Smart is Sexy and Science is Smart

The best teacher I ever had used to insist that "math is fun." And he made it fun with puzzles and tricks and shortcuts. I remember magic boxes. (If  you've never done them, check out a site called allmath.com) Most of my teachers weren't that great, and an algebra teacher I had was downright mediocre. I wish I'd had more teachers like Byron Nelson because if I had, I might have been a rocket scientist or an epidemiologist today.  Instead, once I was done with high school, I never took another math class.
I did take science classes though--biology and chemistry and enough geology classes that I ended up getting a minor in it. (And since I graduated, Dr. Jack Horner's discoveries have pretty much negated everything I learned about dinosaurs.)
Which is all to say that I have an appreciation of science and am thrilled to see sites like Science is Awesome and I Fucking Love Science getting the word out that "science" isn't just some abstract concept meant for misfits but something that can be useful and amusing in real life. Oh yes, we have gone way beyond papier mache volcanoes erupting with baking soda and vinegar. (There is a
GREAT t-shirt place called Science TEEcher that provides geeky t-shirt fun. See the "Peace of Pi" shirt on the above.)
There is a series of new websites going up even as I type called City Science Club. There's one in Portland, one in Seattle and a number of others planned for roll-out shortly. I am going to be reporting for the Los Angeles City Science Club. I hope to entertain and inform and I hope to see you there. More details soon.

40 More Days

I'm already starting to get the election brochures and flyers. My mailbox is small and fills up quickly. I can't tell you how much it annoys me to have to sift through a bunch of sharp-edged, stiff pieces of paper to see if I've gotten a check or received a bill. But this is the way it's going to be for the next 40 days. The word "deluge" comes to mind. October is going to be a long month.

Interview with Christine Pope

Christine Pope is a novelist who defies categorization. She's equally at home writing contemporary romance and science fictionized fairy tales. She writes short stories. She blogs. She keeps up with Kindle boards. She is my hero! This year she's been especially prolific and if I didn't like her so much, I'd hate her. If you like well-plotted, character-heavy fiction with a romantic edge, you owe it to yourself to discover Christine's work, if you don't know it already.

Let's talk about the books.

Your new book, All Fall Down, is the first of your "Tales of the Latter Kingdoms." What are the "Latter Kingdoms" and what is the book about?

The "Latter Kingdoms" are a group of countries spread across one continent in a fantasy world that's more Renaissance than medieval in terms of technology, the arts, politics, fashion, and so forth. Since I plan for the series to be set in a variety of these kingdoms, I wanted the series title to reflect all of them. All Fall Down is mainly set in a kingdom named Seldd, a land that's rather backward compared to many of the other countries on the continent. It's about a young woman named Merys Thranion who has been trained as a physician, and how she's captured as a slave and brought to Seldd, at first to heal a nobleman's injured daughter. But she comes up against a far more difficult situation when the plague appears for the first time in hundreds of years. And behind her surface struggles is her growing affection for Lord Shaine, her master. Physicians in her Order are not supposed to form personal attachments, so poor Merys really has to go through the wringer on multiple levels in the book.

Did you originally intend to write a series? Will each story in the series be stand-alone or will there be "cross-pollination" of plots and characters?  Can you tell us a little bit about the second book in the series, Dragon Rose?

You know, I really didn't think about writing a series. I just started writing several different books set in this world, and then I sort of realized partway through that they were a series, although one connected by milieu and not any overarching quest or storyline. All the books in the series are standalones, although events in some books may be mentioned in passing in others. For example, the next book in the series, Dragon Rose, has a brief comment about the plague that dominates the storyline of All Fall Down. Dragon Rose takes place about five years later in a neighboring kingdom called Farendon. It's a very different book, somewhat inspired by the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, but with an almost gothic tone.

Your book Blood Will Tell and your novella Breath of Life are both set in the Gaian Consortium world. What do you have planned for other books in that series?

I have two more books planned right now, but I'm sure there will be more than that. The first one is called The Gaia Gambit, and it's another planet-hopping romance/adventure story with an adversaries-to-lovers relationship at the center of it. That one is planned for a spring release, depending on what happens with my other books. The next book after that is called Marooned on Mandala, and it also has a Zhore hero (the same alien race we first meet in Breath of Life), although the heroine is very different. She's a Gaian ambassador who gets flung into a world of hurt when the ship she and the Zhore are on crash-lands on an uninhabited planet. I actually got the idea after a fan commented that she really wanted to see another book with a Zhore hero. Your wish is my command! 

Breath of Life is a lovely sci-fi take on the classic "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale. Do you have any plans to science fictionize other fairy tales?

See my comments on Dragon Rose. I really don't have any plans to do more science fiction fairy tales, although I am going to do some set in the "Latter Kingdoms" world. I have some ideas jotted down for a Red Riding Hood–inspired book called The Wolf of Harrow Hall.

You've published a couple of books this year. Anything else coming out this year? What's in the queue for next year?

