Bev Vincent

Finally got caught up on the Thursday night shows I missed while we were in New York. I wasn’t happy with the outcome of Survivor. I was hoping the heroes could turn the tables and even the score with the villains, but it looks like they’re now ripe for the picking and it will get down to a villainous final five. I was especially disappointed with Colby’s abdication during the catfight over the clue to the immunity idol. Since there were no official rules governing what should happen in this situation, I think Amanda should either have held onto the clue and read it aloud to all three of them (advantage: heroes) or destroyed the clue (advantage: heroes, sort of). Failing that, I think that someone from the hero tribe should have followed Danielle like a puppy dog to see what happened with the clue. Major fail for the heroes. JT’s miscalculation tipped the balance…irrevocably, I think. At least the ousted heroes (and Coach) are having a good time at Ponderosa.

It was fun seeing Tim Conway on C.S.I. He used to slay me on The Carol Burnett Show. In fact, he used to slay everyone, including his colleagues. Watching him crack up Harvey Korman was a delight. He hasn’t really lost much from his off-hand, casual delivery, either, which was good to see. “Women, yeah, they’re good” and “Yay! At least he went with his shorts down.”

Sharon Stone is slumming on Law & Order: SVU for a few episodes. Can’t say I was impressed with her performance overall, but what can one do when one is handed lines like the moral-of-the-story-statement “That’s why we don’t rely on junk science,” which came out of left field. This was the second show in recent weeks that tackled the issue of fire marshalls coming to erroneous conclusions in suspected arson cases, both of which turned out to be accidental fires. The other was a recent episode of Cold Case.

Malcolm McDowell looked like he was having fun on The Mentalist. Other than his appearance, it was pretty much a by-the-numbers episode, though.

I really enjoyed this week’s episode of Fringe, though, which was a retro-noir musical. I know that sounds like a holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they actually pulled it off in my opinion. It was a terrific metaphorical recap of the current state of affairs on the series. “Uncle Walter,” under the influence of controlled substances, tells Olivia’s niece a story that is reminiscent of The Singing Detective. It looks like a vintage noir detective film, except it’s chock full of anachronisms: computers, cell phones, laser beams. Walter-in-the-story (not as handsome but just as brilliant as the real Walter, according to Walter) looks like a James Bond villain, as he wanders his lab in a wheelchair. Even the cow is in on the gag, decorated with huge polka dots. Walter is the inventor of everything cool in the world: bubble gum, flannel pajamas, hugs, rainbows and…wait for it…singing corpses. “Why not bring a little life to the dead, I say,” Walter says after their rendition of “Candyman.” Then, in an aside he admits, “The harmonies are still a little off.” Detective Broyles gets some of the best lines. “Time to leave things to the big boys,” he tells Olivia after responding to her greeting by asking if she really meant “hello” or was she just stringing him along. I’ll admit I had my doubts when Walter first broke into song (Tears for Fears, of all things!) but the metaphor of the broken heart worked well, in my opinion, and was probably a much needed break from the grim direction the show has been heading in of late.

I’m glad I stuck with FlashForward, as it continues to be interesting. I have to admit that I don’t have any interest in the Kandahar subplot, and I think they pushed the close calls with the mole a little hard, but I liked the revelation that she’s actually a mole’s mole. It’s also interesting that Olivia (Penny from Lost) is on the wrong timeline, according to the savant.

We watched The Lovely Bones last night. I went into it knowing it had reviewed poorly, but I was willing to give it a shot. I think Jackson blew this one completely. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what went wrong. Stanley Tucci is excellent, but I think too much of the story was about him. In fact, I also think that too much of the story was about Susie Salmon, when in this rendition of the tale it was really Lindsey Salmon’s story–the younger sister. She’s the one I was more interested in and she was the one who cracked the case, after all. Susan Sarandon was funny as the grandmother, but are there really people like her outside of TV and movies? They’re a trope of storytelling, but I’ve never encountered anyone even remotely like her in real life. Soairse Ronan was very good as Susie Salmon, but her purgatory was underwhelming.  In the novel it was much more a place that a young schoolgirl might conjure up, rather than this idyllic grassy plain. Susie’s mother is treated more generously in the movie than in the book, too. In the latter, she resorts to alcohol and an affair. In the novel, Susie’s death has a far broader impact on the community, and she is much more in touch with what happens with her family and friends during the 10-year period that it covers. The film does poorly in trying to convey how tragedy rips a family apart. Sure, dad smashed up his little ships (I did like the repercussions of that action in Susie’s world) and mom goes walkabout for a while, but everything’s cool in the end, and even Susie’s would-be boyfriend isn’t freaked out when she shows up for her first and only kiss. Ultimately, I think the movie deserved the drubbing it received.

