Katherine Johnson, Research Mathematician and Aerospace Technologist at NASA Langley (Amy Echeverri)

By Amy Echeverri

Katherine Johnson inspired me when I was a teenager struggling in math with multiple teachers having told me that it was okay to fail because it was hard and girls are more suited to language arts. 

I read about her when I was 19 and immediately stopped listening to my college professor. I sat in the back of the lecture hall to read the textbook and extra readings, working the calculations as I read. Everything clicked. Instead of struggling to just pass, I excelled. I worked damn hard for my As in math, which was a gratifying improvement over working damn hard for my Cs. And with my new math skills, I saw immediate improvement in all my other academics, including history, Latin, and Spanish.

Math made me start to understand how thoughts and concepts can have logical flow. Understanding math caused my writing to improve. When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I tell them the usual things like daily practice and reading. Then I pause to reflect on how best to say the unusual part. Each time I tell someone that mathematics was the essential piece that made the difference between rejection slips and publication, I get a polite nod and a redirect to talk some more about my English lit classes. 

The trouble is that the connection between math and writing isn’t clear without an understanding of both. The connection is logic and while it’s possible to understand logic (somewhat) and understand writing without math, math is critical to making a deep connection. It makes the difference between an intellectual understanding and a fundamental understanding that runs so deep that it might invoke emotion.

So when I tell you that math is as essential to my writing as language, I mean it all the way to the core of who I am. I don’t mean it as a glib “hey kids, stay in school” sort of cliché. Nor do I mean that without understanding mathematics it’s impossible to be a writer. I simply mean that an understanding both language and math makes it easier to understand writing than an understanding language alone.

Perhaps I should learn more math so that I can figure out how to explain this concept better. And thanks to Ms. Johnson, I mean that sentiment both as a wink and as a serious notion.

I'm grateful to Ms. Johnson for leading generations of women like me. She cut a valuable and necessary trail.

On Tuesday, 24 November 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Image credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters; featured on CBS News

Articles at NASA about Ms. Johnson:

• Katherine Johnson (notable publications plus photos and links to videos)
• She was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts

For Those Subscribing

For those subscribing or otherwise not on social media where I will do the reshare, today I updated my posting schedule for the new year (even though it's still technically two weeks to the new year and a month to my spring semester.)

Something in the Oven

Scheming.

So I've been working on something.

It's not done, but it's formed enough to be rolled out. It marks one of the changes that will be happening here at Writing About Writing.

For about the past two years I've been shoehorning social justice topics into a writing container, either as "metaphors" or under the auspices of "narrative." And those topics are important, and will still be visited here from time to time, but I'm rolling out a brand new blog where I don't have to work so hard to bring the connective tissue back to writing and where I'm not stretching the pretense to tissue-paper-thinness to post it here.

I give you.... Social Justice Bard.

Or at least the proto form of it. Subject to layout changes, color changes, added widgets, and any other knob fiddling I might do.

Since all my writing will always be centralized here at W.A.W., I will put up a compilation of SJB's articles each weekend. The only way that this will affect W.A.W.'s posting schedule is that with fewer social justice posts here, we'll be able to get down to more of the writing stuff.

Hopefully that's a good fix both for people who wish I'd write more about social justice, and for people who wish I'd write less.

Cooking up Something

I'm still coughing a little too much to make a video, and we had a sitter cancellation this morning.

I'm also cooking up something. Possibly the Next Big Thing™

World Building: It's Not Just for Genre Authors (By Anthony Woo)

World Building:  it’s not just for genre authors

By Anthony Woo

When you think of world building you probably think of speculative fiction settings. You might think of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, with its thousands of pages of fictional history, more than a dozen languages, language groups, and scripts, and created the basis for the medieval fantasy stereotype. You might think of Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with its intricate and internally consistent magic system, atmospheric locations, and bizarre interpretations of modern technology. You might think of Star Trek (yes, I know, not technically writing, but still an excellent example of memorable world building), with dozens of books devoted to technical schematics, people who are fluent in Klingon, and more allegorical aliens than you can shake a stick at.

If that seems like a lot of effort for what we all learned in Elementary as “just” time and place, it is. But all the work to establish location and era is necessary. No reader can experience the contrast between the bleak subsistence living of District 12 and the conspicuous consumption of the Capitol. Not one of us has stepped into a wardrobe full of fur coats and come out the other side to find a magical world of talking animals ruled by a snow queen that hates Christmas. These places exist solely as words on the page and our imaginations. And, of course, this is the advantage speculative fiction has over other forms of fiction.

