Happy Monday!
It’s been a calm week that involved me taking care of things I had ignored during NaNoWriMo, and taking a short break from the novel. However, I’ve been reading books on the art of writing a novel, and it strikes me I have ticked none of those boxes. I just need to get the first draft done, after which I can ‘fix it in Post’.
Some cool things I came across this week:
Andy Weir’s interview on Medium about how he worked a programming job while writing The Martian. I took away quite a few things from this piece. It took him a decade to build up a mailing list of 3000 subscribers with whom he was sharing his writing, and that in the heyday of mailing lists. He gave away his writing for free, until he organically ended up putting his work on Amazon KDP (on reader request), which segued into an agent finding his book, and the rest is history. He provides more details in this talk here. As a programmer who is writing a novel, it is pretty encouraging to know I can keep on my path and get somewhere, though I know I can’t exactly replicate what he did - publishing houses don’t republish self-published novels now. Thanks, Mia Moss for the link.
This restaurant in Shinjuku in Japan serves a chicken curry with a very interesting history. Rash Behari Bose, a revolutionary in the Indian independence movement, fled to Japan in 1915, married a Japanese woman, and rejuvenated her family’s struggling bakery with Indian recipes. He then went on to found the Indian National Army, which then was led by Subhas Chandra Bose, who allied with the Axis to overthrow British rule in India,
ICYMI - Old Woman, Long Hair, my Thursday piece, which features extracts from my novel. I find it annoying that long and/or grey hair is considered a disadvantage for women in corporate America, and I decided to put in an old female scientist with long, white hair in my novel.
Sled dogs used by the Inuit today are the descendants of the dogs they brought over when they moved from Siberia. The paper analyzed the DNA of dogs in the North American Arctic from the past 4500 years, and found that the DNA found in Inuit settlements is markedly different from that of dogs found in the area earlier. They also found a unique strain that’s present in both Eastern Siberia and Alaska, and this strain is still present in sled dogs today. As an aside, I’m amazed at how many authors there are for a paper like this, which shows us how much specialized expertise is needed for discoveries like this.
This Language Log post about trolling in Ancient Sanskrit. Yep, Indians invented that, too. Though TBH, I disagree with the definition of trolling in that post. Everyone seems to call everything trolling and that annoys the 2000’s teen that I am.
GIF of the week: This choosy-ass crow which wants only the expensive mackerel off of a fishmonger’s cart and not all the other cheap fish. It actually negotiates with the fishmonger instead of stealing. A big win for bird-human relations.
Would you like to see me get to 3000 subscribers in less than a decade? Tell your friends and family about Write-Brained and all the wonderful things you learn twice a week! Link them to lila.substack.com and encourage them to subscribe!