Category Archives: Methods

Writing prompt: “She watched the autumn leaves fall”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“She watched the autumn leaves fall”

She watched the autumn leaves fall. The floor of the forest must be covered in several inches after the last week.

It’s under there, she thought. She gazed at the sea of golden and brown leaves. It was tempting to notice how pretty the scene was, golden late afternoon light spilling through the nearly bare branches. But it was more like looking at a new ocean that had just formed, a great useless barrier in between her and her prize. How long would it them to find the city under this mess? If she couldn’t, would it be too late by spring?

Five years ago, when she had started the research, the danger of it had never occurred to her. Ants were nifty, clever little critters. Somehow, she still didn’t know how, but somehow she had changed them. They were smarter. They plotted. They got to things normal ants shouldn’t get to, like the morning she arrived to find the sugar-water solution in the next room down a quarter in volume. It hadn’t been her imagination, she realized, when the birth rate went up the appropriate time later.

Somehow, a week ago, a few had stowed away on her person. She wouldn’t even have noticed, except that somehow she’d killed one. What a shock it had been to see one of her hot pink ants in her pocket, the worst kind of smoking bullet. She’d traced her steps back to her cut-through home. Even her ants were remarkably camouflaged this time of year. Had they planned it?

People probably imagined that viruses or bacteria engineering would eventually wreak havoc on the world. But no, she shook her head; it was going to be her Technicolor ants. Maybe they wouldn’t survive the winter.

Writing prompt: “The rider approached from the distance”

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Time: 5 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“The rider approached from the distance”

The rider approached from the distance. At first, Ganya assumed he rode a horse. As the figure grew nearer, he realized the steed was mechanical. Its haunches glistened in the last afternoon light, but in the way of polished aluminum. The creature was utterly detailed in its creation, but stylized. The jointed were open, showing the workings of the gears. The mane and tail were composed of some strange fiber that floated voluminously. He guessed the fibers held static charge, creating this illusion of weightlessness and wonder from, for a human, a truly horrendous bad hair day.

Ganya had seen a few mechanical dogs, toys of the extremely idle rich, but never a horse. There was a certain implication of perfection in the fact that the beast was ridden. A person of such means would never ride something less that transcendently safe. Somehow, that more than the size of the creature, struck Ganya in awe. The mech dogs sometimes failed. This thing must be a marvel of engineering beyond his dreams. What he wouldn’t give to take it apart and look inside.

The rider dismounted and drew back his cloak. No, her cloak. The rider was a small, severe, but remarkable looking woman. In Ganya’s part of the world, women didn’t ride, nor did they possess wealth. Seeing the rider was female filled him with resentment. Surely he deserved this marvelous steed more than she. And perhaps with a little cunning, the shining beast would be his.

 

 

Writing prompt: “The secret to space poppies is harvesting the right part”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“The secret to space poppies is harvesting the right part”

The secret to space poppies is harvesting the right part. I should know. When teaching on Seti Beta goes to recess in the early summer, I switch to my more lucrative career, harvesting. The seeds contain powerful opiates, conveying all their medicinal and jovial attributes. The petals and the stem each have their own pitfalls. The petals have some quantity of opiates, but also contain some oxidized compounds which, in my opinion, lead to the having of a bad time. Unscrupulous vendors will include the petals in their product, knowing that the vast majority of customers don’t know the difference. I like to think that a more pleasant high leads to customer loyalty. The stem contains potent poisons. Homicidal vendors include them.

They aren’t really related to poppies, nor do they look like them. They’re actually enormous lizard plants. But they yield an opiate, and they have plant parts. Part of the trade is keeping the lizards happy. When they’re unhappy, they bite, and they can accumulate more oxidized compounds. I have three flesh fingers on my left hand, although at least I had plenty of painkiller on hand. Some say that the industry is in danger, with the rise of bioengineering and targeted therapies. This is why I support the rise of pleasure purchases. They are the future.

