Story ideas to spark your creativity

Being a Bird

12/13/2024

I have dreams of flying and adore the fantasy trope of shapeshifting. But what’s it really like to be (or become) a bird?

FLIGHT
Although bird wings are essentially modified forelimbs (arms), they’ve evolved complex dexterity for flight.
Birds fly by flapping their wings and steer primarily with their tails. Tail shape affects how rapidly they can change direction (forked tails like those of barn swallows allow the quickest turns). Of course some birds swim (penguins) and others don’t fly at all (ostriches).

For birds that fly, wing shape varies based on whether the bird flaps their wings to stay airborne (shorter wingspan) or spends most of their time gliding (longer wingspan).
Birds can shorten, lengthen, and adjust the angle of their wings, and spread or close their long flight feathers to fine-tune their flight. They have muscles controlling the position of each individual feather.
Shapeshifting into a hawk, for example, would involve much more than flapping your “arms.” You’d also be constantly tilting and adjusting your wings and tail—and moving individual flight feathers—in response to fluctuating air currents. But wouldn’t it be glorious to fly?! But there's more to being a bird than flying~

VISION
Birds process visual information more than twice as fast as humans. As David Allen Sibley notes in What It's like to be a Bird: “where we would see a signpost on the highway as a blur, birds would still be able to see details and track the passing of each post.”

Humans have one focal point (fovea) in each eye and both eyes focus on the same point.
Raptors (hawks, falcons, owls, eagles, vultures, osprey) have two fovea on each eye (four total) pointing in different directions, so they see four different areas of detail and have nearly 360 degrees of peripheral vision.
They see their prey in detail from great distances, and in all directions simultaneously.

According to Tim Birkhead in Bird Sense, raptor visual acuity (ability to see fine detail) is boosted by about one million cones per square millimeter (compared to about 200,000 in humans, eighty percent fewer). He says the closest we can come to imagining what it’s like to process visual information as rapidly as a raptor is the sensation of time slowing down when we have a terrifying, near-death experience.
Our hawk shapeshifter will need to process four sets of visual data (both an overall view and an extreme zoom, on both sides of the head) at more than twice the human-rate of comprehension.

HEARING
Owls have very sensitive hearing, and the asymmetrical positioning of their ears (one is higher than the other) helps them pinpoint tiny sounds with exceptional accuracy on both the horizontal and vertical planes. The special design of their feathers allows “air to flow smoothly around the wing allowing nearly silent flight so prey can’t hear them and they can use their acute hearing to help locate prey.” (Sibley)
An owl shapeshifter must process a very different method of hearing since humans hear only on the horizontal plane.

NAVIGATION
Birds can “read the stars, track the sun, hear infrasound [very low frequency noises], follow smells . . . and detect polarized light, which gives clues to the position of the sun even when the sun is not visible.” (Sibley)

Even more incredible is their “sixth sense” that helps them detect the orientation and slope of the earth’s magnetic field “like a GPS map. [A] chemical mechanism based in the eye provides the compass, while the magnetic receptors in the beak provide the map.
The compass may detect the direction of the magnetic field while the map detects the strength, and by integrating both types of information the birds navigate home.” (Birkhead)

In addition to the complexities of flight, vision, and hearing, our bird shapeshifter will also navigate by more-than-human sensations including smell, detecting polarized light, and position relative to the earth’s magnetic field. Bound to be disorienting at first, but once you get the hang of being a bird, it should be an incredible rush—however, it might be a bit dull to shift back into the limited sensations of a human.

For more fascinating facts on our animal cousins (and shapeshifting options), read Human Hunters & Alien Brains, Lesbian Lizards, Cosmonaut Cockroach Sex, and my review of An Immense World

Embracing Fear

10/7/2024

Facing the blank page, submitting work for publication, and getting dreaded rejections can trigger paralyzing fears. We might freeze when starting a new project, fuss over our work and endlessly revise it chasing impossible “perfection,” or break into a sweat whenever we submit our writing to for others to read.
However, it is possible to turn fear into an ally.
First, I find encouragement knowing I’m not alone with my fears:

In The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, author Ralph Keyes quotes successful published authors and their experiences with fear.
He says, “Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last. …their best ideas are personal, candid, and deeply felt. Yet such ideas make them feel subnaked before the world.”

