I was able to write only briefly today, in a chapter I'm thinking of calling "Witness to the Moonlight Mass of the Tardigrades". The tardigrade is often called a "water bear" and is a microscopic animal that lives on mosses and on the underside of some leaves. Seeing as how at some point the protagonist must talk to the ghosts of dead plants, I figured he might as well be able to see tardigrades also. Whatever, right! I'm going out of my head here. Writing this fantastic, supernatural stuff is so much easier than the counterbalancing domestic passages. I could write for pages and pages about this mythical microscopic subculture but trying to write a conversation between a dude and his boss is just torturous. I should also mention that in this same chapter the murdered neighbor appears and beats the **** out of the protagonist. Yeah, it'll all make sense eventually.
When I saw Michael Chabon speak at AWP this year one thing that sticks out from his talk was the notion that in writing, ideas are easy to come by. The job of the writer is to funnel those ideas that sound so fantastic in your mind into something palatable for someone other than yourself. ADD is killer to novel writing. I keep getting so many ideas for new projects, even though I'm nowhere near to being done with what I'm working on now. All I can do is just write them down and come back to them later and hope they're still good ideas.
Other than tardigrades ("slow walker" in German) I also did some light reading on chemotaxis - the direction of cell movement using various proteins. Researchers grow human neural progenitor cells ("stem cells") and throw proteins at it, hoping to direct these cells to bone or brain damage, in hopes that diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's can be cured. A lab headed by Dr. Steve Stice (one of the scientists who cloned "Dolly") was researching this in Athens, GA the last few years to negative results.
This is what I do all day.
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