Following Tuesday's teleconference, today the design coordinator at iUniverse sent me three different cover mockups for The Earthworm That Blows No Trumpet. That was quick: They said within two weeks, and here I have it within two days. Not bad, iUniverse.

Unfortunately, I'm not entirely happy with any of them. One of them, at least, is closer to what I want than the other two. All three feature the same setting sun, chalice, flame, and earthworm, but each has the chalice placed differently and different fonts for the title and author's name.

The main main [sic] problem is that the chalice is not a standard UU chalice. It's a regular silver goblet. The novel centers around a UU church in a fictitious university town in Central Texas. Given the role that the large Catholic church in this town plays, it might be appropriate to have a standard Holy Eucharist chalice with flames coming out of it. Sigh. There just isn't much in the way of UU chalice representations on thinkstockphotos.com, which iUniverse uses for assembling book covers. Even a look at uua.org didn't produce the chalice I was hoping to find.

The other main problem is that the sun is setting over a darkened ridge, but there's no landscape that one would recognize as Texas. I asked for a sunset over a prairie, and if there's a prairie in the photo it is obscured by everything else. It's the same problem I had with A Small Town for Its Size, which takes place in Houston—in fact, Houston is as much a major character as a setting—but has nothing on the cover that one would recognize as Houston.

To get in all the elements I originally wanted would cost more, because it requires paying fees for multiple stock photos. I understand that too many elements makes the cover too busy, but I think we can do this with a picture that spans the front and back covers.

Oh, here's the other thing: This is a comic/satiric novel. The sun setting (truthfully, it looks to be rising) over a darkened ridge lends an air of mystery and menace. There's plenty of mystery and menace in the book, but it's played for laughs. It needs to be lighter.

Despite all this, it brings this work another step closer to publication. I'm pleased. It's making me start the planning process for author events. "Plan" has always been a four-letter word for me, but it has to be done.

Most folks who bother to read this blog know who Jill Stein is. The 2012 Green nominee for president is considering another run in 2016. Her candidacy, currently in the exploratory phase, is not a foregone conclusion. She seems to make no presumptions about whether the Greens will nominate her again.

All that said, you won't find many Greens in the US who will tell her, "No, Dr. Stein, please don't!"

Here's the blog roll promised in the title of this entry: fellow UU Dan Rigney on his Salon blog Danagram. Dan writes about Jill's appearance at Trinity Episcopal Church for the monthly meeting of the Harris County Green Party.

Earlier yesterday, Jill visited KPFT-FM Pacifica Radio (having appeared by phone on George Reiter's program Thresholds last Thursday. She also made it in for Houston Matters on KUHF-FM Houston Public Media. Then she went out to Refinery Row to meet with striking workers at the Lyondell and Shell plants.

Today she visited College Station, home of Texas A&M University—a school not known as a hotbed of Greendom, but with a fairly active and vocal progressive community. This evening she returned to the Houston area to speak at Lone Star College's Kingwood campus. Tomorrow, it's on to Laredo, about which I have spoken elsewhere in this blog.

My impression, in a nutshell: I was looking for Jill to talk about topics beyond those in her 2012 stump speech, and she did. She also addressed a lot of the same topics. The policy prescriptions outlined in her Green New Deal have not changed much, because the problems still exist. She is still, as I noted on Facebook, "her serene and brilliant self." If she runs and is nominated, she will very likely improve greatly on her 0.3% nationwide showing from 2012. She will be a known quantity, and name recognition is important. I'm psyched and pumping up for 2016.

This will be much shorter than my other post for today, I promise.

My novel has reached the design stage. In this case, "design" refers to the exterior, not the content. I have an appointment next Tuesday afternoon for a telephone conference with my Publishing Services Associate. (I had to go back to the email and look up the title. All these friendly helpers at iUniverse are hard to keep track of, even harder when they change in the middle of the process.) We'll be discussing and choosing a cover illustration, the content and placement of the blurbs on the back, and other packaging decisions.

The cover design service is included in the package that I purchased from iUniverse, as is cover copy polishing. CCP involves examining the promotional text I submitted for the back cover and injecting enough zing to make it even more enticing to a reader in my target audience.

We're still looking at a March release date for The Earthworm That Blows No Trumpet, but I'm thinking April is more likely. Stay tuned.

I'm falling into old habits of neglecting the blog for long periods of time. Ah well. Today I'll do two entries—how-d'ya-like-them-apples?

In April 2015, the East End and Southeast MetroRail lines are due to open here in Houston. In August, after decades of small, incremental adjustments, the whole network of bus routes will change dramatically. This fall I plan to ride every single bus route and blog about the experience.

