I’m in my last semester as an undergraduate now (eek!) and working hard to find something amazing to do next year. I’m looking at science writing jobs and have applied to a few graduate schools. It’s exhilarating and stressful at the same time–I could be anywhere next year, doing anything!

I’m going to the AAAS meeting this February as a student journalist, and I’m very thankful to be funded to do so by the National Association of Science Writers. I’ll be meeting other young science writers and I’ll be paired with a senior science writer for a day, so I’m looking forward to the entire meeting experience.

This semester I’m getting back into art with my graphic novels class. I spent much of my winter break drawing. Like Tom Baker here.

I already have a book idea–I want to write a graphic novel with history of science content. I think it’s a medium people of all education levels can read and enjoy.

Unfortunately the book is on hold, because I’m also taking Media Production 2 this semester. One of my projects for the class is to produce a science show. I think it’s about time for another fun show like Bill Nye. Here at Hope I have fellow students and equipment to work with, so I can produce it cheaply. I’m pretty excited about the show and will post more about it once it gets going.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go glaze a rum cake.

Raina Khatri and Laurie Halse Anderson at the DC ALA conference

This summer I had the opportunity to intern at the American Center for Physics once more, this time diving into the Center for History of Physics. It was, shall we say, different.

I blogged my experience once a week here: http://www.spsnational.org/programs/internships/2010/khatri.htm. It was a summer of reading, writing, and pointing lasers at pigeons. The final product of my summer toil, a historical web exhibit on space science, will be online in a month.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Overall, a good children’s book. Wish I’d read it when I was little. This probably isn’t a popular opinion, but I believe the Christian aspects of the book are the only drawbacks. But not because it’s Christian–in fact, it could have been quite well done as a Christian book–it’s the effect Aslan has on the characters. The instant the driving force of the story shifted from Lucy to Aslan, the book tanked, simply because the kids ceased to be active protagonists. The goal of saving Mr. Tumnus disappeared, and the book felt a bit adrift. I sort of wish Aslan had been more like Jesus in Ben Hur–distant and extremely effective for it.Until that point when Aslan took over, the book was very good. Classic elements of fairy tales shine through, and it’s an enjoyable read.

View all my reviews >>

We’ll see how desperate I get.

I’ve won NaNoWriMo five times. I know I’m capable of writing 50,000 words in a month. But, as always happens in late October, my eye twitches when I look at the calendar and realize November is close. Too close.

For me, the challenge is not the word count, but staying on top of the rest of my life. I procrastinate my classes and housework in favor of my novel, not the other way around as Chris Baty would suggest. I know some of you WriMos out there are the same as me; we live for this month. Homework doesn’t matter this month, at least not in our brains. In December, before exams, we discover how wrong we were.

This year, I have a plan based upon years of experience that should keep both my GPA and novel happy.

The Plan:

1) Finish large school projects due at the end of the semester NOW. I have a few papers that I typically would (and so far, have) put off because they’re not due until exam week. This weekend, I’m knocking them out. Yeah, they’re a long way away…but the bulk of time between now and then is NaNoWriMo.

2) Make a DETAILED outline of the novel. Usually I head into the month with a few notes scribbled on my class notebooks. This year I’ve made an effort to keep my notes in one place (Liquid Story Binder) and think the plot through. My plotted novels tend to be faster to write than the unplotted ones, even if the unplotted ones are more fun to write.

3) Strict word count regimen the first two weeks. I’m always the most enthusiastic about the novel when I first start it, so why not ride that momentum? Why stick to 1,667 words a day? I know realistically I can’t expect myself to go much farther than that, but the guilt in knowing that I should be able to do more will propel me forward.

4) Stop writing sessions in the middle of a sentence. I don’t remember where I heard this trick, but it helped me last year. When you stop writing in the middle of a sentence, as opposed to the end of a chapter or scene, you can dive right back in to the story next time to sit down to write.

5) Don’t write with people. Yes, write-ins are fun, but I know I never get much written, and neither does anyone else. We can talk novels after we win.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to focus on item one of my game plan.

I’ll add more pages as I find them, particularly tutorials and writing strategies.

Happy writing!

For the past few years I’ve used Q10, but this year I’ve been hesitant to do so. I was introduced to the wonders of Liquid Story Binder and yWriter last March for NaNoEdMo. As a result I’ve been bopping between the three, looking at pros and cons.

Q10

My 2007 novel in Q10

For raw, unstoppable word count power, Q10 is your friend. I love these features:

• Takes up the whole screen, so you can’t be distracted by your friend in your Gmail window
• Has a timer function. I like ten-minute timed writings.
• Sounds like a typewriter. You can turn this off, of course, but for some reason the typewriter sounds make me type faster.
• Word count goal. I like setting it to the full 50,000. There’s nothing like seeing your “percentage complete” increase as you write.
• Simple interface. It’s nothing but a blank screen (in the color of your choosing) and a small statistics bar at the bottom. Maybe that’s scary for some people (“blank page syndrome”), but it keeps me focused.

