This morning I started work with my head in the clouds, literally. The Ko'olau mountain range, which is behind my house, is often swathed in misty clouds and that's where I was. These clouds reveal how much the weather can change here on Oahu depending on where you are relative to the mountains. Someone told me once that the island has six microclimates, and I believe it. The weather might be sunny and hot in one area, but rainy and cool (coolish is probably a better term) only a few miles away. Pouring rain in Kailua? You can probably still hop in your car and go to the beach somewhere else on the island.

Anyway, I drove to Mount Tantalus today, where it was very cloudy, because I'm reporting an ecology story for an online magazine and I needed to see the research that had been described to me in an office at UH. I needed to see the native plants, to watch how the scientists set up their experiment. Plus, I needed to get out of the house. (Raise your hand if you're guilty of sitting at a computer for too long. Yep, me too.)

I brought my good camera and a notepad with an extra pen. I also brought an emergency rain poncho, thank goodness. If not for the poncho, my camera probably would have croaked in the rain. I brought an my iPhone, which I was glad to use after the rain started and my camera lens got wet. I just wish I would have remembered to use the bathroom one more time before I left the house. Hiking with a full bladder for three hours can lead to distraction.

I came across a wonderful interview with Salman Rushdie in The Paris Review. You can read the whole thing online here. So much of what he said interested me, particularly the ideas that relate to a story existing outside of the writer's head. 

Elizabeth Gilbert talked about something similar in her TED lecture a few years back. And I remember watching Gilbert's talk and thinking, "Is she telling the truth? Or is she acting out a piece of fiction?" I found her comparison of stories with ghosts or spirits or something in the ether to rather weird.

But the thing is, I've been having moments like this recently. It's not that my stories were floating around in a spirit dimension. The BFG hasn't been trumpeting stories into my window during the night. Sometimes, though, I encounter a situation, or a person, and my hair sort stands on end. I feel like I'm in the presence of a Story. The Story has nothing to do with me, but it's there, and if I want to, I can try to write it. It's a little bit like recognizing symptoms of an affliction or footprints on a path.

I have to admit that this feeling has transported my writing experience out of the "work" category and into something closer to "play." It's quite exciting when you can glimpse the potential of a story, the layers and contours, but only by a bit. And you start talking to people and writing notes, and dreaming about it, and mulling it over a bit. 

And then you read something that someone else has written, or may be you watch a movie. You go for a long walk. You take a spin class. And BAM: You see the story a little more clearly than you did before. But only a bit. You have to repeat the whole process over and over again, depending on how many words your editor allows and how much energy you have to keep up.

I'm going to paste Rushdie's quote below. He said it much better than I could.

"...some of my most creative moments are the moments between books, when I don't know where I'm going, and my head freewheels. Things come to me unexpectedly, and can become a character or a paragraph or just a perception, all of which can turn into stories, or a novel. I work just as hard when I'm not writing a book as when I am. I sit there and let things happen, mostly I throw away the next day what I wrote the day before. But pure creativity is just seeing what shows up. Once something has shown up, then it's more focused, and it's more enjoyable. But this in-between time is when unexpected things happen. Things happen that I previously thought were outside my ability to imagine. They become imaginable. And they come inside." --Salman Rushdie (The Paris Review, Summer 2005, No. 174, "The Art of Fiction No. 186")

"The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write." --John McPhee, interview published in The Paris Review, Spring 2010.

When I moved to Oahu this summer, I was feeling pretty nervous about what the new location might mean for my writing prospects. For one thing, there aren't many science writers who live here. For another, there aren't a lot of big science funding agencies nearby. Now if I specialized in writing for the tourism or defense agencies, that would be one thing. But I don't. I specialize in writing about health and basic science (mostly biology) and human interest stories.

Last week, however, I found encouragement when I went to the local Science Cafe meeting in Kaimuki, a neighborhood on the south side of Honolulu. 

(FYI, everyone here calls the greater Honolulu area "Town." I'm still adjusting to the convention. The area where I live feels much more like a town, whereas Honolulu, which is packed with high-rise buildings and taxis and dozens of pedestrians at every intersection, feels like a city.) 

The invited speaker at last week's Science Cafe explained what black holes are and how they evolve to gobble stars and spawn new galaxies. He also mentioned something that's happening now, or expected to happen soon: an enormous gas cloud named G2 is cruising toward the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and when it gets within range of the hole's gravity, the gas is expected to swirl around and send out flashes of light, slowly settling into what is called an accretion disk, which will serve as a halo around the center of what would otherwise be invisible because black holes are, by definition, black.

It was a fascinating talk. Most of it was completely over my head. Thankfully, the cool photos and videos were pretty self-explanatory. And, just as amusing as these was the way the researcher was clearly having so much fun while he worked. He used non-technical language. He made jokes. He promoted his rock album that was recorded in the 1970s. It was a fun evening with a good group of people. I'm already looking forward to next month's Science Cafe event.