I have ridden Houston's Metro buses almost as long as Metro has existed. In 1970, years before the birth of Metro, I remember a few times paying a dime to ride the 82 Westheimer with a friend from St. John's School to somewhere near Woodlake Square. In 1983, I remember taking the new Park & Ride service from Seton Lake to Downtown, transferring to a bus to the Medical Center.

These days I seldom use a personal motor vehicle, opting to avoid traffic and parking hassles by riding buses or MetroRail. Sometimes I go multi-modal, with the help of the bike racks on the fronts of all local buses and special accommodations on the rail cars.

Since 1979, Metro has grown and evolved in some interesting ways, not always good ways. Due to legal and financial constraints, our transit authority has not been able to focus properly on its main mission of getting people to their destinations quickly and conveniently. Its hands have been tied by operating in a city that has traditionally been hostile to public transit. People of means perceive that local buses are just for minorities, the poor, and people with profound mental problems. The news has trumpeted tales of mismanagement by directors and board members using the agency as their personal cash cow, or violating federal law by procuring rail cars made outside the US.


Despite the difficulties, Metro provides local bus rides for a basic fare of $1.25, far less than other cities. Students and seniors can ride for 50 cents. That fare hasn't increased since 2005. Now that gasoline is less than two dollars a gallon, it's less of a bargain, and people have gone back to driving their gas-guzzlers.

Houston Access to Urban Sustainability (HAUS) is the housing cooperative in which I have dwelt for the past two years and five months. Co-op living, in and of itself, is more ecologically sustainable than living alone, with a housemate, or in a nuclear family. But we take it further with gardening, composting, recycling, reduced water and electricity use per person, and living inside Loop 610 near almost everything we need. We have space to accommodate 26 resident members in two large, refurbished houses in Old Third Ward. Rosalie HAUS is in what we now call Midtown, and uRth HAUS (where I live) is on Ruth Street in Museum Park. (Yes, we currently have some vacancies too!)

Yesterday I posted the following in the News section of hausproject.org; this morning I determined that it was worth reposting here, with some adjustments, rather than just linking to it.

Let's see if I can sum up my recent Seattle mini-vacation experience. Highlights:

• Friday dinner: Treated Kate "Bionic Dance" Fahr to a reasonably priced dinner at Charlie's on Broadway. After that, I caught up with traveling buddy Kevin and the Martins, a couple of friends who are "Houston expats" now living in Portland OR.
• Saturday's visit to the EMP Museum: The Sci-Fi/Fantasy portion had costumery from the Star Wars movies, and the Experience Music Project featured an exhibit on Jimi Hendrix's time in London. There was also an excellent and tasteful history of music video on multiple screens. From EMP I went to Pike Place Market, which can be overwhelming on a Saturday.
• Sunday's expedition to Fremont: After brunch with the aforementioned couple, I walked to, around, and from the Fremont district, including one stop at Theo for some fair trade chocolate treats and at the Dubliner to sip some Harp and read some Ulysses.

There was also plenty of time spent chilling in the rental apartment, which had a state-of-the-art hot tub in back. There was also plenty of walking down Queen Anne Hill for meals and shopping, followed by walking back up the hill afterward.

In August of 1998, I visited Seattle and Washington State for the first time. I have so many pleasant memories of that trip that they consistently outshine the unpleasant ones.

Traveling long distances via Amtrak can be an adventure, and this trip definitely was, especially the first leg between Houston and Los Angeles. Tropical Storm Charley had dumped so much rain on the Rio Grande Valley that the train station in Del Rio was washed out and inaccessible.

After our Sunset Limited train sat in San Antonio a bit longer than scheduled, and the Texas Eagle finally arrived to meet it, those of us continuing west had to be herded onto motor coaches. There was one for all the Sul Ross State students and others heading back to Alpine, and a few other coaches to take the rest of us to El Paso. A train would be waiting in El Paso to take us across the vast southwestern deserts to LA.

Not far from Palm Springs, we encountered more delays, mostly from yielding the right of way to freight trains. I remember the train sitting motionless on the track for about an hour within sight of a wind farm, the AC system bravely staving off 105-degree heat. Due to the delays, we would have arrived in LA too late to catch the Coast Starlight bound for Seattle. So those of us going north got off the train at Pomona and boarded a coach to Oxnard, where we waited a little longer for the train.

If your keeping score, that's a train to a coach to a train to a coach to a train. Fortunately there were no similar mishaps en route to Seattle, and none on my return trip. I had booked the return trip on the Empire Builder to Chicago and the Eagle to Longview, which requires transferring to a motor coach to get back to Houston. (That's right, civilized world: There is no train directly connecting the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the United States.)