Bear with me, because you’re not going to find out why I’m researching commercial spider silk for several years. It’s a secret. A very self-indulgent secret that amuses me, that Ty won't stop giggling about. But, the research I’m doing in the service of my self-indulgent secret still makes for an interesting little story, that I wanted to share with you. Our story begins in the 1800s, in French colonized Madagascar. A Jesuit missionary named Paul Camboué developed an obsessio

I had no way to know at the time that a mildly inebriated argument about Captain America’s sex life was going to spark a lifelong research interest that has fueled me as an author and made me a better therapist. It all started 10 years ago at WisCon, a feminist scifi/fantast convention in Madison, Wisconsin. (Oh WisCon, I miss you). It was evening at the hotel bar, and I do not remember how exactly it started. But somehow, I ended up in a friendly but raucous argument with a

It may not surprise you all that I, as a person who cares about and seriously thinks about the future, am a fan of  carbon-free energy. This includes nuclear power. But nuclear power comes with a well known drawback- nuclear waste, which can stay hazardous for a good 10,000 years. For scale, 10,000 years is the upper estimate of when the first attempts at settled agriculture. Trying to keep something dangerous from hurting people for that length of time calls for serious crea

I’ve frequently found that when something doesn’t automatically attract me about writing I tend to over-compensate, assuming that if I don’t deliberately put in extra effort I’ll end up slacking off and produce something sub-par. Which has resulted in my being praised for my fight scenes, even though starting off writing superhero fiction they were the thing I most wanted to avoid. I tend to space out during fights in movies, and skim fights in books. I would never watch some

I don’t know when or how this story starts, but I know when I became a bit player in it. Several years back, I put my Volkswagen's key through the laundry. I maintain to this day that there is such a thing as too many pockets, and that my wife’s cargo pants have too many pockets to properly check every laundry cycle. The key looked fine, but it didn’t work. I called the dealership. They offered to replace it for me for $300, but also would charge me another $80 to “re-progr