The Women’s Professional Baseball League kicked off their inaugural season this past weekend in Springfield Illinois. The first weekend featured two games: New York Heights vs Los Angeles Queens, and San Francisco Firebells vs Boston Hunters.

One of the coolest things about the league is the way they honor trailblazing women of the past.

The teams are each named after local legends. For the NY Heights, it’s civil rights leader Dorothy Height. For the Boston Hunters, it’s one of America’s first female physicians, Harriot Hunt. The SF Firebells are named for “Firebelle Lil” Hitchcock Coit, an influential early volunteer firefighter. And the LA Queens get their name from “Queen of the diamond” Lizzie Murphy, who played against major league players in the 1920s.

The WPBL instagram has cool videos unveiling the name for each of the teams:

Then there’s the league’s mascot, Maybelle, who embodies the likeness and tenacity of 99-year-old Maybelle Blair. Blair played for the original AAGPBL back in the 40’s, and is on the advisory board for the WPBL. She also threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the league’s first game.

I watched most of both opening games, which wasn’t exactly easy. The games are streaming on ESPN Select, which is an “expanded” version of ESPN that’s not part of the base Disney+ Subscription. For me, it was like $13 more on my plan—a price I’m entirely willing to pay to support the league. International viewers can watch on YouTube, but it’s geo-locked. It’s also apparently on Scripps TV, which I’ve never heard of before.

Personally I think the league should have offered all the games for free on YouTube worldwide. I get that they’d be missing out on the ESPN revenue, but I feel like building a fanbase and hype would be more useful to them in the long run. But who knows.

The games were fun. I’m still getting to know the players, apart from a few of the well-known ones from Banana Ball. It’s nice to see so many countries represented.

What’s not so nice is the vitriol in the commentary. The internet’s need to disparage women’s sports is simultaneously enraging and disheartening.

OK, so they can’t throw fastballs as fast as the guys. So what? Pitchers used to pitch slower in the MLB too, before we optimized pitching to within an inch of its life. And honestly, I think the MLB games were more fun when the starting pitchers went longer, the hitters got more hits, and it wasn’t all about velocity.

Yes, they use composite or metal bats that can generate more power than wooden ones. Who cares? Nobody’s putting Denae Benites (who hit the WPBL’s first home run) up against Jordan Walker (2026 All Star Home Run Derby champ) in a home run derby. Bat rules are designed for safety and to keep everyone on a level playing field. Even NCAA college rules allow non-wood bats.

Yes, there were a few bloopers. Again, so? I imagine the pressure was immense, so some opening day jitters are understandable. Also, as a lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan, I have to deal with stuff like this on the regular. Don’t pretend like MLB players are unerring paragons of performance:

Jokes aside, comparisons across leagues are silly. I used to live in a town that didn’t have a MLB team nearby, so we would watch the local AA team. They were still professionals and talented athletes in their own right. It was still fun to go and watch a game and root for them. Same with Banana Ball. The Savanah Bananas just sold out Wrigley Field for three days straight. If your response to minor league or Banana Ball is, “Well, they couldn’t stack up to the MLB so they suck!”, then you have lost the plot.

I had a childlike glee watching the ladies play, and I know I’m not the only one. They’re just getting started, and I wish them many seasons to come.

Today’s irritating headline came from an article in The Atlantic.

The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious — Why chatbots love "it’s not X, it’s Y"

The full thing is behind a paywall, but my ire isn’t aimed at this one article in particular. It is just the latest in a growing trend of “spot the AI writing tells” gimmicks that are all based on a false premise: that AI chatbots are doing something unique or mysterious.

They aren’t. Everything "AI writing" does is just imitating actual human writers. This is because its algorithms are trained on human writing. (Writing that was hoovered up en masse without permission or compensation, but that’s a rant for another day.)

The em dashes. The three-part structure. Parallelism.

These are all tools that real writers have been using—as the Atlantic article illustrates—for hundreds of years.

Tools that I just used above to prove a point.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to identify AI writing. AI bots use these tools clunkily. They overuse them. They make nonsensical analogies because they don’t really understand how the world works. All I’m saying is that the mere existence of certain rhetorical devices doesn't make something AI-generated.

As writer Marcus Olang' wrote in a substack: "I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me."

this man's mind

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

There’s this conversation that keeps happening, and… ok. Ok. This is the post that finally set me off…

Read more

a year ago · 3068 likes · 218 comments · Marcus Olang'

Olang' talks about the way that the Kenyan educational system delivers this kind of writing, but it isn’t just the Kenyan one. US academia and professional writing circles emphasize the same things. That’s why it comes up so often in the AI training material, which is why the AI often imitates it.

You’ve been seeing these things your whole life. But now you’re seeing them in places where you aren’t used to seeing them, like emails from Uncle Harvey, who previously couldn’t string a coherent paragraph together. Coupled with the fact that AI chatbots sometimes misuse the tools, this draws attention to them in a way that Emily Dickenson poems never did.

I refuse to change my writing style, honed over decades, just because everyone fell in love with the plagiarism machine. You can have my em-dashes when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Just please, don’t jump to conclusions about something being AI-generated just because it ticks a few boxes on an “AI tells” list somewhere. Each of those “tells” were done by humans first.

I know, I know, wild takes on the internet shouldn’t surprise me. But there have been some really bizarre assertions over the recent video purportedly showing Senator McConnell being loaded into an ambulance after suffering a cardiac arrest. (Update 7/13: McConnell’s office has issued a statement denying that he suffered a heart attack.) This article really isn’t about that video specifically, though. It just made me realize how much of a gap there is between what people assume about Emergency Medical Services (EMS) from TV/movies and how things are really done.

For context: I am a certified paramedic in Pennsylvania and spent 20 years as a volunteer with my local ambulance service. Now I teach first aid and CPR.

Note: This information is based on my own training and experience. EMS training is done to national standards, but states and ambulance services can still have their own rules and protocols. I do not claim to speak for all medics everywhere.

We are bound by HIPAA too

You know that privacy notice thing you always have to sign at your doctor’s office? Medics are bound by the same Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act law (aka HIPAA) that prevents your doctor from disclosing your health information without your consent or medical necessity. Willingly breaking the law, like blabbing to the press about the condition of some high-profile patient you took to the hospital, can lead to crushing fines and even jail time.

We go slow and steady

There’s a military expression that is often applied to emergency medicine: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” When we rush, we make mistakes. I remember the first time I saw a real-life trauma team in action. In comparison to a TV drama like ER, it seemed incomprehensibly chill.

In EMS, you’re already in a chaotic environment. You might be treating a patient outside in the snow, or in a car that’s being cut open by rescue crews, or squished in a tiny bedroom with a hysterical spouse watching. Whatever the situation, it’s not going to be made better if the medics are all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. There’s a sense of urgency, sure, but it’s controlled. We don’t run, and we always make sure the scene is safe. We can’t help anybody if we become victims ourselves.

