Alan Zendell - Writer

Temporally Misplaced

   Janine Harding, a naturalist who fled academia and the sexist values of The Depression is studying wolves in the Wyoming mountains, where she discovers a young boy being cared for by the wolves.

   Miranda Thymes is beside herself.  Her son, Jordy, a special child, has just been teleported from Eridani II to Earth so the doctors can fix him. But the transport company informs her that a temporal displacement caused him to arrive on Earth 700 years early, in 1937.

   Janine, struck by Jordy's sweetness, his intelligence, and above all, his loneliness, bonds with him and he with her.  She resolves to keep him; who will ever know out there in the wilderness?

   But Miranda and her escort follow Jordy into the past.  Minutes before they must return to the future, they locate Jordy and Janine. As seconds tick away, Miranda reaches for Jordy, but he clings to Janine...

   ...and of course, there's the missing camel.

Karryn

   World-weary social scientist Eli Rudman is an unpopular outreach officer on the starship Hermes when it discovers Thodes, a lost, abandoned research station in deep space. Thought to have been destroyed thirty years earlier, Thodes is found fully intact and populated by self-aware androids.  Except that the one named Karryn is actuallly a beautiful woman of twenty-nine who was raised by the androids.  Karryn does not even know she is human. 

   Instantly stricken with Karryn, Rudman remains behind when Hermes departs to oversee the station. He decides to teach her what being human means, but he is unable to avoid falling in love with her. Thus, begins his personal descent into hell.

A Boy and His Dog - an Unfinished Love Story

   An illustrated memoir-like account of the unique relationship that can only exist between a boy and his dog.  From the moment when he picks his golden retriever puppy from her litter, through all those that follow, they fill the hollows in each other’s lives and form a bond that no one else can share. 

   As powerful as the love they feel for each other is, it is when she becomes ill that we learn the true meaning of commitment.  The struggle to care for her and nurse her back to health leaves an indelible mark on everyone who loves them both.  No one who ever interacted with Haley will ever forget her or what she taught us about life and death.

An Hour on Venus

   A Man from Mars, finding himself adrift in his local Superstore, realizes he's been mysteriously transported to Venus.  It must be Venus because it’s populated by strange, soft creatures who appear surreally like himself and speak a language he almost but not quite understands.

   The Martian is on an urgent mission and failure is not an option.  He has no choice but to learn to communicate with the Venusians and obtain the items on the list he’s been given.  And he has barely one hour in which to complete his task, because it’s already eight o'clock, and the Superstore closes at nine.

Purloined Minds

  Gary teaches science at a rural high school. He loves teaching, but he’s frustrated, because when Government budget cuts caused the SETI program to close its doors, his dream of using radio telescopes to locate alien civilizations died with it.

  Gary’s passion for being the first to prove we’ve been visited by ET has managed to survive, however, and it has been re-ignited like never before. Something strange is happening. People are dropping dead without warning at remote locations around the world, and Gary is the only one who has noticed a pattern. The incidents all occur at exactly the same latitude.

   When it turns out that all of the victims aren’t actually dead, but instead, seem to have had most of their brains shut down, Gary is convinced that something orbiting high above the Earth is the cause. But how will he ever convince anyone that aliens hiding in plain sight are stealing people’s minds from space?

The Prime Prerequisite

   It seems like every time you watch the news, it's worse. First it was just your city, then the country, and now the whole world seems to be hanging at the edge of a precipice.

   And what's wrong with our leaders?  How could they be so incompetent and out of touch with reality?  More and more, you think, if I were in charge...

   You greet each new day with despair. You can't bear to watch any more.  What if you could push a button and change it all? What if it was all left up to you?

The Bed

   There comes a time in every marriage when a couple squarely confronts one of their most serious incompatibilities.  It's time for a new bed, but each of them wants something different.

   Even worse, the industry has spent decades making the process of acquiring a new bed as confusing (and profit-laden) as possible.  Be that as it may, one day, they march bravely into the arms of a mattress salesman to beg for mercy.