... because, once you do that, you have all but guaranteed that the mother of all cases of writer's block will descend on you as soon as you hit "Publish" on that first post.
Probably at least half of the posts that I've written with the intention of having them be part of a series ended up as stand-alones.
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Post #300
Numbers:
Blog founded - 9/4/2007
100th post - 1/1/2009
Interval between blog founding and 100th post: approx. 1 year, 5 months
200th post - 9/20/2010
Interval between 100th post and 200th post: approx. 1 year, 9 2/3 months
300th post - 6/30/2012
Interval between 200th post and 300th post: approx. 1 year, 9 months
Amazing. I was sure I was getting slower, was taking longer to write fewer posts. Looks like that's not really the case, though.
Blog founded - 9/4/2007
100th post - 1/1/2009
Interval between blog founding and 100th post: approx. 1 year, 5 months
200th post - 9/20/2010
Interval between 100th post and 200th post: approx. 1 year, 9 2/3 months
300th post - 6/30/2012
Interval between 200th post and 300th post: approx. 1 year, 9 months
Amazing. I was sure I was getting slower, was taking longer to write fewer posts. Looks like that's not really the case, though.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Blog Changes in Blog Owner's Lengthy Absence
So I leave the blog unattended for a couple months, and when I come back to it I find I can't even get on it anymore! I have to download a whole new browser before I can use it.
Now that I've done that, it seems to work well enough; the post editor screen is a little different, but not by much. And on the dashboard, where you can see a list of all your posts, they have a little counter next to each post showing how many pageviews it has! I really like that feature; now I can see which topics people are most interested in seeing me write about. (Of course, the high view count for some posts may simply reflect the fact that some of my posts are more widely syndicated than others ... but still, that's more information than I had before.)
Now that I've done that, it seems to work well enough; the post editor screen is a little different, but not by much. And on the dashboard, where you can see a list of all your posts, they have a little counter next to each post showing how many pageviews it has! I really like that feature; now I can see which topics people are most interested in seeing me write about. (Of course, the high view count for some posts may simply reflect the fact that some of my posts are more widely syndicated than others ... but still, that's more information than I had before.)
Monday, April 18, 2011
Why is it ...
... that Blogger always seems to have some weird auto-formatting going on that overrides whatever I'm trying to do? Most of the time, it automatically skips a line whenever I put in a line break, but in my last post it's been ignoring my line breaks completely, and showing my post as a huge unbroken wall of text. (I had this problem with WordPress, too, when I would sometimes write for Here Be Dragons).
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
New Series: Autism-Related Gene Spotlight
With this entry, I'm starting a new series of posts: the Autism-Related Gene Spotlight series.
Each post will talk about a different gene that's been identified as possibly having something to do with autism, and will follow more or less the same format.
I ask, and answer, five questions about the gene I'm spotlighting:
1) Where is it? - which chromosome, approximately where on the chromosome, how much space it takes up
2) What does it do? - which should probably read "What does the protein it encodes do," since genes typically don't do things themselves, but rather direct the synthesis of proteins which do things, but whatever.
3) What mutant versions of this gene have been discovered?
4) How do the mutations referred to in 3) affect the expression, structure and function of the gene's protein product?
and 5) How common are each of the mutations identified in 3)?
I will also link to whatever database entries I can find for the gene, so that readers with the training to decipher this stuff on their own can go have a look for themselves.
I'm excited about this series because this is the kind of stuff I studied in college, and I really love feeling like I understand things --- physical processes --- at the smallest level of detail. It's like when you're drawing a picture of something from life --- a tree or a flower, say --- and you've got the overall shape of it sketched out but you have to move in closer to see the details, to know what sort of texture to give the surfaces, and you see another layer of structure, something you couldn't see from farther away but which makes what you had perceived as texture make sense now that you see more of what it's doing.
I'll try to keep the jargon to a minimum, and provide explanations of whatever comes up that needs explaining (in the last post, I had to greatly expand my "What does [SLC4A10] do?" section to explain some things about acid-base chemistry, active transport and the special role ions play in "excitable" cells like neurons), but let me know if my attempts at making this stuff accessible don't go far enough.
