By day, Christy Noel is a senior hardware engineer. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children, ages nine and twelve. Work and family activities consume most of her energy. However, any spare time she scrapes together goes to writing, playing racquetball, and wondering about things like the curvature of the space-time continuum. She also has two feline assistants who critique her writing when they aren’t lounging in the sun.