Month: February 2011

In the last day, I noticed a lot of postings on Facebook about the shuttle. And this made me realize something about space, and what space means.

I haven’t been exactly paying attention. Whenever a novel is done – let alone a novel that was delayed due to my stupid body, once more, reminding me that these things come without warranty – there’s a lot of things I’ve been putting off that have to be dealt with. Particularly when I’m plunging straight into another couple of books that need to be finished, both of which are ready to enter ‘final phase’ (the phase when things are coming together and I work in a sort of white-hot haze.)

So, in the last couple of days I verified that my kitchen does, indeed, still have a floor by removing all the fur and grime that had accumulated over it; reduced the waiting Everest of laundry to a mere Pikes Peak; did grocery shopping; made sure the kids are still alive (you never know, and zombie children are such pains); cleaned the cats water fountain; removed approximately three Haveys from every surface in the house, including the floor (a Havey is a measurement of fuzziness. It equals about an inch of fuzz on everything.)

As has been obvious from this blog, I’ve logged on to the net maybe twice/three times a day, if that, and I haven’t exactly been thinking about the internet.

Even so, I couldn’t avoid postings on the shuttle.

. Perhaps it is a function of the type of friends I have, but for a day, posts on the shuttle seemed to overshadow even the endless political postings by people who should know better about what they put on their professional Facebook pages (Hint, if you feel free to put it up in a place where your potential bosses will read it, you’re not talking truth to power. You ARE the power.)

It reminded me a lot of the moon landing. For a moment, for a blessed few hours, we looked up from the ball of mud as all eyes turned to space and to what we all knew in our hearts was the next movement for our species. Remember, I wasn’t an American then, but I felt it too. And it wasn’t just me. Within a week our elementary school teacher, in this tiny one-room school house, started talking about how lucky we were to be living in a time when we might grow up and go to space. At various get togethers arranged for kids, the various, insanely-cheerful songs of the row your boat variety suddenly included references to the lunar age, to man of the space age. (Oh, I’m sure some Soviet scientists were furious that day. Bureaucrats even more so. But doubtless even they were in awe.)

The difference of course, is that the moon landing was a first and everyone pays attention to a first. So you might think it means nothing. It doesn’t explain the attention paid to the shuttle, because we’ve been expecting the end there – we know it’s an expensive program and it’s being shuttered.

And yet. And yet there’s something that calls us to space. In Space Engineers, Simak posited that we always longed for the stars, because we’d known we come from there. Of course if I wrote anything suggesting that, it would get buried under screams of outrage – even if I wrote it metaphorically, so I won’t. Beautiful and chest-expanding as that idea is, the explanation is much simpler.

As some of you know when I’m sick I read biology and anthropology manuals and sites. (Unless I’m REALLY sick, in which case I read about dinosaurs. It’s like comfort food.)

Our species – all species – have two modes: expand range or die. As my friend Dave Freer put it, we’re a species of colonists. It’s what we do. Every human race, every human culture longs to expand and most of them have, with varying degrees of success. Expansion is healthy both for the new culture and the one left at home. Innovations are bought back; inventions are sparked; restless young men are given productive outlets.

Are expansions within Earth and into someone else’s territory different? To an extent. It could be argued, though, that from the very long term perspective those expansions have, ultimately, been for the benefit of humanity in general. (Yes, I could expand on this, but not at six in the morning on a day when my to-do writing list is overflowing the page. Also, I suspect to explain it in detail would take a book. However, take the fact that as a whole humanity is now – at the end of expansionary movements and wars of conquest that started in the paleolithic – not only more numerous but more long-lived and healthier than ever. Then connect the dots.)

Whether our expansion is a good thing for anyone else, frankly, is a matter of total lack of concern to me. I know it’s chauvinistic and irredeemable of me, but when it comes to choosing between my own species and hypothetical blue aliens with linked in pony tails, I’m going to choose my own species. And no, I don’t care how ecologically sound these hypothetical aliens are, or how loving-kind or how perfect. Heck, I wouldn’t care even if they stopped being hypothetical.

