Last week I received official word from Peter Crowther and PS Publishing that I will be the cover artist for my father's (Michael Bishop) collection of previously published works of non-fiction. The book is titled A Reverie for Mr. Ray and opens with a short, reverent reflection of my father's literary and writing influences. To whom the book's title alludes, Ray Bradbury (and particularly his short story anthology A Medicine for Melancholy) played a major role in his development as a reader and writer of science/speculative fiction. Designing the cover graphics I think, will be an incredibly challenging project because I have an absolutley blank slate to work with: I've received only a few suggestions from the publisher and my father and therefore anticipate that the first move of the mouse will be the hardest.

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Today I got yet more fantastic news: Mike Jasper hand picked me as his cover artist! In the next few days I'll begin putting together a cover for his soon-to-be-released story collection Gunning for the Buddha which Prime Books is set to publish sometime this summer. (Hopefully for Mike and myself by July and in time for the Trinicon Speculative Literature convention in Durham, NC) After a few exchanged emails and a late night telephone call, Mike and I decided that, to more easily convince the publisher of his choice, I should put a sample of my portfolio online. In addition to encouaging me to get some long overdue work done on the memory39 website, Mike's gentle (and much appreciated) push also netted me a nice graphic design gig. I'd be remiss to omit mentiong that Mr. Jasper is also an incredibly talented writer and that I look forward to collaborating with him on Gunning.

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(And a geeky aside to tie those first two paragraphs together: To get me going in the right direction on these two projects I just bought myself a nifty, new no-name USB-powered scanner! Its $20 pricetag and the fact that it doesn't need a power cord struck me as fine reasons to purchase the contraption. In any event, I'm excited to get started using it for the two Mikes' book covers. My first task, however, is to read all the materials and stories in their collections.)

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I also have yet another cause for celebration. I can finally remove Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind from my "Currently Reading" list. It literally took me 5 months to finish off the 412-page (not including the extensive endnotes section) treatise on why secondary schools should reconsider their use of technology in the classroom. If my mind weren't flickering right now, perhaps I'd attempt a short review of Oppenheimer's thesis. Instead, I'll conclude this paragraph with an over-simplified distillation of the book: Virtual learning cannot compete with an education based on human contact, real-life experiences, and physical sensation. Schools are more likely to improve their educational records by spending their budgets to increase teacher salaries and decrease classroom size -- rather than to invest in overly expensive, quickly-obsolete classroom technologies.

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Currently Reading:
In der Strafkolonie by Franz Kafka
Writing Horror edited by Mort Castle, HWA