The Great Book Project
laelaps | November 2, 2009
It has been a little more than a month since I announced my forthcoming book on paleontology and evolution, Written in Stone, and I have been hard at work on the manuscript. As it stands now the book is about 3/4 complete. Provided everything stays on schedule I should have a first draft of the whole book finished in about a month.
But finishing the manuscript, while of primary importance, is not my only concern. I am a virtually unknown science writer publishing my first book through a relatively small house. That means that I cannot sit idly by and expect lots of people to take interest in…
laelaps | August 3, 2009After a number of false starts, I have finally started work on a "best of Laelaps" anthology. I am going to call it Tales From Deep Time, and it is going to be a sort of "b-sides" compilation that will complement my other, professional book-in-progress about paleontology and evolution. This blog has thrived on material I wanted to include in the other book but had to leave on the cutting room floor, and I look forward to presenting these miscellaneous tidbits in a more professional manner.
I am doing more than just cutting and pasting blog entries, though. Right now I am in the process of…
laelaps | May 13, 2009A little while back I posted a little teaser on Twitter (or a "tweezer", as BrianR aptly called it) that I had some exciting news about my book. Now I can finally share it. I am proud to announce that I will be working with literary agent Peter Tallack of The Science Factory on my book project. I still have a lot of work to do, but this is a major step towards producing an absolutely smashing book about evolution and paleontology for you all to enjoy!
laelaps | April 6, 2009As regular readers may (or may not) have noticed I have not been posting many updates about my book, still tentatively titled Life's Splendid Riddle, lately. The primary reason for that is because other projects have taken up much of my time, but it can also be frustrating trying to find something to say in my occasional progress reports. That's why I have decided to forgo my previous method of posting updates and start tweeting.
When I first heard about Twitter it sounded interesting but not like anything I was intending on signing up for. I am not interesting enough for people to care about…
laelaps | March 23, 2009
A number of people have been asking me about the status of my book lately. I only wish I had something interesting to report!
By mid-January I had completed about 100 pages, or roughly one third of the book. With that goal reached I began to draft my proposal but I began to feel discouraged. How could I, a no-name science writer, make my work appear unique and important among the tidal wave of evolution books being released this year? I have no authority to trade in on and the quality of my work must stand for itself (as well it should).
At present it appears that the best thing for me to do…
laelaps | March 2, 2009[Last night New Brunswick was buried under several inches of snow, shutting down the university and giving me the day off. I have been using my free time to get some reading done and work on a few projects but I did not want to neglect this blog. Here are the first several pages of the chapter on human evolution from Life's Splendid Riddle, the book in-progress I have so often mentioned here. I still do not have an agent and am unsure whether this book will ever make it to shelves, but I could not resist sharing this sample with you. Enjoy.]
Not long after the earth had been given form, when…
laelaps | January 27, 2009It is another busy day, and since I am again left with little time to write here I have decided to post another "follow-up" excerpt from my book.**
A few days ago I mentioned that many paleontologists were skeptical that humans had lived alongside extinct mammals until discoveries made in Europe between 1858-1859 convinced them otherwise. Below is a brief summary of how the scientific consensus began to change on this issue;
The plan of Brixham Cave, from Geology: Chemical, Physical, and Stratigraphical by Joseph Prestwich.
Several months after Koch's presentation, and over 4,000 miles…
laelaps | January 26, 2009
A porpoise, or "sea-hog", from Appletons' Annual Cycloaedia.
I do not have much time to write today, so rather than type something from scratch I have decided to share an excerpt from my book (still in-progress).
In my recent post "Ancient Armored Whales" I briefly drew attention to a quote from Richard Lydekker deriding William Flower's hypothesis that whales may have evolved from ungulates. Presented below in the passage on this subject as it presently appears in the chapter "As Monstrous as a Whale";
A lack of other transitional forms had stirred debate about the place of Basilosaurus…
laelaps | January 8, 2009
Just because I have not been writing much here doesn't mean I have not been writing. This week I have devoted most of my energy to tidying up the chapter of my book on human evolution, and I am pleased to say that it is now practically complete.
The chapter, as it is now, stretches about 41 pages long. I asked my wife to read it and tell me what I could cut out or compress, but she told me she could not think of anything. I will give it one more round of editing, but it is unavoidable that this will be the longest chapter in the book. It is not meant to be a summary of everything you need to…
laelaps | January 3, 2009
Earlier today I wrote a long rant about pop-science books (particularly mediocre ones), but I ended up scrapping it. After I ran out of hot air I hit a wall and did not want to post something that 1) I couldn't find a good way to finish, and 2) I wasn't going to be proud of. I was a bit cranky today anyway, so as was always good advice when I was little, I took a nap.
I had meant to wake up and work on my book some more, but I slept longer than I intended to. That's ok; maybe I'll be up later since I got some rest and put in the work then. Even if I don't, though, I did manage to nearly…
laelaps | December 26, 2008
Things have been a little slow here on Laelaps as of late, and for good reason. Between finals and the holidays I haven't had much time to sit down and write, but more importantly, I have been devoting most of my free time to working on the book.
