Dan Koboldt's Putting the Science in Fiction

I'm a big fan of Dan Koboldt's blog posts featuring experts offering advice to help writers get their fields right. Now these posts have been compiled in book form. Read a sample or Order from your favorite bookseller

About the Book Science and technology have starring roles in a wide range of genres—science fiction, fantasy, thriller, mystery, and more. Unfortunately, many depictions of technical subjects in literature, film and television are pure fiction. Putting the Science in Fiction connects you to experts in a broad range of fields. Scientists, engineers, medical professionals, and other experts offer advice on getting the details right, to help writers create more realistic yet engaging stories that will satisfy discerning readers.

Book Review: Blood Solutions by BJ Smith

Detective stories aren't usually on my bookshelf, but when I found out my coworker had written a novel, I wanted to read it.

From the first page, I was pleasantly surprised that the writing was excellent. I spend a lot of time reading for critique groups and beta-trades and this was well plotted and polished.  The story itself kept me engaged and thinking through a quick, enjoyable read.  The detective was an interesting character but I felt closer to the psychologist by the end. But my favorite part was the mystery--there was a perfect mix of clues that kept me guessing until the end.

His second book just came out so let me know what you think!

Grep within Microsoft Word Files

How many of you are actually UNIX users who write fiction in Microsoft Word for the convenience of sharing comments with others? Wait, it's just me? Regardless of the limited audience, I need to save this cool trick for my own reference.

The issue: I want to bring back a scene that I've written and discarded. I'm sure it lives in some previous version, but it is tedious to open all the previous versions and search by hand. (Yes, this is partly because I save so many previous versions despite my inability to open and search them. Specifically, there are 229 docx files of my current work-in-progress).

The real thanks  goes to the last answer of this question on stack overflow: How do I grep in microsoft word files? . I can't upvote the comment, but the theory and specifics are invaluable.

docx files are just zipped xml files. 

So all you have to do is unzip them, 

use sed to strip off the xml tags 

and you have a grep-able text file. 

(Grep is an invaluable unix command, and one of the main reasons I use a mac so I can open a terminal and use these tools I know.  Grep will return any instances of a string from a text file).

I wrapped the user's answer (in italics below) in order to convert all my docx files. I'm not going to explain all the unix commands; feel free to comment if you want to know more.

ls *.docx > ! list.all

grep -v -e "~" list.all > ! list.docx

mkdir text_files

set list = `cat list.docx`

foreach file ( $list )

    unzip -p "$file" word/document.xml | sed -e 's/<[^>]\{1,\}>//g; s/[^[:print:]]\{1,\}//g'  >! text_files/$file:r.txt

    ls text_files/$file:r.txt

end

Now I should be able to search for my text string (orach, in this case) through each file.
cd text_files
grep orach *

However, the format of the replacement (sed) command above basically makes the entire document into one long line, and since grep returns the entire line that the match was found in, this is too much output.  I spent the rest of my morning writing time trying to get a newline at each replacement with sed, but it is leading me down a rabbit hole.  It all has to do with newline and escaping the newline and such and there are considerations based off of different flavors of unix/linux and shells. (For the record, OSX on a mac is BSD unix and my shell is tcsh).  I can get the \n into the file but it doesn't show up as an actual newline. 's#<[^>]\{1,\}>#\\\n#g'

So meanwhile, all I need to know are the filenames that match, then I can open them in 'less' and get it out.

foreach file ( * )

    set test = `grep orach $file`

    if ( $#test > 0 ) echo "$file matches"

    unset test

end

WhatsYourStory on Amy River's

Thanks to local author Amy Rivers for featuring me this summer in her #WhatsYourStory theme. It got me thinking about my path to becoming a writer.

Colorado Gold Contest Finalist

When I first went to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Gold Conference in 2014, I dreamed of someday getting recognized as a Gold Contest Finalist. In 2015, the contest filled up before I got my entry in. In 2016 and 2017, I managed to enter and got very useful feedback from my judges. Finally, this year, I got the email I've been yearning for.

