C.E. Rowland's Blog

Beta Readers

One of the stages of writing that is perhaps less familiar to readers is the feedback-driven revision that happens thanks to beta readers. Beta readers are the first extra-author audience that a work sees. The idea is that they'll spot flaws that a writer is too close to the work to recognize. In the same way that it was difficult to spot misspelled words before spell check because our minds automatically unscramble the scrambled letters, it can be difficult for a writer to identify weak points in plot or character details in a larger work. Some personality trait that I thought was quirky in one of my characters might be grating. I may have launched my protagonist from emotional points A to C without adequately addressing necessary point B. I may have told you that someone had four siblings, only to later mention his or her only child syndrome.
Until now, the people I have relied on most heavily to be my beta readers are my friends. In college, I would literally read short stories to my friends and take notes on their suggested revisions. This process not only makes the story better, it also makes me a better writer as I learn from the feedback what parts of my writing are good (i.e. pleasing to an audience) and what parts need work. As I've started writing longer works, I've tried to divide the labor a bit, but it seems about time to get a pool of volunteers rather than relying exclusively on conscripts. After all, I don't want my poor friends to start wishing they weren't. What's more, people with different backgrounds will bring different kinds of criticism to a work.
I'm currently looking for beta readers for Transcending Limbo , which (reader beware) is not the sequel to The Watchmaker's New Order. Transcending Limbo is literary fiction, an excerpt of which I published in January. If you're intrigued and are interested in providing critical feedback as a beta reader, I invite you to take the survey below. 

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FREE download of The Watchmaker's New Order

On Feb 15 and 16, 2014, The Watchmaker's New Order  will be available for free to download from Amazon. Enjoy it on your Kindle or on any electronic device that can make use of the Kindle App (computers, tablets, phones).
Reviews so far have called it "a delight for fans from Crichton to Collins." "With an engaging writing style and excellent character development, The Watchmaker's New Order can best be described as The Lord of the Rings meets The Road meets The Hunger Games." And the "couldn't put it down" sentiment has been repeated a number of times. And costing a whole zero dollars, you can try it risk free!

The Olympics

Watching the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi (and all the inspirational commercials the interrupt it) has elicited a couple of unrelated thoughts in me. 
First, it's incredible how much these athletes have given to their sports, and it's a reminder of the kind of dedication and focus that dreams deserve. Most of the athletes aren't professionals, yet their passion inspires them to spend those many extra hours training, hours that I too often fritter away sleeping, watching TV, or on Facebook. I'm inspired, for a while at least, to bring that same sort of devotion to my writing. I may still be an amateur in the sense that I have a 'day job,' but that doesn't mean that I should approach writing with anything but the most serious devotion.
Second, the Russian spectacle evokes my ambivalent feelings towards Russia. I studied Russian language and literature in college but regretfully never visited. I loved Dostoevsky but couldn't stand Tolstoy. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities I most wish to visit, and I've dreamed of riding the Trans-Siberian Express all the way to Vladivostok since I was a teenager; but given the state-sponsored homophobia, I have no intention of visiting any time soon. My ambivalence has been heightened, of course, by the fact that my Russian professors were all ex-pats who grew up under Soviet rule. So in addition to their love of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, ballet, and symphonies, they talked about painful bureaucracy, Soviet propaganda, and the Red Terror.
Oops
Third, it's a reminder that I ought to keep up with my Russian. When it's not coming from the mouths of people at work speaking to each other at a million miles an hour, I can still understand significant chunks of it, and that's something worth retaining. 
And finally, whatever happens in Russia and whatever has happened already around these games - displaced people, an ill-prepared city, extreme politicization (complete with a lecture from the IOC President about leaving politics at home) - I will leave you with the most alluring sentiment I know to have come out of Russia. From Dostoevsky, a man who unquestionably suffered in his relatively short life, comes an idea that became my mantra the moment I heard it: "Beauty will save the world."

