Callie Leuck | Write On!

On the eve of my college roommate's wedding

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 20:01:00 +0000

Happyhungover, doughnut-fed
Woke in a strange new bed
Sunscreen skin and sweat-damp hair
Clear lake water, crisp cool air
Yellow kayak, Michigan sun
Rehearsal and dinner yet to come

Disorganized Remembering

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 02:36:00 +0000

Everybody's taking about remembering the dead lately, it seems. My boyfriend woke me up around 7 the other morning with dire tones.

"I'm afraid I have bad news, babe. David Bowie's dead."

In the pause between those sentences, my heart skipped a beat. His grandmother was in the hospital again. One of the cats had torn another cat's ear off. My dog was sick. Surely it was a personal tragedy he was about to impart to me, my torn-from-sleep mind insisted.

David Bowie? Oh, just a famous person. That was okay, I could deal with that later. (I did.)

Everybody has feelings about David Bowie, it seems. Good feelings, and bad feelings. I have feelings, too, but they're not important to share tonight.

The last week, I listened to "The Fault In Our Stars" on audiobook. It's a book about two teenagers with cancer, and it's a book about being in love and first love, and it's set in Indianapolis, which makes it particularly eerie to drive to work near the Castleton mall while listening to a narration of Hazel Grace walking through that same mall with her oxygen tank, letting a curious little kid try on the nubbins that deliver the oxygen that forces her lungs to be lungs.

But the local setting just keeps the story fresh in my mind longer, it's not why I'm bringing it up now. The thing is, these teenagers have this conversation about dead people, because of course they think about dead people, and about how many of them there are compared to how many living people. And Augustus Waters (the boy) says there are about 14 dead people for every single living person (I haven't validated this statistic), and we don't remember them all because we're disorganized mourners: everybody remembers Shakespeare and nobody remembers who he wrote Sonnet 54 about.

So everybody's busy remembering David Bowie, and I'm thinking about all the thousands of people we're not remembering because we're disorganized mourners. There's been a lot of genocides where everything about so many people gets completely lost. There's a lot of ancient history with presumably a lot of people in them whose names and deeds and general things about them never got written down.

I had to read Homer's "Iliad" in high school, and I remember thinking it was such a downer to read all the lists of people who were killed, but I guess they've been remembered.

But not everybody has a grave or even a name written down.

And this is not to discount David Bowie or your personal, or our cultural, grief about his death. It is simply to say: who is it we are forgetting?

Ponderings

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:25:00 +0000

How is a broth bowl different from soup?

I should stock up on fashion leggings in my size before they go out of style again.

I must have a much more sedentary lifestyle than I'd thought.

Maybe I should offer to wash the neighbors' fence.

How does the dog manage to stink so much within less than a day after a bath?

I wonder how many people have a tattoo that's just the word "tattoo." I wonder how many are misspelled.

I love that cat but if she tries to trip me on my way to the bathroom in the morning one more time, I'm going to lose it. And probably twist my ankle.

I wonder if anybody has made a list of most addictive audiobooks.

If I'm 27, how much would I need to save to retire at 50?

I should have taken more minority studies courses in college.

Where would be a good place to go in February that is warm and outside of the U.S. but not so far that it's not worth travelling to for only 4 days?

I'm pretty sure I'm more-than-typically educated about the gender identity spectrum, but I have no idea what this article about nonbinary femmes is talking about.

Sunsets are actually a fairly easy natural phenomenon to explain.

This internet bill is insane. How many MBPs do we really need?

Apparently there ARE some carbs the dog won't snarf up: those that are sullied with lemon flavor.

What is this white powder everywhere?

I wish science would make up its mind about whether coffee is good or bad so I can decide if it's a good idea to have another.

Most days are good days if you get to quote "Mulan."

Did the whole world only recently discover the Bitch Planet comics? I thought everybody knew about them. I might have unknowingly liked a thing before it was popular.

It's interesting what we call traditional even though it's only been around for maybe a generation.

Yes, I do still know every word to every Backstreet Boys song. Apparently.

It's really not that hard to cast more women and minorities in films. Hollywood should hire me to do this.

That's the third time in a row someone agreed with me instead of telling me what I've done wrong. I must be getting more competent.

How are we seriously still observing Columbus Day?

Of course emoji qualify as a language.

Anybody who thinks feathered dinosaurs aren't scary has clearly never googled artist renditions of plumed raptors.

Garret Tour Tuesday: Nicole Chung

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Nicole Chung is a writer and also works as a managing editor for The Toast. The Toast does not have a central office, so Nicole works from her home, which is where she also does most of her writing, whether it is Toast-based or whether it ultimately gets published elsewhere.

"I just recognize that I need to seize the opportunity when inspiration strikes," Nicole says, "because the perfect conditions don’t exist in my life."

Generally, Nicole works at her standing desk.

"It has wheels so I just push it around the living room," she says. "I can push it over to the window and watch squirrels."

But her favorite spot to park her desk is a few feet from her bookshelf.

Via Nicole: "The print on the wall is a Whistler etching from Venice,

which I saw and then bought way back in college at

one of my favorite art galleries, the Freer in DC."

Nicole says that she was getting stiff after a few days spent sitting.

"I thought I would buy it and hate it and feel stupid," she says, "but it’s actually worked out really well."

When she does get tired of standing, Nicole migrates from her standing desk to the couch.

And if she tires of holding her computer on her lap, she moves to the dining room table.

One of the things Nicole really likes about her job is the flexibility.

"If I get a great idea for an essay in the middle of the afternoon, I can take a break and work on it," she says. "Part of my job is writing, although mainly I’m an editor. Almost everything I do write and publish, even for The Toast, is stuff I’ve written in the evening...in my free time. I find it almost destructively difficult to switch back and forth between writing and editing."

In terms of requiring a specific environment in which to write, Nicole says "I think a lot of us have these little things we’d like to do every time we write."

But for herself, she never established them as requirements.

"By the time I started writing, I was already a parent," she says. "I’ve never really had any standards. I can work in silence, but I can also work with Frozen playing in the background for the thousandth time."

Besides the writing Nicole publishes on The Toast, she has also written essays that have been published in the New York Times, Slate, and the Atlantic. She says she's not great at planning projects ahead of time, although she is thinking about a book.

"I guess I’m in a constant state of being open to ideas and acting on them."

Thanks again, Nicole, for sharing about your writing space!

Some things Nicole wrote:

Garret Tour Tuesday: Oliver Gray

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 13:00:00 +0000

I would call Oliver Gray a science writer with a niche focus on beer.

But what does Oliver Gray call himself?

"I'm a blogger," he says. "For a long time I just told people I work in IT."

Oliver is a prolific writer, constantly producing content for his main blog, the beautifully-titled-and-executed Literature and Libation, along with his special project Homegrew, which documents his year-long process of making homebrewed beer only from ingredients grown and prepared by him.

