Bev Vincent

According to my movie log, I watched on average a movie per week during 2020. The last one we saw in a theater was probably 1917 and boy does that seem like a long time ago.

The long list includes documentaries and a few streaming plays like Hamilton and Phantom of the Opera.

As I’ve said previously, I’m not very good at Top X lists, but I was able to winnow down the list of 50+ films to my top fifteen. In order seen, not in order of preference:

• 1917
• Joker
• Parasite
• Ford v Ferrari
• Harriet
• Just Mercy
• The Vast of Night
• Da 5 Bloods
• Hamilton
• Greyhound
• Radioactive
• The Old Guard
• Enola Holmes
• My Octopus Teacher
• The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

We’ll probably see some more before the end of the year (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, News of the World, Promising Young Woman and the new Wonder Woman are our radar).

If you’re interested in the whole list, you can find it here.

Seriously, who wants to remember 2020? It’s a year that we’re looking forward to seeing only through the rearview mirror where, as everyone knows, objects may be closer than they seem. I have high(er) hopes for 2021, what with the forthcoming change in administration and the availability of two coronavirus vaccines. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll even get out of the house for more than a few minutes at a time, something I haven’t done since March except to buy groceries or walk around the block with my wife.

Nevertheless, it’s time to look back at some of my lists, and I’m starting with publications.

It has been a productive year in terms of getting things into print. I don’t know if there’s been another year when I’ve published as many short stories.

Here’s the list:

• Aeliana, Shining in the Dark, several translated versions including Swedish, Brazilian, French, and Japanese
• Expiration Date, The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths, Mango, June 16, 2020
• Kane and the Candidate, Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, July 4, 2020
• The Hound of Bracketville, Places We Fear To Tread, September 2020
• Halloween Funeral, Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020 (published momentarily and then summarily unpublished!)
• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, October 2020
• Special Delivery: Unnerving Magazine #14, October 24, 2020 (reprint)
• Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
• Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn Vol. 1: 21st Century Noir, December 14, 2020
• The Lobster Trap, Masthead: Best New England Crime Stories, Level Best Books, December 15, 2020
• An Invisible Christmas Spectacular, Halldark Holidays, Cemetery Gates Media, December 2020

Oh, and “Zombies on a Plane” (as “Zombis en el avión”) from Flight or Fright was nominated for an Ignotus Award, which Locus magazine describes as “the Spanish equivalent of the Hugo Awards.” Category:  “Cuento extranjero” (foreign short story). A high honor. I watched the virtual ceremony, which was fun.

In addition to my regular columns in Cemetery Dance magazine and at News from the Dead Zone online, I published my first article in a gardening magazine in 2020! “Bamboozled” appeared in the July/August issue of Texas Gardener. I also wrote an afterword for the SST Publications limited edition of Richard Chizmar’s Gwendy’s Magic Feather.

A little light on reviews this year, for reasons I can’t divulge at this time! However, I did manage to write a few.

• The Outsider (TV review), CD Online, January 10, 2020
• If It Bleeds, CD Online, April 20, 2020
• Of Mice and Minestrone by Joe Lansdale
• Into the Black Nowhere by Meg Gardiner
• The Chill by Scott Carson
• Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill
• A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin
• Fool Me Twice by Jeff Lindsay
• Creative Types by Tom Bissell
• Just Like You by Nick Hornby
• Cry Baby by Mark Billingham
• Plunge by Joe Hill and Stuart Immonen
• The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Turnout by Megan Abbott

It’s been a good day. Two short story acceptances within several hours. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. There have been days when I’ve had two rejections, but not this!

The first acceptance was for a twisted Christmas story called “An Invisible Christmas Spectacular.” I saw Gabino Iglesias’ call for submissions a while back and I cogitated over whether I could tackle a horror story. I haven’t written many of those lately. My short fiction output has been mostly crime fiction recently. Finally, an idea came (after a bit of research) and I sat down at the dining table in the library (a glorified name for the area at the end of our living room, next to the sliding doors that lead into the backyard) with a Moleskine journal. I wrote the entire story in a single sitting, which is also unusual for me. It’s not as long as my crime stories tend to be (2100 words instead of 4-6000), but still. The next day I dictated it into the computer, cleaned up the errors, ran through it a few cycles of revisions and edits, and away it went. It will be published in the anthology Halldark Holidays, from Cemetery Gates Media, later this month if all goes according to plan.

