In which events occur

Mental note: when testing out new themes for the blog, don’t use the iMac with the 27″ screen.  Because Jesus God is that header enormous on the laptop and unreadable on the phone.  I really love it, but I may have to go back to something different so that everyone who doesn’t have a Hulk-sized monitor can view at least a little of the blog without scrolling down.  Continuing to fiddle, at any rate.

If you haven’t looked yet, be sure to scroll down a post to see the just-released cover for the Benevolence Archives short story collection, which I hope to have available before school lets out.  There are two stories still being worked on, but you can read one of the stories (six, currently) that will be included here.  The couple of you who volunteered to be beta readers for Skylights, stay tuned– I haven’t forgotten about you, I just didn’t manage to get the stuff sent out before the DC trip and I’ve been trying to get my feet back under me ever since.  (Ask my wife:  today will be the first day I haven’t fallen asleep on the couch after work in two solid weeks.)

Picking a cover for a book is interesting.  I’m specifically commissioning a cover for Skylights; I’ve given the artist some direction and a copy of the book to read, but other than that he’s a professional artist and I’m going to go with whatever he comes up with.  I didn’t want to spend the money to do that kind of cover for the BA collection, though– at a maximum of $2.99 a pop (and I may go less) it’s going to take forever to make even a small amount of money back– so I found a ebook covers website and bought/customized the one you see below.  The punchline is that I looked at it, thought “Ooh, that looks like a Benevolence spidership,” and bought it, and then in a blaze of glory last night constructed an entire story (BA 7, which will be included in the collection) based on the cover image I’d already bought.  Which, honestly, ain’t a bad way to handle these cover farm websites– pick out a cover that you really like on its own merits and then write the story that makes the cover make sense.  I’ve got two or three on my favorites list already that I’m going to approach in precisely that fashion.  And I found a cover that would be great for Balremesh if Balremesh weren’t a micro-short and thus not something that really is ever going to need a cover.

Lessee.  What else?  My kids haven’t been bastards this week, at least not in my class, although I’ve had a serious rash of my own students getting in trouble in other people’s classrooms lately.  That said, tomorrow is probably going to be exhausting, but I’ll hold off talking about it too much until it actually happens– I have to give a “practice test” for the ISTEP multiple choice that is supposed to happen next week– “supposed to” because who knows how bad the test is going to be fucked up this year; I have no faith at all that it’s going to go well, and my kids are testing in the afternoon because of a general lack of appropriate computers in our building, so their scores are going to be all fucked up.  But as I said that’s probably tomorrow’s post.  Which will be late, come to think of it, because I’m doing a study session for my Algebra kids after school tomorrow and then going to the comic shop.

Gah.  I’m tired already.