Bev Vincent

I received my Edgar nomination certificate this weekend. It’s ginormous, as my daughter would say. 11 x 17. Went out at noon to pick up a frame for it so it can hang on the wall of shame fame.

Speaking of framing, I finished Innocent by Scott Turow this weekend. Probably the best book I’ve read so far in 2010. It’s exquisitely plotted and the way he leverages the events from Presumed Innocent without explicitly stating many of them is quite brilliant, I think. If you haven’t read that book you won’t feel lost, but you won’t know what you’re missing, either. If you have read the book, many scenes take on added resonance. Highly recommended. I post a full review at Onxy later on, but not until closer to publication date.

I posted my review of Solar by Ian McEwan at Onyx Reviews last night. An interesting book. Lots of reviewers on Amazon turned off by either the fact that the main character is totally unlikeable or all the quantum physics, but I enjoyed it.

I know that I mentioned the full details of this, but my poem “24 Hour Psycho” will appear in A Sea of Alone, edited by Christopher Conlon. This book is still taking submissions until April 10, so there’s still a chance for you to get something in to this cool collection.

Here’s a round table discussion among current Stoker nominees, answering a couple of questions about being nominated for an award like this. Well, sort of. There was no table involved, and we didn’t exactly discuss the questions — we just each submitted our own answers to them.

I thought Jordan and Jeff were doomed on The Amazing Race last night when a dim taxi driver took them halfway to Denmark when they were supposed to stay in Hamburg. Fortunately it was a non-elimination round. However, that means they’ll have to make up time and do an extra task next week. Not promising. And, hey, the cops finally made it to the top of the heap.

We watched the first two hours of Edge of Darkness, a BBC mininseries from the 1980s that was recently remade as a two-hour movie with Mel Gibson. Haven’t seen the remake but read good things about the original series. It’s about a Yorkshire cop whose daughter is tangled up in a group called Gaia that is opposing nuclear power. She’s killed in the first episode, but it takes a while to work out whether she was the target or her father. When her hair turns out to be radioactive, he starts digging around. All sorts of government agencies have taken an interest in her and in the case. There’s an American CIA agent from Dallas who wears a cowboy hat and drives a white caddy in London–this was the era of Dallas, after all. A very funny scene where the Yorkshire cop is called out to meet this agent late at night at a bar. The CIA agent’s two buddies are hammered, passed out on the table, except they pop up every now and then to say something. After the agent and the cop carry them back to their room, one guy pops up again to say, “If the White House calls, tell them I’m out in the field.” In due course, the White House does call. Message relayed.

I only watched about an hour of the Academy Awards last night. I’m not generally a big Ben Stiller fan, but I thought his Avatar bit was pretty funny, and I liked the Tina Fey/Robert Downey, Jr. shtick, too. I like to think that Doctor Who fans discovered Carey Mulligan before the Academy did. I haven’t seen An Education yet, but it’s out on video this month so I’ll see it then.

Found out this morning that my story “Ground Wood,” originally published by the now-defunct Wrong World as a DVD ebook, will be in Volume One of Best New Zombie Tales, edited by James Roy Daley at his Books of the Dead Press. Also in the first volume are stories by Ray Garton (30k word novella), Kealan Patrick Burke, Jeff Strand, Harry Shannon & Gord Rollo, Brian Knight, Jonathan Maberry and a new story by Kim Paffenroth, among others. See the TOC for the first two books here.

I think the heroes made the correct choice on Survivor last night. Probst was right on the money when he challenged the wisdom of blindly clinging to alliances made in the early days of the competition when they really needed contest winning players like Tom and Colby. JT needs to learn a poker face, though. His guilt was written all over his face during tribal council. I loved the scenes where first Tyson and then Boston Rob told Coach essentially to quit whining and man up. Doesn’t look like he took the lesson well, though. Boston Rob rocked in the immunity challenge. Calm, cool and assertive under pressure.

I also liked the CIA guy on CSI last night. He looked like a wigged out hippie with his chill on. Mildly creepy in the way he knew something about everyone, but very West Coast. The Mentalist was decent, too. I had the killer pegged from the very beginning, for no obvious reason other than she looked guilty.

I finished reading Ian McEwan’s Solar last night. It’s a fascinating book, chock full of photosynthesis and semiconductors. The main character is a self-absorbed bastard who has had five wives and can’t commit to anyone for anything. He’s been coasting on his reputation as a Nobel Prize winner for years, he’s fat, sloppy (mushrooms growing along the baseboard of his apartment and his maids keep quitting), mildly arrogant, and not above cheating to get what he wants. It’s fascinating to watch his downward spiral–at the end, he still manages to find people to cheat with, but they’re the kind of woman who the police find passed out in the gutter once or twice a year. And everything, absolutely everything, comes crashing down on him in the span of a few hours.

Next up: Innocent, the sequel to Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow. I honestly don’t remember if I read the book before or after I saw the movie, but the movie is impressed into my memory much more than the book itself, although I think it was a faithful adaptation. Hard to shake the sight of Harrison Ford’s dodgy haircut, that’s for sure.

Here’s an interview with Nancy Kilpatrick about the Evolve anthology that will be launching at World Horror.

Had a good time yesterday participating in the interactive, day-long interview featuring editors and authors from Tesseracts Thirteen at Bitten By Books. It’s all still up there if you care to peruse it.

I’m no fan of Kathy Griffin. For the most part I’m oblivious to her, and I thought she was purely obnoxious with Anderson Cooper on New Years Eve. However, she was actually pretty fun on Law & Order: SVU last night. She played an obnoxious (of course) lesbian activist who was actually secretly seeing a man. She made a pass at Olivia and then later smooched Elliot square on the lips, which must be a first for the show. Oh, yeah, and Olivia pretended to be a lesbian to get a perp to confess, and Elliot got punched out by another lesbian who was a bouncer at a gay bar.

On the second episode, Mischa Barton comported herself very well as a young woman who had been a prostitute since the age of 12 who was the sole witness against a religious zealot who was murdering hookers. The premature baby subplot was very similar to the one from Private Practice last week. The SVU ending with Olivia left with power of attorney and having to make a decision about an operation was a bit of overblown. About par for the course for this show.

Came up with a brand new beginning for the short story I’m trying to write for the next MWA anthology. I only have a week or so left to get this one in the can and I’ve been distracted with other projects, so I was glad of the inspiration and the page of scribbled notes I made after I got out of the shower this morning. Which is where the idea came to me, of course.

Three weeks from today I’ll be in Brighton, England for World Horror. I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully it won’t be too hectic, but I’m already having to make myself a grid to be sure I don’t miss something I’ve committed to.

Come on over to Bitten By Books and ask a question of the authors from Tesseracts Thirteen. Many of us will be there answering questions off and on throughout the day, evening and into tomorrow. There are numerous chances to win cool prizes, too.

I had two missed calls on my cell phone this morning. When I looked up the number, it had twelve digits. Apparently someone in Angola was trying to get a hold of me — and not the prison, either. Very strange.

I posted my review of The Inheritance by Simon Tolkien last night. Tolkien is the grandson of the author of Lord of the Rings, but he is writing crime novels in the PD James vein. I haven’t read his first book yet, but I was quite impressed by this one. I especially liked the British courtroom scenes. Tolkien is a barrister, so he knows whereof he writes.

Got a Kindle and a dollar? Tom Monteleone’s early story collection Rough Beasts and Other Mutations is just a buck.

I’m about halfway through Solar by Ian McEwan. The book took a surprising turn at this point, and it will be interesting to see the repercussions of the incident. McEwan is a fascinating story teller. He knows how to concentrate on mundane things and use them to build character and theme. A man aboard an airplane as it banks and banks and banks again in a holding pattern over Heathrow, for example, is a window on the different aspects of his life, past and present.

NCIS brings in another ghost from a character’s past. In this case, Gibbs’s ex-mother-in-law. This episode was the frankest look at the death of his wife and daughter to date. Handled very well, I thought.

It’s getting to the point on Lost where we start blowing things up, kicking butt and killing people in an episode I like to think of as Cooking with Keamy.

It’s amazing the characters from the past they can drag out and use in the flash-sideways stores. I did not expect to see Keamy in that delectable kitchen scene as he prepared eggs con gusto. Why did that scene remind me of something else–some other movie or show where a bad guy works his kitchen magic while terrorizing someone. Perhaps it will come to me.

OK, the actress who plays Claire has seriously had some acting lessons, especially when it comes to looking pure evil. Boy, when Kate told her she had Aaron–if looks could kill. Zoinks.

Poor Sayid. Even when he isn’t being yanked out of reality to a weird island or being messed with by Jacob he can’t get the girl, although this time it seems to be his own damned fault. His choice, at least. Hands up — who thinks he is a translator for an oil company? He had the scene scoped out the minute he arrived in the kitchen. Knew where every potential weapon was.

And he’s still saving his brother’s bacon (remember the chicken neck breaking scene from their childhood?). I’m sure there’s a logical reason why Jin was in the deep freeze. Probably he had his money and watches confiscated by customs and Keamy was less than happy to learn of this. Does memory serve me right in thinking that when Jin and Sun were at customs, the officer addressed Sun by her maiden name? Maybe they aren’t (yet) married in this reality.

The Oceanic Six continues to be scattered on the island. Jack and Hurley are still AWOL, as is Jin. Kate is back in the fold, Sayid’s evicted–but not quite. Not after circumstances changed. Awesome battle scene between the two of them, though. Someone elsewhere speculated that Dogen is not allowed to kill a candidate (whatever they are), which might explain the poison pill. Dogen probably figured he was sending Sayid to his death with the special dagger. Did the fact that Flocke (aka unLock, aka Lockness Monster) spoke before he was stabbed change anything? I was as surprised as anyone when Sayid plunged the knife in like that.

What if I told you that Flock prefaces most of his statements with “What if I told you…”? He’s not making any real claims, he’s phrasing things as hypotheticals. What if I told you that you could have anything in the world that you wanted?

The scene between Dogen and Sayid was very nice–the one where he admitted to causing his son’s death. The son we learned about last week at the piano competition. The significance of the baseball that we first saw several weeks ago–they sure aren’t making this stuff up as they go–or if they are they’re pretty clever.

And, boy, once Smokey was unleashed, what devastation. Once again the tribes are split into us vs. them, even though not everyone is on the side they are naturally aligned with (Kate: WTF am I doing here?)

Good stuff!

If it seems like the days are getting shorter–they are. I know that’s counterintuitive since we’re moving from the shortest day of the year toward the longest, so we actually have more daylight each day. However, last weekend’s earthquake in Chili was severe enough to shake the earth’s balance and the scientific gurus who study such things say that the overall impact was to make our days 1.26 milliseconds shorter. Great. Just when it seemed like there weren’t enough milliseconds in the day already.

I hope you’ll join us tomorrow for a special event coordinated by Bitten By Books. This is to promote Tesseracts Thirteen, which contains my story “Overtoun Bridge.” The event is sort of a progressive interview with the authors in which people are invited to drop by all day long and ask questions, which we will answer from time to time during the day and into the following day as well. There’s also a contest, and if you RSVP in advance you get an additional 25 entries into the contest.

Want to see what the Stoker finalists look like? Visit this page for author photos and brief bios.

I don’t know if there’s cause and effect at work here or just coincidence. I received an e-mail this morning from the editor from whom I had just withdrawn a submission the previous day. I opened it with some trepidation, worried about his reaction to my news. However, it turned out to be a general message to all of the people whose stories he’d accepted to date, dissolving the anthology and releasing our stories back to us. Since we hadn’t yet signed contracts, I didn’t really consider the release something of a formality, but it’s good that everyone is on the same page, so to speak.

The Italian translator of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion has found two errors in the text already. One is a genuine error, the other is an issue of interpretation. I’ll be able to fix the spelling mistake in the reprint. I’m working on getting an interview with him done in time for the next issue of Cemetery Dance. He’s been translating King’s work for two decades, so I thought people would be interested to hear about what his job is like.

The lieutenant on Law & Order was right: Clean-shaven, the two detectives look about 5 or 10 years younger. Baby faces. The two episodes last night were pretty good. SVU is doing two new episodes back-to-back this week, too, but I doubt they’ll be anywhere near as good. The Big Bang Theory was hilarious last night. Koothrappali’s musical shirt, a kind of Harpo Marx garment, was funny, especially the Law & Order double gong. “This restraining order from Stan Lee is going to look good next to the one from Leonard Nimoy,” Sheldon gloats.

I get very nervous watching sporting events, especially ones like the Canada-US Olympic hockey game yesterday afternoon. I can barely stand to watch at times. Making matters worse in yesterday’s game, there were no commercial breaks during the periods, which meant that the play continued on from end to end relentlessly. There weren’t even that many penalties to break up the action. I don’t know what that felt like for the players, but for me watching the game it was tough.

With about two minutes left in the game, I called upstairs to my wife, who was working on her doctoral research data, to ask her if she happened to have one of those portable defibrillators kicking around. When she heard how close the game was, she came down and within a couple of minutes the U.S. scored the tying goal with 24.4 seconds left in regulation play. Oh, the agony. The sheer, relentless tension. I was sure that Canada was going to lose it on a sudden death goal after they’d played such a terrific game. They dominated the third period–with the exception of that one small moment when the puck went into their net.

Fortunately, my prediction did not come true and Canada prevailed, with Sid the Kid Crosby’s goal catapulting him into the stratospheric realms of the likes of Paul Henderson, who scored the winning goal in the famous Canada-Russia summit series of 1972. And lo there was much joy north of the 49th.

I’m working on reviews of Black Hills (Simmons) and The Inheritance (Tolkien). I started reading Solar by Ian McEwan last night. I’m not sure what the book’s going to be about yet, because I haven’t read the cover copy. So far it’s about a rather self-absorbed man, a Nobel Laureate who has been resting on his laurels since winning the prize. Working on his fifth wife, a woman who seems to have been delighted to discover that he was being unfaithful, which gave her free rein to start her own affair, which, inexplicably, makes her much more desirable to him. I also received a galley of Innocent by Scott Turow, the sequel to Presumed Innocent.

I’m trying to keep track of all the new fiction I have coming out. Over the course of the next month there will be  a lot of it.  I have four stories in When the Night Comes Down from Dark Arts Books (pre-order). My story “The Fingernail Test” is in Close Encounters of the Urban Kind from Apex Books (pre-order). My story “A Murder of Vampires” is in Evolve from Edge Publishing (pre-order). Finally, my story “Zombies on a Plane” is in the 23 House anthology Dead Set (pre-order). I think that covers it.

The undercover detectives actually came up with a good strategy during the buried treasure competition on this week’s Amazing Race. Instead of pacing out all the instructions, they figured out where the end should be relative to the starting point. However, I guess they must have done the math wrong. Anyhow, they ended up with their usual second-to-last place finish. The cowboys have been impressive. Jordan and Jeff are still in the middle of the pack after one first-place finish.

Cold Case was fun this week. The touch of levity–working on an unsolved murder while attending the wedding of a colleague–worked well and breathed a little new life into the show. TV is getting back to normal a little this week. There’s a two-hour Law and Order special. Guess they’re making up for lost time.

Dark Arts Books has released the cover of When the Night Comes Down and is now taking pre-orders for the book, which will launch during World  Horror in a few weeks (10 p.m. to midnight on Friday). Here’s what they have to say about my contributions: “Bev Vincent, already renowned for his non-fiction, shows off some impressive range in his fiction — from hard-edged horror (”Silvery Moon”) to Bradbury-esque whimsical (”Something in Store”) to knowing humor (”Knock ‘em Dead”).” The other story of mine in the book is called “Purgatory Noir.”

I’ll also be involved in the Evolve launch at World Horror. I’ll be reading from and talking about my story “A Murder of Vampires” from 3:20 to 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, and attending the launch and signing at 2 p.m. on Saturday.