We’re back from a whirlwind trip to Manhattan for the Edgar Award banquet. We flew out on Thursday morning and encountered our first and only real bump in the road when the pilot had to reboot the entire airplane before we could leave Houston. Some sort of computer glitch, but the reboot fixed it and we were on our way. We went via Philadelphia and got into LaGuardia about 30 minutes early. Though it’s an airport that is clearly showing its age, I like its proximity to the city. Even during a hectic time of day, we were at the Grand Hyatt in less than 30 minutes.

We met up with my agent at an outdoor cafe next to Bryant Park, the first time I’d seen that area of town. It was a beautiful day to sit outside and sip iced tea while talking, though the air was full of pollen. I always enjoy talking with my agent — we cover a wide range of topics from books to food to hockey, and I always feel like he has all the time in the world for us. We were supposed to go to the EQMM reception after that, but we ended up talking for so long that it hardly seemed worthwhile to schlep all the way across town for half an hour at best, so I decided to skip it. We had a snack to tide us over until the banquet started and went back to the hotel to change into our finery.

The nominee mixer started at 6 p.m.  The standard icebreaker at that event was “What’s your category?” Got to meet some fascinating people and sip free wine. I wanted to pace myself in the unlikely event that I had to deliver a speech later that evening. After being photographed by category (I met for the first time Lisa Rogak, who interviewed me for Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King and was photographed with her, Otto Penzler and Joan Schenkar) we were ushered down the hall to the general reception at 6:30, which was wall-to-wall people, including Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, Alafair Burke, Meg Gardiner, Laurie R. King, Harlan Coben, Mary and Carol Higgins Clark, Donald Maass, R.L. Stine, and Charles Todd, to namedrop just a few. In fact, it was so packed that I didn’t even know Simon Wood was there until after we got home and saw his picture on Facebook! More free wine, which I also sipped.

Eventually we were allowed into the banquet hall and found our table, where we were seated with a couple of other nominees: Laney Salisbury, author of Provenance, a true crime novel about an art forger, and Russell Hill, author of The Lord God Bird (paperback original), an editor from The Penguin Press, and others. The meal was fine and the awards ceremony proceded apace until about 10:07 p.m., with Laura Lippman and Lee Child running the show. I didn’t win my category–that honor went to Otto Penzler–but it was fun to bask in the public glory of being a nominee for the evening, and a special treat to have my wife at my side throughout. She’s my number one fan, and I’m hers (as I would have said, were I presented with the opportunity to make a speech). Here are the winners.

Afterward, the lobby was stacked with books and galleys that publishers donated. Some people were filling sacks with them. I took just a few that interested me, including Tess Gerritsen’s next book (Ice Cold), an Alafair Burke (212) and a couple of others.

Up before the crack of dawn the next morning for our return flight. An even faster ride to LaGuardia and smooth sailing all the way. I read Gerritsen’s novel cover-to-cover during the flight and will produce a review in the near future.

Speaking of reviews, Hellnotes published a very nice review of When the Night Comes Down. After a nice paragraph about my story “Knock ’em Dead,” the reviewer concludes: “The savvy writers featured in When the Night Comes Down are skillful tellers of tales. Arch, wise and warped, this collection has much to offer: A savory supernatural sampling of choice works.”

I might have written this before, but when it came to the Bram Stoker Awards last month, I wasn’t nervous leading up to the presentation. I pretty much figured how it was going to go, and the adrenaline only kicked in about 30 seconds before the winner was announced, on the off chance that I was wrong. I’m far more nervous about the Edgar Awards presentation tomorrow night in New York. Not because I think I’m going to win–I don’t, really–but there’s still a chance. One way or the other, we’re going to have a fine day, but we still have to go through the hassle of getting there (and getting there on time, more importantly) so I suspect I’m going to be at least this nervous until we touch down in New York tomorrow. Once we get out of the airport, we’re going to be running from one thing to another for the rest of the day, so there won’t be much time to dwell ont he award annoucement–at least until that time comes rolling around.

Speaking of nerves, I found out yesterday that I have a herniated disc in my lower back, which has been the cause of my discomfort during most of 2010. The disc is pressing against a nerve bundle. It’s been getting better a bit at a time, especially during the past week, but it’s not there yet. The next course of treatment may be physical therapy. We’ll see how that goes.

I posted my review of Tell All by Chuck Palahniuk last night. Some really promising ideas got swept up in an experiment gone awry. I also received a request for a possible reprint of an essay that has previously only been published in French. It will be untranslated–or detranslated–if everything goes according to very tentative plan.

