{"id":7046,"date":"2011-12-16T01:12:56","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T06:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/?p=7046"},"modified":"2011-12-16T11:14:15","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T16:14:15","slug":"struggle-and-serendipity-or-yay-im-in-open-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2011\/12\/struggle-and-serendipity-or-yay-im-in-open-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"Struggle and Serendipity (or: Yay! I’m in Open Lab!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/span>For some reason I wasn’t exactly keeping up with my e-mail last week – or much else that wasn’t Big Geology Conference related. So, although I did take note of the e-mail containing the glad tidings that my post ‘Ten Million Feet Upon the Stair’<\/a> had been chosen to be part of next year’s Open Lab anthology<\/a>, once I had made a pleased noise or two (and a celebratory tweet<\/a>), I didn’t have the time to dwell on it too much, as I had to get back to getting my brain overloaded by cool new geoscience. <\/p>\n

But now I have the time to think about it (and get around to approving the edits for the book version before this year’s editor Jennifer Oullette<\/a> breaks out her painful-sounding ‘Mallet of Loving Correction’*), I have to say that I’m rather pleased about this. Not just pleased in general, though of course I am; who wouldn’t be a bit chuffed that something they wrote is going to appear in a proper book? No, I’m pleased that it’s this particular post, of everything that I’ve written this year, that got the nod. Why? Because I put a lot of effort into writing it. <\/p>\n

I’m actually not the most naturally fluent of writers: I can’t just sit down and let perfect prose flow easily from my head onto the screen or paper. Instead, my writing tends to coalesce from a starting collection of disjointed sentence fragments that represent the key ideas I want to express, or nice turns of phrase that express them. I arrange these into a semi-logical order, and then there is a messy sequence of filling in the gaps so it all flows together, swapping things around, and rewriting, sometimes several times. <\/p>\n

For me, the most challenging writing is when I have an idea or concept that feels perfectly clear in my head, but is novel or unfamiliar enough that I struggle to actually articulate it. This happens all the time when I’m writing scientific papers: I can take ages endlessly writing and rewriting the same few paragraphs as I try to make my ideas and interpretations as clear and robust as I possibly can. It can be very frustrating, but despite the common stereotype, clear writing is just as important to doing good science as well-designed experiments, good data and clever ideas. After all, your revolutionary theories will get nowhere if you’re the only one who understands them. <\/p>\n

Sometimes, I hit a similar block when trying to write a blog post, and ‘Ten Million Feet Upon the Stair’ is a prime example. The basic concept – that a centuries’ worth of wear on a stone staircase is a striking visual representation of the large cumalative impact of many small actions, a key concept in geology – came to be not long after I first moved into my flat in Edinburgh. I liked the idea, and thought it would be good piece. But turning that passing thought into something more substantial turned out to be much more challenging, which is why a post about the staircase up to my flat in Edinburgh did not actually go up on the blog until two months after<\/em> I’d moved to Chicago. By that point, it had already existed in some form for quite a few months, but I’d periodically work on it for half an hour or so, get frustrated with my inability to write something good, and put it away again for a few weeks. This continued until my annoyance with not finishing the darned thing finally inspired me enough to thrash out something I was happy with. That is why this post getting the nod from the Open Lab judges pleases me so much: I put quite a lot of effort into clearly articulating an idea, and writers who I respect got it. And they liked it! Validation! <\/p>\n

On a less self-involved note, it wasn’t just due to the struggle to get it written that this post very nearly didn’t get written at all. To really make sense, the post needed a photo of the stairs in question. Given that I walked up and down them every day, and most of those times I was carrying a phone with a camera, you’d think that that wouldn’t have been a problem. But believe it or not, this shot:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The stairs up to my Edinburgh flat. Photo: Chris Rowan, 2010.<\/p><\/div>\n

was taken on my last morning in Edinburgh, about ten minutes before I got a taxi to the train station. You’d think that when you’re about to move countries, taking photos for future blog posts would not exactly be at the top of one’s to-do list, but it turns out that you recall all sorts of things when you’re in an empty flat with nothing to do but wait. I’m certainly glad now that I remembered. <\/p>\n

So that’s the story of my Open Lab entry, which is in some pretty illustrious company<\/a>. I was extremely glad to see that the judges loved Dana Hunter’s wonderful account of how she got bitten by the geology bug, ‘Adorers of the Good Science of Rock-breaking’<\/a> (also a lovely testimonial to the power of public outreach through blogging), as much as I did. Further geoblogospheric representation comes via Dave Bressan’s fascinating piece<\/a> on forensic geology. Not that these two posts, and mine, represent even a small fraction of the truly excellent geoblogging that took place in 2011, but hopefully we’ll do you all proud in the finished anthology. <\/p>\n

*sic. And scary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some reason I wasn’t exactly keeping up with my e-mail last week – or much else that wasn’t Big Geology Conference related. So, although I did take note of the e-mail containing the glad tidings that my post ‘Ten … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[534,533,532],"class_list":["post-7046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggery","tag-open-lab","tag-shameless-plugging","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7046"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7052,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046\/revisions\/7052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}