"You go from being a guy who likes to drink beer," he says, "to being a guy who wants to work in the beer industry. If you want to have a career in something I think you should try to become an expert."

Oliver is certainly committed to becoming an expert. But let's find out more about the writing space that allows this dedicated beer blogger to produce such pretty prose.

Oliver's magic usually happens in his home office, in front of two 24-inch monitors.

"I'm very picky about my keyboard," he says. "I also do some writing from my laptop, which usually finds a home on any hard surface it can find when I'm at work or traveling. I always need space for a mouse though. No touchpad nonsense for this guy."

He describes his home office as spacious but cluttered, with notebooks, magazines, books, LEGOs, and cameras and photo accessories. In addition to being a talented writer, Oliver is also a skilled photographer, taking artful pictures of beer (and other things. His family, for instance.)

Oliver doesn't have any particular time of day for writing.

"I'm anti-schedule," he says, "because the rest of my commitments have a tendency to just sort of happen whenever, and scheduling ends up being futile anyway."

He prefers to be alone when writing, if given the choice.

"When with other people, I'm too busy talking or people-watching to get any writing done," he explains.

Drinks of choice?

"If it's pre-4:00, I'll have coffee or tea," he says. "If it's post-4:00, I'll have a beer, or much more rarely, a scotch."

I am not drinking anything while writing this post, and I would probably not confess the current beer contents of my fridge to Oliver Gray, although I suspect any judgement would be mostly in jest.

In addition to his personal writing platforms, Gray also freelances for Brewers Publications, writes for All About Beer Magazine, and occasionally writes standalone essays for other publications.

"I'm nearly always writing."

Some samples of writing by Oliver Gray:

Hey Chief: Published by Tin House, this is a beautiful heartbreaking essay about Gray's father
December, 1919: a serialized historic fiction novel about a seventeen-year-old Philadelphia native who inherits his father’s brewery right on the cusp of Prohibition in the United States.
How to Brew a Boddingtons Cone: I don't even care what a cone is. I've accidentally learned more than I ever wanted to know about brewing beer because I enjoy reading Gray's writing.

Thanks for the peek into your writing space, Oliver!

Garret Tour Tuesday is a series on the space that writers write in. Each post showcases the writing space of a different writer.

How We Remember Routes: Nobel Laureates Open New Paths into the Brain's Secrets

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 15 May 2015 16:09:00 +0000

How do you remember familiar routes? Do you have a GPS in your brain? According to the three scientists sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, well, kinda — at least, if your brain works like a rat’s brain, that is.

John O'Keefe discovered the first component to the brain GPS in 1971: when a rat is in one place, a "place cell" activates in its brain. This is a type of nerve cell in the hippocampus: the area of the brain that handles memory, learning, and emotion. When the rat is in another place, a different nerve cell activates. These cells form a map.

In 2005, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser discovered that the place cells interact with grid cells, another kind of nerve cell that generates a coordinate system. These two types of nerve cells work together as a kind of internal GPS.

The winners of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Of course, we've known for some time that rats can navigate: the image of a lab rat running through a maze is a classic image of behavioral psychology. What we hadn't known before was how this process actually works in the brain — or where it actually happened.

What's more exciting is there's now evidence that humans have these place and grid cells, too. This has powerful implications for research into understanding why people with Alzheimer's disease get lost and can't recognize where they are.

But on an even grander level, the discovery of this internal GPS is a huge shift in our understanding of how large groups of highly specialized cells work in unison to perform elegantly orchestrated mental processes. And this, we hope, will lead to more insight into the mysteries of the brain.

This post is the result of an exercise at the 2015 Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop.

#IWSG: The one discouraging thing that gets me down about my writing

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:00:00 +0000

The hard thing about nonfiction is that you cannot make it up. You have to do serious research. I'm a pretty good researcher. I'm not great yet; I haven't really mastered a great organizational system (suggestions welcomed!), but I'm fairly okay. I need to get better at this though.

The other thing about research is you usually have to go interview people, and this often means you end up with a TON of interview information that is incredibly difficult to sift through. Trying to sort through facts and quotes to tease out some sort of narrative and then impose a structure upon it...it's hard, you guys! Oh, and interviewing is pretty difficult, too.

I find that sometimes it can be a very small discouraging thing that dumps water on your previously-in-full-swing parade. One piece of information that, as it turns out, simply doesn't exist. One person who is ambivalent about your subject matter. Or just one person who out and says to your face that they don't read books.

Sometimes I find it hard to regain my previous momentum. Maybe my idea is stupid. Maybe people really don't read books. Maybe people don't read nonfiction books.

I just don't understand people who aren't curious about the world, be it fiction or nonfiction. And I cannot believe there aren't many many people out there who do care and would read these things and would very much enjoy them.

This post is in participation with hundreds of insecure writers who dedicate the first Wednesday of every month to post about insecurities: doubts and fears that we have or have conquered. Check out the Insecure Writer's Support Group for more information and a list of the other participating writers.

Through a Different Lens

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 20:15:00 +0000

My photo essay "Through a Different Lens" was published in the spring issue of Hawkmoth. Hawkmoth is a rad science magazine that focuses on combining images with stories about the world we live in. Through a Different Lens is an experiment in second-person with a collection of pretty pictures I'm rather proud of.

Check it out here:
http://hawkmoth.us/through-a-different-lens

Privilege means I can ignore injustice

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 02:56:00 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of privilege lately. That's a pretty loaded word these days — privilege. It seems like a lot of people don't understand it. Here's an old post from writer John Scalzi that has always struck me as a pretty great explanation: Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.

"I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies."

And that's the problem you have to address when you start talking about privilege. But I'm going to skip it because privilege is really good shorthand for a complicated concept that is, ironically, extremely difficult to wrap your mind around when you're the one with the privilege.

I've been thinking about this because I live in Indiana, and today our governor signed into law a controversial piece of legislation being referred to as a religious freedom bill. Our state legislature is Republican-dominated and CNN claims the governor is considering a 2016 presidential bid, which is completely in line with what I suspected when I first heard of the bill. Why do we need a bill that protects religious freedom? Isn't that literally written into the Constitution of the United States of America somewhere? This must be some kind of political posturing ploy, I thought.

And I did nothing. It seemed inevitable the bill would pass and become signed into law, as it has. And I had my life to live and simply couldn't handle the emotional keelhauling of paying close attention to this legislative stinker.

And I realized today that this is precisely the definition of privilege. These laws will never affect me; not in any real way. Not personally, at any rate. Yeah, I'm angry. I'm outraged. It will legally protect people from discriminating against my friends. But not me. Nobody is going to refuse to serve me or sell things to me because doing so violates their religious beliefs. Realistically, I'm a middle-class white woman. If a straight white male is playing the game of life on "Easy" mode, I'm on "Slightly More Difficult Than Easy." Probably not even "Medium," if we're being honest. Not if "Difficult" is poor, black, transgender lesbian. My opportunities in life are somewhat more curtailed than that of a straight while male in my same situation. I have to take more precautions than he would, and I may be struggling against deeply-ingrained cultural gender stereotypes in ways I'm not even aware of, even in my own head, but...