We only use lights and sirens when necessary

In the same vein of “slow is smooth…”, we don’t always race around with lights&sirens going. Research has shown that crash rates increase dramatically with lights&sirens. Partly this is because you’re driving in unusual ways (going through a red light is always going to be risky), and partly this is because people lose their minds and drive unpredictably when they hear sirens.

When going TO a patient, the use of lights&sirens is usually determined by the 911 dispatcher based on the details of the call. If the person could be dying and nobody’s there to help them, we accept the extra risk and use lights&sirens.

Going to the hospital, it’s different. The patient is already receiving care. Unless they’re super unstable, or the traffic is really awful, the marginal time you’d save going with lights and sirens usually doesn’t outweigh the added risk.

PSA: I hated driving with lights&sirens. It was more stressful than working a cardiac arrest. Please, just pull to the right and stop when you see an emergency vehicle (or whatever the rule is in your locality). It’s not that hard, and it makes a world of difference.

Many cardiac arrests are treated on-scene

When I first started in EMS 25+ years ago, our mantra for a critical patient was “load and go”. Get them to the hospital as fast as possible. Nowadays, it’s increasingly common for cardiac arrests to be treated on-scene.

In most cases, modern EMS crews can give the same level of care for a cardiac arrest patient as the emergency room. We follow same Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) protocols, which is just a fancy way of saying CPR + medications + advanced treatments. Interrupting CPR—even for a few seconds—can actually lower the patient’s chance of survival. As you might imagine, it’s really hard to keep effective CPR going while carrying someone down stairs! All in all, it’s usually better to just stay put and treat them.

Many places also now allow medics to terminate resuscitation if ACLS hasn’t worked after 30+ minutes, often after a consultation with a supervising physician. If the crew decides to transport anyway, ACLS would continue en route to the hospital. Otherwise…

We don’t transport dead people

Once a person has been declared dead, moving them is normally a job for the coroner or funeral home. Not only does the hospital frown on us bringing them dead people (not really their thing, you know?), it’s an unnecessary burden on both the hospital and the family. And for a coroner’s case, it’s important that the body stay at the scene as evidence.

Are there times when we continue CPR and transport someone even if it seems hopeless? Sure. But we treat them like someone who still has a chance. If they’re going to the hospital, they’re getting CPR all the way.

There are situations where an ambulance might transport a dead body. Like if someone with a Do-Not-Resuscitate order dies en route to the hospital, or if a rural ambulance has a special transport contract with their county. It’s just not something you would expect in an ordinary urban EMS setting.

PSA: If a loved one has a Do-Not-Resuscitate order (DNR), check to make sure that it will be recognized by EMS, and make sure your loved one has it with them/accessible at all times. In PA, for instance, there is a special out-of-hospital DNR form. You can even get a bracelet/necklace to go with it. If you cannot present a valid out-of-hospital DNR, we are obligated to begin CPR while we sort things out. We don’t want to go against your loved one’s wishes, but we legally have no choice. Save everyone the heartache and have the right paperwork handy.

We have many kinds of stretchers

Everyone’s familiar with the main ambulance stretcher, but we have a dozen other kinds of lifting/moving devices.

The scoop stretcher breaks in half so you can “scoop” up a patient with a broken hip without moving them too much.

The long board stretcher (aka “backboard”) is used to immobilize someone who might have a spinal injury. It’s the colorful plastic board you’ve probably seen in Hollywood. They rarely strap the person in right, which drives me a little nuts.

The stair chair lets us carry people around in a seated position, especially (as the name implies) on stairs.

The Reeves stretcher is a lightweight, flexible, burrito-like contraption that’s handy for going around tight corners, or down stairs when the patient can’t sit up on their own.

There are many more. Lifting and moving people is our jam.

That Video

So no, the patient was not in an “orange body bag”—it was just a Reeves stretcher or something similar.

The fact that the medics were not rushing around frantically just highlights their professionalism.

Whether they used lights and sirens on the way to the hospital doesn’t mean much.

The fact that they transported him (seemingly without CPR in progress) and the hospital admitted him are strong indicators that he arrived at the hospital with spontaneous circulation. In other words, his heart was beating. Anything beyond that is pure speculation.

The medics involved cannot speak about any of this without risking their careers, life savings, and jail.

Learn CPR

I want to wrap up with a Public Service Announcement:

CPR saves lives.

After a cardiac arrest, the person’s chance of survival goes down roughly 10% every minute without CPR. By the time EMS gets there, it’s usually too late. Even if we get the heart going again, there are often permanent neurological impairments.

By starting CPR right away, you can dramatically increase someone’s chance of survival. And like I tell my CPR students: don’t worry about doing it wrong. They were already clinically dead when you started—you can’t make them any worse.

Taking a CPR class can really increase your confidence, but you can get started right now with these fun videos:

Finally, a special shout-out to the late Randolph Mantooth, who passed away this week. He played Johnny Gage on the TV series Emergency!, which inspired a whole generation of medics, including me. RIP.

I just had to geek out for a moment. In just over a month, the Women’s Professional Baseball League will kick off its inaugural season.

I’ve been a baseball fan all my life, and at one point even dreamed of playing professionally. That wasn’t a particularly practical dream for an 80’s girl, but it makes me happy that the next generation will have that opportunity.

The WPBL has four regional teams: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. I expect that in future seasons the teams will get names, but for now they are just “WPBL Boston”, etc. They will play a 7-week season, all in Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, IL. This provides a neutral, central venue so the teams don’t have to shuttle back and forth. Springfield also has a historical connection, being located in the same region as the AAGPBL of the 1940’s (which you may know from the movie A League of Their Own.)

The league includes women from all over the world, including several players from the Women’s National Team and Banana Ball. (If you haven’t seen Banana Ball, by the way, please check out their videos on social media. It’s wildly fun.) There are also numerous experienced softball players.

Nothing against softball, by the way. It’s fun too and it’s cool to watch. But despite the surface similarities, baseball and softball are different sports. It’s not just that the softballs are bigger; the rules, mechanics, and strategies are meaningfully different.

I wish I could get out to Springfield to see some games in person, but in the mean time I’ll just hope that they’ll be streaming somewhere. I look forward to seeing these ladies take the field.

Check out the official WPBL website.

“Everybody’s autistic these days.”

This statement infuriates me.

First, because it’s just not true—the latest numbers (even with an increase in recent years) show that autistic people are about 1-3% of the population. (Exact stats depending on which study/region you reference.) For context, this is in the same ballpark as the number of men over 6’4” or the number of people with “gifted” IQ. While such people are not unicorns, you don’t see folks acting like they’re everywhere you turn. Even if you double the figure to account for undiagnosed and self-identified folks (who are completely valid, by the way), it’s so far from “everyone”, I can’t even.

