Mary Robinette Kowal

Telemarketer: Is this Frameworks Wine? Me: No. (sigh) This is the cellphone of the wife of the winemaker. We have no idea how my number wound up on call lists. Telemarketer (Laughing): Well, I hope you’re out shopping and spending his hard-earned money. Me (very cheery): No, actually. And that’s an incredibly sexist thing to

People keep asking me why I moved to Chicago. Here, let me show you. My husband got a job as the winemaker of City Winery Chicago. He was the assistant winemaker of their first location in Manhattan. They asked him to be the winemaker for the new Chicago facility.  Midwest Wine Press did a feature

Sure, they are both tiny, but look how our little container garden is doing.

I just came back from my first mission for Zombies, Run! It’s a jogging game that was funded through Kickstarter. I loved the idea of the game, but until today it’s only been available for iPhone. Now it comes in Android and I love it as much as I thought I would. Basically, there’s an

I thought you might like to see photos of our kitchen. It is giant. To answer a question before you get there, the eye chart belonged to my great grand-father, Dr. George Robinette Walker. He was a general practitioner. It is glass and I have it installed backwards in the frame. According to my dad,

My brother does not text me often, but when he does, it’s always over something important and salient. Like this. Steve: Scalzi’s new book is fun. Me: That it is. Not that I’m bitter that you read his book before mine or anything. Sob. Steve: Is yours an ebook? Me: Yes. Oh the woe. The ignominy

I keep waking up at five a.m. and deeply resenting it. I spent twenty years working in live theater and firmly believe that five a.m. is one of those times that you should only approach from one direction, by staying up all night. I mean, it’s before the sun is even over the horizon. But

A friend passed this along to me.  It’s a board book of Pride and Prejudice for children ages 0-3. In twelve words. Here’s the description from the website. The bold is mine. Classics never go out of style—that’s what makes them classic. Cozy Classics is a new board book series that presents well-loved stories to

Continuing our spoilerific series of “Project in Depth” this week, we tackle Way of Kings. There are a lot of things that Our Very Own Brandon Sanderson can get away with. In The Way of Kings, he gets away with not just one, but TWO prologues. In this ‘cast Mary, Dan, and Howard get to

We’ve been careful about letting the cats out on the balcony unsupervised because there’s a window ledge next to it that seems tempting.  The other window ledges are over the balcony, like the one in the photo, but there’s this one that’s over a two story drop. Harriet stepped out onto it the first day, and

I went up to Wheeling to hear Scalzi read, which was fun as always. Our plan was for me to drive him back into Chicago, which is a good plan. I got him to Chicago with no problems and then… and then the travel karma kicked in. Really, I should have known. I mean his

Oh thank heavens. Yesterday the darn thing crashed and Would. Not. Restart. Oh… it would power up, but trying to get it past the “Windows is Starting Up” screen seemed impossible. Even trying the system repair route and F8 proved ineffective. So I finally decided to shut it down, go to bed, and hoped that

People keep asking me how I like Chicago so I figured, having been here a month now, that I should talk about my new city. How do I like Chicago? To start with, I should point out that with my travel schedule I was only here for thirteen days out of the past month. Yeah… Yeah,