Titles

Good titles are a bear to come up with. Imagine spending months working on something and then being asked to whittle your project down to just a handful of words. Now imagine spending years or even decades of your life. What words could you find that would do justice to all the love and labor that you had given your oeuvre?
In academic or scientific writing, you've spent anywhere from several weeks (lucky bastard) to several years collecting and analyzing data and hashing over the finer points of writing with your thesis advisor (if you're a student) or the inept first author (if you're an advisor). And at the end, your title will be anywhere from a few words to a long sentence fragment. If you're like me, you'll take advantage of the common use of subtitles to clarify or expand on the idea presented in the more succinct primary title. What results is a dry but descriptive summary of the most important concepts or key words that you hope will attract the right readership. Take, for example, one of my recent publications, Exciton Fate in Semiconductor Nanocrystals: Hole Trapping Outcompetes Exciton Deactivation. I've managed to embed a complete sentence in the subtitle! And yet, even in this title, there are a few important points that I couldn't fit in. 
Fiction, though, requires so much more love than scientific writing. There are characters to create, characters who have to become real people in the mind's eye of the writer, people with strengths and flaws like any other human. The process of refining the story and the characters in it requires revisiting the same scene, possibly hundreds of times. It's an intimate process, one that I've never been able to undertake without significant emotional expenditure, and one that may take years to get just right. In other words, the investment is far greater, while the titles tend to be shorter. Bane of my writer's existence.
My current writing project is what prompted this post. I'm nearing the point of sending the second half of the manuscript to my beta readers, and I recently purchased the cover image. I have had a working title for a while, and at some point I gave up trying to come up with anything better. The Death and Life of Eva Turner. Eva, the protagonist, finds herself in limbo and spends the first half of the novel coming to terms with what that means and what it requires of her; the second half of the novel visits her life. So on the whole, it's not a bad description of the book.
I couldn't resist getting the cover finalized - there's a whole chunk of fun in seeing how the final product materializes, and the cover is perhaps the most satisfying part of that process. So I sent my first-working-now-final title to the designer, and received my cover the following day:

Yikes! A beautiful cover marred by a terrible title.
So because I still don't know what to do with the two chapters I'm struggling with, I decided to dedicate some serious effort to a new-and-improved final title. To the brain-storming mobile!
This was my process:
Death and Life? Shorter, yes, but it doesn't do much to describe what's going on in the book. Almost anything could be called Death and Life.
Limbo, as a place and as a concept, is pretty important in the novel. What have other people said about limbo? There's a movie called Leaving Limbo that came out in 2013. Crap, someone came up with the perfect title for my novel, and then named something else that. Crap, crap, crap.
I spend a while resenting the person who took what I now perceive to be my stolen title.
What about Goodbye, Limbo. Not great, but Farewell Something? Maybe Farewell, Limbo. Farewell to Limbo? Meh.
A different direction: Eva's brother is really important to the story, not as a character in his own right but as an influence on the direction of Eva's life. Eva's Brother? I don't love it; it's not a story about her brother. What about For Eva's Brother? Part of it is told in the first person, so it could be For My Brother. But, of course, that's already taken. Plus it's weird because it sounds like non-fiction, and it's not for my brother.
I'm still annoyed about Leaving Limbo; I'm having an impossible time moving past that title. But then I think, "You know what's a better word than 'leaving'? Transcending!" Transcending Limbo. It's perfect. Eva's story is a journey. She arrives in limbo, and, without giving too much away, she, like everyone else there, isn't able to just leave it. That would be too simple. Instead there's a challenge, and only by overcoming that challenge, is one able to transcend limbo. Needless to say, it fits Part II equally well, but there I'm afraid I can't give any details because I've sworn myself to secrecy.
So there you have it. A title. A cover. Now all I need is to finish those two chapters.

Excerpt from Transcending Limbo

Transcending Limbo is a piece of in-the-works literary fiction. Part compilation and part novel, it's composed of writing that I've done over the course of more than seven years. I expect to complete it later in 2014. Below is an excerpt from the opening chapter.

