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Adventures

Adventures in Co-Authoring with a Sci-Fi Legend: Origins – Act III: Collaborations

February 6, 2022 by holojacob Leave a Comment

The Gordian Protocol Book Cover
The Gordian Protocol, my first collaboration with David.

Catch up on Act II here!

Act III: Collaborations

Naturally, being an author (a nobody indie author, but an author nonetheless), the concept of writing a novel with David Weber had crossed my mind. David is, after all, not only a prolific author, but a prolific collaborator as well.

I had given David some of my books at that first lunch, more out of courtesy than anything else, fully expecting them not to ever be read.

But he did read them.

Between those reads and our general discussions about writing, sci-fi, and science in general, David must have been impressed by something—because one day he asked me if I’d like to write a short story in an upcoming anthology set in one of his universes.

Ultimately, that anthology never came to fruition, but I still wrote the story, and in the process worked closely with David on both the details of the setting and how to improve my own writing. It was a very short piece, but David is an author who gets into granular detail both in the content and the execution, and the lessons about craft that I learned from this short piece and short interaction alone were priceless.

But, in retrospect, the experience also showed David what I was like to work with on a writing project, which ended up being more relevant than I ever expected.

As mentioned before, the first thing you learn about David when you meet him is that he’s intensely personable—he loves to talk and interact with people, whether they’re fans or not, and he likes to pay his tremendous success forward when he can. One way he does this is to find promising new authors to take under his wing—to teach them the intricacies of the writing craft that one can only get from someone who’s been writing for over thirty years. Part of the reason for this is practical—it brings new blood into sci-fi publishing and gives those authors a valuable chance to refine their skills—but most of the reason is that David enjoys doing it. Moreover, he enjoys playing to his co-authors’ strengths, too; he chooses co-authors who bring something to the project that he can’t (or at the very least, is less qualified than the co-author to do).

I occasionally see it said that David’s just slapping his name on new authors’ work to help it sell, and while that’s definitely true for some authors, it couldn’t be further from the truth for David. For new authors, writing with David is akin to an apprenticeship, and David’s fingerprints are all over those books whether it’s obvious or not.

All this to say, when David worked with me on that one short story, whether either of us were conscious of it at the time or not, certain mental seeds had been planted.

These seeds would not come to fruition until 2016. Around that time, I’d submitted a manuscript to Baen Books (the same one I’d been working on back when H.P. was recovering from cancer). It had been well-received, but was rejected with a list of fixes that would make it more appealing upon re-submission.

One night, all four of us went out for H.P.’s birthday, and I asked David if he’d mind reading my manuscript and providing more detailed feedback than what I’d received from the publisher.

David considered the idea … but then his eyes gleamed with what I could only think of at the time as gleeful mischief.

That’s when he hit me with it: “Why don’t we write a book together?”

I skipped dessert that night, in part because I was so excited I thought I might throw up.

David also had a specific story in mind for our collaboration. You see, fairly early in his writing career, David had submitted ten series proposals to Baen Books. Among these was Honor Harrington—the one Jim Baen selected—but down the list was an alternate history time travel story with a heavy amount of moral complexity. As time went on, other books and series took precedent, but that concept still lurked in the back of his mind, waiting for just the right circumstances.

Never mind that I once promised myself I’d never—ever—write a time travel novel. Good time travel is hard to write, and there’s endless potential for messiness and inadvertent plot holes.

But when David Weber asked me to design multiple 30th century societies along with their time travel tech, I decided to … reevaluate my earlier “promise” to myself.

The concept that eventually became The Gordian Protocol appealed to David as a collaboration because he’d wanted the novel to be not only alternate history, but for the worldbuilding to have a distinct feel from his other series. David could—and did—handle the historical elements effortlessly. The engineering challenges of the setting, he left almost entirely in my court.

And speaking of history, the rest is history. The Gordian Protocol came out in 2019, and its sequel, The Valkyrie Protocol, followed in 2020. And we have an exciting future planned for the series, including another four books under contract (three collaborations and one solo novel from yours truly).

The Janus File (coming later this year from Baen Books) takes the Gordian multiverse in a less … universe-exploding direction. (David decided that I’d blown up too many universes over the first two books and recommended we tone it down a bit.) Instead, we start off with a good, old fashioned murder mystery.

It was supposed to be a routine trip for the Gordian Division. Fly out to Saturn, inspect the construction of their latest time machines, then fly back.

But when the division’s top scientist and chief engineer are killed in the same freak accident, suspicions of foul play run deep. Detective Isaac Cho is sent in to investigate, but he has more on his mind than just a new case. His superiors have saddled him with an exchange officer from the neighboring Admin—Special Agent Susan Cantrell—whose notion of proper “law enforcement” involves blowing up criminals first and skipping questions entirely.

Despite his objections, he’s stuck with an untested partner on a case that increasingly reeks of murder and conspiracy. The unlikely pair must work together to unravel this mystery, and soon they discover their unique combination of skills might just provide the edge they need.

But nothing is ever simple where the Gordian Division is involved.

Not even time itself.

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The exact release date is still TBA, but until then, you can enjoy the cover art, which has already been produced by the amazing Kurt Miller.

The Janus File Cover Art by Kurt Miller
The Janus File cover art by Kurt Miller.

All this to say, I never expected a chance encounter at a small convention book signing to have such wild and exciting results—and I’m looking forward to what the future holds.

I’m also enormously grateful to David himself for taking a chance on a little no-name indie author. And I’d also be remiss if I didn’t say: I’m truly thankful to my lovely wife, for brightening my life in so many ways.

