Springtime

Boston is climbing out of a difficult winter, and spring is barely daring to peak out from the remaining piles of snow. Yes, we can see grass in spots, but next to the bare patches are slowly melting snow drifts, many still measuring in feet rather than inches. And any public outdoor space—think local soccer fields or parks—were used as dumping grounds for plows this year, so who knows when they’ll be clear. They still look like miniature mountain ranges right now!

The point of this is that we’re all on a desperate lookout for signs of spring. So with that in mind, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what makes spring spring.


1. We get access to more sunlight.

Image by Colivine

Earth moves to a point in its orbit where the Northern Hemisphere (or Southern Hemisphere, if you’re reading this post from below the equator) is tilted towards the sun, rather than away. This gives us longer days and more concentrated sunlight. We aren’t any closer to the sun than we were before, we’re just angled more advantageously.


2. The ground warms up.

While we tend to measure air temperature to judge if it feels warm enough to go out in a lighter jacket, spring is really about what’s happening below our feet. The thawing ground allows for a multitude of things to happen.

• Faster snow melt. (Ask yourself, is a chunk of ice going to melt faster on a surface warmer or colder than 32 degrees Fahrenheit?)
• Water begins to filter through the soil once more, and naturally mixes the nutrients from dead autumn leaves into the ground.
• The frost line below the ground rises until it’s gone completely, cluing in life below that it’s safe to come out!

3. Life wakes up.

We all know about animals who hibernate for the winter, and the return of birds from migration is a classic sign of spring as well. But spring is also about the plants and insects (who have been rendered essentially catatonic for months) finally resurfacing and going on with their way of life. They’re the powerhouses of spring. Buds form on trees, flowers bloom, and every around you, billions of creepy crawlies emerge from the earth and the water, busting back out to the surface like tiny, six-legged zombies. Or, in many cases, the grubby larval forms laid in eggs from last year.

Thanks to them, the entire circle of life revs up once more. They are the basis for everything. All hail springtime, the Great Bug Awakening! (And the Great Amphibian Awakening, which I will likely post about soon. For now, take a look below at a Great Reptile Awakening.)



 
4. Babies on the way.

Once life is awake again, it goes on with…well, making more life. It’s important to take advantage of the warm season when possible, so a great number of plants and animals capitalize on springtime to reproduce. The result: spring, hands down, is the cutest season we have. But it also is a dangerous time for many creatures, especially because of human activity.

Image by Guido Strotheide

So try to remember—as you go to bask in the sunlight of spring, all around you your entire extended family is distracted by (adorable) babies who need their attention! Be careful when driving. Watch out during yardwork. Keep cats and dogs controlled and indoors when possible.

And if you find a baby animal that you’re worried has been abandoned, please do some research before taking it away from wherever it’s nestled. It may actually be just where it’s meant to be, and mom may be coming back for it later. This site has good information about whether or not a baby animal is in trouble, and if it is, what you can do about it.

Sitting here, looking out my window at all the snow still on the ground, it’s hard to believe that the above processes are actually heading our way. But I hear it may hit 50 degrees today, so perhaps I’ll open up a couple windows and keep my fingers crossed.

And hey, look at that...I forgot that slide was back there! I wonder what other treasures the Boston Meltdown of 2015 will reveal...

Happy Spring, everybody!

Happy Pi Day!

Today, 3/14/15, at 9:26:53, we will have ULTIMATE PI DAY.

I couldn't let this past without acknowledgment! Happy Pi Day, everyone!

The Legend of Iguanodon

As a little girl, I watched a particular TV special about dinosaurs that I loved so much, my parents had to tape it for me so I could watch it on repeat. I wore that tape out watching it over and over, and today, I can't even recall the name of it.

I probably stopped watching it around late elementary school. As an adult, not only have I forgotten its name, I can barely remember what even happened in it--except for one thing.

Some of the teeth Mary may have found.

