Hello hello, and welcome to our now 13th (XIIIth) writing club update. My dictionary explains that the meaning of “thirteen” is:
One more than twelve.
Truly to words to live by. Shuffling around my books for a more inspirational bit of numerology, I find the chapter in Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan” book, wherein we’re introduced to the outsider “Keda” who is to be a wet-nurse for the titular prince of Gormenghast. I’m not sure how that relates to what we’re doing here, but it’s a pretty weird, and cool, book.
Speaking of weird and cool…!
As always, all are extremely welcome to participate in the writing club, regardless of whether they’re in the list above.
That’s so cool and I love how you describe it as an enjoyable activity, rather than like a chore or obligation, or I don’t know, like a duty. It kind of flips the script in my head about how I think of science writing.
I’d be really curious to hear more about this project, if you ever feel like going into detail. Also, this is more the gearhead / process obsessive in me speaking, but I’m interested if you’re using any kind of special organizational tools or “knowledge base” in your writing.
Gone are the days when I had to do science writing as part of my job, so this is entirely a pet project, and I avoid committing to releasing anything to avoid it becoming another deadline in my life. If I lose the motivation to work on it, I will take a hiatus and get back to it if and when I am ready. There are enough things in my life that are not like this, so why add to that list?
The project is essentially to write up a coherent picture of the observable, physical world (from where I am sitting and looking out the window) and their associated physical processes. So essentially everything from the fusion reactions of the Sun, to the scattering of light in the atmosphere, to the colors of things, weather phenomena such as rain, fog, lighting, the sounds moving through air and through media, the relative movements of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars etc. I have a PhD in a natural science discipline, and have touched upon most of this in my studies, but have 1) forgotten a lot of it, 2) have some big holes of topics I never learnt (fluid dynamics being one of them, optics being another) and 3) have probably a bunch of misconceptions originating from a misunderstanding at the time I originally learnt it.
So it is a quest to relearn and document this stuff in a way that is for my enjoyment and not for passing an exam or getting a paper published.
I write in LaTeX, keep my references in Zotero and will use Obsidian for notetaking during research prior to writing it up.
Whoa! That sounds like such a cool project. Kind of a poetic approach to the scientific understandings of our reality.
Im excited to hear more about your process and hope you enjoy digging into the new project :)
Cheers :)
I want to bottle this feeling up and inject it into my veins.
Am I understanding correctly, that this project is about writing about your very detailed and researched perspective of the world–from like your writing desk?? That sounds SO COOL. Is your subjective position a part of the project, or just a starting point? To me, this feels like an empirical version of what some meditation feels like.
Thanks so much for sharing what you’re working on. It’s really fascinating.
I have no real prior knowledge of biology, neuroscience, psychology or anything related to this, and I don’t want to include anything I would need to research from scratch. So I guess the starting point is to draw a line from my eyes to whatever I see first :) Then I will attempt to keep topics as separate as possible so they could be enjoyed on their own, and where a topic is completely dependent on some prior knowledge from another part of the book, it will come after and with references to which parts would need to be read and understood first. Or that’s the initial plan anyway
Disregard the question in the above comment: this is absolutely metal! I would love to use such a (text)book in my future classes! High schools generally do such a bad job showing why physics is important and how much of what we are surrounded by is explained by the discipline.
Thanks! Yeah, I honestly find that (in my experience) university courses also often tend to get bogged down in examples too far detached from the observable physical world, which can make them demotivating. In my time at the university, I especially found the mathematics courses lacking, as they would focus almost entirely on formal descriptions and rote learning, and avoid using proper examples on the applications of mathematics in the real world. I’m a trained engineer/scientist, not a mathematician. It is the universal language used to describe so much, and yet I would spend my time solving Fourier integral after Fourier integral, not really understanding what I was really doing until it showed up in a physics course later on and within 20 minutes I would have a much better intuition of what I was spending 6 months trying to learn before.
And regarding beta-reading - that could be useful in the future, but as I said, it is first and foremost a personal project for my own enjoyment. But if it turns into something that looks like it could be of value to others as well (i.e. structured, coherent, complete and factually correct enough), I might prioritize trying to get that to a publishable state.