Second, this phrase is usually accompanied with an implication that the rise in autism rates is either surprising, not real, or a problem that needs to be solved. Those are the things I want to push back on in this article.

There are many reasons why the number of autism diagnoses has gone up in recent years that are differences in identification and classification, rather than any actual increase in the population.

For starters, just because we weren’t finding something doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. As one of my favorite memes says: “We didn’t discover Pluto until 1930, but we’re pretty sure it was there the whole time.” Germs existed before microscopes. Breast cancer rates went up when we started screening for it. It is 100% natural that when you actively look for something, and you develop better tools to do so, you might end up finding more of that thing.

A good example of this can be seen with the rate of autism diagnoses in Europe. A comprehensive review of European autism studies, published in 2022, found prevalence “among young people was estimated at 0.8% based on register-based studies and 1.4% based on population.” What that means is that studies that actively looked for autistic people found almost twice as many autistic people as studies that only looked at already diagnosed people. This suggests a significant number of undiagnosed autistic individuals in the population.

Increased awareness is also a big factor. Years of “Autism Awareness Months” and popular culture have had an impact. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s certainly better than it was a few decades ago. I was well into adulthood before I understood that autism didn’t just look like Rain Man. When families and communities have a better understanding of what autism looks like, they’re more likely to identify an autistic child than to write them off as “weird”, “lazy”, or any number of other negative labels.

And let’s be honest, those negative labels were the reality for many generations. Not that long ago, if an autistic person had significant challenges, they’d often end up in asylums or otherwise kept away from society. Those who could mask might get by, but at a cost. So “I didn’t know any autistic kids when I was in school” isn’t the flex that people seem to think it is. It’s just an indication of the historically abominable treatment of many autistic children.

Is it really surprising, then, that many of these overlooked generations are now getting identified for the first time? Often it’s through their children. Since autism runs in families, it’s very common for parents to realize, “Hey, that’s just like me…” when their children receive a diagnosis. But even older generations are getting diagnosed or self-identifying, as you can see from this wholesome video from Autism on the Inside.

These people have been there all along, and they’ve been autistic their whole lives. This tells us that previous counts of autistic people were always wrong.

Finally, one must consider the diagnostic criteria themselves. In the 2013 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), four previously separate conditions were combined under Autism Spectrum Disorder. The first two were the original ASD (akin to modern Level 2/3 autism) and Aspergers (akin to modern Level 1 ASD). The others were the “Uh, something’s going on but it doesn’t fit neatly into the other boxes” umbrellas of pervasive developmental disorder and childhood disintegrative disorder. This happened because scientists realized that they were all just different manifestations of the same underlying condition.

We’ve also seem some evidence that the rates of intellectual disability diagnoses have gone down as the autism rates have gone up, suggesting that some children weren’t actually intellectually disabled, just autistic (possibly non-verbal). I’ve also seen a lot of anecdotal reports about people previously mis-diagnosed with other mental health conditions (such as Borderline Personality Disorder) now getting their correct autism diagnosis. And there’s a host of people with AuDHD (the combination of autism + ADHD) who were previously overlooked because scientists thought the two conditions were mutually exclusive. We now understand that they co-occur quite commonly.

All of this is a form of “diagnostic substitution”, where the underlying condition hasn’t changed; you’re just swapping the label.

Now it’s certainly possible that the actual number of autistic humans has gone up. There could be other factors at play, like parents having kids later, or an increased prevalence of diabetes, or even just more autistic people having families of their own. We just need to recognize that comparing modern ASD rates (with all of these corrected and combined diagnoses) with past rates is foolhardy.

And even if the number of autistic people has gone up, that’s not a bad thing. Neurodivergence is a wonderful thing. We do need to make sure autistics get the support they need, but our existence is not a problem to be solved.

I will take a moment to highlight that study after study after study has shown that vaccines are NOT a factor in the increased rate of autism. The largest was a 2025 Danish study, which looked at millions of children and found no link between vaccines and autism.

So the next time someone talks about the “autism epidemic”, I urge you to think about Pluto. Remember that a lot of this increase is just us getting better at categorizing things and finding the autistic people who have been there all along.

And the next time someone says “everyone is a little autistic”, I would point them to this lovely poem from Dr. Engelbrecht of Embrace Autism (wonderful site, by the way).

Here’s an infographic I made to summarize the points in this article:

On social media, I keep seeing angry posts from parents of higher-support-needs autistic children, criticizing the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (and others) for pushing back against labels like “profound autism”.

First let me say that I sympathize with these parents. I acknowledge the challenges their families face, and the uphill battle to get their children the supports they need. I realize that most of them are coming at this from a place of genuine concern for their children.

I just think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here.

The ASAN and others like them are not denying that people with higher support needs exist, nor are they trying to take away their supports. In fact, since autism runs in families, many of these self-advocates with lower support needs are also caregivers for family members with higher support needs. They know those needs intimately.

It’s also not a resistance to the idea of quantifying different degrees of struggle. The DSM already recognizes three different levels of support needs, with level 3 roughly corresponding to what most people mean when they say “profound autism”.

• Level 1 = Requiring support

• Level 2 = Requiring substantial support

• Level 3 = Requiring very substantial support

No, the objections are specifically about the black-and-white categorization of challenges, like “profound vs not-profound” or “high-functioning vs low-functioning”.

Why?

• They are reductive. They don’t tell you much about what the person actually needs.

• They undermine the real struggles of lower-support-needs autistics, as if to say “Well, you’re already functioning highly, so it must not be that bad.”

• They hearken back to the old Aspergers/Autism split, with its icky roots in eugenics and categorizing people based on their perceived value to society.

These kinds of labels hurt everyone. They try to draw stark lines in the sand when the reality is more like this:

And frankly, we’ve been there before. Part of the reason self-advocates work so hard to build awareness of the level 1-2 experience is because those folks have been struggling invisibly for so long. Recognizing their distinct challenges, needs, and capabilities is not meant to take away from the struggles of those with higher support needs.

Different autistic people have different challenges and needs. We need better vocabulary to encapsulate this, not black-and-white labels. When we talk about other disabilities, we have a language to talk about their specific challenges. For example, in visual impairment, we can talk about whether someone needs glasses to drive or needs a guide dog. In mobility impairment, we recognize that some people might need a cane, while others need a wheelchair.

Better language will help us ensure that all autistic people get the support they need. We need to stop treating aid like a zero-sum game. The autistic spectrum runs from “requires support” to “requires very substantial support”. There isn’t a level where it’s like, “everything is peachy actually, carry on.”

I urge these angry parents to actually read what ASAN has said (below, emphasis mine), and realize that we’re all on the same side here.

