So cool! This is “an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds,” says this. It is a breakthrough from IBM scientists in Zurich who “spent 20 straight hours staring at the “specimen”—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.” In other words, it’s a photo of this:
PBS canceled the show in 2006, but now they aren’t going to show any episodes anymore. Which is understandable, really, but sad for those of us who watched it as a kid.
I have an article in the Pacific Sun this week. It’s about how the town of Tiburon is looking at putting cameras on the roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors.
The fortress of Tiburon may be putting a new guard at the gate. An electronic one.
The affluent municipality of almost 9,000 people is considering putting cameras on the two roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors. Police think that the cameras will help them track down criminals. Since most crime in Tiburon is committed by people who live outside of town, if something happens, the police could quickly get a record of the cars that have passed through around the time the crime occurred and narrow it down to the likely culprit.
If the town council passes the measure, Tiburon would likely become the first town to record the license plates of every visitor. The measure is stirring up controversy from those who feel the idea of a camera tracking everyone’s movements is too close to Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“It’s totalitarian,” says security expert Bruce Schneier. “It sounds like something the Soviet Union would try to do. It’s the surveillance of everybody. It’s not ‘follow that car,’ it’s follow every car. The East Germans tried to do this same thing, but it eventually failed. Technology makes it easy.”
I live in a beautiful place. Two weekends ago, fellow Word Pirate, Morgan, invited a group of us up to his family’s property in Jenner for a picnic. There were gorgeous views of the ocean and surrounding mountains. Here we are on the deck:
(L to R: Marcia, Julie, Morgan, Kyle)
Laura was also there. Also Penny, Morgan’s dog:
We ate a lot of food–salami, homemade bruschetta, cheeses of all kinds, sourdough bread, olives, fruit, wine, dolmas… Afterwards, we burned it off by playing Frisbee.
Then we took a hike to the lookout on top of the mountain. The views up there were even more incredible. I am not feeling very wordy right now, so here are more pictures. The rest are in my gallery, if you know where that is.
Laura
Listening to the ranger read from a book he had with him.
me
sunset
On the way home, the waves along the coast were literally glowing. There must have been some sort of phosphorescence in the water. We stopped for awhile to watch sparkling black waves hit the shore.
I have a pretty awesome life.
I am tired of answering this question: When do you think your novel will be finished, Joy? I realize that people asking me this mean well. They are just impatient for me to have a finished book and are wondering what is taking so long. So I thought I would answer the question on my blog for all to see.
So, I have been working on a novel for a couple of years now. It seems like it should be done. I want it to be done, believe me. I’m sick of it. But it’s not done and there’s nothing to do but keep working on it until it is. But I am working on it. At this point, it has gone through 35 drafts. That number is a little misleading because due to computer difficulties, sometimes I have to save a new draft before reading all the way through. Even considering this, I have edited the novel at least 25 times so far.
It is true that many novelists can write a book in a year, but that’s not me, not yet. At least not with this novel, which is very complicated. Why? A couple of reasons:
The first draft was 560 pages. That is too long. And yet I write tight and try to only put in details that build the story. As a result, finding things to cut is difficult. I am carefully, slowly, winnowing it down. It is currently at 505 pages. I want to get it closer to 450, so I have a while to go.
The novel deals with three interlocking narratives. It is a story about a grandmother, daughter, and mother. The structure of the novel is told from the daughter’s point of view, but the narrative is regularly interrupted with stories of the grandmother and mother. As a result, if I cut something, there is a ripple effect where everything else is impacted by the change. So cutting takes a lot of thought, and thinking takes time.
The novel is set in the past. It spans almost 100 years. So there are questions like “how would a woman in 1887 act if she found herself at a boxing match?” Or “would it be possible to put a piano in a covered wagon in such a way that it could be played during the overland journey?” Or “what happened to German-American immigrants during World War II?” Each question requires research, which takes time.
The world of a novel is complex. There are so many things to consider–emotional nuances, the smells in the room, how well the sentences flow, whether the reader can easily follow along. Each issue needs my full consideration.
I don’t know how to write a novel. Sometimes the way to learn something is to just do it. Novel writing is like that. You have to plunge in and learn as you go. And learning means mistakes, and mistakes mean re-doing things several times until you get them right. This takes time.
Writing a novel makes me anxious. Every day, some yokel on the Internet tells me that book publishing is dying and that no one is reading and that you need to be a celebrity to publish books these days, and so on and so forth. It makes me anxious and sad. That, in turn, leads to me procrastinating by doing things like writing long blog entries about why it’s taking me so long to write my novel. It is hard to write when you are worried that no one will ever see what you are working so hard on. Add to that a lot of time (like years) and it starts to become a complex. I try not to get discouraged by all this, but sometimes I do, and I lose productivity. Usually it’s just a morning here and there, since I’m pretty disciplined, but it does add up.
So there you have it. On the bright side, the novel is closer to a finished book than a rough draft. It feels like a book now, not just some unwieldy Word doc on Kyle’s server. I am notoriously bad at predicting how long it would take for me to finish, but I’m hoping it will be done by the end of the year.
Whether I meet that goal or not is the question.
