I’m a winner in National Novel Writing Month! For those who haven’t been following, I surrendered most of my free time in the month of November to write a 50,000 word novel. I finished my word count ahead of schedule, completing 50,506 words late last night.
Of course, I have to display a winner’s badge on my blog:
I’m going to add a badge to the side column, as well!
The novel isn’t quite finished; I have about 3 chapters left to write of it, which I will complete in the next couple of months. After that, I’ll look into rewriting and editing it extensively and, if that works out, possibly getting it published!
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to having evenings in which I don’t stay up past midnight writing. Also, I’m going to get back to my regular science and weird fiction blogging starting immediately. Among the things to tackle over the next couple of weeks:
- Recent results in invisibility physics, including the idea of a “space-time cloak”
- A post on yet another early speculative model of the atom
- Some thoughts on science rockstars and cheerleaders
- Reviews of a bunch of science-y books
- A discussion of compressive sensing
- An explanation of the rather mysterious Wood’s anomaly
Stay tuned!
Skulls in the Stars 
“Rockstars of science” reminds me of the “music appreciation” inflicted upon us in grade school to make us think that classical music was “cool” — exquisitely embarrassing. Even those of us who had Mussorgsky collections at home winced at the awfulness of it.
Come to think of it, that’s how I feel about a good many “outreach” stunts people enthuse and argue over.
….
On the happier front: congratulations on pwning NaNoWriMo!
As I tweeted the other day, I find the “rockstars” campaign misguided, as it really to me only conveys the idea that scientists want to hang out with rockstars. This won’t make them look terribly special in anyone’s mind. It seems the real strategy should be to get rockstars to show a visible interest in interacting with the scientists, or working with them. I’ll elaborate on this in a few days…
I finally realized the other thing “rockstars of science” reminded me of: sodium!
Once again, MST3k concisely summarizes a social problem (in this case, science communication) in less than two minutes!
Oh, and now I’m gonna have that friggin’ song in my head all week. I will have my revenge… 🙂
Yay on the NaNoWriMo! Did you know there is a NaNoSweMo? I’ll let you figure out what that is. 🙂
Ah, now known as NaKniSweMo! 🙂