Bev Vincent

We survived the cold snap of 2010. It never seemed to be quite as bad as forecast, although it probably was. The worst of the low temperatures were overnight. By the time we got up and about it was usually hovering around or even above the freezing point. No problems with the water pipes, but some of the yard foliage may have succumbed. We tend to be rather mercenary when it comes to shrubberies. If they can’t survive on their own, they’re easily replaced.

I’m having a strange experience with a short story submission. You think you’ve heard it all, and then something new happens. Early last year, I submitted a reprint story to a themed anthology that seemed a perfect fit. In due course I received an e-mail saying that my story had been accepted and that I would be contacted regarding contracts, and other matters pertaining to the sale. As things hadn’t been moving particularly quickly on that project, I didn’t think anything was amiss when I didn’t hear anything for a couple of months. Then, this weekend, a colleague posted that he had a story in the anthology and included a link to the table of contents. Lo and behold, my story wasn’t there. I e-mailed the editor asking what was up with that? (In more professional terms, of course!) He responded almost immediately, saying that he couldn’t find a copy of my story on his pile and there was a chance he’d mislaid it. I’ll get back to you, he says. That’s where things stand at the moment. Weird.

This weekend I finished a new draft of a story that is part of a neat project coming out in a few months. I’d received a lot of feedback from the editor and took it to heart, pruning and honing the story. Though it had swollen by about 1000 words on an early revision, I managed to trim about half of that back out again this time. It’s still not exactly svelte, at 5800 words. I’m not sure about the ending at the moment, so I’m awaiting the editor’s response once again.

This morning I returned to an old story that’s been around the block a few times. A new market opened up that seems ideal for it. I also came up with a new approach and a new metaphor for the story and have revamped it to such an extent that it even has a new title, a deadly clever two-worder that has at least three implications I can think of (in the same way that A Dark Place by Peter Straub has multiple meanings, not that I dare draw any comparisons between my work and his!). I hope to get that story tidied up this week before tackling my submission to the next MWA anthology and then I plan to get back to the novel, which has been lingering too long.

We watched a British movie called Dangerous Parking this weekend. It’s an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Stuart Browne about an enfant terrible movie director who enters rehab and turns his life around, only to get kicked in the unmentionables by repeated bouts of bladder cancer. Written, directed by and starring Peter Howitt, it has more inventive swearing per minute than just about any film I’ve seen lately, including today’s subject line, which comes from one of the film’s funnier moments. The main character and his best friend (played by Sean Pertwee, son of the actor who was the third Doctor Who) are so stoned that they think they’ve been dinged for speeding when in fact they are stopped in the fast lane of the — as the cop puts it — M Bastard 6 motorway. “You weren’t speeding,” the cop says. “You weren’t going  any speed at all!” The judge comes up with the inventive charge of “dangerous parking.” The film also stars Saffron Burrows (Boston Legal). It suffers a bit from non-chronological storytelling (though the main character’s fortunate decision to bleach the front of his hair helps orient viewers) but it’s pretty hilarious–except when it isn’t.

Yesterday afternoon I stumbled upon a film called Separate Lies starring Tom Wilkerson (Michael Clayton), Rupert Everett and Emily Watson. It’s about a couple whose lives are upended after their house cleaner’s husband is killed in a hit-and-run accident. They become enmeshed in a cover-up that becomes increasingly complicated as additional lies are revealed. Powerful acting and sophisticated motivations, although it sort of falls apart at the end.

Last night we found an old Hugh Grant / Sarah Jessica Parker / Gene Hackman film called Extreme Measures (not to be confused with the forthcoming Extraordinary Measures) about a medical resident who stumbles upon a cover-up in his Manhattan hospital where homeless people are being forced to participate in a research project. It’s not the usual Grant fluff (we were bemused to note that it was produced by Elizabeth Hurley). It has this tense scene in the tunnels beneath NYC that is totally irrelevant except as a way of increasing tension, but still it was an okay thriller.

