Book Writing
drorzel | February 6, 2014A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that…
drorzel | February 2, 2014Unless you've been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks-- or, you know, foreign-- you're probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt for the Super Bowl, NFL football, or just sports in general. This can occasionally be sort of amusing, as with Kyle Whelliston's "Last Man" game, but usually, it's just kind of tedious. The AV Club has pretty much the only necessary response, namely that Nobody Cares That You Don't Care…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 30, 2014Since somebody asks nearly every time I mention my TED@NYC appearance back in October, I can now confirm that I will not be speaking at TED this year. Which I found out the same way as everybody else: when the full speaker list for this year's TED was released today. If you're curious about the outcome of the "talent search" I was part of, the only name I recognized from that event was Zak Ebrahim, who was awesome in New York.
Having said what I won't be doing, let me mention a couple of things I will be doing later this year:
-- Kate and I are going to Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction…
drorzel | January 1, 2014I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn't done yet.
The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages (space-and-a-half) and 96,807 words. I don't remember the word count from the original contract, but this is more than that. Which is pretty typical of my writing, really.
Because I wrote it down as part of the final checks, here's the approximate table of…
drorzel | December 2, 2013I got some feedback from my editor about draft chapters of the book-in-progress a while ago, and while it was generally pretty positive, there's a lot of work to be done. Shortly after that, I realized there was a big and awkward gap in the material I had, which involved a lot of frantic research and (re)writing to fix, so I'm not as far along in the revising as I'd like to be. And since I'd like to make the original end-of-the-year deadline for completing the manuscript, for a variety of reasons, that means some intense work in the next few weeks. Which, in turn, means a significant…
drorzel | November 21, 2013I'm not talking about the tv show Eureka here, which was mostly silly fluff but not especially problematic. I'm talking about the famous anecdote about Archimedes of Syracuse, who supposedly realized the principle that bears his name when slipping into a bath, distracted by a problem he had been assigned by his king. On realizing the solution, he (supposedly) leaped out of the tub, yelling "Eureka!" (usually translated as "I found it!") and ran home naked, because he was so excited about the discovery that he forgot to dress.
As you know, I'm working on a book about the relationship between…
drorzel | September 26, 2013As I alluded to a while back, I've been accepted to speak at TED@NYC, which serves as a "talent search" for TED-- the top talks from the event a week from Monday in The City will get a spot talking at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver. I've got six minutes to wow them with a story about quantum physics and crossword puzzles.
I submitted my original application in response to a blog post back in July, more or less as a lark. I didn't notice at that time that the image they had with that post was a talk at a previous talent search event by John McWhorter-- I only spotted that this week, when…
drorzel | September 13, 2013I've finished a first pass through all the regular chapters of the book-in-progress (in addition to those in in this progress report, there's one more in Section 1 about antiques, and three more in Section 4, two about statistics and one about teamwork). I'm starting to do section-level proofreading, looking at blocks of chapters together.
This isn't a step I had to go through with my previous books, for several reasons. One is just that the smaller set of responsibilities I had then made it easier to find contiguous blocks of writing time-- SteelyKid was born after book 1, and The Pip after…
drorzel | September 10, 2013A couple of months back, TED put out a call for auditions for a chance to speak at one of their events. They asked for a one-minute video, and I said "What the hell, I can do that. I need an 'elevator pitch' version of the book-in-progress anyway." This is the result:
So, if you've got a couple of minutes to spare (one minute for the video, plus the better part of a minute for miscellaneous buffering/ network nonsense), check it out. That's as compact a statement of the core argument as I have.
And it was apparently pretty good, because now I get to put together a six-minute version to do…
drorzel | September 5, 2013The stupid Steven Pinker business from a few weeks ago turned out to do one good thing after all. It led to this post at Making Science Public, which quoted some books by Jacob Bronowski that sounded relevant to my interests. And, indeed, on checking The Common Sense of Science out of the college library, I opened it up to find him making one of the arguments of my book for me:
Many people persuade themselves that they cannot understand mechanical things, or that they have no head for figures. these convictions make them feel enclused and safe, and of course save them a great deal of trouble…
drorzel | September 3, 2013I started out blogging about books, way back in 2001, but somewhat ironically, I rarely post anything about books any more. My free time has been whittled down to the point where book blogging is time taken away from other stuff, and it's never been that popular here. I post reviews of science books that publishers send me, but fiction has mostly fallen by the wayside. As has fiction reading, to a large extent.
