Over spring break, a few weeks back, I went to Mexico with a bunch of friends. More importantly, I spent several days without checking email or browsing the web. And I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really didn’t miss my lack of connectivity. At least for the few days…
I was in India over winter break, and one of the funnier aspects of being home was trying to explain to people what I was actually doing. Like Jane, I had thought it hard enough to explain to former professors, but most of them at least knew about UC Santa Cruz. Most people that I…
The internet isn’t exactly known for providing a consistently high quality of writing. And I don’t think most people have particularly high literary expectations of video game reviews. So I was surprised to see a badly-written video game review elicit strong responses from readers, and prompt a discussion on the craft of writing that references…
I took along a whole lot of books during winter break, and started with The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes. I ended up reading it cover-to-cover during my flight, as I was completely engrossed. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned overcoming fear in order to write. I found the…
As I wrote in my last post, fear can be a real problem for writers. So much so that there’s actually a book on how writers can overcome it, called The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. But fear isn’t all bad. It’s a crucial evolutionary response that keeps us away from danger, and scientists…
photo © 2008 hojusaram | more info (via: Wylio) I was reading the closing chapters of Zinsser’s “On Writing Well”. Zinsser has an uncanny knack of pointing out things that I hadn’t thought of before, but that seem obvious once he says them. His chapter on “Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence” is full of good advice….
photo © 2008 Fang Guo | more info (via: WylioWhile at my Salinas Californian newspaper internship yesterday, we were visited by school kids taking a tour of the building. “This is where our reporters work,” said the tour guide, as she walked by me. It brought back flashbacks of my first visit to a newspaper,…
I realized there were no photos of the UC Santa Cruz campus on this blog, so I thought I’d add a few. These are photos that I snapped on my phone’s camera on my way to class in the morning. I apologize for their quality, my phone can only do so much… I never get…
Or, “How the article I wrote got ripped-off within an hour” I was excited this week to publish an article about a new kind of underwater robot in Nature News. I basically got lucky and happened to talk to a researcher about the right thing at the right time, and found out about this story….
I got a little taste of the perils of field research when some of us got drenched by a wave where the researchers first set up. They assured us they’d never experienced something like that in over 10 years. Once we got set up though, things went smoothly, and we actually got to collect sea-otter…
