Brian Clegg's Blog, page 22

I want to write a non-fiction book - part 5 - finding a publisher (or agent)

The quick version of this part of the non-fiction book journey is 'do your research'. I have a friend who runs a small publishing house that specialises in certain kinds of memoir and self-help. Every week, she receives novels, and non-fiction proposals that are way outside her scope. This does not make her happy.

Traditionally I would have said the best thing to do would be to buy a copy of one of the publishing guides, but now it's easy enough to go through a good number of books aimed at a similar readership as is your own in an online bookshop, noting down their publishers. Build a list of, say, ten likely publishers then visit their websites and explore them in detail. Look at how they describe themselves and what ranges of books they publish. Take a look at any guidance they have for authors. As mentioned in the previous part, try to find an appropriate contact (a commissioning editor, usually) to send a proposal to for each publisher. (Linked-In can sometimes help with this.) Only then send off your proposal.

Some worry about sending out a proposal to more than publisher. There's no need to be concerned. In the olden days, some publishers might have regarded this as 'bad form' - but they are more commercial organisations now and recognise that this is going to happen.

A number of publishers don't take direct submissions from authors, requiring you to have an agent. This is typically the really big publishers, such as Penguin Random House. We'll come onto agents in a moment. But most of the smaller publishers do take direct approaches - and they may well be better to start with than a big firm. With the big companies you are a tiny fish in a huge sea and may well get very little support even if your book is commissioned. I've almost always get more post-publication marketing from small to medium sized publishers than the big names.

An agent, of course, takes some of the pain of hunting for a publisher away, in exchange for typically between 10 and 20 per cent of your earnings. They can seem appealing - I've worked both with and without an agent. The biggest plus from having an agent was being made more visible to the publishing business at large. He also got me the biggest advances I've ever had (interestingly, for book that would not be my bestselling ones, in part because of that lack of marketing). But the downside of having an agent, apart from giving up that percentage of my earnings, was that I had to fit my publishing timetable to him, often leaving me with weeks or months without anything happening. It can also be harder to get an agent than to get a publisher direct. In the end I preferred the hands-on control of not having an agent and we were mutually happy with the parting.

If you want to find an agent, again research them well. Some specialise in different types of books, or different markets. Because agents are less visible to the public than publishers, you will get more benefit here from getting a copy of something like the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook to help develop a contact list.

So, you make contact, a publisher likes your proposal and makes you an offer. Brilliant. But they will also send you a contract - and that can have plenty of pitfalls, so that will be our next consideration.

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book? Outlining Other parts of a proposal The pitch letter Finding a publisher (or agent)The contractSelf-publishing

Image by Jaredd Craig from Unsplash

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Review: Terry Pratchett - A Life with footnotes - Rob Wilkins ****

When someone gave me a copy of this book I was rather doubtful. Not because the chances are it's only going to be of interest to Pratchett fans, because that why I was given it in the first place. I have more Pratchett novels on my bookshelves than those by any other author - and most of them are hardbacks, suggesting I couldn't wait for the paperback, a sure sign of fandom. However, I find it easy to separate the creator and their creation. Just because I enjoy a particular book, or piece of music, or artwork - or even foodstuff - doesn't mean I have any real interest in the person who created it. They are quite distinct entities.

The starting point, then, has to be whether the subject's life story is interesting as a standalone thing. And I think it's fair to say that in Terry Pratchett's case, that it was quite interesting. Not in any outstanding way - his wasn't an extraordinary life by any means - but there is no doubt that some of the aspects of his personality that come through in his writing also came through in the quirks of the way he went about life in general, especially in his social life and jobs before he became a full-time writer.

As a piece of writing, the biography does have some flaws. It's far too long. I got about half way through the more than 400 pages and started flagging, finishing it off much more slowly than the first half, because I had to force myself to go back for more, rather than returning to it eagerly. Rob Wilkins, who was Pratchett's assistant for a good number of years knew him well, had access to Pratchett's fragmentary autobiography and was probably uniquely well placed to put together this book. He writes well, though when he attempts humour it feels like he is trying too hard and can be a little wince-making. But the positives weren't enough to make the length enjoyable.

