Well. That was a night. Yesterday, Nick threw out his back while cleaning the toilet; we ended up going on down to the emergency room in an ambulance because I was all “insurance covers stuff, we can afford it, let’s make sure it’s not anything much worse”. In part because I started getting flashbacks to how one day I came home to find the front door of the house wide open and my mother nowhere to be found; she’d kept on ignoring back pain until it got to the point of a slipped disc. She ended up needing surgery. Luckily Nick is not at that point and has a few days of painkillers, and doctor’s orders to work on his core strength, damnit.
Which is a thing I’ve been intending for both of us to work on anyway. I even got us a couple memberships at the local Y late last month but I was putting off integrating that into my daily schedule until after I got that short story out. Now that’s done and I can make that start happening, damnit.
Oh – short story? I don’t think I’ve written about that here either. I got asked to be in “Twisted Romance”, a four-issue anthology series that Image will be publishing this February. Four stories by Alex DeCampi, with art by various people, and backup stories by other people, one of whom is me. And prose pieces as well.
I get to be a backup to Carla Speed McNeil holy crap. So that should be fun. The whole package should be pretty neat, here’s more about it.
My story is about one of the important turning points in the backstory of two characters from Parallax, that SF cartoon pitch I’ve been kicking around with Nick for a year or two now. It should stand alone; I know damn well nobody knows who these folks are besides me and Nick yet. Bug your local comics store to get it if you’re curious, I won’t be posting it on here for quite some time.
I have also been feeding the local birds, which makes me happy. There are assorted tiny birds in the tree near my window, eating the seeds in the feeder I hung from the underside of my upstairs neighbor’s balcony, and I think the crows are starting to realize that I am the nice person who puts out peanuts for them on the stump in front of my door most mornings.
And finally: this morning I unwrapped the boxes that have been sitting near the door for the past half a month while I was in crunch mode on the Twisted Romance story, and folded up twenty-one of them. This happens to be exactly as many copies of Rita are sitting under my desk, with signatures and drawings in them. I’m finally almost done with this project and that feels pretty damn good.