(This prompt is a bit scattered. I barely had the time to finish it during a lull in teaching in a crowded noisy room. But I really think it’s worthwhile to sit down and write on command. We must learn to accept that not all words we write are golden, but if we do write, there will be more golden words than if we don’t. As Wayne Gretzky said, we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. And perhaps, one evening when we think we’re brain-dead, we will write something that we love in the morning.)

Writing prompt: “What if the creatures in your decor emerged?”

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Time: 5 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“What if the creatures and peoples in your photos and paintings emerged from them?”

The man riding the communism literacy poster started to look unnervingly three-dimensional. What ABV is this beer, Edna thought to herself. Indeed, all the photos and paintings of beings had taken an on an odd sheen. Then the figures from the images emerged and stood in her living room. Some were fairly benign, like the Mucha women,  posing serenely, showing off biscuits with a bare breast or two.

Others were more problematic. The rider of literacy, 8 inches high but full of nationalistic zest, waved his torch menacingly and kept shouting tovarich* at her. Out the window she heard the cries of her neighbors and the wail of sirens. She glared again at the beer before running into the next room to seek her russian-english dictionary. Based on the sirens, this might be a situation she’d have to handle herself. She congratulated herself for removing that photo of the shadow vessel from Babylon 5. She wondered if it would count as a creature, but even miniature, such a thing would be a problem.

tovarich: comrade, in Russian.

Writing prompt: “The whirlpool sucked them downwards”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“The whirlpool sucked them downwards”

Aeli floated through the air. The parachute held her aloft, descending unnaturally slowly. Around her, the storm spun, and below her the sea roiled. Angry caps of gray water shot up. They came closer and closer, and she had the distinct feeling that they were reaching for her. Far off, she saw the ship descend in flaming glory into the sea. She would never know what had gone wrong. Blue and green lightning flashed all around.

She floated into the ocean, and the chute came down over her, trapping her against the water. She gasped, trying to pull air and the sea boiled around her. The water began to spin, with a strong clockwise motion. The whirlpool sucked her downwards. She contemplated if she did believe in an afterlife. Her sight began to grow dim, and she felt the burning, salty water enter her nose.

Something wrapped tightly around her ankle—something strong and something living. She imagined it like the tentacle of Ursula from that old Disney movie. The purple tentacle wrapped around her ankle, suction-cup strong, and pulled her down. She imagined she heard the fat villain laughing and peering at her ugly hench fish. Then the world didn’t exist anymore.

#

Aeli woke, coughing sea water, in a cave of crystal. Soft light filtered in from all around her. She was naked, and she was cold.

 

Science is Creative!

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In the US, science is regarded as valuable, but dry and a bit stiff. As a student, it’s easy to get this impression, studying rigid facts first explored centuries ago. The math, chemistry, physics, and biology we learn in high school and college are about recreating long-known answers by well-established methods. But the process of making new science and math is inherently creative, and new ideas require letting the mind run wild a little. In this post, I’ll talk about how I develop my ideas.

I work with populations of oscillators. The idea of this research is that the complexity of the whole (the population) exceeds the complexity of each element (the oscillator). The human brain is a good example of such a system–each neuron is fairly simple and well-understood, but overall brain behavior arising from the interactions of many neurons is not understood. My research tends to work by observation–I notice something I find interesting and I explore that further. Other researchers work on what they suspect they will find, based upon other work. All research works within the context of its field. There are many interesting behaviors I have noted in my experiments, but I explore the ones I might explain. Really random observations are cool, but hard to frame in a way which is meaningful to the community.

The above may not sound particularly creative. But the key to experiments like I do is imagining what might happen when one explores slightly beyond what is known. It requires extrapolating from the areas we know, in the context of the rules we know, to the areas we don’t know. Some of the rules we know are pretty absolute, like thermodynamics, but others may be flexible. (As a note on this point, the stable chemical oscillations I study were once considered thermodynamically impossible. Someone had to bend the established understanding of thermodynamics to explain these oscillations. Einstein had to bend Newton’s Laws for relativity, and he arrived at that conclusion by logic rather than by observation.) In an experimental apparatus like mine, thousands of experiments are possible. It is up to the experimentalist to pick from the possibilities, in the context of what might work in his imagination, to demonstrate something hitherto unknown.

