Changes are coming
I took this photo on a recent trip to the local butterfly gardens
I started this blog shortly after going back to grad school after more than a decade away from anything academic.
At first, I didn't think academic writing would be a big deal as I'd been writing fiction and journaling since I was a teenager. My supervisor suggested I start writing early (good advice), so I quickly produced a text destined for my thesis. Well... that first chuck of text got handed back to me covered with red ink and I was accused of being a taciturn writer (a word that I had to go out and look up).
Standing there with my massacred text, it hit me that I had to make myself into a better writer. All the research I could find suggested the best solution was to practice writing more - and (gulp) send my writing out into the world. I'd written 4 novels by that point which very few people had been allowed to read. Perhaps those books suffered from taciturnity, but my readers were kind enough not to mention (Some day I might work up the nerve to re-read those stories).
After an unnecessarily long time spent pondering the issue, I decided starting a blog was the best solution. I was both afraid to share my writing and worried I wouldn't have enough ideas. But, ideas beget more ideas and writing this format is fun. I ditched thoughts of fiction and started focusing exclusively on non-fiction. I even stopped reading fiction - a state I stayed in for years.
One day, my husband's co-worker loaned me The Martian. I loved the book, then I remembered some notes about a story idea I'd had years ago. I dug out the notes. It was an outline for a book with themes similar to The Martian (Even if I'd come up with the exact same idea, I would never have been able to execute it as well as Andy Weir). This got me thinking... maybe my story ideas could be good, maybe even good enough to share.
The Martian had the side effect of getting me to start reading fiction again - The Night Circus, Wool, Station 11, The Girl with all the Gifts and on and on. I've been reading fiction like mad since.
And (in case anyone noticed my blog posts have gotten a bit sparse) I started writing fiction again. I'm now three drafts into novel number 5 and one of my major goals for 2017 is to finish it and (gulp) publicly share it.
So now that I've admitted that I'm going to publish my book, I'm going to start shifting the focus of this blog (it is about tangents after all). There'll still be some science-y stuff, still some mucking about in the garden and I want to start sharing some of the fiction I've been reading and loved along with some thoughts (not necessarily mine) on creativity.
I'm also going to share some fiction.