Spooky

Happy Halloween! A whole month has gone by and I haven’t written a thing here on Gydle. It’s not the funk, thank goodness, that has passed. I’m back in the saddle, writing away. I had a very relaxing vacation and knitted a pair of mittens. I am now a mitten-knitter, something to which I have always aspired.

Today as I was driving, I caught a snippet of one of my favorite TED talks, the one in which Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray, Love” fame talks about the nature of genius and the dark side of success. I quoted her talk a while ago in a post on Inspiration.

I took it as a sign.

The important thing about the creative process, she says, is showing up day after day. You have to do your part, and trust that whatever inspiration or creative genius or whatever you want to call it will come and visit you at some point. You have to make the choice to put yourself out there and create something. Continue reading

A race well run

I know you’re all dying of anticipation. Did she make it? Did she make the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal?

Nope. I didn’t. I maxed out at 45,137. I just couldn’t pop out another word. My brain circuits shut down. I poured a glass of Bailey’s and called it a night at 10:30.

I could have forced the issue. I could have just typed away, oblivious to the actual content of what I was typing, but as much as I like editing, that didn’t really seem like the point to me. I felt like the exercise had served its purpose.

Here’s why:

  • It forced me to get started on the project. It won’t ever happen unless you actually start the writing.
  • It forced me to keep moving forward. You can’t afford to waste valuable time editing already written words when you’ve got ideas flowing. My typical approach is to write, and then obsessively edit, everything. I had to change that.
  • It forced me to take the project seriously. I’m not going to spend that kind of time and effort on something that never goes anywhere. I’m going to see this thing through!
  • It forced me to get organized; I have to keep all those words easily accessible in case I need to go back and check something.
  • It forced me to pay attention to setting aside time every day for my own writing, no matter how heavy my workload of remunerative translating and editing was. It’s only going to go forward if you spend time on it. Those words piling up (or not) are vivid proof of that.

I’d say that in terms of the novel, I’m about halfway done. I’m really starting to get to know some of these characters. I had to change the plot because I couldn’t imagine my Swiss post-doc being evil at heart. I like him too much. I’m hooked.

I’m going to take a couple of days off, and then get back to work. Next week I have some interviews set up with people to get a handle on some of the scientific and technical details.

I’ll also be able to get back to the blog, and some gripping stuff I want to write about cognitive biases (I did slip one in just a couple of days ago, in case you didn’t catch it) and mice.

Keyframing

It’s the last day of November. I have less than 12 hours to go on the NaNoWriMo challenge. In a last desperate bid to hit 50,000 words, I’m going to keep on writing all day, with just this little break to keep the blog alive. I’m still under 45,000, so it’s a stretch. Speaking of stretch, Thanksgiving was way too much eating and not nearly enough writing.

Once again, I could take a lesson from Smokey. Look at him. He’s just lying there, I’m standing right above him with the camera, and he doesn’t even budge. In fact, after I took the picture, he calmly turned his head away and closed his eyes again. I need some of that focus!

Continue reading

Yawn

DucreuxyawnMonday afternoon, I couldn’t stop yawning. Sure, I was tired – I’ve been writing thousands of words a day on top of endless little bits and pieces of translating that keep dribbling in – but this was unusual. Later that afternoon, I saw this:

Yawning may no longer be a wide open question

Worth a click. I wasn’t aware that yawning was one of the great unsolved problems of science.

A dentist from the University of Maryland School of Dentistry (Gary Hack) and a Princeton postdoc (Andrew Gallup) claim that we don’t yawn because we’re tired, sleepy, or need more oxygen.

No, they say, we yawn in order to cool down our brains. Continue reading

Spiraling down the double helix

It’s almost mid-month.  I’m at about 19,000 words, about 3,000 words behind my carefully calculated NaNoWriMo goal. (I’ve made an excel spreadsheet). I took my blood pressure yesterday and realized that stressing about keeping up with my self-imposed word count is not helping anything. In fact, my scientific approach to this endeavor – just 2,000 words a day, gives me 5 days off – is totally ludicrous. Creativity doesn’t work like that. I should know better.

Take yesterday. The central theme of my plot involves people researching induced pluripotent stem cells. Informing myself on this seemed the sensible thing to do, so I started reading. Now, I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that the topic of stem cells has been around forever. But did you know that human embryonic stem cells were only discovered in 1998? We’ve only known about these suckers for a dozen years? Continue reading

Serendipity

Just as I walked up to the metro on Saturday, the doors shut in my face. I was literally one second too late.

Damn. Steamed. I’d been working in the Starbuck’s on the Place St. Francois for the last couple of hours. Yes, I know, Starbuck’s is a big, evil chain store that sells sub-par coffee for over-par prices and manipulates people with all kinds of marketing gimmicks. But it’s the only coffee shop I know of around here where I can get out of my head and into my writing properly. If I stay at home on the weekend I’m constantly being asked for food by the resident teenagers or feeling like I ought to be doing laundry, and I can’t get anything done.