I won’t name the other acceptance because the paperwork is still outstanding. It’s an even shorter piece, but also horror.

This has been a particularly productive year for me in terms of short fiction. At least eight stories have seen or will see print in 2020. Of recent note:

• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, October
• Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, December (the ebook is out now; trade paperback later this month)
• Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn, December 14
• The Lobster Trap, Masthead: Best New England Crime Stories, Level Best Books, December 15
• An Invisible Christmas Spectacular, Halldark Holidays, Cemetery Gates Media, December 2020

I have at least two stories on deck for 2021, plus the publication of my longest piece of fiction in Dissonant Harmonies with Brian Keene. I’m hoping to replace that honor with an even longer piece—a novel. I’m working on the final (for now) draft of a book that’s been in the works for a long, long time. I’m not sure I’ll get this draft done by the end of 2020, but I hope it won’t be much after that, at which point I’ll send it to my agent for his feedback.

What have I’/we been watching lately? We zipped through The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. An excellent series. Highly recommended. Last night we watched the first four episodes of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. I’d seen a tweet that led to a series review that featured a clip from a late episode that got me interested in it. Sitcoms are a hard sell for me, but this one works because the main character (played by Jason Sudeikis) is so upbeat in the face of adversity and the situations aren’t horribly artificial. We’re also keeping up with Star Trek: Discovery.

In the mornings while I toil away on the elliptical, I’ve been watching the Brazilian crime drama Good Morning, Verônica, which is dark and gritty and violent but quite interesting. It’s helping to cleanse the palate from The Undoing, which had five strong episodes and then one terrible one.

Recent movies include Hillbilly Elegy; Sometimes, Always, Never; Uncle Frank and Dolly Parton: Here I Am. Sometimes, Always, Never stars Bill Nighy as a Scrabble-loving father who can’t give up the search for a son who went missing. It’s a kind of reverse prodigal son story, as he rediscovers the one who didn’t go missing. Uncle Frank stars Sophia Lillis from It as a teenager who learns a secret about her favorite uncle. A series of circumstances bring them all back to semi-rural South Carolina, where everyone has to learn to deal with this unexpected news. Pretty good, although a little contrived. Written by Alan Ball from Six Feet Under.

I upgraded our Apple TV interface to the fourth generation version. The older one we were using didn’t support some of the new streaming services directly except by casting them from an iPhone or iPad. That meant we weren’t paying much attention to Disney+ or HBO Max, not to mention Peacock. So now we have a number of “new” viewing options. I want to check out Flight Attendant and The Mandalorian. Plus, of course, all the new movies that are going to be released on HBO Max. What an embarrassment of riches we have when it comes to online entertainment. I can’t help but think of how much more difficult lockdown would have been if the pandemic had occurred ten or fifteen years ago. Now we at least have Zoom, etc. plus streaming. It helps.

Twenty-five years ago today (yes, a quarter of a century ago), my wife and I, accompanied by our then eight-year-old daughter, went to the local courthouse at about 4:30 in the afternoon to get married. The other people at the courthouse that day were mainly there to pay tax bills or fines. I remember one guy telling us, “You’ve got the best deal going today!” when he found out why we were there.

Indeed, we did.

The justice of the peace put on her robe over a pair of jeans and t-shirt, ushered us into an otherwise empty courtroom, and officiated as the three of us said our vows (our daughter had hers, and she was included in ours). Then we went off to dinner, enjoying steak and a novelty: fried ice cream for desert!

Since we both had to work today, we decided to set aside last weekend to celebrate. Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the day we closed on our house. (It was a busy week back in ’95. We closed on the house on Tuesday, spent that night in an air mattress in the new house, woke up Wednesday to find ourselves flat on the floor after all the air leaked out overnight, got married on Friday, and moved from our apartment into the new house on Saturday! We still marvel at the fact that we carried our washer and drier down a narrow set of stairs from the apartment by ourselves.)

