I have a rating system I apply to all people. Mao Zedong might have a Meow Factor of four, but I like to keep my Meow Factor as close to zero as I can. This system is not to be confused with my HV methodology, where I assign myself a Hooray Value of ...
I always smile when I think of him, and when I see his doppelgängers I rubberneck to get a look. Then allow myself to dissolve into a serene, secret little smile as that feeling takes over. Is it possible to fall in love with someone you've only met...
There are billions of men in the world, probably millions near my age. Maybe hundreds who are compatible with me. Maybe at least a dozen who would want to date me. There's got to be at least five on the continent whom I could probably marry. So why a...
Well, when was five, I wanted my mother to let me go around and around inside a dryer with the clothes,” Clary said. “The difference is, she didn’t let me.” “Probably because going around and around in a dryer can be fatal,” Jace pointed ...
The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I coul...
I think we should all live the moment. But you also have to think ahead. You have to think, 'Am I going to be happy with this five, ten years from now? Is it going to let me evolve and grow, or am I going to grow to one day wish I had never done it?'...
Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, I didn't have a deep liberal arts background. So we'd go to lunch and people would talk about their favorite seventeenth-century poets, and I'd be thi...
My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of ha...
You can hear some artists, hear five of their albums and still have no idea who they are. But if you've heard most of what I've recorded, you know me. You go from 'Honesty' to 'Going Through Hell' - you can listen to the hits, and they pretty much re...
The Doctor: The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. And there it is: planet Earth at its height. Covered with megacities, five moons, population 96 billion. The hub of a galactic domain, stretching across a million planets, a million species. Wi...
Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market u...
I have been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). It's a terminal disease with an average lifespan of two to five years post-diagnosis, and scientists don't know what causes it. ALS prevents your brain from talking to your muscles. As a...
African-Americans assume I'm named after the notorious Soledad prison or Mount Soledad in California. Latinos want to know if I'm lonely. That doesn't fit, because I grew up with five siblings, and I have four kids of my own, so I'm not lonely at all...
I was in the gym five days a week, two hours a day. At one point, I was going seven days straight. I had put on a lot of weight, and then I started losing it drastically, so I was worried. It turned out I was overworking myself. My trainer told me th...
In 2009 I went up on the space shuttle. I was in space for 16 days and docked at the space station for 11 days. The entire crew did five space walks, of which I was involved with three of them. When you're doing a space walk, you always have a buddy ...
I have this wonderful personal chef who sources and stocks all my organic produce and I basically live on five smoothies a day. I'm totally vegan. I blend this green concoction with kale, cucumber, broccoli, string beans, avocado. My protein comes fr...
I would say things like 'I am the greatest! I'm pretty! If you talk jive, you'll drop in five! I float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! I'm pretty!' When white people heard me talking like this, some said, 'That black man talks too much. He's brag...
Although I could read before I went to school, and I won the school reading prize at five years old, my early children's stories came from the radio and watching films at a cinema on Saturday mornings in Australia. It wasn't until I was nine years ol...
I started out doing something little. I went to Africa to spend five weeks putting roofs on a building. I seen the small child that stepped on a land mine. Three months later, I'm back helping pull the land mines out. Little things just kept getting ...
Being in the industry, I've seen many situations where someone will get the call from the network where they say 'You guys have 5 episodes to wrap it up.' Then all your long-term story arcs gotta get wrapped up in five episodes because that's how man...
I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical dat...