Yes, I know, you’re looking at me in horror. But there are things that are so basic, so simple, so fundamentally gut-right that it takes years and years of education and an exquisite attention to moral formation to make people ignore them or think otherwise. Arguably our system does just that to people, just now.

And that’s insane, because even herbivores fight for their herd. You never see cornered antelope go “Oh, look, it’s much better for our herd if we let the lions eat the weak and the old. I mean, it’s not like they can live forever. And what right do we antelopes have to take over the area? Everyone knows we overgraze and destroy bio diversity.” The reason antelopes don’t do this is that they haven’t spent twelve plus years listening to how the species they belong to is harmful and useless and should go extinct for the sake of higher values of a nebulous kind. Lucky antelopes.

I did spend sixteen plus years listening to what horrible creatures humans are. I’ve also read countless books to the effect. But, aw, shucks, as my parents found out from the moment I could move around and say “no” I’ve never taken suggestion well. Also, I’m a mother, (no, not in the sense you guys call me that) and I’m selfish. I’d like to see my line of descendence stretch all the way into the future and if possible to the stars.

Those posts yesterday proved that despite schooling, despite instruction, despite the fact that the rest of you aren’t as tri-plated irascible, stubborn b*tches as I am, (which is a good thing. A world full of me would be terrifying, not to mention boring) most people at a gut level feel the same yearning to push our species past the ball of mud and on to new and bright frontiers.

Oh, we know it won’t all be blanket trees and candy fields. If anything we know the dangers far too well. We know in this wave of expansion as in many others, men and women will die, and we’ll lose some of our true best and brightest. Doesn’t matter. In reaching beyond one simple planet, they will bring a better life to the vast majority of us. A life so rich, so free, so full of security and abundance that we can’t imagine it, and our ancestors would have called it heaven.

And that is why I’m talking about it in the future, despite the last decade or so of our being assured this expansion would never happen; despite the last two decades of our being hectored on how this was a pipe dream and we had to learn to be good stewards of this one, tiny corner of the galaxy.

Look my friends, here is wax. Block your ears against the siren song of the nay sayers, the guilt-trippers and the scared sisters who always, always prefer their fireside to the discovery of new lands. Their ilk has always existed and always will. Someday our descendants will come back from their distant space colonies, conquer their descendants and bring them the innovations we discovered meanwhile. And then some of their descendants will join in the expansion to another galaxy and – if it’s possible we’ll find a way – another universe.

Oh, things look nasty right now, but the way we’ve been doing space is expensive and not very efficient. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent decades (since we went to the moon) is that not only isn’t big government necessary for big projects, big government is usually an hindrance to big projects, (it tends to be staffed by all those fireside sisters.)

So, government is broke and won’t be doing much for us. That’s fine. Not a problem. Le us do for ourselves. Let us try many ways to get into space. the best will succeed, and after that we’ll continue trying.

Look up into the skies at night see all those stars? Your descendants (direct or collateral) and mine will walk in planets circling them. They’ll be born and die, war and marry in worlds we can only imagine. They’ll change, they’ll grow, they’ll understand more than we can know.

And they’ll dream of bigger things.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

I know you’ll find this riveting, but today it’s all I’m up to post.   Turned out I wasn’t as recovered as I thought.  I found I simply wasn’t up to cleaning the house, so after the book was sent I slept a bit and then we went out to dinner.  Stayed up late talking and for some reason I had a case of middle-of-the-night wide-awakes.

I’m just up now and grabbing coffee, medicating the cats (you don’t want to know!) and then going to lie down and read.  If I feel better later, I’ll vaccum and maybe iron a bit. 

If you’re all very good and eat all your green beans, I might post a blue plate plate special short story later.

I know you’re thinking that today is the second day I’ve taken off to eat bonbons and read trashy books…

Actually the bonbon eating – as it were – hasn’t started yet. I finally finished A Fatal Stain yesterday a little past noon, and now I’m engaged in the great typo hunt. Particularly when dealing with this sort of book, which had at least two versions of the ending, assorted tweaks in the middle and parts and references that were replaced, typo hunt is a nightmare, because it also catches fragments of the past versions.

