Lifeguard river krait, preparing to give mouth-to-mouth.

  The first time a sailor spies a river krait and realizes what he is looking at, it is likely to be an existentially life-altering—and probably pants-soiling—experience. Ten to twelve feet in diameter and over two hundred feet long, the mostly impassive animal lays down along the bottom of large riverbeds waiting for food to…

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Vacations… cheap!

The tundra. A great spot for a cold, uncomfortable picnic   Thirteen Perspectives Magazine: This is part one of our ongoing series of interviews with the major players of the Misplaced Mercenaries volumes. These are the most important people in the Thirteen Kingdoms, and we are bringing them straight to you, warts and all. Especially…

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Of COURSE I'm really Dante.

Hey, I’ve got this idea for a book. If you’ll write it and take care of all the publishing stuff, I’ll split the profits with you fifty-fifty. Wow. What a deal that is. Like you carrying a full-time job, cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids… and I’ll nip over in the afternoons to bang the…

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I maintain a fairly healthy curiosity for the world around me, but even I don’t go to playgrounds and theme parks for education. Playtime should involve relaxing and diverting experiences, not stress about dwindling resources and the safety of your food supply. Enter the Monsanto exhibit at EPCOT’s Hall of Innovention. The Experimental Prototype Community…

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Some people have reacted positively to being shut in the homes for months at a time, cleaning, painting, doing yard work, working out, and otherwise improving themselves. Others have taken a different approach to enforced solitude/joblessness, and are trying to sit through an entire episode of All of Netflix on a diet of whatever cheese-powdered…

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I was recently asked for an interview, not by a book outlet or as part of some marketing effort, but by the son of my dentist’s boyfriend. He was supposed to find someone famous to interview as part of his journalism class. I told him that my dentist is probably more famous than I am,…

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I just finished the first round of edits on Big Damn Magic, which is book three of the Misplaced Mercenaries series. The way this works is that I write the book, then send it out to my beta-readers who all shit on it. If they don’t shit on it at least a little bit then…

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“So what do you want to do?” Lena asks me this, and I ask her, at least once a day on the weekend, and maybe a couple of times during the week. My answer is always the same. “I want to scream.” Of course, I don’t say that, because the worst thing I can think…

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For years Lena has made fun of me for being obsessive. It was nonsense, obviously—no matter how many miniatures you have it is easier to pick the one you want at a glance if they are stored in neat and orderly rows, organized by class and race, facing front, tallest at the back. That’s just…

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Yesterday a friend of ours was taking her daughter to the eye doctor (we live close to a hospital so there are a lot of doctors in our area) and she spotted Lena and me on the porch eating lunch. She pulled over and we had a nice conversation—with us on the porch and them…

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