There was a reenactment of a woman named Mary Mantell finding the first dinosaur.

Mary was the wife of a scientist. She was walking down a road one day on one of the many trips her husband took, and picked up a strange looking rock that turned out to be the teeth of Iguanodon. And it's only this scene that I can still picture clear as day out of the multi-hour special that I watched on repeat for years of my life.

Why that one scene?

In hindsight, it's obvious. Mary was a woman.

In every TV dinosaur special I watched as a kid--this one and otherwise--all the experts and interviewees were men. Always. It's just how it was at that time. I've written before about how seeing men in the leading roles in fiction skewed my life towards hating my own gender, but there was also the matter of seeing men in the roles of reality. The profession I wanted to be didn't seem to have anyone in it that looked like me. And so I held on ferociously tight to this one image.

I remember reenacting Mary's scene as a child. I'd walk down the driveway, pick something up (a rock or a woodchip), and dash off with it to my imaginary male counterpart who would proclaim what a wonderful discovery I'd made.

Later in life, I discovered the legend of how the first iguanodont teeth were found may just be a myth. Mary's husband, Gideon Mantell (a name, by the way, my young mind did NOT lock and load, since I just had to look it up), later on explained that Mary didn't really accompany him on his trips out, and that he was the one to find the teeth.

There's debate about what really happened. But I've realized that I don't care, because at the most impressionable time of my youth, I got to see someone of my own gender be the first to discover dinosaurs. Even if none of the scientists were women, I could subconsciously cling to that one image of the awesome lady who'd discovered my favorite thing on the planet.

The point of this blog post isn't that we need to fact check which Mantell really found those teeth, but rather that a single image of one woman made it possible for a young girl to see herself in what was otherwise a TOTALLY male-dominated profession.

This is exactly why representation matters. People of different genders, races, religions, sexualities, EVERYTHING, should be shown to young children doing all sorts of things. Let kids see folks that look like them doing the type of work they're passionate about. You never know who is watching, and who will be inspired.

Paleontology Dr. Ellen Curano recently wrote a wonderful article about this very topic and the challenges women face in the field of paleontology. I can't recommend reading it enough. Dr. Curano is a blogger who highlights women in geosciences, precisely for the above explained reasons. Check out her site! And check out the Bearded Lady Project she runs, while you're at it.

As far as Mary Mantell goes...I'm certain that regardless of whether she was the first to pick up those dinosaur teeth, she contributed to her husband's work in ways that history has long forgotten. So in honor of International Women's Day, I honor Mary. Thank you for your curiosity, and your inspiration.

Moving Past What's Expected

I haven't blogged in a while. I was wrapped up in a major novel revision throughout January and the first half of February, and I thought when I came out the other side of it I would be thrilled to get back to blogging.

But I wasn't. I also found I couldn't figure out what creative writing project to focus on next. Beyond this still, I've been wrestling with bigger "what am I really doing with my life?" questions. It's been an introspective few weeks, to say the least. Probably brought on by how much time I spent trapped indoors and alone due to the hundred inches of snow Boston got this winter.

I've been in a confused, upset place trying to figure out where to go next. I'd open up my blog, and feel like I couldn't post anything because I couldn't find a science story I really wanted to talk about. I'd open up a new word document, but find I couldn't start a project because I couldn't decide which project would make the most sense to focus on next. I'd go to work, and fret about personal finances and whether or not I'd be able to secure a future and support a family with the career path I am currently on.

Nothing in my life was working. And just in these past couple of days, I've started to understand why.

I was focusing on what was expected of me. What others expected of me, and what I expected of myself. I've fallen into this trap before.

But today I put on my Let It Go bracelet my friend Marie gave me, and really started to take that song to heart once again. (I'm sorry for those of you sick of Frozen, but Elsa is my soul sister.)

Anyway, I realized that first of all, this is MY blog. I can post about whatever I want. Or not post at all. This space isn't meant to be stressful, it's meant to be fun, and if I'm letting it stress me out, then I've got to take one big step back.

