Story Series

The Stories section contains accessible, topical narrative series written as small, connected works. These pieces explore scientific concepts through story rather than direct exposition — lighter in tone and more narrative-driven than the book-illumination posts found in the main Blogs section and technical papers found in the Research section.

Each series stands alone but is best read in order.

Farm Series

Narrative fiction grounded in peer-reviewed science. Short stories that explore genetics, breeding, and intelligent design through a farmer’s eyes.

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Recommended reading order (start with the earliest):

The Greenhouse
A Farmer's tomatoes do something his game-developer son can't get his NPC's to do. Story One of the Farm Series.
The Breeding Season
Thirty years of careful selection revealed as thirty years of careful subtraction. Story Two of the Farm Series.
The Fence Line
The farmer didn't set the fence. He can breed within it. He can't breed across it. Story Three of the Farm Series.

Canyon Series

A narrative fiction series grounded in peer-reviewed science. Follow a multi-generational Native American family who run a rock shop and river tour operation near the western canyon. Through their long-kept ledger and map, they begin to see what the rock has been saying all along.

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Stories in reading order:

The Shop
For twenty-two years Clara has been selling petrified wood with exquisite cellular detail. When her geology-student daughter comes home, the family ledger and map force a question no one had asked: How fast was this wood actually buried?
The Wash
A sudden monsoon flood rips through Alder Canyon, stripping a giant cottonwood, transporting it, and depositing it with its root ball pointing upstream — exactly the same physical signatures Nita and Ray later find in the giant petrified logs of the Sonsela Member. The flood debris and the ancient formation tell the same story: catastrophic transport at a scale far beyond anything modern rivers can explain.
The Bones
Clara's fossil inventory holds a secret she never saw: enrolled trilobites buried before their muscles relaxed, brachiopods sealed shut before their shells could open, soft-bodied worms preserved before bacteria could erase them. Her daughter calls it a taphonomic archive. Her grandmother calls it a cabinet of last moments.
The Ledge
At Blacktail Canyon, river mile 120.5, the family touches the Great Unconformity — a razor-sharp contact where a billion years of expected weathering left no trace. Above it, the canyon walls reveal a single fining-upward sequence from sand to shale to limestone. Ruth has always known the layers take turns. Now Nita can say why.
The Standing Stone
A family road trip to Yellowstone — and the first time Nita brings Michael home to meet her people. Seventy-five levels of petrified stumps, three centimeters of soil between them, and species from incompatible habitats mixed in the same layers. Ruth doesn't need a geology degree to know you can't grow a forest in three centimeters of dirt.

More series will be added as they develop.