I'm so excited to get to wear a Finalist ribbon on my conference badge this year, and walk up to the stage with the other finalists. They will announce first, second and third place winners from the list but it is enough for me to be there. It validates all the hours of writing and money on classes that I've put in over the past five years.

Then my critique group read the current ending, and a suggestion from Dinosaur Four author Geoff Jones set my brain on a path of changes that could make it a lot better...but different. Now I have to decide if it is worth putting in the work to do this, and not having a finished book to pitch at the conference. Frustrating, but even more I'm excited to have so many issues solved at once. Updates forthcoming!

Word Cloud

 I've often thought that having a histogram of word use in my stories would be educational. Today I found a site that makes a word cloud out of an uploaded text. This is the hundred most-used words in the section I'm currently working on (section three of four total, about 25K words).

Hana and Mari are the protagonist's daughters; Jackson is the antagonist (who isn't even present in the scene so I'm glad he ranked!).

Warning signs of bad writing: looked, going, started, stop, maybe,thought, sleeping, walking... My critique group might be suprised to see that 'trudged' didn't make it in the list!

Parallel Universes

What would my life have been like if I had gone to a historically black university?

A radio segment on NPR a few days ago reminded me that I had been tempted as a high-school senior by a brochure from a college in Atlanta, simply it featured a beautiful picture of a window. During a college fair, I talked to their representative, an African American man who heard my GPA and said they would admit me for sure, they'd love to have me.  I don't know if me being white had anything to do with his reaction, but it gave me pause.  It was enough different from the reaction I'd had from other colleges I'd been talking to: that I shouldn't expect to get in unless I was a valedictorian, multi-sport athlete and had done a lot of community service. When I researched the Atlanta college and learned it was historically black, I may have entertained a romantic idea of adventure, and I still loved that window, but I knew it wasn't enough to base a college decision on.

There are three main reasons I wouldn't want to go back and change where I went to college. The first is that I met my husband there. The second is that I went on a study-abroad-turned-traveling adventure. The third is that, once I returned to finish my degree, my undergrad department gave me the chance to be a paid teaching assistant, which showed me what a great deal grad school was, and so I went to grad school, and subsequently found science to be one of my places in the world. But all of that aside, if there was one thing I would be tempted to change, given the chance to do it over again, it would be going to a historically black college.

One of the things I love about traveling is that its a lazy way to build character. All you have to do is put yourself in the country, on the journey, and things won't be easy. You don't have to choose every day or every moment to do the challenging, uncomfortable thing. You just end up doing them, often in order to eat, drink or sleep. The result is that deep, unique, satisfying experiences are delivered.

What a culture shock it would have been for me, a white girl who grew up in the mountains of Colorado. I'm sure I would have been uncomfortable. Probably miserably self-conscious and experiencing culture shock without even understanding what I was. Maybe it would have been too much for me and I would have used my privilege to run back to a majority-white world. If I had been rejected by other students because of the color of my skin, I would know what that feels like. If I had had to answer for the actions of every white person throughout history, I would know what it feels like to be held as an unwilling representative for my race.  If black students thought I was receiving preferential treatment (as indeed I felt from the representative at the job fair), I would have had to confront that possibility. If I had been singled out, or conversely ignored, what would that have done to my self-worth? Would I have laughed along with jokes that made fun of white people, just to prove I belonged? Would I even have gotten the jokes? Would I have a better idea what it means to be white, or would I have struggled to identify with my race and sub-culture?

Compared to my hippie travels, which I thought at the time had changed me a lot, it seems this cultural experience would have been much more substantial, and much more useful for living in the United States.

One of the advantages of being a writer is that I can explore those parallel universes in theory. The paths I didn't take.  I can talk to white girls who took that plunge and find out what it's like, and write a book. (Someday... after my current one is polished!) What better 'leaving the unknown' in the Hero's Journey, and what better way to explore race relations without trying to take over someone else's voice?

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