Even if I still don’t understand the whole cabin fever thing.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: baen books, David Weber, Jacob Holo, Kurt Miller, Science Fiction, The Gordian Protocol, The Janus File, The Valkyrie Protocol, time travel

Adventures in Co-Authoring with a Sci-Fi Legend: Origins – Act II: Monster Con

February 6, 2022 by holojacob Leave a Comment

Jacob's Well-Loved Copy of In Death Ground
My well-loved copy of In Death Ground.

Catch up on Act I here!

Act II: Monster Con

We arrived early to David’s signing, hoping to not only get my copy of In Death Ground signed, but also to whisk H.P. back home to safety and comfort.

This plan, as with many plans before it, did not survive contact with the enemy.

David had not yet arrived, but his signing was being hosted at a table run by The Royal Manticoran Navy—a fan club for his Honor Harrington series—and so, naturally, there were other David Weber fans hanging out, many in full military cosplay from the Honor Harrington universe. We began to chat about David’s books and the club itself, little knowing that many of the people we chatted with would become close friends to this day.

(Fun Fact from H.P.: It turns out that one of those impending friends was the person who suggested that Monster Con invite David in the first place, and he runs the shop that has since become the top supplier for my mild Funko Pop addiction. Which is to say, Jacob also owes this twist in his writing career to Richard at Richard’s Comics and Collectables, so be sure to swing by his shop and buy everything.)

The conversation soon swung over to books and my own aspirations as an indie author.

At which point, a member of the TRMN said, “Oh, you should talk to David’s wife.”

I was not keen on this at all. What business did we have disturbing David Weber’s wife?

That’s when they decided to drag us over to her table.

Surely enough, Sharon Rice-Weber had been hanging out there the whole time, chatting with the TRMN like they were close family.

I expected to say a quick hello and then leave, but one thing you quickly learn about the Webers is they love people, and they love talking with people.

We ended up chatting with Sharon for over an hour, well past the start of the signing, and nearly to its end. We chatted about writing, about the publishing industry, about the fan club, about recent surgeries—both Sharon and H.P. could sympathize on that one—and when it came time for us to finally break away to have my book signed …

Sharon invited us to lunch with David.

So … we set up a lunch.

Again, H.P. and I expected maybe an hour-long meal and chat in which David politely tolerated this weird, awkward fan’s questions.

We ended up talking for four hours.

Which proved not to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because David and Sharon asked us out to lunch a second time. And a third. And a fourth. And so on.

At some point, we ended up popping over to the Webers’ house for David’s homemade spaghetti.

And now I can say that I have eaten spaghetti cooked by my favorite author, in that author’s house.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect my wife’s short (but very frightening) bout with cancer to end there.

And, strangely enough, it didn’t.

Continue to Act III here!

My signed copy of In Death Ground.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Cancer, Collaboration, Collaborations, David Weber, Honor Harrington, In Death Ground, Jacob Holo, Monster Con, Science Fiction, Sharon Rice-Weber, The Royal Manticoran Navy, TRMN

Adventures in Co-Authoring with a Sci-Fi Legend: Origins – Act I: Cancer

February 6, 2022 by holojacob Leave a Comment

Signing preorders of The Gordian Protocol! Photo by Angi Clayton.

I’ve been writing with David Weber for six years—first on The Gordian Protocol, then The Valkyrie Protocol, and now on three more novels set within the same multiverse, the first of which will come out later this year.

Even after this long, the notion of writing with David Weber maintains a certain … surrealness in my mind.

David Weber is one of the authors who inspired me to write in the first place, and how many people get the privilege of writing with those who inspired them? There are still times when that aspect of my author journey doesn’t feel entirely real.

So here it is, the tale of how nobody indie author Jacob Holo went from that … to being “the other guy” on books with David Weber’s name on them.

Act I: Cancer

The story starts with cancer.

And, as my wife is fond of saying, “I do not recommend starting here.”

In the summer of 2014, we found a suspicious dark spot on H.P.’s leg. That spot ended up being a melanoma—the most aggressive form of skin cancer. Luckily for us, we caught it early enough that the dermatologist thought she might have caught all of it in the first visit. But with cancers this aggressive, it’s best to be sure, so H.P. went in to have the skin around the cancer excised and a lymph node biopsy performed to check for any signs of metastasis.

The good news is the operation was completely successful, and H.P. hasn’t had a recurrence since.

The week of waiting between the excision and biopsy results was miserable. For more than the obvious reasons. You see, of all the things H.P. likes to do, staying indoors in one place is not one of them.

For context, H.P. gets stir crazy on rainy days. I’ve been married to her for over a decade, and I still don’t understand this. She once went out to mow the grass during a tornado warning, with the reasoning, “The tornado’s not here yet, and I still have half an hour left on my audiobook.”

The excised patch on her leg wasn’t too bad, but the doctors had to cut through muscles to reach the lymph nodes, so she was basically recovering from a hernia that week. Walking was a chore at best, painful at worst, and required my help either way, which meant she was stuck on our couch with nothing but painkillers and me to keep her entertained.

Which, by the end of her prescribed recovery week, meant she was ready to go literally anywhere, as long as it wasn’t our house.

And by “go,” I mean hobble. Slowly. With lots of grunts. I wasn’t inclined to take her anywhere, but H.P. is stubborn, especially where cabin fever is concerned. And she isn’t opposed to playing dirty in order to convince me to go somewhere or do something (which is how we ended up with our beloved cat Nova, but that is a whole other story).