On Friday evening, we ordered Mexican food from our favorite restaurant, the first time we’d done that since June. We had been out of tequila for a long time, so we went to the local liquor store for the first time since lockdown and got a bottle of mix and some tequila, along with a couple of limes. Picked up our dinner at the drive-up and headed home. Enjoyed our chips with red salsa and fajitas. Man, were those margaritas strong, though. It wasn’t until last night, when we were having leftovers, that we realized that our margarita “mix” was actually ready-made margaritas with 30 proof tequila. So when we added more mix to try to make the margaritas less strong, well, we were just charging them up a little more!

Saturday was beautiful, so we sat outside much of the day, listening to classic rock on the radio, sipping wine and, later, grilling steaks. We were in a particularly celebratory mood when we learned the election had finally been called. (I had an alert set using ResistBot, so I got a text message when Biden won.)

On Sunday, we did much the same, except we ordered seafood from Landry’s and used DoorDash to have it delivered, something else we hadn’t done since March.

We have been completely self-reliant as far as meals go for the past eight months, cooking everything “from scratch.” We’ve always made good meals, but before COVID we got lazy sometimes and went out a couple of times a week. Nowadays, we have a well-stocked small freezer that has just about anything we’d want to make and we enjoy preparing meals ourselves. Ordering out a couple of times on the weekend was our way of treating ourselves. We enjoyed some different flavors — Filé in the gumbo, for example, and salsa roja.

We watched a few movies, too. The new version of Rebecca starring Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas (as well as Keeley Hawes and Ann Dowd) was pretty good. The documentary My Octopus Teacher details a year in the life of a man who decides to explore a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa, where he “befriends” an octopus by patiently returning every day. He free dives — no air tank and no wetsuit — which is hugely impressive. It’s quite fascinating.

For a change of pace, we watched Operation Christmas Drop, about a congressional intern sent to Guam to evaluate an airbase for possible closure. The congresswoman is played by Virginia Madsen, the only actor I was familiar with. She’s the grinch or, alternately, Scrooge. It’s a cute movie based on a real, long-term operation to bring supplies to the remote islands. Finally we watched the Apple TV+ documentary Letters to You, about the making of Springsteen’s latest album. It’s always interesting to watch songs take shape once the band gets involved, but there’s never any doubt about who’s running that show.

A few years ago, I wrote a story for the XPRIZE short fiction contest. It didn’t win, so I revamped it and started sending it out again. “Helen Wheels” found a home in the Science Fiction edition of The Binge-Watching Cure anthology, which will be out next year. It’s an interesting concept: around 20 stories starting at 100 words and increasing steadily until the final piece, a 20,000-word novella. My story occupies the 3500-word slot.

Time for my monthly update! I’m taking a rare day off from work today—from the day job, at least. Catching up on writerly obligations. Number one among those was the signing of more than 1100 signature pages for the limited edition of Dissonant Harmonies, which will be out in early 2021. Since the book was motivated by music, I tweeted the names of the three albums I listened to while I sat at the kitchen table and wrote my name a hundred dozen times (while watching the birds and the squirrels fight each other at our birdfeeder on the front lawn). They were: “Metallic Spheres” by The Orb (featuring David Gilmour), “Heligoland” by Massive Attack (the album featuring the song that was used for the Luther theme song), and “Satellite” by Panic Room.

Next week is a big one for this country and, in fact, for the world. My wife and I voted early, two weeks ago tomorrow. We went an hour early, folding chairs and cups of tea in hand. There were about a hundred people ahead of us and, by the time the polls opened, the line stretched a long way behind us. Still, we were in the building within ten or fifteen minutes of opening and on our way back home by twenty after the hour. Not a hitch. We’d done our homework the night before (people in other countries don’t always realize that we’re not just casting one vote—there were two full pages of federal, state and local races to vote on), so it was just a matter of dialing up the right candidate in each race, double-checking (triple checking the presidential race to make sure nothing went wrong there), and punching the submit button.

The issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine containing my story “The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo” is out now. I also sold a reprint of my King-inspired story “Special Delivery” to Unnerving Magazine for issue #14, which is out now. Then I was pleased to learn that my story “The Lobster Trap” had been accepted for Masthead: Best New England Crime Stories. This is my third appearance in a Level Best Books anthology. The story features the same befuddled crooks who first appeared in “The Bank Job,” which won the Al Blanchard Award and then in “Sticky Business.” They’re all caper stories, and “The Lobster Trap” has a COVID-19 spin. It will be out in late November.