Autistic people need and deserve better services, especially those of us with the highest needs — but the “profound autism” label doesn’t help. “Profound autism” doesn’t give us any actionable information about why a person needs support or what support they need. It doesn’t tell us if a person has speech apraxia or complex medical needs, or if the person needs access to AAC or specific mental health supports. It also doesn’t reflect what we know about people with significant developmental disabilities generally, which is that high expectations and inclusive services benefit everyone and we can’t predict what someone can achieve with the right support. Instead of rehashing old, harmful arguments about functioning labels, we should focus on improving the services available to all autistic people.

• ASAN, Functioning Labels Harm Autistic People

I traveled to Boston recently, and found myself in the baggage claim at Pittsburgh International Airport. This is the where the opening scene of my novel Blackout Trail takes place, and standing there made me think of how much things have changed since I first visited the airport doing research for the story.

From the airport pickup lane to the highway leading back to town, I scouted and obsessed over Google maps. I wanted everything to be accurate, knowing that local friends and family would immediately pick up on any discrepancies.

But back then, I figured friends and family were pretty much the only ones who would read the story. After all, my first book had sold a whopping 25 copies in 10 years. Needless to say, my expectations were modest.

2300 Amazon ratings and millions of KENP page-reads later, I feel very blessed. It’s still hard to believe that there are actual readers who care about my work.

As I work on the sequel, that knowledge brings a new kind of pressure. Though I’ve always set out to write what I personally enjoy, I don’t want to let down readers who honored me by expressing interest in the sequel. I also know that pleasing everyone is impossible. Put those two things together and…

There are also some technical challenges in writing a sequel that I didn’t anticipate. Finding new character arcs. Keeping continuity straight across multiple books. I also want the books to be reasonably stand-alone, so that means having enough clues for a new person without feeling repetitive to returning readers.

It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it is definitely a new degree of difficulty.

I still don’t have a firm release date in mind for the sequel, but rest assured I’m making steady progress. I can’t wait to share the new adventures of Anna and her friends.

If you haven’t already checked out Blackout Trail, here’s a little excerpt from the opening airport scene. (And for those who have, thank you!)

Blackout Trail - Available on Kindle Unlimited, Hoopla, and more.
(Auch auf Deutsch erhältlich!)

The nearby baggage carousel ground to a shuddering halt. A collective groan from the other passengers drew my attention away from the useless brick in my hand. Snatches of disjointed conversation reached my ears.

“Can you hear me? I think we got cut off. Frank?”

“The hell? I had plenty of charge left.”

“Moooommy! My movie stopped!”

A growing sense of dread pooled in my stomach. It wasn’t just our baggage carousel that had stopped; they all had. Both the overhead lights and the computer screens showing the baggage carousel assignments had gone dark too. The only light streamed in from the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the perimeter of the baggage claim area. Why hadn’t the emergency lights kicked on?

The automatic sliding doors had also stopped, confounding a gaggle of college kids trying to leave. Beyond the doors, an ominous stillness had replaced the constant bustle of parking shuttles, cars, and taxis creeping along the pickup lane. There should’ve been engine sounds. Horns. Something. Now there were just a bunch of confused and pissed-off people getting out of their vehicles.

The Artemis crew returned safely to Earth yesterday, after a ten-day mission that took them around the Moon. It was the first mission to the Moon in my lifetime, and it took them the farthest from Earth that astronauts have ever been. Really awesome stuff.

As a kid, I was fascinated by space. Being an astronaut was way too adventurous for me, but I would have been happy working on the support side. The scene in Apollo 13 where the ground team has to figure out how to jury-rig the air filter is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. That’s what engineering is to me—solving practical problems within sometimes arbitrary constraints. I also followed the Mars rover missions with great interest, my love of the red planet spurred by research for my novel about a brewing revolution on Mars.

Then things changed. The last space shuttle was retired. Flights to the ISS became as routine as flights to Antarctica. Even the later Mars rovers, despite their astonishing longevity and a cool little helicopter, were a little underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still important work. It just didn’t capture my imagination in the same way.

Artemis II rekindled my love for space. I watched the launch live:

Although, like so many GenX kids, with some trepidation:

I geeked out over the pictures from the lunar flyby, thought the zero-gravity indicator Rise was the cutest thing in space, teared up over the crew wanting to name a crater after the commander’s late wife, and set the amazing eclipse photo as my desktop background.

The coolest part was being able to share all this with my kids. They’re nowhere near as enthralled with space as I am, but they did think it was neat. And frankly, with everything going on in the world right now, it was nice to be following something that was an uplifting, future-focused bit of human teamwork and achievement.

I’m glad everything went well and the crew made it home safe. I can’t wait for Artemis 3 and hope that someday I might be able to watch a Moon landing the same way my parents did.

In the mean time, I’ll leave you with this epic quote from Mission Specialist Hansen:

"Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying.” - Astronaut Jeremy Hansen

The below video from Knitting Cult Lady (KCL from here on) came across my feed the other day. I want to say up front that I’m not angry at KCL. I am respecting her request to not come into her comments defending homeschool, but this is my space, and I have some thoughts to share.

It is clear from this video (and others that KCL has shared) that she had a very negative homeschool experience growing up. I am sympathetic. Homeschool is not a perfect institution. There are parents who use it as a cover for abuse or indoctrination, or who commit emotional and educational neglect. I hear her concerns, and I take them seriously.

There are nonetheless some points on which I respectfully differ.

“Othering”

One of KCL’s concerns is that homeschool kids have such a different experience than public school kids that they inevitably end up “othered” from society.

Yes, kids who have different experiences can feel alienated. But that is not a given, nor is it something exclusive to homeschool kids. In fact, many families choose to homeschool because their kids already feel “othered”. They may be neurodivergent or LGBTQ, have some kind of medical condition or learning difference, etc. The common experience of public schooling doesn’t automatically give these kids a pass to fitting in. Believe me—as a neurodivergent, Army Brat, geek girl, I saw this first-hand every time we moved.

We also shouldn’t pretend that there is one universal “public school experience”. I attended public school in a half-dozen different states, plus a DoD-run school in Germany. Sure, there are some basic trappings in common, but the experiences were still very different. And that’s just public schools. There are also private schools, charter schools, cyber schools, and schools with unique educational models like Montessori or Waldorf. Perhaps KCL also opposes these on similar grounds, but it is not like homeschoolers are the only kids in America doing things differently.

Expecting everybody to have the exact same experiences is the wrong solution here. We should instead embrace our differences. Welcome the “others”. Only then can we recognize and leverage everyone’s own unique experiences and perspectives.

Missing Skills

Another concern KCL raises is that homeschool kids are missing vital skills when they go out into the real world. This is something I worry about constantly. My job is to raise kids who are prepared for adulting in the real world, and that is not easy!

