When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.
So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.
Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.
It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.
I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.