M.C. Gainey is sure getting around these days — not that he didn’t before. He plays the sheriff on Happy Town, which debuts tonight (see last Saturday’s post for my comments on that show), and he also appeared as Boyd’s incarcerated daddy at the end of this week’s episode of Justified. Fans of Lost will know him as Tom, or possibly as Mr. Happy. Another smashing episode of the show. I always enjoy Raylan’s prison therapy sessions with Boyd, and it’s good to see that people who get shot don’t always die right away. The book-writing hitman was a hoot, too. The episode had some nice surprise moments.

A lot of people said they were going to jump ship from Law & Order: Criminal Intent after Goran and Eames left the show, but I still think it’s the best of the three incarnations of the series. Nobody puts the screws to the bad guys better than the detectives of the Major Case Unit.

Catch y’all on the flip side of the Edgars. I might be able to tweet from New York, but if not, check out the Murder By the Book feed for updates, if you’re interested.

I updated my online “store,” which has handy links to Amazon for my books and for anthologies that include my stories, including When the Night Comes Down, Evolve, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, and Dead Set.

I posted my review of Robert B. Parker’s last Jesse Stone novel, Split Image. This morning I finished reading Tell All by Chuck Palahniuk. Some might call the book “experimental.” I might call it “self-indulgent.”

Apparently I did the unthinkable last year — I threw away payment for one of my stories! When I was updating my submission tracker, I noticed that the entry for my story in New Love Stories didn’t have an amount filled in for the sale. I checked my accounting software and determined that I’d never deposited any payment for it. When I queried the editor, he said the check was in with my contributor copies, which I’d received in November. I looked through every page of the magazines and the only inserts I found were subscription cards. The only conclusion I can come to is that the check stayed inside the envelope and got tossed out in the recycle bin five months ago. I pleaded temporary insanity and asked for a replacement, throwing myself at the mercy of the court.

I’ve come to the conclusion that House isn’t a medical drama. It’s a drama set in a hospital that features doctors and people with illnesses, but the patient-of-the-week and his or her malady is only a catalyst. Inevitably, the patient is a launching board to explore something about one or more of the regular cast. This week, a woman in an open marriage reflected Taub’s situation–he had an affair and now he’s contemplating another. Even he uses the patient as an overture to raise the subject with his wife. After the initial outrage, she decides that his lying was worse than him having sex with another woman, so she gives him permission to see someone on Thursdays. No lies, no cover-ups, no further discussion required. She rescinds the offer at the last minute and Taub claims he’s okay with her decision, the weasel. And the subtext of secrets in relationships gives House ammunition to sabotage Wilson’s rekindled relationship with his first ex-wife. Milk on the door of the fridge, a banana peel in the bedroom trashcan. The guy is devious.

I think the scene in the Winnebago on Breaking Bad this week ranks as one of the series’ most intense ever. He should have listened to his lawyer. “Even the Enterprise had a self-destruct button,” the lawyer said. “I’m just sayin’.” Salvation comes at first in the form of a junkyard lawyer who knows just about everything there is to know about civil liberties. I have to wonder, though, if their ultimate solution to the Hank problem showed too much of their hand, since it belied an intimate knowledge of his family. I like the new guy, the chemist who has a thing for the perfect cup of coffee. Like him, I’m an X-ray crystallographer and “I could talk about that for hours,” as Walt said. I liked Walt’s reaction to the coffee. “Why the hell are we making meth?” He’s still in borderline denial, even though he’s back in the business. “I can’t imagine we strike each other as criminals.” Those two taciturn Mexican killers seem like an irresistible force of momentum headed on a collision course with Walt, but now that they’ve been sicced on Hank, how’s that going to work out? Great show!

Ed Gorman kindly posted a Q&A with me on his Pro-File this weekend. In it I talk about the novel in progress, my experience selling my first book, pleasures and displeasures of a writing career, and I offer a little bit of advice to writers, too.

Speaking of the novel in progress, I found some shelf space that would hold a six-foot sheet of paper so I can plot out the book. I have the main plotline up, and now it’s a matter of weaving in the two main subplots. I’m still working out the details of a “new” character, too. She was dispatched in the first pages of the original manuscript, so I didn’t really know much about her. Now that her head is off the chopping block (almost literally), I have to figure out who she is and how she relates to the main character.

This morning, I did a radio interview with Tania Moody from KLVT in Levelland, TX. I called in five minutes before my scheduled slot, was told the correct pronunciation of the host’s name (tawn-yuh), and put on hold. Two commercials played, and then I heard the host introducing the segment. I’d thought there might be some off-air prep, but all of a sudden I was being introduced and away we went. The whole piece was about five minutes long. Stay on the message, I kept reminding myself mentally, which is especially important with short interviews, I think.