The only reason I’m not sure about using it this year is because I have a tendency to ramble when I’m writing prose. Q10 displays my story as a giant sheet of text. After taking a course in Playwriting and doing Script Frenzy, I know that my writing is at its best when I stay focused in a  structure of several acts and many small scenes within them. It’s hard to tell how much time I’ve devoted to one scene or another in Q10. Having won NaNoWriMo five times, I think I can move beyond the simple goal of getting 50,000 words written. My challenge now is to make sure they are words I can edit and work with later.

yWriter

My 2007 novel in yWriter

This is where yWriter enters my debate. It’s exactly what I need. I can keep my story moving with these features:

• Divides the story into chapters, and divides chapters into scenes. You can add a description of each chapter and scene
• Each scene is written separately, and you can easily go from one scene to another
• You can fill out a worksheet for each scene to evaluate it in terms of importance, which characters are featured, which locations and items are used, and other variables
• If you fill those pages out, you can make graphs of your overall story
• Character worksheets. You can easily keep track of all your characters and their information
• Saves all your files often

So why am I not using yWriter? Ironically, I haven’t figured out a way to view the book as a cohesive whole. You have to export it first and view it elsewhere, which isn’t terribly convenient. Yes, I need to focus on the small scenes and not get carried away with rambly prose, but it’s also nice to read the whole book without clicking between scenes. Also, writing the scenes in a tiny window doesn’t work for me. I feel claustrophobic.

Liquid Story Binder

2007 novel in Liquid Story Binder

This brings me to Liquid Story Binder, which I’ve been using for a few days to plot my book. It was difficult to get into this program because of all the features. But if you find a way to use it that works for you, it’s pretty neat. My favorite features are:

• The organization. All of my relevant files, characters and outlines and such, which would normally be scattered on several pages in several notebooks if I were plotting by hand like usual, are in a single list.
• Dossiers. All of my main characters have a detailed dossier with a picture and loads of information. It helped me piece together my story as I thought about the characters.
• Outline. My plot is looking sharp in one simple outline.
• Okay text editor. You can change the color of the background and font like in Q10, and you can set a word count goal. It also shows how long you’ve been working, which is helpful for people like me who need to remember to work on school work.

That’s where the helpful features end. My book is in better shape than usual for this time of October because I’ve had a good time putting it together in this program. But there are some serious cons:

• UNRELIABLE. I’ve had to restore my book twice now in three days. If you don’t back up often, you’ll lose everything.
• Confusing. I had to keep at it to begin to understand how I’m supposed to be using it.

So, I’ve been torn on what to use. I’m nervous having all my plans in LSB. I certainly don’t want to start writing in it; plans are one thing, but I can’t imaging losing my whole novel.  yWriter keeps me organized but isn’t pleasing to write in, and I have a tendency to get lost in my own words while using Q10.

My game plan is this: Continue planning in LSB. (It’s almost all done, I might as well.) If it weren’t so unreliable, I wouldn’t mind writing the book in the program. But it is, and I can’t. Because Q10 has never let me down, I’m going to use it again. Maybe this year I can stay focused on the story, because the outline is so thorough. Sorry, yWriter. Familiarity won. It’s not NaNoWriMo unless I have a timer beeping every ten minutes, typewriter sounds, and a purple word processor.

If only CeltX had a useable text editor.

Plausible. Quite plausible, and fun to ponder. But, unless time travel in the future works like the method in the Terminator ‘verse, in which you can only go back or forward  in units of whole years and therefore can’t exactly control where you show up in the past, the much easier way to stop us from observing the Higgs boson would be to make sure the LHC were never built. I would think cutting funding or stamping out support is far easier than disabling the machine once it’s built. Plus, we wouldn’t seek to repair the LHC and continue experiments if it didn’t exist.

The other problem here is the fact that, unless there is a causal loop involved, it seems the future has turned out just fine with the knowledge LHC scientists seek if the future has a time machine. The causal loop I mentioned would be this: sabateurs from the future have to preserve the future by making sure the machine doesn’t work.

But then, I’m a mere undergraduate physics and English major. And these were just two reasons off the top of my head. I haven’t actually thought any of this through. Maybe it would be better if we unplugged the darn thing and let particle physics rot, just in case the hiccups in operation truly are hints from a dystopian future.

As usual, there are four or five stories in my head that need writing. As usual, it’s perfectly clear which two of those will yield a final product worth my time. As usual, it’s also clear which one of the two would be most beneficial to myself and humanity. And as usual, I want to write the unworthy, unbeneficial option I’ve called “Project Opposite of Twilight with Robots Instead of Vampires.”

The book that I should write this year would be a memoir of my experiences in India. I would be able to use this for my memoir class and use the time I set aside for that class to work on it. It’s the only topic I believe I can write a memoir on, because it’s the only area of my life that’s changed enough for me to offer meaningful reflection on it. It would make too much sense to write this book during November.

The other book that I could write and rationalize pouring my time into it would be the second rewrite of my science fiction novel. It would count as a NaNo novel because I intend to keep nothing from the first draft. I tried to edit it last March for NaNoEdMo and discovered in the process of thinking “What is this really about? What are the true conflicts here?” that I seem to have missed everything that I truly meant to say. The story, while full of brilliant characters and a noble quest, is not the story I meant to write. It’s strange, but my characters have a much bigger story than what I’ve written for them. However, I’m reluctant to write this because I question how good of  a job I could do on it with all of the writing required for my memoir class at the same time.

So, why am I not taking the path of least resistance? I think it’s because November is my month of escapism. The year I wrote a novel for a novel class didn’t go so well. Instead of using NaNoWriMo to procrastinate everything else in my life, I procrastinated NaNoWriMo. It was for a class. The magic of willingly throwing time I do not have into a book diminshed.

For me, it’s also about escaping to a new world that I make up as I go along. Meeting new people that are products of my imagination and seeing what they do. I wrote a travelogue several years ago for NaNoWriMo, and while it was the easiest November I’ve ever had because I didn’t have to pause to make things up, it was also the most boring. I don’t want to write about myself during November. November is the month of diving into uncharted territory.

And so, for the next few short weeks, I’ll continue to have a bad feeling about November and every book idea I have. I’ll flit between them, feeling queasy, until midnight of October 31st rolls around and I start whichever one has the most favor with my brain at that moment. Wish me luck.

Marinara in a hurry: Experiment 1.