why proteins win

post-nano postmortem

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:30:21 GMT

so, final word count during the month of november = 37, 841 of not total crap. but still not an official win. darn you, christmas show, for having tech week right after thanksgiving! i think i might post parts here and maybe also some commentary about what was going on during the writing of those parts. but don't hold me to it cause i might not do that.

nanowrimo update & how theatre shift plots are like novels

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:28:48 GMT

well, here it is day 13, and i am about 2,000 words behind if you go by the 1,667 words/day formula. i feel like i'm in a tiny slump but this morning's writing went all right but i obviously didn't get enough words. i have a production meeting this afternoon and should totally be writing up my shift plot right now, but i am stalling because i sort of hate doing shift plots. i like having them, they are kind of the representative "stage manager" piece of paperwork and really very helpful, but i hate having to do them. they always end up getting redone like 5 times - they are NEVER right the first time and usually not the second or third. probably sort of like a novel but way more boring to read.

day 5 nano update

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:16:09 GMT

so between the election (whew!) and rehearsals (which carry cumbersome daily reports and production meeting notes) and the important everyday things like child care and eating, i have fallen behind where i should be on my word count. but i'm happy with what i've written so far.

word count = 6099!!! i only need to get up to 8335 to catch up!!!

nanowrimo begins!

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:27:37 GMT

here it is, the first 1735 words of my nano, and proof that i can make word count every day! and the day isn't even close to over.

Type your cut contents here.

chapter one

Vivi Kouropoulos gripped the armrest of her airplane seat, on the aisle of row H, chosen expressly for its proximity to the emergency hatch. Her stomach was in knots, her abdominal muscles clenched even though the flight was smooth, no turbulence so far. A clear sky mocked her from every window. She clamped her eyelids shut to close out all that space in the air, a visual reminder of how far there was to fall if anything should go wrong. Vivi watched the pilot episode of "Lost." She knew it was fiction, but some things don't need to be enhanced for effect; physics held true even on television.

"Ma'am?" Vivi heard the flight attendant's voice above her shoulder. "Can I offer you a drink?" She forced her eyes back open and carefully avoided looking out of any windows, concentrating on the attendant's pretty, meticulously made-up face. It would take me an hour to get my make-up that perfect, she thought.

"Ginger ale, please?" Vivi replied, and the flight attendant set about pouring it from a can into a small plastic cup. Vivi watched the bubbles and thought about carbonation. Maybe the drink would help calm her nerves a bit. On the rare occasions she couldn't get by without flying it hadn't really helped, but at least it was a small routine thing she could do to reassure herself, not to mention keep herself busy for the next few minutes to keep her mind off the altitude and the inescapable physics. That was the danger of having a science degree, she supposed. She possessed just enough accurate information to realize the inherent dangers of a wide variety of everyday phenomena. Most of the time, she let her higher intellect rule her brain and day-to-day life wasn't scary, but flying was different. Her common sense stayed firmly on the ground and in the tiny, mercifully pressurized and oxygenated cabin she was anxious and quietly irrational.

Jolting herself back into activity, Vivi lowered the tray from the seat in front of her, and the attendant handed Vivi her ginger ale.

"Thank you," Vivi said softly, and the flight attendant consulted the passenger across the aisle. Vivi focused on her cup, wondering briefly if the atmospheric pressure in the cabin was different enough from the pressure on the ground to effect the rate at which the carbon dioxide bubbles left the fructose liquid mixture. That was at least chemistry more than physics, in her mind, anyway. Oh, she could recite the periodic table; that would keep her busy for a couple of minutes. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium--

"Nervous flyer?" It took her a couple of seconds to come to the conclusion that the man across the aisle was asking her and not someone who could actually look him in the eye. Looking directly across the aisle meant a straight line of sight out of a window, and that was not going to happen. Okay, I'll try to be friendly, but if he needed her eye contact, I am going right back to being boron-- um, boring, she thought firmly.

"What gave it away?" she asked self-deprecatingly, even attempting a small laugh.

"Your death grip on the armrest, among other things. Should I make you a list so you can be more incognito next time?" It sounded like he was smiling.

"Oh, I'm painfully aware of how obvious it is, believe me, and as nice as that offer is, I don't think a list will help. If you know a good hypnotist, though..." He laughed at her attempt to power through her fear.

"At least your sense of humor still works at 35,000 feet," he offered good-naturedly.

"Could we not mention the altitude?" she requested softly and took a gulp of her ginger ale.

"Sorry. What should we talk about? How 'bout them Cubs?"