I DID NOTbelieve in an afterlife until I arrived here, and now there is very little refuting it. I feel as though I have just woken from a restful sleep, yet I am standing upright, poised to move as though I have merely opened my eyes from a blink. Where I am standing is a white, unadorned hallway with textured mint green linoleum floors that stretch on at least as far as I can see in either direction. It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to a white brightness that emanates from nowhere in particular; there are neither light fixtures nor windows, and I do not cast a shadow, as though the light pours from the floor and walls themselves. On either side of the hall are doors, spaced about twenty feet apart and staggered so that a person walking would pass one every ten feet, first on one side, then on the other. Between every second and third door on either side of the hallway is a bench, wrought iron frame and wooden slats that looked weathered, although likely not by weather but perhaps by time and assesA placard hangs on the wall on either side of me. On it is written “TELL YOUR STORY. KNOW YOURSELF,” in large, black block letters. Underneath and smaller is scrawled, “Good luck.” Though it appears to have been added by hand to both of the signs, they are entirely indistinguishable.There are only two directions in this hall – forward and backward relative to the orientation in which I became conscious – and it seems important that I remember which is which. To my original left is a bench over which is hung the placard, while to my right the placard is separated from the nearest bench by a doorway, so as long as I remember that the bench-placard wall is left, I will know which way is which.I sit down on the bench under the placard and contemplate the door across from me. It is the same white as the walls and has neither keyhole, nor peephole, nor knocker; its sole feature is a round brass doorknob.
I think that this is something momentous, these my first moments in this life. In my last life, my first moments must have been chaotic with a doctor and nurses and mother and father and grandparents hovering at the door and orderlies in and out. But I was barely present at that event, and here I am the only spectator and the sole celebrant to these minutes in this life. I try to feel the weight of it. I fail. Instead what I feel is an urge to cry out to the empty hallway, to ask where I am and to what end and what has happened to bring me to this place. Where is everyone else? What is behind the doors? And is this place good or bad? And why am I hungry?

Crazy Cat Ladies

I've been part of an on-going conversation on Twitter, to which I am relatively new and conversations in which somewhat mystify me, about crazy cat ladies (henceforth, CCLs). We participants all self-identify as nearing the CCL mark, which has prompted a discussion including such things as where that line is drawn (I say at the fourth feline, Huffington Post has suggested perhaps at the third), whether qualifying as a CCL might spawn witch hunts by the non-CCL general population, whether we might avert such witch hunts using our black cats and some *ahem* 'white' magic, and how exactly CCLs come to be.


But what about crazy dog ladies? Why do the people who love cats get the bad rap? I know someone who, some number of years ago, had seven dogs. Seven. That's a legitimate pack. Now I grant that she had recently transitioned from being a CCL, so this was probably just the same malady now tuned into a different fuzzy face. Even my significant other, though, at one point had five dogs in the house at once while growing up. Is my future father-in-law a CCL in disguise? If so, he's pretty well disguised. He doesn't even like cats! And yet no one talks about crazy dog men. What gives?

Book Reviews on Amazon

One of the things, and logically so, that's critical to selling books on Amazon is the reviews that people write. Just like you (or at least I) would think twice about buying a vacuum cleaner that has only been reviewed by one person ("I don't wanna be the schmuck who ends up having to write the crappy review! I'll just get 'cuum that's been tried and tested and reported on already."), lots of people aren't willing to waste their money/time/energy on a book that no one else seems to have read. And, equally important, liked.

So in an effort to garner more reviews, I offered The Watchmaker's New Order at a weekend-long promotional price of free. I publicized the promotion on every social media outlet in which I participate and asked (on those same venues) that people who read and enjoyed the book consider writing a review.

My first review appeared a few days later, a glowing five stars, I might add. To my delight, another five star review appeared just a couple of days after that. Two reviews! Small victories! Aaaand... then I was down to one again.

I've now spent a while reading about Amazon's censorship of reviews, specifically of those that address the work of indie authors, and it's a pretty disturbing phenomenon. The reviews that disappear are, from what I can find, always the good ones (devil's advocate, though, says that no one would complain about losing bad reviews). In at least reported one instance, this censorship has effected the majority of the reviews that an author has received (if you've only had six, losing four is a huge deal, especially if it's the four that were five stars). Further reading revealed anecdotal stories of authors who had complained and were threatened by Amazon with the removal of their work. Note to Amazon: I am not complaining. I'm merely panicking. And sad, but that's more to do with the lack of sunlight here.

