Juggling as fast as I can.
Overcast most of the day, but I don't think there was any rain. We could really use some rain. It's been a long time, and I'm beginning to worry about forest fires, which tend to happen here in the spring and the autumn. Today's high was 77F.
I was up at 5 a.m. this morning, which has become the norm, it seems. I did another 1,072 words on "Ulysses and the Sirens" before I allowed myself to even think about the revisions to MP 1.3. I think I'll be done with the story on Sunday, at which point I will go back to work on The Night Watchers until it's finished. No more short stories until the novel is finished. Anyway, after a break, I got to work on the second reviewer's four pages of notes, someone who truly loved the paper, but still gave us four long pages of suggested changes. But that's just the way it works. No matter how good a paper is, it can always be better. I told Jun yesterday, that this was almost nothing like writing fiction. For one thing, I have to put my ego in a box. This is not my art. This is pure communication rendered as clearly and concisely as possible. And I am not the smartest and most talented hominid in the room. My fiction is almost always spared all but the barest editing (I'm rabid about this), but here I have to edit, and revise, and edit, and revise. When I write fiction, the "first draft" is pretty much always the "final draft." With this paper, and everything else scientific I've written since I returned to paleo' in 2019, every single sentence is written, then rewritten, then probably rewritten a few more times. Like night and day, these two things I'm doing.
The most jarring part of yesterday was realizing that we need to add a short section describing the neurocranium of one of the specimens. In the paper, we said that the basicranial circulatory pattern would be covered in detail in a later paper, but the second reviewer said, be that as it may, we should describe the bones themselves in the type description. And they're right. So, doing that today, which also means Jun has to produce another figure this weekend, because he's spending all of next week at Dauphin Island doing field work. And there's still at least a hundred other edits. With luck, I might finish this evening. We are racing to get this back to the journal's editor by the beginning of the week.
Oh, and I also signed a contract today for Polish editions of the three Tinfoil Dossier novellas. Actually, a lot of my stuff will be coming out in Polish soon, including The Drowning Girl, The Red Tree, and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales.
---
Brett Davidson, who follows me on Facebook said something I want to quote here. It's in response to what I said about lost nuance and unity, back on the third:
The media create the problem and social media exacerbates it. You can go back to Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' and Noam Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' (whatever you think of him overall) written in the 80s. Novel and complex ideas require detailed, nuanced, and contextualised explanation but generations have now been raised thinking soundbites and excerpts from press statements are normal. Social media cuts discussion down further to a few score characters. Discourse is forced into being exchanges of slogans and thought-terminating cliches punctuated with outrage.
Thank you, Brett, for letting me quote that. This is, obviously, an enormous part of how we came to this, even if it's not the whole story.
I should probably wrap this up. Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. We're about to pay taxes and deal with Selwyn's vet bill, and every little bit helps. Also, the Substack is still a go, it seems, and while I'm too busy to give you anything this weekend, sometime next week I should be able to, even if it's just me sitting at my desk reading Wallace Stevens poems or nattering on about mosasaurs. So, subscribe.
Oh, turns out the trolls I encountered yesterday in GW2 originated from a Twitch channel, and they've caused trouble all across the game. Yesterday, someone, or several someones, whom I suspect work for ArenaNet, stood up for me, and they backed off, and things kinda went back to normal.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast (Lady Scientist and Teller of Tales)
2:47 p.m. (Monday)
This postdated entry was made the morning of 10/7/23.
I was up at 5 a.m. this morning, which has become the norm, it seems. I did another 1,072 words on "Ulysses and the Sirens" before I allowed myself to even think about the revisions to MP 1.3. I think I'll be done with the story on Sunday, at which point I will go back to work on The Night Watchers until it's finished. No more short stories until the novel is finished. Anyway, after a break, I got to work on the second reviewer's four pages of notes, someone who truly loved the paper, but still gave us four long pages of suggested changes. But that's just the way it works. No matter how good a paper is, it can always be better. I told Jun yesterday, that this was almost nothing like writing fiction. For one thing, I have to put my ego in a box. This is not my art. This is pure communication rendered as clearly and concisely as possible. And I am not the smartest and most talented hominid in the room. My fiction is almost always spared all but the barest editing (I'm rabid about this), but here I have to edit, and revise, and edit, and revise. When I write fiction, the "first draft" is pretty much always the "final draft." With this paper, and everything else scientific I've written since I returned to paleo' in 2019, every single sentence is written, then rewritten, then probably rewritten a few more times. Like night and day, these two things I'm doing.
The most jarring part of yesterday was realizing that we need to add a short section describing the neurocranium of one of the specimens. In the paper, we said that the basicranial circulatory pattern would be covered in detail in a later paper, but the second reviewer said, be that as it may, we should describe the bones themselves in the type description. And they're right. So, doing that today, which also means Jun has to produce another figure this weekend, because he's spending all of next week at Dauphin Island doing field work. And there's still at least a hundred other edits. With luck, I might finish this evening. We are racing to get this back to the journal's editor by the beginning of the week.
Oh, and I also signed a contract today for Polish editions of the three Tinfoil Dossier novellas. Actually, a lot of my stuff will be coming out in Polish soon, including The Drowning Girl, The Red Tree, and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales.
---
Brett Davidson, who follows me on Facebook said something I want to quote here. It's in response to what I said about lost nuance and unity, back on the third:
The media create the problem and social media exacerbates it. You can go back to Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' and Noam Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' (whatever you think of him overall) written in the 80s. Novel and complex ideas require detailed, nuanced, and contextualised explanation but generations have now been raised thinking soundbites and excerpts from press statements are normal. Social media cuts discussion down further to a few score characters. Discourse is forced into being exchanges of slogans and thought-terminating cliches punctuated with outrage.
Thank you, Brett, for letting me quote that. This is, obviously, an enormous part of how we came to this, even if it's not the whole story.
I should probably wrap this up. Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. We're about to pay taxes and deal with Selwyn's vet bill, and every little bit helps. Also, the Substack is still a go, it seems, and while I'm too busy to give you anything this weekend, sometime next week I should be able to, even if it's just me sitting at my desk reading Wallace Stevens poems or nattering on about mosasaurs. So, subscribe.
Oh, turns out the trolls I encountered yesterday in GW2 originated from a Twitch channel, and they've caused trouble all across the game. Yesterday, someone, or several someones, whom I suspect work for ArenaNet, stood up for me, and they backed off, and things kinda went back to normal.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast (Lady Scientist and Teller of Tales)
2:47 p.m. (Monday)
This postdated entry was made the morning of 10/7/23.