Unfortunately I know me, and if I try to do too exact a typo hunt, I’ll end up adding more typos than I remove. (Like, I lose the original meaning of a sentence and try to fix it, thereby muddying it beyond repair.)

Anyway, that should be done sometime this morning, and I have a short story that is due next week, as well as two space operas to finish. (Maybe three, if I can decide if one of them – almost done – is dead or not. There are times when a novel dies in mid writing. I never know why or how to bring it back.)

Because I have other things due, and because frankly I hardly know what to do with myself when not working, there’s a great temptation to sit here and write. Or to indulge in two or three days of reading – the trashy novel thing, though there’s a lot of non-fic I need to catch up on, as well.

What I feel though is that right now I can’t take words. Written words and writing words. It’s like my brain is tired of all the pushing and wants to recover.

So, once this thing is de-typoed and underway to its proper destination, I’m going to go do a bazzillion (technical term) loads of laundry, do a quick dust and vacuum (both the boys have tests this coming week, so I’m not bothering them with it) and then, if I’m very lucky, vegging in front of Pride and Prejudice mini-series.

This is one of those blogs where I explain I’m not blogging.  Yeah, I hate to do these, and I suspect you hate to read them.  However today is the first day in a long time that I woke up completely clear headed and I’d like to push through and finish the mystery, so I can finish the (2) space operas, before my editors kill me; so I can finish Shifters before Evmick kills me.  My chest is still congested and my friends have threatened me with seven kinds of death if I exercise today — so instead I’ll just write.  Particularly because I only know five kinds of death and I don’t want to get educated in that.

A quick explanation of how I got so awfully sick — and, having talked to other people, I really think this is the illness that started in October which has been going slightly better then much worse in a steady spiral.  You see, being 48 I’m menopause-hypochondriac   As long as the symptoms aren’t OBVIOUSLY some illness, when I start dragging and feeling irritable (which I DO feel when I’m dragging and I’m trying nonetheless to work normally) I assume “Oh, it must be starting.  About time I had some symptoms.”  And because until the last week it wasn’t PATENTLY obvious I had chest congestion, I dismissed the episodes of sore throat and stuffed nose, etc, as “oh, allergies on top of going menopausal.”  Which is why I haven’t gone and got meds before.  And why I kept trying to power through the almost-finished book and getting annoyed at myself I couldn’t.

You know, bodies should come with idiot lights.  That way when my “upper respiratory infection” light came on I wouldn’t start imagining “I’ve entered da changez”.  Truly, a flawed design, the lack of those.

Now I have meds, and I’m improving, but it will probably take a couple of weeks to normal, and I suppose till then I have to sort of baby myself, at least on the exercise and physical work front.

BUT today I finish the book, because tomorrow I’ve pencilled in for sleeping and reading trashy novels.  So there.

*Sorry to be absent on Tuesday. I woke up feeling VERY ill and went to the doctor. Those of you who know me personally know what it takes for me to admit I need a doctor. Anyway, I’m now medicated which will hopefully put an end to the creeping crud that has been extending in one form or another since before Christmas. The following post is being echoed at Mad Genius Club.*

When I’m sick – yeah, let’s just say that my respiratory system is a walking liability – I can’t read fiction. This is part of the reason I’ve fallen so far behind on my fiction reading. It doesn’t seem to be a rare affliction. When you’re sick you can’t handle emotion and, of course, all good fiction is emotion.

However, I can’t stop reading. Reading is what gets me through the stupid stuff that must happen in life, like washing dishes, cooking, cleaning. I have yet to figure out how to read in the shower. Someone must make a better, water-proof ereader.

So, instead of fiction I read non-fiction. The more tired/sick I am, the dryer my reading material. Years ago, when pneumonia put me in the hospital (ICU for eleven days) I read a collection of nineteenth century biology manuals. No, you probably don’t want to ask.

And I know I’m at least becoming somewhat more human because I either start having story ideas, or I start figuring out how what I’m reading applies to some aspect of writing.