A little over a month ago, the world’s shortest man, He Pingping, died. He was only 21 years old and 29 inches tall. He was featured during the Shanghai installment of the Amazing Race this week. I’m not sure exactly when they filmed the episode, but they dedicated it to him in the closing credits.

I could feel the frustration of the two teams that were plagued by the wind during the puzzle-solving challenge at the stadium. Can you imagine being almost done with a difficult puzzle only to have all your work blow across the field? With a million dollars at stake? The detectives had trouble with this challenge and might have been eliminated. Phil screwed with them by saying they were “out” when they reached the mat, but he didn’t use the word “eliminated.” After giving them time to react, he continued “…in the cold. You’re out in the cold.” Ballsy thing to do to a guy who probably knows ten ways to kill you!

The weatherman is threatening us with the possibility of our first 90° days this week. We’re going to have to turn on the A/C soon. I just know it.  We’ll have a brief reprieve when we’re in NY later on this week for the Edgars, because it’s only supposed to be high sixties/low seventies. I checked out my tux this weekend to make sure it still fit and that I had all the parts. Still have to take an iron to the shirt. Should probably get my hair cut, too, since no doubt there will be photographs taken.

We’ve reached the mid-point of the third series of Ashes to Ashes. This one has a different feel to the others. The guy from D&C alludes to some terrible secret from Gene Hunt’s past, and there are implications that he had something to do with Sam Tyler’s death, but mostly they go about solving the crime of the week without much forward progress in Alex’s quest to return to her daughter (who is scarcely mentioned) or in ferreting out the truth about what happened to Sam. Time’s pressing onwards, folks. They’ll have to get busy wrapping things up soon.

The fourth episode of Doctor Who is one for the ages. Not only does it bring back one of the most terrifying creatures from the recent past, it also reunites the Doctor with River Song (Alex Kingston, who has also been on FlashForward recently), the archeologist who has an as-yet undefined with the Doctor in his future. She’s a mysterious character (Amy Pond speculates that she might be the Doctor’s future wife) who calls the Doctor “sweetie” and who seems to have unusual power over him. “That woman is not dragging me into anything,” he says as she drags him into something. “She’s kind of like, ‘Heel, boy.'”  Amy observes.

Speaking of Amy Pond–she’s in the running for Best. Companion. Ever. She’s saucy and pert and smart, vulnerable and strong, and astute. She understands immediately that the Doctor’s visit to the museum is his way of keeping score. She and River take to each other quickly, and River identifies her as, perhaps, a kindred spirit. The actress has terrific delivery on lines like “Anybody need me? Nobody?” and especially “Are you all Mr. Grumpy Face today?”

And speaking of delivery, I loved Matt Smith’s emulation of the noise the TARDIS makes when it lands, only to be told by River that it’s not meant to make that sound and it only happens because he leaves the brakes on. “Yeah, well, it’s a brilliant noise,” he responds. “I love that noise.” River is a master of TARDIS operation, showing him that it actually has stabilizers. “They don’t do anything–they’re just blue,” he says after River points out the controls. “Yes, they’re blue stabilizers.”

It’s a fascinating relationship–she’s in his future and he’s in her past, since she died during her first appearance on the series. “We keep meeting in the wrong order,” he says. He knows she’s going to be a professor (“Spoilers!” she yells after he lets that detail slip, which she didn’t know yet on this episode) and she knows…what? Quite a lot, but we won’t find out for a while, probably. A brief reference (“I have no intention of going back to prison,” she says to the armed Bishop), that’s all.

And what to say about the villains of the week other than that they’re as brilliant as when we first encountered them, and perhaps even more ominous. I wonder if Amy’s symptoms will recur or if her momentary hallucination will be the end of it. I loved her reaction to the Doctor’s solution to her dilemma. Not “oh thank you for saving my life” but “that made a mark.” I wasn’t prepared for the way the episode ended, though. Argh!

Funny line of the show. When Amy says that a certain person is dead, the Doctor replies, “So is Virginia Woolf, but I’m on her bowling team.”

A nice review of When the Night Comes Down was posted this weekend at Shroud Magazine’s website. I finished reading the other stories in the collection this weekend. It’s an interesting mix, with some fascinating crossovers of theme or concept from one writer to the other. For example, two stories (one of them mine, one Bob Weinberg’s) deal with purgatory, though in very different ways. Purely coincidental, because each author submitted independently of the others and there was no selection process by the editor.