H.P. handles the scheduling for all our con appearances, which means she has a general working knowledge of all the conventions in our area. This meant she knew about a little event—the now-defunct Monster Con—that was happening close to our home that very weekend.

She casually mentioned this con the day before … while at that very moment holding onto me for support during a walk around the living room.

Naturally, I tried to convince her otherwise.

That’s when H.P. began to form her plan of attack.

She went to Monster Con’s website and brought up the list of guests, hoping she’d land on one that would change my mind.

She landed on David Weber.

I wavered—but again, considering her difficulty walking, I stressed her need to focus on recovering.

That was when H.P. put on a truly serious face and said:

“Jacob. You told me three weeks ago that David Weber was one of your favorite authors of all time. One of the authors who inspired the manuscript you’re writing right now. And your copy of In Death Ground is so well read we keep it in the cabinet to protect it from falling apart! WE ARE GOING TO GET THAT BOOK SIGNED!”

So … we went.

Continue to Act II here!

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Book Signing, Cabin Fever, Cancer, Collaborations, Conventions, David Weber, In Death Ground, Jacob Holo, Melanoma, Monster Con, Stir Crazy

Adventures in One-Eared Cats

February 1, 2022 by hpholo Leave a Comment

Welp, it’s been a bit since Nova’s initial cancer diagnosis. That and her initial surgery fell in the midst of the Monster Punk Horizon series’ launch, so there wasn’t too much time for blogging. 😮‍💨

But now that there is, I’m delighted to let you know that Nova’s surgery went well! 😄 Her vet reports that the cancer didn’t spread beyond her ear, and Nova’s so chill about it all that, frankly, I don’t even think she realizes she’s missing an ear. 🤣

At the very least, when I brought her home the day of surgery, she was interested in only one thing and that thing was food:

If you missed the news back in November, you can read the original post here, but the short version is that we found a weird “scab” that ended up being squamous cell carcinoma, and when that shows up on a cat’s ear, the treatment is a pinnectomy – that is, to remove the external part of the ear entirely.

It sounds dramatic, but according to our vet, it doesn’t affect the cat’s quality of life, and the only real downside is that the cat looks a little more … characterful. (As if Nova needs any more character. 🤣)

The surgery itself was back in early December and went as smoothly as it possibly could. (The whole vet’s office loves Nova, and she loves them. Sometimes she comes home with cute little neck-scarves from the vet, just because. 🥰)

The only real challenge thereafter came from the Cone of Shame that Nova had to wear for 10 days – though, given the designs printed on it, it’s probably more accurate to call it a Cone of Encouragement. 😊

Her first night home was amusing, partly because painkiller-high Nova is always amusing. She loses her depth perception, tries to jump on Jacob’s lap … and frequently misses the couch entirely. 🤣

Jacob and I were also serenaded to sleep that night by the relaxing sounds of Nova bumping into literally every single surface inside our house. 😐 Which was hilarious, but also ensured that none of us got to sleep at a reasonable hour.

The cone was primarily there to keep Nova from scratching her ear and thus tearing the stitches.

We thought she’d get frustrated by it fast – but we also neglected to remember just how endearingly manipulative this little cat can be. 😂

Within twelve hours of coming home, she figured out that if she dipped her head a certain way in Jacob’s presence and made a pitiful “prrt” noise, Jacob would scratch inside her cone in the places she couldn’t reach. Which meant that, for the next 9.5 days, she had personal scratchers-of-itches, which she exploited to great effect.

Of course, doting cat parents that we are, we didn’t mind being exploited – Jacob in particular. He pampered the heck out of this cat.

When the cone made it difficult for her to eat from her regular bowl, he just filled up a whole huge bowl with kibble and let her eat whenever she wanted. (We normally only feed her a small amount once a day because her appetite is as limitless as her charm, and in normal circumstances, she will eat ’til she barfs, then eat the barf. 😐)

Normally Jacob also brings out a special bed for Nova when we play Digimon (so she won’t lay on our card gaming mats) but she got to lay on the Digimon table that week, too.

She spent much of the week in general lurking under our bed, which is where she goes when she’s not feeling so well. (Luckily the cone could fit under there with no trouble.)

Eventually, though, she started chilling out in my paper trash again, which is her usual hangout.

And she was back to lurking beside me on her designated #bosscat pillow in no time.

Now that the surgery adventure’s over, all we have to do is be vigilant about protecting her thin-furred parts from sun exposure whenever she follows me outside on writing days – but fortunately, that’s easy to do with a bit of cat-friendly baby sunscreen. 😊

So closes another adventure in the nine lives of Nova!

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Author Cat, Author Pet, Cancer, Cat, Cats, Cone of Encouragement, Cone of Shame, Nova, Novabun, Squamous Cell Carcinoma, Surgery

Adventures in Weird Cat Ears

November 24, 2021 by hpholo Leave a Comment

Here’s your occasional reminder to GET YA WEIRD SKIN SPOTS CHECKED, courtesy of Nova. (BTW, if you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see these reminders more often, in addition to other stuff like more pics of Nova, plants, book updates, and whatever I’m eating/drinking that day, so if that’s your jam, DO IT.)