Same goes for my writing. I love writing. But I've been panicking lately about writing the right thing next, and this is making me run in tinier and tinier circles in my head and I'm sure I'm on my way to imploding. So rather than try to come up with the perfect story, I've decided to let myself write whatever moves me. Right now, that's a trilogy I've been poking at for years. The first book is drafted, the second two outlined, and it speaks to my heart. I don't need to try and logically pick apart how marketable it is, because if I love it I will write it well. That's most of the marketing battle right there.

And heck. If I start working on it and decide it's not for me after all, I can move onto something else. That is okay.

As far as my job goes...well...I love my job. I'm really awesome at it. I like where I work, I enjoy what I do, and I feel fulfilled by it. I can't control everything in life, so I will just have to trust in fate a little bit more that I will eventually figure out a way to financially support a family by myself. I don't have a significant other, and I don't want that to hold me back from being a mother some day, so this is pretty much a constant concern. It's scary trying to plan for this alone! But I can't let that fear take control of my life.

That's really the take-away point for me. Not letting fear control me. (Elsa. Soul sister. See?)

I set up these strict deadlines and goals and convince myself that the world expects certain things from me. I don't want to fail the world. I don't to fail myself. But all these expectations do is trap me in a box of anxiety. I have to be free to do things that feel good, that feel right--even if my life isn't lining up as perfectly as I'd hoped at the moment. I'll figure it out. There's no way I can see the whole picture from this one place and time. Who knows what opportunities are on the horizon? All I know is that I work very hard, and I've set myself up in the perfect position to grab opportunity if it should ever finally grace me.

So as far as my blog goes...for my own sanity, there isn't going to be a blog schedule. I'll post when I want to, I'll write about what I want to (let's be honest, that will continue to be either science or kidlit, because those are my worlds), and I'll enjoy this space again.

I need to stop thinking in terms of expectations, and start listening to my gut. I need to pursue what makes me happy.

And I need to reread this post probably every day going forward to remind myself of that.

Yearly Science Roundup: 2014

It's that time again. Time to do the impossible and select my top five science stories of the year. After much deliberation, I've settled on the following:


5. A Swimming Dinosaur

Credit: Mike Bowler.

Spinosaurus splashed into headlines this year, when new research indicated that its skeleton had limbs suited for swimming. Most of this dinosaur was lost to science for almost a century, but then new fossils were found in Morocco that gave paleontology a more complete picture of this animal. This is the first time a non-avian dinosaur has been shown to have adaptations for a semi-aquatic lifestyle, and that earns it a place in my Top 5. For more information, check out my SVP blogpost from a few weeks ago.


4. Earth Is Not Alone

Enceladus. Credit: NASA.

The more we learn about space, the more we find we have in common with other worlds. In 2014, we learned Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, has oceans of water below its surface. We also learned that Europa--a moon around Jupiter that we've known to have liquid water under its surface--also has tectonic plate movements. It's the first body beyond Earth to demonstrate these! Meanwhile, Curiosity found the building blocks of life on Mars, and we finally found a rocky exoplanet that's in the Goldilocks zone of another star (where it's not too hot or too cold for liquid water) and is similar to the size of Earth. Wow!

Every single one of these things deserves its own post, but I only have 5 slots, so I was forced to clump them together. Regardless, if we learned all of this in 2014, I can't wait to see what we learn about space in 2015.


3. Ebola Outbreak

Ebola virus, color-enhanced. Credit: T.W. Geisbert.

There's no nice way to put this. Over 6,000 people died this year from Ebola, and over 17,000 were infected.

Past outbreaks had deaths numbering in the dozens, and more rarely, the hundreds. This outbreak was like nothing ever seen before, and most of it can be attributed to poor health care methods. There is no real cure for this virus other than helping a patient through their symptoms, which means assisting patients at their most contagious stages. Healthcare providers rapidly became patients themselves this year. There is an intense effort now to find treatments and vaccinations to prevent this type of outbreak from ever happening again, and to continue to find better ways for workers to aid patients without risking infection themselves. Hopefully, some of these problems will be solved by medical science in the near future so I'll never have to write another post like this again.


