Tastes from the past
Posted on | September 2, 2010 | No Comments
Nostalgia comes in many forms. We enjoy movies set in the era when we were young. We browse through old photo albums and floods of memories come back. We go to reunions or meet up with old friends from school on Facebook.
I have food nostalgia. There are certain things my mother used to bake or cook or even buy that are inextricably linked to childhood. Some of them I never expect to experience again. One example: mom used to make the greatest jelly roll. It started with a light, yellowish, spongy thin cake that she would wrap in a wet towel and roll after spreading jelly on it. The jelly roll itself was great, but for me the real treat was the edges of the cake. She would trim these off before making the roll—they were dark and crispy and crunchy, and no one, not even my older sister, quite knows how she made them. Geez, I can taste them right now simply writing about them!
Alpha-Bits was one of the cereals I often had as a kid, along with Honey Comb and Shreddies. The latter two I can still get (though I have to import Shreddies from Canada), but Alpha-Bits went “out of print” a couple of years ago. Then I saw a box on Covert Affairs a couple of weeks ago and, after a little research, found out I could buy them from Amazon so yesterday morning I had Alpha-Bits for breakfast again. Heavenly.
My mother made the best boiled icing. She made it look easy. No candy thermometers were involved—she knew it was ready by the way a drop trailed a thread behind it when released from a spoon. I really wish I’d paid more attention back then. I attempted boiled icing yesterday and it was a catastrophic failure. It looked like it was going all right. I had a thermometer and I heated the boiling sugar water to 240° and blended it in with the beaten egg whites. But it never set, and I ended up with a bowl full of liquid froth that would have run off and puddled onto the floor if I’d tried to ice the cake with it. I was very disappointed. I was so looking forward to recapturing that taste from my youth again. Had to settle for a can of store-bought. Bummer.
I finished and posted my review of Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith. Not the absolute best Renko novel, but any MC Smith novel is guaranteed to be at least very good.
I was a little surprised by Annie’s actions in Covert Affairs this week. She hasn’t been on the job long enough to go off the grid the way she did. I also don’t understand exactly why Joan didn’t put her through the wringer. I know she’s their best link to Ben Mercer, but still. And who are we really meant to trust? Joan and Arthur or Mercer? It was inevitable that she should run into the FBI guy that she encountered on her first job, when she pretended to be a prostitute to get the data from a smartphone at a crime scene.
And I’m still not sure who’s zooming who on Rubicon. Ingram seems to be guiding Will along gently in a certain direction, but to what end? And poor Maggie—she and Will always seem to have the absolute worst timing.
Big Brother is getting down to brass tacks. Only five people left, and only two people will vote tonight, unless there’s a tie. If I were Enzo and Britney, I might collude to make a tie and force Lane to cast the deciding vote. That would put him in the cross hairs by whoever he sent to the jury house.
I’m going “off the grid” for the long weekend. Have to get away from phones and internet every now and then. Time to recharge the batteries and relax. Cook some good meals, play cards, make jigsaw puzzles and just hang out.
Denethor Bishop
Posted on | August 30, 2010 | No Comments
At just about the same time as he was accepting an Emmy award, John Hamm’s alter ego, Don Draper (or Dick Whitman, if you prefer) was getting a Clio award for the best floor polish commercial. Nice piece of synchronicity. I didn’t watch much of the Emmy’s. Saw the opening sketch on YouTube and thought it was pretty clever and well done. (Where did Hurley come from all of a sudden?!) It’s a kick to see Hamm doing something different, and Betty White is sure getting a lot of mileage out of her rediscovery. Kudos to Kate for letting herself be the butt of the joke.
The Twitter idea might have sounded good on the drawing board, but it was lame in execution. I don’t really know much about Fallon, have never watched his show, but I thought he did okay. The “tribute” sketch for three shows we’ve lost this season was funny. Ricky Gervais can be both funny and lame in the same sentence.
I wonder how far they’re going to let Don Draper fall before he rebounds. He’s getting worse and worse. This week he had a lost weekend, where he went to bed on Friday night with one woman he’d just met and woke up on Sunday morning with another he didn’t recall meeting, presumably the waitress at a greasy spoon who served him french fries. He didn’t remember ordering Peggy to camp out for the weekend and he most certainly didn’t remember cribbing someone else’s slogan at a drunken pitch meeting for Life cereal. That scene, where he was scrambling to come up with ideas, was almost painful to watch. I wonder if Roger Stirling actually did hire him (while drunk) or if Don just used his knowledge of drunken behavior to convince him he had.