Follow H.P. on Instagram

Anyway, earlier this year, I’d noticed a weird scab on Nova’s right ear that didn’t seem associated with any injury and, moreover, never actually healed, so I had her vet take a look at it. (After my run-in with melanoma, we don’t mess with weird skin stuff in House Holo, even when it comes to our cat. 😤)

It’s a good thing I did, too, because it turns out that it was a spot of squamous cell carcinoma. 😮

Which is to say, cancer. 😟

However, the important and encouraging part is that we caught it at a very early stage. 😮‍💨 There are still some steps to be taken – a check of her lymph nodes to make sure it hasn’t spread, and essentially, the removal of that one ear to make sure they got all the cancer cells – but given how quickly we caught it, it looks like the worst that’s going to happen is Nova’s going to look a little more badass. (All the better for cracking the #catboss whip.)

It’s also worth knowing, though, that this is apparently pretty common to cats that have light-colored or thin-furred ears like Nova does. 😮 This particular type of skin cancer is largely caused by sun damage, so her vet told me to put baby sunscreen on her ears, nose, and bridge of her nose whenever she’s going to spend a lot of time outside ☀️ (i.e. when she follows me to the writing porch).

All this to say, if you have a cat with pale ears, be sure to protect those ears during their sun time, and either way, be vigilant about odd things that are happening on their skin. The earlier you can catch these sorts of problems, the better, and in these cases, a little time often makes all the difference.

ALSO: Nova herself is doing well, with no apparent symptoms other than the one scab we had punched out. She’s in good spirits and doesn’t understand why she’s suddenly getting more treats, but SHE’S HERE FOR IT. 🤣

UPDATE 2/1/22: Read the follow-up here!

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Cancer, Cat, Cats, Nova, Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Adventures in Card Collecting, Part 2 – Digimon

August 1, 2021 by hpholo Leave a Comment

In the course of rediscovering Pokémon cards last month, I made one other fascinating discovery:

There’s a new Digimon card game, which came stateside as recently as this January. 😮

Y’ALL.

Y’ALL.

Preteen me might have liked Pokémon, but when it came to Digimon, she was a straight-up obsessed nerd (like, even more so than usual). Pokémon was a fun show to watch, but Digimon had a darkness and complexity to it that Pokémon didn’t (at least, for the age group it was aiming to entertain), and there was a certain weird edginess to the monster designs that made it capture my imagination in ways Pokémon didn’t.

A lot of my writing from that period was obviously Digimon-inspired, as were the monsters I created for my own unique monster series, and Digimon stayed with me far longer than Pokémon did.

There was also a Digimon card game in those days – Digimon Digi-Battle – but it never took off like the Pokémon card game, and didn’t last very long. I’ve always lamented that Digimon itself never reached the level of success Pokémon did – it’s always been present, but never as popular – and thus I found the new card game a welcome and pleasant surprise.

So I resolved to collect it, too. Because 1) IT’S DIGIMON, and 2) the art on the cards is BADASS. While Pokémon continues to be made for kids, the art on the Digimon cards is clearly aimed at adults who loved the series as kids, with a respect for the target audience to match. I mean, look at the difference in the two generations of cards:

I didn’t expect to actually play the game, just because my main gaming buddy is Jacob, and he’d been indifferent to the Digimon show when I tried to introduce him to it several years ago. (Admittedly, Digimon Adventure – the Americanized version, at least – does not watch well if you have no nostalgic attachment to it and are first experiencing it at 40. 🤣)

However, when I went to one of my local card shops to pick up some packs, the employees were chatting about how well-designed a game it was. Knowing that Jacob enjoys analyzing rule sets, I casually mentioned this to him and asked if he’d like to play.

My goal was really just to use gameplay and deckbuilding as justification to buy more booster packs for my collection. 😁

But then Jacob started looking at the rules and deck options. 😮 And talking about how each theme color plays differently. 😮😮 And asking about the lore of specific Digimon. 😮😮😮

And suddenly we own all the trial decks and Jacob’s telling me to watch the mail for Digimon booster boxes.

I was already a card-collecting monster, but it looks like I inadvertently created a new one. 😆

The awesome thing about the whole discovery, though, is that the new Digimon Card Game really is a spectacularly-designed game.

Its basic rules make it easy to pick up and play; each color-grouping of cards lends itself to an interesting variety of play styles; and most of the individual cards are designed with such an interesting variety of functions that, easy as it is to pick up, it has the potential for a wide range of complexity.

That’s also one of the things that makes opening booster packs so exciting; while I’ve of course pulled cards that don’t mesh with my play style, it’s rare that I find a card to which I’m indifferent, either because of what it can do inside the game or because of its art.

To some degree, I’ve liked literally every card that I’ve pulled.

There are more than a few cards where I’ve gone “Oh, I’m going to hate facing this card in the game … but that is also a really cool gameplay mechanic. 😀” And often a single intriguing card or combination of cards will lead me to building a whole deck inspired by them. 😮

It’s been enormous fun to rediscover and re-engage with this part of my childhood in a way childhood me never did. Back then, I only collected cards and kept them in binders to admire; I never played with them, and actually getting into the gameplay side of things gives me a whole new appreciation for the hobby as a whole.

It also comes in an extraordinarily well-timed moment – when I’m about to release a brand new series that pays homage to Digimon, Pokémon, and all the other monster franchises I’ve loved since childhood.

But more on that in my next post. 😉

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Card Collecting, CCGs, childhood, Collectible Card Games, Digimon, Digimon CCG, Gard Gaming, Nostalgia, TCGs, Trading Card Games, Trading Card Gaming

Adventures in Card Collecting, Part 1 – Pokémon

July 23, 2021 by hpholo Leave a Comment

Several weeks ago, Jacob made the fateful choice to show me a random article about the insane state of today’s Pokemon card scene.

Little did he know what monsters he was about to awaken. 😁 (Yes, plural.)