Now, Amazon is a private company, and it has no obligation to post all the reviews it receives. It has every right, as far as I know, to engage in all the censorship it wants to. But this is a fairly horrifying prospect to someone who is just getting started. I have to worry not just about writing (which is all I really want to think about), formatting, and publicizing, but all the work I do in those arenas can be wiped out with a little whimsy on the part of a corporate behemoth. Good writing should garner good reviews, which in turn will help more people discover my work, but Amazon has no obligation to show any of the good reviews I receive. And further, of course, Amazon provides a platform for indie writers to sell their work to a broad audience, and Amazon is under no obligation to provide that venue. Have a dream? Amazon can choose to crush it.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Higher ratings mean higher sales, which translate to more money for Amazon. Obviously, Amazon wants to discourage fraudulent reviews because that would undermine the whole review system. But this is a real person (yes, I do know this person, but that happens when you publicize on social media) who has now attempted three times to post a review of a real book that was really read. What gives?

Snow Day!

It turns out that snow days as an adult are just as fun as (maybe even a teeny bit more fun than) snow days were as a kid. And when they unexpectedly extend a vacation by a day, they're even better.

In honor of today's snow day, my partner and I decided to construct an ice rink in the back yard. We both play hockey and have been talking about the cost/benefit ratio of a rink for a while. Given a long, cold winter, it sounds like a great idea. But there's always the chance that it will be a short winter with lots of thaws. And let's be realistic, when the National Weather Service says there's a 40% chance that it will be a colder-than-average winter, that does also mean that there's a 60% chance that it will be an average or warmer-than-average winter, so a seasonal forecast doesn't really mean anything. But the snow day seemed like a sign.

Based on a number of online sources, we opted for the second lowest-cost option, lining the rink with a plastic drop cloth. You can also go with no liner at all, but that seems to work best in the really frigid climates a bit further north of here ('here' being Chicago). Construction of a wood-based perimeter sounded like too much work and too much money for me. So on the way back from work, where we were informed at the gate that the lab had been closed for the day due to weather conditions that probably should have kept us off the roads, we stopped at Walmart and bought a 20' x 25' plastic sheet.

plastic sheet from Wally WorldOnce home, we set to work in the back of the yard. My understanding is that it's advantageous to have nothing overhanging the rink, as dead leaves and twigs will serve as little solar absorbers and melt your ice. And obviously working in a flat area is advisable. Just about every yard in the Chicago area fits the 'flat' bill, so no trouble there.

Flat, check. No overhang, check. Perfect ice rink? Check.We first built a snow bank around the perimeter and then began clearing the middle of the future rink. The interwebs suggest either clearing or packing the snow, and we vacillated for a while but eventually settled on clearing. It didn't take long for everything to start coming together.

Imagine the music to go along with the montage...
Bum ba-dum
Deedle-dee bee
Do deee-do
Ba-dum dum dum
We then re-measured to make sure the plastic liner would come up the sides of the snow banks sufficiently far to contain the water during the freezing process.

MeasuringAfter measuring, we ascertained that the ice rink was going to be somewhat smaller than initially intended. It turns out that 20' x 25' minus some wiggle room with the plastic liner is about two strides worth of ice for someone who knows how to skate. So after some careful reassessment, we settled on this solution:

The bottle of Veuve we meant to drink for New Year's, our makeshift flutes,
cranberry juice for poinsettas, and a lurker in the background.

Beads? Bees!

If you've watched Season Four of Arrested Development or read any of the numerous alarming mainstream media reports on bees , you've heard of colony collapse disorder (CCD). While a variety of factors have been shown (or postulated) to play a role in CCD, the outcome is consistently the death of the honeybee colony.

"Oh no!" you say. "No more honey!?"

But what you should be saying is, "Oh no! No more food!"

