Here's a blog post I did for the lovely Janice Gable Bashman, coauthor (with Jonathan Maberry) of WANTED: UNDEAD OR ALIVE. It's about how having fun and watching TV and movies has helped me be a better writer.
When I was growing up, my mom would let us know when—in her view—we’d had too much fun. My brothers and sisters and I jokingly called it TMF or “exceeding the fun quotient.”
Mom used to feel the TV for telltale signs of warmth when she came home from the grocery store, and she instructed me on many occasions to “get my nose out of that book” and into, say, the garden, which needed weeding.
In the entirety of my childhood, I saw three movies in the theater: STAR WARS, ET, and THE GOODBYE GIRL (twice, for some reason). Any more was TMF.