I just don’t see any particular skills from public school that can’t be learned elsewhere. Certainly all the core academics are the same. Are we really worried about them not learning the bell schedule? Sitting through a lecture? Figuring out a locker lock? What skills are we talking about here?

The big one people often raise is socialization, but this usually comes from outdated stereotypes about homeschoolers. From co-ops to “wild and free” groups, many modern homeschool families build their own communities. Our kids have field trips and dances, playdates and online gaming meetups. In many states, they can join extracurriculars, athletic teams, and even classes at their local school districts. Our co-op has several musicians, a fistful of black belts, a cheerleader, several scout troop members, a couple theater kids, and more.

Many homeschoolers also have more free time to explore outside opportunities, including volunteering and entrepreneurship. My son has volunteered at a farm, done a job shadow program at the aviary, tried out a junior firefighting camp, and designed a Fortnite map featured by Epic Games. That is way more real-world experience than I had coming out of public school.

Community

At one point in her video, KCL calls out families who have pulled our kids out of public school because we feel the system isn’t working. She calls it selfish, as if we’ve somehow turned our backs on the community.

Our kids are not sacrificial lambs for society. Expecting us to subject them to an environment that doesn’t meet their needs in the name of tradition is misguided and unfair. Their well-being matters more.

But also, homeschooling and supporting public schools are not mutually exclusive! I still pay attention to our local school board elections. I write to my representatives about education. I support educational advocacy groups. So do many other homeschool parents.

Public school is important for society. Whether we have kids in public school or not, we all need to fight for everyone’s right to a good education.

Listening Goes Both Ways

Most of KCL’s videos center on the idea that homeschool parents don’t listen to adults who were homeschooled. But I have listened to her, and to other unhappy homeschooled adults. Their struggles are real, and I feel for them. I try to learn from them so my kid has a better experience.

However, I have also listened to others. To people like Callie Vandewiele, who talks of the beauty of the unschooling experience for both herself and her now-adult children. To Parkrose Permaculture, whose homeschooled adult children are thriving. To YouTuber PrestonPlayz, who talks about how the “blessing” of homeschool helped him in building his multi-million dollar business. To AdventureGirl, a third-generation “worldschooler” (homeschooling while traveling) turned travel blogger. Their stories matter too.

The National Home Education Research Institute reviewed many academic studies on homeschooling, and their fact sheet shows that homeschool kids often turn out quite happy and successful in life. A Harvard study in 2021 showed similar results. Homeschool kids can and do go on to be successful in college (even elite schools), in the workforce (often as entrepeneurs), in the military, and more.

At the end of the day, we all just want what’s best for our kids. I don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all education that works for everyone. Families deserve options so that all kids—whether in public school, homeschool, or something else—have a chance to thrive.

The senate is currently debating the SAVE Act, which would impose new identification requirements to vote and/or register to vote. On the surface, this seems perfectly reasonable—after all, the Pew Research Center reported that about 80% of Americans favor voter ID. In theory, I am one of them, but I vehemently oppose the SAVE Act.

The problem here is not the idea of voter ID, it’s the execution. As with so many things, the devil’s in the details.

But rather than debating hypotheticals or nuances of the bill itself, I first want to share the very specific, personal, real experiences my family had getting their Real IDs.

Why am I talking about Real IDs, when they are separate from the SAVE act? Because Real IDs and the SAVE Act require similar kinds of documentation, and so the obstacles are similar.

We’ll start with me. I had my original birth certificate, but the DMV told me I needed a new, certified birth certificate with the raised seal. Pennsylvania made it easy to order online (if you meet certain requirements) but that still cost $30 and delayed the whole process by several weeks. Then I had to make another trip to the DMV.

Side note: If I hadn’t been able to order my birth certificate online, it would’ve required a separate trip to the Vital Records Office. There are only six of them in the entire state.

Next let’s look at my ex-husband. He was born overseas to American parents. His original birth certificate was lost in a flood. It took a while to find the right government office to help him get a new copy. This process ultimately required locating and then trying to communicate with the original hospital in some tiny town in Germany. It was onerous and took forever.

Then there’s my newly adult daughter. She didn’t have the right kind of documentation to prove she was a PA resident, despite having lived here all her life. W2 form? She’s a full-time student. Utility bill or lease agreement? She still lives at home. Vehicle registration or car insurance? She doesn’t have a car. We eventually got some postmarked mail, but even that was a challenge because what young adult routinely gets snail-mail these days?

Side note: Online verification systems (like the one we’d have to use if I didn’t have her birth certificate handy) often choke on the apostrophe in her name, or deny she exists because she has no credit history. Those systems sound good in theory, but they don’t work for everyone.

Finally, there’s my mom. I had forewarned her about the birth certificate thing, so she had the right version of that for her first trip to the DMV. But she found out she also needed something else—I believe it was a certified copy of the marriage license (not the original), since her birth certificate didn’t match her current name. That meant contacting some other agency, getting the new marriage certificate, and then making another trip to the DMV. In her wheelchair. While battling cancer. She was really determined to make sure she had it before the Real ID deadline. (This is the best of my recollection from what she told me. Unfortunately she passed away last year so I can’t verify. Even if I messed up some details, though, the gist of the story stands.)

That is FOUR people in ONE family. All eligible voters. All who faced frustrating bureaucratic hurdles trying to get the new Real IDs.

And don’t forget, a Real ID will let you travel in the US but still isn’t enough, by itself, for you to vote under the SAVE Act.1

Our family was fortunate enough to overcome these obstacles. We have a car, a DMV in reasonable driving distance, and the time to make multiple trips there. We can afford the extra registration fees for certified birth certificates and the like.

Many citizens aren’t as lucky. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that over 21 million Americans lack ready access to the kinds of documents you’d need to prove your citizenship. These hardships are especially hard for poorer Americans, the elderly, the disabled, new adults, those who rely on public transportation, rural folks who live far from governmental offices, etc. etc. etc.

There are a ton of people who may be disenfranchised by this law.

And for what? Another analysis by the Brennan Center, using data from the conservative Heritage Fraud Database, confirmed what countless others have already shown: actual voter fraud is vanishingly rare.

States already have systems to stop voter fraud. They verify eligibility with tools like the Help America Vote Act data or the SAVE database. They verify voter identity, as summarized by Ballotpedia. Even states (like PA) marked as “voter ID not required” do require it when voting for the first time or at a new polling place, and use signature verification thereafter.

This is different from the SAVE Act in two crucial ways:

• Eligibility and identity can be confirmed at separate stages. We don’t need one MegaID to rule them all.

• Most states accept a reasonable variety of valid forms of identification, not the super-limited set called for by the SAVE act.