I did have a run recently of books with some elements that resonated with my own book-in-progress about scientific thinking, so I figure that's a good excuse to bring them in. The…
drorzel | August 28, 2013I've been revising a chapter on collaboration in science for the book-in-progress, making an analogy to team sports. And it occurred to me as I was trying to find a way to procrastinate, that while science is a highly collaborative endeavor, most of the popular stories that get told about science are not. There's no Hoosiers of science out there.
Now, admittedly, the sample of great pop-culture stories about science period is pretty small. But what does exist mostly concerns individual struggles-- the lone genius who can revolutionize science by just thinking about it in isolation, but who…
drorzel | August 26, 2013The list of editions of my books in character sets I can't read just got bigger: I got author copies of the Thai edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The cover is the "featured image" above (and I'll copy it below for those on RSS), and I love the goofy tongue on the cartoon German Shepherd. The bunny-squirrel-steak atom is also pretty sweet.
Of course, I can't assess the translation at all-- honestly, I don't even know which was the script runs. The pages are all right-justified, so I'm guessing it reads right-to-left, but I haven't the foggiest idea whether the translation does it…
drorzel | July 23, 2013I'm doing edits on the QED chapter of the book-in-progress today, and I'm struck again by the apparent randomness of the way credit gets attached to things. QED is a rich source of examples of this, but two in particular stand out, one experimental and the other theoretical.
On the experimental side, it's interesting to note that one of the two experimental effects that really galvanized the theoretical effort leading to QED bears the name of a particular person, while the other does not. Ask any physicist about the origin of QED, and they will almost certainly be able to cite the "Lamb shift…
drorzel | July 18, 2013One of the chapters of the book-in-progress, as mentioned previously, takes the widespread use of statistics in sports as a starting point, noting that a lot of the techniques stat geeks use in sports are similar to those scientists use to share and evaluate data. The claim is that anyone who can have a halfway sensible argument about the relative merits of on-base-percentage and slugging percentage has the mental tools they need to understand some basic scientific data analysis.
I'm generally happy with the argument (if not the text-- it's still an early draft, and first drafts always suck…
drorzel | July 7, 2013There was another round of the "who counts as a scientist?" debate recently, on Twitter and then on the Physics Focus blog. In between those, probably coincidentally (he doesn't mention anything prompting it), Sean Carroll offered a three-step definition of science:
Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an "hypothesis."
Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see "data" (or "evidence").
Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.
This isn't quite the way I would put it-- I'm an experimentalist where Sean's a theorist, so I…
drorzel | July 1, 2013One of the great frustrations of my intellectual life, such as it is, is the problem of the disappearing quote. This is a function of having acquired a broad liberal education (in the sense of "liberal arts college" not the sense of "person to the left of Rush Limbaugh") in a somewhat haphazard manner. My knowledge of physics is reasonably systematic, but for just about everything else, I've taken a bunch of classes, and read quite a bit of stuff, but never done all that much to keep the knowledge thus acquired organized. Which frequently leaves me in the position of knowing I read something…
drorzel | June 27, 2013The day I bought my iPad, as I was taking it out of the box, SteelyKid (then 3) came bopping into my office, spotted it, and declared "I want to play Angry Birds!" It's a remarkable demonstration of the genius of their product: not only have they created a game that a three-year-old can play, they've managed to make every three-year-old in the industrialized world aware of their product.
It's also a testament to my current obsession, the universality of science, and not just because you can use the game to illustrate physics. After all, the process of playing the game serves as a good…
drorzel | May 31, 2013For the last several months, I've been poking along on the book-in-progress in a very constrained manner-- basically, I get to work on it in three-hour chunks on Tuesdays when I don't have class (and this term, Thursdays as well). This is, as you might imagine, incredibly frustrating, though I do get some book-related stuff done in the evenings, mostly reading history of science books and the occasional textbook after the kids go to bed.
Other stuff ate up a lot of this week's meager writing time, and next week's going to be a dead loss, as I'll be at DAMOP in Quebec City, then my 20th…