Trivia & Update

If you’ve read through the Raven of Iskandar series, you may have noticed a running joke about the names of female twitteralls.

In short, in the novels, twitteralls are a human-like species that look totally human except for having feathers on their heads instead of hair. Their origin is unknown as they are found on many planets and there doesn’t seem to be a ‘planet Twitt’. As least not in the stories….

Twitteralls are massively efficient, so they are found in large numbers wherever data has to be kept. Since their names are atrociously long, they tend to ‘galactize’ their names. Thus you encounter a lot of female twitteralls named ‘Amanda’.

While this is a cute mild joke (Malinda, a twitterall you will meet in Book 6, remarks that she likes to be called Malinda in Galact as she already has three sisters that go by Amanda), there’s actually a real life situation that this story evolved from.

Back around the turn of the century (I always wanted to say that), was the only time I was laid-off from work without a place to go to immediately. My wife and I had been doing foster care, we had a license with the state, but at that time we did not have any kids. Generally we took younger kids, not older than 6 or 7.

To help out with the finances, my wife decided that we should take a teenager and very quickly a 14 year old named Amanda was deposited at our house. A week later, the state called and asked if we could take another teenage girl. And, you guess it, her name was Amanda also. As if that wasn’t enough, two weeks after that, the state asked us to take a third teenage girl–which we didn’t–and, you guessed it, her name was Amanda also.

About that time, the movie ‘The Fifth Element’ had just come out in theaters, so I joked that if we kept it up, we could have made a movie called ‘The Fifth Amanda’.

Now for the update: Book 6 ‘All-Star’ is now over 65,000 words. I’m making progress, but it is going a bit slow. I probably have another 5,000 words in chapters that haven’t been added yet.

And now another cartoon. This time it’s from Dilbert and I’m dedicating it to Al Fabrizi.