These existing systems work well to catch the rare fraudster. Can we fine-tune them? Sure. In Texas, you can use a handgun license but not a student ID to vote, which is kind of silly IMHO. And we could probably improve the eligibility screening systems to make them easier for the states to use.

But the SAVE act isn’t focused on any of that. It’s instead fixated on this fiction that we have masses of ineligible voters registering to vote, or people impersonating others at the polls. These things simply don’t happen at any scale we need to worry about.

For the record, I am not theoretically opposed to a national voting ID as long as the system is:

• Free (aka paid for by our tax dollars)

• Accessible (based on distance to offices, wait times, the hours the office is open, robust online systems, etc.)

• Navigable (with experts on-hand to help you sort out whatever bureaucratic nonsense is between you and the paperwork you need)

But I think we all know there’s a snowball’s chance of that happening any time soon.

In the meantime, it’s not acceptable to use a microscopic amount of voter fraud to justify policies that threaten to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters. That’s voter suppression, plain and simple.

Every citizen has a right to be heard. That’s what a democracy is. Our systems should make it easier to vote, not harder.

Here’s a little experiment: Imagine a horse. What color is it? Is it wearing a saddle? Where is it? What is it doing?

Most people can picture the horse pretty clearly in their mind’s eye. But for some of us (a little under 5% of the population) the image is hazy or even non-existent. The inability to call up pictures in your mind’s eye is called aphantasia.

For people with complete aphantasia, they don’t picture a horse at all. They may instead conceptualize the horse, thinking of its constituent parts (like the neck, hooves, tail, etc. as explained by aphantasia.com.) There are others who can only picture a vague outline, or a fuzzy, incomplete image.

Here’s a great SciShow video explaining aphantasia:

I was in my 40’s before I realized that I don’t visualize things the way most other people do. Turns out my brain operates somewhere in the 3-4 range on the aphantasia scale. I can remember a specific horse I’ve seen, like Katy from Young Riders, or the cartoon Spirit, but even those memories are static and lacking in detail. If I have to imagine a horse from scratch? It’s just a vague horse-shaped blur.

This inability to visualize things can be a drag when reading. I’ve read 20 Pike Logan novels, but I have no picture of him in my mind. I know from the book descriptions that he’s got a scar on his face and “looks like a pirate”, but that doesn’t translate into a visual image at all. If characters are depicted on the cover, like in the Sword Dancer series, those static images are all I see them as. This is why I often enjoy movie adaptations even more than their books. They fill in that missing visual component, adding a whole new dimension to a beloved story.

When writing, this lack of visualization can be an even bigger challenge. How do you describe a scene or a character when you can’t even imagine it yourself? Turns out you can, it just takes some extra work. Here are a few strategies I employ.

When it comes to characters, I can decide basic characteristics without ever being able to picture what they actually look like. Ethnicity. Hair. Eyes. Height. Weight. Distinguishing features. It’s like filling in a dossier. From that, I can give a basic written description of a character, like when we meet Mark and Lily Ryan in Blackout Trail:

There was a resemblance in their faces, and their hazel eyes might as well have been carbon copies of each other. Lily’s hair was a sandy blonde, tied back in a braid reaching midway down her back. Her father’s was short and a little darker, a shadow of stubble lining his jaw. He looked to be about my age, early forties. Very handsome. Also very married, judging by the gold band on his finger.

Another trick is to use a visual reference. When I have something in front of me, I can describe it. For example, I wanted a scene where the characters came to a scenic overlook, to highlight their isolation and the changing of the seasons. I searched for “Adirondack Mountains autumn” and found stock photos and sites like Visit Adirondacks. From those images, I constructed this:

We camped that night, and the next morning followed the highway back to the trail. It took us on a winding trek east through the mountains. The path often went up above the tree line, where we were met with biting winds and breathtaking views—a canvas of fall colors, backed by serene mountains with a dusting of snow at the peaks.

Visual references also help with characters. I usually have a “dream cast” of actors for my main characters. I still can’t imagine them in photo-real story situations, but it helps me describe them better.

Dynamic scenes can be harder, so I leverage my tabletop-roleplaying days. I’ll sketch out a map of the area (often with the help of a visual reference), place markers on the map for the characters involved, and plan out “moves” for each of them. For a fight scene in a ski resort, I browsed resort cabins until I found one that had the right vibe. (This can really confound your targeted advertising, by the way. For weeks, Facebook was convinced I wanted a vacation in New Hampshire.)

Occasionally I enlist my kids for some choreography. Just the other day, they helped me test the hypothesis: “Is it practical to bear-hug someone who’s got a backpack on?” You’d think after a decade of teaching martial arts I’d be able to imagine this better, but no. (In case you’re curious: technically you can do it, but there are better ways to subdue someone with a backpack.)

Lastly, I think it’s okay to just leave things to the reader’s imagination. Sometimes my characters just sit down at the table or climb into the saddle without any extra embellishment about the table or the horse. I know I’m not going to win any awards for flowery descriptions, and that’s okay. I can make up for it in other ways, like plot, dialogue, and characterization. A story is the sum of its parts, and it’s entirely possible to write engaging stories even if you can’t visualize them clearly.

When someone says “diagnosis”, it’s easy to think formality. Authority. A label on an official medical record.

But “diagnosis” has always had another meaning:

• the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms

• investigation or analysis of the cause or nature of a condition, situation, or problem

It doesn’t always take a medical degree to deduce a potential cause from a set of signs and symptoms.

When people talk about self-diagnosing autism, that’s all they mean. Nobody is claiming a formal diagnosis from this process. Nobody is getting accommodations or services based solely on their own vibes. That’s just not how that works. Self-diagnosed autistics are merely pattern-matching between their understanding of autism and their own lived experience and saying: “Yeah, that checks out.”

This is hardly limited to autism. Every time we’ve wrapped an ankle because “it’s probably just a sprain”, or taken Tylenol for a suspected cold, we’ve been self-diagnosing. Over-the-counter medicines and remedies exist because we recognize that people are capable of managing their own health to a reasonable degree. When it’s an emergency, it’s something we can’t handle on our own, or it requires a treatment or medication that’s gated behind a MD, we can and should seek professional help. It’s just not always necessary.

I think a lot of the pushback to autistic self-diagnosis is rooted in the perception that people are just flippantly seeing a single TikTok video or something and deciding they’re autistic. But as autistic advocate and author Nicole Filippone points out in a recent article, that’s simply not the case:

People don’t actually self-diagnose after watching a single video.

There is no evidence to support this claim. None.

What’s actually happening is that people are seeing autistic people talk about autism and are getting curious.

And as they engage with the content on social media, the algorithm feeds them more of it, and they are suddenly falling down a very deep rabbit hole about autism.