The other issue with the second half, other than it took me so long to get there, was that with success, inevitably, Pratchett's life becomes more detached from everyday experience than in his struggling years, and as such was harder to relate to. 

I'm giving the book four stars because I think Wilkins does a good job, and in parts it is genuinely interesting - but it hasn't persuaded me of the benefit to a fan like me of reading a biography of the author. What I'll always treasure is Pratchett's novels. I'm quite happy to leave an author's life to the individual and their family.

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I want to write a non-fiction book - part 4 - the pitch letter

To date in this series, we've got a book proposal together. There's one last component that can seem relatively trivial - but in reality requires as much effort as you can put into it - the pitch letter. This is the cover letter for your proposal.

In reality, these days, the 'letter' is likely to be an email, and that makes it particularly dangerous as we're used to writing emails quickly with limited editing. I highly recommend you craft your basic cover email in a separate editor, such as Word and only paste it in as an email once you are happy with the contents. This should help give it the attention it deserves.

Put yourself in the head of the person who receives this email. They will receive many such emails. Although I'm not an editor, I review a lot of books and I get sent plenty of book press releases from publishers, which are a form of pitch email. They go through a two stage filter. Quite a few will get deleted after a few seconds, because I can already tell they won't be interesting to me. I'm likely to have read the subject of the email, the title of the book and the first couple of lines in the press release. If they pass that filter I'll read on - but even then, they only get a minute or so before deciding whether to bin or to ask for a review copy, the equivalent of reading your proposal.

Note, by the way, I'm looking at this assuming you will be pitching direct to a publisher. This is likely to be fine with smaller publishers, but some of the big names use agents as gatekeepers - if that's the route you decide to go (I'll explore whether or not you should have an agent in the next item in the series), all that I'm saying about appealing to a publisher will also apply to catching the eye of an agent.

So, a starting point has to be the subject line of the email, a title line for your book and those first couple of sentences. By that point you need to have hooked the reader sufficiently to get past their first filter. Make the email subject simple and to the point - don't try to sell in it. I've already covered the book title in the previous part of the series. Next, I'd suggest putting in a single sentence summary - if you like, an elevator pitch. This is really hard to do, but essential to get right. I'd suggest getting quite a few possible versions in place before going for one and refining it.

Broadly there are two relatively obvious ways to do this. One is to compare it to books that have already done well, often in an X meets Y format. For example, if I was writing a book on relativity that made use of a collection of emails and other bits and pieces of communication, I might say 'A Brief History of Time meets The Appeal.' While I personally find this approach rather cheesy, I do know that some people have used it successfully. (X or Y could also be an author, e.g. 'Terry Pratchett meets Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is one that would make me read on.)

A good alternative is to pick out the USP (unique selling point) of your book - what makes it different, interesting and sellable? List some key words that describe what is distinctive about your book and see how you can bring them together into a pithy, attractive sentence.

Apart from that I'd probably only include three more paragraphs. Use a couple to expand on the book a little more - why it's important and (ideally) timely. And finally say a little about why you are the ideal person to write this book. We don't want your life history or greatest achievement (unless is directly relevant) - be aware of answering 'Why am I the right person, right now, to do this?'

One final consideration on content is whether to send out the pitch email with the proposal attached, or whether to send it out asking if they'd like to see the full proposal. (Either way, you should have the full proposal ready before sending out your emails.) The simple answer is I'm still not sure which works better. I tend to use a pitch email without a proposal, but have the advantage of being reasonably well-known in my field. The advantage of attaching the proposal is that if they like your idea, they can get straight into it; the disadvantage is it feels a bit pushy. If you aren't sure, I probably would attach the proposal.