Each post will talk about a different gene that's been identified as possibly having something to do with autism, and will follow more or less the same format.
I ask, and answer, five questions about the gene I'm spotlighting:
1) Where is it? - which chromosome, approximately where on the chromosome, how much space it takes up
2) What does it do? - which should probably read "What does the protein it encodes do," since genes typically don't do things themselves, but rather direct the synthesis of proteins which do things, but whatever.
3) What mutant versions of this gene have been discovered?
4) How do the mutations referred to in 3) affect the expression, structure and function of the gene's protein product?
and 5) How common are each of the mutations identified in 3)?
I will also link to whatever database entries I can find for the gene, so that readers with the training to decipher this stuff on their own can go have a look for themselves.
I'm excited about this series because this is the kind of stuff I studied in college, and I really love feeling like I understand things --- physical processes --- at the smallest level of detail. It's like when you're drawing a picture of something from life --- a tree or a flower, say --- and you've got the overall shape of it sketched out but you have to move in closer to see the details, to know what sort of texture to give the surfaces, and you see another layer of structure, something you couldn't see from farther away but which makes what you had perceived as texture make sense now that you see more of what it's doing.
I'll try to keep the jargon to a minimum, and provide explanations of whatever comes up that needs explaining (in the last post, I had to greatly expand my "What does [SLC4A10] do?" section to explain some things about acid-base chemistry, active transport and the special role ions play in "excitable" cells like neurons), but let me know if my attempts at making this stuff accessible don't go far enough.
Friday, October 22, 2010
I Think I'm Finally Starting to Figure ResearchBlogging.org Out ...
I've had an account over at ResearchBlogging.org (a nifty aggregator website for posts about peer-reviewed research) for a year or two now, and though I've tried several times over this period to upload posts there, I never succeeded until today.
Even now, my success rate is nothing to be envious of --- today, I think I've tried to upload seven posts (making many separate attempts at each one, for the most part, although sometimes I get lucky and something will go through on its first or second try), and have only succeeded with four.
My problem, in case anyone reading this also posts at ResearchBlogging.org, is that the thing that scans your posts for citations can't seem to detect mine. I use their Citation Generator, and paste the code into all of my researchy posts, but for whatever reason posts I try to upload keep getting held up and flagged with "No citation" or "Error" messages.
(When I get an error message, it acknowledges that I included a citation, but it tells me the citation "cannot be parsed as XML". I have no idea what to do when it tells me this).
Anyway, here's my page at ResearchBlogging.org --- now with content! Yay!
Even now, my success rate is nothing to be envious of --- today, I think I've tried to upload seven posts (making many separate attempts at each one, for the most part, although sometimes I get lucky and something will go through on its first or second try), and have only succeeded with four.
My problem, in case anyone reading this also posts at ResearchBlogging.org, is that the thing that scans your posts for citations can't seem to detect mine. I use their Citation Generator, and paste the code into all of my researchy posts, but for whatever reason posts I try to upload keep getting held up and flagged with "No citation" or "Error" messages.
(When I get an error message, it acknowledges that I included a citation, but it tells me the citation "cannot be parsed as XML". I have no idea what to do when it tells me this).
Anyway, here's my page at ResearchBlogging.org --- now with content! Yay!
Friday, October 1, 2010
Wow, A Blog Award!
Clay and Corina have both decided to give me the Versatile Blogger Award. Thank you, to both of you. You are both good writers, and you both handle such a broad range of subjects so well, it's an honor to be chosen by you.Anyway, this award, like so many others, comes with a meme: now that I have it, I have to share seven things about myself and then pass the award on to seven other bloggers I like (and, presumably, think are versatile).
Seven weird, random fun facts about me:
1. If you follow pop psychology at all (and I do --- we all need something to snicker at), you'll have heard something about digit ratio; if the ring finger is longer than the index finger, it means you're more masculine. Simon Baron-Cohen has also tried to tie digit ratios to autism, as per his theory that autism = hypermasculinity.