In some ways, the process is similar to writing. There are rules that must be obeyed, and the process of finding something new or interesting is very indirect. With science and writing, I develop some of my best ideas drinking a beer or taking a walk. Sitting at a desk focusing is required at times, but so too is active contemplation. The rules of science are broader and more rigid and take longer to learn, but there are similarities.

A lot of historical scientists were fascinating people, akin to historical artists. Van Gogh got his ear cut off in a fight. Astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel. Salvador Dali shellacked his hair. Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon. Mathematician Paul Erdos lived itinerantly for decades. In one visit to a colleague, he couldn’t figure out how to open a carton of juice, so he instead stabbed it open (among many, many other oddities). Physicist Richard Feynman used to work on his physics at strip clubs. Artists may share their eccentricities more in their works, but I would argue that scientists have every bit as much oddness.

I hope this post illustrates a little what it is like to be a research scientist, and how science at the cutting edge works. For more science posts, check out my fun science list.

Writing prompt: “What if a disease that causes schitzophrenia became common?”

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Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“What if a disease that causes schitzophrenia became common?”

The man on the far corner screamed at the sky. Little Alicia pointed at him and laughed. “Daddy, that man is funny.” I pull her back from the curb harder than I intend to and she starts to cry. Somebody else will call this one in, probably. I pull Alicia and Tania behind me, against their protests. When they’re older, they’ll understand. I hope, I really hope, that when they’re older, this will just be another terrible chapter in history like the yellow fever of Memphis or the swine flu.

The schitz strikes men more often than women. The latest statistics suggest 5% of adult men have been stricken, and 2.5% of adult women. Nobody really knows why. Only about 10% ever recover. Unlike many more ignorable maladies, the schitz first struck in the wealthier classes. Scientists think it first became widespread through air travel. They say that the sickness doesn’t actually have a gender preference, but that businessmen are more common and thus were more stricken. I’m skeptical. The old disease, schitzophrenia, which this one so strongly resembles, selected for men. I’ve seen many of my old classmates go down to the illness.

I tighten my mask. Alicia’s has slipped down and she is fingering her nose. I swat her hand and pull her mask back up. The kids don’t see it, which is frightening and heartening. Maybe they will make it through these times not much worse for the wear. We walk, rather than take the tram, which is empty, back to the flat on the edge of town.

Writing prompts: “The child yelled at the monkey” Aug/29

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Sometimes I want to write, but I don’t have a great idea or I’m not in the mood to write something grand and perfect. I just want to write something. When I was working on my novel draft, I was writing 1500 words a day, and afterwards, I felt like a better writer than before. I learned to be in the habit of just sitting down and getting to it and worrying later.

I felt like I could do the same thing with writing prompts. I scoured the web, and a lot of what I found felt more like writing exercises than prompts– I wanted something to run with and retreat into a brief, if perhaps hastily formed, fictional realm.

So I decided I can make up my own writing prompts.

On different days, I can focus on different aspects of writing–beautiful language, or character development, or world-building, or economy of words, or plain weirdness. And I end up with a couple hundred words I can take and mold into something better, or that I can chuck. I do them on a timer, so far of 5-7 minutes, so I can fit them into any day, no matter how hectic.

Unlike fiction I intend to publish, I can share this with others through the blog. I’d love to see what others do with the prompts too. Just link me so I can enjoy it too.

 

Today’s 7 minute prompt is “The Child yelled at the monkey”. I’ve posted mine below, for your pleasure. I will post these at noon on Thursdays. (Edited only to remove several horrific typos!)

