MICHAEL BALDWIN

Counting Backward From Infinity is a collection of eight poems based on science, mostly astronomy, that won the Morris Memorial Chapbook Award, 2012, from the Alabama Poetry Society. The central long poem, The Butterfly Effect, provides a mind-boggling ride into the history of the universe, the evolution of life on Earth, and explains why there is everything instead of nothing and why everything is just one thing.

Fourteen Science-Fiction short stories that will add some needed spice and weirdness to your life, providing just the strange perspective you need to challenge your ordinary reality.Some of these new stories carry on my concern with contemporary social issues (such as global warming, bullying, abortion, animal rights, gun control, etc.) by extrapolating them into the future or exploring them thru unusual perspectives. Other stories here briefly ponder philosophical questions such as the nature of good and evil and the concept of justice. Some are simply for the fun of making our spines tingle a bit. I like to think each story will be a thought provoker that you will consider the implications of after reading.

A thriller for anyone who enjoys mayhem, music, and romance. Join Missy McKean, beautiful teen virtuoso who plays a haunted violin; Missys genius jazz mentor, Tiger Blakely; a devious drug kingpin who wants Tiger very dead; Tigers dog, Bix, a canine Einstein; a mysterious red-haired Indian from outer space; and a bevy of craven killers on a crazy cross country jazz road trip that can only end in death and disaster.

A short story collection for those who like a little weirdness in their lives. These stories will challenge your assumptions, your beliefs, and perhaps even your hold on reality. These are stories that will perhaps give Stephen King the shivers.

Again Passing Strange is Volume 5 of the Passing Strange series.Delight your taste for strangeness with these 11 stories of the wild, weird, and wonderful. Let your reality bend and descend into these mind-bending stories of plausible unreality, many based on known science.Corona Chrono Tango combobulates the Coronavirus epidemic with our renewed interest in UFOs and the possibility of literal loops in spacetime.Catastrophic is a humorous take on the serious subject of climate change from an alien perspective thats not really so alien after all.Tennis Anyone? will be immediately attractive to tennis enthusiasts, but non-players will enjoy it as well. Tennis is the most international sport, why shouldnt it also become an intergalactic sport?The Girl In the Grove is a fairy tale suggesting that fantasy is not so far removed from the quantum physics of hidden dimensions and time dilation.I Feel Your Pain is a poem based in the neuroscience of schizophrenia. Careful, it may try to get its claws into you.Elvis Is In The Building is a prose poem riffing on the science-fiction premise of time travel via antimatter. There may be just a tad of social commentary in there as well.The Cane is an alien-contact story that will charm you and maybe give you a few shivers. If you like the ET alien, you will love this alien and its amazing cane.Universal Love is based on a number of scientific facts and theories in astrophysics and biology. It asks the question, could two universes fall in love and merge?Two new Zbub stories find that zany Lovecraftian leprechaun accidentally dabbling in national politics, then traveling back in time to give some help to Leonardo da Vinci.Eschaton considers that the Biblical End Time might be brought on by human technology. Can the apocalypse be thwarted by two lovers holding the secret of human purpose?The book includes 11 images that relate to the stories. So treat yourself to these strange unputdownable stories.

This is the fourth volume of my Passing Strange series of science fiction and weird short stories. It may be the last, since I think Ive run out of titles that are variants of Passing Strange. Well, I can always start another series.As with the stories in the other books of this series, Ive kept these tales short and plot-based. Each story, tho strange and improbable, is based, in part, on hard science. In order to explicate the scientific aspect, Ive appended the authors notes to several of the stories that were heavily based on recent scientific findings.You will note from the previous paragraph that I am continuing to use the words tho for though and thru for through, as I have thruout the previous volumes. I hope other writers will adopt this convention, which I believe eliminates some of the confusion and distraction brought about by the similarity of those Anglo Saxon verbal/visual delinquencies: though,thought,through, and thorough.Several of these stories carry personal associations of some kind. Abomination was inspired when my writer friend Bret and I exhibited our books at a local paranormal cosplay fair, where I observed many people in weird costumes. It caused me to think this might be the perfect place for a real alien to appear without being noticed. The mouth of the Abomination is pictured at the end of that story.The writing of Beastly Bar was a challenge from a friend who sent me a beastly birthday card to base a story on. The card image appears at the end of the story.Catch and Release was inspired by my son-in-law, Jesse, after he returned from a fly-fishing trip in which only catch-and-release was allowed. The fishing fly mentioned in the story is pictured at its end.Mind-Locked was partially the product of witnessing my fathers locked-in mind condition for several months before he died.The Paper Knife draws on my career as a librarian. Early on I was tasked with inventorying a group of rare books in a spooky basement of the Fort Worth Public Library.Almost reflects my long-standing interest in both neuroscience and Neanderthals. I have written a thriller with a half-Neanderthal boy as the protagonist and I am currently writing a book on the neuroscience of poetry.Cabal uses the same time-travel conceit and location as the story "Elevator Talk" in my book Beyond Passing Strange.All the Worlds A Stage riffs on my experiences with the eccentricities of actors I encountered while producing plays during my library career.The other stories here, as I stated, are based on recent scientific discoveries I found interesting. See the author notes at the end of each for details.As with my other books in this series, these stories were written not only to entertain, but to stimulate thought and conversation. I hope that will be the case for you.

Friends since childhood, musicians Max and Larry, simultaneously fall in love with Kitty, but perhaps for different reasons. Larrys ex-wife, JJ, helps Kitty cope with the mens pursuit of her, and JJ falls in love with Kitty herself. Kitty marries Larry, to her regret, and has an affair with Max, which Larry discovers. Their ruined relationships implode on September 11, 2001, as the twin towers collapse. Max leaves to lick his wounds by reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is blown up, rescued by a Sufi mystic, survives attack by the Taliban, and returns home to joy, rejection, and death. But all is not lost in a universe of infinite possibilities. Roll Back the Sun is perhaps the greatest literary love story since Dr. Zhivago.

An introduction to EMDR, a proven trauma therapy with the power to heal, cowritten by a world-renowned therapist and a patient who experienced transformative relief through EMDR therapy. Trauma is a part of life. You or someone you care about has probably experienced trauma, whether big-T trauma, such as emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or the more common but no less significant little-t trauma that can result from divorce, job loss, painful childhood experiences, or any situation where you felt worthless, afraid, or powerless. Untreated trauma can lead to long lasting effects such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and difficulties maintaining intimate relationships. But the good news is that we can healand it doesnt have to take a lifetime. EMDR (which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a unique type of psychotherapy proven to help people recover from trauma and improve the quality of their lives. Cowritten by a patient who experienced transformative relief from trauma through EMDR therapy, and a world-renowned psychologist who explains exactly how and why EMDR works, Every Memory Deserves Respect provides clear information while offering inspiration and hope. Through compelling science, personal stories, and powerful photographic images, we learn how trauma is stored in the brain and body, continuing to cause pain and suffering, and how EMDR frees us by repatterning our thinking and emotional reactions. It explains why talk therapy has only a limited impact on trauma recovery, describes what to expect from gentle and targeted EMDR therapy, and offers guidance on how to find a therapist who is just right for you.