I am still working on the chapter and human evolution, and it has become far more complicated than I had anticipated. Every time I think I have everything in order, I am reminded of something else important to the story I'm trying to tell. This is definitely going to be the longest chapter in the book, and even then some substantial cuts will have…
laelaps | December 9, 2008
This is what I call that "Finals feeling." From Garfield Minus Garfield.
Slowly, but surely, I have been editing the human evolution chapter. The difficult part is simply finding the time to do it! Classes come first, then I have to keep the material coming here and on Dinosaur Tracking, and then I work on the book during whatever time I have left. The chaotic semester schedule certainly doesn't make things easy. When I write, I like to sit down and keep going for as long as I can. Stealing 20 minutes to edit a paragraph here and there isn't the way I like to do things, and sometimes it's…
laelaps | November 21, 2008
Another day, another 10 pages. The human evolution chapter now stretches about 40 pages long, and it still requires quite a bit of detail. (It will, of course, balloon again when illustrations are worked out. One particular illustration of the branching tree of hominin evolution will require that I do some digging in the literature to find the best current estimates for the ages of particular genera and species.) Even so, it now presents a more-or-less coherent story, from early discoveries of stone tools in Europe to our strange position as the one surviving variety of human. Now I have to…
laelaps | November 18, 2008
Lately it has been difficult to work up the motivation to work on the book. My free time is so fragmented that I rarely have the ability to sit down and concentrate on what I'm doing for more than an hour or so. The fact that it gets dark by about 4:30 does not help, either, as it makes me feel that the day is essentially over even though I have a few hours (depending on the day) to work. I really do hate autumn and the winter here.
My wife does not let me get away with moping around the apartment, though, and at her behest I worked for about two hours last night. I honestly do not think…
laelaps | November 5, 2008
I am actually starting to feel optimistic about meeting my self-imposed mini-deadline. It took me a few days, but I was able to go through what I had previously written for the human evolution chapter once. It let me regain my bearings and straighten things up a bit, even if I ended up adding as much as I deleted. (It now stands at 25 pages, which will have to be severely condensed.)
As far as the historical narrative, I have now reached the part when Piltdown was unveiled as a fraud and W.E. le Gros Clark convinced his colleagues that Australopithecus was relevant to human evolution after…
laelaps | November 2, 2008
After putting it off for too long, I finally began my re-write of the human evolution chapter today. I feared what I would find when I began working with it again. I had written about 25 pages, but that was back in April, May at the latest, and I knew that a lot of it would have to be thrown out.
I am not exactly starting from scratch, though. Instead of starting with a blank sheet I decided to re-mold what I had already put down, injecting new ideas and examples as I go along. Not all my prose is horrific, and to an extent I am mining what the Brian of last spring wrote for whatever useful…
laelaps | October 27, 2008
Two down, one to go. Sort of. Even though it took longer than I thought, I am setting aside the dinosaurs and birds chapter for a bit to work on the section on human evolution. To get myself in the spirit of things I picked up Bones of Contention yesterday, although I also have a stack of academic resources to go through to try and make sure what I write is up to date.
When I first started seriously writing this book, I thought it was going to be a relatively easy project. I was at least somewhat familiar with each of the subjects I wanted to tackle, and I knew I could do a better job than…
laelaps | October 23, 2008
I finally did it. After a number of delays due to scheduling and new discoveries (i.e. Aerosteon, Epidexipteryx) I have nearly completed the dinosaurs/birds chapter. It still requires one more edit (from a low of 25 pages it ballooned back up to 30), but it is essentially complete.
Writing the chapter was much more complicated than I expected. There are so many new discoveries (many of which require more study) that creating a synthesis of the information was difficult. Indeed, I expect some of the information I have presented to change in the near future, possibly even as the book goes from…
laelaps | October 17, 2008
I had not expected it to be this difficult to edit the chapter about birds and dinosaurs. I have gone through it several times and I'm still about 11 pages over my target number, and a lot of material is going to have to be excised or collapsed. In fact, I'm afraid that as I make finishing touches this weekend the number of pages is going to balloon rather than shrink.
It would be easy to simply lay out the evidence for how we know birds are living dinosaurs, but that's been done before. This book is not going to be a regurgitation of what others have already done, and I want to introduce…
laelaps | October 8, 2008
I have been hacking away at the chapter on birds & dinosaurs for the last few days, but it is still overgrown with tangles of excess material. It stings to cut out some of the great quotes and concepts I stumbled upon during the course of my research, but 41 pages is about 15 too many for the chapter I have in mind.
The task at hand right now is one of editing. I need to inject a little more information about some of the arguments I employ, but my main task is to chuck out as much material as I possibly can without watering down what I am trying to describe. A lot of the excess material…