I was also pleased to learn that some of my words will be appearing in the MWA handbook How to Write a Mystery, edited by Lee Child with Laurie R. King. I’m not exactly sure which words, as I submitted two essays, but it’s thrilling to be part of this project all the same. Due out in April from Scribner.

On the other hand, I just had one of my stories “unpublished,” so to speak. It was accepted for an anthology several months ago. After a bit of haggling about the way payment would be remitted, I was, indeed paid. Contract signed and all. The anthology appeared on Amazon this week. But then I saw a tweet from a contributor complaining about not being paid. And then today the editor emailed everyone and said the anthology was canceled, returning the stories to the authors as if it had never been published. At least one copy was sold, perhaps more, and it is still listed on Amazon, albeit with a 1-2 month shipping date. Those of us who’ve been around for a while feel that this brief appearance on Amazon does indeed mean the book has been published, so our stories would now be considered reprints should we wish to attempt to publish them again. Apparently several contributors weren’t paid, so what does that mean for them? A messy situation.

We’ll be leaving the lights off tomorrow for Halloween. Not sure there’ll be any ghouls and goblins wandering the neighborhood anyway. The temperature has dropped significantly in the last week or so (we’ve had to run the heat!), and, of course there’s this pesky pandemic thing going on. I also think we’re going to skip watching the returns on Tuesday evening as I’m not sure my nerves are up to the suspense. We’ll probably just have a nice dinner and a bottle (or a few) of wine to steel us against whatever we’re going to face on Wednesday morning.

Next weekend we’re also going to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. The actual date isn’t until the following week, but we both have to work that day. Back in 2019, we would occasionally ask each other what we wanted to do to celebrate this milestone. We had all sorts of fancy ideas, but that ground to a halt in March or April. We still ask each other what we want to do, but our options have become severely limited! Nevertheless, we’ll find some way to mark the occasion!

Sounds like a terrible condition for a writer. However, I’m referring to names for hurricanes. We’ve already expended the complete list for 2020, which means we’ve moved on to Greek letters. Tropical Storm Beta is knocking at our door, promising to deliver a considerable amount of rain over the next couple of days. Nothing we’re concerned about, but the high tides down on the coast are pretty impressive. I saw drone footage from Surfside Beach, one of our favorite getaway spots (back when people were getting away), and the beach was completely covered with water, which was overlapping the coastal road. Fortunately, the houses down there are all on stilts, so they won’t get flooded. Their cars parked beneath the houses might, though.

The storm has brought with it a nice change in temperature. We’ve had a run of days where the temp doesn’t get above 77 or 78, and it’s been as low as the upper sixties. Too bad that didn’t kick in a few days earlier. We had a couple of guys working in our uppermost attic for two days replacing our A/C and heating system, and it was in the high 90s outside. I can only image what it was like up there.

Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, September 22, I’ll be taking part in an event to celebrate National Voter Registration Day with many of my fellow contributors to the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote Volume 2. It’s a free event, but you have to register to attend. Some authors will be interviewing other authors, some will be reading excerpts from our stories, and some of us will just be gabbing for a few minutes. It all begins at 8:30 Central. There’ll be a raffle, and our illustrious editor will show off the $10,000 check that is being donated to Southern Poverty Law Center.

Cemetery Dance will be publishing Dissonant Harmonies, the collaboration between Brian Keene and me. We each wrote a novella listening to a playlist created by the other author. Mine is called “The Dead of Winter” and Brian’s is “The Motel at the End of the World.” The signed/limited hardcover edition is only available to members of Cemetery Dance’s Collectors Club but fear not…there’ll be affordable paperback and eBook editions, too. Here is the cool cover, featuring an illustration by Don Noble.

Forthcoming publications include:

• The Hound of Bracketville in Places We Fear to Tread, September 2020
• Halloween Funeral in Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020
• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo in Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, 2020
• Bloody Sunday in The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
• Reflections of the Past in Mickey Finn, December 14, 2020

Below is the cover for Something Good to Eat. Looks pretty cool, eh?