My most common recurring fears are:

failure, humiliation and shame
not (ever) being good enough
running out of time
rejection

It’s helpful to know that rejections are a common experience in the publishing industry, yet every time an editor passes on my work, I go into a brief shame spiral.
I try to remind myself that successful authors are persistent authors, and of the Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, get up eight.

William Kenower suggests the antidote to the fear and vulnerability writing is focusing on the story itself. In Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence he says, “Why you want to share your stories will both teach you how to share them and keep you safe from the fear that sharing engenders. ... To write fearlessly and with complete confidence, you must rest in your unconditional love for the story you’re telling.”

I love spinning stories and creating interesting characters, many of whom become “friends.” Publishing allows others to fall in love with these fictional characters and share in their adventures. I also try to imbue my work with meaningful themes, such as spiritual connection with the natural world and inclusiveness, where absolutely everyone has a place at the table, including my villains.

Ralph Keyes notes that “Writers work under constant threat of public ridicule and rejection.”
But in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland advise creatives to focus on the integrity of the story itself. “Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.”

I must learn to balance writing in a way readers can enjoy, responding to critiques from editors and other writers, and staying true to my own vision—without getting paralyzed by fear.
Some days it’s especially challenging to quiet my inner critic.
Ultimately, I must come back to my character “friends” and the story I want to tell, then pray for the courage to tell it.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” —George Adair.

I try to start every writing session with a brief ritual. I light incense and pray to be inspired and guided in what I write. Lately I’ve also been praying to “embrace and cherish” my fears. A tall order, but it does (temporarily) shift my dread.
Reading craft books and taking classes often inspire me to write, as does reading great fiction or fascinating nonfiction. Once I’m inspired, it’s easier to dive into writing.
When I’m stuck in a particular story and can’t seem to regain my momentum, I may go back to an earlier passage and move forward from there, or switch to a different project. Writing blogs and book reviews for my website and taking stock for my monthly newsletter provide creative outlets when my stories or poems aren’t working.
I’ve also started keeping a daily word-tally, which helps incentivize getting words “on paper.” I count each major revision of a story, which helps me celebrate my progress.
Sending stories and poems out for submission is always scary, but it helps if I reread my work to regain that thrill of completion.

In The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes admits, “I feared…I would be revealed as an imposter: someone who said he could write a book but couldn’t.” It’s easy to fall into imposter syndrome when my work doesn’t measure up to my expectations.
Bayles & Orland address this issue in Art & Fear:
“The irony here is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you’re right on the edge of being able to imagine. …The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”

My fear that I’m not “good enough” or will never “make it” as a “real author” triggers my perfectionism. But what does “perfect” mean in terms of writing? Every reader has unique tastes. You may not finish a book I adore and reread with delight. I'm learning that there's no one right way to tell a story. Instead, I strive to craft the words that most closely convey the story I want to tell.

Author Sarah Callender reveals that even success can be terrifying in her delightful essay “Writing (and Living) in the Midst of Fear.” After ten years she finally sold her novel, and was confronted with new fears. She uses her fear of being strafed by crows to explore how “like a contagion, fear infects our hearts and brains, our relationships and communities. Even when there’s good reason to feel scared, fear tempts us to retreat, isolate, blame, hoard.”
She recommends playing with crow finger puppets and “continue using words to expand the world, to amplify empathy, to fertilize the love-parts of our fellow human’s hearts.”

In The Art of Mistakes Melanie Rothschild suggests “Mistakes give us ideas we could never deliberately think up otherwise. …And most of the time, the price we pay for avoiding mistakes is the loss of stretching our thinking in substantive, new ways. There are serious consequences for not understanding the nature of how mistakes serve us.” Rothschild encourages us to embrace “mistakes” as part of the creative process.
The goal then is not to avoid “mistakes” or write “perfectly,” but to honor the integrity of each project.