This was our weekend for tormented musician movies. Last night we watched Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the Ian Dury biopic, starring Andy Serkis, who is most famous for his digitized performances as Gollum and King Kong. I was never a fan, but was aware of him during my university days in the early eighties, along side the Sex Pistols. I knew so little about him that I thought his last name was “Drury.” I also wasn’t aware that he had polio as a child and was virtually immobile on one side, wearing metal braces all his life.

The movie is a part Fellini, part Brecht and part All that Jazz. It’s not an entirely linear retelling of his life, and one wouldn’t be surprised to discover that a lot of it was made up or exaggerated for dramatic effect. Today’s subject line comes straight from the movie as testimony to that supposition. For part of the film, Dury himself narrates or expounds on his life while on stage, addressing an unseen audience. Serkis is fantastic–he is transformed into the punk rocker, a tormented soul who suffered horrors in a hospital school for disabled children. The “headmaster” of this institution was straight out of Dickens, played with abject cruelty by Toby Jones (The Mist). When Dury revists the institution as an adult, one of the teachers tells him that the man commited suicide by hanging himself in one of the upper offices. She watches for his reaction. “You made my day,” he mumbles. Also appearing in the film is the guy who played Mickey in Doctor Who–Rose Tyler’s boyfriend. He’s a studio engineer or producer who criticizes Dury for being “out of pitch,” setting off one of Dury’s famous tirades which ends with Dury pouring liquids all over the mixing board before getting himself arrested. A major character in the film is Baxter, his son, who idolizes his mostly absentee father. He is the young boy pictured beside Dury on the cover of the album New Boots and Panties!! The movie certainly doesn’t idolize Dury–he is shown to be volatile, irrational, hateful, demented and, worst of all, neglectful. He does have a certain charm, though, that makes the movie fascinating. It’s something of a train wreck in slow motion, but the guy flung himself at life (in much the same way his roadies once famously flung him onto the stage) with gusto. He always found himself apologizing to those around him (as his son observes), and he didn’t want Baxter to be like him, but by the end of the movie I’m not sure that he regretted very much.

It was supposed to rain buckets today, but it turned out to be very nice. I have the office window open as I work, and the outside world is full of the sounds of lawn mowers and leaf blowers in their natural habitats. Before returning to plotting and scheming over the novel in progress, I got two short stories back into circulation, both of them to markets that don’t take e-subs, so that necessitated a trip to the post office. I love those little kiosk machines, I surely do.

Last night we watched Crazy Heart. I was surprised to see Colin Farrell in it, and he didn’t suck, either. His character was nothing at all the villain that Bad Blake built him up to be. In fact, he was diffident, hardly making eye contact with anyone, and appreciative of his former mentor. And he could sing, too, as could Jeff Bridges as the stereotypical down-on-his-luck country singer who shambles around the country in a thirty-year-old car, drunk most of the time, sitting with this pants unbuttoned because he’s gained so much weight and pissing in a plastic jug. He’s never late for a concert, and even stone drunk he gives the crowd what it wants–although he might have to duck out back for a puke every now and then. What young mom Maggie Gyllenhaal sees him is beyond me, because we get the impression that to stand near him would be like visiting the bowels of a whiskey factory. When we reached the scene where he is dead drunk in his Houston home, barely conscious and gripping the bottle for all it’s worth, I jested to my wife that this was the epitome of screenwriting: the end of the act where the main character has hit rock bottom and can’t go any further. “What happens next?” she asked. “The character has an epiphany,” I said, and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than Bad Blake calls up someone and says he needs to get sober. The film has all the predictability of a country song, but Bridges’ performance is what makes it worth the journey. He’s a lovable, irascible wreck of a man whose sad songs “come from life, unfortunately.” I’m not a huge country music fan, but the T. Bone Burnett songs in this film are fantastic. I especially like the snippet of lyric that is the title of this post.

Caught up with FlashForward. Interesting developments with respect to Dyson Frost and the guy who was supposed to die on March 15, and ominous signals that something even worse that flash forwards awaits everyone in 2016. Nothing less than THE END itself.

