A Blue Moon in August

Paperback: HiT MoteL Press, January 2010, 1st Edtion
Ebook: HiT MoteL Press, 2010, 2nd Edition.
335 pages. Paperback ISBN 9780965584272

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Buy the ebook from Amazon or HiT Motel Press.

See the other books in this sextet HiT Motel Press.

Summary

motherhood is a potent spell — Euripides

A Blue Moon in August is a comedy of manners about marriage and children late in life. It is the 5th novel in the “My Years of Apprenticeship at Love sextet” about Walker Underwood, now a bohemian information worker in Berkeley and Silicon Valley who meets and marries and becomes a father late in life and suddenly.
The story is told from the perspective of both the man and the woman as they come to embrace their commitment to each other. Shifting between third and first person narrative within their stories, we enter fantasy and dreams or see the characters from outside through a ‘bookmovie’.
It is a novel in the form of their emotional memories and creative experiences: the man’s as he struggles with the decision to marry, and finds the male role model of marriageability and becomes a father; and the woman’s as she liberates herself from her family to start her own.
One chapter,The Prowess of Kong, presents the great hippie dream of group marriage in a Tantric Buddhist commune as a contrast to traditional marriage. Another chapter, Urbance, a cyberpunk sci-fi, presents a man’s fear of the future and coming to rely on his wife.
A Blue Moon in August, is a hilarious picture of a new father undergoing the spell of motherhood and struggling to maintain his sense of self and grow with it.

Good-bye Bachelor Days .................................................. 1
Pandit ............................................................................... 14
Expanding the Nest.......................................................... 22
The Prowess of Kong ....................................................... 27
Modeling Marriageability ............................................... 75
Urbance ............................................................................ 92
Bring It On ..................................................................... 127
Nativity .......................................................................... 134
Domestic Multitasking for the Complete Mongol ........ 150
To Sam on her 43rd Birthday ........................................ 157
The Tabernacle of Dr. Mom .......................................... 159
Father Night ................................................................... 168
A Blue Moon in August ................................................. 203

Writing Notes for A Blue Moon in August from the Author

Read or Download sample chapters Nativity .

Images from within the book

The images in the book are signposts of the story path, are gestalts of the significance of the change in the emotional being of the main character.

This figure is titled Father Night. It illustrates some of the material in a chapter of that title in the book. The chapter is a theatre piece or when in a book, a "bookmovie". Walker the new father is feeling threatened by some crazy person howling outside at the corner under the street lights. The fear reminds him of his mother being afraid of mororcycle gangs back when he was a child. He is reminded of his own father and poolhalls and drinking problem, and his maternal uncle who Walker emmlated The flow chart or Entity Relationship diagram on the right of the image is reflected in the image on the left which shows frames of a movie and wells in curved space time into which Walker feels himself falling and coming out on the other side. This kind of diagramming is explored heavily in the previous volume of the sextet Seeing Through the Spell of Transference.

The figure is entitled The Prowess of Kong. It is the end piece of a chapter of that name. Walker makes a trip with a fellow communard to Mt. Shasta to clean up the camp of the sangha. All the while Walker is trying to make up his mind: Should I marry? The image shows King Kong gettin jabbed in the crotch my Mt. Analo (a symbold of the buddhist life), while carying the female. The truck below is a 4 wheel drive 3/4 ton that can go anywhere and is named Kong. The chapter is The Prowess of Kong. Will marriage curtail my sexual prowess?

Illustory front piece for the chapter Modeling Marriageability.

This figure is titled "Getting to know your new wife in Lamaze class."

After Walker drops his wife off at the hospital delivery station he goes home to pick up a few of his wife's things, and has a long intimation of the three body configuration which the new baby will bring.

This illustration is for the chapter Urbance. In it Walker writes a cyberpunk story in which he has put several of his friends and his new wife, about a firefight at the 7-11 store in and apocalyptic future in whhich people have powerful inhancements made to their physical body. Walker uses a writer's tool software that he developed. A manual for the software makes up a chapter in the 4th book of the My Years of Apprenticeship at Love entitled Seeing Through the Spell of Transference.

A book cover Walker design to share his newfound grace around taking care of babies.

Summer house hunting in San Francisco.