In speculative fiction, the setting is frequently as much of a character as any of the people with names. And like any character, the setting needs an appropriate introduction and details that differentiate it from others. Redwall, for example, would be far less memorable without the attention to culinary detail and the Enchanted Forest would not be nearly as entertaining without the frequent self aware nods to stereotypical genre tropes. But if you’re not writing in Lyra or Tortall or Dragaera, you don’t have to do that. You’re writing about a real place. A place that people know. A place that people can see and hear and smell and touch. Right?

Wrong.

A few years ago, I skimmed an article about the history of Chinatown. It was described as an attraction planned and developed by the Chinese community. A location that would draw tourists and benefit Chinese immigrants with employment without the fear of racial discrimination. I had to read it again, because that was not the Chinatown I grew up in. The Chinatown I knew was an ethnic ghetto created by redlining. It was populated by mostly low income and ageing immigrants who had little opportunity to learn English. In my memory, it had gone through a period of gentrification that had (mostly) failed to displace the existing community. It turns out I was reading about the wrong Chinatown.

The Chinatown most people have heard of, the first one, is in San Francisco. The other one, where my parents grew up and I visit on a regular basis, is in Oakland (and if you've never heard of that one, you can probably tell from my description why). The point being that, even with real places--perhaps especially with real places--world building is critical. Without a description, just the name Chinatown, I would never have known the difference.

So does that mean that you have to write about every stone, tree, and blade of grass? Not necessarily. On one end of the spectrum is Tolkien. Consider the tower of Orthanc which is a relatively minor location, with pages of text devoted to its description, history of construction, battles fought around it, and various occupants and owners. On the other end of the spectrum is Jane Austen. We know hardly anything about the town of Meryton--best known as the setting of Pride and Prejudice. It is a provincial country town in Hertfordshire near London, and that's pretty much the extent of our knowledge.

So, it really depends on your story.

Writer is Sick (Again, not Still)

This is me. (Technically last night, but I don't look much different today.)

Last night a norovirus took my description of being sick last week with that bad cold as a personal challenge. So I'm not just uncomfortable and possibly contagious. I woke up this morning after 13 hours of sleep, made myself some soup and Gatorade for breakfast, and that was so draining that I went back to sleep for another four hours.

I'll get a guest post up tomorrow. But today, even trying to coordinate with the writers is exhausting me.

Some Bad News

Edit: Of course we've now learned what the mystery ailment was (cancer) and what was going on that was affecting her health. 

To my wonderful, awesome readers,

I have a bit of bad news.

I've been trying to put this off for a long, long time, but after last night, the final straw landed on the camel's back.

There will need to be some structural changes to how we do things here at Writing About Writing for at least the forseeable future. I'll get into the specifics of how this will (and won't) change the landscape here, but let me explain why first. If you don't care about WHY, you can skip to the bottom.

If anybody has been following me for the last two years, they know that I've been hanging on for dear life. (Fortunately, that's hyperbole, and I'm talking about maintaining my ambitious writing schedule or my arms would be really tired by now.) I'm constantly struggling with my writing time and my writing schedule, and I've been trying like the Dickens to get up more articles of quality in a given week. I have put up a few of these reorganization efforts in the name of meta-commentary on how difficult it can sometimes be for a writer to protect their writing time, but honestly, I didn't post it every time it happened because I thought it was getting too repetitive as a topic.

I've kept writing. (Because that's what writers fucking do, yo.) I've even kept writing every day, and getting up good articles regularly. Writing stayed a priority through all the schedule shifts and priority reorgs, and that didn't and won't change going forward. But no one watching has had any illusions about how much trouble I've been having trying to eke more time out of 24 hour day.

"Two years" is not just an arbitrary number. Exactly two years and two days ago, The Contrarian joined the Hall of Rectitude and ruined everything in the nicest way. Writing with kids is a little different than writing without kids. For values of "little" that include "literally it is entirely different in every conceivable way; you have never written so fast during someone else's nap ever). Can you even believe that there was a time before T.C. when I wrote three or four solid articles a week? It's not that writing with a two year old is impossible. Obvi (as my friend Mal, says.) It's definitely a lot tricker though. Even that first year when they sleep a lot is easier than what comes after.