The fact that I can ignore this kind of thing for even a couple weeks because it would cause inconveniently distracting emotions pretty much screams privilege. And that, my friends, is what privilege is: it is when you have the option to ignore injustices because they do not directly affect you. It's not a judgement. It is merely a statement of fact.

On Looking Like A Dancer

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 13:53:00 +0000

When I spoke to a personal trainer last year in a free assessment at my new gym, I told him my fitness goals were to increase my strength and stamina.

"But what do you envision your body looking like?" he prodded.
"I don't have anything specific in mind," I explained. "I just want to be able to go swing dancing with my friends without having to sit out every other song."
"So you want a dancer's body," he concluded, relieved that he'd finally identified a goal body type I'd been resisting providing. "We could put together a program to improve your legs-"
"That's great," I interrupted, "but I'm really more concerned with my lung capacity. I seem to run out of breath really easily."
"Well, losing weight will help that."
"I get that, I really do, but-"
"I'll just go over the outline of a program we can do that would give you a dancer's body."

I gave up. As he kept talking and I nodded occasionally, it became very clear what he thought a dancer's body should look like: tall, lithe, and slender. I thought about all the women whose dancing I envied. A few of them fit this type, of course, but they were a widely varied bunch who knew their bodies and inhabited them with grace and apparent ease.

I think the dancers pictured in this article are beautiful: The 'dancer's body' is fat. All bodies can be beautiful. It just depends on what you do with them and how you feel in them.

I am currently trying to lose weight, but mainly because I think it'll help my knee heal better, and I'm doing it in coordination with exercising because while I have a goal weight (you have to, in Weight Watchers) my main metric is still increased capabilities. And I'm certainly not losing weight to "look like a dancer." All I have to do to look like a dancer is dance.

#IWSG: Watch This Space

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 20:46:00 +0000

I signed up for the Insecure Writers Support Group, which blogs about writing insecurities on the first Wednesday of every month.

Then I promptly forgot to write the first post. Because I'm SUPER ORGANIZED like that.

So I offer my deepest apologies and the following confessions:

1. I have been really crappy at blogging the past year. I feel surprisingly little guilt about this, although I do think I should really kick it up a notch now.

2. I have hardly written anything new since I graduated from my writing program in 2012. I mean, I write professionally all the time, but I've barely even tried to pitch anything anywhere. I also feel surprisingly little guilt about this, and also think I should probably make some kind of real attempt to do things like this. But have mostly not done so because....

3. I'm working on writing a book proposal for a nonfiction book. I think this is very exciting, but it is also very terrifying because in a book proposal you have to imagine your book is already written and you have to talk about how marketable it is, which seems like some serious putting-the-cart-before-the-horse evil magicks to me. AND like tempting the karma gods with an overly-inflated ego.

So what about you, fellow insecure writers? Are you blogging/pitching/proposing?

The Color Purple and #BlackLivesMatter

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:23:00 +0000

I realize Alice Walker's The Color Purple has been out for longer than I've been alive, but I only just read it last month — at the gym, actually. I've taken to picking up more audiobooks through Audible.com and am working through a backlog of audiobooks I snagged during a big sale last year. It's pretty awesome because I can download them to my phone with my Audible app and listen to them wherever. So since I listen to them at the gym, it's been a very useful motivation to spend more time at the gym.

But I digress.

Alice Walker

A few weeks ago, I turned on The Color Purple while I was on the elliptical. It's narrated by Alice Walker herself, which is a rare treasure. I love listening to authors read their own books when they're good at reading, and Walker is simply incredible. Her voice, both literal and metaphorical, grabs you by the heart and falls. The whole book feels like running downhill, gathering speed, getting faster and faster, getting so fast you couldn't stop if you wanted to, not without falling head-over-tail and continuing to tumble downwards.

I was at the gym a lot that week. I didn't do my laundry. I forgot to pay a bill. I became confused at how to interact with a world in which everybody around me wasn't listening to The Color Purple.

It was a weird, lonely, intoxicating week.

I have been thinking about it deeply for some weeks now, and I can't think of another book that had so profound an impact on my life while I was reading it. I can't think of another book that made me feel as if I was suffocating from lack of air during times I was deprived of it — while at work, for example.

If I were going to leave my boyfriend for a book, it would be The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

The next week, a new coworker told me that Walker wrote more books in the same storyline. I haven't picked them up yet; I'm a little afraid. Afraid that they won't be as good. Afraid that they will be as good and I'll disappear from the world entirely into Walker's story.

It's a hard book. It is. It starts out with a really upsetting scene that I'm used to writers burying in the 7th or 8th book of a series. (Rape.) But life gets better for Celie, the 14-year-old narrator, a black girl living in the south in the 1930s. It gets better slowly, but it does get better.

I think this story is about empowerment of black womanhood. It's about the struggles of black people — men and women — but it's also particularly about womanhood. Or maybe that's just how I took it because that's the part that I most identified with.

The novel spans 40 years and 2 continents, through letters written by Celie in America and her sister Nettie, who travels to Africa as a missionary.

This is a hard book to read. It's hard. Lots of bad things happen to people who didn't do anything to deserve these things — things that nobody could possibly do anything to deserve. It portrays a time and place where people were abused and downtrodden simply for existing. The truly sad thing is that there are many people in America who are still abused and downtrodden merely for existing. People who are killed for doing no more than existing. How many reports of people being killed did we see last year? It was a lot more than zero. While reading The Color Purple, I frequently found myself thinking of the people who have been killed in recent years. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Akai Gurley. Kajieme Powell. Michael Brown. John Crawford. Eric Garner. Yvette Smith. McKenzie Cochran. Jonathan Farrell. Rekia Boyd. Shereese Francis. The list goes on, and on, and on, and...on.

And it's bullshit, you guys. It's bullshit.

This book is supposedly set in the 1930s and it's capturing a situation that's still so relevant today. Is it still relevant to the same extent? Hell, I don't know. Black people are disproportionately poor, disproportionately incarcerated, disproportionately affected by health problems related to lack of access to proper food. People are still dying. People still have to teach black children how to "not get themselves killed." (No different from teaching women how to "not get themselves raped.") What the actual hell.

I think about my cousin, whose son is black. I think about my boyfriend's supervisor, whose daughters are black. I think about the inner-city kids that are in my friend Patrice Hutton's creative writing program, Writers in Baltimore Schools.

This is bull. Shit.

My hands are shaking as I write this. I'm pissed off and I'm angry, and I'm still pretty affected by Alice Walker running my heart right through the wringer over and over again in The Color Purple. My coworker tells me it's been made into a movie. And I think maybe I'll watch it. Maybe I'll watch it pretty soon.

