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imaginarycircus at 11:12am on 05/08/2010 under unhelpful tips for writers
imaginarycircus at 11:12am on 05/08/2010 under unhelpful tips for writersNPR has been wailing about today's oppressive humidity since yesterday and yeah, it's humid. August is kind of the sweaty armpit of the year in the north east. 89 degrees with 82% humidity is normal. It's not pleasant--sure. But it could be 100 and 90% humidity with a heat index that is making people drop dead. I'm not impressed, or particularly oppressed.
While I was brushing my teeth I was thinking about the time I sat next to a nuclear physicist on a flight from Albuquerque to JFK. He was going to Paris to meet with other physicists to do an experiment that made particles (electrons, iirc, but my physics is so very very rusty and was never very good anyway) move so slowly you could pour them into a jar. I think he used the term superinduced. Anyway I happened to be writing a paper on the plane about Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism and how they fed Einstein's general theory of relativity. He got very excited when he saw my notes and offered to interview me for an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I never called him about it because I was worried my math would never be good enough for me to be a physicist. I'm not what I would call stupid, but I know when I'm not the smartest person in the room. I'm pretty good at math, but I'm slow. And please don't lecture me about different kinds of intelligence. There is a reason I am doing what I'm doing and there is a reason I didn't call the LANL guy or study physics and math beyond college. Good lord. This turned navel gazy in way I didn't intend. My apologies.
What I wanted to get at was the way in which I've been struggling to see the larger framework of my novel and the finer detail at the same time or at least in proximity to each other. And how hard it is to switch from one perspective to the other, at least for me it is. I'm good at sticking to the micro, but have trouble holding the larger story all at once--even with charts and all sorts of diagrams. I feel like I've finally learned how to see both of those things. It's kind of like one of those cube images that you can flip with your eyes, but way more complicated. And I was thinking about that strange image of pouring electrons into a jar--I see someone pouring tiny olives stuffed with pimentos into a glass Ball jar when I think about it. Maybe my perspective of close up and far away or micro and macro isn't right. Maybe what I've been trying to do is see the story both quickly and slowly at the same time. Does that make any sense to anyone besides me?
21 days til the move. Wooster cat suspects something is up.
While I was brushing my teeth I was thinking about the time I sat next to a nuclear physicist on a flight from Albuquerque to JFK. He was going to Paris to meet with other physicists to do an experiment that made particles (electrons, iirc, but my physics is so very very rusty and was never very good anyway) move so slowly you could pour them into a jar. I think he used the term superinduced. Anyway I happened to be writing a paper on the plane about Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism and how they fed Einstein's general theory of relativity. He got very excited when he saw my notes and offered to interview me for an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. I never called him about it because I was worried my math would never be good enough for me to be a physicist. I'm not what I would call stupid, but I know when I'm not the smartest person in the room. I'm pretty good at math, but I'm slow. And please don't lecture me about different kinds of intelligence. There is a reason I am doing what I'm doing and there is a reason I didn't call the LANL guy or study physics and math beyond college. Good lord. This turned navel gazy in way I didn't intend. My apologies.
What I wanted to get at was the way in which I've been struggling to see the larger framework of my novel and the finer detail at the same time or at least in proximity to each other. And how hard it is to switch from one perspective to the other, at least for me it is. I'm good at sticking to the micro, but have trouble holding the larger story all at once--even with charts and all sorts of diagrams. I feel like I've finally learned how to see both of those things. It's kind of like one of those cube images that you can flip with your eyes, but way more complicated. And I was thinking about that strange image of pouring electrons into a jar--I see someone pouring tiny olives stuffed with pimentos into a glass Ball jar when I think about it. Maybe my perspective of close up and far away or micro and macro isn't right. Maybe what I've been trying to do is see the story both quickly and slowly at the same time. Does that make any sense to anyone besides me?
21 days til the move. Wooster cat suspects something is up.
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