Skip to content

G. Helen, R.I.P.


My maternal grandmother died earlier this week, only days after her 103rd birthday. She was a long-distance grandma, but reliable, and she loved sending and receiving letters, which meant I practiced writing from an early age. This is my favorite childhood photo of Grandma Helen, sharing one of our favorite things to do–reading. I also like remembering that for a very brief time I was a blonde.

Posted 20 April 2010 † nickyp § Reading § Thinking ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Second draft hurtles into view

So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth.

This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the night in between (after I’d done two months of on-and-off analysis). I ran out of “meditation” candles in the middle of the night, so had to resort to our REI emergency candle-lantern, at back, to remind me to focus. To further distract my busy-mind, I listened to Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas,” acoustic version, on continuous repeat–more than 300 times. Usually I don’t need candles or tunes; at most I listen to recordings of rain in the forest or waves on a beach. But I wanted to tap those dormant, under-the-consciousness vibes, and it was really a reach this time.

This desk forms the new “fiction corner.” The old desk and closet have been transformed into my work office now that my office office has closed, and it’s easier for me to keep my day job and my night job separate if I am in a separate space while I’m doing them. This has made the room where I keep all this stuff rather cozy. The notes on the left, in the photo below, are taped to the back of a bookshelf.

Here I am going scene by scene through the first draft, comparing it with the new outline (propped up on the right) and reviewing all the plot, scene, setting, conflict, and character notes I’d taken, as well as the actual manuscript (in front). This part took the night shifts over three days (and counting).

The sharp new ideas I was getting during the weekend continued to flow, so I changed some stuff on the fly. I expect more will change in the next few weeks, as I go through the remaining steps to sharpen the characters and make sure every scene has conflict and is driving the story forward.

After I figured out how much would need to change in each scene, I wrote new, color-coded cards, one for each scene. Red is for massive change or a new scene altogether, orange shows one major part is changing but much remains the same, yellow a little less change, and green is for scenes that don’t need much structural change at all. Usually I keep them on a ring (unless I’m shuffling them around); here I spread them out to get a big-picture reading. Scene One is on the left; Scene 93 on the right.

First off, as usual, I began in the wrong place in the story, so it’s all red cards to start. First draft was in summer, with my heroine on her way to a house party; now it’s winter and she’s going to a very small social gathering. I was a little surprised to make this same mistake; I’d done a lot of plotting and character play, and roughed out a pretty-solid sentence-for-scene outline before I started. Que sera sera.

A lot of the red also is thanks to a new, kicking antagonist, who sort of amalgamated himself out of three mildly antagonistic characters in draft one. He is an excellent and formidable foe, but that meant that any scene with the old antagonist or with one of the two other characters in it became at least an orange card, and usually red.

BUT, good news, the middle looks pretty solid. In the past couple of manuscripts, the second and third acts have been textbook examples of “sagging middle syndrome,” where the plot meanders and the characters just talk, talk, talk until the events of the climactic ending finally get rolling. No such problem here, though you can see that my antagonist change has led to a clump of reds at the second turning point. So here the initial rough outline seems to have helped me as I barreled through the NaNoWriMo “just-get-it-down-on-the-page” first-draft marathon.

And then we get to the end, which involves the same time and mostly the same events, but still has massively changed. I realized my people were too passive, riding the waves of major changes and reacting to them but not making any waves themselves. Boring! So I rethought the kind of people they would be and what kind of choices they would make earlier in the story (like around that second turning point) that would roll down the hill and make big boulders crashing here in the fourth act. Now I’m thinking this story could be a real tear-jerker; I might make it a goal to make the reader cry. Twice. For different reasons.

This is a lot of work, and I felt a little bummed when I saw all that red. But this second draft is already so much better a story, I can’t wait to tell it (in the evenings, after I do my day job). The goal with all this analysis, pages, and cards, is to get the story where I want it in one step: a “one-pase revise.” I’m following the system devised by writer Holly Lisle, who is far more organized than me–and far, far more prolific.