Are we ready to send the email? Not quite. Who are you going to send it to within a publishing company? If at all possible, send it to an individual rather than a generic email address. Spend a few minutes researching the publisher online. The worst address to send it to is a generic information email for the publisher as a whole. Better if there is an address specifically for proposals and even better still if you can get the address of an appropriate commissioning editor. This may be possible from online searches, the Bookseller magazine (or similar), or contacts you might have in the publishing world.

At this point you are pretty much ready to go - but I've jumped the gun here, because in coming up with the right email addresses you need to know which publishers to send your proposal to. It's essential you do some research first - and that's the topic of the next post.

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book? Outlining Other parts of a proposal The pitch letterFinding a publisher (or agent)The contractSelf-publishing

Image by Markus Winkler from Unsplash

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels - Janice Hallett *****

It seemed almost impossible after Janice Hallett's first two novels, The Appeal and The Twyford Code that things could only go down hill - yet, somehow, she's managed to better them both with her latest. While continuing in the same style of collected communications, the Alperton Angels is more gripping (and even more clever). And once more, the setting is sufficiently different to impress.

Here we have the collection of notes, messages, emails and more put together by a non-fiction author, commissioned to write a true crime book on a terrible event from eighteen years earlier. A cult had persuaded a 17-year-old that her baby was evil. On the night of the great conjunction of the planets, it was to be sacrificed to save the world by deluded individuals who believe themselves to be angels in human form. Yet all but one of these 'archangels' appear to have killed themselves, while the last of them, Gabriel, is jailed for life for his part in their deaths, and the murder of an apparently unconnected man.

As was the case with the earlier books, the collection of documents and messages allows us to gain an idea of the character of the author, Amanda Bailey, and also brings in other authors working on the same series, a rival of Bailey's also writing about the Alperton Angels (because the unidentified baby should now be 18) and a motley collection of aging police officers, would-be amateur sleuths and more.

Things are inevitably all not what they seem - and with her usual skill, Hallett prevents the reader from spotting this until all is revealed. It is absolutely brilliant. Packed with twists, but also fascinating details. At first it seems as if it's going to be far too complicated to get your head around, especially as there are conflicting stories about what really happened, yet such is Hallett's skill as a writer than you never lose the thread and everything eventually opens up to reveal the complex workings within.

Less far fetched in plot than The Twyford Code, this is as near perfection as you get. I see Hallett has another title due out in 2024 (and yes, I've already pre-ordered it). Can she keep this up? I really hope so. 

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here You can buy The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.
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I want to write a non-fiction book - part 3 - finishing your proposal

The previous part of this series looked at putting together an outline, which both helps the writer get ideas together and is an essential part of a book proposal. Here we'll look at what else a good book proposal contains. Always remember that in the end this is a sales document - you are selling your book idea to a publisher. Make it engaging, not dull.

Start off with a title and subtitle. These may we be changed in discussion with a publisher, but it's a starting point and is necessary. The title is your first opportunity to grab the attention of a would-be reader. Don't waste it. It can either make clear what the book is about, or be a clever title that intrigues, which is then explained in the subtitle. Either way, the subtitle is also a good opportunity to get in some keywords that might be useful when someone searches in an online store.

I recently read Ananyo Bhattacharya's book The Man from the Future. This title could have applied to anyone male, but grabs the attention. The subtitle then fills in the essentials: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. Or take James Gleick's book Genius. A one word title can be strong - but it certainly wouldn't work without the subtitle The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. This kind of approach works well with something like a biography. Sometimes, though, just coming out with the topic up front can be effective. One of my best-selling books is Inflight Science. We immediately get a picture of the topic area. But even here, the subtitle makes it clearer what it's about - A guide to the world from your airplane window. Without this, you might think the book was just for plane enthusiasts.

