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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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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I am an old videogamer. I owned and played the hell out of the first Pong home console, a single box with a dial on either side for your controllers, which was marketed as a date night activity. That last bit may have been a little hopeful. Today’s games are insanely fantastic by comparison. The stories,…

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After coming down out of the Tennessee mountains, Lena and I stopped off at the Biltmore Estate and visited the palace and grounds. Huge and grand and opulent beyond reason, the home is created entirely to impress visitors with the wealth of its owners, which it does well. This creates an interesting tension with the…

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In the middle of last August I was positively diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.I had been losing weight without explanation, and developed a permanent, burning thirst. After a couple weeks of constantly drinking water like a dying man in the desert, I went to the doctor. My blood sugar was 267, (100 is the normal…

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Last week saw the arrival of a bit of a crisis in our household. Several unrelated and individually easy to deal with issues collided to create a spectacular stress-bomb that blew up all over my and Lena’s home. Something had to be done. I snuck away and grabbed the phone. This was no job for…

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