I’ve been a Pokémon fan since age 12, when the series and associated games first started coming to the US. I saved up my hard-earned preteen allowance to buy a Game Boy Color solely to play the Pokémon video games and then spent everything that was left on Pokémon cards. My enthusiasm waned when I hit high school and decided I was grown up enough to put away childish things (😐), but once I stopped feeling so full of myself in adulthood, my love for the series returned.

To this day, I still play Pokémon Go like it’s that one week in July 2016 when the game first came out and there was such a sense of joyous community that we all thought Niantic had singlehandedly achieved world peace through Pokémon. (Ha.) There are Pikachus hidden all over my house. The Detective Pikachu movie was a high point of my adult life.

I hadn’t touched my cards in 20 years, though, and figured that, if I was to offload them, now was the time to do it.

For the uninitiated: Pokémon card collecting right now is bonkers, y’all. A combination of pandemic-inspired collecting (a hobby easy to do from home … especially with stimulus checks), scalpers rushing stores to buy up stock for sale at inflated prices, and all things Logan Paul have united to send prices for the cards skyrocketing. (For perspective, one of my comic shop pals decided to bite the bullet and finish his Pokémon collection last Feburary. At that time, it cost him $400 to do so. The same cards today, post-pandemic, would have cost him several thousand. 😳)

My collection was modest, but given that I did all my collecting during Pokémon’s earliest days, I knew I had at least a few cards that would sell well, so I started researching to figure out how best to price them for auction.

And Y’ALL.

Turns out there’s a whole card collecting culture that I was wholly unaware of.

Pokémon Investing, for example, is A Thing, and involves strategizing which sets, packs, etc. to buy and keep in anticipation of their value rising. (Which it absolutely does with Pokémon cards. Unopened Base Set packs – single packs, from the first release – can go for $200-$400, and even semi-recent booster packs sell for at least 3x their original market price. 😳) There are controversies over the ethics of pack-weighing before selling (because heavier sealed packs are more likely to contain holofoil cards). There are even card types from the generation I collected that I’d never even heard about – namely the shadowless Base Set cards, which are an early printing that lacks a shadow behind the focal picture on each card. (The shadows were added in subsequent printings to enhance the look of the card.)

All this to say, the more I learned about the modern collecting culture, the more it fascinated me, and the more I wanted to get back into it.

I started that week wanting to sell all my cards and ended the week ordering bulk lots off eBay and Facebook Marketplace to jump start my collection. 🤣

I don’t plan on being a hardcore collector. I’m in it mostly for the fun and sense of childish, nostalgic glee the series instills in me, so my collection’s basically going to be Pikachus, cards with art I like, and Pokémon with ridiculous, silly designs and punny names. (In accordance with this, my first goal is to build up my Perrserker horde.) Plus, frankly the idea of having expensive cards in my house stresses me out, especially given the frequency with which Nova likes to put her butt on whatever I’m paying attention to at any given time. 😬

My Perrserker horde is already multinational.

Still, it’s been enormous fun to return so hard to a hobby I hadn’t thought about in decades, and to find such a fascinating new branch of it.

But it didn’t end there.

This is where the plural “monsters” comes in.

Part 2 to come! 😁

***

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Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Collecting, Hobbies, Hobby, Pokemon, Pokemon Card Collecting, Pokemon Cards, Pokemon CCG, Pokemon Collecting, Pokemon TCG

Adventures in Dirt

March 23, 2021 by hpholo Leave a Comment

Recently I was at my local Chick-fil-A, on my way to grab some sweet, holy writing protein, when I saw a dirt pile from the drive-thru line.

This was not just any dirt pile. This was a grand 30-foot-tall mountain of sedimentary glory, and as I stared at it, an absolutely Pavlovian burst of happiness blossomed inside me. Fine memories of my childhood blasted out like fireworks manifested in clods of red clay and rocks, and for a moment, I sat in utter nostalgic bliss. 😊

When I was young, my grandparents decided to expand their house and, in the process, add a basement. Tiny me was excited about this – basements were magical places to me for some reason – but did not anticipate the excitement that would come even before the basement was completed. 

See, to build a basement, you need to dig a huge hole in the ground, and when you dig a big hole in the ground, you get a big pile of dirt. 😀

My family has always been creative. My grandpa keeps scraps of every material he finds simply because he might build something out of it someday. My parents live at home improvement stores. When we were kids, my sister and I would go with them and imagine all the tools and screws and light fixtures as weapons or magic items or enchanted whatevers and make up our own worlds in the family cart.

Which is to say, when we saw that dirt pile, something inside us exploded. 💫

Mom banned us from playing in the dirt. It was red clay. That stuff’s harder to clean off than blood. 

But our grandma was sneaky. Every day after school she’d let us play in the dirt, and every day before Mom came to pick us up, she’d hurry us into baths and fresh clothes. We had designated sets of Dirt Pile Clothes that we hid from Mom and cherished. 😁

Dirt is nature’s play-doh, y’all. And just as dirt forms the earth itself, we built entire universes out of that dirt pile. We shaped forts. We built castles. We packed a vague mini facsimile of Pride Rock that we pretended to murder each other on, Scar-and-Mufasa-style, ALL THE TIME. An interesting rock became the magical MacGuffin that drove the story of the day. I knocked one of my sister’s baby teeth out over that MacGuffin. Our imaginations were hardcore.

But then came the time to finish the basement and return the dirt to its natural place. And suddenly the basement was not exciting to us. It was a tremendous waste of a neat hole in the ground, and the stuff that filled that hole.

