September 14 was our 24th anniversary, two dozen years of being married to the wonderful, beautiful, and talented Rebecca Moesta. And as with previous years, instead of doing one “big” thing, we make a whole week out of it, writing up a bucket-list of activities and special things we’d like to do. On the Saturday before, we had a big party at our house, inviting about 30 friends over for a “movie night” (which really means a movie playing in the background, while everybody pretty much just talks to one another). The main excuse for the get-together was to celebrate...
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It’s taken me more than two weeks to write this. On Friday, September 4, Rebecca and I lost one of our closest friends, Deb Ray, after a very long battle with cancer. We met Deb when we were all working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and involved in the science fiction club there. Once, Deb called Rebecca at work, and Rebecca—thinking it was me—inadvertently answered the phone, “Hello, Sweetheart.” Henceforth, we always called her Sweetheart. Deb suffered from increasingly difficult health issues and was, repeatedly, misdiagnosed as having Crohn’s Disease and treated for that without success, even though she...
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Artist Nick Robles, who did such a fantastic job on CLOCKWORK ANGELS: The Graphic Novel, has done thirteen amazing line drawings for the new novel, CLOCKWORK LIVES (as in, plural of "Life").  ECW Press will release the book next week, and they have been revealing the art, one day at a time. Some lives can be summed up in a sentence or two. Other lives are epics. In Clockwork Angels, #1 bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson and legendary Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart created a fabulous, adventurous steampunk world in a novel to accompany the smash Rush concept album of...
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STORMWORLD, written by Brian Herbert and myself, was begun on 9/11.  Indeed it was frightening and apalling to watch the trade towers explode and crumble into billowing clouds of flame, smoke and ash. Such a disaster.  But in context to the book we began that morning, STORMWORLD, in retrospect, reflects upon the question of what the greater disaster?  That? Or the (recently revised) 70,000 who died in the heat wave the broiled France in 2003? Or the 58,000 Russians who died from stiffling heat and suffocating smoke from burning peat bogs around Moscow several years back?      Climate disasters...
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