Cyndi and I went to see the author of the new book PARTY speak at Changing Hands Bookstore. Tom Leveen was a great speaker and informative lecturer. He gave us super advice and a great tip about making sure your characters have an “actionable want”. We went home and started reading the book right away. It’s a story about 11 teens headed to the last party of the year (I still remember those days!). Read more about it here.

Merry Christmas! While our friends in the northern regions of the country are enjoying a white Christmas, here in Phoenix the sun is shining on the green grass. It’s odd, even still, to have a Christmas without snow. I remember the years as a child when snow fell on December 25th and how that felt extra special, like God was delivering one more gift.

Speaking of gifts, 2009 was a great gift. Amid the turmoil in the news and on Wall Street, our little world has been blessed. We had an unusually slow business year which turned into an explosively creative period of time. We focused on things we love to do in our spare time. As a result we honed our talents and created some truly spectacular things.

We went at huge canvases with exuberance and paint; we used our artistic skills and love for contrast to design garden landscapes; and the most significant development was our foray into creative writing. Now we can look back on 2009 and see our accomplishments. The paintings are hanging in a show at the University of Arizona, we developed a website/blog dedicated to gardening with xeriscape plants in the Phoenix area (www.xeriscape-today.com), and the creative writing has lead to my first novel. If 2009 was any different, we would not have been able to include these things in our lives. And we are thankful.

Now, as we look forward to 2010, we come into the new decade with a fresh outlook on what lies ahead. And as the sun shines on this Christmas Eve, we are thankful for these gifts and another great year.

Now in its seventh year of operation­, the Ceramics Research Center is home to one of the best contemporary clay collections in the Untied States. We are pleased to be chosen to brand their yearly conference. On display will be outstanding works by many of the best ceramic artists working today. On the schedule are tours of collectors’ homes and several nights of dining and dancing in a beautiful desert setting!

I have always been interested in how the world works. Yet while I contemplated a career in biology, I knew my free spirit and entrepreneurial bent would be best served in a creative field. I went on to get my degree in design and spend two decades working the visual side of creativity until I began taking my writing seriously a few years ago. All the while, the scientist in me lurked just below the surface.

Recently, my burning desire has been to understand as much as I can about quantum physics. I have read it is bewildering even to physicists, but I felt there had to be someone who could put it into layman’s terms. I was delighted to find a book written by physicists who taught a elective class on the subject to non-scientists. The book gives the history of physics and its main contributing scientists, plus it examines the quantum enigma—that physical reality is created by our observation of it. Fascinating!

“Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Schrödinger showed that it “absurdly” allowed a cat to be in a “superposition” simultaneously dead and alive. Einstein derided the theory’s “spooky interactions.” With Bell’s theorem, we now know Schrödinger’s superpositions and Einstein’s spooky interactions indeed exist.”

What I love about this subject is that with my understanding of the possibilities of quantum physics I can create more interesting worlds in my writing. Anything is possible! Of course I am not the only writer who incorporates the theory into fiction—entire genres are based on it—yet I feel I have observed things that will be interesting to write about.

If you have ever wondered about the science of the small, I highly recommend this read. Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness is for the science geek in all of us.