Book Writing
drorzel | December 30, 2011I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing.
That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my second book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be out at the end of February. And the first pre-publication review is in, from Publishers Weekly:
Physics professor Orzel follows his How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with a compact and instructive walk through Einstein's theory of relativity,…
drorzel | December 9, 2011Three quick items relating to science in book form:
1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in the best non-fiction-book-list world, but you can see for yourself.
2) In the "good books about science coming next year" category, the line-up for The Open Laboratory anthology of outstanding science blogging has been announced. I'm very pleased to report that my write-up of the OPERA preprint was…
drorzel | September 20, 2011I'm looking at an email from my editor when Emmy wanders by the computer, sniffing around just in case a crumb of food has fallen on the floor in the last five minutes. "Hey," I say, "Come here and look at this."
"Look at what?"
"This:"
"It's the cover for my new book."
"A-hem."
"OK, fine, it's the cover for our new book. Anyway, what do you think?"
"Hey, that's not bad. I'm way better than that dog, though."
"Yeah, well, they didn't want to make the owners of inferior dogs jealous."
"Oooh. Good point. See, this is why I could never make it in marketing."
"It's Madison Avenue's loss, I'm…
drorzel | August 8, 2011When we got home from visiting Kate's family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions!
That's the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing golden retriever as the Brazilian edition. The overlaid equations and graphics are lifted directly from the translated figures, which is nice.
My new favorite edition, though, is the Korean edition, whose cover designer went for "Puppy Innnn SPAAAAAACE!!!" as a concept:
There's nothing remotely…
drorzel | July 19, 2011I've been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references-- quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I'm sure I've missed a few-- many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes tend to slide right over as I read (in the previous book, one section was titled "Clever Section Title Here" until distressingly late in the process)-- but for your amusement, here's what I have at the moment, in approximately the order in which they appear in the book:
Star Wars
The Adventures of…
drorzel | June 25, 2011"Hey, Dude, what'cha doin'?"
"I'm checking out the dog drawings I commissioned for the book-in-progress. Here, take a look:"
"Hey, wait just one minute. That looks like me!"
"That's the idea. Since you're in the book, I thought it would be nice to have some pictures that look like you, rather than just a clip-art German Shepherd from Office."
"I look kind of worried, dude."
"Yeah, well, you get that look a lot when we're talking about physics."
"Good point. So, was there a point to this, other than showing off the spiffy drawings an art student did for you?"
"Sure. It's a reminder that I'm…
drorzel | May 25, 2011I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week's episode of the series "Naked Science," titled Living in a Parallel Universe.
I haven't seen it, obviously, but it's running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your DVR accordingly.
(I'm also very pleased to have learned of the air date via email from Alan Guth...)
drorzel | April 22, 2011A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them.
So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This…
drorzel | April 15, 2011Regular blogging has been interrupted this week not only because I jetted off to southern MD but because this week was the due date for the manuscript of the book-in-progress. It's now been sent off to my editor, and thus begins my favorite part of the process, the waiting-to-see-what-other-people-think part.
I'm pretty happy with it, though it's a bit longer than it was originally supposed to be. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that I'm too close to the thing at the moment, and can't see the obvious places where I could cut material, but that's why professional editors get the big…
drorzel | April 12, 2011I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as:
Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…
drorzel | April 7, 2011A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo's Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the video is hopefully embedded below:
I haven't listened to the entire thing, but I watched the first 10-15 minutes, and it's pretty good. the sound is coming from a microphone on my shirt, so you can't really hear any of the audience reaction (I got some good laughs in appropriate places), and in places…
drorzel | April 1, 2011I've got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I've entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how many new words I type, but how many old ones I can make disappear.
I always find this faintly depressing, but it's a nearly inevitable part of serious writing for me. There have been a few cases where I've had open-ended writing assignments-- one of the papers I published in grad school, and my Ph.…
drorzel | March 30, 2011I got my student comments from last term's intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me.
It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that the experience is a lot like reading Amazon reviews of my book. I think there's actually a decent analogy between the response of authors to reviews and the response of faculty to student evaluations:
-- Really good comments can make you feel great, but the negative ones make you feel worse. I've got…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…
drorzel | March 14, 2011I've still got work to do today, but I did want to pop in quickly to note that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, at SUNY New Paltz. It's part of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association meeting, and has also been plugged in the local paper.
If you're in the area, and looking for something interesting to do, stop by and say hi, and learn a bit about why quantum physics matters to the dog on the go.
drorzel | March 2, 2011Another shameless self-promotion post, but since I was confirming some arrangements this morning, I thought I'd throw up a post, so:
- On March 15, two weeks from yesterday, I will be giving a talk for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association at 8pm on the campus of SUNY-New Paltz. If you're in the downstate NY sort of area, and want to know what your dog should know about quantum physics, stop on by.
- On March 19th, two weeks from this Saturday, I will be doing the same presentation at 9:30 am at the University of Toledo, as part of their Saturday Morning Science program (warning: PDF). If…
drorzel | March 1, 2011Blogging will continue to be minimal, as I'm buried in grading, and feeling significant time pressure regarding the book-in-progress. I thought I'd pop up briefly, though, to provide a look at the current status of the book-in-progress.
The way this process works (or at least has worked for me) is that I write up a proposal describing what I plan to write about and giving some samples. For both books, this has included one full chapter worth of prospective text, plus a bunch of dog dialogues for other chapters. My agent then shops this around to publishers, one of whom buys it and sets a…
drorzel | February 27, 2011A few lines of dialogue that I wrote today:
"So, the treats I eat represent the matter falling into the black hole, while my poop--"
"You are not coming to my class and pooping to demonstrate Hawking radiation. Don't even think about it."
"I guess that means you don't want to hear my take on the black hole information paradox, then?"
My life is very strange.
drorzel | February 9, 2011I haven't been as relentless about flogging How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now available in paperback!) as I was last year, because it gets kind of exhausting. I do have a vanity search set up on Google Reader that points me to the occasional review-- this one, for example, so I still see the occasional positive comment, which is good for a boost in a difficult week at work.
Of course, the vanity search is world wide, which means it also picks up mentions of the international editions, such as this Italian blog (oddly, it gets my employer wrong-- I should check the Italian edition and see…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!