This last month and a half, as I’ve been spiraling deeper and deeper into illness (And no, I don’t even know if it’s the same illness or a succession of respiratory bugs) I’ve been reading about the pursuit of the Indo-European language and culture.

Yes, this morning I finally decided enough was enough and this afternoon I dragged self to doctor and I’m now medicated. While I’m still not substantially better – except the fever must be down because my head is clearer – in the “up” points of this er… bug sequence I’ve been able to realize what I’m reading is both a wonderful seed for stories, possibly a setting for a series of novels which has deviled me (my last run at it was … fifteen years ago, when I was definitely not ready) and, more importantly, a world building tool.

What I’ve been reading, particularly, which attempts the reconstruction of an ancient culture that might have been homogenetic, but was almost certainly heterogenetic (same or different genetic heritage), might have been located over a region or another, and might have worked out one way or another, has made me realize how things are connected, things we don’t tend to think about.

No, I don’t know how much their guesses are true, but I do know that there are certain “rules” that tend to apply and that these archeologists use them to reconstruct a culture just like a paleontologist reconstructs a dead animal from a loose tooth. Will they sometimes be wrong? Oh, yeah, heck, yeah. Remember the dinosaurs that have changed name or shape as more has been found out about them? But still, there are certain things that apply. If you find a certain shape of tooth, you know you’re dealing with an herbivore, for instance. And if you find human craniums with largely cavity-free teeth, you know you’re dealing with a culture whose diet was low on carbohydrates. Oh, there might be some genetic freak that keeps them from getting cavities, but, more than likely, you’re dealing with a diet based on protein.

The same goes for population replacement, for instance. One population disappears, another comes in. Was it war? Maybe. Sometimes you do find a population where the graves show women of the previous population and men of the new one. You could be dealing with a Rape of The Sabines situation. Alternately, you could be dealing with some elaborate treaty and bride price, and perhaps the men of the tribe moved elsewhere to marry women from the other tribe. Yeah, that wouldn’t be total, but these graves never represent everyone, just the powerful families.

And then there’s that too – what was powerful at the time? What was “wealthy”. A man is buried in a grave that would require immense labor with only a few shards of pottery and a dagger. Was it because the culture was terribly poor, or were the gifts symbolic. You only know by comparing to smaller graves of the same culture.

I’m not going to go into details, but it is important, not just for historical fiction but for science fiction and even for fantasy to think through these details. “What does my culture use for transport?” for instance, limits how far your character can travel. That much is obvious. But it will also limit the ideas of the world; how far her parents’ married; how many languages there are in the immediate vicinity; what they eat and possibly how they pray. “What do they eat?” again limits or shapes what the culture is like. If they are mostly agriculturalists, their culture will be different from if they are pastoralists. And if they are pastoralists with frequent cattle raiding (which also correlates to weapons) the culture is yet different. (And if they eat mostly stew, you’re caught in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.)

I confess that even with as much as I know about history and how cultures evolve, and how economics influences daily life, I’ve caught at least a couple of mistakes I’ve made in one of my cultures – where they could not possibly be settled agriculturalists with those habits.

We live in a time where the world is our backyard, where food of all seasons and all continents is available to us and transport is cheaper and easier than it’s ever been. This divorces source from event in our minds, so that we have trouble creating even complex, future cultures.

Of course, the classic work with everything integrated is Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness. I’m not saying I don’t have problems with some of her extrapolations. I do. She and I come from widely different philosophical traditions and that always shows. Also, though I liked it originally, the presentation itself now seems incredibly dated to me. BUT at least she tried to show a culture integrated in all facets of myth and daily living and its natural environment. And managed to hint at a full fledged society, which of course never fits in a book.

What is your favorite such example? Do you have one? What would you like to see? How do you think archeology can help us learn world building?

And not liking the way my chest feels.

It seems like these days there’s a revolution going on everywhere, and one seems to be in books — at least with the borders debacle in book distribution.

Go here, http://nakedreaderpress.wordpress.com/

Read.

There will be some thoughts from me on this, later.