I'll leave you with this poem written by one of Patrice's students. Their poems were featured in this article in the Washington Post.

Christian Pearson, 13
Mount Royal Elementary/Middle School

The New Jim Crow

Hey, whaddaya know?
It’s our friend Jim Crow.
And nowadays he’s
Running America’s show.
Took Mamie Till’s son
And Michael Brown in Ferguson
Get us running from the cops
And cleaning blood with mops.
Believing old pains and forgotten sorrow,
African Americans, meet the New Jim Crow.

The most asked-about book on my bookcase

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 12:00:00 +0000

I have a lot of books, as you can imagine. I even have a lot of books that I intentionally leave out on display as coffee-table discussion books. You know the kind. Books by my favorite webcomic artists, books full of funny things customers say in bookshops. But since I added it to my collection, there is one book on my regular bookshelf that draws curiosity like none other.

"Why do you have a book called How To Be Black?"

I've never answered this question in a way that seems right to me. I'm always slightly flummoxed. I have a lot of books, most of which I've no ready answer to justify their presence in my home, besides "I like it," which seems, at any rate, obvious. But nobody questions the inclusion of any other book in my collection, some of which I consider stranger.

But okay. Sure. From the title, it looks like a self-help book, and the fact that it's in the collection of a young white woman must be somewhat baffling, even if you do happen to know that I read practically everything.

So I've been thinking about this question a lot. Why do I have a book called How To Be Black? I'll tell you.

The literal answer: I was searching the internet for new comedic books in search for a gift for my brother a few years back. I ended up reading about a book by a comedian that was described as a collection of satiric essays such as How to Be The Black Friend, How to Speak for All Black People, How to Be The Black Employee, and How to Be The Angry Negro.

That's a link, by the way. That way How to Be The Black Friend is in different color? That means it's all clickable, and it'll take you a place where you can read that essay, hint hint. So, that's what I did. I listened to an NPR interview with the book's author, Baratunde Thurston. Then I bought the book.

The real answer: It's a really good book. Thurston is an excellent writer. His material is complicated and interesting. This book makes me think. It's worth revisiting.

Most books that I keep a physical copy of have some real value to me. (Not always, but usually.)

Thurston had me at the introduction: Thanks for Celebrating Black History Month by Acquiring This Book. Feel free at this point to pop over to Amazon and preview the book. You can read a pretty sizeable chunk of the introduction.

You've probably figured out by now that I think you should seriously consider reading this book. Look, it's February now, so Black History Month is on. You'll probably enjoy this book, especially if you like nonfiction collections, since this is a lot like a collection of related essays.

Read How to Be The Black Friend

Listen to an NPR interview with Baratunde Thurston

Buy How To Be Black

Oh, and you should be prepared for people to ask you why you're reading a book called How To Be Black. Because that will likely happen. I'm still working on a truly good answer.

Now you!

What other books are Black History Month must reads?

5 Useful Science Tips for Writers

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 12:00:00 +0000

Is this why all my best ideas happen at night?
Source: http://usefulscience.org/post/darkness-and-dim-lighting-can-improve-creativity

We all knew this but now science proves it!
Source: http://usefulscience.org/post/walking-whether-outside-or-treadmill-leads-more-creative-thinking

Use this one to justify your messiness to your spouse/partner/roommate/dog.
Source: http://usefulscience.org/post/messiness-can-help-boost-creativity

For when you're choosing your next desktop background.
Source: http://usefulscience.org/post/color-computer-backgrounds-can-influence-task-performance

This study focued on children, but heck, I certainly know enough writers who think it's applicable to adults too.
Source: http://usefulscience.org/post/handwriting-composition-task-generated-more-ideas-typing

This list comes to you from Useful Science, a site where a team of mostly PhD scientists find interesting studies and summarize the useful bits of them. I'm addicted. I joined the team in November, after meeting a Useful Science contributor at the National Association of Science Writer's 2014 conference in October.

Website: http://usefulscience.org/

Twitter: @usefulsci
Facebook: www.facebook.com/usefulsci
RSS feed: http://usefulscience.org/rss.xml
Email Subscription: http://usefulscience.org/about

I curated this list of interesting bits of science for writers because I kept finding neat tidbits in the Useful Science archives. You can click through to the website in the source links above for more information on the study — and typically new stories about the study, as well.

You can probably expect more Useful Science lists in the future — let me know what you're interested in!

Callie's Holiday Gift Guide for Totally Fab Gifters

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 21:47:00 +0000

Everybody does a gift guide, so I decided to join the crowd. Here are some things (personally vetted by me) for those tricky people on your lists for whom you still have no idea what to get.

Click on the title for more information about each item.

3-month Audible Gift Subscription: $45

Audible is a digital audiobook shop, and it's amaaaaaazing. A 3-month subscription runs you $45, and gives your giftee 1 credit per month to buy any audiobook in the shop as well as heavy discounts on additional audiobooks. The best part is that audible now have ALL THE APPS so if your giftee has a smartphone, iPod touch, or tablet, they will be able to auto-sync their books to their device. This removes a huge obstacle from a few years ago, when there were several somewhat-confusing steps to download and sync your books. It's now very user-friendly. Your giftee will get the opportunity to pick their own books, and you can listen to a sample of the book on Audible before buying so you know beforehand if the narrator is likely to irritate the heck out of you.

Good for: anybody who likes listening to stories; now highly user-friendly

Callie's story: I got this for my dad for several gift-giving occasions running, and he seems to enjoy it. I also personally enjoy Audible.

EFFIGY by M.J. Fifield: $18

This is the first book of The Coileáin Chronicles. It's the incredibly exciting debut novel by author M.J. Fifield. It's a truly beautiful and hefty paperback fantasy novel with all the trappings.

Summary: The survival of a once-mighty kingdom rests in the hands of its young queen, Haleine Coileáin, as it slowly succumbs to an ancient evil fueled by her husband’s cruelty. A sadistic man with a talent for torture and a taste for murder, he is determined to burn the land and all souls within. Haleine is determined to save her kingdom and, after a chance encounter, joins forces with the leader of the people’s rebellion. She gives him her support, soon followed by her heart. Loving him is inadvertent but becomes as natural and necessary as breathing. She lies and steals on his behalf, doing anything she can to further their cause. She compromises beliefs held all her life, for what life will exist if evil prevails? Her journey leads to a deceiving world of magic, monsters, and gods she never believed existed outside of myth. The deeper she goes, the more her soul is stripped away, but she continues on, desperate to see her quest complete. If she can bring her husband to ruin and save her people, any sacrifice is worth the price—even if it means her life.

Good for: readers who enjoy fantasy; people who like the writing of George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss would likely enjoy this novel.

Callie's story: I proof-read this novel and absolutely adore it. However, I am not profiting from its sales, so my gushing about the book is not in any way inspired by money.