We buried our adventures in the dirt around that basement. 

We went to imagine new ones.

But to this day I remember all the magic we made from that dirt, and to this day, when I see a pile of dirt, I wonder how much of my adult creativity I owe to the worlds we built from that soil.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: childhood, childhood memories, creative, creativity, dirt, dirt pile, dirt piles, imagination, memories

Adventures in Mystery Pikachus

November 9, 2020 by hpholo Leave a Comment

Y’ALL. There’s been a mystery brewing in our yard today. 😳

When I went to see Jacob off to work at The Real World Job, we spotted a weird item in our neighbor’s yard. We thought it was just a leaf bag, but checked it out anyway to find that it was a random Pikachu beanbag. Because of its placement, we figured it wasn’t intended as a decoration, but left it and didn’t think any more of it.

Anyway, Jacob goes to work. I go to the porch to write. When I get up for my break walk, THE PIKACHU HAS MOVED. 😳 And it’s right next to my water hose, right around the corner of my house, perfectly positioned where I can see it. 😳😳 Which is SUPER CREEPY. 😳😳😳

(But, like, still a Pikachu, so I’m not as creeped out as I should be. 🤣)

So I go to investigate this thing. Turns out that it’s not a beanbag, but a giant costume mask…that is light enough to be blown about by the wind. Which proceeds to blow it across my driveway. And is a lot less creepy than anything I was imagining. Thus, by the Rules of Yard Wind, I now have a new writing buddy! #mysterysolved ❤️

Actually I’m going to walk the neighborhood later to see if it blew out of anyone’s yard, ‘cause it’s a really well-crafted mask, and I’d hate for someone to put all that work into it only to lose it. If it doesn’t get claimed, though, IT MINE. 😁

UPDATE: Mystery solved again! It belonged to our neighbors across the street! 😃 Turns out they’d bought it for their son’s birthday party and had been looking for it all day.

Also, it’s not handmade, but rather purchased online for what they claimed was an embarrassing amount of money – which is a super cool thing to learn about my neighbors. As I return their Pikachu mask in my favorite Pikachu shirt. 😄

***

Originally posted on H.P.’s Instagram.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: Cosplay, costume, Halloween, halloween costume, mask, Mystery, Pikachu, pikachu costume, pikachu mask, pocket monsters, Pokemon

Adventures in Yard Life

July 26, 2020 by hpholo Leave a Comment

There’s so much happening in my yard to distract me from writing today, y’all.

FIRST, a Nova story.

Nova gets to sit outside with me when I write because she’s generally well-behaved, doesn’t leave the porch, and doesn’t hunt. Outside cats can be a bane to songbird populations in particular, so I’ve always been glad that she’s confident enough in her food supply that she doesn’t feel the need to go for my yard critters.

Well, turns out I was wrong about that. 😐

It’s not that Nova doesn’t want to hunt. It’s just that she’s too lazy to hunt anything that presents the remotest challenge.

Which I learned when she zipped off the porch, snatched something from the ground, and sprinted to bring it in the house as it was cheeping for its dear life. 😮

Turns out she’d gotten her fangs on this little dude – a fledgling mockingbird who’d just barely left the nest in one of my trees, and hadn’t even learned to fly yet.

After lots of incoherent screeching and chasing Nova all over the yard, I finally got her to drop it. Thankfully, it was unharmed, if a little traumatized, so I left it in the shade with a bit of water and put Nova inside so it could recover without the fear of being eaten.

Then, interestingly enough, another mockingbird came to give it some attention. I’d noticed this mockingbird totally freaking out when Nova first snatched the fledgling. It wasn’t too cool about me being near the fledgling, either, so I let it be and went back to my porch to continue writing.

Over the course of the day, though, I kept an eye on the fledgling, and every now and then saw the adult mockingbird – probably its mom – hopping around with it, showing it how to spread its wings and do other essential bird stuff. Eventually mom bird finished her duties and flew off. I lost track of the fledgling in the evening, but I assume it flew off, too, and is now doing happy bird things like being in the sky and avoiding cats on the ground.

So, even though it started rather roughly (for the fledgling, at least), it was neat to see that little bit of nature’s cycle take place in my own backyard. 😊

But that wasn’t my only adventure of the day.

SECOND, when I sat back down on my porch after rescuing the fledgling, I noticed an unusual shape in my jasmine plant.

So now, in addition to a yard fledgling, I had a frickin’ yard snake to keep away from Nova. (Needless to say, she did not come back outside the rest of that day.)

This was the first time I’d seen a snake in my yard in all the years I’ve lived here, so after sharing some texts and photos with family, I learned that this lil’ dude was a rat snake, and a good snake to have around for pest control. 😊

He was a surprisingly chill snake for having witnessed all the chaos of The Fledgling Incident, and much to my surprise, stayed in my jasmine the entire day, despite being well aware of my continual presence on the porch. He was a surprisingly relaxing little presence, too, and I found myself rather pleased that, of all the local nature he could have chosen to rest in, he chose my jasmine vine.

When he was still there the next morning, though, I became extra curious. 😯 After all, why would a snake take ten hours of night and safety from humans…and still stay hidden in a plant very close to humans?

So I kept peeking out to see what he was up to.

Finally I saw him leave.

And slither into one of the vents leading under my house.

Turns out he was hanging out in the jasmine because he’d eaten himself too fat to get back into his home. He’d just needed to digest. 😂

I haven’t seen him since, but I do make sure that little vent is cracked open so he can get in and out.