See, in a place like Starbuck’s there are a lot of distractions. Babies crying, background music, other people working and talking, low lighting, lots of people coming and going. So many distractions, in fact, that I have no choice but to tune them all out and concentrate fully on the task at hand. And Starbuck’s, evil as it may be, does have one thing figured out: how to leave you alone and not make you feel guilty for taking up space. It’s like the Apple store I went to in Albuquerque, where the Japanese guy was just working away at one of the demo computers and nobody minded. I appreciate that.

Plus I secretly want to be J. K. Rowling.

I’ve always liked writing in the midst of chaos. In college, I wrote all my essays parked in a coffee shop near campus, drinking foamy lattes and eating chocolate chip cookies. Back then, in the dark ages, that meant writing by hand on a pad of paper, like in the picture at the top of the post. Now, with a laptop, it’s so much more efficient! As long as there’s a plug and tons of distractions, I can go into my zone. When I found out J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter in a coffee shop, it clicked. Someday I, too, would write a blockbuster in a coffee shop.

So there you have it, people. It’s finally happening.

Anyway, back to the metro. The monitor said the next one wouldn’t be there for 12 minutes, so I went into the news shop in the metro station and browsed the magazines. I took down the Economist, put it back. I can’t read it, it’s too dense and I object philosophically to the absence of bylines. Wired  was really tempting. Then I caught a glimpse of the Technology Review hiding on a shelf behind. I pulled it out and looked at the cover.

Oh. My. God.

There on the cover of the Technology Review was a blurb that said Stem cells get personal. I may have mentioned that the novel I’m writing involves stem cells. I’d just had a bit of a block on the subject back in Starbuck’s, and I needed to do some research. I opened the article, and it was perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. How’s that for divine intervention?

I was so psyched that I went out for a run when I got home.

bare footI realize I have been remiss in reporting on my barefoot running adventure, so here’s an update for those of you who are interested: I haven’t put on a pair of regular running shoes since August. No kidding. I only wear my New Balances Minimus Trail shoes now. In fact, I wear them almost every time I leave the house for anything, I like them so much.

On Saturday, I don’t know whether it was the elation of having found the article on stem cells and unplugging the block in my writing, or the fact that there was a cushion of soft-looking fallen leaves on the ground, but I had a sudden urge to make skin-to-earth contact, and not with my face like I did last week, but with my feet. I took my shoes off and ran about 2 miles barefoot. The leaves took the worst of the bite out of the nasty little evil stones on the path.  I ran along the beachfront in Preverenges, in and out of the water, feeling like a little kid. Then when I got back to the really evil section of path I photographed on my earlier post, I sat down by the lake and put the New Balances back on.

What a great run! A lot of people had given me strange looks, but I just smiled and carried on. My feet felt so happy.

I know you want to try barefoot running, too. In another astonishing stroke of serendipity, I ran across a how-to video this weekend so you can get started in the comfort of your own living room! In honor of the New York City Marathon, Christopher McDougall, of Born to Run fame, has an article in  the NYT Magazine this Sunday. There’s a video of him hopping from one foot to the other, demonstrating how to work on your running form. If you don’t have a subscription to the online NYT, you can see the video at this blog, Hunter-Gatherer (written by a NYC barefoot runner type). Running barefoot may seem crazy, but trust me, it’s going mainstream. In a few years you’ll be thanking me for getting you started, because you will be so far ahead of all the other sad losers out there.

Images: top,  StarbuckGuy. The other one is my foot.

I can do this

Wow. I just want to go on the record here to report that writing 2,000 words a day is really tough. Last night, I was explaining the idea to Marc at dinner.

So how much have you written today? he asked.

Well, technically, 118 words. On the blog, I said.

So your first day is going to be one of your days off?

I can’t start with a day off! So after dinner last night I managed to crank out about 1,000 words. I got all the way up to where my main character leaves the office to go have lunch with the IT guy. Then I just ran out of steam.

Today I spent the morning translating, then went for a run. After my own lunch, I tackled lunch with the IT guy. I cranked away for what seemed like endless hours – and now my total is just over 3,000 words. Six pages of single-spaced text. Tons of riveting dialog.

I am already 1,000 words behind!

Well, I’m not going to waste my valuable typing muscles whining about it here. I still have four hours left in the day, technically. I can do this.

On another note, the Wikileaks guy, Julian Assange, lost his appeal (did he ever have any appeal?) and will have to go back to Sweden to face sex crime allegations. (Maybe his lack of appeal is why the sex wasn’t consensual in the first place?) Why Wired Magazine is reporting on this is beyond me, but there you have it. Word has it that documents from the rape investigation have mysteriously been leaked onto the Web…