Fabric Rosette Hairclip by Baby Birdie Boutique: $12.50

This is a lovely fabric hairclip. The artist will make it in your choice of colors and your choice of accessory (headband or clip). This is a large, striking accessory. The artist also makes single- and double-rosette accessories.

Good for: people who like pretty headbands and hairclips; especially good for dancers and people who enjoy hosting parties

Additionally: This artist also makes a variety of decorative headbands for babies, which is something to keep in mind if you have to shop for the baby who has everything. (Or if you want to get your friend a cute pretty thing for his/her baby.)

Callie's story: I bought it to wear for a friend's wedding, and I've since worn it several times. I've gotten a lot of compliments on it and it's perfectly comfortable. I got it with the alligator clip, as my inherited mushroom head isn't conducive to standard headbands.

Ceramic Pendant Necklace by SurlyRamics: $18

Artist Surly Amy features SO MANY lovely ceramic pendant necklaces: science geekery, feminism, insect fossils, sparkly trees inset with gems, a depiction of the chemical compound of a scent along with a vial of the scent to put on the necklace and release scent during the day... the list goes on. Have a person to shop for who loves pendants and art? Go look.

Good for: unabashed geeks, scientists, scent-lovers, sparkle-lovers, feminists, atheists, nature-lovers

Callie's story: I have admired Surly Amy's art for some years but couldn't ever pick just one. While at ScienceWriters2014, I saw a woman wearing one of these pendants and went home and and bought one the very next week. Pictured above is the Starfish ceramic necklace I purchased, which unfortunately does not appear to be currently available, but there's many other amazing options.

10 Notecards Variety Pack by On A Good Note Designs: $12

A great gift for the letter-writer and adorer of notecards. I've frequently gifted personalized sets of notecards from artist Sarah Eutsler (as well as used them myself) and I can vouch for them being well-made, high-quality cards. They just feel good in the hand. This set is a great deal because you get to pick the contents of your 10-card variety pack. This would be a particularly great gift packaged with a fountain pen and ink set, which you can get at any bookstore.

Good for: stationary-lovers and letter-writers

Additionally: This artist also does personalized pet stationary featuring original colored pencil artwork of your giftee's pet on a set of notecards and notepads, but unfortunately at this point, it is too late to order this gift in time for Christmas. This is a great future gift idea for the crazy pet lover in your life.

Callie's story: Sarah gave me my own set of these cards for my graduation from my master's program. The year before, my brother gave me a lovely fountain pen and ink set, and my sister gave me a set of sealing wax and a seal. As a writer and lover of the physical activity of writing, I very much enjoy using all these gifts together.

Personalized Etched Drink Glasses: $23 + time

What you need: stemless wine glasses ($10) and Glass Etching Cream ($13) and, I assume, some patience. My sister etched a set of wine glasses for me; I believe she basically followed the instructions on the package for the etching cream and made her own punctuation templates with tape on the glasses, but this tutorial looks promising. The key part here is that you can make a set of highly-personalized wine glasses that will appeal to your giftee personally.

Is your giftee not much of a wine-drinker? What about etching a set of whiskey glasses or beer glasses? Tall glasses for lemonade? Glass mugs for coffee or tea? Get creative!

Good for: people who like personalized things, people who drink things

Additionally: Obviously you could etch any glass item with this cream. It just takes some creative thought about what would personally appeal to your giftee. Glass vases? Glass pitchers? Glass ornaments? Glass mirrors? The list goes on!

Callie's story: My favorite wine glasses are a set of stemless wine glasses my sister personally etched a set of punctuation marks into. As a writer and giant punctuation nerd, I obviously completely love my punctuation mark wine glasses and drink from whichever one I feel best expresses my mood or situation. (Am I more of a comma or a semicolon tonight? It's definitely not an exclamation mark sort of day.)

And unfortunately that wraps up this list for now, friends, because the other artists who I'd love to include on here apparently don't believe in the Internet, so you'll just have to hope I'll buy their things and gift them to you!

What are your favorite gift ideas? Tell me in the comments!

Get your flu vaccination ON!

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 16:55:00 +0000

I got my flu vaccine. It was offered through my company because vaccines save lives.

#Vaccines save 2.5 million lives a year, or 5 lives per minute #health http://t.co/awx01Ubcix
— Useful Science (@usefulsci) October 26, 2014

It might not be your life (or health) it saves. There are certain people who cannot be vaccinated because they are too young (under 6 months) or have chronic health conditions. Your immune system might be able to fight off the flu with little affect to your life, but you could pass it on to a child or elder less capable of fighting it off.

Photo by Flikr user Noodles and Beef
Creative Commons Copyright 2010

The flu vaccine cannot give you the flu. However there may be some side affects such as soreness and aches. There are more side affects for the nasal spray version of the vaccine. You can learn more about the flu vaccines here: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/keyfacts.htm

The more people who get vaccinated, the less the flu can spread. Your healthcare coverage probably covers the flu vaccine. Do your part to choke off the flu in your community and get vaccinated.

Oh, Chocolate Fortune Cookie, tell me more...

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 20:56:00 +0000

This past weekend, I was with my brother and sister in Chicago for my sister's birthday. She's kind of a BAMF. And my brother's an incredibly funny art student. So they basically just riff off each other practically all the time. I'm barely even sure why we bothered going to see Second City (besides the fact that, duh, it's Second City) do a comedy show because I've rarely laughed as hard as I did last month when the three of us were driving to a wine and beer festival and Sis got Bro to read the entire lyrics of Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball" in the voice of Barack Obama giving a speech.

Yes. That happened. I thought we were gonna have to pull off the road.

Anyway, we were in Chicago, and we were in Chinatown, because when you go to Chicago you have to go to Chinatown to get pastries. And that's when I saw the holy grail of fortune telling: bags of chocolate fortune cookies.

Obviously I had to buy a ginormous bag of chocolate fortune cookies. For the office. Because how else do you justify buying an enormous bag of fortune cookies?

The best part is that within these glorious treats are real, actual fortunes. None of that nonsense about proverbs or words of wisdom. These cookies go all in. They really make fortunes. And boy was I flabbergasted on Monday when I popped open one of these bad boys to see a perfectly-tailored fortune.

It tasted like Cocoa Pebbles. And accomplishment.

Unicorn Riot!

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:00:00 +0000

M.J. Fifield is an amazing person who’s written an amazing book that you need to read immediately.

I got to read Effigy last year and it has been just about killing me to not tell everybody how awesome it is. HOLY BOOK-RELEASE, BATMAN. EFFIGY IS COMING OUT JULY 22, 2014! GET IT ON YOUR TBR LIST PRONTO!

What a GORGEOUS cover.
Everybody together now.
Ooooooooh! Aaaaaaaah!

I suppose you want to know what it's about so you can figure out if you want to read it. (You do.) Here is the official blurb:

The survival of a once-mighty kingdom rests in the hands of its young queen, Haleine Coileáin, as it slowly succumbs to an ancient evil fueled by her husband’s cruelty.

