I’ve had another break from blogging. I appear to have a one-track mind, and I’ve been so pre-occupied with finishing the first proper draft of my novel that I haven’t been able to write any non-fiction. Right now, the novel is lurking in a mountain of paper underneath my desk. I’m waiting for feedback on it from a couple of brave volunteers.
My mind is still fully immersed in it, though. In many ways it feels as real to me as the external world. I find myself constantly thinking and worrying about how well I’ve brought out the themes, developed the characters, unfolded the plot…
It’s just biding its time, waiting for the inevitable rewrite.
And yet, I’ve already started thinking about the Next Novel. I know what I want to write about, namely to what extent our identities are determined by the superficially opposing forces of genes and environment. During my time at the Genomics Forum, I learnt that the two actually work together; the environment can work to ‘express’ genes that would otherwise stay dormant. From a writer’s point of view, this is rich pickings, especially as a lot of commentary on genetics is so over-simplistic and often seems in thrall to a rather mechanistic view of genes. (I try to avoid reading articles with the title, ‘A gene for…’ as they make my blood-pressure go up.)
In my desperate attempt to wait for feedback on Novel Number 1 and not dive straight into rewrites, I’ve been doing a fair amount of rummaging around on the interweb. This article blaming mathematicians for the financial crash also gets in a swipe at modern cosmology. The fact that it’s so ludicrous and yet it’s been published by a (supposedly) respectable journal makes it secretly quite enjoyable to read. I love the author’s assertion that cosmologists blindly assume that light travels in straight lines, and that dark matter is uniformly distributed. Hasn’t he heard of general relativity? And there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of papers on the complicated nature of dark matter distribution. Elsewhere in the article his ‘argument’ for propagating made-up uncertainties in the gravitational constant and the speed of light back to the Big Bang made me laugh out loud.
What is irritating is that there are plenty of valid criticisms of cosmology which would have made for a much more interesting article. I shall have to blog about those in the future, as right now the Novel is nudging my foot. Better give it a saucer of milk, or something…