2. We Landed on a Comet, and Avoided Another!

Cheers upon hearing of Philae's landing. Credit: ESA.

In 2014, we landed scientific equipment on a comet, and saved other scientific equipment from getting beaned by one. I think that's pretty great, which is why it's so far up on my list.

On November 12th, Philae touched down on Comet 67P, making the ESA's Rosetta Mission a success. Thanks to this mission, we've learned that at least on this type of comet, the frozen water it carries is a different form than the kind found on Earth. This makes it unlikely that these comets were the depositors of the initial water on our planet, which is pretty big news. We also got to hear what a comet's magnetic field sounds like, which is just plain awesome.

Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier than Philae's touchdown, Mars was dodging the bullet of Comet Siding Spring. Five satellites had to be moved to avoid the debris this comet would bring as it sailed within 87,000 miles of the surface of Mars, including the new MAVEN and MOM missions. Mars survived, our equipment survived, and here on Earth, some people took some pretty great pictures.


1. Half of All Wildlife Dead

We're doing this.

And for one last, sobering entry, we have this news. According to the latest research and counts from the World Wildlife Fund, over 50% of all wildlife has died in the last 50 years. That's not an exaggeration. This is the reality we're living in. Please let that sink in. Half of all wild things have died in less than a single human lifetime.

It is up to us to make the changes necessary to slow this decline.

“High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses,” said Keya Chatterjee, WWF’s senior director of footprint. “In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion.”

This isn't an issue for future generations. This is happening now. By us. In 2015, make it a resolution to do something about this. I won't pretend to tell you what you should do, other than to please not forget that our world is in our hands, and we are letting it slip away. I know I post a lot about great space stuff, but I never lose sight of the most important planet: ours. It's why it's the back drop for my entire blog.

Please. In 2015, make it a personal goal to be a better tenant of Planet Earth. I'll leave my blog posts of 2014 on that note.

New Novel Update #2: First Draft COMPLETE

A couple of weeks ago, I finally finished the first draft of my work in progress, "DW". Cue party noises and bad dancing:

Yeah, that's right. I am AWESOME.

 

YEAH! FIRST DRAFT!

 YEAH! YEAH! --Okay, I'll stop.

 Ahem. Anyway.

I'd started drafting DW in 2012, then tried again in 2013, but didn't have a clear sense of where it was going until I did a pile of plotting work this past January. So the bulk of what ended up in the first completed draft happened in 2014, even though the idea has been in my head for far longer.

As it (always) turns out, I have a much better sense of my characters now that the story is on the page. So I've begun Draft 2, tearing things apart line by line. I'm fixing major plot holes and rewriting dialogue for basically everyone in the beginning. I'm combining scenes, switching segments around, hacking out extraneous blabbering, etc. All the typical things you do in the second go-around.

For once, I'm actually not overwhelmed at the revisions that need to be done re: the plot (seriously, my revisions usually involve MASSIVE plot overhauls). This time, in a bizarre twist, I'm feeling pressure because of what this story became thematically. It has a heart to it that I desperately don't want to screw up.

If you'd told me a year ago that my main concern about DW would be the theme and the character growth, I would've laughed in your face. The complex plot was all I could think about in 2014, and now that the bulk of that is sorted out, I have fallen in love with my characters and can only think about doing them justice in future drafts. Funny how that happens.

And now, for a pretty lame attempt at cleverness: DW is a complex beast, and Draft 1 is just the bare bones of this story. The skeleton, essentially. I hope Draft 2 will bring it to life.

(...Maybe someday, when this story is published, people will read the end of this old blog post and smile. Or maybe they'll just wonder how I managed to get published with lines like those.)