In Fearless Writing, William Kenower advises us to “look upon writing as a practice—meaning something at which you gradually improve and are not expected to be perfect at every time you attempt it.”

Kenower also says, “The best writers exploit fear’s energy to billow the sails of their imaginations. They convert anxiety into enthusiasm and an unparalleled source of energy.”
I have found it beneficial to give my characters my deepest fears: rejection, abandonment, failure. By forcing my characters to face these fears and vicariously experiencing their courage, I become a smidge more comfortable.
And as much as possible, I let my imagination play.

I’ve come to accept that fear will always be a companion on my writing journey. And as my author friend LaShaunda C. Hoffman says about writing with fear: “Do it scared.”

Human Hunters & Alien Brains

9/11/2024

Inspired by An Immense World, Ed Yong’s exploration of animal senses, read on for highlights of the lowly (but infinitely annoying) mosquito, and the brainy octopus.

MOSQUITOES
In An Immense World, Ed Yong calls mosquitoes “the planet’s most effective hunters of humans.”
Research indicates that mosquitoes taste with their antennae, and, like flies, also taste with their feet. To mosquitoes, DEET tastes bitter, so when we cover skin with mosquito repellant “the receptors on their feet force them to take off before they get a chance to bite.”
Good thing, since the CDC lists multiple dangers associated with mosquito bites.

Ed Yong goes into detail exploring a mosquito’s inner world:
“Imagine what it might be like to be a mosquito. Flying through a thick soup of tropical air, your antennae slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of carbon dioxide. Enticed, you turn into the plume, zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead whenever you pick it up. You spot a dark silhouette and fly over to investigate. You enter into a cloud of lactic acid, ammonia, and sulcatone—molecules released by human skin. Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat. You land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and other tastes. Your senses, working together, have once again found a human. You find a blood vessel and drink your fill.”

OCTOPUSES
Photoreceptors in the human eye are the rods and cones that convert light into images within our brains. “Octopuses, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods have photoreceptors dotted throughout their skin, which might help control their amazing color-changing abilities.”
According to Two Oceans Aquarium, their color change comes from manipulating skin pigments: “Just beneath their skin, octopuses have thousands of cells called chromatophores. Each of these cells has a tiny sac filled with either a red, orange, brown, yellow or black pigment and by stretching or squeezing these sacs, they can rapidly change the brightness of each of these colors.”

It’s the octopus brain where things get really interesting. Ed Yong again:
“An octopus’s central nervous system contains around 500 million neurons—a total that dwarfs that of all other invertebrates and that’s comparable to the number found in small mammals. But only a third of those neurons are found in the animal’s head…The remaining 320 million are in the arms. Each arm has a large and relatively complete nervous system, which seems barely to communicate with the other arms. An octopus effectively has nine brains that have their own agendas."

“Even the 300 suckers on each arm are somewhat independent. Once a sucker makes contact with something it reshapes itself to create a seal and then sticks by creating suction. Meanwhile it simultaneously touches and tastes using 10,000 mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors on its rim. Our tongues perceive flavor and mouthfeel as separate qualities, but given the wiring of the sucker, an octopus likely doesn’t.
“Depending on the flavor it feels, or the texture it tastes, the sucker might continue sucking or let go. And it can make that decision on its own, since each sucker is served by its own mini-brain. …[The arm brains] coordinate the individual suckers and allow the entire arm to act in an organized way. And they can also accomplish a lot on their own without involving the central brain ... .reach out, grab objects, and pull them back in."

“…an octopus has a body of pure possibility. Aside from its hard beak, it is soft, malleable, and free to contort. Its skin can change color and texture at a whim. Its arms can extend, contract, bend, and rotate anywhere along their lengths and have practically infinite ways of performing even simple movements. How could a brain, even a large one keep track of such boundless options? …The brain doesn’t have to. It can mostly let the arms sort themselves out, while imposing the occasional grudging nudge.”