The child yelled at the monkey, and waved his doughy arms about. I looked around for this tiny miscreant’s guardian. About twenty feet away stood a man, thoroughly absorbed by his hand held electronic device. I watched smugly from my bench, safely out of the radius of any potential mayhem, eating a frozen lemon sorbet. The child’s taunts increased, and so too did the monkey’s rage. This culminated finally in the flinging of certain odoriferous weapons. The many-creased child shrieked and fled. The wayward father scolded him. I smiled slightly. Then the monkey looked me sternly in the eye. I didn’t think it could throw this far, but perhaps I ought to go elsewhere.

I wandered on, and again observed the husky child, his bright yellow shirt now tarnished with certain unpleasant organics. This time he leaned over the tiger pit. He waved, like he had at the monkey. The tigers roared and the air seemed to quaver. Maybe the child had a talent for enraging beasts. Again, the father didn’t seem to notice. He was certainly inattentive, but perhaps the rage of animals around his child simply wasn’t abnormal. Curious, I decided to stalk them a little. Every animal seemed incensed by the existence of this child; the polar bears, the penguins, the giraffes, even the turtles. I had read papers proposing ESP, a sort of ability to read emotions and probabilities. Maybe this kid had a sort of Extrasensory Irritation Factor. I had to admit, upon examination, that watching the kid made my blood boil slightly, and watching the animals hate him was exciting. Perhaps his father could only bear his presence by so dedicatedly ignoring him.

Editing

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Editing is a word I hate. I’m one of those people that always wants to be on to a new project. Bigger, better, and newer. Realistically, nothing I write is publishable after only the first draft, and this is true for most people.

Perhaps part of my dread of editing is that I’ve read very little advice on how to go about doing it. I try to write what I write as best as I can the first time, but then what? But it’s something I have to learn to do, so I am forcing myself to learn. Here are three of my approaches, and some links to some sights that have more experience than I do.

1. Maybe leave that small error in there on the first draft, if you are debating it. It helps you get through the writing faster the first time. I find it helpful to have a toe-hold of some error you know you want to fix, and then move into the manuscript from there. I sometimes feel the urge to make the first draft as perfect as possible, but I think for me, it’s actually better to leave it rough. This also makes it easier to take a machete to it where needed, since there’s less sense of loss.

2. Leave it the hell alone after the first draft. This is two-part in motivation. One, I love it too much initially, and it guts me to rip it apart immediately. And two, I’m more likely to overlook awkward phrasings or logical leaps if it’s still too fresh in my mind. For both parts, it needs some time to gain some other-ness.

3. Work top to bottom. Does the character change behavior inexplicably? Is there a beginning, middle, and end? Big, basic stuff. Then I think about things like pacing, and then about specific sentences.

Some links that helped me think about my approach to editing:

So happy editing? It’s a miserable process for me, but it makes the fun bits worthwhile. In every worthy endeavor, there are parts that are inevitably less than thrilling, but we keep going. I welcome any suggestions from others, too, since I am learning always.

 

Writing: engineer style!

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As I’ve mentioned a few times, I am currently trying to write a novel. It’s a lot of writing, and I have something of a history of starting and stopping projects. So I’m happy to report that I am still on the path and plodding along. Today I reached 23,000 words. I found estimates that trade paperbacks have 200-250 words per page. So that means my progress would fill 93-115 pages of a paperback. That’s kind of fun.

I am a mad procrastinator, but one of the ways I try to motivate myself is to allow certain writing related side activities. And because I am an engineer and a grad student, that distraction right now is…. excel sheets. Yeah. Below is a chart of my day-to-day progress. The slope gives my average words per day, so it can be fun seeing that change. When I reach a hitch, I get to go put my chapter’s word count into the chart and see what my daily word count is and my overall rate. What’s more exciting than fitting data?

writing progress

 

There are some websites I like to use as well when progress fails to appear. Written kitten is super cute. You get a picture of a kitten as a reward every so often. Because I need lots of motivation, I set it to every 100 words. If you need punishment more than reward, writeordie is quite popular. This blog had a decent summary of both.

I suppose this stuff doesn’t make the most exciting reading, but I hear it’s good to post about this stuff. Something about peer pressure? Plus since I’m writing all the time, I have less time to go read nifty things to post about. So, Happy Friday!