Sylvia Patience, Author

It’s April Fool’s Day, but this isn’t a trick post. I’m sitting here listening to birds outside my window, expressing their delight (or so I imagine) in the sunny spring weather we’re experiencing after the deluge and flooding we had last week. Yesterday afternoon I went to the first session of a field trip style… Read more

Since the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan I’ve been having a mixture of thoughts and feelings about the situation. First of all, the loss of life and destruction is almost more than I can comprehend. And at the same time, I’m amazed that so many people survived a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Having experienced our… Read more

After my recent sojourn into the realms of physics, down to the smallest energy/particle units and out to infinity and parallel universes, I’ve just been grounded again by reading Becoming Animal by David Abram. It’s a beautiful vision of this Earth in (not on) which we live, and of the sentience we share with all… Read more

My interest in learning more about the idea of parallel universes led me to In Search of the Multiverse; Parallel Worlds, Hidden Dimensions, and the Ultimate Quest for the Frontiers of Reality by John Gribbin, a physicist and popular science writer. He discusses all of the above. Apparently the Multiverse is a widespread idea among… Read more

Thanks to my friend and critique partner, Claudia Finseth, I was recently reminded of the excellent book Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King. Claudia pointed out the advice on dialogue and it made me go back and look at the dialogue in the books I’ve written. Browne and King recommend that almost… Read more

Last weekend I had the opportunity to join a tour, sponsored by the Santa Cruz Natural History Museum, of some of the sand hill habitat in Scotts Valley. This was part of the museums Connect with Nature series and there are still three more weeks. Before volunteering at the museum I didn’t know much about… Read more