Thailand, Author’s Notes, and Query Letters

I spent most of this last Memorial Day weekend, frankly, trying not to think about bad news. My little brother is in Bangkok while they declared Martial Law, promptly had a military coup, and now have suspended the constitution. The misogynist shooting in Santa Barbara prompted strong responses from me, but I tried not to engage with trolls on Facebook and Twitter about it, mostly (though a truly horrifying number of men think its totally appropriate to kill women for not giving them sex on demand – just see the #yesallwomen tag..) Plus I managed to sprain an ankle and run 101 fever for five days last week. So I was a little slowed down (possibly from the Skagit conference? I’ve got to watch overdoing…)

And then I spent hours researching my own past as well as all of nuclear history to write this author’s note for my next book, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” I interviewed my Dad on stories I remembered from my childhood about his work and read papers and sections of books like Atomic Accidents and watched documentaries. Not much fun to watch what happens to butterflies who eat houseplants from Fukushima, for example, or ponder exactly which of your medical problems might spring from radioactive exposure in your youth – but both things seem important to the book. (Flannery O’Conner railed against the difficulty of writing an author’s note for Wise Blood and now I see why! They are very difficult! You want to include enough of a clue about your own reasons for writing the book, enough of the history and science of the subject matter to make it understandable, but you don’t want to talk down to the audience…it’s a tightrope walk!)

Anyway, after several nights of bad sleep, anxiety dreams about death and not much peace or productivity, I decided to try the “taking my mind off it” strategy of seeing a movie – in my case, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” which was fairly enjoyable except for the total lack of attention paid to the state of robotics in 1973, which I happen to know something about (see previous paragraph) plus I noticed entire sections ripped off of other movies/shows (particularly a sequence exactly like a similar sequence in The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s The Wish, and time-travel stuff that reminded me strongly of Charles Wallace in Swiftly Tilting Planet and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight series.) Oh well. Besides my small disturbances, the movie was great fun and even had some hope/emotional resonance, I thought, which is pretty good for a comic book movie. (Also, I watched five trailers for comic book movies to come..not one of them featuring a female comic book superhero. Come on, Wonder Woman movie! Or Scarlet Witch! Or Black Widow? You dudes in Hollywood know Hunger Games wasn’t a one-time aberration in movies, right? That we actually want to see strong female leads in action movies? Oh well…)

To combat my non-productivity, I did manage to write two pages of the author’s note (which will need to be edited down later,) a few pages on my “medical memoir” project and…even more bravely…re-wrote a query which I may or may not send out to agents about the book. Any agents out there reading my blog really excited about a medical memoir project? 🙂 Get in touch!

Anyway, I hope your week was filled with peace, health productivity, and much less anxiety than I had this week. May your loved ones be safe, may you stay healthy, may your writing flourish! That’s my Memorial Weekend wish!