Yesterday I got to watch a sneak preview of Happy Town, the new show that premieres on ABC next week, I believe. I’m not convinced it’s going to survive. The show is about an edenic small town that always smells like baking bread (my favorite line: after flour is detected on the body of a murder victim, the sheriff says, “The back of my balls would test positive for high traces of baking flour”) and hasn’t had a serious crime in years. However, before that, they were terrorized by someone they came to know as the Magic Man, who made people vanish off the face of the planet. The first episode opens with the arrival of a perky young woman who plans to open a candle shop with her inheritance. She is the viewer stand-in, the one who has the town’s history explained to her (us). Some of the writing is unartful — there’s an awful lot of instances where characters summarize their situation in ways that people never do (“Mommy and Daddy still sneak away for smoochies despite being high school sweethearts,” a man explains to his young son, thereby introducing the characters to us). It has the small-town clichés of the menacing junkyard proprietors, with their obligatory mad dog. “Mr. Happy” — aka Tom from Lost — is the town sheriff, and there’s some definite weirdness going on with him. Sam Neill is the town’s Leland Gaunt, proprietor of a store that the newcomer astutely observes would have a hard time surviving in a big city. He’s probably a magician, and we’re meant to believe that he’s a strong candidate for the Magic Man, so he probably isn’t. The murder scene is suitably gruesome–especially the aftermath. Steven Webber pontificates as the father of one of the missing victims from years gone by. The pizza parlor is run by the same guy who tends bar on Grey’s Anatomy. Some characters are sickeningly upbeat–the real estate agent and the old biddies at the boarding house, but the woman who runs the house is nice and creepy. Remains to see what they do after the first episode, but it feels a bit like Eureka crossed with Harper’s Island.

Got back to my prep work on the novel in progress this morning after a 1-day hiatus. I’m thinking about charting the whole thing out on a big sheet of paper on my wall. Only problem is–my office doesn’t have any walls that aren’t occupied by my desk, a window or bookshelves. Do I really need that window?

While playing around with my iPod Touch last night, I noticed how many high-profile web sites are enabled for mobile browsing. Wikipedia, The NY Times, etc. I found a WordPress plugin (from Crowd Favorite) that does the same thing, so now if you visit this blog via www.bevvincent.com on a mobile device it automatically detects that and serves up content for handhelds. It’s very cool and was a cinch to install. There’s a link at the bottom of the mobile page that lets you revert to the normal content if want to see it in original layout.

Chris Conlon just announced the table of contents for A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock. I’m pleased that my “24 Hour Psycho” will appear with the likes of Steve Resnic Tem, Gary Braunbeck, Norman Prentiss, Marie Alexander, Martel Sardinia, Lucy Snyder, Lisa Morton and others. It’s my first-ever published poem.

I started reading Tell All by Chuck Palahniuk last night. It’s a very strange book, supposedly inspired by the life of Lillian Hellman. It is chock full of name-dropping, and just in case any reader might miss a newly dropped name, all of them are in bold text. I have no idea where the book is going, but it seems odd, to say the least, and strikes me as the kind of book that an unknown author would never get published.

There had been talk of a US version of Torchwood, but I read somewhere today that it won’t happen because of the huge budget it would require. I’m not disappointed–the UK version is good enough for me. Apparently a fourth season is in the works.

This Heroes vs. Villains season of Survivor has been filled with one surprise after another. This week takes the cake. Rupert came out of the evening looking like a genius, because he had the villains’ strategy completely figured out, but no one would believe him. JT swallowed Russell’s Kool-Aid hook line and sinker, and paid the price. Parvati made one of the gutsiest moves in the show’s history, shocking not only JT but Russell. I loved Jeff Probst’s zinger, though, when she was whining about how people ignored her all day. “Is that just because you’re just so used to getting attention all the time in life?” he quipped. Point! The three players at Ponderosa are having a blast together — they formed a band and are writing and recording songs.

CSI‘s plot last night brought to mind King’s “Apt Pupil.” A teenager befriends a man and discovers that he’s actually a war criminal. Different war, in this case: Rwanda, and far different outcome.

The Mentalist was one of those episodes that could never happen in real life. Despite assessing $16 K in contempt charges, no judge would ever have allowed anyone to get away with Jane’s outrageous behavior. The opening teaser was fun, and I’m glad they paid it off early in the episode instead of making us wait to the end to confirm what we already knew about the situation–that it was a sting. The bit about the old lady running the show while pretending to suffer from dementia is almost exactly the same device that was used in this week’s episode of Law & Order: SVU.

And Fringe — well, Peter finally knows the truth. It looks like they’re going to make us wait to find out how that plays out by airing a whimsical episode next week that appears to be some sort of bizarre holodeck noir mashup. “Leave it to the big boys,” Broyles utters in the preview.

I just received my contributor copy of Close Encounter of the Urban Kind, edited by Jennifer Brozek. You  should check it out if you get a chance — it’s about urban legends that actually have alien explanations. My tale is called “The Fingernail Test,” inspired by…well, you’ll have to read the story to find out. Each author was given some room to explain why we chose the urban legends we did, and how our stories arose from it. I look forward to reading the other contributions.

The Edgar Awards are a week from today. If there is wireless in the convention center, I may tweet from time to time, but the folks from Murder By the Book (who are also nominated for their Busted Flush Press books), will definitely be updating their feeds, so if you’re curious about how things are going next Thursday night and my Twitter feed is silent, check out the MBTB feed.