And since he spent the whole day with me, I gave him a name, so now whether I see him or not, Sir Biscuit is part of my yard posse. 😊

***

Originally posted on H.P.’s Instagram.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: baby bird, birds, fledgling, jasmine, jasmine plant, mockingbird, nature, outdoors, outside, rat snake, snake, snakes, yard life

Adventures in Heart Health and Diets – The Sequel

May 24, 2020 by holojacob Leave a Comment

Well, readers, it’s been a little over a year since chest pains sent me to the doctor on my 40th birthday. 😐 You can read all about that fun adventure here, but given that a recent cardiologist visit gave me some good news, I figured it was time for an update.

The good news? I no longer need to see him for heart issues! 😄

Gif by @nerdbugs.

While it’s possible that there’s still a blockage, my intense adherence to my heart-healthy diet, combined with regular exercise and my prescribed meds, reduced the issue so much that it’s no longer significantly detectable. He still kept me on some of my assigned medications due to my age and family health history, but even so—it’s a real relief to find that my heart trouble was more lifestyle-based than medically-based. A lifestyle, after all, can be changed easily. A physical heart problem is more of a challenge.

All that said, though I’m going to allow myself some occasional splurges—which will be so nice after a year of no splurges—I still plan to stick to some version of this diet. Heart improvements aside, I’ve felt a lot better while on it and have even seen some wholly unintended perks like clearer skin!

I have to give credit again to H.P. for helping me stick to it. Her fascination with all things food—and finding tasty ways to emulate the yumminess of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods—has been instrumental in keeping me satisfied enough to keep up with it.

On that note, here are some other tasty, diet-friendly foods we’ve discovered over the past year, for any of you readers who are also aiming for low-fat, low-cholesterol diets:

Everything MorningStar Farms – Since cholesterol is found only in animal products, it logically followed that switching to a mostly-vegetarian/vegan diet was the way to go. The challenge with vegan diets, though, is that a lot of vegan meat substitutes are nasty, or at least off enough in texture to make them unpalatable. Enter MorningStar Farms. While we’ve tried a few products we were indifferent to (The pizza rolls didn’t taste pizza-y enough), most everything we’ve tried tastes exactly like the non-vegan equivalent. It’s insane. And delicious. The corn dogs, chicken nuggets, and various veggie burgers are regulars in our freezer.

A note about eating out on vegan diets: One thing we learned early on in this adventure is that, while a vegan diet generally suits our purposes, vegan dishes can be designed for one of two types of people: 1) those who eat vegan for ethical reasons, and 2) those who eat vegan for health reasons. And most non-vegan-specific restaurants make their vegan dishes for ethical vegans. Which is to say, while they use healthy plant matter, they also use high-fat ingredients like coconut oil to give the dish flavor—and coconut oil is one of the fattiest oils out there. That said, even when eating vegan dishes at restaurants, I still had to double-check the ingredients to make sure they fit on my diet.

Vegetable Stock – One of H.P.’s best discoveries was the flavor vegetable stock can impart to even simple food, like rice. For many dishes, she’d previously just used water since the flavorful (i.e. fatty) items would counterbalance the blandness, but once I switched to this diet, we found that veggie stock contributes a surprising lot of flavor! Now we always make sure to have some on hand. (H.P.’s brand of choice is Swanson, but honestly she’ll buy anything that’s on sale.)

Spice Blends – One afternoon H.P. got bored and wandered into the local Spice and Tea Exchange, and it was life-changing (so she says). It doesn’t take much of a good spice blend to make a boring vegetable delicious, and after some impulse buys of the most interesting-smelling blends, H.P. discovered a whole new range of dishes to make. The Tuscany spice blend is our favorite, but Vik’s Garlic Fix, the Smoked BBQ Rub, and Onion Obsession blends are close seconds. Also worth noting is the Popcorn Seasoning. We didn’t even eat that much popcorn before, but H.P. tried a sample in store (this was in The Before Times), and now we keep a stock of Skinny Girl popcorn at the house solely for this seasoning.

Skinny Cow Vanilla and Chocolate Ice Cream Sandwiches – These are on the higher end of the amount of fat I’m comfortable eating, but they’re also a yummy treat for my sweet tooth.

Tostitos Baked Scoops – Tortilla chips and salsa was one of my favorite snacks before this diet, but most tortilla chips were no-goes because to the amount of fat content. Fortunately these Scoops (and really, most of Lay’s Baked line) fit comfortably within my diet.

Hello Fresh – This doesn’t apply to all their offerings, of course, but I thought it worth a mention. H.P. signed up on a whim when the pandemic started and we were trying to limit our going-out. We’d only intended to stick with it a short amount of time, but the longer we’re on it, the more we enjoy it! There’s such a variety of meal options each week that it’s surprisingly easy to find meals that are on my diet (or that H.P. can easily make for my diet by switching out a few ingredients), and we haven’t had a single bad meal yet. In fact, since each delivery comes with recipe/ingredient cards, H.P. has started working her own variations into regular rotation!

