Avoid Seeing A Mouse Proofs Received and Returned, Cover Design Displayed

This is the pitch I sent Alien Buddha Press just one Sunday ago (cf. November 21): At a bit less than 40,000 words, AVOID SEEING A MOUSE, AND OTHER TALES OF THE REAL AND SURREAL offers twelve stories set in times that range from the mid-part of the previous century to a heat- and pollution-baked far-future Earth, but all in worlds a bit askew from what we might be used to. These range from a city-wide celebration-to-come where only the dead may be asked to attend, to the title tale of a 1999 pre-New Year’s Eve Memphis, Tennessee, where contemporary fears that the changing of dates to the 21st century could bring about worldwide computer failures combine with an ancient Egyptian curse to engender a horrific alternate history. Also included: an anti-Communist who collects bottles, an eater of corpses learns sophistication, news coverage of the 1980s Voyager space probes’ approach to Saturn with strange implications, a high school science fair gone berserk, and six more visions* – two to be published here for the first time – of the (hopefully) unexpected, but all mind-bending. I hope you enjoy the attached manuscript and decide it’s one you would like to publish and, either way, will look forward to your decision and any comments you might wish to offer.

And notice — sneaky me — the note the asterisk points to. *One of which you’ve recently seen already, “Crow and Rat,” appearing as well in THE ALIEN BUDDHA LOVES YOU.

That is, one story they’d seen before and accepted. Sneaky me as I say. And it worked (or in fairness the pitch itself worked, wordy though it may be) as we saw two days later! And so things have continued to go very fast with the text itself subsequently accepted, a contract signed and sent back, and — still just the day after — what amounted to a proof copy received: Attached is the first revision as both a PDF and a word document, and also a cover.

Feel free to go into the word document and make a revision of your own. I only ask that you leave the press pages, paper size, and margins all as is.

So the cover, with back copy and its own blurb, appears above. But now due to the local library being closed over Thanksgiving, we had one delay. The veteran cave computer here balked at leaving “paper size, and margins all as is.” Until Saturday, yesterday, at still just a week — and with the library reopened — I was able to copy twenty some tiny, but pesky corrections via an up-to-date operating system into a correctly sized word document, convert that to PDF, and zip it back to the Alien Buddha.

And that is that. The cover is here and — though outside scheduling with its own delays, plus a reluctance to publish a book only days before Christmas (distractions, anyone?) come into play too — AVOID SEEING A MOUSE is all but completed, with a tentative release date set for early January, 2024.