A sadistic man with a talent for torture and a taste for murder, he is determined to burn the land and all souls within. Haleine is determined to save her kingdom and, after a chance encounter, joins forces with the leader of the people’s rebellion. She gives him her support, soon followed by her heart.

Loving him is inadvertent but becomes as natural and necessary as breathing. She lies and steals on his behalf, doing anything she can to further their cause. She compromises beliefs held all her life, for what life will exist if evil prevails?

Her journey leads to a deceiving world of magic, monsters, and gods she never believed existed outside of myth. The deeper she goes, the more her soul is stripped away, but she continues on, desperate to see her quest complete. If she can bring her husband to ruin and save her people, any sacrifice is worth the price—even if it means her life.

This is a beautiful blurb, obviously, but here are what I think are the 3 things you really need to know to understand that you need to read Effigy:

Haleine is a total badass lady heroine character.
If you like a sold baddie, her evil husband very much makes you want to punch him right in the face. And he's not even the REAL baddie. (bum bum buuuuuuum)
Unicorns. There are unicorns. I don't know why M.J. didn't mention that in the blurb. THERE ARE UNICORNS IN THIS BOOK.

Now for linkage:

Ravven, the cover artist: www.ravven.com

M.J.'s website: http://www.mjfifield.com/

M.J.'s pet blog: http://mjfifield.blogspot.com/

Add Effigy on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22545883-effigy?ac=1

I am so excited that Effigy is finally being published. Unless M.J. backs out at the last minute to become the lead haiku-intoner of new breakout band Unicorn Riot, you can get your copy on July 22. Hooray!

We Are Not In A Romantic Comedy

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:22:00 +0000

Anybody remember me saying back in January that I really miss writing fiction? Well, I tried writing a short fiction story based on a prompt from Prompt & Circumstance, and I submitted it to their spring contest. The editors, bless 'em, sent it back and said they liked it but wanted more. So I rewrote it with some great feedback from friends, and the revised short story won an honorable mention in the 2014 spring contest and was published in Issue 3 of their literary journal, Promptly.

Promptly, Issue 3
My story: We Are Not In A Romantic Comedy
Interview with me

This was a bit experimental for me, as I discuss in the interview. Straight fiction, not fantasy, somewhat of a romance. Very new ground. It was fun!

I encourage you to read the other winners in that issue as well! There are some truly excellent pieces of writing in there. I'm still blown away by the second-place winner "Big Gulp" by Simon Barth. Who could pack such a story in two paragraphs?!

And all my writerly readers out there: check out the prompts on Prompt & Circumstance. Maybe try your hand at one. Actually, that goes for my readers who don't consider themselves "writers," as well. Want to dabble in story? Fiction, memoir, nonfiction, poetry? Give it a go. G'won.

#MyWritingProcess Blog Hop

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 16 May 2014 03:32:00 +0000

Fellow writer Shelby Settles Harper asked me to participate in this blog hop about my writing process. It comes with a standard set of questions to answer and the instruction to then "pass it on" to three other writers who will answer the same questions next week. But I'm a lazy rebel, so I'm just going to link to three other people who have already answered the questions. DON'T PANIC! These are froods who really know where their towels are, so I'm doing you a solid by not making you wait a WHOLE WEEK for their answers. (Also one of them is Shelby, so I'm cheating even more!)

QUESTION TIME!

1. What am I working on?

Well, there is that secret project I mentioned once sometime last fall and have NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN until just this moment. Okay, fine, I'll tell you: my friend and fellow Johns Hopkins science-medical writing grad Sarah Lichtner and I are trying to develop a nonfiction science-focused literary journal. This scares the sweet bajeezus clean out of me sometimes, particularly as things are actually sort of going forward. We might actually do this thing, maybe. Please find wood immediately and knock on it.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I'm not entirely sure how my science writing differs from that of other science writers. I'm not as funny as Erik Vance, as thoughtful as Ann Finkbeiner, as clever as Virginia Hughes, as beautiful with words as Carl Zimmer. But those guys are damn superstars, so that's okay. (They're kind of my writing crushes. Shhh.) It's something to aspire to. I think my answer to this question is: yet to be determined.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Ah, this one I can do. I write about science because I get excited to write about science. I know that sounds crazy given that earlier I said that I'm not working on writing anything much at the moment. But I do have a full-time job and am working on developing another writing-related project, so cut me a break! Let me tell you a story. My good friend Thomas McCarthy (he does science) recently published a paper that he's rather proud of. Here it is. There's some free linkage for you, Thomas. Anyway, I started trying to understand the paper because, well, my friend did a science, and I wanted to know what it was. I started having quite an enjoyable time trying to break down the abstract, and I might use it as an example in a later post of how science writers might approach a scientific paper. I told you that story to illustrate that I still get excited about these things, even though I'm not necessarily actively pursuing and writing science articles. I still want to write about science because gosh durnit this stuff is neat!

4. How does your writing process work?

Usually how I go about a story is that I have some interest in a thing.

Some real examples:

I wondered why those people had so many antennas on their cars
My sister sent me a list of creepiest abandoned places and I became fascinated with underground coal fires
I was obsessed with the Oxford comma
My cousin posted a picture of a miniature panda cow on Facebook and I needed to know why tiny cows existed
After discovering Madeleine L'Engle had not invented mitochondria in her science-fiction books, I had always had a fascination with mitochondria
I got sucked up in the hype for the Mars Rover launch and have maintained an interest in the mission

After I have some general interest, I start talking to people about it or otherwise learning about it through books or research papers. Eventually I identify people to interview. More often than not, the story changes dramatically after the interview stage, either because of something that turned up during the interview(s) or because of the simple fact that an expert is nearly always going to know more than I know even after pretty decent research.

At this point, I usually can put out a first draft. I might be able to put out a first draft before an interview, but it is usually not worth the effort because of how dramatically information/quotes from an interview is likely to change whatever I initially think the structure or focus of the piece is going to be.

Then I go through a few more drafts, sometimes with feedback from a trusted reader. I may entirely restructure the entire piece one or more times.

And now for other writers!

I now take this opportunity to brag on some of my fellow Johns Hopkins Masters in Writing alum. If you click on their names, you'll see their much more eloquent responses to the same questions I have just stumbled all over.

Shelby Settles Harper is an awesome writer who is currently working on a novel in a genre she is calling "literary American Indian." Shelby also holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Colorado and is a citizen of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma. Her list of publications is ridiculously extensive, but I have particularly enjoyed her recently published short story Peyote Spirit, which is an excerpt of her upcoming novel; this is a good thing, as you will read Peyote Spirit and immediately consider writing a strongly-worded demand for more.

Kelly Ann Jacobson is the Poetry Editor for Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine. Kelly is the author of the literary novel Cairo in White and the young adult trilogy The Zaniyah Trilogy, as well as the editor of the book of essays Answers I'll Accept. She also currently lives in the town I used to live in: Falls Church, Virginia. I don't know how we didn't cross paths.

