bigdecade-blog

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Oh, why don’t I have a Running Big Year? "I had not reversed time, or gotten any younger. But I had shown, at least to myself, that time and age are not walls but fences, and fences can be jumped." That's a conclusion from Peter Sagal's splendiferous book on running. 35 more words

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Author Big Year: Pronunciation pleasures What startles me is how much genuine joy I get out of minuscule word/phrase education. In a podcast, I heard a wonderful writer pronounce "segue" as "seeg." Surely that's wrong, I thought, so I looked it up, betting on the pronunciation I've been using ever since when, namely "segway," like the powered two-wheeled "personal transporter." Yes, "segway" is the go, but you can also use "saygway." Who would have thought?

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Wings Big Year: When did Dooley tick the cranes? Yesterday I asked one question of Sean Dooley's "The Big Twitch?" Today I went hunting for two birds in particular.

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Wings Big Year: A bird is a tick

Wings Big Year: A bird is a tick

Few keen birders avoid the pleasure of ticking off the birds they see against some kind of master list. I know “twitching,” the obsessive pursuit of ticks, can arouse scorn, but shouldn’t a systematic pleasure be stronger than an unfocused pleasure?

A core inspiration for my own birding was Sean Dooley’s 2005 masterpiece about a ticking obsession, “The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A…

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Writer’s Cave #282

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Writer’s Cave #281

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Author Big Year: Day 73

Author Big Year: Day 73

I’m in a shambles. Working desperately hard does not, repeat, does not mean I’m getting in the hours, each and every day, to which I’m committed. Nor are the hours always the work I need to do. I can’t decide whether to draft or produce the next mystery (launching in April) or improve marketing or try new projects. Aaaaaaaaaaaah!

I’ve worked just over 6 hours a day over the 73 days. That’s…

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See a bird on its flyway

See a bird on its flyway

Study is such fun. Yesterday’s Wings Big Year reading unearthed a technical term I’d kind of known about but never appreciated. For migratory birds – creatures who breed in one place and then regularly fly somewhere else, often far away, for the other half of the year – a “flyway” is its annual path on a map of the globe.

This is most relevant for me. If I do indeed launch a special project…

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My Wings Big Year... an hour each day gnawing away at the question: what is a bird?

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How many ways can we ask: What is a bird? Musing on this question, I’d like to figure out what, to me, a bird MEANS. Here’s what Melbourne birder and writer Harry Saddler says, in his wonderful book “

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Wings Big Year: Boring? No!

Wings Big Year: Boring? No!

The technical specs of birds (and animals and everything) sounds boring and is boring until it isn’t and you want to figure out “what a bird is,” that is, how it sits as a species among the 10,000-plus species.

I’ve been reading various books but the best and best-written one so far is Colin Tudge’s “The Secret Life of Birds.” I can’t pretend to have mastered any of the technicals but here is…

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Day 59 I'd love to be immersed in 1957, writing up German post-war reactor efforts, but today is urgent editing of Gentle & Tusk #2.

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Days 45 to 58: An unequal struggle but keep going Another 14 days and much the same story, tracking at 6 hours a day, not the minimum of 6½, definitely not the preferred 8 hours a day to compensate for non-working days.

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Author Big Year: Monitoring The dynamics of this 13-month Big Year, in which I aim for 6.5 hours of quality writing work every day, require me to monitor more closely than I'm accustomed to of late.

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Wings Big Year: How many families? When I tick sighted birds off a list, I'm ticking off a species. But species fit into "families." How many families?

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What a bird isn't

What a bird isn’t

Such a pleasure putting everything else aside each afternoon (or sometimes at night) to spend my Wings Big Year hour musing on this:

What’s a bird?

When we were holidaying recently, we stumbled across a copy of the Simpson & Day bird guide incarnated in its 1984 edition. Here’s the start of its influential words and I like the practical orientation: “When you see a bird, it is going about…

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Wrestling Wrestling the right story, let alone an accurate one, out of the late 56/early 57 morass of Italy and Euratom is a killer. Hence the affirmation or homily, depending on how you see things.