Want to lose your appetite? May I suggest reading about guinea worms before lunch. Here’s a book that can help you:

(I can take no credit for the cover design, that was done by my talented friend and colleague Amelia, but I did take her splotchy cover design and adapt it to the interior layout. Here are a few spreads:)

I’m in no way saying this is a healthy diet plan, just that it helps you lose your appetite.

The guinea worm. A parasite. Say you’re really thirsty and live in a place where your water is not filtered nor treated. You drink water from streams or lakes, and little do you know that you’re drinking guinea worm larva too. The larva you drink works its way through your digestive system, somehow making its way into your leg. Over the course of about a year, it grows, maybe even up to 3 feet long. One day the worm realizes it needs to escape the host body (yours) into water to propagate, so it starts to force a way out of your skin, causing horrible sores that are calmed by being in the cooling properties of water. This makes you head to water. The worm then escapes your body and completes its life cycle by creating more larvae to infect other hosts.

Sometimes I’m just really glad I live in a town with clean and treated water.

The guinea worm is only one sort of critter that can cause zombie-like behavior in living (or dead or soon to be dead) creatures. This is an excellent read, but caution you against reading it before a meal. Unless you’re trying to not eat that meal.

And here’s a bit of a behind the scenes extra in the life of a publishing house—designer notes on a 1st pages proof of Zombie Makers:

(can’t tell you that children’s book publishing biz isn’t sometimes fun)