This morning I had a close encounter of the magnetic kind–my first ever MRI. I had no idea what to expect because, as we all know, what you see on television is usually a simplified version of reality. The note on the procedure order said that MRIs take an hour, so I thought I was going to have to be stock still for an hour. As predicted, reality was different than expectation. For one thing, the cavity into which you are inserted is smaller than it appears on TV. Much smaller. Your elbows rub against the walls (cushions were graciously provided) and the top of the machine, with the two-way speaker, is only a couple of inches above your nose. I’m not claustrophobic, but I can see how people who don’t like confined places might be…troubled. I was given a bulb to squeeze in case I was overcome and wanted a fast exit. I was also given earplugs, because it’s REALLY LOUD in there. In fact, my main impression of the experience was the sound.

Instead of an hour, the MRI took only twenty minutes, and consisted of six scans in total. A one-minute scan, three three-minute scans, a three-and-a-half minute scan and a four-minute scan. Sometimes I was repositioned laterally between scans, but not always. The loud noises were interesting…banging and clicking and repetitive wonking noises that made me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange or the scenes in Room 23 from Lost. Most of the time I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on the sounds, doing my best to estimate the passage of time by counting. In almost every case, the scan finished well before I finished counting mental seconds. At the end of the experience,  I was left wondering what happens when claustrophobic people close their eyes when in uncomfortable surroundings. I was free to imagine I was anywhere, with my eyes shut.

I don’t get the scan results until next week, to see if they provide any insight into what’s causing my lumbago. Because of my very early date with the supermagnet, I didn’t get any work done on the novel this morning.

Lilja posted an excerpt from my introduction to The Book of Lilja on his website. Also check out Editor of the ‘Night’: A chat with Bill Breedlove, editor of When the Night Comes Down. Bill says some very kind things about me. In part, “I am really excited to see the reaction to his fiction, because I think he is a supremely talented short story writer…I think a lot of people who have read only Bev’s nonfiction will be very surprised by his story ‘Knock ‘Em Dead’ which is essentially a very dark comedy.”

Law and Order: SVU — new depths of ridiculous. Not only was it another public service announcement episode about the dangers of eating meat, the resolution of the homicide was hilarious. I try to imagine the real culprit slitting that girl’s throat and I just laugh and laugh and laugh.

On the other hand, Justified is my new show of the season — I’m getting a great kick out of it. The language is spicy and the plots and dialog are terrific. This week, a woman commits a murder using details she learned from a show on the Discovery Channel. Of course, the crime isn’t as easy as they think it will be–the intended victim lives longer than expected, and the greater conspiracy falls apart from greed and conscience. The resolution of the Hitler paintings subplot (featuring Robert Picardo, who I always recall as the holographic doctor from Star Trek: Voyager) was priceless and unexpected. I like Raylen’s visits with his incarcerated, born-again former friend–they’re almost therapeutic. And it seems like everyone who lives in that Kentucky town is saving money to move elsewhere.

I’m all set for my radio interview with KLVT on Monday morning. Alas, it does not appear that the station streams on the internet.

My outlining and plotting proceed apace on the novel. I finished summarizing the plot of the existing draft as a starting point so that I have all of the old events in mind as I replot it with some significant changes. I’m going to take my time with this–there are a lot of things to consider.

I saw one of these critters on our fence last night. At first I thought it was just a dead leaf or some other yard waste. On closer examination, though, I realized that it was a moth. Huge critter, at least four or six inches across. From a distance, he looked like a flying lime wedge. Turns out it’s a luna moth. Exotic looking. Like something from outer space.

Yesterday was my day for encounters with interesting wildlife. Every year or two we get some sort of critter in our attic, despite all efforts to plug up any entrances. Usually it’s in the fall, when the weather starts cooling off, but this year we heard the telltale sounds a couple of weeks ago. I set traps, but didn’t have any luck until yesterday. When I saw the poor victim, I thought at first it was a Norway rat, the usual culprit, but as I got closer I realized it had a furry tail. Huge eyes, too. The tail was flat. After some research, I figured out it was a flying squirrel, which are apparently the bane of exterminators. Hard to catch, apparently. So I was feeling proud of myself for conquering such a difficult critter, until my wife said, “Flying squirrel? You mean, just like the one on Rocky and Bullwinkle?”