Fellow heart-healthy dieters, what are your favorite diet foods? 😀

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: diet, dieting, heart disease, heart health, heart healthy diet

Adventures in Heart Health and Diets

May 16, 2019 by holojacob 2 Comments

background-balloons-birthday-1415557
Well, H.P. and I expected this spring to be an exciting one, what with the release of The Gordian Protocol. What we didn’t expect was excitement in the form of spending my 40th birthday at the doctor with chest pains.
Heart disease runs in my family (as it does in so many)—it’s one of the reasons why I’m attentive to working out and eating healthy—and given that my own medical history involves a regurgitant mitral valve, we’d feared this was a harbinger of heart surgery to come.
Fortunately, after a few weeks of cardiologist appointments and uncomfortable waiting periods, we learned that while I do have a minor blockage, it’s not severe enough to merit immediate surgery, and the effects can be thwarted by a cocktail of medications and a change to a diet that emphasizes low-fat and low-cholesterol foods.
Happy Birthday to me! 😐
On the bright side, H.P. is getting a kick out of the culinary challenge. I’m lucky that I have a wife who not only loves to cook but looks an unappetizing diet in the face and says “I bet you this wind chime that I can make it work.” (She’s really into this one fancy, expensive, tuned wind chime. I don’t get it either.)
The single most unnerving part of the whole experience was that, despite my dedication to my health and diet, the blockage had still grown large enough for me to feel its effects, and so comparatively early in my life at that. For me, this was a wake-up call, so being the engineer that I am, I decided to research potential diets and go all in.
I know I’m bound to have readers who are going through something similar, so I wanted to share my findings and experience here in the hopes that some of you will benefit from it, too.
By far the most intriguing information that I found was that from cardiologist Dr. Dean Ornish, who has published a variety of books on both preventing and reversing heart disease through diet and lifestyle changes. When I read that some heart patients who followed his Reversal diet improved so much they voluntarily took themselves off the heart transplant list (and then researched that claim a little more because really), it didn’t take long for me to go “Sign me up!”
ornishprogramThe book H.P. and I first went by was Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease which, among a host of exercise and lifestyle recommendations, lays out what is essentially a vegetarian diet with some additional restrictions, mainly against high-fat plant matter like nuts, avocados, and oils. Non-fat and low-cholesterol animal products like milk, yogurt, and egg whites are allowed, too. Given that cholesterol is found exclusively in animal products, the vegetarian-leaning diet didn’t come as a surprise, but I was definitely surprised that fish—generally regarded as a healthy meat—was excluded. This meant I couldn’t have sushi, which is basically a food group at House Holo. 😢
But I was determined to see this through.
Fortunately, the wide availability of heart-healthy foods on the market made it fairly easy to find foods that fit my new diet. There’s a trade-off, of course—nearly every low-fat version of a food compensates with increased sodium—but though I missed sushi, I discovered a whole new love for beans, pasta, berry medleys, and Greek yogurt.
And when I went for a checkup after a month on the diet, I found that my cholesterol had absolutely cratered. It was the lowest it had been in my entire adult life! Some of that can be attributed to my cholesterol medicine, of course, but it was also a sure sign that the diet was working.
There was another trade-off, though. A few weeks into the diet, my body began to feel the effects of such a dramatic dietary change, manifesting in the form of awful, persistent nausea. It was then that I thought it wise to take a step back from that extreme, to allow my body time to adjust.
ornishspectrumeverydaycookingThus I picked up Ornish’s The Spectrum and Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish. These focus more on his Prevention diet, which is less extreme and allows for a moderate amount of meat and fat. I’m still being cautious about the amount I eat, but now that I’ve put fish back on the menu (mostly in the form of sushi and canned tuna), I’ve begun to feel a lot better and think I’m on my way to figuring out a diet that’s more sustainable in the long run.
I’ll probably go back to the Reversal diet once my body has adjusted to the Prevention diet, but until then, here are some of the tastier low-fat, low-cholesterol foods H.P. and I have discovered.
Post Great Grains Cereal – H.P. and I weren’t big cereal eaters before this, but these cereals quickly became a new staple. They include nuts, so they’re a no-go on the Reversal diet, but they make a delicious breakfast/snack/dessert on the Prevention diet.
Daiya Cheddar- and Mozzarella-style Cheese Shreds – We’ve had some some disturbing experiences with vegan substitutes before (vegan sausage—NEVER AGAIN), but were pleased to find that this plant-based cheese substitute tastes convincingly like actual cheese! It’s on the higher end of the fat limits we’re trying to pursue, but it’s still excellent for satisfying cheese cravings.
Lightlife Black Bean Burgers – We loved burgers prior to this diet, too, and though this is too clearly bean-based to be anything like a good ol’ beef burger, it’s super tasty on its own merits. Franklin Farms’ Portabella Burger is a nice burger substitute, too, if you like mushrooms.
Skinny Girl Salad Dressings – Finding a suitable salad dressing was one of the hardest challenges of this diet because we eat salads all the time, and even the healthiest common-brand dressings are loaded with oils. These dressings, then, were a godsend because they’re the only ones at our local grocery store that are low enough in fat to satisfy our dietary requirements. (As an added bonus, they’re also sugar free!)
Yasso Chocolate Fudge Greek Yogurt Bars – We have to be careful with this brand because, though it’s generally healthier than other frozen dessert brands, some of its treats are higher in fat than we’d like. This particular bar, though, checks all our boxes while also allowing me to get a chocolate fix (something I can’t get with my beloved Ghirardelli chocolate bars because of the fat content 😔).
Oikos Triple Zero Greek Yogurt – I’d known about this from before my diet because H.P. practically drinks it, but once I started watching my fats, I found that it made for a nice healthy dessert, with a variety of flavors to keep it from getting boring. A lot of heart-healthy recipes also substitute mayonnaise with yogurt, so we keep a large container of the plain flavorless version for cooking, too.
Readers, what are your favorite heart-healthy foods?
***
Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: dieting, Dr. Dean Ornish, happy birthday, heart disease, heart health, low-cholesterol, low-fat, vegan, vegetarian

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