About the Author

M. R. Boucher writes with historical accuracy.

I've spent my life in two worlds that had no business meeting — until they did.

The first was machines. I did four years in the Air Force maintaining and repairing missile guidance systems, deep in the silo. The silo was quiet, and quiet is good for a writer, so between checks I wrote science fiction. Two of those stories sold to Asimov's Science Fiction — still one of the proudest surprises of my life.

Machines kept paying the bills. I ran a DEC PDP‑11 spectrometer in a plastics lab, learned to keep the thing alive, and wrote microcode to automate our color QA. When the first home computers arrived I was all in: a TRS‑80 running a dating service I coded in BASIC and assembly, then an Apple II, a Commodore 64, and a side hustle fixing the machines my neighbors kept breaking. When the IBM PC landed I made a career of it — repairing PCs and copiers, wiring up some of the earliest Novell networks, and eventually building corporate networking and storage systems.

The second world found me later, on the SciFi Channel of all places. I stumbled onto anime in the mid‑90s and fell hard — first the shows, then the history and culture underneath them. By the early 2000s I was living in Japan on and off. I met my wife there twenty‑two years ago; we've been married twenty. We go back often, and we've worn out our share of Shinkansen seats chasing castles, shrines, temples, and museums across every main island. I speak Japanese — badly, my wife would want me to add.

The Reality Meld Saga is what happens when those two worlds finally collide: the Japan I've spent decades walking through, and the machines I've spent a lifetime taking apart. Feudal history, hard science, and the thin, fracturing seam between them.

Tsumugi Publishing — named for the art of weaving thread into cloth — is the imprint through which those stories reach readers, unhurried and whole.