"That conversation would be over in the amount of time it would take me to tell you I have no clue about sports." Her father had watched college basketball since before she was born, but Vivi had never become interested like her brothers and sister.

"You knew I wasn't talking about baby bears, so that's something." Wow, this guy was a real optimist. She wondered why he was being so nice to her when she couldn't even look him in the face. "What do you like to talk about? Music? TV? Puppies?"

"Promise you won't out me as a dork?" she queried.

"If you would look over here, you would see me crossing my heart."

"Maybe in a minute." She took a breath. "I was reciting the periodic table. You know, like in chemsitry class."

"I do know. I'm a hematologist." That got her attention. She let her eyes venture over to his feet, covered with comfortably worn cross-trainers, then up the medium blue jeans on his long looking legs, although it was hard to be sure when those legs were folded into an airplane seat. The plane was still in the sky on its planned trajectory, and her breathing was still at the same rate, no eminent hyperventilation, so she continued looking up. She got to his arms, resting in his lap, long-fingered hands folded in a blessedly relaxed pose, which he broke to cross his heart. He had on a rust-colored short sleeved T-shirt that fit just closely enough to outline a pair of shoulders that were somewhat wide and very probably strong. Those were not the shoulders of a doctor chained to a lab bench. Hematologist? Really? She looked up to his face, not really knowing what to expect a hunky hematologist to look like, and she was not disappointed. He gave her a big smile.

"See? Your eyes are open and the plane's still in the air." His shiny dark brown hair was clean-cut, but he had a bit of an edge about his features, slightly more angular than all-American, and the small crinkles around his kind, slightly sleepy-looking eyes from the warm, open smile were reward enough for daring to look up. Vivi felt like the inside of her chest was expanding slowly and briefly wondered if the cabin was depressurizing. Then she realized it was this man's face that was affecting this change. She took a deliberate breath and gathered her wits before she made more of a fool of herself than she already had by being a prisoner to her phobia.

"So far, so good, anyway. You're a hematologist? I'm a medical lab technologist. My name's Vivi," she offered. Maybe conversation was the way through the fear to the end of the flight. And what a handsome way through it could be.

"I'm Vaughn. Nice to meet you, Vivi. We could probably swap blood anecdotes for hours. The flight would be over before you know it."

"Oh, God, could we? I'm being serious, not sarcastic, I swear. Blood is the whole reason I went into the MLT program after undergrad. I was not up for med school for a variety of reasons, but blood, I could handle." Talking about school reminded Vivi of the reason behind this flight: her 10 year college reunion. She supressed thoughts of that whole other set of circumstances which would only serve to stress her out more. She could think about them after she landed safely. For now, she would concentrate on this man and the enticing field of hematology.

"I was genetically predisposed for it. My parents were both medical doctors who started their own research lab, and I work with my dad there now." She wondered why she didn't work with his mom, and he must have noticed some change in her expression. "My mom passed away several years ago."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." It always seemed ineffectual to her to offer condolences like that even when she knew the person she was offering them to; this time it really sounded hollow to her own ears.

He shrugged. "Thanks, but it was a long time ago. I'm glad she got to see the lab open up before she died."

"Where is your lab? What kinds of research do you do?"

"Charlotte." The destination of their flight, her childhood home, where she'd attended college, and where the rest of her family still lived. She both loved the place and resented it.

"I grew up in Charlotte."

"Me too." They seemed to be finding more common ground by the second.

"Really? What year did you graduate high school?"

He surprised her by blushing slightly. He had been so composed in approaching her that it was completely unexpected.

"2000," he replied, seeming somewhat reluctant to divulge the information.

"Wow, you don't look that young. I gradutated in '94. We probably ran in totally different circles." His face definitely belied his age. She wasn't sure if it was those crinkles around his eyes that had fooled her at first, or the slight sense of emotional, or perhaps mental, weight present in his expressions. She did some quick calculations in her head. "You must have blasted through college and med school," she noted impressed. This man was cute and obviously intelligent. This flight was getting less atrocious by the minute.

"I did an M.D./Ph.D. program at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland."

"Overachiever much?" she joked, thankful she felt comfortable enough to do something that normal in the middle of a flight.

"If you only knew," he responded, shaking his head in a gesture of what she interpreted as faux regret.

"Yeah, science is a real time-sucker sometimes. Especially in med school, I would imagine."

"Practical research is even worse than school. No classes to interrupt your testing. And it doesn't help when you're so interested in what you're doing that you forget about everything else. Between me and my dad, we have to get our administrative assistant to remind us to eat meals. Sometimes she sets an alarm clock when she leaves so we don't keep working right through the night."