One of the things that I needed reminding of, given the number of years separating me from a biology class, is that plants flower as part of a sexual reproduction process in which pollinators like hummingbirds and, yes, honeybees serve as a go-between. Plants can't carry their genetic materials to each other, so pollinators (and occasionally the wind) do it instead. Birds and bees feed on the nectar contained in a flower, inadvertently accumulating pollen on themselves, and move on to the next flower for more nectar. Transfer of pollen is the plant equivalent of fertilization of an egg, and the fruit that eventually grows is a sort of plant uterus, harboring the seeds safely in the a pocket of nutrition necessary for the germination process. No pollinators means that when flowers whither and die, no fruit grows, and no seeds develop. No apples, no pears, no oranges. No onions or brussel sprouts. No cotton or cocoa. Imagine what your life would be like without those foods and products, among the many other agricultural products that bees pollinate.

Enter the solitary bee, a bee quite different from the honey-making, swarming, hive-dwelling Apis that people most commonly think of. Solitary bees in the genus Osmia make no honey. They live in single-bee dwellings and interact with each other only to mate. Their isolated lifestyles make them much more docile than their honeybee cousins: they have no colony to protect and therefore no interest in self-sacrifice for the benefit of the hive. In fact, males are incapable of stinging, and among the females that are capable and that are sufficiently goaded, the sting is is anecdotally no more painful than a fly bite. Osmia also happen to be remarkable pollinators. In fact, they are, bee-for-bee, far better pollinators than their honeybee cousins, both in terms of pollination quality and quantity (they can visit up to 22,000 blossoms in just fifteen days). In fact, as few as 250 solitary bees can do the job of an entire hive of honeybees, which contain tens of thousands of individuals. And, perhaps most critical of all,  because they don't live in colonies, they don't suffer from CCD.

So, why, you may ask, aren't farms using solitary bees for crop pollination? One reason is that honeybees are something of a traveling circus. Plenty of farms and orchards keep their own bees, but many rent bees (at ever increasing cost) for the few weeks a year when they require pollination. That system allows the professional farmers to do the farming and the professional beekeepers to mind the bees, besides which, it keeps the bees busy as they're ferried from one food supply to the next. Solitary bees fly for only 4-6 weeks before succumbing to old age, so their utility as pollinators expires before they have a chance to move to another crop. The next generation of solitary bees will develop for a full year before emerging to pollinate the same crop their parents did the year before. Honeybees also have a commercial advantage in that they produce a commodity - honey - while they're doing their pollinating business, whereas solitary bees produce only enough foodstuff to provide each of their larvae with the nutrition necessary to grow into next year's bee.

Those factors were considerable advantages for honeybees until they started dying en masse. Now, solitary bees are now beginning to look a good deal more attractive. As I mentioned earlier, 250 solitary bees can replace a hive of honeybees, and because both possess a similar foraging range, bee condos (more on these later) can replace hives on a roughly one to one basis. Their seasonal pollination habits mean that they can (must) be kept locally rather than being ferried among food sources, and temperature control of the cocoons can ensure that they emerge at just the right time to pollinate the crop that a farmer grows. Each female produces, conservatively, about ten females to replace herself. In nature, that would ensure a stable population, but in a managed bee population with close to 100% survival rate of cocoons, a farmer could have 10,000 (female) bees in five years, enough to replace as many as 2 millionhoneybees in terms of pollinating potential, having started with just a mating pair (note that females, who are making pollen balls to feed larvae, are the primary pollinators). Don't get me wrong, keeping 10,000 solitary bees is a bear of an undertaking, but then this is a huge portion of the world's food supply that we're talking about.

So what are bees condos? What does it mean to 'keep' Osmia? And who are these little loners, anyways?

Osmia are solitary but gregarious bees native to North America, unlike European honeybees, and include ground-nesting and hole-dwelling species. Their ability to be solitary relies on the fertility of every female, whereas in hive-dwelling communities, only the queen reproduces. Because they don't protect a queen and the hive's honey, they are non-aggressive, and the females will only sting if trapped or squeezed. They are classified as gregarious because they choose to live and build nests in proximity to each other, probably to maintain genetic diversity when mating. In terms of crop pollination, the most important players are orchard blue mason bees and (foreign but now naturalized) hornfaced bees. Leafcutter bees, which are from the genus Megachile , are also commercially important (and also naturalized foreigners). These are the three species I'm really referring to when I write 'solitary bees,' although there are many, many more.