It’s hard to imagine consciousness based on so many different centers of processing—like a biological internet with multiple terminals operating simultaneously but all focused on unique activities. The ultimate multitasker!
Not surprisingly, there’ve been a number of science fiction stories based on these amazing creatures, including The Mountain in the Sea and a delightful micro story by Peter Chiykowski.
Explore other amazing animal senses in An Immense World, by Ed Yong, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and my blog Being a Bird.

Serving Plants

8/12/2024

What if . . . we evolved to propagate plants? Perhaps gardeners and farmers are actually servants— diligently watering, weeding, and fertilizing plants who have convinced us they are the most edible and desirable.
In The Light Eaters, the author says: "We know that some plants are hallucinogenic, some are addictive…in what other ways are they influencing us? A fleet of humans carefully tending a field of crops can certainly start to look like an army of plant symbionts”

The author continues:
“There are presumably thousands of [chemical] compounds we might inhale or ingest every day, simply existing as plant eaters on a plant-dominated planet.

How might the complex chemicals plants synthesize influence us?
“[Consider the] thousands of natural plant chemicals we unwittingly ingest every time we eat a fruit or vegetable. We don’t know what they are doing with our brain. We can never be sure, when we are eating something nice and tasty, that there is not something in this tomato or apple that makes us believe it is the best food.”

Hot peppers are candidates for a top human-influencing plant.

Hot peppers contain a chemical called capsaicin that makes them unpalatable to most insects, and we humans are the only animals who “enjoy” having our mouths set afire from it. As a result of our singular taste for capsaicin, humans have spread pepper plants around the world and even bred them for a higher capsaicin content.
From the plant’s perspective, we’ve done their work for them.

Plants are more intelligent and cunning that we usually give them credit for--and incredibly adaptable per The Light Eaters:
“[S]everal plants, including lima beans and tobacco, can react to an attack of munching insects by summoning those insects’ specific predators to come pick them off.”
“Other plants…secrete a chemical that causes hungry caterpillars to turn away from devouring their leaves to eat each other instead.”

“[Plants] grow thorns and spikes and stinging hairs, developed with remarkable precision, to pierce the flesh or exoskeleton of whatever mammal ro bug might be its main threat.”
“[Or] secrete sticky sugar to entice and then immobilize their antagonists, whose hungry mouths get stuck shut.”

“[Plants] form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemical aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses.”
“Some plants are able to detect that an insect has placed its eggs somewhere on their body and sabotage the eggs.”
“Plants see each other by the color of the light. Light changes color when it passes through a plant, and the light that passes through different plants is altered each in a different way, far too subtle for us to notice but clearly distinct enough for plants to notice.”

“[C]arnivorous plants…were recently discovered to have evolved to hunt in packs. Collaboration on catching insects allows them to lure larger prey.”
A venus flytrap can count:
"if two trigger hairs... are touched within 20 seconds... the trap snaps shut. But the flytrap keeps counting. If the hairs [inside the trap] are disturbed five times... it injects digestive juices... and the meal commences." If there's no additional movement, it reopens the trap.

Plants communicate through chemical signals but they also make clicks.
“Each species of plant seemed to have their own click frequency. A cactus sounded very different from a grape, for example.”
“Perhaps plants are also speaking in movement, in electricity, or even in the flow of fluid in their bodies that clearly produces audible clicks, though all of this has yet to be understood.”

Ursula LeGuin predicted this understanding of nonhuman language fifty years ago in her fabulous short story, The Author of Acacia Seeds, that features translations of the language of ants and dolphins among other creatures.

Our world is more bizarre and mind-blowing than any science fiction story!
For more brain-boggling factoids read about whacky weeds, cyclical cicadas, the world of microbes, extremophiles, pathogenesis, cockroaches in space, and plant-animal hybrids.

Creating Microtension

7/15/2024

Plenty of writing craft books advocate ways to create plot-level tension and suspense, but few mention microtension, the secret sauce that keeps readers turning pages.
In The Fire in Fiction, Donald Mass says, “Microtension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story, but in the next few seconds.”
Microtension is born from conflicting emotions—the inner conflict of the characters— and its key element is making readers uneasy so they have to keep reading to find out what happens next.

In dialogue, it’s not what characters say, but how their words reveal their internal conflicted emotional states.
Action becomes tense when conflicting emotions are folded into the events, making outcomes more uncertain.
Exposition and inner monologue also benefit from conflicting ideas and emotions to keep readers uneasy and engaged.

Even quiet moments can benefit from microtension:
“Every minute has a mood. Every moment has meaning."
"Tension springs from weaving these elements into a passage that precisely captures small visceral details and surgically dissects the enormous feelings that fill a silence.”

The opening scene of A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland illustrates the uneasiness created by microtension in the author’s word choices:

“acute relief” contrasted with “terror and worry” and “routine [birth]” → A self-aware character embarrassed by his intense, passionate emotions, which are exaggerated for the situation
“prayed fervently” versus “breathe easy” → A pious person who knows he worries needlessly
“days of celebration” and “daily concerns” contrasted with “alarming break-in,” “most blasphemous crimes,” “perplexing tantrums,” and “shaky nerves” → Subtext that all is not well despite the celebrations, and that the character struggles to fulfill his duties

Unease and reader questions infuse the opening scene of The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton:

“Scars and fresh scratches marred the rich tan of his back and arms” → A beautiful man unconcerned by fresh scratches and scars [What caused these scars?]
“…the canopy of leaves chattered welcome.” → Are the trees actually speaking with him?
“...[He] replied, That’s encouraging, in their tongue” → How can he speak with trees?
“It had taken Bran months to win the trust of [these] trees, for he’d arrived angry and corded over by bitter flavors” → He is trustworthy yet full of anger and bitterness
“He needed the rhythm under his skin to properly connect, to find the paths of magic he could use to track the loathsome Burgan army” → A powerful magician concerned with mundane war
“Peace and solitude,” “tranquility,” “refreshed and blessed,” “where he might best catch hold of a wind willing to report on Burgun.” → Serenity contrasted with spying on his enemy
“Ban rather liked his [scars] for how they proved his experiences and belonged to none but him” → An unexpected response to scars and being physically wounded.

Reader uneasiness can thus be generated within characters and between the character and reader expectations.

Writer Zara Altair recommends using juxtaposition to generate microtension: a contrast between what a character sees and what they hear, or an inner conflict created by a character wanting information but being unwilling to sacrifice their dignity to get it.
She notes “each character has motivations. And each motivation is tied to an emotion.” Choosing words that highlight character motivations and emotions can help illuminate a character’s inner conflicts.

Writes With Tools describes crafting creative tension through “oppositions, juxtapositions, and resolutions of seemingly contradictory ideas or feelings.”
She offers the following practical suggestions:

Choose words with subtle nuances of tension (desire vs. lust) or contrary meanings (sweet sorrow, cruel kindness, admirable villain)
Explore polarizing word pairs: impossible/necessary, powerful/helpless
Show a character acting in a way that contradicts her stated desires
“Make one character uncertain about or suspicious of the other character”
“Make a character’s dialogue contrary to their goals, thoughts, body language”
Reveal the character’s “emotions about the action…and what it might mean”
“Tie setting, in some way, to inner tension” in the character

Writes with Tools also recommends structuring sentences and paragraphs without a summarizing lead sentence to heighten reader curiosity:
“Look for instances where you’ve made the punchline the topic sentence …when the [character] makes a conclusion then gives the reader evidence for drawing it. He’s a slob [summary]. His sink is full of week-old dishes. His bed is unmade… Instead, show what the character sees and then draw the conclusion…if you even need to. There’s no reason to repeat things the reader has figured out.”
This example also illustrates common writing advice of showing (dirty dishes, unmade bed) versus telling (He’s a slob).

Why work so hard to incorporate microtension in your writing?
According to Donald Maas, microtension is THE KEY to crafting compelling fiction readers can’t put down.

More from Donald Maass: The Emotional Craft of Fiction, The Fire in Fiction, Crafting Emotional Resonance

Wacky Weeds

6/8/2024

Some years are better than others for garden vegetables, but I grow one set of abundant crops without fail every year: weeds. They reappear as quickly as I yank them out, like aliens from a horror movie.

Science fiction/horror movies have long celebrated killer plants: The Thing from Another World (1951: a resilient plant-based alien); The Day of the Triffids (1962: walking alien plants); Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978: sentient tomatoes rebel against humanity); Little Shop of Horrors (1986: an alien plant with a taste for human blood); The Happening (2008: trees defend themselves agaisnt humans with psychosis-inducing pollen).

Actual weeds are as fantastical as anything in fiction. For example, in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants, by Richard Mabey, the author says, “In a single summer each underground stem [of ground elder] can extend as much as three feet, so that from a single rosette an area of more than a yard square has been colonized. The roots plunge down as well, to unprecedented depths. In a quarry in Kent…a worker found ground elder roots probing thirty feet below the surface. …[and] almost any fragment of the wiry root system or shoot, cut up by hoe or spade, can generate a new plant.”

Another fabulous weed Mabey describes is knotweed. “Each [knotweed] had a root system that could extend six feet underground and advance the growing shoots of the plant twenty feet or more each year. …The spring shoots, several of which appear from the bulky rhizome, can break through asphalt, lift concrete slabs into the air, and reach a height of five feet in four weeks.”

How do weeds become so voracious? According to Mabey, we create them:

First, it’s important to realize that weeds are naturally resilient~
“Weeds’ rapid, opportunist lifestyles mean that their role—what they do—is to fill empty spaces of the earth, to repair the vegetation shattered naturally for millions of years by landslide and flood and forest fire, and today degraded by aggressive farming and gross pollution. In so doing, they stabilize the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants, and begin the process of succession.”

Second, this adaptability is genetically enhanced~
“It’s long been known that many plants —e.g., juniper or fat hen—can exist in different forms in different habitats without any genetic variation between types. It now looks as if these “epigenetic” effects can be produced in individual plants within a very few seasons or generations. ... gene complexes shared by many weed species, which predispose them, for example, to fast growth and adaptability.”

Third, agriculture promotes the evolution of modern weeds~
“…just as the hoe gave advantage to individual weed plants with deep roots that could regenerate when chopped, and grain sieves helped the evolution of weeds whose seeds were the same size as crop grains, so chemical weed killers actively encouraged the evolution of individual weeds whose biochemistry is unusual enough to be immune to the poison.”
This “endless game of chemical poker” encourages increasingly resilient weeds. Over fifty species “have evolved some type of resistance to a wide range of herbicides.”

Weeds not only inspire fantastical stories, they also provide a mirror:
“Every single weed nuisance—from the ground elder in the over-hoed English herbaceous border to the casually imported pond plant suffocating the Everglades swamps, to the cogon smothering the napalmed remnants of the Vietnamese rainforest—has been the consequence of thoughtlessness and sometimes deliberate disruption of natural systems. Weeds are our most successful cultivated crop.”
“[Weeds] are mobile, prolific, and…use multiple strategies for getting their own way. …the species they most resemble is us.”

For more on fascinating plant facts, read Serving Plants and Plant-Animal Hybrids.

Rewarding Gluttony: Cicadas

5/25/2024

Periodical cicadas fill the summer air with their trilling mating songs.
Cicadas spend most of their lives as wingless nymphs underground, feeding on tree roots. When they emerge, they molt into winged insects to mate, leaving behind ghostly shells.
Some emerge from the ground every 13 years, others every 17.

Both broods will reach maturation this year, creating an almost deafening cacophony of males buzzing to attract female mates.
This irregular emergence of thousands of cicadas all at once is a survival strategy called predator satiation. The birds and snakes that glut themselves on cicadas can’t eat all of them, ensuring that many will survive to breed the next generation.

Oak trees utilize a similar strategy called mast seeding. Every 2-5 years, the oak trees in a given region all produce a bumper crop of acorns, up to 10,000 per tree. This overwhelms the squirrels, chipmunks, deer, and other nut eaters, leaving extra acorns to grow into young oak trees.
Oaks produce acorns every year, and some of these are buried and forgotten by squirrels, or missed entirely. But not every acorn germinates, and very few seedlings survive to become adult oak trees. By producing an overabundance of acorns at random intervals, the oak trees of a forest increase their odds of successful reproduction.

Why not produce a bumper crop of acorns every year, or in the case of cicadas, emerge to mate more frequently? This actually would have a detrimental effect on species survival. It would encourage predators to expand their populations to take advantage of the abundant food source: hordes of squirrels and deer munching on acorns, mobs of birds and snakes devouring cicadas.
By utilizing a random (oak) pattern of overproduction or rare (cicada) pattern of overpopulation, predators can’t expand their numbers fast enough to consume all of the bounty, leaving plenty of individual acorns or cicadas to seed the next generation.

On the flip side, animals that eat a very specialized diet—for example koala bears, who eat only eucalyptus leaves—are more susceptible to die off if their specific food source declines due to habitat loss or climate change.
However, generalists who eat a wide variety of foods—like racoons, coyotes, and humans—are able to adapt more easily to habitat changes.
As humans continue to destroy natural habitats through overdevelopment and climate change, generalists will become more dominant and specialists like the adorable koala will dissappear.

Take-aways:

opportunistic gluttony is natural, so go ahead and eat that whole pizza (but only occasionally)
omnivores with varied tastes have the best odds of surviving the climate crisis

Universes within Us

3/26/2024

To a tree, humans are fast-moving and short-lived creatures. On a cosmic scale, our lifespans are hardly measurable. But to a bacteria or a virus, we're as large as a planet~
We humans are, in fact, made up of a constellation of microscopic elements. An adult human is composed of about 30 trillion cells, and 39 trillion microbes: bacteria, viruses, and fungi that call our bodies home. The biome within you may weigh as much as five pounds!
Three-quarters of our microbes may be inherited from our mothers (for those born vaginally) and we ingest millions of microbes with our meals.

Fun facts:
“Each part of the body is a different type of ecosystem, like a planet with different continents and climates, the [miscroscopic] inhabitants of which have adapted to the characteristics of each location.” (BBC)

“Friendly” microbes can help protect us from more harmful ones. For example, Lactobacilli living in the mucus membranes of our nose may guard us against chronic sinus inflammation and allergies.

Other microbes are more insidious.
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic bacteria that only reproduces in the gut of domestic or wild cats, yet can infect any warm-blooded animal including humans. Toxoplasma is known to manipulate its hosts. For example, it makes rodents reckless around house cats and therefore easier to catch.
Infected hyena cubs are more likely to approach and be eaten by lions.
Wolves infected with Toxoplasma are 46% more likely to become aggressive pack leaders than noninfected wolves.

At least one-third of humans are thought to be infected with Toxoplasma. Infected humans are more likely to engage in risky driving habits and become entrepreneurs.

What remains unanswered:
Are infected humans more susceptible to feline manipulation (like the hapless infected mice sacrificed to entertain house cats)?
Am I feeding the cats treats because I am a kind and caring cat-mom, or do I cater to their every whim because I’m infected by Toxoplasma?

Gotta go, my cat bosses demand my service . . .