When I was very little and very sickly, before I learned how to read much less write, I spent the time I was kept alone, indoors, while recovering from some dread awfuls, making lego houses. It came naturally, after that, to make up stories about the people who lived in the lego houses.

After a while, learning and listening to adults became a mission of finding facts and “how things work” to incorporate into my stories. Some of the story lines and some of the characters have been with me in one form or another since then.

Needless to say I started writing stories as soon as I could write for a long time without discomfort – about six. But the “untamed” story lines, the ones that I told myself, continued in the background. And some of these people became as real to me as my best friends.

Right here I want it to be perfectly clear I don’t hear voices and I don’t see things. Having just watched Harvey, this is an important distinction to make. The only way I see things others don’t is if my fever is through the roof (and then mostly I see cartoon characters. Don’t ask. Tom and Jerry, yep) or if I take anything morphine-based, which seems to have a disproportionate effect on me, which is why I don’t take it unless the pain is truly unbearable. (Unbearable – can’t stop either crying or throwing up JUST from the pain.) Then I see Tom and Jerry speaking Latin to each other. (You wish I was joking. You’re just jealous because you don’t have the high class hallucinations we published authors get. Comes with the SFWA card, I swear.)

This is not auditory or visual or any of that type of input. I’ve HEARD some writers have those. I’ve read The Evolution Of The Bicameral Mind. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

My storylines and characters exist in the same space as the “constant internal narration.” If you have no clue what I’m talking about, you’ve never stepped back and thought about it. There is a voice, always, inside your head telling you who you are. That voice sometimes takes on multiple tones and allows you to debate things with yourself. “No, I shouldn’t go to the store, because” “But I need to go to the store.” Etc. there’s also the times it replays arguments you had, or conversations where you’re not sure you got your point across. The story lines and characters are sort of like that, only these conversations never happened in the real world. Yet, it has the same feel. I.e., I can’t just change a character or what he/she says, just like I can’t just change what my mom told me when I was three. I’ve always figured it’s because my subconscious is a MUCH better writer than I am and creates this stuff without asking me about it. Usually I find the characteristics that bugged me about a character or a situation are needed – at least if these characters/situations are in an actual story (more on that later.)

From what I’ve found, I’m not unique in this. Most, if not all writers, have this going on in their heads. Some with one world, some with several, some with a world that’s much like our own, some with wildly alien lands. Some writers even have the full blown auditory/visual thing going.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. Most of us who have this in ANY degree think we’re completely alone and possibly insane. My first clue I was not totally alone was when I read an interview with Rex Stout, when someone asked him how Nero Wolfe was doing, and Stout was able to give him the exact place Wolfe was, what he was reading, etc. as though Nero lived next door. After that, I became a member of a tightly knit writers’ group and found I wasn’t alone.

I still have the two or three “primitive” and hyper extended story lines going on in my head, but these days I tend to shove them to the back. I’ve learned to put my peculiarity in service of my art, and I USE that in the service of my writing. If a character never comes alive – and yes, I’ve had those – and the scenes don’t start playing themselves out in my head – including scenes I’d NEVER put in the book but which explain actions in the book – then the book is very difficult to write. To date I’ve done three that way, and I’m not going to tell you which, because I don’t think you can tell. It was just hell to write. And I have had one set of books in which only ONE character came to life. The others were “placers”. This is strikingly obvious and reviewers have noted it.

In addition, I have stories that come to my head by means of a fully formed character wanting to discuss things. This is why walking, ironing and repetitive tasks are ideal for coming up with story ideas. The mind goes somewhere else.

Again, I assume – and it’s the only explanation I can come up with – that as a result of my boring, lonely childhood my mind learned to amuse itself by playing chess between my conscious and my subconscious. My subconscious sets up the board, as it were, and throws up these situations and creatures for the conscious to play with. This is also not a bad analogy by the way on how to control it, survive it and use it.

So, why am I telling you this? Well… there are several reasons.

First of all, there is a huge possible trap for new writers who are of the type I am – people who want to write because the stories won’t leave them alone.

