Grumble Flap

The moon. It’s up there. Keeping an eye on everything, most of the time. Sometimes during the day. Sometimes during the night. Sometimes the eye is wide open, and sometimes it is nearly closed.

And sometimes it is totally closed, and yet it is when the eye is fully open when we act like lunatics. As if we are proud to be under the watchful gaze of celestial silence.

My daughter calls the moon her sister. Our youngest calls tells her when “your sister” is in the sky.

Sometimes I write enough to put out a collection. Here are the e-books.

The Wedding of the
Princess-King
and Other Stories

A fairy tale for people in a fairy tale world. A moon mission with a sinister secret. A tax collector comes face to face with powers he doesn’t understand while investigating a celestial incident. The three stories in this collection will take you to imagined lands where people trying to get on with their lives grapple with unexpected forces. This collection contains the first appearances of these stories: “The Wedding of the Princess-King,” “Take the Moon at Full, Now She’s Changed,” and “Earthfall.” Cover by Simon Brom.

E-pub here.

Kindle here.

The World is Bigger
than an Ell

Reality and meaning come together in the life of one man. As they spiral around each other, Darrin looks deeper into his life and the world around him, and is challenged by what he sees.

Darrin no longer sees things, but rather the shaped descriptions of things in this short story. This edition also contains two bonus items, “Because Love Resists Narrative,” a villanelle, and “Meet Ashley’s Neighbor,” a short-short episode in a serial character sketch.

Cover art and design by Stephen Brom.

E-pub here.

Kindle here.

Reading comic books is like feeling the magnetic tug of the past.

Or, like watching the love of fans pull the things they love forward from their youths, and then do the work of making those dream state tales speak.

Going to the dentist… this is not today, though…

So that was fun.

With a carful…

Or… care.

Cat’s Paw…

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This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Cat’s Paw Nebula, so named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint. The nebula is a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy, located in the constellation Scorpius. Estimates of its distance from Earth range from about 4,200 to about 5,500 light-years. Framed by green clouds, the bright red bubbles are the dominant feature in the image, which was created using data from two of Spitzer’s instruments. After gas and dust inside the nebula collapse to form stars, the stars may in turn heat up the pressurized gas surrounding them, causing it to expand into space and create bubbles. The green areas show places where radiation from hot stars collided with large molecules called “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” causing them to fluoresce. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A post shared by NASA Goddard (@nasagoddard) on Oct 27, 2018 at 5:52am PDT

Beautiful.

Like any picturesque town, we have a library. Outside the library, along the road, are a number of street trees. They’re fully grown. Tall. Spreading. Chock full of leaves.

We have a fairly small number of streetlights. Which is great! But some of them are placed just right to really highlight some cool things.

And the wind, o! the wind!