Nicole Filippone

Challenging a popular but flawed premise about autistic self-diagnosis

"I don't know who needs to hear this, but you're not autistic…

Read more

6 months ago · 1 like · Nicole Filippone

Also commonly, autistic parents are seeing their kids get diagnosed and realizing: “Wait, they’re exactly like me.”

Again, pattern-matching.

It turns out that autistic people tend to be pretty good at self-diagnosing. There’s been some research, but this summary from the University of Washington Autism Center’s self-diagnosis resources is my favorite:

In our experience at the University of Washington Autism Center, many professionals are not informed about the variety of ways that autism can appear, and often doubt an autistic person’s accurate self-diagnosis. In contrast, inaccurate self-diagnosis of autism appears to be uncommon. We believe that if you have carefully researched the topic and strongly resonate with the experience of the autistic community, you are probably autistic.
- University of Washington Autism Center

This makes sense, right? It does seem pretty unlikely for a fully neurotypical person to do a deep dive into autism and conclude: “That sounds just like me!”

And let’s not forget that self-diagnosis is a critical first step to getting an actual diagnosis as an adult. It’s not like we’re proactively screening adults for autism. Who on earth would go through the time, effort, and expense to pursue a professional diagnosis if they didn’t already think there was something there? With broken healthcare systems, long wait times, and care deserts, it might not even be possible for an adult to pursue an official diagnosis, even if they wanted to.

Self-diagnosis can unlock understanding, community, and self-accommodation. Sometimes that’s all someone needs. When it isn’t? They can go on to pursue a formal assessment, and be better-equipped to navigate that process.

Lots of hand-waving is centered around question: What if the self-diagnosis is wrong?

If it leads them to support, I really fail to see the down-side.

But I think it’s just as important to ask:

What if they’re right?

I was scrolling Facebook one weekend when I came upon a cool video from the history center showing a musket and mortar demonstration. I showed it to my homeschooled son.

Me: “Check this out. That musket is taller than he is! What is that thing?”

He didn’t know either. After a bit of searching, we figured out that it’s a Wall Gun. On a neat site about revolutionary war firearms, we learned how wall guns were used on the walls of forts to shoot long distances, but need to be braced due to their size.

Him: “Oh it’s like the Streltsys.” (spoken with a decent Russian accent)

Me: “The whats?”

Him: “The Streltsys. Russian hand cannoneers. They had big axes for melee combat and they would stick them in the ground and rest their muskets on them to shoot. Look them up.”

I swear, this kid knows more military history than I do—and I know a lot of military history!

After some creative searching to look up a Russian name neither of us could spell, we found more about the Streltsys. Their axes were polearms called “bardiches”, and there are indeed many depictions of the Streltsys using them as musket rests.

Me (reading): “The Streltsys were disbanded after participating in an uprising against Tsar Peter, and a lot of them were executed.”

He wanted me to look up more about the Streltsy Uprising. Among other things, we found a deep-dive analysis about the painting “The Morning of the Streltsy Execution” by Vasily Surikov.

I read a bit aloud, intending to give just a quick overview, but he was enthralled and asked me to read the whole thing. We followed along as the author dissected everything from the symbolism of the white shirts and candles, to the architecture in the background, to the eye-line glare between the Tsar and one of the defiant Streltsys.

Turns out this Surikov guy did a “historical trilogy” of paintings, and we found another in-depth article about the third one. There we learned about the Boyarina Morozova, a Russian noblewoman. She was imprisoned and killed because she got on the wrong side of Tsar Peter during a split in the Russian Orthodox Church.

By the end, we’d done some history, Russian culture, art critique, reading comprehension, phonics (as I modeled sounding out the Russian names), and research techniques (reputable sources, search crafting, skimming, etc.)

Did I expect to spend a couple hours of my Sunday morning looking up Russian art and history? Hardly. But that’s the beauty of unschooling, which advocate Patrick Farenga describes as “allowing your children as much freedom to explore the world around them as you can comfortably bear.”

Supporting kids in those explorations is vital. Unschooling is not intended to be “hands-off lazy homeschool”, as it is sometimes depicted in the media. It is just a methodology that recognizes that learning comes in many forms, that all learning has value, and that people (including children) learn best when they can learn about things that are interesting and relevant to them.

This TEDx talk by Callie Vandewiele is one of the best explanations of unschooling I’ve seen:

I also love this one from Parkrose Permaculture:

I’m a hybrid unschooler, not a purist. I do think there are some foundational skills needed for adulthood. Also, keeping kids in the same general ballpark as their peers on basic reading/writing/math skills can help with clubs and extracurriculars. Still, our homeschool has a lot of flexibility baked in. It’s pretty cool just how far your natural curiosity can take you when you give it room to run.

Everywhere I look, people are sharing their year-end summaries of books, music, etc. While there is a part of me that enjoys looking back on what I’ve done this year, the whole exercise comes with conflicted feelings.

I shared the 5-star gallery above because it highlights some of the books I enjoyed this year. You may also be interested in the My three favorite reads.

Goodreads sent me a slew of other reading stats for the year, from my month-to-month totals to how far the pages would stretch. The latter immediately begged all sorts of questions—are we placing the books front-to-back like on a bookshelf? Lining up the pages end-to-end? Equating number of pages to meters? Inquiring minds want to know. (Or maybe it’s just me.)

Anyway, apart from some curiosity about their measurement techniques, I couldn’t care less about the numbers. Reading quantity isn’t some kind of badge of honor. The number of books you read is going to vary based on:

• Reading speed

• Free time

• Availability of titles that interest you

• Average length of the titles you consume

• Challenges like dyslexia, ADHD, or a million other things that can impact your ability to get through a book.

Even setting all that aside, these stats don’t tell the full story. Goodreads didn’t capture all the nights I read The Odyssey with my son, because that was a physical book. It ignores all the books I started and never finished. (Life’s too short to waste time on a book that doesn’t hold your interest.) From wikis to manga, there are a million different ways to read, and they’re all valid. (And yes, audiobooks count too. To argue otherwise is pretty ableist, IMHO.)

If you have a personal reading goal, more power to you. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your achievement, whether that’s one book or one hundred.

My only point is that comparing book stats between readers is not comparing apples and apples; it’s more like apples and bananas. We can have fun with it, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously.

I recently watched Greyhound with my Dad, a huge history buff. The Tom Hanks film, about a first-time captain leading a convoy of ships across the Atlantic during WWII, was a tense, gritty thriller. It got decent marks on our family’s historical accuracy scale. Not perfect, but not bad by Hollywood standards. It sparked an interesting conversation about the impact of historical accuracy (or the lack thereof) in historical fiction.

On the one hand, we have to acknowledge the truth inherent in the name: these things are fiction, not documentaries. Even the most faithful historical adaptations have to make sacrifices: often combining characters, compressing timelines, or simplifying the story so you don’t have to be a history professor to understand it.