Next in the proposal we need a summary of what the book is about - no more than a page, and ideally somewhat less. (Historically, sticking to one page had a specific reason as publishers used to circulate a single page of paper internally - but keeping it compact is still essential.) The summary should encapsulate exactly what the book will do as a product. It's a common mistake to write this like the blurb on the back of a book. But that's aimed at the public and will often both use superlatives and leave questions unanswered to avoid spoilers. A commissioning editor is not interested in you saying this is the best book on [whatever your book is about] ever published. They want to read about what the book will deliver, not see self-praise. Make sure you give answers to the key points covered. If, for example, it is a book about an unsolved crime, you need to put your solution in here. 

Write your summary like a good newspaper article. You want to grab your reader's attention and hold them. Craft the opening sentences so the editor wants to read on. The first paragraph should get us deeply engaged in the core of your subject, not meander around background matters. And make sure you end by pulling the whole thing together. Highlight what's special about your book. If you have personal experience that's relevant, mention it in passing, but unless it's a memoir/autobiography the essential is the book's topic, not you. You can reserve most of that for a short (no more than half a page) 'about the author' section, which should come next. Don't tell them about your school exam results - make sure it's about your experience that makes you the ideal person to write this book.

Next, the editor will want to see some context. Tell them what is already published in this area and why your book is different and better that the competition. Try to do this honestly - pick out four or five books that are as close as possible to yours. Reasons yours might be better include the other books being out of date, lacking detail, taking a totally different line and so on. 

A final precursor to your outline is a short section on audience and delivery. Who will want to read your book? Resist the temptation to say everyone - it's just not true. But with many non-fiction books there are specific subgroups of the population who might particularly enjoy reading it. Make it clear who they are (and specify why). As far as delivery goes, when could you reasonably deliver the manuscript by? Again, be honest. Don't tell them what you think they want to hear, but what is realistic for you. 

You also need to give a length in words and details of scale of illustration. Broadly, slim non-fiction titles start around 60,000 words, midsized around 80,000 and chunky ones 100,000 or more. As far as those illustrations go, how many do you envisage? Break it down, if relevant, to diagrams and photographs. Usually photographs will be black and white, in line with the text. (This means they need to be high contrast. Photos, say, of space scenes simply don't work this way.) If you need colour, say so - but be aware it pushes up cost and may make your book less likely to be published, unless it is a book that's driven by its illustrations. We'll come back to different kinds of book when we look at finding a publisher, as not all produce heavily illustrated books. Of course you won't actually know numbers of images or diagrams you need, but you can give a good guess.

Next comes the outline (see previous topic), and finally a sample of the book itself - usually a chapter or 10 to 20 pages. There's a temptation to make this your 'best' bit, but bear in mind the editor has to read it in isolation, so it can often be best to make it the first chapter (though ideally not an introduction, as these are often dull). This is your chance to show what your writing style is like. Don't try to fake it and be more literary than you usually would be - just make it count as an excellent piece of writing.

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book? Outlining Other parts of a proposalThe pitch letterFinding a publisherThe contractSelf-publishing

Image by Scott Graham from Unsplash

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Review: The Twyford Code - Janice Hallett *****

Hugely impressed by Janice Hallett's The Appeal , I had to buy her second novel, The Twyford Code and was equally pleased, though for slightly different reasons.

Once again, what we have here is an ingenious mystery novel, constructed in an unusual fashion - where The Appeal was primarily made up of emails, the bulk of The Twyford Code comprises 200 voice notes, left by one-time career criminal Steve Smith. Transcriptions of these (supposedly made by software, and so containing a series of transcription errors) have been sent by a police inspector to a professor to ask if he can throw any light on them.

At the heart of the story are a series of books by a variant of Enid Blyton called Edith Twyford. The equivalent to the Famous Five is the Secret Six, and a Secret Six book that Smith encounters while at school seems to both contain mysterious coded messages and to be linked to the disappearance of his school teacher, an event that still haunts him from many years in the past. Smith ends up meeting up with some old school friends who act as sort of anti-Secret Six in trying to work out the mystery.

Incidentally, I have no idea why the tagline says 'It's time to solve the murder of the century' - there is a murder in the story, but it isn't really what the story is about at all... and it certainly isn't the murder of the century in any identifiable sense.