Writing with Authority

1/4/2024

I recently ingested a writing book by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Consider This. It had some excellent writing tips despite extensive name-dropping and life-as-a-famous-author-is-hard grumbling.
My take-aways:

"A book will only become a classic if it binds together a community of readers. …To create this community, give readers more than they can handle alone. Give them so much humor or pathos or idea or profundity that they’re compelled to push the book on others if only to have peers with whom they can discuss it. Give them a book so strong, or a performance so big, that it becomes a story they tell."

AUTHORITY.
"Action carries its own authority. If you move through each scene with clear, physical verbs→taking steps, touching objects→your reader’s mind will follow as closely as a dog’s eyes track a squirrel."
"Stories have greater authority if they’re delivered with the same passion and flawed language that an actual person would use telling the emotion-laden truth."

DIALOGUE.
"Consider that when you put a character’s dialogue in quotes you give the character greater reality. …If you want to negate or lessen a character, paraphrase what they say. When you want to showcase a character, put their dialogue in quotation marks. Use attribution. Underscore each speech with a gesture."

TENSION.
"A good [ticking] clock limits time, thus heightening tension. And it tells us what to expect, thus freeing our minds to indulge in the emotion of the story."
"...by introducing limited elements, and doing so early, the Minimalist writer is free to aggressively move the plot forward. And the limited number of elements→characters, objects, settings→accrue meaning and importance as they’re used repeatedly."

More favorite quotes:

Avoid making your reader feel foolish at all costs! You want to make your reader feel smart, smarter than the main character. That way the reader will sympathize and want to root for the character.
The job of a creative person is to recognize and express things for others. …The best writers seem to read our minds, and they nail exactly what we’ve never been able to put into words.
Find some way to love every aspect of the writing job.
You never dictate meaning to your reader. If need be, misdirect [her.] But always allow [her] to realize the truth before you state it outright. Trust your readers’ intelligence and intuition, and they will return the favor.
Tell your stories not simply through your readers’ eyes and minds, but through their skin, their noses, their guts, the bottoms of their feet.
A character’s mistakes or misdeeds allow the reader to feel smarter. The reader becomes the caretaker or parent of the character and wants the character to survive and succeed.. ...establish emotional authority by depicting an imperfect character making a mistake.
A good writer must gently pass the reader from sentence to sentence, like a fragile egg, without jarring the reader out of the story.
Build your novel with a number of scenes or chapters that can stand alone as short stories. …Self-contained, a story can also be sold to a magazine, for extra money and to assure some future book publisher that the topic has already been embraced by other editors.

Grateful my local library had this book. It's not one I'd choose to buy because so much of it didn't interest me (his gratuitous name-dropping and famous-author stories), but it did have solid technique advice.

Space Trash

11/11/2023

I’ve been picking at a short story involving space trash (our upper atmosphere is cluttered with debris). It's a timely topic given that three astronauts were recently stranded for over a year after their capsule radiator was struck by a miniscule piece of space junk.
I’m not the only person fretting about the trash floating overhead. A company called Privateer is creating 3D images of the junk cluttering Earth’s atmosphere. Omega (of spacewatch fame) is a recent partner and issued a cool video showing these 3D images.

Per Wikipedia: “As of November 2022, the US Space Surveillance Network reported 25,857 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 5,465 operational satellites. However, these are just the objects large enough to be tracked and in an orbit that makes tracking possible.”
NASA has an orbital debris tracking program. They estimate there are half a million marble-sized objects and one-hundred-million flecks smaller than one millimeter.
The speck that incapacitated the Soyuz capsule radiator and stranded those three astronauts was 0.08 millimeters--about the diameter of a human hair. It was able to pierce the spaceship because of the incredibly fast speed at which this debris travels in orbit around the planet.

I don’t want to live in a garbage dump. I pick up trash while hiking to keep it out of the water supply and as a favor to the forest and fellow hikers. Once a week, I take our garbage barrel and recycling out to the curb. Every day I pick up scattered cat toys.
Here’s hoping the satellite and space exploration industries learn how to clean up after themselves, before it becomes a more lethal problem.

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