On the other hand, there comes a point at which you’ve deviated so far from history that you’ve essentially entered alt-history or straight-up fantasy territory. Where’s the line? When does it become a problem? These are questions I’ve wrestled with when doing the Women in War Stories series on my blog. In this series, I highlight films, TV shows, and books featuring the too-often-untold stories of women’s wartime contributions.

In The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, for instance, the film gave Special Operations Executive agent Marjorie Stewart a more hands-on role in the operation than she had in real life. Was it fun? Yes, absolutely. Was it strictly historically accurate? No. But then, neither was the rest of the movie. The action was over the top, and many of the events were heavily fictionalized. A machine-gun toting Stewart was hardly the most fanciful thing in the film. Nor was it entirely far-fetched. There were plenty of female SOE agents who risked their lives during the war. (I covered some of their stories in my blog reviews of Carve Her Name With Pride and A Call to Spy.)

Ministry screenwriter Arash Amel told CinemaBlend, “Given that [Stewart] was actually training a lot of the female spies going behind enemy lines, it would’ve been criminal to not send her [character] out on a mission in the movie to respect and honor her...That’s where it’s acceptable, for me, to stray from the bounds of an absolute commitment to history because contributions get forgotten."

Another film that bends accuracy to highlight women in war is Pearl Harbor. The attack on the hospital was over-dramatized, but I appreciated that the film took a moment from its bombastic destruction to recognize Navy nurses. In real life, nurse Lieutenant Annie Fox was honored for her “calmness, courage and leadership” managing casualties during the attack.

Yet there might be a bright side to all this inaccuracy. In his video essay “My Unpopular Opinion of "Pearl Harbor", Dr. Jared Frederick of Reel History points out that even a flawed film like Pearl Harbor can raise awareness of historical events. In his middle school, “[teen girls] knew facts about the Pearl Harbor attack that they otherwise would not have known had it not been for this movie. They knew about the USS Arizona. They knew the date on which Pearl Harbor had happened. They even knew who Admiral Husband Kimmel was. Through what other circumstance can a 15-year-old girl know who Admiral Husband Kimmel is? This is the power of Hollywood.”

I really enjoyed Frederick’s analysis. Check it out on YouTube:

Even as someone who knew a fair bit about WW2 before seeing Pearl Harbor, it still taught me a few things. I hadn’t ever heard of the Doolittle Raid, and the film made me go and read more about it. I also learned a lot about the Navy nurses when I got curious why they gave Evelyn a Purple Heart at the end of the movie. (Early on, the Purple Heart was a meritorious medal. Only later did it become reserved for soldiers wounded in action.)

I grew up watching historical movies. From A Bridge Too Far to Titanic, they’ve always caught my imagination. And sure, sometimes they can leave you with some erroneous impressions. It was a long time before I knew that the kilts in Braveheart were a few centuries out of place, and I was genuinely crushed when I learned that the epic sing-off between the British and the Zulus in Zulu never happened. But without those movies, it’s unlikely that I would even know who William Wallace was, or what the Zulu Wars were about.

Historical fiction is the start of the story, not the end. I love historical epics, flaws and all. And if Pearl Harbor gets even one person interested in the story of Dorie Miller, or Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare gets even one person interested in Marjorie Stewart or the women of the SOE, I count that as a win.

The locations in Blackout Trail are all inspired by real places, albeit sometimes with some creative license. The pleasant little town of Tionesta, on the edge of Allegheny National Forest, wasn’t named in the story. Yet anyone familiar with the place would probably recognize one of its notable landmarks depicted:

Just as the sun was dipping down behind the mountains and Lily began to doze off against my side, we came across an odd sight.
​
“Who the hell builds a lighthouse in the middle of a river?” Mark wondered aloud as we all stared at it. The lighthouse stood on a tiny island, watching over the river channel. As far as we could tell, it served no useful navigation purpose.

I recently visited Tionesta. I couldn’t get a decent picture of the lighthouse, but I did snap the pic above at Tionesta Lake, which the characters encounter as they’re trying to make their way upriver:

A fork in the river headed east, towards where the creek intersected the North Country Trail.

Or so we thought.

Instead, we found that the east fork ended abruptly. A swirl of white water in front of a concrete face marked what I presumed was a spillway from a dam. The dam itself wasn’t concrete, but a berm of earth rising a good hundred feet from the river. Signs warned us to stay back from the spillway.
​
“That’s not on the map,” Mark groused, frowning at his laminated map. “It looks like the river should connect.”
​
“Well, obviously it doesn’t,” I pointed out dryly.

This exchange is based on a real-life conversation with my Dad. It was during an early draft of the story. I was telling him about the route my characters would take from the river to Tionesta Creek to the NCT trailhead. He said, “That isn’t going to work. The river doesn’t connect to the creek. There’s a dam.” Perplexed, I showed him the satellite map view. It sure looked like they connected. He assured me that he had been there; the Army engineers had built an earthworks dam to create Tionesta Lake. He was right, of course.

Internet research is amazing, but it does have its limits. It made for a fun little scene, at least.

Fun times!

I actually love doing book research. My search history is so random. At one point, Facebook was convinced I really wanted a vacation cabin in rural Maine (their destination).

This mug is my life: “Pay no attention to my browsing history. I’m a writer, not a serial killer.”

Anyway, in the photo above, you can see my sticky notes outlining key scenes, like “Airport Baggage Claim” (where Anna, Mark, and Lily first meet) and “Walking 279” (where they walk the highway near the airport). There’s a map showing their route along the NCT north of Pittsburgh, and detailed notes from the Central New York part of the trail (shoutout to CNY Hiking, which was an invaluable research tool).

I took creative license with some of the details, so towns and locations in the book aren’t always exactly where they would be in real life. But you can see how notes like “Townsend Creek - impassable and dangerous when high” could spark inspiration for scenes in the story.

EDIT: As of 2026, shepherd.com is now bookdna.com. I have updated the links throughout.

Some time ago, I came across the website bookdna.com (formerly shepherd.com). Like Goodreads and Storygraph, it’s aimed at helping readers find books that will interest them, but it has a few unique angles.

For example, the site is currently highlighting readers’ favorite books of 2025, and has a neat summary of reader surveys:

I submitted my three favorite reads of 2025.

Authors can curate lists like:

• “The best books with great autistic representation” (by Meg Eden Kuyatt)

• “The best books that realistically depict war without glorifying it” (by Anne Montgomery)

• “The best post-apocalyptic stories that don’t lose hope” (by me)

The site is still growing, so you won’t find millions of reader “likes” just yet. The interface is clean and elegant, though I wish it were a little easier to discover book lists relevant to you. They’re always adding new features, which you can follow on their substack.

Overall, I think it’s a cool idea, and I became a member to support their mission of helping readers sift through the zillions of books out there.