Being a big, butch, queer autistic woman, I naturally wanted to see if I displayed the expected masculine pattern of finger lengths, so I measured mine --- all the while taking it about as seriously as a newspaper horoscope or a fortune cookie, mind --- and found that each of my hands has a different digit ratio. On the left hand, the ring finger is longer than the index finger; on the right, they're the same length.
2. I have enormous trouble telling right from left. At *best*, I have to hold up my hands in an "L" shape and see which one makes the "L" point the right direction to determine right from left; at worst, I forget which way an "L" is supposed to point so I just pick one at random.
This runs in my family; my grandmother and sister are like that too. (My grandmother would always get teased at work about "Polish lefts").
3. I've flown an airplane! A Cessna 172. It was one of those introductory flying lessons, where the instructor helps you do the pre-flight checks and sits next to you while you take off and fly around, then takes over when it's time to land.
4. I love M&Ms, but have "rules" for eating them. I eat them in groups of 3, 5 or 6, either all the same color or one of each color. (If its groups of three different-colored ones, lately I've been only eating primary colors. Other colors I just eat in single-color handfuls).
5. When I was a kid, I was terrified of bees and wasps. Like, if I saw one I would freeze up and have to go inside RIGHT AWAY. I am still jumpy around wasps, as they seem to be less predictable than bees.
6. All Gatorade tastes green to me.
7. My oldest T-shirt, which has a design of a cow skull on the front, a bald eagle carrying off a diamondback rattlesnake on the back, with red, blue and black tie-dye on the sleeves and sides, dates from when I was 8 years old. This is impressive when you consider how large I am now --- I
So, now, seven people I think are versatile bloggers!
Urocyon
Amanda Baggs (probably a bit hubristic for me to name her, since her writing helped make up the foundation of online neurodiversity, but she practically defines "versatile blogger," so I'd feel weird not naming her)
Clarissa
Astrid
Daisy
... and two more who don't seem to be writing for the general public anymore, but who are both terrific writers who tackle a broad array of topics with aplomb: Anemone Cerridwen and Kowalski.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Post #200!
Right now, this is the 200th post on this blog, though that will probably change once I finish up some very old posts in the draft queue --- some of which I'll want to keep backdated so that they will appear in chronological order as part of a series.
There's also another milestone I passed recently: this blog is now a little over three years old.
Two hundred posts over three years means I average about a post a week, with two every third week. Given how long it's taken me to write posts lately, that sounds incredible.
There's also another milestone I passed recently: this blog is now a little over three years old.
Two hundred posts over three years means I average about a post a week, with two every third week. Given how long it's taken me to write posts lately, that sounds incredible.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Neither This Blog Nor My Etsy Store Is Dead ...
... and what better way to demonstrate those two facts than by posting pictures of my latest offering?
One reason I haven't been posting, reading or commenting as much on blogs is because I've been having a glut of ideas for jewelry pieces, and thus have been spending a lot of time making them.
As I might have mentioned before, I love geometric shapes. I also love contrasting colors.
This panel bracelet manages to tie both of those things I think are awesome together, with its framed boxes in alternating canary yellow and ... whatever you call a light blue that has a (very slight) hint of teal or turquoise in it. Each of those panels is made of twelve rows of twelve seed beads, all woven together with peyote stitch. (The beads are wider than they are long, so a 12 x 12 matrix ends up being a rectangle, not a square).
Another thing I love --- on bracelets, at least; on necklaces they tend not to stay fastened --- is a button or toggle clasp. Much easier to open or close than those thumb-operated ones with the tiny levers that require you either to have long fingernails (nope) or to never, ever lose your grip (also nope) in order to open them one-handed. Lately, just about everything I make has a button clasp, but I did get a set of toggle clasps recently that I decided to use making these:
I really like this motif of the rectangular panels with geometric designs on them strung together on a sort of cuff. I think it's one of the more original design templates I've come up with, and I'm definitely doing a lot more with it.
One reason I haven't been posting, reading or commenting as much on blogs is because I've been having a glut of ideas for jewelry pieces, and thus have been spending a lot of time making them.Most of them are sitting around in a half-finished state, as problems arise and have to be troubleshot, worked around or --- sometimes --- the piece in question needs to be started over altogether.
