Needles & Bones anthology & a contest

Ours is probably the only household on the block with no cell phone and cable or satellite TV. Our Internet service clunks along at DSL speed--which means slow--although we did succumb to wireless, which is great for early Sat. mornings out on the patio, surfing the Web.

Consequently, much of 21st Century tech has bypassed me. No apps for an IPhone I don't have, etc. So, when I got word from Drollerie Press that my short story Memorabilia had been accepted for their anthology Needles & Bones, this segment made me realize how behind the times I was: "N&B will be available in PDF, Microsoft Reader format, Mobipocket format, ePUB, Sony Reader, and HTML reader for Windows."

My ignorance began after the word PDF. Drollerie's editor Deena Fisher asked which format I wanted. I didn't know what to tell her, nor which format might one day be of use to me.

Anyway, here's where you, the La Bloga reader, can become the beneficiary of my technological uncouthness. I'll run a contest for a week and the winner will receive a copy of Needles & Bones in whatever format he, she or it desires. Before I explain the contest rules, here's a bit about the book so you can decide if it's your copa de té.

Blurb from the publisher:
"Needles & Bones is a collection of poems and short fiction by a double handful of brilliantly creative artists-with-words. It begins gently, with fairy tales, but its tendrils of surreality spread from the stories of our childhood, into our adult world, and on to places beyond our own. We visit heaven, and hell, and places we might never imagine, peopled by creatures who are only sometimes like us."

There's also a link about the authors, and you'll find that these are twenty-two contributions from a great pool of talented and well-published novelists, poets and short story authors. To get a better idea, you can read two excerpts if you go to Drollerie's website. Or you can buy it for the strange price of just $8.46.

My story Memorabilia uses a premise from the epilogue:
“Surely all material things have a form of sentience, even the inorganic: surely they all exist in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects, irrespective of contact.” [from “Edgar Allan Poe”, Studies in Classic American Literature, by former N.M. resident D.H.Lawrence, 1923]

If that doesn't pique your interest, I'll say Memorabilia is the crazy story of Tomás Chaneco Martinez, a near-immortal Aztec shaman-sorcerer, who finds himself in contemporary, rural, northern New Mexico. He's gotta clean out decades' worth of knick-knacks that somehow found their way into his adobe. It seems that his nemeses, some ancient dragons, have taken possession of the things and are threatening to disturb more than his sleep. What starts out as a spring housecleaning turns into a series of fantastical encounters that Harry Potter would never have survived. Anyway, if you enjoy fantasy, dragons, azteca lore, No. New Mexico, and maybe a little humor, I expect you'll like this one.

Now for the contest:
Compose a 50-word (more or less, but not much more) synopsis of what a book entitled Agujas & Huesos (needles & bones) might be about. Everything is up to you--any genre, any authors you want to include, any hyperbole you care to wield. Do it scholarly, humorous, satirical, in Spanish--whatever. "Best" synopsis wins. Post your entry by clicking the Comments section below. Must be posted by Friday, midnight, June 26th, 2009. No more than two entries per person, please.

P.S.: In the event my fellow La Bloga contributors enter, they won't be destined to win.

Rudy Ch. Garcia