As was the case with The Appeal, what makes this book work so well is the multi-layered mechanism of the the medium - in this case those voice messages, with occasional recorded conversations. Hallett incorporates all kinds of deception, some of which you might be able to predict if you've read the previous novel, but most of which take the reader by surprise. In the final section of the book, the professor uncovers what really happened - it's all there to see, but pretty well impossible to predict.

One of the quotes on the back says this is 'even better than The Appeal' - I don't think this is true. Because the storytelling here is mostly a monologue, rather than a series of interactions between different characters, it didn't engage me as much as The Appeal did (though it was certainly still un-put-down-able). However, it makes up for that by setting a far more complex puzzle, with a wonderfully convoluted relationship between what you read and what it's actually about. It's rather like one of those beautiful, jewel-like Japanese puzzle boxes: it's so intricate and beautifully constructed. Even though I did spot one of the coded messages that eventually would give everything away, I didn't interpret what it meant correctly at the time. The plot is, admittedly, far-fetched - but this genuinely doesn't matter.

Overall another brilliant triumph for Hallett. Can't wait to read book number three.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here You can buy The Twyford Code from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.
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Review: Red Rock - Kate Kelly ****

If I am honest, I'm not a great fan of books with a disaster, 'end of civilisation as we know it' scenario. In my teens I hoovered up vast quantities of these from War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids, and absolutely loved them in my typical teen enjoyment of misery, but as I've grown older I have become increasingly fond of it all ending happily ever after. I think my problem with disaster books (and films) is the cavalier way that millions are slaughtered by the author. We are expected to feel connected to the main character, who usually miraculously survived, but I am always kept at a cold distance, because I am so sad for everyone else, the bit part players who are killed off for the sake of the scenario.

This meant I was a little nervous coming to Kate Kelly's young adult novel Red Rock, as this is 'cli fi' - fiction based on the world being transformed by climate change, and on the whole that's a pretty disaster-laden scenario. I needn't have worried - although the backdrop is of civilisation crumbling in the face of climate change, the storyline is pure action thriller with plenty of mystery and suspense, which soon distracted me from any concern about the fate of the world.

The main character, Danni, is beset by a host of problems, left on her own (or at least with a stranger) in an attempt to escape capture and understand more about the mysterious object given to her by her dying aunt. The tension rarely gives up for long - this is one of those excellent stories where the reader accompanies the MC on a race against time and the odds.

If I have any complaint it's an unusual one for me - there is not quite enough description. I felt this particularly when Danni visits both Oxford and Cambridge, cities I am very familiar with, yet I was never given enough to know where she was. Particularly irritating was the way she had to find the library of a Cambridge college, but we aren't told which. But any frustration from this is washed away as the action pounds on.

Particularly good for a young adult novel is the way that there is a 'bad' character who turns out to not be all bad. For those familiar with that soon-to-return epic of Australian art, Neighbours (what can I say? my children made me watch it), I was always rather impressed by the character Paul Robinson, who despite being a long-running baddy was at the same time very caring for those who are close to him, and had moments of genuine thoughtfulness to season the self-centred, grasping ruthlessness. Similarly, Red Rock has a character (I won't give it away by saying who) who betrays a friend but then more than makes up for it.

The other surprise was that I rather liked the climate change backdrop. It is never heavily laid on, but both the sad remains of Cambridge, under water when the tide is in, and the casual decay of coastal towns is beautifully handled. It is never trowelled on, but really gives a feel for the depressing reality of a future where climate change continues unchecked.

Overall, a book that works both as a good, page-turning YA thriller and one that makes you think.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here You can buy Red Rock on Kindle from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
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Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game, backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess).

Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense of suspense.

Chess is wonderfully cerebral, but it lacks any parallel with real life, where luck always plays a significant part. By mixing strategy and luck, backgammon is far more visceral. And this aspect is made even stronger by backgammon’s other strength - it has a gambling element. 

