Tiberius, "The Shadow Place," and Change

Well, this is it, the day of change. I'm  not actually a huge fan of change; I tend to like things to stay the way they are even if I don't like the way things are. Which is not to say that I don't want to be on the other side of the change; I just hate the process of the change itself. I blame my mother.

No, seriously, I do. When I was a kid, especially when I was in middle school, she used to like to move the furniture around all of the time because she'd get bored with the layout. I was the furniture moving guy. My brother was to little (I'm six years older than him), and my dad just wouldn't do it. There was a point early on when I think she was asking him first, but he would always say "later" until she'd get frustrated enough to make me do it. Eventually, she wouldn't bother to ask him anymore. My assumption is that the furniture moved so much during those years was because I was finally big enough to do the heavy lifting and it was before I quit being home all the time. That is to say, once I was a sophomore in high school, I was never home anymore, so she no longer had anyone to help her with the furniture, so it went back to staying put.

I just want to say, here, that if it had just been the normal kind of rearranging the furniture, everything would have been okay. But it wasn't...

See, when I was in 7th grade, we moved into a two-story house. There was a spare room that ran the length of the back of the house that connected to my parents' bedroom but could also be accessed through one of the bathrooms. My mom had a crusade to put that room to some kind of use beyond just being a spare room where stuff paused on the way to the attic and, then, never left.

Her first big plan was to make it into the "family" room. That meant moving the entertainment center we had in the "family" room up to the spare room. This thing was huge. It was, like, seven feet tall or something. It only just fit up the stairs with less than an inch to spare, but it wasn't the trip up the stairs that was the problem. It's just that it didn't really take all that long, a couple of months, at most, for my mom to realize that sleeping in on a Saturday morning would never be possible with the TV right outside of her bedroom (it didn't bother my dad; he could sleep through anything), so the entertainment center had to go back down the stairs. That was the hard part.

Then, she decided she would make that room the laundry room. It would be more convenient, she said, to have the washer and dryer right there in that room rather than lug the clothes down to the back porch and back up again. Yes, I had to move the washer and dryer up the stairs into that room. We won't go into the altercation my parents had over the issue of getting water to the washing machine. Eventually, though, the washer and dryer went back to the back porch; I'm pretty sure it had to do with the fact that my brother and I were travelling through my parents' bedroom all the time to get to our clothes.

And I'm not even gonna start on the time she wanted to move the piano up the stairs...

So, yeah, me and change... not hand in hand. Just ask my wife.

But here I am changing things up. Today is the release of the first collected volume of Shadow Spinner parts:

"Shadow Spinner: Collection 1: Tiberius (Parts 1-5)"
Yeah, that's a lot of colons, but what can you do? You try taking a colon out of a place where it's needed and see what happens. But, anyway... the biggest process of change is recovering the 38 reviews I have scattered over the first five parts of series. It's kind of like moving furniture except that I have to ask other people to help out. "Collection 1" is only two bucks, which is less than the five bucks it would have cost to get the parts separately, so I hope you will pick it up, read it, and leave a review. PLUS! There is the excellent bonus story by Bryan Pedas, "Like An Axe Through Bone," which is actually longer than five chapters I have in this collection. It's worth the price all by itself.

[Oh, and just a note: I'm still looking for at least one more author to feature at the back of one of these collections, so let me know if you're interested in writing an Imagination Room or House on the Corner related story!]

So, now, after asking you to spend money, I'll give something away, because today is the FREE! release of "Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place." And, remember, there will be a new chapter every Monday until the serialization is finished. And, hopefully, the second collection will be ready in a few weeks as well. Here's the list of today's FREE! offerings:
"Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place" (also FREE! tomorrow, Tuesday, August 20)
"Part Twenty-seven: Leaving"
"Part Twenty-six: The Bitter Fruit"
"Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge"
"Part Twenty-one: The Chase"
"Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire"
"Part Nineteen: Lost in the Garden"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
That's 18 parts for FREE! today. You can't beat FREE!, right? Well, unless someone is paying you take it...