I’ve been trying to get caught up on reviewing. I posted half a dozen to Onyx Reviews over the past few weeks, with one more on deck:

• Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill
• A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin
• Fool Me Twice by Jeff Lindsay
• Creative Types by Tom Bissell
• Just Like You by Nick Hornby
• Cry Baby by Mark Billingham

I’m almost to the end of my current editing pass on a novel, which I then plan to send around to a couple of beta readers for feedback. I’m feeling pretty good about it. It’s got a looooong history, but it’s vastly different from the first draft, that’s for sure.

I’m into the fourth season of Money Heist and enjoying the heck out of it. My wife and I are almost nearly finished Away. Both of these are on Netflix.

In 2008, Hurricane Ike arrived in our neighborhood and did some damage. Trees fell on neighbors’ houses, we lost a few shingles from our roof, but there was nothing like the damage that occurred elsewhere, or like what we’ve seen in Lake Charles and Cameron, Louisiana from Laura. Twenty-four hours after Ike passed through, we lost power, including phone service, and that went on for four or five days.

Laura looked like she might be aiming right at us for a while, but she turned away. It was amazing to look at the radar and see this massive storm sitting right beside us, but just out of reach. We had a brief rain squall on Wednesday afternoon, but after that…nothing. No wind, no rain, nothing. Honestly, we could have used the two or three inches of rain they’d been promising/threatening us with.

Then, yesterday, shortly after noon, the power went out. I scrambled to get an email out to our company’s social media manager and post something on the corporate website, but then cell phone internet service degraded and vanished. I could make phone calls, but I couldn’t even send text messages.

Uh oh, we thought. We’re on the same grid through the same power company as western Louisiana, so we feared we were going to have the same aftermath as with Ike. This time, we had a freezer full of food to worry about losing–last time, we just kept raiding the fridge until we ate everything perishable! So, we rolled our gas grill out of the garage where we’d stored it in advance of the storm and put it on our front porch. We made a quick, strategic dive into the freezer to find a couple of steaks. And did what we always do: made the best of it!

Fortunately the power came back on after five hours. Stuck around for an hour, then went out for another hour. We have a hand-crank radio/flashlight that was sent to me as part of a promo kit for the TV series The Colony back in 2010, so we were able to listen to the radio and I got a good workout turning the crank every five minutes or so to power it up! There were rumors we might see the same power fluctuations today as Entergy worked to shore up and protect the grid from total collapse, but that turned out not to be the case, and things have returned to normal.

Last weekend, I ventured out to my office building for the first time in five months. I went at a time when I was fairly confident no one else would be there, and that proved to be the case. My main goal was to retrieve my “kangaroo“–my adjustable-height desk adapter that lets me stand while I work at the computer. I have one for my writing/home computer, but I’d been sitting a lot at my laptop computer for the day job at my ad hoc work station (positioned at a 90° angle to my writing computer) and I was starting to feel the strain on my back. So now I have two kangaroos in my office, and my back is much happier.

I also retrieved several bags of food from my office–my lunch and snack supplies–that I had abandoned on my last day working there. I’d forgotten how much stuff I’d left behind: soups, crackers, fruit cups, snack bars, etc. It was like going on a shopping trip! (Except everything is at least five months old–I’m not going to look at any expiration dates.)

Still working on the same tank of gas as I had when I came home from the office that day in mid-March. The poor car has only been out six or seven times on short runs since then so, naturally, the battery died. I left it like that for a few days until I remembered I needed to be able to move the car to get at the lawn mower. I contemplated calling AAA, but instead I spent less than $20 on a trickle charger. I let if run for five or six days, but the first time I tried to start the car, it worked. Now I leave the battery plugged in to the trickle charger full time. Best $20 I spent in a while.

What have we been watching lately? I saw season 3 of The Sinner (USA) and S3 of Absentia on Amazon. Both ok, but not terrific. I zipped through the The Woods, a Polish series based on Harlan Coben’s novel, which was pretty good. I’ve been revisiting my youth watching Columbo episodes from time to time. I’ve finished the first three seasons already. Another season 3 was the final season of the Danish series The Rain (Netflix)–only six episodes, but they packed a lot into them. I loved Perry Mason (HBO)–great cast, great look, and an interesting “reboot” of a beloved character.

