Acquired from the internet hive mind: Map of Hell by Sandro Botticelli painted between 1480 and 1490.
As mentioned in my March 1st posting, I am about to enter the Dark Night of Soul portion of tax season where every day funnels me lower and lower through the crushing end on April 17th. A fitting time to revisit “Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Reimagined for Linguistic Transgressions” by John Rauschenberg.
I spend too much time in the Second Circle: The Serial Comma.
Amazon Cover
I crossed paths with Dr. Emily Lavin Leverett at my first ConCarolinas. She mentioned a press she worked with, and I started haunting that press’ blog. From there, the blog’s visual writer’s prompts tempted me so I started writing responses and created my own blog. When a job opened in the administrative branch, I offered to remote work for the Canadian company. After a time, I started line editing for them too.
So you can blame where I am today in the publishing industry on her. I would have found a path of some sort – after all I met her at ConCarolinas – but this particular path I’m on started with a throw-away remark by her on a con panel.
Eventually that press folded, and I went onto another press. I still attended ConCarolinas and so did she, so we would say “hi” on occasion. Though she was a panelist, an editor of anthologies, and I was just a paying attendee, Dr. Leverett was always polite during our short exchanges. Short because my shyness and her guest-panel-busy.
Then my next press folded (Amazon did some changes on how romances could be advertised and that tanked a lot of the small press industry) and I was at loose ends. Thanks to a different network opportunity, I fell into Falstaff and discovered Dr. Leverett already there. In fact, her manuscript, Changeling’s Fall, had inspired the publisher, John Hartness, to take the step to becoming a publisher of other people’s works.
Her day job is an English professor and a medievalist. Her afternoon job is editing anthologies and writing papers required to remain a professor. And when she finds the time, she is working with her co-author Dr. Sarah Joy Adams on the other three books of The Eisteddford Chronicles.
It’s been an interesting walking along the same path as her. We take different stops in the publishing industry, but I admire her craftsmanship and determination as she trail blazes ahead of me. She is an amazing woman.
Image courtesy of Phil_Bird at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
“I said GOLF course.” Shaking my head, I survey the ravaged landscape. Dozens of rivulets rupture the once perfect rolling hills of grass. Several deeper chasms pierce the muddy terrain, a few narrow enough to easily step over, while others would require a running jump or maybe even a dirt bike. Random pits stab deeper while the displaced earth beside them add to the obstacles.
My enthusiastic helpers who embraced their assignment while I dealt with the fallout from the last debacle trace their feet back and forth excavating new trenches in the soil.
(words 94; first published 3/18/2018)
Notes: I belong to a small writing group which every-so-often puts out a writing challenge. March’s was use the word “Gulf”, any genre, any length. … So the word I am suppose to use never actually is used in the flash. Oh well, I’ll blame tax season.
Image courtesy of KEKO64 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
My love of sushi and my budget are often at odds now my favorite sushi chef has retired from the local buffet. He was amazing, offering dozens of versions of fresh sushi, and snuck me sashimi on the side. Three plates of sushi for all-you-can-eat buffet prices. The new guy isn’t nearly as good; now the sushi is worth what I pay for it with no sashimi at all. The result is still better than pre-made grocery-store-bought crap so when I need a fix I return to the buffet.
(If you ever want to buy me food, fried chicken and good sushi – at different meals – are the way to my heart.)
Today’s geeking science is about how the sushi craze nearly didn’t happen, how science discoveries belong to the entire world, and how strange and wondrous life forms are.
The full article is available on Ars Technica: “How an unpaid UK researcher saved the Japanese seaweed industry” by Esther Inglis-Arkell, posted November 19, 2017.
Nori, wonderful, tasty seaweed – perfect straight or wrapped around vinegar-soaked rice with a bit of fish, was impossible to cultivate. Japanese farmers every year would put out bamboo and rope frames and wait for filaments to form and grow into large plants. No seeds, no flowers, no saplings, no transplants. Spontaneous generation, or so it seemed. Some years were better than others.
In 1951 production stopped. Spontaneous generation no longer occurred.
Americans didn’t feel the pinch since the Kawafuku Restaurant in Los Angeles, CA didn’t put sushi on the map until the 60’s, where it spread first throughout the urban centers by the 80’s, and finally to Chinese buffets in small Southern cities by the 90’s. But the Japanese lost a favorite food.
On the other side of the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker just completed a path to discover something wondrous. Fired from her teaching job because of the sin of marriage, she became a research assistant (in modern speak, unpaid intern). Common practice of the day required women to be released when they marry so they could pay proper attention to their husband’s careers instead of a day-job; more accurately women were expected to resign and then, if teachers, continue to work unpaid. But that is a different post not related to the scope of this blog.
Back to the amazing Kathleen Drew-Baker. She was poking around with a seaweed that grew in Wales used by locals for bread and soup. The seaweed grew during the winter months, seemingly by spontaneous generation. She looked for spores, thinking fungi. But the spores she found led to a pink sludge growing inside shells during the summer months.
The seaweed led a double-life, during the winter as a leafy green seaweed and the summer as a pink sludge hanging out inside a shell. Like a caterpillar and butterfly without cocoon stage to mark the difference.
Being a scientist she published the discovery in Nature on October 29, 1949 through a paper entitled “Conchocelis-Phase in the Life-History of Porphyra umbillcalis (L. Kutz)“. (Yes, she was allowed to publish under her own name. She wasn’t living in medieval times; she just wasn’t allowed to make a living at being a scientist or teacher.)
In Japan, a scientist ran across it and thought, maybe that applies to the Japanese seaweed too. He looked. It did.
No longer restricted by unpredictable spontaneous generation, the Japanese farmers have gone big business, industrialized farm on the seaweed. Temperature control, testing different shells, maximizing light. Each and every stage of the double-life growth cycle tested and maximized for production. Production on a scale large enough to feed not only a growing Japan, but the rest of the world’s love of sushi.
Cool side note: Every year Uto City holds a festival honor of Kathleen Drew-Baker.
To read the full article (explaining the controls used to maximize nori growth – because who wouldn’t want to know that?!?) go here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/how-an-unpaid-uk-researcher-saved-the-japanese-seaweed-industry/
Image courtesy of renjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
“Redundant” is a word I use a lot while editing. I’m not talking duplicate words or phrases, go-to words, or echo words. I’m talking about repeat of presenting information.
For example, the point-of-view character describes the villain of the story to someone. Two chapters later the POV describes the villain (or love-interest) to someone else using nearly the same phrases.
Recaps are well-and-good, once or twice in a book, especially an epic fantasy tome. So long as the recaps present the information in a slightly different fashion. Change up the words. One way to do this is having the events be described by a different character, and interpreting them from their viewpoint or with additional information. Have the recap pull double duty, showing something new in the characters or situation.
Most of all, TRUST YOUR READERS. They do have working memories.