I hated being a girl.

This might be my most personal blog post ever, but I want to talk about why I've made the choice to have girls as the protagonists of my novels.

Growing up, I loved adventure stories. I was obsessed with Star Wars, could recite Jurassic Park front to back, plowed through every fantasy book series I could get my hands on, and daydreamed about the day I'd get to go on my own epic quest. I listened to John Williams soundtracks on repeat, and when Harry Potter hit, I dived into that with wild abandon.

The stories that meant the most to me all had male leads. Girls had varying degrees of prominence, but were almost always there to supply a romantic interest for one of the main male characters. None of them were ever the focus of the adventure. They were never the "chosen one". Never the central character who everyone rallied around. They just weren't. 

As I was internalizing the female role of being a sidenote to the male, I was barreling through my teenage years, being told I needed to start wearing makeup and sexier clothes because getting a boy's attention was of top priority. My nerdy side was not attractive, and as I was reminded over and over, I needed to hide what I was really interested in if I ever wanted a date.

But I didn't want a date, I wanted an adventure! The combination of societal pressures and the fictional worlds I practically lived in told me that I was supposed to want romance. Duh, I was female, that's our entire focus, right? But this just confused the hell out of me. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the things I was meant to care about, and no amount of faking it could hide the real me.

On top of not caring that much about boys, I hated shopping, I hated smelly fragrances, I hated dresses, and I hated gossip. And I decided girls who DID like these things were the problem. Because of them, I had the entire world telling me I was supposed to be someone I just wasn't.

I put girls in a box. All of them. "Girl" became a label that meant something flighty, stupid, and shallow. I was furious when someone would try to label me as one. It got to the point in college that I refused to call myself a girl. Flat out refused. Being a girl was the most insulting thing I could think of to be. It disgusted me. Girls were the root of all of my problems. I wished they didn't exist.

I literally wanted to erase my sex from the planet.

When I began to seriously consider what this meant for me, I realized that while I claimed to wish I'd been born a boy, I wasn't interested in actually being a boy. I didn't feel like I was male deep down. This isn't a story about a trans discovery. What I was deep down was female, it felt female, it just wasn't what I'd internalized "female" to mean. I was better than "female".

And when I hit upon that realization, I felt sicker than ever.

What's wrong with being female? What? Why did it have such a negative connotation to me? Why was so I nauseated by my own sex?

It's still a work in progress, but from that moment on, I've begun to reclaim that identity. I am female. I'm a girl. I'm a woman. And I'm a pretty awesome person. Those shouldn't be exclusive!

No, girls never got to be the action heroes (unless they knew five martial arts, slept with a million guys and broke all their hearts, and wore skin-tight black catsuits--none of which remotely described me). Girls were scarcely in adventure stories at all, except for the token few there to provide a romantic side story. But WHY NOT?

I grew up learning that unless it was a romance story, main characters were boys. What did that say about me--the main character of my OWN life? As someone who wasn't that interested in romance, I identified with the action heroes who were always male. And this fed into my twisted view of girls, and caused a lot of self-loathing through my teens and early twenties.

That's not okay.

ANYONE should be able to see themselves of the hero of the story, without having to change a basic aspect of their identity. When I started writing seriously, I focused on the fictional girls who drove this point home. Hermione. Polgara. Mara Jade. But even they were only there as side characters.

So I made the choice to make my main characters girls. Sometimes people tell me that my writing is more of a classic "boy adventure" mold, and I should consider that in my protagonist choice.

...Trust me. I have.

That's pretty much the entire point.

Nowadays, we are getting more True Adventures starring girls, which is great. But we've got a long, long way to go. We've barely made a dent in the male-dominated hero world. Until things are 50/50, it's not good enough.

If I can save any other young girl from the deep self-hatred I felt, I feel like I owe it to her. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that being a girl is just as cool as being a boy, but I can't.

This is why my protagonists are girls. And this is why I'm not backing down from that.