So much for a regular blogging schedule!

Shanah Tovah, everyone, a few weeks late.

For a couple weeks I was very busy, and then I fell out of the habit.

I’ve also written a second short story, and read…way too many books. It’s funny– I used to work so hard as a graduate student. I had to instill personal boundaries like “no bench work after midnight”, and “if you need to be in by 8am, make sure you’re out by 8pm”, because otherwise that sort of thing happened all the time. These days I have my books, my creative writing, my pets, and a few other hobbies lurking in the background. I sleep every night, I shower every day, and I’m a lot happier. It feels a little like cheating. I have the sense that if I’m not miserable in graduate school, I’m probably not working hard enough.

However, I finally finished Mistborn: The Final Empire. In the space of a couple days, I also read the two sequels. Brandon Sanderson is probably the top name in the epic fantasy genre these days (excluding George R. R. Martin, of course). This Penny Arcade comic isn’t entirely wrong: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/09/30/sanderfuge

His prose is decent, his characterization is not extremely convincing, and large parts of his books get redundant and long winded. By the end of the trilogy, I’d find myself skipping pages at a time, because they were covering old (or annoying) ground.

That said, he can *nail* an ending! Any complaints I had about writing quality consistently disappeared in the last hundred pages of his books. They were all fast paced, surprising, and for lack of a better word, awesome. After finishing the Final Empire, and book 2 “Mistborn: The Well of Ascension”, I was ready to take back anything negative I’d ever said or thought about his writing. They more than make up for other weaknesses.

All oars at the boat

So much for posting every day. I’ve been working on a short story in the evenings, and that’s been eating up my creative energy. It’s been affecting my research as well. On a few (many) occasions I’ve found myself tweaking my draft, or looking up writing tips in the lab.

I think that’s worse than blogging in the lab. My blog is about reflections on science and graduate school, so it’s nominally related to my research. Writing sci fi stories is not.

A few years ago Senior-Adviser gave the entire lab a lecture on the importance of arriving at lab by 10am. It wasn’t delivered as a lecture, but as an extended metaphor, with accompanying visual aids. The lab is a boat (specifically one of the boats that used to sail out of Cold Spring Harbor). If you’re in science, it’s important to make sure that all the boat’s crew have their oars going in the same direction. Otherwise the boat moves to slowly, and the lab loses funding. If you want to have time consuming hobbies, you should work at a bank. In science, you need to be all in. And that means getting to work before 10.

I want to keep writing for fun, but I need to learn to set better boundaries. Otherwise I don’t belong on the pilgrimage.