Matters of Life and Death

The third collection of short stories from the future history that is Machine Civilization. Eleven stories of people getting on with life. Angels and demons. Life and death. The banality of politics and the pleasure of going shopping at the farmers' market.
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All the people of the Machine Civilization, whether human, demi-human or Machine, on this world or off it, struggle to overcome challenges major or mundane.

One-time design engineer, some-time pharmacy technician, full-time father and writer. Clayton Barnett continues to reinvent himself even into his dotage. Having tried his hand at writing visual novels a couple of years before, he thought that was all over. However, when unexpectedly confronted by National Novel Writing Month of November 2014... a throw-away line from Prof. Glenn Reynolds of UTenn-Knoxville linked with an image of Hatsune Miku in Clayton's mind, and he was off. Twenty three days later, he'd his first novel, "The Fourth Law."
Liking the people he met there, he set another irrational deadline and wrote some more of what is now called the Machine Civilization future history. That turned into his second novel, "Echoes of Family Lost." For NaNoWriMo 2015, he began "Crosses and Doublecrosses," a political-espionage thriller, but was thwarted by the genre and his wife's diagnosis of lymphoma. To give himself something to do and exercise his mind, he wrote the free webnovel, "Defiant."
With his best friend now in remission, he turned towards something lighter and untried: a children's book! Scouring the internet for an illustrator, he reached out to Claudia Gadotti in New Zealand for his most recent addition, "Henge's Big Day!"
To-date, Clayton has written and published twenty books in ten years.
Clayton lives in central Ohio with his wife and and various animals, with his two daughters now grown and out pursuing their lives.