Dragon Rose is slated for release in December. It's finished and has gone through its first edit, and I'll be sending it out to beta readers in October. For 2013 I'm planning on releasing The Gaia Gambit, the next Gaian Consortium book; Desert Hearts, a sequel to my paranormal UFO romance Bad Vibrations and the second book in the Sedona trilogy; Binding Spell, another "Latter Kingdoms" book; and possibly Marooned on Mandala and (I hope) Angel Fire, which will complete the Sedona trilogy. In addition to all that, I'll start getting the rights back to my small press–published books in 2013, so I'll be editing and updating them as needed and then releasing them with new covers.

Register to vote...

The deadline to register to vote in the 2012 presidential election is fast approaching. Check here to find out the deadline in your state.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony

I was living in Virginia when I turned 18. Virginia was one of the last states to vote for the 19th Amendment.  The amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified on August 18, 1920. Virginia finally joined the party in 1952, 32 years later, long after it was ratified.  The last state to vote "yes" for votes for women was Mississippi, which voted "yes" in March of 1984--sixty-four years after it was first put to a vote. 
Is it any wonder that the "Equal Rights Amendment" never passed?  Are you old enough to remember the scare tactics employed by those who didn't want to make "equality" official?  There will be WOMEN IN COMBAT!  We'll have UNISEX BATHROOMS!!  Well, both events have come about and the world didn't end, but women still aren't officially equal. 

Book Review: Christine Pope's All Fall Down

Illustration by Nadica Boskovska

Writer Christine Pope ventures into fantasy in All Fall Down, a story of pestilence and ignorance and a woman who fights both. This is fantasy in the vein of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels, more of a magic-tinged historical novel than a romp with fairies and elves. The world building is precise and developed with both logic and flair. There are contending kingdoms and the actions of rulers impact the lives of the ruled, sometimes in a benign way but often… not.

These people come off the page, they feel real and rooted with problems and responsibilities and hard, hard choices to make. The political situation that exists in the world Pope has created has an impact on the plot; it's integrated into the narrative on many levels and not just thrown in to create random drama.

Merys, the heroine of the story, is a healer, a woman of science not superstition. Kidnapped by slavers who sell her to a lord whose domain runs on slave labor. Lord Shaine is not a bad man, and it's to Pope's considerable credit that she makes him sympathetic and sexy in a way that makes him more than a standard-issue alpha male.

Merys is enormously appealing as a woman who relies on her wits to better her own situation but who also takes care of those around her. Her intervention in the life of a young stable hand changes his life for the better. Her bond with the daughter of the man who holds her captive is warm and caring, and extends to the young man the girl is destined to marry. Merys has real "people skills" and interacts as easily with the cook as with her master's aristocratic allies.

As always, Pope's prose is a multi-sensory experience, with mouth-watering descriptions of feasts and detailed accounts of courtly dress. At its core, this is a romance novel, with several story strands resonating with romance--from the sweet relationship between the lord's daughter and her beloved to Merys' growing attachment to Lord Shaine despite their difference in philosophy. There's a true maturity to their bonding, which does not come without sacrifice but which is all the sweeter for it.

This book is the first in a series of novels set in "The Latter Kingdoms." I cannot wait to read the next one, which is called Dragon Rose.

Daniel Scherl is an amazing photographer!

Photo by Daniel F. Scherl

I have been holding off getting head shots because I just don't enjoy having my picture taken. But that changed yesterday after a session with Daniel Scherl. (Check out his site here.)  He's a friend of a friend and was having a summer sale and I realized I can't keep using the photo that my best friend took.  (Well, I could, but it's kind of informal and I've needed a more "corporate" head shot about 10 times in the last year.)
The photo session was not just a lot of fun, I can already tell the photos are going to be fantastic. This one hasn't been retouched and it's still, oh, about a BAZILLION times better than the last couple of photos I've had taken.  I cannot wait to see what the retouched photos look like.  I'm going for 40-something...(And isn't 40 the new 30?)
 If you're in Los Angeles and you need a photographer, your first call needs to be to Daniel. 

SweeTango Apples

Just as Envy apples are going out of season, there's a new apple in town, something called a SweeTango. It's another red and gold variety that looks like it's been polished even when it's just piled in bins waiting for you to walk by and admire them.
You know it's something special when the produce guy sees you looking at the display and launches into a spontaneous, lyrical endorsement of the fruit,
"Better than an Envy?" I asked skeptically, because as far as I am concerned, the Envy is the perfect apple. I first enjoyed it last year when it was in season for three minutes on August 5. This year it was available for a lot longer--seems like it was around for almost two months--so I could splurge a lot longer. (And "splurge" is definitely the word. At $3.99 a pound, Envy apples aren't cheap.)
"Better than Envy," he said. "Want to taste?" And he whipped out his knife and cut me a couple of slices.
If the apple Eve ate was a SweeTango, the trade off was worth it.
A perfect balance of sweet and acid.
The perfect crispness.
Just the right juiciness.
It is an 11 on a scale of 10.
I was not surprised to find that the SweeTango is a cross between a Honeycrisp (my third favorite apple) and something called a Zestar, which I've never even heard of. 
SweeTangos are also a splurge item. In L.A., they're only carried by one supermarket chain and it would be the upscale Gelson's. (Since Gelson's is handily located half a block from me, my access to the apple goodness is limited only by their hours of operation.)
If you like apples, you really, really, really need to track down this apple.