Written in Stone
laelaps | January 1, 2010Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books. How does a book go from being an idea to a real, dead-tree product? I will be discussing some of the details of this process (especially using online resources to write and promote books) with Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson in a few weeks at ScienceOnline2010, but I thought I would cover some of the basics here.
The first and most crucial step of the process is coming up with a book to write! This is not as easy as it might sound.…
laelaps | December 31, 2009With a few hours left in 2009, now seems as good a time as any to take stock of what I have accomplished during past year.
The year got off to a pretty good start. After participating in the ScienceOnline09 conference I decided to get serious about science writing, both on blogs and "dead tree media." Among my first formal efforts to be published outside the blogohedron were an article about spotted hyenas for Antennae and a review of A History of Paleontology Illustration for Palaeontologia Electronica.
What I did not expect, however, was the appearance of "Ida." I won't recapitulate the…
laelaps | December 15, 2009After spending a long weekend hammering away at the text, I am now happy to say that the first formal iteration of Written in Stone is nearly complete.
It has been difficult work. Making sure that the narrative flows smoothly throughout the book has been among the top challenges, especially since I am not using the somewhat worn technique of starting at a point in earth's history and chronologically creeping towards the present. Instead I am using the history of science as a way to introduce what we have come to understand about the history of life from the fossil record. The two narratives…
laelaps | December 8, 2009Long before I signed up with ScienceBlogs.com I started blogging on the website ProgressiveU.org as part of the "Blogging For Progress" scholarship contest. I was one of the winners selected for the fall of 2006, and some of the folks at ProgressiveU recently caught up with me about what I have been up to since then. Science blogging, the public's fascination with dinosaurs, "Ida", Written in Stone, and more covered in the two-part interview, which can be viewed here and here. Enjoy!
laelaps | December 7, 2009Via PHD comics.Blogging might be a little light here over the next few days. I have only one week left to tune-up the initial draft of Written in Stone before sending it off to my editor for comments, so the pressure is on. The entire manuscript will be finished by the end of January (and then it will be time to finish those papers I have been working on and the proposal for book #2).
Photos of the day and little tidbits will pop up now and then, but every time I get the compulsion to write a new essay I am going to turn that energy to editing Written in Stone instead. Posts at Dinosaur…
laelaps | November 28, 2009For months now I have been hammering away at individual chapters of my first book, Written in Stone, but this weekend I finally put all the individual parts together into one document. I still have a lot of editing to do, but it still feels good to move past the stage of large-scale construction and get down to fine tuning.
With the greater body of work properly arranged I could hardly resist creating a Wordle cloud for the book. For those unfamiliar with Wordle, it is an online program that will scan through a body of text and pick out the most frequently used words and display them in a…
laelaps | November 23, 2009
I get a lot of questions about my forthcoming book, Written in Stone, but the most popular by far is "What are you going to say about creationism?"
Presently there is a glut of books that confront creationism in one way or another. There are books that counter creationist claims with scientific evidence (Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, Why Evolution is True, The Greatest Show on Earth, &c.) and others that, while they present many of the same scientific arguments, are also concerned with making the idea of evolution less threatening to religious audiences (Only A…
laelaps | November 2, 2009
It has been a little more than a month since I announced my forthcoming book on paleontology and evolution, Written in Stone, and I have been hard at work on the manuscript. As it stands now the book is about 3/4 complete. Provided everything stays on schedule I should have a first draft of the whole book finished in about a month.
But finishing the manuscript, while of primary importance, is not my only concern. I am a virtually unknown science writer publishing my first book through a relatively small house. That means that I cannot sit idly by and expect lots of people to take interest in…