So, rip rip rip, and 14 hours of work later, I had a giant list of bumps along the story road. How giant? Twenty pages of things that are broken in the story. Four pages listing all the times the characters’ hair color/height/name changes, their actions don’t match their motivations, and random new characters pop up without introduction or plan. Two pages listing things I like (!). And nine pages listing setting, history, and other facts I need to look up. Again, the most-common note was “add emotion”; this time second-most was “where ARE they?” There are a number of scenes that could be set in outer space for as much detail as I put in.

Next up, a week of research and setting up a story timeline that makes sense. And next weekend, another readthrough, this time looking for things promised (i.e. “gun on the wall in the first act”) that I didn’t follow through on.

This method (the numbered lists) is based on Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel online course.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), the signature injury of the current U.S. wars, calls for the nation’s best “emergency medicine,” Kevin Kit Parker told a group of top scientists, medicine makers, and policy makers, this spring at the One Mind for Research conference in Boston.

“Certainly TBI, as it affects the force, is a national security issue, and it’s certainly an emergency issue.” Like the race to the moon and the Manhattan project, he said, TBI is an emergency science project with national security at stake and a need to move rapidly.

“You’ve got young NCOs [non-commissioned officers], young soldiers out there that have been blown up a dozen times, a dozen times they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, since 9/11. We have this growing cadre of our professional warriors that are out there, that are walking around, and the concern is, what does the future hold for them?”

The timelines of TBI damage range from nanoseconds to years. “The data now is pretty clear that TBI can potentiate a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease,” Parker said. “So the outlook for these young soldiers is kind of bleak right now.”

Parker, a professor at Harvard, has also served multiple tours in Afghanistan in the Army Reserve, tending the wounded immediately after impact and observing their recovery on base and back in the United States. The experiences led him to expand his research focus from the physics of the heart to the brain. “When people started trying to kill me with IED’s I thought I’d better get a piece of this,” he said.

His background also led to an unusual approach to the problem, or at least unusual for neuroscientists. “I’m an infantry officer in the reserve, and I’m not a physician, I’m a physicist, so I look at things in terms of scaling laws.” Interested in how mechanical energy (such as from blasts) affects neurons, he and the people in his lab decided to try to build physical models of blast injury from molecule to cell and from cell to tissue.

“We use tissue engineering as a tool, including blasting neurons,” he said. “What we found right away is that we can mimic some of the things that the neuropathologists are reporting that they’re seeing in patients.”

“Now that we’ve got all these models, we’re working on developing a systematic understanding of the mechanical forces required to injure these neurons, these vascular tissues, and understand the chemical cascades that are turned on by these mechanical forces.” If they understand these chemical cascades, they could start to identify which molecules along the cascade are the most vulnerable—and which might be easily reached by drugs and other therapies.

Part of emergency medicine is exploring many avenues simultaneously, Parker said. His theory is it’s diffused axonal injury that leads to damage from TBI, but researchers need to work on multiple hypotheses, to “flank the problem” with the outside-the-box ideas until someone finds some badly needed solutions.

One giant challenge: “We need to build a brain,” he said. “Everyone would benefit from having a brain in their [laboratory] dish to work on:” a 1 mm³ piece of brain that mimics the neural microenvironment, scalable so what people discover in the lab can be tested in drug-maker’s wide-assay studies. He’s working on it.

In addition, “we need to push the science as far forward [on the battlefield] as we possibly can,” he said. “It might be a diffusion tensor imager that we put downrange, it might be a biomarkers lab that we put downrange … so we can understand, as these soldiers come off the battlefield, what’s happening to them, rather than waiting 6 months, 12 months before they present at a VA emergency room.”

“The whole idea is that when these guys [medics] run up there to pull these broken kids out of this MRAP [armored vehicle], that there’s a whole team behind them supporting them,” he said. “If I run up there and this kid’s got a leg dangling off, I know how to apply a tourniquet to him. If I run up there and he’s got his bell rung, I got no way of treating this guy right now. And right now he’s at the genesis of these neurodegenerative diseases that might not appear for 20-30 years down the road.”

His remarks start just after minute 1 of this video. The slides he uses are especially useful in understanding the science.

The forum was held in Boston May 23–25 by the One Mind for Research campaign, whose goal is “to significantly reduce the U.S. burden of disability due to brain disorders.” The campaigners released a blueprint of research goals at the event: “A Ten-Year Plan for Neuroscience: From Molecules to Brain Health” (PDF). Videos of all the sessions are collected on the Science Network site.

The Science Network also did a wide-ranging interview with Parker, on work in the lab, his experience in Afghanistan, how he got started in science, and his passionate advocacy for his compatriots in the field. (22 min). It’s also well worth a listen.

–Nicky Penttila

I was inspired by talks by Kristan Higgins (“What are you prepared to do?”), Cathy Maxwell (“You’ve got talent!”), and especially Sherrilyn Kenyon — whose story I am still chewing over. As she said, I had no idea of her or her life, and how much can I know of anybody else’s, either?

