The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.

Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

The only thing that can effect a big change in personality is something that physically rewires the brain and/or alters the body's chemical milieu.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.