I thought some people would be interested in seeing the evolution of our ideas for the cover of our recently released novel, Olivia Lark’s The Sum of Love. This is a sampling only — I developed many more variations of each of these, with different stock photography, different titles, and different typography. By way of …
We’ve talked many, many times about using cloth towels and rags in place of paper towels, and despite sounding like a smart idea, it has never taken hold (with me). This time we (Marsh) bought like a 50-pack of towels, bar-mop style towels. When they arrived, they seemed smaller and flimsier than we’d been picturing, …
Start with a credible geography, and a credible ecosystem overlay. Not just for map-based adventure fantasy and Lit-RPG, where often the map comes before the manuscript, but for finished manuscripts, too. The manuscript itself won’t give you that explicitly. You have to know the story well and reverse engineer it. But if you’re lucky, the …
To reach out in the holiday spirit to our friends and family, we co-designed and printed this card in 2019. Among other things, it is a celebration of the simple fact that we’re able to do that — that we have the time, attention, planning ability, and energy to engage in this simple civilized act. …
Had a first visit here at Three Bunny Farm from my eldest, her husband, and her 11-month-old boy. We’d been thinking about this day for many months, and it was everything we could have hoped. Eleven months is pretty young to form lasting impressions, though, even of baby lambs and crowing roos and flooffy bunnehs, …
Here’s the thing: we got here from that damned pocketwatch, that someone dropped in a field. Yes, it’s a marvelous design, intricate, ordained, functional — it could not have occurred by accident. But nor is it accidental that when that analogy was first proposed, the gold pocketwatch was indeed the very pinnacle of human design …
I’ve read, and been in, a lot of debates about Intelligent Design (ID). Leaders of the ID movement famously do not like to come too close to defining what an actual Intelligent Designer would be like (can’t risk hypothesizing something that could be empirically disproven, after all!), leaving actual scientists to worry about the question, …
It looked promising at first. “Do You Know Why…?” The eternal question of philosophers and scientists. Why does your hair turn gray? (Pigment cells die in the follicle.) Why do your feet fall asleep? (Compressed nerves.) Why hiccups? (Diaphragm irritated.) You could ask more “why” questions about each of these answers, but that would be …
I’m reading Why Intelligent Design Fails, a handy collection of grad-level scientific essays, edited around the idea of pointing out the weaknesses of Intelligent Design. It is okay, though it illustrates the difficulty of trying to hit that sweet spot between writing for a lay audience and doing real, complex science. As I’ve been reading …