I got good reactions during my pitch-to-agent sessions, and another reminder that I need to Always Be Marketing. That includes using a real photo, not my beloved anime mug, as my avatar. But the camera is traditionally indifferent or hostile to me, really, just no love at all. It’s so bad that sometimes at relatives’ houses I secretly steal their worst pictures of me and trash them (sorry, grandma). Just thinking of getting photos taken makes my smile turn grimacy and my face break out.

BUT marvelous planners that they are, the retreat organizers had invited a photographer who has a magic about her that set me so at ease. After another member raved about her photo session, I went and signed up for the very next session so I couldn’t back out and had no time to worry about it. And we did it — and found 4-5 images that look pretty good! She’s tweaking them, so I won’t get them for a few weeks, but that’s one giant to-do item checked off the list. All because I went to retreat. Thank you Barbara Woodard, photographic designer.

Story-wise, I seem to be building another set-of-three structure, with three pairs of protagonists-antagonists and interlocking stories. Maybe it’s too much Dickens in my diet, but I seem to want to explore many angles of a subject, be it second-chance love, duty vs. family, or whatever. Unfortunately, this is what got last year’s story rejected — too many subplots and not enough focus on the main romantic couple (one editor suggested I cut every subplot out). Am I treading down that same (reject, reject) path again? What could I do differently?

Career-wise, I am very tempted by the idea of e-publishing/self-publishing. Advantages: quicker potential payday; I can “be an author” now; I have more control over my content. Disadvantages: I’d need to spend money on my own editor, cover designer, and text-coder; I’d need to spend time now on marketing; I worry that if the story isn’t “good enough” to find a publisher, what makes me think it’s good enough to publish any other way?

One twist: I could write the interlocking stories as standalone novellas, and sell those as e-versions, and then gauge the interest in my weaving them together into a longer tale. The more successful current e-pub authors have a lot of content to sell, while my books are long and intricate and take a year or more to finish so I have not so much to sell. And if a 30k-word novella and a 120k novel both sell at 99 cents, what is the advantage to making it a novel? The pool of e-authors is relatively small now, but surely will explode; maybe now is the time to take advantage of a smaller market?

Or is this all jumping the gun? Maybe I should just keep writing the novels, and when I have five or six good ones, and when I have exhausted the query-submit-agent-publisher route, then turn to e-pub. But I want to be an author now. But I want to be a good author more. And while I want to make money from my writing, I can wait another few years to do it: If our current economy holds steady, I won’t need to get a more-immediately-lucrative second job until the end of 2012.

All this mental buzz (plus my bad reaction to the tree pollen) has cut into my writing time this week. That won’t get me anywhere. Weekend of writing coming up (with a break for the DC science writers’ workshop). And — great timing — the next weekend is the Washington Romance Writers annual retreat; maybe my fellow scribes have found some answers.

The video my husband produced for the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition, about victims of financial fraud, opens two weeks from today, May 4 at 7 pm at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore ($8, $3 members). Come one, come all! Or watch more parts of it on MCRC’s YouTube channel. UPDATE: Shows added: June 14 at the Enoch Pratt Free library in Baltimore; July 11 at the SE Anchor library in the Highlandtown section of Baltimore.

• write consistently more than 50 hours per month (12-15 hrs/wk)
• spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work
• write 3 or more short stories and pitch them to publishers
• research and plot out a 2-book regency-set series
• finish city short stories, and see if I can structure them as a novel
• attend 3 or more writers’ conferences
• volunteer to judge or coordinate 3 writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW membership goddess
• buy a copy of all my friends’ debut books this year (3-D copies preferred)
• read 50 books
• keep a list of books I read this year (see right).

And you?

• spent 543 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing)
• spent 108 hours doing volunteer work
• saw some of my neuroscience reporting reprinted in arts and education journals
• finished 1 print-worthy book (!)
• built up ideas for 3 short stories and 1 novella
• traveled to England to do research for my stories
• won NaNoWriMo
• entered 1 RWA-linked writing contest and won honorable mention, even though it was a first-chapter-only contest, for a story where the hero isn’t introduced until the second chapter (I didn’t read the entry rules right)
• volunteered as judge for 3 writing contests and coordinator for one
• volunteered as WRW Web goddess, switching in October to WRW membership goddess
• attend 4 writing retreats or classes
• created a successful writing habit (6:30-8:30 am) that has lasted 4 months
• read 59 books (see right) across many genres.

And you?

It really fires up around the :25 mark, but watching the whole thing reminds me how much we move around when we are “sleeping quietly.” The video credit on videosift is “by Perky,” on YouTube it’s “derrobsi.” Here’s where I found it: http://videosift.com/video/Time-lapse-man-sleeping-with-cat

I wandered across it because I was looking for a poster of a famous time-lapse photo of a man sleeping with his cat that is part of J. Allan Hobson’s Dreamstage Sleep and Brain Science Museum in Vermont. I have wanted to go, but rarely (never?) get to Vermont, but now the museum has launched a virtual tour on its site, with lots of slides and audio of Hobson describing the various exhibits and the science of sleep and dreaming.