Robert Kroese

Robert Kroese’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan - home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade, he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. He continued to write in his spare time, and in 2006 he started a blog, MattressPolice.com, as an outlet for his absurdist wit. The Force is Middling in this One is a collection of the best material from that blog. Around the same time, Kroese was appointed to be a deacon in his church, and this juxtaposition of roles prompted him to create the character of Mercury (the title character in Mercury Falls) - an acerbic, anti-establishment angel who is well-meaning but not particularly well-behaved. Kroese lives in Ripon, California, with his wife and two children. Oh, and it’s pronounced “KROO-zee.”