Caitlin Sinead has been writing since the second grade, when she drafted a riveting piece about witches who turned out to be friendly. Her writing has appeared in multiple publications. She currently works as an editorial manager.

I cut. I paste.

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 01:03:00 +0000

The best revision advice I've heard either came when I was sixteen or not yet six, depending on which story you believe.

***

It came as formal writing advice in high school English class. The first major revision I ever did was in my junior research paper with Mrs. Teresa White, who was one of my favorites and to whom I therefore may be inappropriately giving credit properly belonging to some other teacher who wasn't as gregarious toward me. But that's unlikely, given the whole Junior Research Paper Situation.

I am nearly positive it was Teresa White who first advised me that a good practice for revising a writing project is printing the whole blessed thing out, taking a pair of scissors to it, and then rearranging it on the floor and pasting it back together.

Crude, perhaps; yet, effective.

It's a trick I've used many times over the years. I forget about it for a spell, then it suddenly comes back to me, or someone suggests it again, and I wonder why I don't do it all the time.

***

The advice came informally, perhaps, when I was not yet six, and it is documented.

My family has a whole slew of old home videos, mostly incredibly mundane. Mom jokes that Dad thought turning the video camera on was equivalent to watching us; if true, the flaw in Dad's otherwise-rather-brilliant plan was that we clearly didn't comprehend the video camera as a watcher—it was more tattling undercover spy than guardian whose presence discouraged misbehavior.

One episode that I find too embarrassing to rewatch in order to have a detailed retelling here involves me and my sister playing at, I think, our little craft table with crayons and paper and assorted crafty things. At some point, I hit her, who knows why really, and she must cry that I've hit her because I claim "I did not!" and then am off-camera for some time, leaving my sister to enact her revenge upon my crafts with the simple declaration, "I cut. I paste."

The author and her sister in their Sunday best,
apparently not fighting.

I could be entirely misremembering the events of that episode. At this point, it's not a memory that actually exists in my mind; merely a memory of a video, lacking any context whatsoever, particularly the context of what was going on in either of our heads at the time. Perhaps, for example, I am seeing diabolical vengeful motives on my sister's part that were simply never there. Perhaps I think that her cutting and pasting are revenge because that's what I would have done had she hit me and then run off to claim that I was lying to make her look bad.

But she was a cheerful child, not given to acts of vengeance, at least not to my recollection. And perhaps it is a truer interpretation of her actions to see that she was improving my project by cutting and pasting. Perhaps she was trying to make it more beautiful, rather than ruin it.

***

Recently, a rather large document revision was giving me some trouble. It is in the format of a choose-your-own adventure story, but with health care information. You start at the beginning and, if [A], you go to page 3; if [B], you go to page 4; the option tree branches out from there. Sometimes the paths cross, and those were the bits that were hurting my head. I was having trouble understanding the logic paths when I thought to myself I wish I had this all laid out in front of me and I could cut it apart and arrange it in order.

I felt a fool for not having thought of it earlier. Of course I could do that. Sitting at my desk, cutting out the different answer options from the paper and pinning them to my bulletin board with tacks, I murmured, "I cut. I paste."

And it worked. I ended up with something that is, I think, better than when I started. Simpler. Clearer. Or so I hope.

A crude method, perhaps, but a method nonetheless. One that children can explain and intuitively grasp, or an elegantly simple revenge: I'm still not sure which. But it works as a revision method, and it makes me smile. And there's a certain pleasure in physically cutting up a project that's being difficult and rebuilding it from the pieces. Destroy and recreate. Cut and paste.

A love letter to my friends

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 20:23:00 +0000

Every once in a while, something happens in my life that feels like the kind of thing that only happens in stories or movies. I rarely write about them, perhaps for fear of being unable to grant them the magic in writing that they had in reality. The writing conference in Maine in July 2012 included several of those instances: the 80s night at the bar, a night that ended with us all drinking the Hemmingway, afternoons spent in the sun reading writing aloud to each other, the cruise, the last night on the pier with the bio-luminescent algae. Another was one night in DC in particular, bar-hopping in Dupont Circle with the grad school writer friends. The birthday party of a new Indy-based friend, Sylwia, with a ridiculous amount of vodka and a high-rise apartment overlooking night-lit Indianapolis. The George Watsky concert I attended in Indy with my sister before she moved north to start her fancy new Civil Engineering job.

The most recent example was last weekend. I had coffee with Sylwia after work Friday at a very cute cafe near my home. We went to the swing dance and even though I didn't prepare for it at all — didn't do my hair or my makeup or even change out of my work clothes — I felt more fantastic out on the dance floor than I'd felt in some time.
Maybe it was the previous weekend spent at a blues dancing workshop with David and Sylwia at my old Alma Mater that gave me new confidence or new ideas or at least more permission to be unafraid to look a fool. Thomas even showed up unexpectedly from Cincinnati for the Friday dance, and with David in attendance it was almost the entire Old Gang, which is a funny term for a group that only formed about six months prior. And then my dance shoes were stolen from beside our table at the Steak n Shake, rediscovered on the feet of a woman at the next table, and retrieved via direct confrontation, which perhaps wasn't the smartest idea but I was high on exhaustion and caffeine and wasn't even thinking about it. Uncontrollable laughter.

Despite — perhaps because of? — all the weirdness, it was a wonderful evening. I suspect I wasn't even dancing particularly well that night, as one lead I'd never spoken to before felt the need to impart unto me advice on how to improve (a practice which is generally frowned upon on the social dance floor unless the feedback is requested). Nevertheless, I had an unabashedly enjoyable evening of the sort that seems surreal.

In some ways, I had wondered if moving away from Washington, D.C., its opportunities, and my group of graduate school friends would be a mistake. I wondered whether I would be able to build that kind of thing again. Historically it has taken me quite a while (in terms of years) to make true new friendships. And I certainly miss my DC/Baltimore friends. But I've seen that there are people to be friends with every-where, even for a book-loving quasi-introvert who is often kind of awkward and tends to over-analyze just about every single thing.

But somehow here in Indy I have book-loving friends. I am beginning to explore the writing community, so perhaps I will have local writer friends. I have dancing friends. I have friend friends with whom I have ridiculous text conversations and absurd adventures.

And next month I am visiting my DC/Baltimore friends and probably doing all sorts of shenanigans. And perhaps next July I will get to Portland with some yahoos from the undergrad days. And next August one of my grade-school friends is getting married and there shall be guitars and beers and probably ridiculous singing around campfires with all that crowd.

And I am so lucky in my friends.

A comma by any other name

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 13:00:00 +0000

Surprisingly, at least to me, I wrote very little last year. Compared to other years, that is. I didn't write a single original unique nonfiction article or essay. Not a single fiction story, unless you count that one in March about the phoenix that I never actually finished. I came up with a few interesting ideas for my novel project but didn't do a thing with it.