When all the planets aligned the schedule that looked good on paper could manifest in corporeal form in the physical world, I did pretty well getting some good articles up. But all it took was one thing to kind of throw a wrench into the cogs. One illness. One tough board meeting at someone's work. One super villain robbing a bank but not during banking hours. One hiccup, and the whole house of cards came down. Posts were going up so last minute that a mild rhinovirus could could screw up a whole week. And if someone else was dealing with illness, I was easily working a 70 hour week before writing a word.

And yet, I've put off this post for months (possibly years) because I thought if I could just crest one more thing, I'd be though the woods. But there's always one more thing and one more thing and one more thing. And these last few months with the holidays and the vacations and the personal issues and the health issues (mine and others') it has just kept going on and on. 

The thing is, that's life. Shit happens. And you're not going to have to bury a friend or go through a divorce every week, but if being tapped for an extra few hours of child care crashes the whole system, you're probably cruising at ludicrous speed. 

I might have kept going too–holding out for that moment of scheduling Nirvana. It's possible that after finals and after Christmas and after the New Year and after the new semester starts and after I visit my mother in January that there would be some open space of time where nothing would go wrong and this schedule stretched tighter than a snare drum would finally work for a bit. Maybe.

However yesterday I heard something that brought it all into relief. I can't go into a lot of detail because it's about someone who doesn't like being blogged about, but someone very close to me has a health issue that isn't something likely to go away–not for at least the next couple of whiles and maybe ever. It's also nothing we can pretend isn't going to rock the boat. Not without being blissfully naive. Again, in a perfect world we could balance two sitters, get a housekeeper in every week, and no one would ever need to say "Chris, can you handle this?" during my precious writing time. 

But that's not life. Shit happens.

I have struggled for the past two years to get up two strong articles a week and try for a third. And that effort has meant I have done very little other writing. I've neglected other blogs I write for, longer articles that just take more than a few hours before posting, the thank you notes for incredible donors who deserve to be thanked for helping this blog stay afloat. It's cut deeply into any fiction time I've tried to carve out. I don't even read as much as I used to–I mean I still read a lot of non-fiction articles, but it's been incredibly difficult to find the time to dig into books. And this is to say nothing of swaths of days and sometimes weeks where I can't remember having more than a few idle minutes of guilt-ridden Notwriting to myself (because this list doesn't even include extra childcare tag ins, house work, or other domestic chores that I step up to the plate on when schedules get screwy). It's not that I want to write less, it's just that I want to write some different stuff and have a bit of breathing room with the rest.

I'll also be working behind the scenes to find the balance in the other aspects of my life so that I can work smarter and harder as soon as is feasible and as often as is plausible. 

So what does this mean?

This isn't one of those posts that ends up with a blog on hiatus. I promise. I might start to take a couple of days off around major holidays and post less often when I'm on vacation, but I'm not going to stop writing–here or anywhere else.

What I am going to do is shift my posting schedule. Instead of two major articles a week and trying for a third, I'm going to red shift it down to one major article a week and try for a second. I'll still update five days a week. (And possibly six depending on something else I'm thinking about doing–deets on this to come.) I've been trying to post two solid articles a week and go for a third.

Instead, what I'm going to do is shift my schedule dramatically to try to post one good, solid, home-run article each week on Fridays (except for this Friday). Monday through Thursday will be the usual stuff: polls, running plot, personal updates, guest posts, and more.

Now if I have the time and energy (or if we've had one of those Nirvana weeks I dream about), I'll do a second major article (probably on Wednesday). But if not, I'll pour everything into that Friday post. There's still going to be some fun fluff on other days but Friday will be the day I'm trying to nail it.

If I can carve out some time on weekends and write ahead, it's entirely possible that this move will actually usher in a renaissance of better posts, fiction, and more robust daily posting. But while that new schedule and whole new approach is sussing out–also depending on the severity of the diagnosis we get–it might seem like I'm doing less.

To my Patron Muses and Regular Donors:

Each and every one of you were part of the reason I held on for so long, and I am keenly aware that the new schedule is not quite as awesome. I have been saying for years that I could maybe take more time off with more financial support, but the reality is that in order to hit that point (where I either hire a sitter for a big chunk of time each week or stop teaching all together), it's going to take several more guaranteed donations to match the lost income, and in the meantime, I don't expect you to keep donating for less output.

Each of you is donating generously and if a reduced rate of my output is worth a smaller donation or no donation, please please please do not consider for even a moment that there will be even a particle of hurt feelings. If anything, I'm doing financially okay right now since making myself a little more available to my family means I end up covering more than my expenses. Donations are, of course, always appreciated and breathtaking, but they are not expected, and I will never stop writing, even if they go away.