I wasn’t as analytical or organized when I revised my other stories, and they went through draft after draft after draft. I think one of them lost all hint of energy from being reworked so many times, and when one of my beta readers reacted to a certain part in one draft, I couldn’t remember if that part was still in my current revision. And it was a sword fight!

Because this one has so many red cards, I’m pretty sure there will be a third draft, but if I can get this one structurally sound, then the third draft can be a quick edit and polish, and I’m still ahead of the game. My goal is to have this ready to submit by December.

How the reading is going: Not well. My head is full of multiple scene possibilities, and I haven’t kept up on my reading. I did get through HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson, which I have opinions about I may share soon, and I got swept into the “Song of Fire and Ice” saga, after reading A GAME OF THRONES for class. Next book-club book: THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Barbara Kingsolver.

Posted 07 April 2010 † nickyp § Learning § Reading § Thinking § Writing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Women and stress

We are not all the same when it comes to our reactions to stress, I rediscovered on Tuesday afternoon during a workshop sponsored by the International Brain Research Organization to mark Women’s History Month.

For example, the idea that our bodies’ involuntary stress reactions serve us well in the case of acute stress (short-term) but can cause harm when the stress is continued or chronic, may not be true for most of us, suggested Victoria Luine of Hunter College. She was one of the three main speakers during the session, called “Stress and the Brain: Effects on Addiction, Cognition and Well Being” and held at the Cosmos Club (which for its first 110 years was the most exclusive male-only club in Washington, DC).

    “These relationships were determined scientifically in adult males,”
she said. “The male response is fight or flight, but is the female’s?” She and others have been testing these other populations (in the rat world), and in some memory tasks, some cell-level investigations, and other work, they have found big differences.

[See the rest of this post at the Dana Foundation blog]

Posted 25 March 2010 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Grace Hopper, in at the beginning

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! As per findingada.com: “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.”

One of the women who inspired me to continue my interest in science, even as I changed my major from engineering to communications, was Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a longtime U.S. Naval officer, mathematician and early computer programmer who developed the first compiler for a computer programming language (COBOL).

I first learned of her through a segment on 60 Minutes in 1983, when she was Captain Hopper and still working and lecturing in her dress uniform, though she was in her 70s. She “helped teach computers a language,” as Morley Safer puts it in the video, and allowed all us non-mathematicians to be programmers, too.

At that time, I thought all scientists were men in white labcoats; all computer scientists men in white labcoats with pocket protectors. One of my girlfriends was majoring in computer programming and finding it lonely and rough for a woman; my school had a special program trying to get more women to take the program. I thought my friend was breaking new ground. And then I saw Capt. Hopper, who had worked for decades and decades already, who had built a foundational part of our PC, who had popularized the term “bug” (after an actual moth that got caught in a relay in one of the old, giant Mark II computers). She was a scientist, an engineer—and a word-maven!

Thanks to YouTube, I watched the segment again last week for the first time since I first saw it, and was inspired again. This time, I was struck by how forward-looking she is, and how easily she can put things into perspective. In the second clip here, Safer asks her about the people who are afraid of computers, thinking they might take over the world or something. Hopper recalls people who were scared to death of telephones, of electric lights (compared to gaslight): “We’ve always gone through this, with every change.” And while I disagree with her on the ability of women to perform combat roles, it was nice to hear her say, “Women have always done mathematics, since the days of the Greeks.” When Safer asks, “Do you think that women are better than men at mathematics?” she quickly responds, “No. just the same.”

And as my friends know, I aim to live one of her favorite adages: “When in doubt, don’t ask. Just do. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.” I can only imagine how much grief she put up with–Naval regulations, bureaucracy, sexism, ageism, whatever-ism–but she persisted and prevailed.

Grace Hopper was born Dec. 9, 1906, and died on Jan. 1, 1992, still working, still looking forward.

Posted 24 March 2010 † nickyp § Learning ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , , ,

Gazing with new eyes

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon in Baltimore, I joined a couple dozen people participating in an experiment in neuroaesthetics, helping researchers try to take a reading on what art does to our brains.