If you think of your world as pretty toys, spun out by your subconscious to amuse YOU particularly, you’ll understand how fascinating these stories are to the people who created them. Most of them, once they become hyperextended over years partake a lot of the characteristics of soaps, or even Lost (coff.) People die. People come back to life. Bizarre and purposeless stuff happens. But because these are designed to catch YOU and they are aimed specifically at you, you’ll remain fascinated. If your particular angle is sex, your plots will have tons of sex. Mine had/has tons and tons of medical details – because I grew up in a family with a lot of doctors and absorbed a lot of the interest, even if I never wanted to do it myself. These days mine also have a ton of start up businesses, economics and new inventions, because those subjects fascinate me.

For new writers, who are afraid to talk to anyone about it, the danger is that they will get caught in the first world they (subconsciously) created and which to them is so immensely fascinating. ANYONE who has been in a writers’ group for any time knows the “eternal beginner” who writes story after story after story in a world that is obviously NOT commercial by anyone else’s standards – a world that’s so targeted or so icky or so bizarre that you know no one else will ever buy it. But the writer remains trapped. If you read Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, and examine the dromes, these are something like it. The dream catches you to feed the dream. If you go on in it, you’ll never be published (more on why this is important later) and you and the drome will eventually die together.

The type of writer who does this type of story usually has ABSOLUTELY no control over them, either. You start noticing after a while, that their stories partake this dream-like and formless quality and it’s not unusual, if you approach them, to be told that “it happened that way.” That means they’re being used by the subconscious, instead of using it. It’s one of the many ways potentially great authors die on the vine.

Worse, with the advent of self publishing as economically feasible and THE way to get in, a lot of these writers will churn out endless novels that two people read, and go quietly insane, never understanding why they don’t sell more.

So what can you do about it?

1– (Sorry to use Pratchett as a guide here, but the man presumably knows what this is like.) Always remember which voice is yours, there inside your head. This is very important because it’s easy to become fascinated by a character and let it take over. I wonder how many of the cases of “possession” or personality disorders are just that.

Remember that your mind is yours. For whatever reason, you created this mechanism to cope with reality. Perhaps like me you were just bored and lonely. Or perhaps, like others, the situation was unbearable and you escaped it.

You might not even remember the circumstances, but do, please, remember, you are you — the other “voices” are just stories wanting to be told.

2- Seize the story, instead of the other way around. Yes, okay, people getting complex operations to repair bizarre injuries might be endlessly fascinating to you. Understand it’s not fascinating to most people. Your world might marry high tech and a neolithic society, because at the time you created it you had clue zero how that stuff worked. Understand you can’t use it that way in a story, unless you explain it. Then deliberately intervene. “No, it didn’t happen that way, it happened this way.” Give the story form, shape it (studying stories that worked commercially helps, here) and write it as a commercial story. You’ll find this helps too. Once it’s out there, in commercial form, it will cease to obsess you. Though you’ll probably get others and have to write them too…

3- Take a clue from stories about possession (I believe a lot of them centered on this type of mechanism) and bring in more devils to drive out that one devil. Weirdly, this does work. By conjuring up a lot of different stories (not in the same world) it divides your subconscious’ ability to create lures for you. That means each story line will be SLIGHTLY less fascinating to you, personally, and you’ll take better control of it.

4 – Publish it. Eric Flint has been known to say that if you’re not crazy when you become a writer, you’ll be by the time you’re a professional. He says this is not so much because we have to work with imagination at a level kids do, but because we live such solitary isolated lives, in which weird thoughts and ideas can seem perfectly plausible. It is the same with your world. You must expose it to the sunshine of other people’s minds. All the unpublished, cherished, obsessed upon worlds I know grow in “ick” factor. It’s the nature of the beast to make itself even more targeted and push more buttons. Which means “more insane” and also “would cause more readers to run screaming into the night” And, UNFORTUNATELY more importantly “will distort my sense of reality till I start reacting oddly to real life.” You must make it passable enough for other people to read. And this will allow you to control you own obsessions and move on.