The first step in keeping solitary bees is providing them with a domicile, a 'bee condo.' Mine looks like this:

Bee Condo
Bees sleep in the holes overnight, when it's too cold for them to fly, and use them as a safe place to amass pollen and lay eggs during the day. After fertilization by males, who obnoxiously hang out in on the condo's 'stoop' all day hoping to score, the female collects sufficient pollen to provide one larva with food for development and lays a single egg with the pollen ball. She then builds a wall of mud (hence 'mason bees') or leaves ('leafcutters,' get it?), sealing the cell, and fills the next compartment with it's own pollen ball and egg. She might finish several dozen such compartments before dying, having strategically placed the males at the front of the tube so that they can snag a female on her way outs. Meanwhile, the eggs will have hatched within a few days of being laid, and the little larva will be chowing down on the pollen ball that mom left them. They go through the larval and pupal stages and then spend the winter cocooned in their compartments.

In nature, obviously, the bees don't have the luxury of a condo. Instead they use hollow reeds or naturally-occuring holes bored by insects or woodpeckers. Their numbers suffer from infestation by parasitic wasps, spread of mites (which eat the pollen balls and starve larvae), predators like woodpeckers, etc. In a human-managed population, however, these challenges are mitigated by physically protecting the condo from parasites and predators once all the females have died (and thus all the eggs have been laid) either by moving the condo indoors or by covering it with mesh. As winter approaches, the cocoons can be removed from the condo and gently cleaned in water to remove mites and pathogens like mold spores. Cocoons are overwintered in a humid container kept in the refrigerator, eliminating the risk of early emergence during a warm spell. When daytime temperatures reach optimal levels (or crops approach their flowering state), the cocoons are simply placed outside. The bees will emerge on their own, and the cycle continues.

In the next post, I'll go into what to do if you want bees of your own to improve the yield of your garden, to safeguard our agricultural future, or to keep you company. I'll include plans for a condo and sources of bees. If you absolutely must read more right now, I highly recommend sections of Bee Pollination in Agricultural Ecosystems, fragments of which are available free of charge from Google Books.

Welcome

Welcome to my Workshop. Before any more serious undertakings, a few introductory remarks are in order.

Who am I?

I am a Hoosier currently living in a petite house in the suburbs of Chicago with my significant other and our three cats and dog. My academic training, which is, of course, how academicians self-identify, is in science, which can be narrowed to chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and even further to nanomaterials. In another year or so, I'll attain the pinnacle of higher education (as measured in years in school; I don't make that claim on any other basis) and obtain a Ph.D.

While science is my vocation, my avocation is writing. I have plenty of opportunity within my field, writing papers that summarize my findings for the scientific community (after peer review, of course), but I also write literary and science fiction.

What will I do here?

A workshop is, of course, a place of many projects, and this Workshop will be a forum for me to share both my extracurricular scientific interests as well as my writing.

For example, I have developed a reputation for exploring unusual hobbies, the typical lifecycle of which includes a period of intense research followed by the development of some product (and eventually loss of interest). Topics range from the manufacture of a maille hauberk as part of my interest in 10th and 11th Century Norman history as a teenager to building a bee condo this fall to house next spring's solitary bees. I will share what I learn and the process involved in the physical product, if there is one.

I will also post excerpts of recent writing and invite reader responses. Here's your opportunity to shape a work of fiction prior to publication.

You haven't written very much here yet. What else is there for me to read?

I hope to have a novel ready for publication within the next few months, but in the mean time, I'll refer you to blogs I have kept previously and, if you're so inclined, to my scientific articles.

An Eventual Hobbit Travel adventures in Peru, musings of the past year

Utulei, Tramway above Chief Afoa Lutu's Residence A summer in American Samoa

Scientific Research