(Problems usually take the form of too many loose ends not staying hidden, too many unsightly knots or awkward bulges, or a bead unexpectedly shattering as I try to force too many strands of thread through it.)
But I have two new projects that *are* totally done, and here's one of them!
As I might have mentioned before, I love geometric shapes. I also love contrasting colors.This panel bracelet manages to tie both of those things I think are awesome together, with its framed boxes in alternating canary yellow and ... whatever you call a light blue that has a (very slight) hint of teal or turquoise in it. Each of those panels is made of twelve rows of twelve seed beads, all woven together with peyote stitch. (The beads are wider than they are long, so a 12 x 12 matrix ends up being a rectangle, not a square).Another thing I love --- on bracelets, at least; on necklaces they tend not to stay fastened --- is a button or toggle clasp. Much easier to open or close than those thumb-operated ones with the tiny levers that require you either to have long fingernails (nope) or to never, ever lose your grip (also nope) in order to open them one-handed. Lately, just about everything I make has a button clasp, but I did get a set of toggle clasps recently that I decided to use making these:(That's my arm --- big, hairy, and stylish!)
I made three of these; two to sell/wear myself until they are sold, and one I gave as a gift.
I really like this motif of the rectangular panels with geometric designs on them strung together on a sort of cuff. I think it's one of the more original design templates I've come up with, and I'm definitely doing a lot more with it. Sunday, May 30, 2010
"Autism Science Blogging"
In the comments section of this final post at Here Be Dragons, Riel and Yarrow^Amorpha articulated some things that had always bothered them about the Autism Hub:
(Here are several of Kowalski's previous posts dealing with unexamined biases and unchecked privilege in the skeptical, atheist, autism, liberal- and radical-feminist blogospheres).
I don't have a problem with autism- and/or science-related blogs (or blogs devoted to other topics that sometimes dabble in science) writing a lot of anti-vaccine-debunking posts; debunking posts help make a whole field somewhat accessible to laypeople, by sketching the outlines of whole complicated bodies of evidence that it would be really hard or time-consuming to discover on one's own, and sometimes debunking each permutation of the vaccines-cause-autism meme requires you to talk about very different things.
It it's the thimerosal-in-vaccines-causes-autism incarnation, you can get into the pathophysiology of mercury poisoning and how it differs from what's generally been observed about the brains of autistic people, and you can also get into all the different epidemiological studies comparing autism prevalence before and after thimerosal was phased out of a given country's vaccines. If it's the measles-DNA-in-MMR-causes-autism variant, though, you get into very different matters: how the immune system works, how measles virus infects a host and causes disease, what viral DNA can and can't do inside a human cell.
I love this kind of writing, and do a fair amount of it myself. (Indeed, this was one of the first things I wanted to do on the Internet! My first-ever plan for a website, which I had to abandon as being way too ambitious, was to create one big webpage indexing *all* of the autism-related research articles I knew of; this blog was to be separate, dealing only with autism in fiction. I later decided to just write about whatever research interested me on this blog, too, since my rudimentary computer skills do not allow me to build a website from scratch!)
I certainly understand what Riel and Yarrow^Amorpha are talking about when they mention the ignorant, intolerant attitudes toward autism, and toward disability in general, in much autism-related science blogging, though. Most writing I've seen debunking the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theory* includes at least one disclaimer about how the writer is totally not suggesting that autism is anything less than a terrible disease that ought to be eradicated, and the writer understands the desperation parents of autistic children feel, especially since autism is incurable. Our existence is a terrible tragedy that ought to have been averted; that's the common ground on which reasonable people are encouraged to meet in these discussions.
That's to say nothing of the casual ableism that permeates so many of these posts, and especially their comment threads. Armchair diagnosis of quacks and Internet cranks with various mental illnesses masquerades as critique, serving no purpose but registering the author's and commenters' disdain for whomever is being discussed while at the same time making readers who are actually diagnosed with whatever mental illness is being bandied about as a slur feel shut out of the discussion.
Anyway, I just wanted to reproduce, and endorse, those observations of Riel and Yarrow^Amorpha's while also defending debunking.
