8 Ways to Sunday

I’m back in Tucson, and have been since the seventeenth. It turns out that my mother, Angela, will get to come home sooner than expected.

Phone consultations with my mom’s Wichita-based allergist, and with the interior environment specialist who examined our house, revealed some stark disagreements with “Dr. Erickson’s” assertion that the house would never be habitable for her again. According to the allergist, Erickson’s is an extremist viewpoint that leaves her with virtually no options; according to the environment specialist, all that remained to be done was replacement of the carpet in the formerly-leaky loft.

When I returned to Kansas in late September, Angela was healthier than I’d seen her in years. Over the three and a half weeks that she was on her own, however, the burden of doing all her own shopping and errands — along with searching for an apartment¹, buying a car to save money over renting one², and getting exposed to pesticide when the bushes outside the hospitality house were sprayed — had caused her to deteriorate almost to her previous level of ill health.

Shortly after I came back, she started taking oil of oregano and olive leaf extract. Both were recommended by a Tucsonite she’d befriended who knows a great deal about natural medicine. She started to cough up a lot of the remaining crap in her lungs, which turned out to be a mixed blessing. This was apparently one of those “it gets worse before it gets better” things, and there were a couple of very scary episodes. Now, however, she’s breathing much better. I’m hopeful that this will continue to be the case.

The current plan is to take the new car (a 5-door Chevy Aveo) back to Kansas on Thursday. We’ll be heading north to Flagstaff, then taking I-40 east through Albuquerque and Arlington to Oklahoma City. At Oklahoma City, we take I-35 north back to Kansas. It’s a two-day trip; we’re currently looking for hotels in Albuquerque with Evergreen rooms, where my mom can stay the night without setting off her allergies.   (more…)

Who knew Dean Allen was such a romantic?

Bill’s second book of short fiction, Visions of Shadow and Light, is now available on Lulu.com. Availability on Amazon is coming soon, too.

I once again did book and cover design duties for the book, just as I did with his previous short story collection. The cover was designed in Corel DRAW 12.0, and I wrote the author bios and back cover blurb. The background photo comes from stock.xchng, the free stock photography community. It was taken by Johnny Waterman, one of the many talented amateur photographers who offer pictures on the site.

I think it turned out pretty well (click the thumbnail for a larger image):

The cover of Bill’s latest book of short stories (click for a larger version)

The really cool thing about this book, which you may have noticed from the cover, is that it has some of my own stories in it. Three of the ten stories in the book were written or co-authored by me:

• “The Regular” — which won second place in the Kansas Voices contest in 1999 — is a story about faith and redemption, featuring a disgruntled Lucifer telling his side of the story to a long-suffering and incredulous bartender. The story was co-written by my mother, Angela, and I. It’s based on something I originally wrote for a short fiction class in college.
• “Depravity, Death, and Inter-dimensional Spelunking” (how’s that for a title?) was originally written by my mom, who called me in to help clean it up when the length ballooned to over 8,000 words. She wrote the piece for a dear friend, and was too close to it to be impartial about what had to go. As a firm believer in Twain’s advice to “murder your darlings,” I had no problem taken a scalpel to the story and trimming the fat. She liked my edits enough to bring me on as a co-author, and the resulting work (a svelte 6,700 words) is a combination of both our styles and tastes. What’s it about? Oh, right… It’s the story of a man haunted by an otherworldly Beast, who must seek out the only being that can answer his questions about life, death, and eternity. Originally an allegory about addiction (the friend for whom my mother wrote the story had a son who was a multiple-substance addict), the story can be read as a message of hope to troubled souls of any kind.
• “The Killing Jar” began as my first assignment for that short fiction class in college. We were assigned to write a single scene based on an aphorism that the professor gave us. I have trouble enough thinking in single scenes rather than stories, and the lukewarm saying I was given to work with — “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” — wasn’t helping any. While grasping at straws, however, I came up with an idea using a different saying. My instructor gave me permission to make the change; the result was a 1,000-word story about the psychological repercussions of child abuse, based on the saying “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Its message of how violence begets violence, even in children, was eerily prescient. Less than a year later, a spree of schoolyard killings would shock America into second-guessing its child-rearing skills. It’s a profoundly creepy little tale, and I remain very proud of it to this day.

The book also features seven excellent stories by Bill, one of which won the grand prize for fiction in the 2003 Kansas Voices contest. Since this is my blog, however, I get to toot my own horn. Don’t forget that Bill’s first book of short fiction, Hail, Freedonia! and Other Tales, is also available from Lulu. Very different in tone from Visions, it’s full of oddball stories designed to make you giggle. Did you know that Lulu’s shipping prices are the same for two books as for one (hint, hint)?

That’s all for now. I’m currently getting ready for yet another airplane trip (more on that later), so I have to get off the computer and get busy. Go buy our book. I think you’ll like it.

Updates

• 10/24/2005 @ 11:52 PM — There’s a problem with the cover of the test print of Visions that we ordered. It’s clipped too far in on all sides, the opposite of the problem that we originally had with the cover for Freedonia. Don’t know what the hell happened, since I used the exact same measurements for the new cover. I’ll be correcting this ASAP, but probably not until after I get back home from Tucson.
• 11/14/2005 @ 12:30 PM — The books with corrected covers have arrived, and they’re perfect! The book is also now available on Amazon.com. Order away!

If it hadn’t come from National Geographic, I’d assume this photo to be a fake. Pretty far out. (Warning: not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.)

Huge pythons like the one pictured are not native to the Florida wetlands where the photo was shot. They’ve been introduced into the environment by humans and thrived, coming into competition with native species such as this unfortunate alligator. For more information on this phenomenon, you can read Wikipedia’s articles on introduced species and invasive species.

Japanese scientists have captured the world’s first photos of a living adult giant squid (Architeuthis dux). They used a simple fishing-line-and-camera rig to lure and photograph the illusive and legendary marine animal.

(Props: Ars Technica)