Eureka was like old home week, with the return of several characters from past years. Thankfully, their return was only temporary and, for the most part, hallucinatory.
Reviewed the page proofs for one forthcoming short story and the contract for another. Beyond that I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done this weekend. I’m tinkering with a Cemetery Dance column (though I don’t have a deadline for it yet) and cogitating over a couple of short story commitments.
We watched The Return of the King (the four hour version) yesterday afternoon. I didn’t know who John Noble was when I first saw the movie, so I didn’t make the connection between Denethor and Walter Bishop of Fringe until now. Frodo is a passive protagonist for most of the adventure. He makes a few concerted decisions–like the decision to be the ring-bearer and the decision to part from the fellowship after Boromir’s meltdown–but for much of the long journey he’s listless and unimpressive. If not for Gollum, he would have failed. If not for Sam, certainly, too.
I finished Martin Cruz Smith’s Three Stations this weekend. A gritty, dark portrait of Moscow. A few gibes at Putin. Arkady Renko has to be suspended or dismissed once every book, like Inspector Rebus. A relatively brief book with two major storylines that are unrelated. Full review to come. Next, I picked up Star Island by Carl Hiaasen. A good opening, in which a paparazzo is misled into following the wrong ambulance when a celebrity named Cherry Pye overdoses on vodka, Red Bull, hydrocodone, birdseed and stool softener. I’ve only read a few of his books, but I like a light crime story every now and then.
A year of stories
Posted on | August 27, 2010 | No Comments
It’s so nice to leave the gym at noon and walk out into dry air. Usually it’s like a sauna, but our humidity has been down so it doesn’t feel nearly so close.
While I was updating my bibliography this morning, I observed that 2010 has been a particularly good year for short fiction. Counting reprints, I’ll have eleven stories see print by the end of the year, and one other reprint released in audio version. This includes the four stories in When the Night Comes Down (an excellent way to sample a cross section of my fiction, as well as introduce yourself to three other fine authors, by the way!
Other publications this year include appearances in eVolVe (which will be available in the U.S. in September, by the way), Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, Best New Zombie Tales and Dead Set, along with forthcoming appearances in Specters in Coal Dust, Shivers VI and one other anthology I’m not allowed to mention yet.
That, along with some nice award nominations, a second printing of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion and an Italian translation of the same, and an appearance in Thrillers: 100 Must Reads all make for a decent year—and it ain’t over yet.
A double elimination on Big Brother last night. Matt played a good game, but made some bad decisions along the way. His original plan to get rid of Brendon blew up, and this week he made a couple of very bad strategic moves. The worst was in not revealing the presence of the brigade to try to sway Ragan and Brendan into keeping him. It was the only card he had, and he didn’t play it. Nevertheless, Brendan got his due finally, as well. I wonder what Rachel will think of his bald head when he shows up at the jury house! It will be interesting to see what happens to the brigade now that they’ve reached the point where they have to start eating their own to survive.
I wasn’t expecting last night’s episode of Burn Notice to be the season finale. They sure packed a lot of plot into 42 minutes. It took me a while to recognize the lawyer/father of the client from Without a Trace. I knew his voice, but his grizzled face threw me. I think it was probably Jessie who picked up the briefcase at the end, with Michael lying in a pool of blood on the side of the road. Thankfully we only have to wait until November for the show to return.
I posted my review of Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay last night. The next review will be the latest John Connolly. I received Carl Hiaasen’s new book from Amazon Vine and ordered the new Isabel Dalhousie by Alexander McCall Smith. I haven’t read any of that series, but I can’t pass up a book with a character who shares a name with the town where I went to school and the name of my university, too.
Shivers Me Timbers
Posted on | August 26, 2010 | No Comments
Cemetery Dance officially announced Shivers VI today (after a pre-announcement directed at long-time clients yesterday). The anthology contains my story “It is the Tale,” as well as stories by many names you’ll recognize: Brian Keene, for example. Kealan Patrick Burke, Norman Prentiss, David B. Silva, Melanie Tem, Al Sarrantonio, Nate Southard, Brian Freeman, Scott Nicholson. See the link for more.
