Happy Monday!
I’m still full from Thanksgiving, and I WON NANOWRIMO!
That just means I wrote 50,000 words in November, mostly towards my novel. It’s not a zero sum game, and everyone can win. You get a bunch of discounts on writing software, swag, and self publishing options as a winner.
I’m at a little over 52,000 words, though to be honest, only about 38,000 are on my novel, while the remaining 14,000 are the words I wrote on my Thursday pieces on this Substack. I’m thrilled I have been able to sustain writing a long piece every week for eight weeks, even when four of them have been NaNo weeks. I rather enjoy writing fact-based pieces. They push me to spend time focusing on depth, something that is really good for me.
As for my novel, I’m amazed at how hazy ideas suddenly become real, with strong motivations, cutting dialogue, and real danger. What started as a nod to Tales Of The City except with more tech and immigration is now a murder mystery with tight timelines, fun banter, and reckoning with the idea of America.
Now for the links!
I rather enjoyed reading this piece on the first Indian-American citizen. His name was Eduljee Sorabjee, and he moved from Bombay to Gold Rush Los Angeles, via Lancashire, with a British wife in tow, sometimes in the 1880s. He seems to have integrated into LA life quite easily, what with going to jury duty, being close to the Armenian community, and working on building water supply systems in Pasadena.
This paper in Nature about new evidence for the existence of the river Sarasvati. This is from researchers studying sediments in an ancient river bed, and concluding that there was indeed a river flowing through central India in the Bronze age. Why is this important? Because Indologists rejected the ancient vedas as historical sources and disputed the timeline of their writing, because they all referenced a ‘mighty river’ Sarasvati, which didn’t exist. But now we know that there existed a perennial river, along which we find a lot of 2500+ year old settlements and cities. The paper is easy to read, and very accessible.
One man solely maintains a software used by ten million people, by not following well known best practices for open source software maintenance! Dr. Philip Guo maintains PythonTutor, a software that lets you code in Python online. He writes here about what he’s learned from ten years of it. It’s incredibly interesting, mainly because most tips and tricks in this arena are more suited for teams of people, and not very much is said about doing things all by yourself.
I spent some time reading this long, exhaustive piece about self publishing and traditional publishing. I like that all of the information and ideas are in one long piece. It’s usually spread out all over the place. Thanks, Lyle, for sharing this link.
GIF of the week: Superfight between monkey and tiger on the treetops.