Here's an interesting autobiographical piece written by Lisa DePaulo about how she approaches profile assignments.

"Do not promise anything you can't or won't or shouldn't deliver. (Especially in writing.) Basically need promise anything but fairness. Always offer to talk to anyone they think you should talk to--but never promise to not talk to people they might not want you to talk to. And try to get them to really let you into their world. Or close to it."


From Jack Limpert's blog, About Writing and Editing, posted here.

Hawaii is full of story material for those who want to write about ecology, marine biology, or agriculture. I'm sure there are plenty of stories here for me, too (because I don't write about ecology, marine biology, or agriculture--at least not yet). In the meantime, here's a video clip of a plant that I filmed while on a tourist excursion today with the kids. Our guide said this plant is called "sleeping grass." 

I've seen this plant in action once before, when I traveled to Costa Rica in 2006. That was a very quick trip for a destination wedding. I had no tour guide to explain the surroundings, it was just an accidental observation that the plant folded when I touched it. Nearby, a team of ants was carrying leave cuttings across the path, just like what I'd seen on nature programs such as Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom...

Sleeping grass makes me think of nature movies again, only I'm thinking of ones like Planet Earth, which show amazing time-lapse video of forests where new plants spring up in a matter of hours, or where the leaves change from green to gold to red in a matter of days. Those fast-forward movies do a pretty good job of making plants look a lot like animals, don't they? They're not sentient beings; they're responsive, they sense, they move. And in this case, with sleeping grass, we can clearly see it.

I wonder why more plants haven't evolved to employ such quick reflexes?

I haven't posted anything here for a while because I've been engulfed in a trans-continental, trans-Pacific move this summer. That's right, I no longer live in Maryland, but currently reside in Hawaii, on the windward side of Oahu. 
And traveling this far with two children, a household of furniture, and two careers-worth of legal and tax documents leaves little time for trivial matters like updating a website. 

Fortunately most of the slogging is behind us. And fortunately I managed to do a little work (other than the house-sorting variety) even in the midst of this transition. You'll see two new thumbnails in the favorites section of "My Projects" that lead to feature articles published this summer, including my first feature for the children's magazine Muse, which my son has been reading faithfully for more than a year.

By the way, if you have elementary-age children and haven't read Muse, you should definitely check it out--not only because of my feature story in the September 2014 issue ("Stop Paying Attention! Improve your thinking with daydreams") but because every issue seems to have a great mix of stories about science, the world, and various "gee-whiz" items that are written to pique the fascination of bright kids. 

In March I waved goodbye to my husband and children, boarded the Metro toward Union Station, and headed north on Amtrak for a five-day retreat with the Highlights Foundation, where I learned everything I could possibly want to know about science writing in the children's marketplace. 

Here are some photos from my trip, including the cozy cabin where I slept and worked; one of the faculty members, who talked about structure in writing; our tour of the Highlights Magazine editorial offices in Boyd's Mills; and a book written and illustrated by one of my fellow students, Jeannie Brett. 

The weather could not have been worse for this trip. I think the high temperature was in the 30s, and when the snow started to melt, it made all of the paths to and from the meeting barn a muddy mess. Nonetheless, this was an amazing experience! I learned so much, and I'm so grateful to the Highlights Foundation for offering this as a resource for writers and editors like me.

Before I started freelancing, I struggled a lot with work/life balance. Who am I kidding? I still struggle with it. But things are a million times better now that I have control over when and where I work. Before freelancing, so much of my time was wasted in getting dressed for the office (which involves dry cleaning and makeup), commuting to-and-from the office, and most of all...so much time of my time was wasted in meetings and participation on pointless committees.

This article by Anne-Marie Slaughter really struck a chord with me because of what she says about giving women freedom to make their own schedules. I think she hit the bulls-eye here. Our persistent "slacking" in the climb up the corporate ladder has little to do with ambition or commitment or bravery. It's about avoiding martyrdom and doing simple math. 

Here's what I mean. There are only 24 hours in each day. Doctors say we should sleep for about 8 of those hours. If children are in the mix, you can factor in at least 1 hour each day for meals, 1 hour for homework or some form of educational enrichment, and 1 hour for transportation. Add 1 hour per day to accommodate the doctor visits, dental cleanings, haircuts, teacher conferences, and lessons that accumulate each week. If a woman works only 8 hours a day, that leaves 4 hours for her to get showered and dressed, eat, use the toilet, commute, manage household stuff, and exercise. If everything goes PERFECTLY, then she'll be okay. But nothing ever goes perfectly, does it? The nonessential activities like exercise and eating properly and avoiding constipation are usually the first to get cut. 

I'm a huge fan of the RadioLab podcasts. I like to listen to them while I'm at the gym, or if I'm running in the neighborhood. An hour-long episode is just right for meeting my daily quota of exercise and taking my mind off of the monotony of a cardio machine.

This morning I listened to their podcast in honor of Dr. Oliver Sack's 80th birthday. I'll attempt to embed their player below so that you can enjoy it, too. Happy listening!