On scene 50 of 98. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves, finished scene notecards below and cut-up pages of old manuscript under that. I am the queen of cut-and-tape this revision. Pages not yet started on are on the bottom, with the remaining scene cards above them (look, part of the shelf is empty!). “Blank” pages are in the center. I’ve gone through 257 of the 417 first-draft pages; the final scenes are shorter than the early scenes, but there’s also a lot of new writing coming up.

(p.s. comment if you want to see the whole, gory work area!)

Below is the current work-table. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves; pages not yet started on are on the bottom , scrap paper, notebook paper, and cards fill the rest. Today’s count: 21 finished, 390 not finished, scene 4 in progress.

In the foothills of the mountain, looking up, up, up. Wish me luck!

WHEN full sedition’s stalking through the land,
It then behoves each patriotic band
     Of Noble Minded Yeomen Cavaliers;
To sally forth and rush upon the mob,
And execute the Magisterial Job
     Of cutting off the Ragamuffin’s ears.

HOW valiantly we met that crew
Of infants, men and women too,
Upon the Plain of Peterloo,
And gloriously did hack and hew
     The d—–d reforming gang;
Our swords were sharp you may suppose,
Some lost their ears—some lost a nose,
Our horses trod upon their toes
E’re they could run t’ escape our blows,
     With shrieks the welkin rang.

— from “ ‘The Renowned Atchievements of Peter-Loo’ by Sir Hugo Burlo Furioso Di Mulo Spinissimo, BART. M.Y.C. and A.S.S.,” which I found at the Manchester Education Wide Area Network site. Here’s a direct link to the full lyrics.

Busting Some of the Myths of Attention: Multitasking, ADHD, and optimal study times were among the topics as scientists and educators shared their expertise during the “Attention and Engagement in Learning” summit this week.

The second event was the 3-day Learning & the Brain conference, held at the Capitol Hill Hyatt in DC. The topic this year also was attention and motivation; I learned a lot more science this year than the one last year. Another writer is doing the story on that one, but I’ll have some short stuff for the blogs later on it.

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.

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.

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]

Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are from events all over the world. This year, Brain Awareness Week is March 15-21. [see my earlier post, "I touched a brain," for more]

The Dana Foundation supports this annual world-wide campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research by hosting an international calendar of events, sponsoring some events and offering a clearinghouse of ideas for people to put on their own events. See more at dana.org/brainweek.