I’m currently reading Lee Thomas’s collection In the Closet, Under the Bed. His publisher, Dark Scribe, kindly sent me a copy and I have been enjoying it greatly. I haven’t read much of his short fiction before, so this is a treat. I noticed a character named Nick Hoffman who works at a video store and suffers an unpleasant fate…

Colder here this morning than in Halifax, NS, by a few degrees at least. I’m not sure I would have noticed if they weren’t making such a huge fuss about it on the TV and in the newspapers. Sure, it’s brisk out there, but I’ve seen far worse. Of course, construction around here isn’t designed for anything like this, so some people probably do run the risk of having frozen pipes, especially if the houses are empty. The biggest impact on us will be the natural gas bill next month, I suspect.

I finished Sleepless by Charlie Huston yesterday and will write up my review in the coming days. In addition to the two books en route to me that I mentioned yesterday, I also have the new Dan Simmons heading my way. First one to the front doorstep wins the race.

Watched the first half of the BCS game last night while working on a jigsaw puzzle. Texas had a tough go of it from the start, and goofy little mis-haps like that bobbled toss/pass in the closing seconds of the half didn’t help. I read this morning that they came back to within 3 points but couldn’t quite manage a comeback.

This morning I got the green light on a short story I’ve been revising with an editor of a forthcoming project. I hope to have a new version of another story ready for him by the end of the weekend as  time is running short.

One of my Facebook friends from Texas made this pithy observation: When the temperature in Texas begins with the digit “1,” it’s supposed to have two more digits after it, not just one. The cold snap of 2010 is sweeping across the state. It was in the forties this morning but should be down to freezing by supper time and may not rise above freezing for the next 24-40 hours. Saturday should be back into the forties again. Another Texan friend suggested that I send this weather back to Canada. I said that I tried, but they sent it back because it was too wimpy.

The wind is also supposed to arrive later on this afternoon, creating a wind chill near zero degrees F in some places. Meh. I was once in Minneapolis when the mercury temperature was -40 and the wind chill was -70°.

Another empty night for television. I watched Law & Order: SVU but it felt like a rerun of an old episode, and once the witness/victim was forced to read HIV slogans from slides I just about gave up.

Didn’t get any writing work done this morning but I’ll make up for it tonight as I’ll do some editing while listening to a football game with one ear. I also hope to finish Sleepless by Charlie Huston. It’s not my favorite of his books by a long shot. One thing he’s doing that is irking the crap out of me is backloading character explication. Very late in the book, he’s putting the brakes on forward momentum to talk at great length about the backgrounds of the major characters, things we should really have known about them earlier in the book. I also find it hard to imagine Park stopping to pen these lengthy journal entries that represent his first person narration, especially since they contain information that he wouldn’t want to be caught possessing. The book makes me think about Chinatown, for some inexplicable reason. I’m hoping to get ARCs of the new Michael Slade and Joe Hill books shortly.

It felt good to be back at the keyboard this morning. This was my first day of normal writing sessions of the new year — my first since before Christmas, in fact. I’m still working on revisions to a 6000-word story and I managed to get through six pages this morning. I hope to trim at least 300 words during this pass and then do one more clean-up pass before running it past the editor again.

Here’s the book trailer for the forthcoming anthology Evolve, which contains my story “A Murder of Vampires.”

This weather is good business for the home supply stores. They are selling out of insulation for pipes. Starting tomorrow night we’re supposed to dip down well below freezing for three consecutive nights. We also have a slight chance of snow or sleet for tomorrow morning.

An idle week for television. NCIS was new last night, with geeky McGee going bananas over jet packs. The jousting between Gibbs and the lawyer was fun. I also watched “Allons-y,” the Doctor Who Confidential episode that accompanies part 2 of The End of Time. It’s clear that filming was an emotional process for all involved, especially for Tennant who got choked up when the crew called him back under false pretenses after his last shot for a “golden wrap” moment. I was also intrigued to learn that the first time Russell T. Davies met Matt Smith was on the day that he showed up to film his part of the regeneration scene. The previous Confidential showed how tedious it was to film the Master scenes where Simm is everyone. He had to do about 24 wardrobe changes over a 4-hour period just to do the press conference scene where he is every journalist in the room (and everyone else, too).

The Houston Chronicle had a jaunty front-page article this morning about how the temperature in Houston is going to be lower than the temperature at McMurdo Station in Antarctica on Friday morning. The forecast low there is 21° and we’re supposed to get down to 19–the coldest it’s been around here in 14 years. I recall, however, my first winter in Texas when it got down to 4° around Christmas, back in 1989. Pipes burst in people’s houses everywhere.

I’m still watching Men of a Certain Age and the show is maturing, I think. Less awkwardness and more relevance. The scene with Ray Romano and his daughter’s ex-boyfriend was probably his best thus far, and Andre Braugher’s resolution of his problems with the city was classic, too. He found the key.

Learned this morning that The Stephen King Illustrated Companion won in the non-fiction category at the London Book Festival, which honors the best of international publishing. I won’t be going abroad for the award ceremony, which is later this month at Grosvenor House in London, but it’s a nice little nod to the book. I purchased the last available copy at the local B&N yesterday, taking advantage of the 50% discount.

The forthcoming vampire anthology Evolve, which contains my short story “A Murder of Vampires,” has a spiffy new web site and is now accepting pre-orders for the various editions, including a trade paperback (signed by all contributors), a hardcover, and a collector’s edition wrapped in silk and packaged in a sturdy pine coffin. The book launches at the end of March during World Horror 2010 in Brighton, England. Among the contributors who will be present for the launch: editor Nancy Kilpatrick, Kelley Armstrong, Natasha Beaulieu, Gemma Files, Ronald Hore, Sandra Kasturi, Claude Lalumière, Michael Skeet, Jerome Stueart, Sandra Wickham, Rio Youers and cover artist John Kaiine. And moi.

Speaking of World Horror, I will be moderating the following panel discussion:  INTO THE GOREZONE: CAN YOU GO TOO FAR IN HORROR? It will be held in the Lounge on Saturday from 5 – 6 p.m. and is described thusly: The late Charles L. Grant preferred “Quiet Horror” but these days it seems that anything goes. Explicit sex and violence in fiction and films has given rise to accusations of “Torture Porn”. Has the genre gone too far, or are there those who think that it has not yet gone far enough…?

I was able to confirm that “Rule Number One” from The Blue Religion is listed at the back of The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 in a section titled Other Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2008. Only 28 stories are listed here, so I consider myself fortunate to have the story singled out for this honor.

The Houston Texans did the unexpected yesterday — they beat the Patriots. They started out well, then it looked like the game was getting away from them. We actually gave up on it during the third quarter and were in the kitchen having lunch when I heard the announcer say that it was tied at 27-27. Color us surprised. Good game, but unfortunately the teams that needed to lose yesterday so Houston could make the playoffs didn’t cooperate. Still, the Texans have their first-ever winning season.

Some very cold weather headed our way later on this week. We’ll might get as low as the high teens at one point, or so they say.

Addendum: Forgot to mention that I posted my review of The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith yesterday.

My daughter is attending the Houston Texans game today with a friend, who is a Patriots fan. I’m sitting at home watching the game on TV, probably getting a much better view of events without all the aggro of dealing with crowds and traffic.

Yesterday we watched Part 2 of The End of Time, the David Tennant swan song as Doctor Who. I’ll be curious to see him on the upcoming NBC sitcom (can’t recall the title) where he plays a lawyer with stage fright who coaches his clients to defend themselves.

Anyway, the finale had some wonderful moments. I always thought that Wilf deserved to be a companion because there have been few characters in the Whoniverse who have the same delight with creation as the Doctor. Delighted that he got his moment, not only in the TARDIS but in Earth orbit as well. I also thought that the manifestation of the “he will knock four times” omen was particularly inspired, as it had a certain perfect symmetry to it. John Simm chewed up the scenery again and the writers had the courtesy and clarity to draw him not as a monotonic evil character but as someone deserving of at least a modicum of sympathy, from the viewers as well as from the Doctor. Plenty of tension in the final conflicts and a delightful scene where the Doctor is strapped to a dolly as he’s pushed around, giving rise to the subject line above.

And, in the closing moments, the Doctor got to go on a brief tour of his reign, being afforded–unlike any previous Doctor–the opportunity to wrap things up with the people whose lives he touched. A veritable swan song, with enough devastation wrought within the TARDIS to allow them to remod the place if they decide to do so with the new Doctor. I’ll reserve comment on Matt Smith until he gets a few episodes under his belt. There was a lot of whinging at the end of the Eccleston era, but Tennant proved to be (in my opinion) the best of all Doctors and definitely the one who has given the best overall storyline from the moment of his regeneration when he had to decide what kind of man he was through his end of days.

Allons-y.

We then watched Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, starring Dame Joan Plowright (she was once married to Sir Laurence Olivier) as a widow who moves into a London hotel because she wants to regain control of her life and no longer wants to be a burden to (or continually observed by) her daughter. She meets up with a young writer (played by a guy who looks like Orlando Bloom) and they become surrogate grandmother and grandson to each other as he mines her life and lessons for story ideas. The Claremont seems like a glorified senior citizens’ home, with a cast of colorful characters sticking their noses into each other’s business.

The other evening, we watched the opening moments of Fahrenheit 451 and I was struck by how the story might have been inspired in part by Don Quixote. The first book Montag finds in the opening scene is that novel, which is bundled up with the rest, pitched out the window and burned in the courtyard. There is a very similar scene at the opening of the Cervantes novel, where a group of Don Quixote’s friends go through his books and select the ones that have some literary merit. The others are chucked out the window into the courtyard and burned. We didn’t watch the rest of the film, though. It didn’t age well, I’m afraid, and looked like a poor episode of The Prisoner.

I haven’t seen it for myself yet, but I’m told that my short story “Rule Number One” (published in The Blue Religion, edited by Michael Connelly) received honorable mention in one of the Year’s Best Mystery Stories collections, possibly the one edited by Jeffrey Deaver.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched a hockey game all the way through, but the Winter Classic caught my eye yesterday afternoon. They built a regulation arena inside Fenway and played outdoors, with about 40,000 people watching. Philadelphia vs. Boston, two of the original six teams. Bobby Clarke and Bobby Orr were the honorary captains, respectively. I would have recognized Orr anywhere but Clarke, without his wooly hair and with all of his front teeth, looked far different from the team leader from the 1970s. (Clarke said that one of the current Flyers suggested that he “stick” Orr during the ceremonial face off!)

The game was pretty good, especially with the tying goal coming late in the third and the Boston win in OT just seconds after a flurry of Flyers scoring chances. I’m not fond of Boston’s uniform these days. Guess I’m too much of a traditionalist.

I’m about halfway through Charlie Huston’s Sleepless. I have to confess that I find the book mildly confusing. There comes a point when stylistic printing tricks (such as the total lack of dialog attribution identifiers) and dual first person narrators works more to a book’s detriment than anything that might be gained by apparent cleverness.

We watched Pink Cadillac (Clint Eastwood, Bernadette Peters) last night. Cute film, more like a TV movie of the week than a theatrical movie. Many of the supporting cast were regulars from shows like Matlock and Rockford Files. One of Eastwood’s broader performances, especially when his skip tracer is putting on an act for the benefit of one of his targets. We also tuned in to the last hour of 2010. Except for the humanistic computer, most of the science in the film seemed at least possible if not currently available, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch twenty-some years into the future. Helen Mirren is almost unrecognizable as the Russian astronaut captain.

A happy 2010 to one and all. Have a great and safe evening.

You know all those things they say happen only once in a blue moon? Well, tonight’s the night that they all happen. Beware.

Next interesting date: February 1st, 2010. Why? because in the US, it’s a palindromic date: 01 02 20 10. In the UK, it’s January 2nd that’s palindromic.

We went to see Sherlock Holmes a couple of days ago. A decent movie, lovely to behold. I felt myself bristling against some of the liberties they took with Holmes and, to a lesser extent, with Watson. Lestrade was almost perfectly true to Doyle.  The scenery was visually stunning. I especially liked the Tower Bridge. I thought Robert Downey, Jr. mumbled a little, making some of his lines hard to understand. On the whole it was a fairly good film. Loved the Irish music, too, especially the Dubliners.

Yesterday we saw Blind Side. Sandra Bullock is really good in this film. The story itself is almost devoid of dramatic tension. They try to inject some with the incident with the NCAA investigation and the one instance where Big Mike vanishes, but for all intents and purposes, once Bullock’s character sets her mind on her goal, it rolls out pretty much without complication. Even her own kids don’t rebel or object in the least to the new status quo. I smiled at the irony of a woman who is such a socialite but at the same time a Taco Bell heiress of sorts. Kathy Bates brings a little humor to the story, but her “confession” felt a tad forced.

I don’t think I mentioned The Hangover, which we saw a week or so ago. It had its moments. Wasn’t as over the top or raunchy as I expected it to be, which isn’t a bad thing as I don’t tend to go in for that sort of film. A few bits were brilliant, some clever, and a fair number missed the target, but on the whole it was okay. I think the concept could have been made much, much funnier, though.

Finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Scones by Alexander McCall Smith and moving into The Double Comfort Safari Club, also by AMS. Also reading Sleepless by Charlie Huston. An interesting concept but the book’s structure is a little confusing, at least in the early going. I also finished Don Quixote, finally. Glad to have read it, and was a bit surprised by how mean-spirited it could be at times, especially with poor Sancho Panza being “sentenced” to lashings and pinchings and slaps, on a whim. At least he figured out a way to get around the lashings.

We had a very Doctor Who Boxing Day evening. BBC America re-ran the two most recent specials as a lead up to part one of The End of Time, the two-part swan song of David Tennant as the Doctor. I noted with displeasure that they edited down the previous shows, cramming them into an hour with commercials. All discussion of the need for bicycles was missing from The Waters of Mars, for example. I’m not sure what else was sacrificed.

The new special was very much a mixed bag. I’m a big fan of John Simms, especially from his roles in State of Play and Life on Mars. (I was amused to see frequent ads for a new show with his frequent co-star, Philip Glennister during the evening.) Still, the first half of the episode dragged badly, especially the scenes in the junkyard where the Doctor marched as Simms leapt around. It just seemed like a waste of good screen time. The two disguised aliens seemed like it was a rehash of earlier material. Delightful to see Donna’s grandfather again, and glad to see that he finally got a brief jaunt in the TARDIS. The episode picked up a bit in the second half, after the rather jarring interjection of James Bond before the commercial break. I appreciate their efforts to turn Simms’ character into something of a tragic figure, and there was much merriment at seeing him in all of his various guises at the end, but I’m hoping for something big and grand in the second part and that it won’t be over-run by this new resurgence of the long-gone Time Lords.

I’ve only watched Graham Norton a couple of times, but the Doctor Who special that aired after The End of Time was pretty hilarious. I have no idea who the other people were on stage with Tennant and Tate, though. I guess we were meant to figure that out by ourselves. The TARDIS bits were amusing, and the personal ad “sketch” was funny and audacious, too. I laughed at Tennant’s aside about the licensing folks for Doctor Who having a cardiac after he posed for the bawdy photo.

We went to see It’s Complicated yesterday. We hit the early matinee and the theater was cram packed. Average age of attendees: over 40, at least. If you could get past the pervasive infidelity concept, the movie had some extremely funny moments. Steve Martin was charming and funny without being silly. No pratfalls–even when his character was stoned he played it straight. Alec Baldwin was smarmy and charming and shallow, but delightful, and Meryl Streep was very good. Not stellar, not award-worth, but very, very credible, since it was upon her to play the movie’s tormented conscience. Her future son-in-law, Harley, almost stole the movie several times.

We watched a two-hour History Channel documentary about Woodstock that filled in some of the gaps in fact left by the movie we saw earlier in the week. The whole concept of hiring a bunch of people from California who had experience with handling people on bad LSD trips (they set up the so-called “trip tent” where these people could go to be brought down safely) is amazing. You couldn’t imagine getting away with something like that now, but they seemed to handle it well. If there were people whose lives were scarred by their experiences at Woodstock, their story wasn’t told, either in the movie or in this documentary.

We also re-watched Howard’s End. My memory of the plot was faulty — I thought a lot more of the story took place at the eponymous house, but in fact very little of it did. One of the fascinating plot devices is the fact that a “stolen” umbrella ultimately caused such complications for the two intertwined families.