I’m following along with Lovecraft Country (HBO) as it rolls out. I have no idea what to expect, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. My wife and I have only two episodes left of S4 of The Good Fight before we’ll have to start looking for something else to watch. My current early morning watch while I hit the elliptical is season 1 of the Spanish series Money Heist (Netflix). I always feel like my linguistic skills should be much better than they are after immersing myself in a foreign TV series for days and weeks on end. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work that way.

Brian Keene and I signed a contract with Cemetery Dance to publish our collaboration Dissonant Harmonies. Some formats of that book stand a decent chance of appearing in 2020. Stay tuned!

Other forthcoming publications:

• The Hound of Bracketville, Places We Fear to Tread, September 2020
• Halloween Funeral, Something Good to Eat, September 28, 2020
• The Fugitive with the Dragon Tattoo, Black  Cat Mystery Magazine, 2020
• Bloody Sunday, The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories, Mango, November 2020
• Reflections of the Past, Mickey Finn, December 14, 2020

It’s a little hard to tally up my total fiction publications, including reprints and translations and audio versions, etc. but the number now seems to be somewhere in excess of 150 publications of nearly 100 different short stories. That’s a lotta words!

In an ordinary world, I would be in an airplane headed to New England for Necon 40. But it’s far from an ordinary world and I’m not going anywhere farther than the mailbox to pick up the post today. By my reckoning, I’ve been in lockdown for 121 days. I’ve been to the post office several times (twice during opening hours when I had to interact with a human being), that’s pretty much it.

I do regret not being at Necon–it’s a heckuva lotta fun. However, given the current circumstances, I don’t want to be around anyone other than my wife. We’ve been waving at our neighbors on occasion, but haven’t really spoken to them. Social distancing to the max.

When I lived in Howe Hall, the men’s residence at Dalhousie University, I went through a phase of short story writing. I had a few hardcover journals with the university crest on the front, and I filled them with handwritten tales. I never did anything with them beyond reading them to a few friends. About 15 years ago, I got my hands on those journals from the attic at my family home and transcribed them into Word. At least one–maybe two–of them were published subsequently. A number of them will never see the light of day.

When I was looking at submission guidelines recently, I saw a call for a Halloween-themed anthology. I started looking through my digital files and discovered a 1983 story that looked like a good fit. On my first editing pass, I trimmed about 100 extraneous words (out of 2300) and tidied up some awkward wording. Then I went through it four or five times, deleting, adding, shifting, rewording, expanding, contracting. I ended up with a 2700-word story that is essentially the same as the original version, but much more in line with my current style. I found it interesting that none of my edits had to do with the fact that the story was originally written 37 years ago. Nothing about it was tied to that era.

I submitted the story on Tuesday and it was accepted today. Hooray! I suppose there’s a moral here, about stories and timelessness and universality and being patient, but I’m just happy this little story from my early years as a writer has found a home.

The two-day response was gratifying, but it’s not the quickest I’ve had recently. I submitted my story “The Hound of Bracketville” at 10:30 one morning and had it accepted at 1:30 pm the same day! It will appear in the anthology Places We Fear to Tread in September.

Other recent publications: My Benjamin Kane story “Kane and the Candidate” is now available in eBook and paperback in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, a charitable anthology benefiting the Southern Poverty Law Center. My story “Expiration Date” is now available in the anthology The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths.

If you’re looking for a Stephen King news update, check out my latest post at News from the Dead Zone.

What have we watched lately? Hamilton on Disney+ and Greyhound on Apple TV+. We enjoyed them both. We’re into the final season of The Good Wife (pleasantly surprised to see Lucca Quinn show up! I’m watching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark each week on HBO. I binged through the five-episode BBC series Paradox last weekend and started the Finnish crime series Deadwind (Season 2) this week. I have some issues with the writing on the latter. Some of it is quite lazy and sloppy.

After finishing Season 3 of Dark (excellent show), I went back and did a quick rewatch of the first season. It makes so much more sense now that I have a firmer grasp on who everyone is and the different stages in their lives. An intricate show extremely well executed.

By my reckoning, today marks 100 days since I was last at my day-job office. One hundred days during which I have only been out of the house to pick up take-out (once), go to the post office (half a dozen times, almost always during the off hours), or to pick up something from the township (no human interaction required)…except for the occasional walk around the neighborhood with my wife. I’m a huge advocate for mask wearing, especially in situations where you might be trapped indoors with another person. Texas is not looking very good at the moment, and it threatens to get worse, much worse, before it gets better. So I’m glad that I have the option to work from home…as does my wife. We’re weathering this lockdown just fine.

I found out today that three stories from Por Los Aires, the Spanish translation of Flight or Fright, have been nominated for a 2020 Ignotus Award (described by Locus as the Spanish Hugos) in the “Cuento extranjero” category (“foreign short stories”). The nominees are “El experto en turbulencias” by Stephen King, “Quedan liberados” by Joe Hill and my story, “Zombis en el avión.” This comes as very much of a surprise, but news like this is always welcome!

Flight or Fright (Classe tous risques) was selected by Vogue (France) for their list: Les 5 livres de poche de l’été 2020 à lire sur la plage. Quite an honour!

My story “Expiration Date” appears in The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths: The Best New Original Stories of the Genre edited by Maxim Maxim Jakubowski. It came out last week and is available on Amazon and, presumably, elsewhere.

Forthcoming publication news: My short story “Kane and the Candidate” appears in the anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume II, which comes out on July 4th. The anthology will raise $10,000 for the Southern Poverty Law Center to help fight voter suppression. The eBook edition is available for pre-order on Amazon. We just found out this week that Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and, more recently, The Last Trial, has contributed an introduction to the anthology.

I have an essay in the July/August issue of Texas Gardener magazine. I’m nobody’s gardener–at least not any more, although I spent many an hour in the vegetable garden when I was growing up–but something happened in our neighborhood that inspired me to write an essay called “Bamboozled” for the regular “Between Neighbors” feature.

Stay tuned for news about Dissonant Harmonies, the collaboration between Brian Keene and me. After many, many years, this project is finally going to see the light of day! My novella, “The Dead of Winter,” is the longest piece of fiction I’ve ever published.

Speaking of long-delayed projects, I hear that we might be getting back to work on Stephen King Revisited before too long!

My wife and I are still working our way through The Good Wife. We’re about halfway through Season 5 right now. We also recently watched the movies Da 5 Bloods (which stars Delroy Lindo from The Good Fight) and The Queen of Katwe, about a female Ugandan chess prodigy (featuring Lupita Nyong’o as her mother and David Oyelowo as her chess teacher), based on a true story. I also watched The Vast of Night, which is a really effective sci-fi film.

For TV series, I recently watched Bordertown S3 (Finland, Netflix), Killing Eve S3 (BBC America), The Valhalla Murders (Iceland, Netflix), and Reckoning (Australia, Netflix), and I’m halfway through Marcella S3 (UK, Netflix).

Several unrelated thoughts that occurred to me while I was mowing the lawn this morning – the longest stretch of time I’ve been outside in at least two months.

• When my daughter was 10, I offered her 25¢ for every pine cone she picked up from the yard. She declined but later realized what a deal she had passed up on. Today she could have made $100 easily. Back then, we had a mechanical push mower and pine cones were my nemeses.
• Now my daughter has a nearly four-year old daughter and, as of yesterday, a newborn son. Where has the time gone?
• I wish I knew as much about the inner lives of squirrels as Jack London did about wolf-dogs. There’s a White Fang to be written from the point of view of these entertaining creatures.
• My wife was upstairs working while I mowed. I stumbled upon three unexpected flowers: a deep-red rose on a bush we’d long thought dead, a single azalea flower on a bush that had fully flowered over six weeks ago, and a hydrangea flower on what was once a house plant that has blossomed into an enormous shrub after we transplanted it outside. I texted her photographs of each of them as I discovered them.
• I haven’t been among people in over two months. I’ve gone to the post office to drop off packages in the early morning hours to avoid encounters, and I picked up a to-go order in my car once. That’s it. However, once it becomes necessary to be among people again, I plan to cultivate the skill of coughing raucously and/or sneezing on demand if those around me are non-compliant with social distancing.