Brooke Borel writes about the backstory to the "Making Passion Projects Happen" session at ScienceWriters2014. Each of her session's panelists had to find a way to pay the bills while working toward the big prize: "Many of us also fumbled a bit as we figured out how to make our projects work — just because the end result is a success doesn’t mean it was easy or straightforward, and it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works."
Science writing news
Have you ever planned a 15-minute presentation that you wound up delivering in five? That's a sure sign you're speaking too fast, Denise Graveline writes. She offers some advice on slowing things down: "I've shared practical tips on how to hit the brakes when you're speaking too fast. But you'll do even better at pacing yourself if you take the time to analyze your speaking speed, understand why it is so fast, and plan your speech or presentation so you set the pace."
William McPherson won a Pulitzer for the Washington Post but now, in retirement, he lives in what he calls poverty, getting by on Social Security and a Post pension. The story of how he got to that point is a cautionary tale for anyone in the middle class: "I look through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid."
Justin Ellis assesses the non-profit news site The Texas Tribune on its fifth birthday, and wonders whether its future will remain bright: "While the business of journalism today offers less stability than ever before, the Tribune has been able to build a measure of security through a mix of philanthropy, donations, and sponsorships. But success brings spectators, and the Tribune’s business model has many trying to clone it and others continuing to question it."
Maria Popova writes that keeping a personal journal "is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives." She adds quotes from Thoreau, Emerson, Susan Sontag, and others, including this from Virginia Woolf: "The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles."
It bounced a couple of times, no one's quite sure where it ended up, and its batteries are dying because its solar panels are in the shade, but Tabitha M. Powledge still cheers the Philae lander: "As Josh Witten observed at The Finch and the Pea, 'No matter what else we might be, we are a species that landed a robot on a comet about 500 million kilometers away for the purpose of scientific exploration.'" Also, #shirtgate and its backlash.
Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists discusses what journalists can learn from the new movie Rosewater, about the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was interrogated in Iran during the 2009 election protests: "The standard email and social media account contains the kind of information that interrogators used to pull out fingernails to get — your friends; your colleagues; your associations; your private opinions; your political beliefs."
Science writers have always had to cope with angry readers or industries who don’t like their stories. Responding to criticism is part of the job. But these days journalists, PIOs, and scientists find themselves facing personal attacks and even death threats. Just writing about global warming, GMOs, or vaccines can trigger personal attacks or lawsuits. Women are also subjected to harassment, stalking, threats of rape, and barrages of pornography.
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and we're in it right now — or at least Barry Shell, a Vancouver freelance writer, is in it. Shell writes about what it's like to switch to fiction from writing about university research: "They say that by week three most NaNoWriMo participants get stuck, and the best advice at that point: kill off one of your characters. So I know that day will come." Also, why writers should join NaNoWriMo.