A number of years ago, a friend of ours who was about the same number of years older than us at the time, succinctly commented on the aging process thus: “Shit wears out,” she said. Alas, I am finding that to be true. As I approach 50, I’m all of a sudden feeling my age, thanks to an unexpected bout of lumbago. I’ve been to the doctor a few times this year already (more than I’ve seen a doctor in the previous decade combined!) and tomorrow I get to go in for an MRI. I’m beginning to suspect that this is just one of those things I’m going to have to live with, since the cause of chronic lower back pain is notoriously hard to isolate. Not too keen on surgery, if that option gets bandied about. Where’s Greg House when you need him? Ah, yes, playing court jester at the Renaissance Festival as he was on this week’s episode. After 13 flashed Taub last week, she ended up cramming her assets into medieval garb. A fun episode, and it’s good to see Cynthia Watros as Wilson’s first ex. I see fireworks in the future.

Just when Walt thought he was out, on Breaking Bad, he gets pulled back in again by a sexy new lab. No more working in a Winnebago in the middle of the desert for him. That RV, however, could be bad news for Heissenberg and his erstwhile flunky, Jesse. In fact, when I watched the episode OnDemand, I thought at first there’d been a mixup because the first several minutes of the show were set back int he days when Jesse first acquired their mobile lab. This was an interesting episode. Marie’s insight into Hank (something’s eating at him from the inside and facing death has to change a person) describes Walt’s situation to a tee, and Skyler heard the unintentional message. It made her look at Walt in a different light. However cheery their next meal might have seemed, the director established their schizm by shooting it from an adjoining room so that a wall formed a black panel down the middle of the screen between them. Then, just when it seemed like Skyler was making overtures toward perhaps forgiving him, he does the unexpected. And then there’s Jesse, the new wild card in the equation. I think Walt should sign up for a frequent shopper’s card at the place that repairs his windshields. Apropos of nothing: whatever happened to the subplot about Marie’s kleptomania?

I’m glad they decided not to make Rick’s “rival” the corrupt cop on Castle this week. That would have been too pat, and this show rarely takes the lazy course. That’s one of the things I like about it, aside from the terrific chemistry between the two leads. And I think I’m getting a handle on the two “other cops,” who were almost interchangeable to me prior to this episode, thanks to it being Esposito-centric, in Lost parlance.

Speaking of Lost, we have now reached the point where the writers can no longer do character-centric episodes. There’s too much important stuff going on all at once, and very little time to the end. I guess someone filled Jack in on the smoke monster, because he didn’t say to Locke “Hey, you’re alive,” but rather “You look just like him.” He–and we–gets some answers about his father’s apparent appearances on the island, and the fun thing about parallel timelines is that he gets to be blindsided by the revelation about Christian’s other family all over again (courtesy of lawyer Ilana).

I love the reversal between Jack and Locke. Locke was the true believer, but he’s now dismissed by the MiB as a sucker, whereas Jack is the one who thinks they were brought to the island for a purpose, and he’s willing to jump off the boat (in much the same way that Sawyer jumped off the helicopter, but for a different reason) to support his belief. (I wanted Kate to go into the water after him, but we had to wait until nearly the end of the episode for her wet t-shirt shots.) MiB says that the candidates were trapped on the island before they even got to it, thanks to Jacob, but Jack thinks that MiB is afraid of what the candidates can do to him if they don’t leave.

MiB is certainly fallible. The earlier raid by Widmore’s group took him by surprise, and he didn’t anticipate the bombs launched in his direction last night, either. (I guess they had some leftover explosions in their budget after last week’s show.) And one hopes that Sayid was lying to him about dispatching Desmond. MiB seemed unsure, at the very least. Not confident.

Did anyone else expect Sun and Jin to get zapped by the perimeter fence? I know Zoe gave the order to turn it off, but I still went ZZZZZZT in my head when they ran toward each other. So, near death experiences are confirmed as a way of getting people in the sideways universe in touch with the island world. Sun was terrified of Locke when she saw him. Also, I found the scene of Jack preparing to do surgery on Locke reminiscent of his preparations to operate on Ben at the Hydra station. I read somewhere that the guy who wheeled either Sun or Locke into the hospital was the same one who wheeled Desmond in after Ben shot him.

Locke’s ominous final words: “You’re with me now” make him the final recruit of the title, and apparently confirming Claire’s theory that he had joined MiB whether he liked it or not, just by letting him speak. Of course, Jack has other ideas about this.

Line of the evening (Sawyer referring to Lapidus): “…the pilot who looks like he stepped off the set of a Burt Reynolds movie.” Runner-up (Hurley, when asked what was happening): “People are trying to kill us…again.”

Open question I hope they answer soon: Who is Jack’s wife in the sideways universe? Alas, no questions will be answered next week as we are on hiatus, with a rerun of the Richard Alpert episode.