But that's okay. I was working on other things. I switched jobs and moved states. I actually moved twice. I made a few new friends. I settled in at my new job. I got a few previously-written pieces published.

In fact, just the other day, my essay on the Oxford Comma was published by Tin House. It's called The Comma That Launched A Thousand Ships, and I might write more about that whole process later.

Their Announcement

"I give a fuck about an Oxford comma, Vampire Weekend." You tell 'em, @CallieLeuck http://t.co/bwCUZlscfv
— Tin House (@Tin_House) January 15, 2014

My Reaction

Inspired by Allie Brosh
It's green because it's supposed to be me.

My Oxford Comma essay has been published by @Tin_House! I need to go find a chaise longue on which to swoon! http://t.co/stHbn50fpQ
— Callie Leuck (@CallieLeuck) January 15, 2014

I have another previously-written nonfiction article to complete a revision of for another publication (I haven't forgotten you!) and then I'll have pretty much parceled off most of my thesis. Strange. It's only been a little over a year. And now I need to write something new. I've fallen out of the habit, somehow, and I feel like perhaps I am ready to get back to it.

I also really miss writing fiction. I haven't had the headspace for it this past year, not really, and I think perhaps I'd like to make space for it again. An author I admire who I sometimes communicate with told me something that I thought was really nice. She told me that, basically, it's okay to not write a novel now, that I have a lot on my plate and that life is crazy.

And I thought about whether maybe I mightn't be happier if I wasn't sort of either compulsively writing or compulsively feeling guilty about NOT writing. That maybe I could just...be normal? What is it that people who don't have some kind of compulsive hobby do with their time? Enjoy...things? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I don't really think I could just not be a writer, though. Especially since I have this sort of craving for it. But maybe I could stop feeling guilty about not doing it when I'm doing other things. It's all a headgame, my friends. All a headgame.

Days of our Lofts

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Polar Vortex is a beautiful phrase, somewhat reminiscent of Polar Express, but with that lovely harsh V sound, as if that holiday train was manned by Vulcans, who almost certainly wouldn't dance while serving steaming hot cocoa. Neither would they believe in Santa, which is not a logical belief.

Polar Vortex was not an enjoyable thing to experience. "You've never experienced negative 40-degree wind chill," my mom informed me. "You don't want to experience it."

But as I sat in my third-floor loft as Monday morning crept by and the temperature slowly dropped, with no sense of when or if the power may return, I wondered if I may end up experiencing the vortex. I had been down to the first floor, which was the dark cold of Dante's Hell; it appeared the entire first floor had already evacuated. Where to, I did not know.

The power flicked back on slightly before noon, to my immense relief. As it stayed on for hours and with the heat cranked up to nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit, I began to be curious about what negative 40-degree F wind chill felt like. Also, I wondered if I would be going to work the next day. I ventured out to assess the car situation and quickly discovered I did not, in fact, enjoy negative 40-degree wind chill. At that point, it was probably no longer quite that cold, but I never bothered to discover the true "feels like" temperature. I broke my ice scraper in the first five minutes and gave up, not venturing back out until the following evening, joining a mass of neighbors digging their cars out of snowy tombs.

I've since heard that the cold of the polar vortex was colder than highs in Antarctica, colder than Mars at the same time, too cold for the polar bear at the Chicago zoo. All I know is that my brief experience of the worst of the cold left my teeth aching for hours afterward.

On Wednesday, I managed to get to the office. Three days alone was too long for me; I expressed to friends and family that I was going to start writing soap operas based on the conversations happening in the hallway behind my loft if I spent one more day trapped in there alone.

I may be an introvert, but even introverts can only take so much imposed completely-alone time.

Seeing, with the Dawn's Early Light

noreply@blogger.com (Callie Leuck) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 21:39:00 +0000

I haven't needed glasses for three months now, but it clearly takes some unknown time longer than that to break a habit of nearly eighteen years: this morning, as the dawn light reached through the windows that border my ceiling, I reached for my glasses on the bedside table, nearly dashing a glass of water to the concrete floor of my downtown loft before the usual morning realization that I can, in fact, see.

It is these little ways in which my life has shifted since I undertook vision-correction surgery on this day three months ago. Four score and eleven days ago. The initial shifts were in my vision as my eyes improved — at first in one, and then more slowly in the other, as I had a different procedure for each eye thanks to an infection some years earlier leaving its mark on the surface of my left eye: a scar visible only to eye doctors and which nobody would ever describe as dashing.

When the vision improvements slowed — though they improve yet, in increments too small for me to discern — the shifts in my life were neither as drastic nor as shocking as I had expected, given that
after I had given up on contacts, which I suspected were complicit in, if not directly to blame, for issues such as the aforementioned scar, glasses had become part of my face.

Worse yet, they were becoming cool: geek chic became a style. I had spent years — practically all of grade school and a large part of my collegiate life — attempting to select frames that were the least visible, kept the lenses closest to my face, looked the least intimidating or nerdy or smart or, heck, insert your favorite glasses adjective here. But today, if you walk into a store selling glasses frames, you'll see bold, chunky frames that scream I am glasses and pictures of sexy, pouting people in various I am glamorous poses. Glasses were a thing that everybody wanted. The assistant at my optometrist's office informed me that people bought designer frames with prescriptionless lenses, simply to have as a fashion accessory.

Finally, something that was so me that a designer friend who used my website as a sample client incorporated chunky frames into her final designs was In, was popular, was cool — and I was going to take it away. I might as well consider a nose job.

I knew that oftentimes what people saw when they looked at me wasn't me; they saw glasses, and they saw whatever they associated with glasses. Who would I be without my frames? Who is Gretchen Grundler without her oversized frames? Who is Harry Potter without his coke-bottle glasses? And what use is magic, anyway, if you can't right vision troubles with something more elegant than bits of metal or plastic suspending corrective lenses between your eyes and what you cannot see?

What use is science — what use is technology? — if I were to reject these fantastic advancements in favor of clinging to some strange attachment to glasses as a significant part of my identity?

I realize the enormity of the mere fact that I had the chance to leave my glasses behind — to walk into that surgery room with the machines and the blinking lights and the whirring noises — I had the opportunity, the means, the support, the everything. And I don't want to say that people who for whatever reason stay with the frames are any less; merely that, for me, it was a crisis of identity, a step away from my childhood and the security blanket that my glasses had become. I had that opportunity, and I took it.

And for every moment my glasses are not skittering across the dance floor, every moment my glasses are not losing a screw, every moment that my glasses aren't slipping down my nose, every moment that I actively benefit from my peripheral vision, every night I lie abed and watch the moon through the window and watch the lights on airplane wingtips blink their way toward the airport to the south — every morning I reach for my glasses and experience that little joyful rush of realization that I can see — I am glad I did it.