The exhibit/experiment “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics” at the Walters Art Museum is a collaboration between the museum and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University. As part of a series of experiments, Institute researchers are collecting nearly three months’ worth of museumgoer experiences and compare them with the reactions of a far smaller number of subjects on campus viewing similar shapes while they are in an fMRI brain scanner.

Outside the single gray-walled room stood a sculpture by Jean Arp, “The Woman of Delos,” finished in 1959. Inside, the two long walls each held five posters containing 25 computer-generated modifications of the work, stretching it, compressing it, re-orienting it, and taking a slice out of it.

As we entered the exhibit, we picked up 3-D glasses, pencils, a score sheet, and directions: “Look at the arrays (picture groups), fill out the answer sheet and leave your response for the scientists to analyze.” For each array, we circled the dot corresponding to the position of the shape on the poster we found “most pleasing” and marked an X over the dot for the shape we found “least pleasing.” I filled in my age and gender, and set off. With me were about 15 other “research subjects,” ranging from middle-school age to retired folks.

The directions said to stand a foot or so away from the images; younger people often stood much closer, older people a little farther away. Sometimes I needed to move forward or back or side-to-side to see the 3-D effect.

Some of the images looked to me like misshapen clown-faces, others (as in the photo) were sloping shapes a little too reminiscent of all the snow I’d been shoveling this winter. Some images seemed to be reaching out to embrace me in soft, bulbous arms; others, with sharper edges, looked more likely to slice me. Guess which ones I preferred.

The distinctions are so small, the images so similar, I had a hard time discriminating among them, and the longer I took the harder it became to decide which I truly preferred. Most of the time, I ended up choosing extremes, usually an image along the edge of the frame.

The researchers hypothesize that our basic three-dimensional shape preferences are determined in part by neuronal responses in visual regions of the brain; by collecting and aggregating a large number of responses, perhaps they hope to find the limits of our sense of aesthetic pleasure. I like the idea that artists are “intuitive neuroscientists,” as Walters director Gary Vikan puts it, but I’m not sure how much this testing will expand our knowledge.

For example, would I have answered differently if I had not seen the actual piece just before I saw all its modifications? Even as a sometime art-goer, I know that Arp pieces usually are rounded and robust; if I hadn’t known that would my choices have changed? Just before my exhibit-going, I had enjoyed a brunch with friends and was in a good mood; if I had been in a different mood, say, angry, would the “pointier” pieces have appealed to me more? My companion, who had not been to the brunch, found more flaws than I did with the experimental procedure (and liked the pointy ones better, too). 

Also, I prefer to view this Arp piece from the back, and follow the line making up its “shoulder” as it flows to form the front. I couldn’t tell for sure, but there seemed to be no views from that angle. The images on the posters were 3-D, but only from one angle; our experience is surely different as we walk around a sculpture.

On the other hand, I’m willing to be proven wrong, and the exhibit did pull a swath of non-scientists into the curious mode of scientific experimenters. What a great way to introduce neuroscience and something like the scientific method to the general public. I’ll keep an eye out for results of this research and others in the series, and, I expect, so will some of the others whose responses filled the “answer box” at the end of the day.

Try it yourself: “Beauty and the Brain” runs through April 11 at the Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays; admission is free.

[This post appeared first at the Dana Foundation blog]

Posted 19 March 2010 † nickyp § Brain science § Learning § Playing ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , ,

Music as a healer

We’ve come a long way in incorporating evidence-based methods into music therapy, and we’ve only just begun, said Concetta M. Tomaino, of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in the Bronx, New York, in her recent “Music and the Brain” lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

When she started working as a music therapist 32 years ago, “there was no neuroscience in music therapy,” she said. No one could explain why the people with severe dementia she worked with would respond to music and little else. But “lucky for us,” she said, the neuroscience community grew intrigued with the idea of using music as therapy and started investigating it, and “it’s only now that we’re able to say how this works.”

Tomaino is the latest in a string of lecturers at the Library this season who have described the power of music to improve, maintain, and retrain brain function. She referred to the research presented by Gottfried Schlaug in December and Petr Janata in January while concentrating on how what we are learning has improved therapy in the real world for people with stroke, Parkinson’s disease, aphasia, and other motor and speech troubles. [She also wrote a piece for Cerebrum in 2002, “How Music Can Reach the Silenced Brain.”]