Oh, yeah, and Stephen King and Peter Straub. King’s contribution is a reprint of “The Crate,” first published in Gallery and in a couple of early 1980s anthologies before being adapted as one of the sections of Creepshow, the one starring Adrian Barbeau, Hal Holbrook and a tribble with teeth and claws. Peter’s contribution is “A Special Place,” an excised part of A Dark Matter that was previously published in limited edition.
A pleasant surprise, to say the least. This is my third Shivers appearance. I seem to have a lock on the even numbers.
The humidity is down considerably today, which makes it feel a lot cooler even though it is still in the nineties.
And he shall be Leon
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
A while back, I sat down for a lengthy interview with a producer working for Biography Channel International. They were updating their Stephen King biography, which was a decade out of date, and wanted to add some new faces to the mix. Lisa Rogak and I fit the bill. I spent three hours answering questions based on what I wrote in The Stephen King Illustrated Companion. I figured they might use five or ten seconds of all that footage—and the five or ten seconds where I said something ill advised or ill considered.
I received a DVD copy of the finished product last weekend. While I find it painful to watch myself on the screen, I didn’t see anything I regret saying, which was my worst fear. They actually used quite a bit of the new footage. And where else will I get to share the screen with people like Johnny Depp and John Cusak? In fact, it might be my only opportunity to be on television. This version is for the international market only, so I don’t expect to accidentally stumble across myself on TV while flipping channels.
The first single from The Union, the upcoming Elton John/Leon Russell album, is now available at iTunes. It’s called “If It Wasn’t For Bad,” and was written by Leon Russell. It ”features vocals by Elton John and piano and vocals by Russell along with an extraordinary band bringing a bold rock/country sound organically crafted by these true musical legends,” to quote the Decca press release.
I’ve been exploring options for converting my work desk into a standing desk. I’m not sure this will be a permanent change, so I don’t want to invest a ton of money in it. The swivel arms that I’ve found at ergonomic shops—ones with sufficient range for what I’m looking for at last—all run between $700 and $1200. Out of my budget. I’d be happy with a wooden platform that I can sit my flat screen monitor, keyboard and mouse onto. Maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but I’m not finding anything that fits the bill. I might have to break down and build it myself. My biggest concern is in getting the height right, which is why the swivel arm options were attractive. Anyone out there have any first-hand experience doing this?
For the first time in weeks, we aren’t under a heat advisory. The temperatures are dropping slowly this week. By Friday we’ll barely be in the 90s during the daytime. It’s a welcome change.
I’ve been invited to join a local, limited membership writing group. There will be just five of us, four of whom I’ve met before. All of us are published. The biggest downside is that two of the writers are in San Antonio, a solid three-plus hour drive away. Our first get-together is in mid-September, so we’ll see how onerous the drive is. I gave up the local writing guild a number of years ago because I didn’t think I was getting anything out of it, but most of the writers in that group were still struggling to get published. This should be different.
I finished Dexter by Design, the fourth Jeff Lindsay novel, this weekend. It’s an improvement over Dexter in the Dark, which jumped the shark badly by wandering off into Moloch territory. Narrator Dexter has an acerbic wit, especially in his observations about Miami drivers, but he treats his homicidal tendencies more like demonic possession than a corruption of his personality. Also, Lindsay tries too hard to make a statement about death and dismemberment as performance art by having Dexter and Rita visit a gallery in Paris, while on their honeymoon, that features video of a woman cutting her leg off bit by bit with a chainsaw. Ultimately, this vignette ties in thematically with the rest of the book, but not actually, which makes it seem like something of a coincidence. Everything gets tidied up a little too neatly and conveniently at the end, too.
Started Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith. So far it’s set in and around the same three train station cluster featured in Stalin’s Ghost—a lively place in the daytime and an underworld at night.
On Saturday, we went out shopping for a little used car for our daughter to use at university. She lives not far from campus, but there are no sidewalks. The first car we tried out was a disaster. The engine light came on before we left the lot and the air conditioner never produced any cold air. It was hotter inside than out. I guess we should have gotten a clue when the salesman didn’t join us for the test drive. We tried a couple of other places and decided the VW dealer would be our last. We struck gold—got a very nice car for a decent price. So nice, in fact, that my wife decided she’d rather have that one and passed on her car to our daughter!
Back to Middle Earth
Posted on | August 23, 2010 | No Comments
I’m sure there are worse things in the world than picking up a cup of iced tea, taking a huge draught and discovering that it’s sweetened. I’m quite sure of that, in fact. But at the moment I’d be hard pressed to come up with an example. Ugh. Sweet tea—that’s just plain nasty.
Shame seemed to be the theme of this week’s episode of Mad Men. Betty Draper was ashamed of what the neighbors might think if they found out what Sally was doing during a sleepover (and doing to to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., no less!). Bert Cooper finally got to make use of his Japan-o-philism when the agency hosted a group from Honda, but his strongest contribution was to express shame over Roger’s behavior. And Don made use of the culture of shame by goading his rival into breaking the rules of a bake-off for Honda’s business (thus causing them to over-invest in the project) and then expressing indignation to Honda’s executives because they broke their own rules. My favorite part of the episode was Don’s deception. It was like a caper movie, where he pretended to be spending a boatload of money on an ad, thereby inducing another firm to up the ante. It was very much in line with the Business is War philosophy.
We watched Cairo Time on the weekend. It stars Patricia Clarkson as Juliette, the wife of a Canadian United Nations employee stationed in the Middle East. She’s a magazine editor taking a break to go visit her husband, except he’s been delayed in Gaza, where he helps establish refugee camps, by an uprising. She’s a fish out of water, and her hero is a Syrian, Tariq, who used to work with her husband, played by Alexander Siddig. He looked very familiar to me, and it took me a while to recognize him as Dr. Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Tariq becomes her tour guide through this beautiful landscape, explaining the local customs to her while trying to navigate a dangerous path between chaperone and something more. Juliette promised to wait to visit the pyramids until her arrives, but delay begets delay and a trip to the pyramids is just one more step toward overstepping bounds. It’s a beautifully sensual movie, written and directed by a Syrian-Canadian filmmaker. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt and the movie enhanced that desire. My favorite line comes from Tariq after Juliette says she wants to see Alexandria: “You know the library burned down.”
It turns out my wife has never seen The Lord of the Rings, so we watched The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers this weekend. The super-long extended versions of both. I found myself marveling at the use of forced perspective throughout. I maintain that the scene where Galadrial goes nuclear when Frodo innocently tempts her with the ring, is the worst part of all three movies. It’s like someone else got in there and decided to tinker with that one bit, it’s so much out of line with everything else. Otherwise I like it as much as ever, and look forward to seeing the final installment, perhaps next weekend, 35 false endings and all. I think Jackson’s crowning achievement is in his treatment of Gollum. Not so much the animation but his understanding of the character as tragic rather than evil. The scenes where Gollum struggles with himself are great.
I’m almost finished Dexter By Design and ready to take up the new Martin Cruz Smith novel. The Dexter book is okay. I like the fact that the nemesis is essentially off-screen for most of the book. He’s briefly glimpsed while stabbing someone important, and observed fleeing from the scene of a hit and run, but other than that he’s in the book mostly by implication. Still an example, in my opinion, of a case where the TV adapters did a better job than the original.
Masha, Masha, Masha
Posted on | August 20, 2010 | No Comments
I was surprised to see a box of Alpha-Bits in the background during the opening scene of this week’s Covert Affairs. Used to be one of my favorite cereals. Then, all of a sudden, it disappeared off the shelves. Apparently it did a “New Coke” reformulation that was just as successful as that failed experiment. I’ll have to dig around and see if I can find some. Hopefully they’re just as good as they were back in the day.
This was a good episode of Covert Affairs, as it had Annie realizing the consequences of what she did. There were loose ends that the agency tried to cover up with maximum prejudice, collateral damage and it served as a cautionary tale to all involved. Good to see Lauren Holly, who met a violent end in NCIS a few seasons back. I read that the series has been renewed for a second season.
Fun developments on Big Brother this week. Brendon got screwed over when he opened Pandora’s Box. True, he got a nice day to himself in a mansion with all the conveniences, but he thought he was going to be there with the love of his life. Instead, she was inflicted on the House for the same 24-hours, which led to fireworks between her and Ragan. Matt did a great job of ad-libbing when his diamond veto fell apart when he yanked it from his pocket. Dude can think on his feet. I wonder who Brittany will nominate–it’s getting to the point where there aren’t many candidates any more, and they’re all pretty chummy. If she were smart, she’d put up two of the brigade, except she doesn’t really know there is such a thing.
We watched The Last Station last night. Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy during the last year of his wife, Helen Mirren is his long-suffering wife Sofia, Paul Giamatti is the weasely head of the Tolstoyan movement who wants the author to sign over the copyright of all his works to the Russian people, and James McAvoy is the new private secretary who is dropped into the midst of all this intrigue. Plummer is a great Tolstoy, striding around, pontificating but solidly aware that his followers think that he’s a much greater man than he really is. He doesn’t believe in the same things they’re using him to symbolize. He may preach abstinence, but he’s never practiced it. The private secretary starts out wanting to follow the Tolstoyan philosophy, but he meets a fetching young woman who seduces him (her name is Masha, which I heard as “Marsha” throughout the entire movie. She bears a passing resemblance to Marsha Brady, hence today’s title, and she’s the film’s sole fictional character) and opens his eyes to the reality–or rather the artifice–of what’s going on around Tolstoy. I kept thinking “Queen Elizabeth” every time I saw Mirren, but Sofia was a much less assured character, feigning illness and making feeble suicide attempts to keep Tolstoy’s attention. The title is a reference to the place where Tolstoy died, a southern Russian train station.
Comfortably Floyd
Posted on | August 17, 2010 | No Comments
Today on Storytellers Unplugged: Why digital publishing didn’t catch on 10 years ago–and why it might now. My rambling thoughts on why I think eBooks…well, the title pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
I got to see Pink Floyd live once, during their Division Bell tour. Never saw them with Roger Waters, and I’ve never gone to see Waters solo even though the opportunity has presented itself a number of times. I liked the Live 8 gig they did a while back. Recently Gilmour joined Waters on stage for four songs during a charity concert, and Gilmour’s wife recorded the set from the audience. Sure, they’re showing their age (who isn’t?) but Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb stand the test of time as great songs.
I feel Tom Piccirilli’s frustration with Rubicon. He recently tweeted, “Rubicon, I have tried to love you, but you have left me cold, frustrated, and bored as if you were a $5 tranny whore. We’re through.” If there was anything else on in the same time slot, I might be tempted to agree. It’s burning so slowly there’s a threat it might snuff itself out. And yet I found this week’s installment intriguing because it demonstrated the real world importance of what these data analysts are doing. Most of the time it seems dull and dreary to them. At the end of the day, though, life and death decisions are being made based on their synopses and recommendations. Never more clearly to them than this week, when they were forced (on a rapidly shrinking deadline) to decide whether the data supported a strike on a known bad guy despite the fact that there would be collateral damage. Once that was all over, it was back to more tedious data crunching. The trip to Washington was entirely baffling, though. Will’s entire purpose for being there seemed to be to say as little as possible.
I thought I was getting a step ahead of the cops on The Closer last night. When they were interrogating the second guy from prison–the one who was acted as if he was sitting in front of a parole board, spouting all the right phrases to express remorse (at least, I hope he wasn’t just a bad actor. I assume he was a good actor playing a felon who was a bad actor…) When the lights started to go on and he asked Brenda to apologize to his victim’s wife, I thought that he and the wife were in on the killing together and that this was a way for him to pass a message. The garage door opener gimmick was pretty good, though Brenda was taking a huge chance that the perp hadn’t already changed the code back again.
Did you get pears?
Posted on | August 16, 2010 | No Comments
It rained this morning, if by “rain” I mean a little bit of water fell from the sky and a few things got vaguely moist. After a soggy July, we’ve had effectively no rain thus far in August. The local paper claimed that we haven’t officially had a day over 100° yet, either, but the heat index has been over 110° a number of times, and my car thermometer has registered triple digits even after equilibrating.
Yesterday we moved our daughter into an second-floor, no elevator, outside access apartment. Man was it hot. Fortunately there wasn’t a ton of stuff to move, so it didn’t take us all that long, but I was drenched when we finished. I think I lost two pounds.
To the right is the cover for the forthcoming anthology I mentioned in my previous post. Click on it to get a larger version. The artist is a guy named Matt Mahurin, who does covers for Time as well as other magazines and has directed films, especially music videos where he has worked with artists such as U2, Queensrÿche, Metallica, Tracy Chapman, Alice In Chains and many others.
Mad Men was interesting this week. Peggy let her hair down and joined the counter culture. She’s found a lot of confidence since we saw her in the first episodes. When the secretary called Peggy’s new friend “sort of pretentious,” Peggy responded by saying, “I know,” in an appreciative tone. Still, Peter’s news knocked her on her back, almost literally, and there is still a lot unsaid between the two. Joan gets the last laugh on Don by giving him the sort of secretary he’s unlikely to offend. What to make of the ending, where an elderly couple plays out a little scene in the hallway as Don goes home. The woman is carrying groceries and her husband steps out into the hall and asks her three times if she bought any pears. She ignores him until she’s close enough to whisper, “We’ll discuss this inside.” Interpersonal dramas are kept behind closed doors in that era. Don’s former secretary tries to find a sympathetic ear with Peggy…behind closed doors. Peggy spies on Don over the transom. Peggy smooches a guy she just met…in a closet. But things are changing, and even Don realizes that people can’t tell what they might think about in the future. (Line of the evening: “No, but he’s renting it,” uttered by Peggy after her new lesbian friend tells her that her boyfriend doesn’t own her vagina.)
We went to see Eat, Pray, Love on Saturday. Made the mistake of getting there only five minutes before showtime and ended up sitting in the second row staring up at a huge screen. I remember seeing Good Morning, Vietnam under similar circumstances when it first came out, except we were also on the far right side so everything was skewed. The jeeps seemed to lean over. The movie is essentially a well-off person’s self indulgence. Few people could just chuck everything and wander the world for a year. Javier Bardem is good in his nonchalant way, but the standout is Richard Jenkins, who is almost unrecognizable behind a grey, wooly beard. He’s Richard from Texas and he calls Julia Roberts’ character “groceries” because the first time he met her he heard her eating before he saw her. More than anyone else she encounters, he challenges her, and his rooftop scene where he explains how he lost his family is heart-wrenching, and a lot of it seems to be from a single take. Unusually, both actors spend a lot of time looking away from the camera during that scene. The settings are grand (you don’t get to see Naples very often, a place where people are even mugged in museums), and anyone wanting to chuck it all and live on Bali could be forgiven. Still, at the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what Roberts’ character actually learned. She has epiphanies in each city but seems back to ground zero in her next setting.
Eureka was light and frothy this week, without a whole bunch of substance. In a week moment, I queued up Haven from OnDemand and regretted it. The most recent episode was the most ludicrous to date. Stuffed animals coming back to life to hunt down and kill the people who shot them. Give me a break. And the episode wins the award for the character with the worst Quebecois accent ever. There wasn’t even any Duke to balance things out. And why does it seem to me that the two actors playing the newspapermen are actually younger actors made up to look old?
Working in a Coal Mine
Posted on | August 14, 2010 | No Comments
No better way to start the day than with a short story acceptance letter! My tale “Centralia is Still Burning” will appear in Specters in Coal Dust, edited by Michael Knost. I asked Michael at World Horror this year if he had had any submissions featuring the town of Centralia. He hadn’t, but he warned me the book was filling up fast. I started the story a week after I got back from Brighton and finished it about a week later. I was very pleased with the way it turned out. The other authors in this anthology are: Gary A. Braunbeck, Christopher Golden, Tom Piccirilli, Steve Rasnic Tem, Elizabeth Massie, Lee Thomas, Ronald Kelly, William Meikle, Nate Southard, Joshua Reynolds, Barbara Jo Fleming, Brian J. Hatcher and Michael Bracken.To be published this fall. I imagine pre-orders will be accepted soon. Stay tuned!
It appears that the second printing of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion is now available from Barnes and Noble online. For the first time since December 2009, you can now order the book from their website. Though the book has been available in stores, it has not been available to anyone outside the U.S. This new printing means that anyone can order it, no matter where in the world you’re located. The best news of all: B&N’s international shipping rates are very, very reasonable. Much less than it would cost me to ship a copy abroad, that’s for sure.
Working on my Storytellers Unplugged essay today. Should have the first draft of about 1000 words finished by the time I call it quits today. It goes live on Tuesday.
About
Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated companion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar® Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, From the Borderlands and The Blue Religion. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and a member of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging community. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews.