This doesn't mean that backgammon has to be about money (and of course you can bet on a game of chess just as much as you can backgammon) - it’s the incorporation of a type of gamble into the play itself. Backgammon has the concept of doubling. At any point, a player can challenge their opponent to make a better forecast on the outcome of the game, gambling on that by accepting a double. If the opponent accepts, the value of the game is doubled, but if the opponent refuses, they immediately lose. If you play backgammon without doubling, you miss a major part of its gameplay attraction.

The originator of game theory, John von Neumann, famously told British mathematician Jacob Bronowski 'Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games are not like that. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do.' While I think von Neumann was a little hard on chess, and I personally extend the definition of games to include it, for me the combination of a random element and the forecast challenge of doubling makes backgammon the superior game.

Image by Figist and Co from Unsplash

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I want to write a non-fiction book - part 2 - Outlining

As I mentioned recently, not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series.

In the first part of this series I looked at deciding whether your idea was really a book - to do this I recommended listing around 10 headings that would set out your basic structure. Now we're going to flesh those out. What we'll get is the biggest part of a book proposal - the document you send to a publisher to sell your idea. It's also extremely valuable once you starting writing the book. What you will do next is, for each heading, fill in some detail.

I'm going to show you two ways to do this - but before I do, I ought to warn you that putting together the outline is the hardest part of writing a book. It can be agony. If you do it properly, it should take you between half a day and a day, which doesn't sound like a lot of effort. But the thing is, what I'm asking you to do is put together all the key topics covered under each heading, at a time you probably won't have fully researched the contents. This really stretches your imagination to the limits. Also - like every forecast or budget - it will be wrong. Some things you list here won't end up in the final book. Some will need to be added as you go along. But it's still an essential part of putting a book proposal (or plan for self-publishing) together.

I'm going to give you two examples of (part of) an outline. In both cases, these are books that use a particular style of having an introductory chapter, then a step back chapter giving some background, then diving in for some more detail. Of course, your book may not be structured like this, but it is one effective way to draw readers in. 

The first example is a bullet point approach. Here we provide a series of subheadings (you could include sub-subheadings too, if it helps) - short phrases that take us through the main points that will be covered. It can be quite useful to have a summary couple of words, then a little more text rounding out the description as you will see here. This is the first three chapters of the original outline for my book on Gravitational Waves.

14 September 2015

·      The first hint – whispers of a detected event on the LIGO team network

·      Engineering runs – this version of LIGO was not live yet. They were still testing

·      Blind injections – even if there was a detection, it could have been a fake

·      Realisation – the reality hits the team: a gravitational wave has been detected

Waves?

·      On the beach – waves at their most familiar

·      Modelling the universe – how we make use of models, like waves to explain the unknown

·      Light fantastic – the wave theory of light and its current status

·      Ripples in the cosmos – other waves, leading to the possibility of gravitational waves

 

Einstein’s baby

·      Newtonian wobbles – how gravitational waves could exist even in Newton’s version

·      Einstein goes relativistic – the introduction of relativity

·      The general theory – Einstein takes on gravity

·      Warps and wefts – the implications of having warped spacetime and its ability to wave

·      Shaking it all about – Einstein’s prediction – but remembering he also said he expected they would be impossible to detect

In the second example, rather than use bullet points, I've written a couple of paragraphs describing the chapter. This can work better with a longer book, where the chapters can benefit from a more readable description. The text below is from the original outline for my book What Do You Think You Are? - note the way that each chapter summary ends with a sentence tying it to the next chapter, which makes it flow better for the reader. This is particularly useful if you are using the outline to sell to a publisher, as it's particularly important then that your text reads well.

1. A Complex Web

Genealogy has never been more popular. Yet TV shows such as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and genealogy websites can only scratch the surface. This approach may give small insights into where we came from as individuals, yet the components that make you distinctively you form a complex web stretching into the far past that consists of so much more than the skeletal parental lines of genealogy

This introductory chapter prepares us for a dive into the different aspects and pathways of our individual pasts that make us the people that we are.