“Music is a whole-brain exercise,” she said. Because it is processed in many parts of the brain and uses many brain networks, music can offer alternate gateways to an area that might have become cut off. For example, networks for rhythm and timing are, if not innate, laid down before a child is born. At four months’ gestation, a fetus can respond to “beat induction” (matching movement to a beat); as early as two days after birth, babies can distinguish the beat in a piece of music. This is a critical function, Tomaino said, because “sound gives instruction to the world around us.” Babies must quickly learn to respond to verbal commands, tone, speech patterns, and other aural cues. They also must learn to move in time, including the basic rhythm of walking.

That this capacity is so ingrained also means that if people lose their ability to move, as when their motor networks are damaged by Parkinson’s or after a stroke, their subcortical regions might be tapped to retrain or rewire the motor system. “Using auditory cues, we can reimbue them with this ability,” she said. Tomaino showed a video clip of a woman with Parkinson’s shuffling toward the camera; when the music starts, the woman’s posture straightens, her stride improves, her arms swing in time, and she executes a pivot-turn, all movements she hadn’t seemed able to do moments before. Part of the improvement may be due to where the command to move is processed, Tomaino suggested. By “letting music take over,” the patient may be dimming her conscious processing of a now-difficult maneuver and letting the brain automatically fill in the proper form. [more examples in a video by of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function]

In therapy, “we bypass, believe it or not, fear,” Tomaino said. “When they stop their thinking about it, making it less conscious, their fluidity of movement comes back. It looks amazing, and it is. But this is so true with many people with Parkinson’s disease.”

It also can help process language and speech. People with speech difficulties can improve their breath control by singing, and music’s rhythmic cues can help extend a person’s phrasing and access lost pockets of memory. Tomaino showed a video of a woman who could string together only three syllables at a time; after two months of twice-a-week training, she could speak 19 syllables at a time. “The motor timing, the contour and the timing of the singing, helped retrain the ability of speech,”Tomaino said. And the breath-control exercise helped her regain strength enough that doctors could remove her tracheal tube and she
could breathe on her own.

“I don’t think that everyone with aphasia is singing, but they should be,” she said.

[This post appeared first at the Dana Foundation blog]

Posted 17 March 2010 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

It’s Brain Awareness Week

This year it’s the 15th anniversary of the worldwide event to celebrate the brain. To paraphrase my dentist (who asks me every visit, “How is everything in your mouth?”), how is everything in your brain? To learn more, and maybe understand more, check out an BAW event this week–there are hundreds listed on the Dana Foundation’s BAW calendar. Here’s where I was last year, in sprightly video form:
Brain Awareness Week (BAW) 2009 in Washington, DC

Posted 14 March 2010 † nickyp § Brain science § Learning § Playing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Return of Spring

The last snowpile is only inches high, and in the backyard the crocuses herald a break in the weather.


This is the only bunch of white ones; all the others are lilac, like below:

Posted 13 March 2010 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Spring break

Where have I been? Austin!

Best “club” show: Classical guitar stars Duo Melis at the Northwest Hills United Methodist Church.

Best food this time: migas outside at Juanita’s (formerly a red caboose) at 1120 W. Fifth.

Best exercise: Urban Dare Austin (we came in 51st of 150-some). Close second: Frisbee challenge in Wii Sports Resort.

Best stroll: Along Lady Bird Lake/river, where I saw this statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his double shadow, as well as a log-full of turtles.

Posted 10 March 2010 † nickyp § Playing ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Brainy Student-Bees

Twenty students from 14 schools across Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia braved the snow and ice to participate in the DC Regional Brain Bee on Wednesday. Before the competition, Bee judge Dr. Ben Walker of Georgetown University asked how many participants are contemplating a career in the sciences. All twenty competitors raised their hands. More scientists! My story on the event is over at dana.org [link is fixed now].

Posted 18 February 2010 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: