The Duology

Book excerpt: The Duology combines and revises two previous books – Visions, Voices & Violence (VVV) and Not Blood Uncle (NBU) – all by Zahn Pesh, to tell one story: How Vaney got in trouble with the San Francisco police (Chapters1-11) and how Zahn got him out of it (Chapters 12-17). Based on a true story, Pesh created these fictional memoirs to memorialize the epileptically disabled youth. To make Billy’s non-verbal communications intelligible to readers, Pesh created an argot based on the youth’s Midwestern dialect. Also, especially for strong verbs, the youth forms past tenses by adding d’s or t’s to infinitives (e.g., instead of “go, went, gone,” Billy says “go, go’d, go’d” or where t’s sound more natural “think, think’t, think’t”). Pesh also created a way (e.g., a new punctuation mark “hyphen hyphen” before direct thoughts) to indicate internalized thoughts. Further, all print-to-order royalties go directly to a nonprofit organization for gifts to the needy or matching awards to train police to distinguish between disabled persons and criminals. These books – The Duology, VVV and NBU – are available individually as e-books or in soft covers through Xlibris, Barnes and Nobel, and Amazon and the nonprofit organization James Floyd McKinney Foundation, where tax deductible donations are gratefully acknowledged and accepted.