*Anymore, I suspect I'm doing that particular belief too much credit by calling it a "hypothesis"; hypotheses are for testing, and get modified or discarded when the evidence proves them wrong. The "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism seems to be impervious to evidence.
There's a lot on the Hub that doesn't seem to have much to do with ethics or reality. We occasionally got the impression that it was really by and for this clique of people who all had this thing they called "autism science blogging." Which seemed to have little to do with what we understood science to be or with autistic people's lives, and to be mostly about making repetitive snarky debunking posts every time anyone anywhere says anything about autism being caused by vaccines and/or mercury poisoning, no matter how many times they have previously established that it is not. Often with ignorant to downright appalling attitudes about disability in general mixed in, and oh-so-fun ableist language. I think you [Kowalski] blogged about that previously, actually.
(Here are several of Kowalski's previous posts dealing with unexamined biases and unchecked privilege in the skeptical, atheist, autism, liberal- and radical-feminist blogospheres).
I don't have a problem with autism- and/or science-related blogs (or blogs devoted to other topics that sometimes dabble in science) writing a lot of anti-vaccine-debunking posts; debunking posts help make a whole field somewhat accessible to laypeople, by sketching the outlines of whole complicated bodies of evidence that it would be really hard or time-consuming to discover on one's own, and sometimes debunking each permutation of the vaccines-cause-autism meme requires you to talk about very different things.
It it's the thimerosal-in-vaccines-causes-autism incarnation, you can get into the pathophysiology of mercury poisoning and how it differs from what's generally been observed about the brains of autistic people, and you can also get into all the different epidemiological studies comparing autism prevalence before and after thimerosal was phased out of a given country's vaccines. If it's the measles-DNA-in-MMR-causes-autism variant, though, you get into very different matters: how the immune system works, how measles virus infects a host and causes disease, what viral DNA can and can't do inside a human cell.
I love this kind of writing, and do a fair amount of it myself. (Indeed, this was one of the first things I wanted to do on the Internet! My first-ever plan for a website, which I had to abandon as being way too ambitious, was to create one big webpage indexing *all* of the autism-related research articles I knew of; this blog was to be separate, dealing only with autism in fiction. I later decided to just write about whatever research interested me on this blog, too, since my rudimentary computer skills do not allow me to build a website from scratch!)
I certainly understand what Riel and Yarrow^Amorpha are talking about when they mention the ignorant, intolerant attitudes toward autism, and toward disability in general, in much autism-related science blogging, though. Most writing I've seen debunking the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy theory* includes at least one disclaimer about how the writer is totally not suggesting that autism is anything less than a terrible disease that ought to be eradicated, and the writer understands the desperation parents of autistic children feel, especially since autism is incurable. Our existence is a terrible tragedy that ought to have been averted; that's the common ground on which reasonable people are encouraged to meet in these discussions.
That's to say nothing of the casual ableism that permeates so many of these posts, and especially their comment threads. Armchair diagnosis of quacks and Internet cranks with various mental illnesses masquerades as critique, serving no purpose but registering the author's and commenters' disdain for whomever is being discussed while at the same time making readers who are actually diagnosed with whatever mental illness is being bandied about as a slur feel shut out of the discussion.
Anyway, I just wanted to reproduce, and endorse, those observations of Riel and Yarrow^Amorpha's while also defending debunking.
*Anymore, I suspect I'm doing that particular belief too much credit by calling it a "hypothesis"; hypotheses are for testing, and get modified or discarded when the evidence proves them wrong. The "hypothesis" that vaccines cause autism seems to be impervious to evidence.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
New Blog Feature: Executive Summaries
Stephanie Lynn Keil left a comment on this post at FWD/Forward that I think raises a very good point: long, densely-written blog posts are inaccessible to people with some kinds of cognitive disabilities.
As I was reading her comment and nodding along, it occurred to me that I might be one of the writers whose style prevents Stephanie (and probably others) from reading many of my posts! My posts can get very long, and I tend to write long, confusing sentences.
Also, my posts sometimes change their focus as I'm writing them; it can take me hours, days, or even weeks to write one post, so by the time I reach the end of writing one of my longer posts, I can hardly remember what I was talking about when I started writing the thing. I imagine the reader probably feels a similar confusion!
