From Around The Internet

It's a slow day today. I'm trying to write a letter to one of my congresscritters. It's already far longer than anything she or her staff will probably read, and it's not done yet. So, meanwhile here are some cool things from around the net. That old joke "Sorry for the length of this letter, but I didn't have time to make it short" comes to mind.

First off, Suzanne at Two Ton Green Blog has a marvelous photo sequence up at her place. I'll give away the ending:

The rest of the story is definitely worth checking out.

At Coffee Stained Writer guest blogger Abi Wurdeman has some great advice for people who want to write for a living, especially if what you want to write is fiction:

This little discovery of mine started out as an excuse. I spent my young young adult years in total resistence of the notion of writing as a career path, largely because I was afraid my life would come to a screeching halt if I tried to make a living from writing. Yes, writing fills my soul and teaches me about myself and enables me to reach strangers on the other side of the country, blah, blah, blah. But I always had this image that if I wrote, I (who am already inclined toward excessive solitude) would end rotting away in a dank corner of some dark apartment, breaking myself away from my computer screen only long enough to make conversation with my own thoughts. Was that the life I wanted?
...
This is how my blog, Hollywood Back Roads, was born. I set a goal to visit a lesser-known area of Southern California every weekend and blog about it the following week. It was practical. I could get out and explore all in the name of gathering expertise in a specfic area. After all, a beginning writer cannot support herself on fiction alone, and if I was going to be an expert on something, it might as well be something that got me out of the house.

That was a good call, since getting out of the house changes everything.

Something Worth Writing

I'll just add a thought that you also want to get as much education as you can. Learn mathematics (and by that I mean calculus, statistics, and computer programming), physics, chemistry, biology. In short, learn as much as you possibly can about the world we live in and how we learn more about it. My friend and occasional blog adversary Dana Hunter lives that advice, as you can see from her last Sunday Science article:

One thing Arizona doesn't lack is rocks. We've got nearly every type of rock on earth, plus a big one from space. And they're not buried under a bunch of inconvenient vegetation. They're right out in plain sight. For the geologist, Arizona is utter paradise.

I did some rockhounding in my home state, and subjected you to the results in Arts & Cats I, II & III. You even got to see my horrible attempt at photographing the completed collection:


Now comes the science part, which is a hell of a lot more interesting than just looking at someone's random collection of rocks. We'll be discussing a select sampling, delving into deep time and discovering how little (well, mostly big) rocks are made.

And, yes, there will be a cat involved.

Arizona Rockhounding

Moonsets, writing, science, and cats - it's more than I've got at the moment, that's for sure.

I'm going outside for a while.