I'm With A Great Woman

I’m going to break from my usual scribbles on here about games and entertainment media to acknowledge my wife.

There is that tired old phrase, “Behind every great man there's a great woman.” Well I don’t consider myself great, but I sure as hell consider my wife great. She’s not "behind" me either. If anything, I’m behind her.

Yesterday my last post on here up and vanished, likely due to some anomalous glitch on blogspot. All the links to the various communities I posted the article on were broken. I was having a small fit. To make matters worse, the post had somehow reverted to an earlier draft version of mine. The pictures I added were gone and the text was in its earlier unedited version. My wife, (an extremely accomplished writer and editor) edits almost all my posts before I push them live. Why I was not backing up these articles on my computer, away from blogspot, is a complete mystery my shortsighted brain is now recognizing as foolhardy.

So after realizing I had lost the edited version my wife, Kathy, sat down and edited my article again. As a writer I somehow manage to construct these half-assed, sometimes cogent blog posts on gaming, films, and whatever else I deem worthy of mention. She then edits them.

Kathy edits my fast writings and corrects all my thoughtless errors. I’ve gotten better over the years (comma) but she is there (no comma) always working behind the scenes to make sure my ideas don’t come off as ridiculous due to careless grammatical and spelling errors. Often times she points out that concepts I’ve written about don’t make sense and I’ll reword a sentence or two to make it clear. She’s not an avid gamer like I am, so her lack of gaming knowledge actually brings a mountain of straightforward comprehension to otherwise muddled gaming concepts. In my downtime I daydream of her writing the ultimate RPG handbook with me—one that can be easily understood by anyone. Cough, cough — Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I am looking at you! :) 

Kathy writes and edits science, language arts, and social studies textbooks for grade school and middle school students. We run our very small business right from home. Her accomplishments are many. I’m not going to list them all here as she’d surly distain the spotlight if I shined it too directly, but I will just give you a taste of what she’s accomplished over the years.  She’s managed to support this family in addition to putting up with me, my difficult and demanding artistic sensibilities, as well as being the most amazing mother to our two beautiful boys.

Here is one book she wrote for National Geographic a few years back…

National Geographic Kids Everything Weather: Facts, Photos, and Fun that Will Blow You Away. She worked on that book with the late storm chaser Tim Samaras, who was sadly killed chasing a tornado with his son in the spring of 2013. Kathy then received The Louis J. Battan Author's Award K-12 from the American Meteorological Society for her excellent writing in that book. Tim Samaras was also given the award posthumously.

More recently Kathy has worked on National Geographic Kids Ultimate Weird But True 2: 1,000 Wild &Wacky Facts & Photos! She wrote ½ of this entire book last year.

When she is not working on high profile books like these, she is tirelessly writing and editing children’s textbooks for various markets around the country. Both our boys have benefited greatly from having a mother so well-educated, continually working to help create the books that are used in our schools to teach our nation’s children.

Another great book Kathy authored was her children’s picture book, Flower Girl. The book was published by Viking back in 2003 and illustrated by Pixar’s Harley Jessup. The book is wonderful and Harley Jessup’s delicate and colorful illustrations bring Kathy’s wonderful words to life in a way only few picture books ever manage to accomplish. The book is still for sale on Amazon to this day if anyone wants to pick up a copy.

Flower Girl by Kathy Furgang & Harley Jessup

So I’ll end here with a simple and humble “thanks” to my lovely wife, Kathy Furgang. She is the great woman alongside this very humble and thankful man.