So, I've decided I will start doing short (shooting for 1-3 paragraphs) Executive Summaries of my longer, more information- or theory-dense posts.
Some of these will show up as separate posts (for any series of posts, I think it makes the most sense for the Executive Summary to cover all posts in the series, and be included in the series as a separate post), but most will be tacked on to the beginning of posts like an abstract.
If you're using a feed to read my blog, this might mean that you get spammed with wave after wave of old posts to which I'm adding Executive Summaries, so if you want to avoid having your reader jammed with everything I've ever written, you might consider taking me off whatever feed you're using.
As I was reading her comment and nodding along, it occurred to me that I might be one of the writers whose style prevents Stephanie (and probably others) from reading many of my posts! My posts can get very long, and I tend to write long, confusing sentences.
Also, my posts sometimes change their focus as I'm writing them; it can take me hours, days, or even weeks to write one post, so by the time I reach the end of writing one of my longer posts, I can hardly remember what I was talking about when I started writing the thing. I imagine the reader probably feels a similar confusion!
So, I've decided I will start doing short (shooting for 1-3 paragraphs) Executive Summaries of my longer, more information- or theory-dense posts.
Some of these will show up as separate posts (for any series of posts, I think it makes the most sense for the Executive Summary to cover all posts in the series, and be included in the series as a separate post), but most will be tacked on to the beginning of posts like an abstract.
If you're using a feed to read my blog, this might mean that you get spammed with wave after wave of old posts to which I'm adding Executive Summaries, so if you want to avoid having your reader jammed with everything I've ever written, you might consider taking me off whatever feed you're using.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Blog Hiatus Retroactively Declared
If you've been following this blog lately, you've noticed I haven't posted anything in a month or so. The reason for that is mostly that words --- and the gallimaufry of unfinished posts sitting in my draft folder waiting for me to wrangle them into intelligibility --- have been even less tractable than usual this past month. I've also had lots of cool things outside of the blog on which to lavish my attention --- new books! lots of snow! and also, visiting siblings --- as well as physical energy in sufficient abundance to work out semi-regularly.
(The above picture is Boots again, this time exploring the clothes dryer. I took several of him in there, but that one is my favorite because I think he looks like an intrepid feline space explorer, preparing to set paw on some strange new planet).
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Commenting
Because I've been having a huge problem recently with spam comments showing up on old posts (and apparently I am not the only person this is happening to), I've decided to moderate comments on posts more than two weeks old.
I am not exactly happy with this development, since many of my old posts continue to get (legitimately) commented on, and I think having an unmoderated comment section works best for discussion purposes. I'm also not crazy about the additional work it will take for me to personally read and approve every comment. But that's less work than what I do now, which is to read them all (I get comments emailed to me), and then, if they are spam, look for the post they're attached to and delete them there.
So we'll see how this works. At present, the only comments I don't intend to approve are spam, so dissenting readers, please continue to comment. The mod queue is not there to weed you out.
I am not exactly happy with this development, since many of my old posts continue to get (legitimately) commented on, and I think having an unmoderated comment section works best for discussion purposes. I'm also not crazy about the additional work it will take for me to personally read and approve every comment. But that's less work than what I do now, which is to read them all (I get comments emailed to me), and then, if they are spam, look for the post they're attached to and delete them there.
So we'll see how this works. At present, the only comments I don't intend to approve are spam, so dissenting readers, please continue to comment. The mod queue is not there to weed you out.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Happy Blogiversary to Me!
I've been blogging for exactly one year now, it seems. As I've never had a blogiversary before, I don't know what one ususally does to celebrate it, so I will just make something up.
...
I know! I'll make my blogiversary a time to revisit my first and second entries, which lay out the general scheme of the blog as I first envisioned it, and try to chart the blog's progress along that path (or branching off of it, as the case may be). It will be a time of reflection and introspection. And cake.
Well, the most obvious divergence from the initial plan is the inclusion of posts that aren't about books. I mostly did that because, if I only posted after I finished a book having to do with autism, I'd be posting only once every month or two.
