Sci-Nonfi: RoboRoaches

On an otherwise unremarkable day in May, I spent time with high school students and neuroscientists and their remote-controlled cockroaches.

Two live RoboRoaches on a lab table

My essay appears in The Curator today. An excerpt:

The students finish the SpikerBoxes; the cockroach experience begins. A few Blaberus discoidalis cockroaches will have a limb surgically removed. The legs, the scientists explain, have neurons firing in them, even after they are amputated, and will remain alive for up to two days.

Volunteers take on the roles of anesthesiologist and surgeon. Marzullo guides them through the procedure. The cockroaches are removed from their habitat and submerged in ice water. Using small, curved scissors, the leg is quickly and carefully cut and pinned to a SpikerBox. Students huddle around it, waiting to hear the spikes. It sounds like static. Gage and Marzullo then connect the box to an iPad, and students can see a visual representation of the sounds.

They discuss possible responses of the leg to stimuli, and reveal what will be one of the student’s favorite experiments: How will a cockroach leg respond to the sound vibrations of hip-hop, specifically the song “Love the Way You Lie?”

Read the entire story here.

You can read The Oakland Press article, learn more about Backyard Brains, or prepare for the coming RoboRoach invasion.

Flash Collaboration: Tips on Writing Your Bio Blurb

Today I realized two things. 1) I miss collaborative art. 2) I hate writing my own biography blurb. So I sought input, and this is the result. Thanks to Tina C., Carol R., Dean S., Wendy S., Karen R., Betty M., Matt F., and Rene S. 

Writing Your Own Biography Blurb

You are a rock star soccer mom and kitchen ninja, and it's time to let the world know it. It's time to write your biography blurb.

Not just any biography blurb: the greatest bio in the history of the internet, the one that's going to revolutionize the art and practice of blurbing, the one that's going to catapult you into the rare air of internet darling and employed author. After all, you are a housewife with three kids living outside the most insulted city in the country, faking a basic understanding of SEO and nursing an anemic freelance career. The only thing holding you back is a quality bio.

Don't be shy. Tell your story, the way you'd tell it at some cocktail party you imagine going to in some city you've never visited with people who are really just on their way somewhere else.

This list is going to evolve your personal landscape, and is sure to drive traffic straight to your blog. It will give off a scent, and people who want to give you loads of money will turn Google into their personal bloodhound, clicking your link like hunters after a raccoon. That's right, these tips are going to make you reek like a wild animal, and you will eventually be treed ... in a tree full of PROFIT. You'll be shot ... shot full of RESPECT.

Keep reading for the kind of tips you can't find on any other blogs written by writers who give tips.

Blurb Do List

• DO make awkward self-references that most people will not find funny. For example, "Laura Tokie hates to write about herself in the third person."
• DO reference moments when you were inspired by bad teachers/writers to not be like them after some serious therapy. In fact, mention therapy whenever possible.
• DO remember that author bios work best if they bear a vague resemblance to the contestant intros on The Dating Game. "In her spare time, [author/contestant #3] enjoys spear fishing and topiary . . ."
• DO mention your pets. Everyone wants to know about them. 
• DO include details concerning your multiple failed attempts at trying to develop and market a successful ice show entitled "Cops on Ice."
• DO mention all sorts of hard accomplishments achieved and your daily tasks in such a way as to make everyone recognize they could never be you...and shouldn't even try... e.g. "[Author] loves running 30 miles daily and has run the Boston Marathon 3 times. In her spare time she sews mosquito nets for children in third world countries."

Blurb Don'ts

• DON'T forget to mention the 1. substance abuse 2. multiple personalities 3. embezzlement from the girl scouts 4. an Uncle Earl...who ever that is. 5. any mob affiliation 6. "accidental" killings and dismemberment. You've already mentioned your pet, so that will soften any implied hard edges. 
• DON'T publish your first draft. Do the work. Craft, polish, correct grammatical errors, lie. 
• DON'T hesitate to claim you love sunsets, need your morning coffee, and are working on a novel. Some people fear cliché, but I believe potential readers enjoy connecting to your common side.

A Final Word

Be sure and wrap up your blurb. Find a way to end it. Land the plane. Circle the runway, put the landing gear down, bring her home.

Now go back to your biography and add 'pilot', my little raccoon. You've earned your wings.

Laura Tokie is a housewife, soccer mom, and kitchen ninja. She lives 45 minutes outside Detroit Rock City with her family and Dano, a yellow lab. She loves coffee and sunsets, and is working on a novel. In her spare time, Laura mocks herself and saves her pennies for her children's future therapy bills. She thinks "Cops on Ice" would be fun for the whole family, and often pictures Kurt Browning throwing a salchow in the space between the repeated phrase,"Bad boys, bad boys". Follow Laura on Twitter. 

Writerly Habits

Today, Advice To Writers posted a Garrison Keillor quote:

When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.

This reminded me of a favorite exercise and a favorite practice for writers. 

A favorite exercise

This is from Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark. The books gives sensible advice and exercises, useful to both fiction and nonfiction writers. One exercise asks you to contact five acquaintances and get the names of their dogs. He then asks you to list the names in the order that sounds best.