I made a difficult decision about another story that had been accepted for an anthology. The publisher for the book closed up shop, leaving the book in limbo. Though the editor said he’d start beating the bushes to find another publisher, my feeling is that it would keep the story tied up without much prospect of seeing print for far too long. So this morning I withdrew the submission. I feel bad about doing so, but on the other hand I had been invited to submit a story to another anthology that does have a publisher and this one seemed like a good match. Call me mercenary, but there you have it. Of course, the joke will be on me if the editor of the new anthology decides to pass on this submission, but those are the risks you take in this business.

I had actually thought I’d write something brand new in response to this invitation and I got down over 1200 words of a new story yesterday, but the deadline is too close at hand for me to do the story justice. Besides, I’m not sure the new story is going to be overtly horror. It’s more of a “Shatterday” kind of story. I mapped a lot of it out in my head in the waking hours yesterday morning and managed to get most of that down on the page during the day. However, it will take me at least a week to finish it off and I do have other things with close deadlines so I may have to put this new one on the back burner for a couple of weeks.

I watched the final ends of both the bronze and gold medal curling matches yesterday. The Swedes put up a valiant battle but ultimately one rock thrown a tad too hard in the final end gave the Swiss team the victory. The Canada/Norway match was fun to watch–not just because of Norway’s gaudy pants which, according to the NY Times, have half a million fans on Facebook. The Canadian team is so much fun to watch, with their mix of older, mature self assurance and skill and the rock star sensibilities of someone like Johnny Mo. Good on them for finally getting the gold they so richly deserved. I felt a little bad for Cheryl Bernard–her team did so well all through the Olympics and fell short by a single point for the gold in the 11th end. I hope she’s proud of what the team accomplished all the same.

I wonder how much it cost CNN to run near-continuous coverage of empty beaches and normal tides on Hawaii yesterday. I also wonder how that surfer made out–if the swells were anything out of the ordinary for him or her. There’s gutsy and then there’s foolhardy.

Just a couple of hours until the big hockey game. I know quite a few other Canadians in the community and it’s like we’re a little enclave at the moment, cheering our team on in the midst of all these fans for the other side!

We watched The Time Traveler’s Wife the other night. I’ve become a big fan of Rachel McAdam’s work (another Canadian!) lately. She is so earnest and delightful and involved in her scenes. This is a difficult film, though. I can only imagine how hard it was to plot out for continuity. Like season five of Lost, in a way. You really have to pay attention to catch all the little signs that tell you how old the time traveler is during each of his appearances. I wouldn’t have noticed, for example, the grey in his hair during the wedding unless someone else commented on it. I thought they gave short shrift to their lives after they were married–if things were complicated for them while they were still “dating” how hard must it have been once they were a family to have him go zipping off unpredictably? And I also had to check my skepticism at the door when it comes to him vanishing so often without anyone else noticing. They could have had fun with that–scenes where he vanished in the grocery store, or while driving a car, or while having sex, or any number of other circumstances where suddenly not being there any more could have posed some interesting questions.

I had to go out last night so I didn’t get to see the women’s hockey gold medal match. Got home just in time to see the medal presentation. When I turned the TV on, the medals were being given out to the US team. The way the light was reflecting from the medals, I couldn’t tell if they were silver or gold. One look at their faces told the story, though. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a glummer, sadder looking bunch of silver medal winners. They looked like they were all ready to burst into tears.

The Canadians, of course, celebrated the way any team from that great northern country would: with a few beers and a cigar. No criticism from me on that front. Well played. Looking forward to the remaining men’s games, and the curling gold medal games, too.

I was surprised by how aggressive the heroes were on Survivor last night. Every one of them stood up to his or her opposite number on the villain team and dumped him or her into the mud. For some of them it was more of a struggle, but they got the job done. Then along came James and sent Randy flying halfway to Fiji. Last time out, Randy struck me as a sad, lonely man. Doesn’t look like much has improved with his lot in life since then. He’s one of those players who self-ostracizes, which isn’t good strategy.

