Where I Write

I get these gaps in my blogging. Either I’m sick and lying comatose on the couch while my child demolishes the orderly home it took me months to create. Or I’m doing something else. I haven’t been (too) sick lately, so it’s all been something else.

I just get the need to do something. It doesn’t always matter what. In this last longish gap, I’ve made a skirt that fits, turned a queen down comforter into two twin minicomforters, instituted a regular preschool session on the days I’m at home with GeekBaby, read books, finally figured out the breviary, learned to pour beeswax candles, plotted mischief, and done my usual work here and in the lab. I like to be busy doing things, and I always have too many projects in various stages, all of them running at once.

But writing is never, ever one of them. Because writing isn’t doing something. Writing is just sitting, staring impotently at the screen, and occasionally growling softly.

If you thought that was funny, I didn’t write it. It was part of my usual internal running monologue and it popped up while I was halfway up two flights of stairs. I popped into an empty lab and borrowed a sharpie to scribble it down so I wouldn’t forget it.

My house is drowning in such scraps of paper. See?

Although, this room is also part of the problem. My space for writing is right now a combination of storage area and federal disaster area. FEMA doesn’t cover additional bookshelves, sadly. We need them. We have books stacked two deep on every shelf, and we still have stacks and stacks on the floor. (That’s what comes from frequenting the $10 a back Houston library sale even once!) Part of this mess this house is twice the square footage of our old apartment, and we just don’t have enough furniture. But, really, we just aren’t naturally tidy people. Behold my shame.

I have a hard time writing on computers. It’s easier to get something out on real paper with a real pen. Once I have something, and it doesn’t always need to be very much, I can sit down at a keyboard and produce something.

Since my upstairs game room is a disaster area, here’s where I do most of my work.

See, part of my house is clean!! I actually like working at a large table like this. We have grand plans for the game room upstairs that involve the removal of the giant cardboard pirate ship and the conversion of a scavenged dry erase board into a table similar to the Emissary, only without the dropped interior and $$$$ pricetag. A table perfect for homework, gaming, work, and other projects (sewing, quilting, etc.) that want a large flat surface. (Himself and I have lots of madly dreamt up projects like this.)

And here’s where I read. Books: the entire set of Liturgical Mysteries by Mark Schweizer, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (New Testement), the Steve Jobs autobiography, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Lamb’s Supper, Crust and Crumb, Home Comforts, Jesus of Nazareth Part II, another Bible (NAB), the three Magnificats for March and April, and Sheep In A Jeep. You can also see my embroidery frame and lapstand. I have Teresa Wentzler’s Peacock Tapestry up on it now, but I haven’t worked on it since before Christmas.

This collection is actually a little on the small side, and it’s unusually free of Girl Genius, but I wasn’t going to stage it. Books naturally migrate here, and ever once in a while I go through and try to put them back in their homes. This usually involves evicting squatters. Have I mentioned we need more bookshelves?

And this is where I code. This is where I really miss the upstairs game room. The books here are Learn Cocoa on the Mac, Beginning iOS5 Development, and Knight and Dragon. I’m not sure why Knight and Dragon is there. I’ll have to make sure it gets put away during morning clean up. Yes, I code at a little red IKEA kids table. I don’t sit in the chairs though.

They do hold my weight though. Those IKEA kids chairs are boss.

(I was originally going to participate in Jen’s writing spaces link up, but I guess it’s too late now. I kept forgetting to take the pictures. Plus, I’m neither a real writer, nor organized in any significant way. So I probably don’t count.)

 

Germinating Stories

I had the oddest thing happen to me.

I’ve had the idea for a story floating around for years and years. Longer than I really remember. It was a children’s story, something like 13 Clocks or The Phantom Tollbooth, but also different. It involved a truly atrocious pun that got my wrist slapped by Mike when I told it to him. But the idea was fun. While I never let it go, I never wrote on it either. I just couldn’t get the hero started down the road. The only things I could think of had been done before, and they didn’t quite fit anyway. So I let it alone in the dark.

And while driving to work, I realized how my hero got involved in the story. And as soon as I realized what happened to him, the story changed. The pun vanished, the hero grew up, the whole plot mutated into something completely different.

It was such an intense experience that I actually forgot I was driving to the bus depot and drove all the way downtown instead. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was insight, not invention, and both terrifying and exhilarating. I don’t yet dare write any of it down, it feels rather like if I do, I am stepping off the edge of the world.

Affect Versus Effect

This week my friend, the doctoral candidate and fellow crazy person, asked me the question dreaded by scientists around the world: is it effect or affect? (A question more annoying than usual since we science types use the rare ‘effect as a verb’ )

So I look it up. Again. And we decide that she should use effect when she is referring to experiments that cause an effect and affect when she is referring to experiments that influence an effect. This is an incredibly subtle difference, so allow me to illustrate…

Transfecting the cells effects the transcription of the gene – this says “we’re putting something in the cell and it will turn the gene on”.

Unloading the heart affects the transcription of the contractile genes – this says those genes are already in effect in the heart, but changing the environment influences their effect.

So when in doubt on which word to use, consider your experiment. If it directly proves or disproves your hypothesis, use effect. If it is more of a descriptive experiment, use affect.