If you thought the nature/nurture debate was settled, think again. Far from it, even within the scientific community. Are genes the primary determiner of who will get fat over time, is it the sum of their behaviors, or both?

An article this week in Science News reports on a study done by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute (yes, really) in Boston. They looked at over 2 million genetic variants from thousands of people and came up with a way to predict, they said, a person’s likelihood of becoming “obese” (having a Body Mass Index of 30 to 39.9) or “severely obese” (BMIs of 40 or higher). OK, that sounds useful.

But hold on, other researchers said...

I’m ticked off this week. No getting around it; I am. But I’m also sad and frustrated.

As of April 11^th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there have been 555 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. That’s more than in all of 2018 (372) and the highest number since 2014 (667). Measles was declared “eliminated” in the U.S. in 2000, but that means the disease isn’t present all the time (or “endemic”), not that it doesn’t exist at all.

Travelers from countries where measles is still endemic bring cases into the U.S. every year. Usually, there are enough people who’ve been vaccinated around them that no one else catches the disease, or a few do, and then no one else does...

The fundamental element of my Eternity Plague series—The Eternity Plague (book 1), Chrysalis (book 2), and Wild Spread (book 3, currently in draft)—is that five naturally-mutated viruses have infected all of humanity and are doing all sorts of strange and not necessarily wonderful things to everyone. My heroine, Dr. Janet Hogan, discovers the viruses and has to try to stop them before they do too many awful things. Good luck with that: so far the viruses are doing more things faster than Janet and her team can respond to them. How will the series end? Sorry, no spoilers here.

But because these books are science fiction, I wanted to ground them in science, and good science at that...

The cliché “writing a book is like running a marathon” has, like all other clichés, that kernel of truth that gets worn out from overuse. But the kernel remains true.

I got to thinking about this because, while I work on draft #4 of Wild Spread, I’m also getting ready for my 19^th consecutive year of volunteering with the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. There are many parallels between writing the book and my volunteer work—which I do to honor the memory of a friend who was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building—the first being that they’re both important to me. I’ve also completed one half-marathon and two books, so I can speak with at least some knowledge of running and writing.

The other parallels bet...

This is the last post in the series on characterization. Next time we’ll move on to setting.

If you’ve traveled around the country, or watched TV or the movies, or done just about anything other than live under a rock, you know that people speak differently in different places. They have different accents, different slang terms, and different styles of speaking. Compare the laconic Mainer or cowboy to the fast-talking New Yorker. And that’s just in the United States! Canadians, Britons, Scots, Irish, New Zealanders, Australians, and some Indians and Kenyans (to name just a few) speak English, too.

And they all do it differently.

England’s WWII Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill famously described America and ...

It’s been longer than I care to admit since I worked on my third book, Wild Spread, in any serious way. There are plenty of excuses for why, and some actual reasons, but neither change the fact that work came to a dead stop. There was no flow—of words, of ideas, of anything except frustration.

This seems to be my pattern: intense periods of work followed by months of inactivity. This time I was in a deep funk over the quality of draft 2 and the inadequacies of draft 2B. And I wasn’t sure draft 3 was headed in a direction that was any better. When that happens, stubbornly moving forward is just a waste of time and mental energy. A writer friend insists that “all writing is good writing,” even when it’s crap because it is writing, but I know myself...

Friendly Fire, by Scott A. Snook. Copyright 2000 by Princeton University Press

As I did when I reviewed Joan Piper’s book, A Chain of Events, I need to begin with a set of disclaimers.

• I am a retired Air Force officer.
• I was a Mission Crew Commander (MCC) on the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft.
• On the date of the shoot-down of the two Blackhawk helicopters over northern Iraq—April 14, 1994—I was deployed to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to fly missions enforcing the southern no-fly zone over Iraq for Operation Southern Watch/Desert Calm, the counterpart to Operation Provide Comfort (OPC).
• In July 1994, when the first investigation report was released, I was deployed to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, to fly OPC missions...

Yesterday I did something I have not done in ages: submitted a short story to a science fiction magazine. The story, however, was not mine: it was my late friend Cappy Hanson’s last work, “The Otter’s Stone.” A few days before she died, she told me which magazine she intended to send it to first, so that was where it went. There’s no guarantee the magazine will accept it, so I’m not going to name it.

Submitting a work, whether to a magazine, a contest, a literary agent, or an editor at a publishing house is an action that readers are blissfully unaware of, but one fraught with tension for the author. There’s no reason why readers should be aware, of course, but for the author it’s a major milestone.

The first step on the roa...

Two weeks ago today, as I write this, my closest friend left all of us behind, going on to whatever, if anything, is next. She left behind a lot of broken hearts and fond memories. Fortunately, because she was a wonderful writer of poetry and prose, a painter, a musician, and much more, we will have tangible things to hold near to revive those memories.

Cappy left “too soon,” of course. Far earlier than any of us would have wished. Frankly, we would have wished that she would never leave and spare us that pain. Never mind that if we were the ones to leave first, we would be inflicting that pain of leaving on her.

Such is the nature of our feelings about those we hold most dear, even at times when letting go is the kindest thing to do. I do not think that was the case th...

It’s hard to say I “enjoyed” this book. After all, how can one “enjoy” a book about the real murder of an eight year old girl by her mother’s boyfriend? Indeed, at times there were tears in my eyes.

That said, there’s a lot to like—or maybe “appreciate” is a better word—about Too Close to Home. Let me set the scene first.

Samantha’s home life was anything but easy. Her mother, Rachel Stra, had been divorced by Samantha’s biological father. Samantha and Rachel had moved with Rachel’s boyfriend from Florida to western New York to “get a fresh start.”

Angel Colon, the boyfriend, was no angel...