I watched the last few ends of the tie-breaker in men’s curling last night. Sweden beat the Scottish team in the 11th, on the last stone. Then I discovered that the Canada/Russia hockey game was already well into the first period (msnbc? seriously?) so I tuned in there and watched the rest of the impressive match. Surely the Russians will replace the goaltender at the end of the first period, the commentators speculate when it is 4-1 after 20 minutes. But no (and don’t call me Shirley). Bang, bang. Two more quick goals, a couple of power play goals in return and just like that it’s 7-3. Ten goals in the first two periods, and then nothing for the rest of the game except excellent playing by the Canadians and desperation by the Russians. Looks like the home team has finally found its groove.

I’m about halfway through The Inheritance by Simon Tolkien. Remains to be seen whether the sought-after relic will play an actual part in the story or whether it’s just a McGuffin. I received an ARC of the new Ian McEwan novel, Solar, which will probably be my next read. Started working on Black Hills review this morning.

When I left work at 5 p.m. yesterday it was like driving in a blizzard. These great, huge flakes were coming down and splattering against my windshield like bugs. You could actually hear them hitting the ground. It was awesome! It snowed off and on for at least the next two hours, but none of it stuck. There was a little accumulation on cars and rooftops, but none on the ground. The kids across our back fence managed to scrape enough together to make a few snowballs. Places within 50 miles of here did get 1 or 2″ on the ground for a while and other parts of the state got as much as 4 or 6″. Third snowfall of the year, which effectively doubles the number of times I’ve seen snow in Texas in the past twenty years.

The Canadian men’s hockey team beat Germany and now faces Russia to advance to the medal round. Go team! A friend of mine just got back from a week at the Olympics and he was very impressed with everything he saw. More than anything else the camaraderie among the athletes of all nations. He got to see the US/Canada hockey game and said that even the Canadian fans were in good cheer after the game was over.

Last night’s Lost was about a lighthouse.

So Claire’s not quite as crazy as Rousseau was, but give her another dozen years or so and she might get there. I had a bad feeling about the axe once she started sharpening it, but I thought at first she planned to amputate Jin’s leg. If the others have been torturing her as she said (and her branding scar is reminiscent of what they did to Sayid, so she’s probably telling the truth) then she has good reason to be irked with them. Jin’s sudden change in story about Aaron had me worried and confused. At first I thought he was the bad person that was going to the temple, that he had somehow been infected, too. But then I realized that he was protecting Kate, that he’d figured out that Claire probably wouldn’t take kindly to Kate’s actions. Some are speculating that it is Claire herself who is the bad person going to the temple, but I figure it’s fake-Locke.

What would this show be without Hurley? What an awesome character. He balances off the seriousness and drama all by himself. “I could eat,” he tells Miles. Of course he could. His previous experiences with dead-Charlie and dead-Libby and dead-Ana Lucia have prepared him to deal matter-of-factly with dead-Jacob.

Though there wasn’t a lot of action in this episode, I liked the Jack story a lot. This season seems to be running full on parallel to season one, step by step, episode by episode. I am intrigued by the fact that off-island Jack doesn’t seem to remember details of his childhood, as if he didn’t really live through them. The appendix scar, for example, which seemed to take him by surprise. This represents another difference in his life, as he still had his appendix in the original trajectory. Juliet operated to remove it in season four. I wonder if his ex-wife wasn’t shown for expediency or because she’ll show up and be a surprise at some point in the future. Juliet, perhaps? Pretty cool seeing Dogen at the music tryouts. Their lives are always intertwined, no matter what course reality takes.

And why didn’t they notice the lighthouse before? Because they weren’t looking for it, of course. Perfectly sound explanation! #108, by the way, is someone named Wallace, but that might just be a Maguffin. Several other familiar names on the dial if you look up a screen capture of that shot. Linus, which could be Benjamin or even his father. Mr. Friendly, which was the unofficial name for Tom the other before we met him without his beard. The deeper we get into this season the less likely I think they’ll pull a white/black : bad/good switcheroo on us. It may end up being a toss-up or a push, but I don’t think Jacob will end up the bad guy.