I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn’t done yet.<\/p>\n
The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages (space-and-a-half) and 96,807 words. I don’t remember the word count from the original contract, but this is more than that. Which is pretty typical of my writing, really.<\/p>\n
Because I wrote it down as part of the final checks, here’s the approximate table of contents. The book is broken into four sections, around the four steps of the general process of science: Looking, Thinking, Testing, and Telling. Each chapter starts with an everyday activity that employs scientific thinking, emphasizing a particular element, and is paired with a historical example of scientific discovery using a similar process. The contents listing below gives the everyday activity and the historical science; these mostly have cute\/clever titles, but I’m not looking them all up for this post.<\/p>\n
Most of these include a couple of few-paragraph summaries of other discoveries as well, to make clear that this stuff is more general, so all told there are 50-some historical discoveries included. I have spent a lot<\/em> of time reading historical narratives about science.<\/p>\n Barring a complete disaster, this should be out toward the end of the year; the exact date, cover, etc. are decisions made well above my pay grade. I’ll share that information as I get it. I have no concrete plans to do public appearances at this time, but as a general matter, I’m very happy to give talks wherever I’m invited. If you’re looking for speakers about science-y stuff, shoot me an email, and we can almost certainly work something out.<\/p>\n This was much more exhausting to write than the previous books, for a whole host of reasons. The last couple of months in particular have been pretty brutal, to be honest, so my primary reaction to handing this in is less excitement than relief. Sadly, I don’t really get much of a break, because classes for our Winter term start on Monday, and I have a giant pile of stupid administrative stuff that I didn’t do during December because I was losing my mind over finishing the book. So don’t expect all that much here right away, but we should ease back into something resembling normal blogging over the next few weeks.<\/p>\n And that’s how I closed out 2013. I plan to spend New Year’s Day playing with toys, and maybe taking SteelyKid to see a movie. Hope your old year ended well, and your new year starts out better. Unless you use a non-Gregorian calendar, in which case, have a lovely Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn’t done yet. The final draft, according to Word anyway, comes to 253 pages… Continue reading Eureka! Discovering Your Inner Scientist<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,18,80,2,7,37,68,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book_writing","category-books","category-history_of_science","category-personal","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-progress_report","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}