take a taxi to the airport since the trains don’t run on Sunday mornings. I got there in plenty of time, went through security and heard them issuing last call for an earlier flight to Houston. I went to the gate and discovered that they had one open seat—someone had just been canceled for not checking in on time—and they waived the usual $50 fee and waved me on the plane, so I got home a couple of hours early which was nice.

All in all a terrific weekend, and if you are ever in the New England area in November and you’re at all interested in crime writing, you should check out Crime Bake.

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Crossing swords

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I’m getting ready to leave for the airport to fly to Boston, where I will be attending Crime Bake for the next couple of days. I’ll report on it when I get back, and will probably post tweets if the WiFi at the hotel cooperates. Dennis Lehane is going to be there, so I hope to get a chance to meet him. Charlaine Harris, who I met at NECON a while back, is the Guest of Honor.

Surprising turn of events on Survivor this week, and I think Marty was as astonished as anyone. Based on the way he strutted down the catwalk after he cast his vote, I think he was convinced that Jill was done. And NaOnka surprised everyone by keeping the idol for another week. I wonder if she had inside information. I had to laugh when she counselled Chase not to get on Brenda’s nerves. As if she hasn’t been getting on everyone’s nerves. Funny line of the week came from Dan. “There aren’t any ziplines in Brooklyn. If there are, you’re a burglar.” The preview for next week looks ominous. Everyone looking down and reacting as if they’ve just seen the most terrible thing ever. Any guesses as to what it is, Jeff Strand? It’s always interesting to watch the Ponderosa footage on line, to see the dynamics of how the previous person adapts to the insertion of someone new who is just coming down off the game.

Big sense of deja vu watching CSI last night. The show opened with a bunch of young people skinny dipping and discovering a body in the water with them. The exact same thing happened in the opening scene of Law & Order: Los Angeles the night before. And in both cases the person had been killed elsewhere and dumped in the water—the Pacific in the case of L&O and in a sulfur spring on CSI. I was hoping to see more of the oil rig they visited as a crime scene on L&O:LA, as it made for an interesting setting. The defense attorney was someone the DA (Decker, played by Terrence Howard) knew from law school. When she said, “Imagine my thrill when I heard we were going to cross swords” he quickly countered with, “I didn’t realize you had one.” Later, when his assistant chides him for thinking that his manly approach would convince a reluctant witness better than hers, he said, “This voice has changed the minds of a lot of women.”

The opening scene of The Mentalist was a nice surprise. Does Lisbon know that Grace is dating the FBI guy? If so, putting him and Rigsby together was a risky move. And Hightower blows the killer away by shooting in a direct line with Lisbon and Jane. No through-and-throughs? You know you’re in trouble when your captor says, “I have to take my medication now.” Lisbon thinks she needs to analyze what Patrick would have seen at the crime scene, but she fails. Patrick would probably have identified the witness as a liar. I had my suspicions, especially because Lisbon said to check them out, which is something you don’t often hear the cops say. LOL at Patrick’s filing cabinet full of complaint letters. Not much Cho action this week. Lisbon got off the best line, sotto voce at the end: “I wish I had a cattle prod.”

A little bit of levity on Law & Order: SVU this week. Stabler is confronted with his nemesis, FBI agent Dana (Marcia Gay Harden). Every time they meet up with her, something bad happens to him. “I don’t have a good track record with you and explosives,” he tells her, then, winded after chasing a suspect, he gasps, “She’s not going to be happy until she kills me.” A few seconds later he catches one of her ricochets in the shoulder. Of course she brings him flowers in the hospital, so that’s okay. Munch got a little more screen time this week because the plot involved paranoid conspiracy theorists and he’s the resident expert on those. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Finn tells him when he’s reading their propaganda. Stabler did a little play-acting when he was interrogating one of the wing nuts. “Don’t look at the mirror,” he advises, before warning about “FEMA Death Camps.” I’m still not sure what happens to the kid Liv inherited when she’s called out on the job. I know Marcia Gay Harden is an excellent actress, and I enjoyed chatting with her on the set of The Mist, but I find I’m usually conscious of her acting when I watch her. Except at the end of this episode when she has to testify about her assault. That was engrossing.

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