"That sounds dreamy," she confessed. "Hospital labs are pretty routine. Almost everyone gets the same basic tests, with a few specifics thrown in for good measure, but there's never anything that keeps me glued to my seat when I'm done with my shift."

"You would probably fit right in at our lab," he noted with a half-smile.

so, it's good momentum to start with, and we'll see how the rest of the day goes. i have rehearsal most of this week, so hopefully i can keep it up.

hello, my beautiful protein-folding game

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:18:57 GMT

O. M. G.

there is a game online, i guess made by some computer/biochem people from the university of washington where you FOLD PROTEINS. it's called "foldit." the cool part is that they use your results from playing the game to help computer-model the way proteins they are researching actually fold. so when you play, you are helping science :) or you can feel all right telling yourself that. there's also a competitive element to it because they rank you based on a point system - the lower the energy in your conformation, the more points. so you can go smack-talk the other science geeks.

fold.it/portal/

embracing the insomnia

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:32:47 GMT

because it's the only way i could actually get through the month of november and have any hope for winning at nano. seriously, it's like an extra 4 hours a day to write. luckily my daughter still takes a nap in the afternoon so i can take a nap too if i get in the weeds.

so, nano. how the heck am i going to write 50 thousand words? i made myself enter a fanfic challenge-type thing so i had practice at a deadline and writing a bunch of words. but that's like 5K, a mere 10% of 50K. how????!?

on a completely different note, i have to go to concord mills mall tomorrow. actually, i have to go to the honda dealership in concord tomorrow afternoon and there's no way i'm hanging out at the dealership with my 3 year old while they do the regular maintainence thingy on the car, so i'm taking their offer of a shuttle service to the big scary mall. we will be visiting build-a-bear and hoping the stuffing machine will not make weezy cry this time like it did the first and only other time we went to build-a-bear. it is kind of creepy, when you think about it. sort of stepford/frankenstein bears.

ETA: she totally cried, but got over it quickly.

the nobel prizes are starting to get announced and i was happy to see that robert gallo (who essentially bogarted a strain of a virus from the pasteur institute in france and then declared he had discovered HTLV - which was the name for what ended up being called HIV - forgive me if the details are not exactly right) was NOT included in the hysiology/medicine prize. that is what you get for stealing other people's research. not to mention that little stunt cost out government 6 million dollars or so when it came out that he did it (after he got a patent on the virus for an antibody-based test; we had to pay the french government back royalties). punk.

how much preparation is enough?

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:15:47 GMT

i love to think things through before doing anything about them. so i am currently making little cards with plot points on them for my nano. lots of little cards. it reminds me of doing research term papers in college, only i have to make the stuff up instead of find it in big science-y books. the best part of these little cards is that they can be re-organized if needed. right now they're in a zipper bag, but they may graduate to a cork board if i can put it up high enough that a certain set of grabby 3 year old hands can't reach them. but all these little cards make me wonder if i won't end up thinking myself into a corner, that i might lose any desire to change up major parts of the plot even if it would serve the story just because it's not in the cards, so to speak. or i could be brilliant at little cards and do just fine, who knows.

icons - nanowrimo

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:01:42 GMT

1 2 3
4 5

snag away, just credit, please!

geeking out

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:51:09 GMT

you meet the most interesting people at the theatre...one of my running crew for godspell is a biology teacher, as it turns out, and tonight she was lesson planning before the show started and i walked past and was like "the Krebs cycle rocks!" (well, it does) and we subsequently geeked out about biology and i actually ended up starting the show like 2 minutes late because i was too busy talking to go call places...oops.

anyway, now i'm worried i'm going to burn myself out on my nano if i plan too much. it's very like me to worry, but not very like me not to plan if i have the opportunity to plan. i love a good plan. and sometimes i'm mostly okay if my plan crashes and burns, so why not plan, right? i just have to remember that its over 30 days left till nano so i might need to pace myself.

and i would like to take this opportunity to express my love for daytrotter, super-cool music site; they might be able to take credit if i make it through nano. they have free downloads of their own studio sessions with bands i heart. here: www.daytrotter.com/

science vs. fiction

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:49:19 GMT

apparently i'm going to be using the month of october to do some hard-core biochem research so i don't look like an idiot when i try to explain all my lovely fancy ideas about hemoglobin. i made it harder on myself, i think, because the person/people explaining are research scientists and the person they are explaining to works in hematology...hmmm...maybe i should put some non-science person in the room with them so there is a valid reason for the explanations to be less technical (= boring and wordy and really requiring diagrams). i can't imagine it would be interesting to read a bunch of overly technical science crap about how hemoglobin works normally and then how my people can manipulate it. that's right! manipulating hemoglobin! my main plot point is that there are people who can either manipulate someone else's hemoglobin (and for god's sake, i'm going to start abbreviating it - Hb = hemoglobin) or interpret electrical/electrochemical impulses from some else's Hb. so these fancy people can do things like "hear" thoughts in close proximity, change someone's blood to rust goo by oxidizing the iron in their Hb (or maybe stanch massive bleeding in an emergency), keep them from carrying oxygen in their blood (or increase the amount of oxygen if they're being helpful), speed up the breakdown of Hb to build up catabolites and make someone light-sensitive, cure sickle-cell anemia, maybe even rework some of their Hb so the iron is replaced with magnesium and turn it into chlorophyll so they can make their own sugars for nutrients. farfetched, yes. but it amuses me. i just have to figure out how to make it not boring!!

anyway, maybe i will try to post some simpler explanations of the science-y aspects on here as i go and try to get it nano-ready. it would probably help me clarify and keep unnecessary words out of my nano. and i can't believe i'm already trying to keep words OUT of my nano. how silly of me!

character sketches = bags of fun

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:59:06 GMT

i started doing character sketches for my nano characters and it seemed to jumpstart me. but that could've also been adrenaline from actually committing to doing nano in print. either way, 2 of the 3 MCs have names now and some details worked out, so yay, me! i also think i found a title that will work for what i want to write. it is hard to think up good titles that other people haven't already used. i first got the idea for my nano from this here poem by edna st. vincent millay, who rocks the sonnet like nobody since shakespeare:

From Fatal Interview
VIII

Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust,
You shall be bowed and brought to bed with me.
While the blood roars, or when the blood is rust
About a broken engine, this shall be.
If not today, then later; if not here
On the green grass, with sighing and delight,
Then under it, all in good time, my dear,
We shall be laid together in the night.
And ruder and more violent, be assured,
Than the desirous body's heat and sweat
That shameful kiss by more than night obscured
Wherewith at length the scornfullest mouth is met.
Life has no friend; her converts late or soon
Slide back to feed the dragon with the moon.
--E. St. V. M.

did i mention i heart her? i do. and i think i am going with "Blood to Rust" for my title. i call "dibs" if anyone else was thinking of using that. and, no, it's not about vampires. just blood. and rust, conveniently enough. and other stuff, including some UST between 2 of my MCs that i am hoping will be thick enough to cut with a machete. i am getting pretty excited about this nanowrimo idea; the possibility that i could crank out 50K words about the same characters, much less in a month, makes me sort of awed, in the scared to death way as well as in the potential reams of pride way. we'll see!
--Hb

p.s. so on a "weird coincidence" note: i am listening to a LONG playlist that i made a while ago and as i went to post this, "honey and the moon" by joseph arthur started playing. it's a lovely song, but the reason this is exciting is that one of the lyrics goes: "we're made out of blood and rust, looking for someone to trust without a fight" - spooky.

talking myself into doing nanowrimo

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:17:20 GMT

so here's the deal: i am tring to decide if i'm going to jump in and try nanowrimo this year. i just discovered its existence recently and i have been going back and forth on this for acouple of weeks now. maybe i should just lurk this year...50K is a lot of words. but then, if i try and don't make 50K, who cares? pretty much no one but me. so that's not a good enough reason NOT to do it. i have never attempted to write something that long. not even to get 10K words into something that long. so is inexperience a good reason not to try? probably not, because, hey, you've got to start somewhere, right? and i like novels. i like reading them. it's always been sort of a secret dream in the back of my mind that one day, maybe, i would write one. and this might just be the best time in real life for me to do this. also, what a great birthday present to myself, starting a novel! how exciting! and i do have an idea already - thus the hemoglobin themed LJ. i can do this.

so, okay, i think i've talked myself into nanowrimo. off to join the comm.

--Hb

intro post

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:34:01 GMT

all right, so i'm the first to admit that hemoglobin is kind of a weird quasi-obsession to have for a person who is not a scientist by degree. i do consider myself a scientist by virtue of love for the subject matter, also for a moderate amount of coursework in the subject of science. i have a theory that most things that tend to bemuse people (and i think i probably mean non-scientists here) can be boiled down to proteins. really. i use the words "theory" and "most" because i'm sure there are plenty of things that can't be explained by proteins. but i don't care much about those things. i am all about proteins, this one in particular. i may yet make a career of hematology for that very reason.

i swear i won't wax poetic about hemoglobin every post i make for days on end. i actually have a "grand scheme" kind of purpose for starting this LJ. more clarification later; i reserve the right to wimp out.