Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

My weekend had a bit of craziness to it, and not just because I was getting over a cold. I took an unexpected loop around my brain and ended up with some renewed writing motivation. And it was all thanks to my Number One Anime Nerd Girl of Science . Okay, some background. Kemono no Sou-ja Erin or Erin the Beast-Player was a 2006 anime fantasy series about a girl growing up in a world with giant lizards called "touda" and giant wolf-headed eagle creatures called "beast-lords." We follow Erin from her days as a curious ten-year-old in her home village, through various adventures until she ends up as a twenty-year-old teacher in her kingdom's beast-lord refuge. What struck me about Erin was that she's a passionate scientist through-and-through. She may be dealing in made-up science about made-up creatures, but her methods of scientific inquiry and deduction are real-world solid. As I've said before, if we had more characters like Erin in our f...

I needed a break, and I knew it. Between audit preparations in day-job land and the online class I'm doing at home, I needed a day to get away from everything. So a couple of weeks ago, I booked another trip to Santa Cruz Island - my third one, only this time I'd be going to Prisoners Harbor, on the border between the National Park side and the Nature Conservancy side of the island. Fewer people go there, so it's a good spot for solo adventuring. Things got off to a fast start, as we found a dogpile of sea lions on the buoy marking the Channel Islands Harbor entrance. Another sea lion wanted to join them, but couldn't find an open spot, and so it swam around the buoy barking loudly. After we left them, it wasn't long before we encountered several small groups of dolphins. Most swam by and went on their way, but a few came up to the front of the boat and briefly swam alongside. I was standing up in the bow, my preferred spot to prevent seasickness, so I got ...

I turned five years old in September 1969. It was just two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing and I was space-crazy, and my mom came up with the perfect birthday party game for me. She got a bunch of leftover boxes from our local grocery store, cut holes in the bottoms for us kids to stick our legs through, and decorated them to look like spaceships. Then she decorated the back yard with signs for the moon and the planets. At the party, we all ran around in our spaceships, going from one planet to another. It was great. The California Channel Islands are kind of like that, a set of eight little worlds just off the coast, waiting for you to go out and visit them. Only one, Santa Catalina, has any permanent civilian communities on it. Two of them, San Nicolas and San Clemente, are military bases, although scientific and archeological research teams go there as well. (The real story behind the book, Island of the Blue Dolphins , took place on San Nicolas.) The other five -...

I was heading back down from Santa Cruz Island's Montañon Ridge Saturday when I met a pair of hikers on the way up. I'd just seen one of the Island Foxes (the one in the photos below, to be specific), and mentioned to them that they had just missed out. They half laughed and half rolled their eyes, and said, "Oh, we've seen plenty of foxes." The Channel Island Fox is one of the conservation movement's great success stories. Fifteen years ago, four of the six varieties (one for each island they live on) were almost extinct, the victim of an ecological chain reaction that began when DDT wiped out the bald eagles that lived on the islands. Golden eagles flew over from the mainland and filled the gap in the food chain - but they eat land animals, whereas bald eagles eat fish. They saw the foxes as snack food, and the foxes, who had never had to worry about bald eagles, didn't know they needed to get under cover. The Catalina foxes also took an en...

Last summer, I fell in love - with the California Channel Islands. They've been sitting out there, just off the coast, for all the time I've lived here, but it wasn't until I took Emma to Carpinteria last June that I really took an interest, like the proverbial special someone who's been standing next to you all along but you never noticed. Now I'm hooked. I want to visit as many of them as I can, and I've got the beginnings of ideas for stories about them (my "literary 401K," I call them, since I could be retirement age by the time I get around to writing them). There's just one little, itty-bitty problem. Boats. Unless you're wealthy enough to afford an airplane, the only way to reach the Channel Islands is by boat. Well, they are islands, after all. I made my first voyage onto the open seas back in 2012 , sailing out to Anacapa Island and back with my boss and some other people from day-job land. I did okay going out because th...