A favorite practice

I cannot remember the source of the practice, but someone suggested that every day, a writer should write down five things he or she sees. I've fallen out of this habit, but perhaps tonight I'll fall back in again.

What are your habits or practices that keep your work "in touch with the beautiful surface of the world?"

The Roy Peter Clark book is on my top 5 list of writing books. You can read the rest of my picks here.

Rediscovery through teaching

Teaching is an act of rediscovery. 

Land ho ... that's one skinny mitten

Over the past two weeks, I've had the privilege of teaching on leadership, interviewing skills, and writing powerful paragraphs. Each class has reminded and encourage me to renew my commitments to basic things.

A class on leadership stirs me to consider vision and values. How can I help students see who they want to be? How can I help them figure out what's important? In crafting their lessons, I'm reminded of my own vision, values, and goals. I'm challenged to be a better steward of everything in my care.

Teaching interviewing skills keeps me sharp. I sit a little straighter; I speak a little more clearly; I strive to not just 'come across' as humble and confident, but to be truly 'be' both these things. I see the students battle through their nerves during a mock interview and am encouraged to push myself a little further.

Finally, what could be more refreshing than explaining how to write a basic paragraph? I find myself considering each simple form I present, wondering how I might be able to use it in my work.

It's been two weeks. I've got two weeks to go. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to influence young lives, of course, but it is not simply altruistic: I'm gaining.

The kids are alright

A winter or two ago, I decided to take a crack at a writing discipline of a thousand words a day. This is a rewritten excerpt from those days, appropriate, I thought, after the first day of NaNoWriMo. 

This is the goal, a goal of a thousand words. A day. So what do I really want to write about, what do I want to cover?

A thousand words. I need to hit a thousand words. 

What was that? It sounded like the dishwasher. Or an icicle piercing the skull of one of my kids. 

(I listen for screaming.)

Nothing. Not a sound. Probably the dishwasher. 

(I send the kids away from the house, and put on the headphones.)

What will I write about? It’s tough when I don’t have an assignment. Left to my own devices, I don’t really know what I want to say, or to whom. The words just kind of lay in my mind, flat and lifeless, like my tongue when it’s really really dry. Like it is now. Dry as a bone, dry as the Sahara, but wait, those are clichés and clichés=badness. So, if I riff on it, it’s dry like chalk, or dry like, like the tongue of a writer who has to ignore a possible fatality in order to hit a thousand words a day...

November 1 report: Daily NaNoWriMo word count goal met. No children, pets, or family members were harmed, or seriously yelled at, as a result of this effort.

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

I am not a novelist. I am not a fiction writer. What on earth am I doing signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)?

I'd like to claim peer pressure made me do it, but that's not it. It would be fun to say that I've always dreamed of writing the Lesser American Novel, but that's not it either. The concrete goal draws me: 50,000 words in 30 days. The marathon nature intrigues and challenges me. It's not 1334 words a day, it's 1334 linked words, connected words, words disciplined and directed to tell a story that might engage or delight. Being forced to keep going with one idea appeals to me, because I flit about so easily.

Ultimately, I love a good story, and I like to explore ways of telling a story, so why not a novel? 

Come November (the Mo in question), I will be devoting this space to brief thoughts about writing. In these days prior to the race, I plan to get some things in order to prepare for what I predict will be a wild ride. Planning and preparing are not the same as doing, of course, so we shall see and we shall see.

Check Please

A couple of days ago, after a long day of falling short and failure, I had one of those funny moments of self-doubt. The 'what are you thinking, go get a real job' moments. The 'just who do you think you are' voice.

So I started to think that what I needed to do is get me a reality check. Give one of my honest friends a call, and beg them to lay off the nicey-niceness and be very hard on me and my current delusion of being a writer. Who, I wondered, could be mean enough?

While I did ask Paul (story to follow), I realized this: it doesn't matter. By this I don't mean that I want to be crappy at writing. I want to improve, I want to grow, I want criticism. But ultimately, no matter what someone says to me about my skills or my voice or whatever, I am a writer. Writing has done more than stopped by for a visit. It's moved in, taken over my couch, started asking for snacks and keeps trying to hide the remote.

Yep. Yikes.

The story - while we were making dinner, I asked Paul about my writing. He said he wouldn't answer that. I got all mock grammatical and said, you *can't* or you *won't* - which of course led to a little acting out of my transformation into the Dragon Lady Who Destroyed the Butter Yellow Kitchen with Her Need for Approval.

I didn't actually morph into the above character from a domestic 'B' movie. The acting out was done by the inimitable Paul. Oh he got me laughing. I am particularly susceptible to his ways when I am laughing.

He stopped and he said, 'Let me ask you this. Do you think I'm a poor reader?'

I am a horrible wife. 'Yep,' I said. Then I did a little backpedal dance, complete with a hem and haw beat, but Paul didn't care. I'd fallen right into his special trap, a terrible mechanism constructed of humility, truth and wisdom, set to end a no-win conversation.

'So do you really think I'm qualified to judge writing? Cuz I don't.'

He is good. I am not. I guess that's what they mean when they say opposites attract.