As writers, we’re creatures who shape dreams. To some extent these dreams also shape our lives. We must walk that fine line every day. I hope this will help people stay on it, without falling into either side.

My body let me down again, which means I had a blinding type of headache all afternoon yesterday, leading to almost no work done in the afternoon. So instead of taking the day off and enjoying myself, I’ll be here and writing, probably all day. Ah well. At least I enjoy writing. Mostly I’m changing the last five chapters, so that … well… so it ends completely different.

A few, random, passing notes:

Older boy is upset because he can’t “read” my fingers as I type.

Havey cat is upset because I won’t stop typing and pet him.

It’s such a lovely day today I’m tempted to go write outside, if I can figure out a place.

My friend Tedd Roberts kindly agreed to do a post to help you with your research while I’m working on finishing the book.

My good friend Sarah Hoyt asked me to do a special crossover between her blog “According to Hoyt” and “The Lab Rats’ Guide to the Brain” at Teddy’s RatLab For those of you joining us for the world outside the lab, I am Tedd Roberts, a professional researcher in the field of Neuroscience, and an apprentice SF writer. As a Ph.D. I talk to a number of writers and give advice – some requested, some gratuitous (grin!) about getting the science right in Science Fiction. Over in Teddy’s RatLab I am working on “The Lab Rats’ Guide” as a way to describe the basics of brain science in an informal way, without losing the accuracy of the science.

After all, *some* brain science in TV and Movies is just laughable. What? You’re not laughing? Well, trust me, the doctors, scientists and students who watch and read are laughing; that is, when they aren’t hanging their collective heads in shame.

I’m sure you’ve seen it – the brain probe that is long enough to stick out the other side of the skull, yet somehow it never seems to do any damage when inserted into the back of the brain. The outer space doctor emoting over “The engram has wrapped itself around the neocortex and we’ll never get it out!”

Right. Sure. And the engines, they canna take ennimore, Cap’n. Yup, a whole university’s worth of professors is shaking their heads over that one.

So – as a writer, or as a reader, what are you supposed to do? Read a scientific paper?

In a word? No.

My advice, don’t do it. “That way lies danger young apprentice.” Scientific papers *really* aren’t written for nonscientists. They are full of phrases like “Under conditions of altered physiological constituents of the interstitial fluid, we determined a significant 5% increase in intracellular osmolality.” Now, if you’re a scientist you can read that and figure out that when the liquid outside a cell is salty, the liquid inside a cell gets a little bit salty, too. Scientific writing is *stilted*. It uses a very rigorous style that is meant to convey certain facts in a manner such that other scientists will know to look at the information in a certain way.

I have a colleague that says “Scientists only really only know how to write about 20 sentences. They just have to learn how to use those same sentences over and over until they run out of results to include in a paper.” He should know, he’s written over 150 articles for scientific journals, and they all use the same basic construction. Only another scientist, schooled in the same art of manuscript preparation can truly wring all of the essential facts out of a scientific paper.

“Psst, hey Boss?”

“Yes, Ratley, what is it?”

“What about scientific magazines? The Grad Students keep leaving them lying around in the lab. Surely they’re not so bad!”

“That’s true, Ratley, but sometimes I think those magazines are edited by Ratfink. Somehow, people seem to get impressions about science that the scientists themselves never intended. Unfortunately, the better public science magazines are still scientific journals, and the articles can still be hard to understand.”

[Oh, sorry folks, Ratley is my assistant. He showed up in the lab one day, and asked for a job. Who better to handle lab rats, than … a Lab Rat? I introduced him and the other LabRats a couple of days ago over at the Guide. Oh, and yes, I’m translating. When Ratley speaks, most people just hear “squeak.”]