We can’t ignore genealogy though. It is embedded in our consciousness. However, what we uncover rarely does more than scratch the surface. As we shall discover, though, we can say that the reader is indubitably descended from royalty.

2. Your Ancestors Were Royal

Some of us delight in genealogy, others treat is as family trainspotting – but whatever your view, it has severe limitations. This chapter starts with the idea of a very simple family tree that ignores siblings and works backwards. Each generation, the number of people goes up exponentially: 1, 3, 7, 15… for n generations, it’s 2n-1. It has been estimated that around 107 billion people have ever lived. This is less than 237. Yet 37 generations takes us back fewer than 1,000 years of the circa 200,000 humans have existed. And that’s just one person’s family tree out of 7 billion plus. There’s something very wrong here.

The flaw is in thinking that your real family tree is a neat branching structure – but in reality it’s entangled and intertwined. Whether it’s the intense inbreeding of historical royal families (and the medical problems that brought) or the historically limited gene pool from lack of mobility, such is the entanglement that show mathematically that you are related to everyone in the region you were born in alive 1,000 years ago or earlier (who has living descendants). That includes all the royalty. Just like Danny Dyer, you have royal blood.

This chapter goes on both to include the history of genealogy and the remarkable story of mitochondrial Eve – the result of using mitochondrial DNA, passed down through the female line, to trace back to the most recent common ancestor of all living humans. Going deeper we look at how using the complete genome goes back far further to LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all organisms now living, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years in the past. This, though, is as nothing to your true origin story – the origin of the atoms that makes you up.

3. Stardust Memories
On a physical level, you are a collection of atoms – and they have far more history than any other aspect of what comes together to make you up. In this chapter we trace back the history of a number of atoms in your body to see how they’ve previously been in plants and mountains, movie stars and dinosaurs. But that’s only the beginning. 
Long before the first sparks of life on Earth – before the formation of the solar system around 5 billion years ago – almost every atom that is now in your body already existed. (We’ll also track down those odd ones that didn’t.) We see how the heavier atoms were forged in stars which then exploded to send their stardust across the galaxy. But even that isn’t the beginning. The components of those atoms existed before those exploding stars themselves were formed – as did all the many billions of hydrogen atoms in your body. We see how those came into existence over 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 400,000 years old. We can even go back further to understand how the energy those atoms were produced from originated with the universe itself.
Atoms are a very reductionist way to see what we’re made up of. But there’s a higher-level pathway to follow too. Food, water, oxygen – there’s a whole mess of inputs required to power your body, grow it and keep it healthy. 

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book? OutliningOther parts of a proposalThe pitch letterFinding a publisherThe contractSelf-publishing

Image by Corinne Kutz from Unsplash

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Review: How to be Creative - A Practical Guide for the Mathematical Sciences - Nicholas Higham and Dennis Sherwood ****

Some subscribe to the view that creativity is only about the arts - but this is to misunderstand the nature of creativity. There is a huge amount of creativity in the sciences, yet we rarely seen any guidance on improving it. (Creativity is also important to business, but that has a solid literature.)

How to be Creative does what it says on the cover - unlike some books on creativity, it’s a practical guide, easy to read and apply. The authors start with a brief introduction to the nature of creativity and the reality of engaging creativity on demand. They then look at the basic structure of a creativity session, particularly one that's team oriented (the quick version is 'don't do anything they do on The Apprentice when attempting brainstorming’). We then get a good chapter expanding on possible creativity techniques. 

So far, the topics covered have been general purpose problem solving and idea generation techniques, but the most novel content is the next chapter which is specifically about mathematical creativity (with a touch of physical science thrown in). Finally we return to the general for a chapter on workshops and one on evaluation of ideas. The whole thing is a compact 100 pages. It's practical, easy to read and effective.

If you are involved in STEM work, this book is really worth a look - it might change your view on the relevance of creativity to you career. My only real criticism is that it's priced more like a textbook than a general purpose title - but hopefully it’s one that your organisation might purchase.

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