Back on track. I’m sure you’ve seen them on the newsstand, Magazines with Science or Scientific in the title. There are two high quality “public” journals (“Science” and “Nature”) that publish new or important results with broad appeal. Manuscripts are typically submitted to a board of editors, who then send them to be read and reviewed by other scientists in the appropriate field before the editors will consider publishing. If an article passes this “peer review” and is also considered to be of interest to persons other than just those who study that exact phenomenon, then the magazine will consider publishing it. These magazines are considered “public” because scientists and knowledgeable people from many different scientific fields read them. There are other magazines that take science seriously, such as “Scientific American,” either by inviting scientists to write articles for the general public, or having their own writers interview scientists before writing an article. However getting an article to be understandable by the public requires someone that can *write* first, and the science comes second – sometimes without even talking to scientists. It is very rare that a scientist is such a great communicator that they can write Sunday Supplement articles on science that anybody can understand – the late Carl Sagan was one, and the Science Fiction and Fact author Isaac Asimov was another. The hazard in writing an article so that anyone can understand it, is that you might lose the science along the way.

So, “hard science” is … hard, and “easy science” may not be science at all. Is there a middle ground? Sure. If you are serious about including science, and in particular brain science, in your writing, consider taking a couple of courses at your local community college. Often there are classes in physiology, neuroscience or psychology for non-majors – you may even find one taught by the same professor that teaches a university course to PhDs. Take the survey courses, learn the language. It may not help you understand The New England Journal of Medicine, but it can certainly help with Scientific American. The other thing it will help with is …

Ask a scientist.

“Ya want I should call Ratley and get some help in here, Teddy?”

“No, Ratso. I think I can handle this one.”

“Are ya sure? Da emails have been pilin’ up ever since ya posted dat blog on da Internet”

“No.” (pant) “I can handle it.” (heave) “Man, that’s heavy. How many more sacks of mail? Oh, heck no. Yeah, Ratso, call the guys in here, we’ve got to sort through all of this stuff.”

“Hey, Boss. You’ve got more fan mail.”

“No Ratley, not fan mail. More questions, but I can’t figure out how they got my address. Do you know? Ratfink ?”

(Ratfink leans on a mail sack, whistling)

“Ratfink? You *do* know! You did this, didn’t you!”

“Sure. You know folks, Teddy here will be *glad* to answer your questions, just email him at…”

“No, Ratfink. Don’t you dare, or no cheese.”

“Aw.”

You’ve probably figured out by now that if you *really* want to get a better understanding of the brain, who better to ask than a real brain scientist? There are a bunch of us out there that are fans of *whatever* fiction genre you might choose. Science Fiction is a favorite, and there are quite a few scientists that write as well. Many years ago at a very large scientific conference, one professor had a booth selling (and signing!) his mystery books. They were quite good, and appealing to scientists and nonscientists as well. However, we scientists are not always the best at *writing* fiction, but we sure can tell when the science is wrong. There are over 30,000 people attending the Society for Neuroscience meeting each year, and if you mention “Spock’s Brain” or “The Matrix” they will laugh, but at the same time they will speak well of “Memento.”

Need help finding a scientist? Just ask on whichever bulletin board you frequent. Ask the local medical school or university, find out who teaches the night classes in Biology, Chemistry or Physics at the local community college. Ask someone you know.

Getting the science right is *worth* it. You owe it to the readers. You’ll find that many if not most scientists will appreciate it – but be sure to explain to them that The Story comes first. You aren’t writing a Ph.D. dissertation. They’ll understand.

And who knows? You might find out that you’ve gained a whole bunch of new fans!

No, it’s not as alarming as it sounds. I just didn’t get QUITE to the point I wanted yesterday because all of a sudden at about nine thirty pm I felt like someone had yanked the rug out from under me, and barely managed to stumble the twelve feet or so to my bed.

I woke up at five am and thought I’d done myself violence pushing yesterday. I.e. I thought I was worse again, and I could not sleep. But I took an aspirin and had some warm tea and went back to sleep for two and a half hours. I woke feeling more like myself than I have in months. So now I shall have some coffee and write.

WHY is it that writing takes it out of me so profoundly. You’d think “soft job, indoors, sitting” would mean no great effort, right? However, not only does it tire me more than say painting walls, but (and this is weird) if I work a whole day and push hard, I lose weight more so than if I’d been doing violent, physical labor. This is one of the mysteries of the universe.