Another thing that follows somewhat from that is that I've brought a lot more of myself to the blog than I had initially intended. In blogging about autism research, I bring the scientific part of myself to the front, and in blogging about feminism and about my own life, I allow more of my personality, philosophy and ethics to show through. I do not think these are bad things.
In my second entry, I have a list of themes I hoped to track through their various permutations in different works. I've only gotten to some of these, though I definitely have posts waiting about others. Also, it was part of my general plan to review a bunch of books before jumping into compare-and-contrast mode.
By far, I've written the most posts about autism and gender. I've also managed to write a fair amount about empathy and metaphor, and maybe obliquely dealt with distance in these posts. I haven't done much with the idea of first contact, or anything at all with narrative.
I also think I'm slowly adding another theme to the list: context. This refers both to the environment through which a given autistic character moves, and its effect on him or her, but also the extent to which the whole society in which he or she lives defines autism (and, by extension, the character). I think sci-fi is most conducive to this kind of analysis, if only because sci-fi writers make up whole societies, so they have to spend more time describing them than plain old fiction writers, who are free to restrict their scope to the characters' private lives.
I'm also gearing up to do another series of posts, this time on basic autism science. Look out, Internet!
...
I know! I'll make my blogiversary a time to revisit my first and second entries, which lay out the general scheme of the blog as I first envisioned it, and try to chart the blog's progress along that path (or branching off of it, as the case may be). It will be a time of reflection and introspection. And cake.
Well, the most obvious divergence from the initial plan is the inclusion of posts that aren't about books. I mostly did that because, if I only posted after I finished a book having to do with autism, I'd be posting only once every month or two.
Another thing that follows somewhat from that is that I've brought a lot more of myself to the blog than I had initially intended. In blogging about autism research, I bring the scientific part of myself to the front, and in blogging about feminism and about my own life, I allow more of my personality, philosophy and ethics to show through. I do not think these are bad things.
In my second entry, I have a list of themes I hoped to track through their various permutations in different works. I've only gotten to some of these, though I definitely have posts waiting about others. Also, it was part of my general plan to review a bunch of books before jumping into compare-and-contrast mode.
By far, I've written the most posts about autism and gender. I've also managed to write a fair amount about empathy and metaphor, and maybe obliquely dealt with distance in these posts. I haven't done much with the idea of first contact, or anything at all with narrative.
I also think I'm slowly adding another theme to the list: context. This refers both to the environment through which a given autistic character moves, and its effect on him or her, but also the extent to which the whole society in which he or she lives defines autism (and, by extension, the character). I think sci-fi is most conducive to this kind of analysis, if only because sci-fi writers make up whole societies, so they have to spend more time describing them than plain old fiction writers, who are free to restrict their scope to the characters' private lives.
I'm also gearing up to do another series of posts, this time on basic autism science. Look out, Internet!
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Themes
Though each book I write about will have its own unique set of implications, there are a few themes I expect to be most important, and which will form the prism through which I look at the books as I read them. Here they are, along with some questions I'll be keeping in mind:
- Narrative - some research indicates that autistic people tell and interpret stories differently than neurotypicals. How do autistic writers tend to structure the stories they write? Do neurotypical authors do anything unusual with narrative structure to try and capture the mental states of their autistic characters? What effect do these variations in narrative structure have on the reader?
- Metaphor - what metaphors are used in the book? How do they try to shape a reader's thoughts about autism or autistic people?
- Distance - how is the distance between the reader and the autistic character(s) used in the book? Is any attempt made to bridge it? If it is not bridged, is there a thematic reason for it?
- Empathy - autistic writers make some unusual connections in their work, often by the process of intuitive identification we call empathy. With whom or what does the author identify, and what does that identification tell readers about his/her experience of autism?
- First contact - many autism-related memoirs, whether written by autistics or by parents of autistics, focus on the issue of "overcoming" autism and beginning to engage with the wider world. How does the "first contact" episode inform the rest of the narrative? What does the way the narrative is structured say about the importance of this episode in the author's eyes?
- Gender and autism - girls with autism often experience conflict between autistic identity and the role they are expected to play as women. Autism itself is a highly gendered category, with 4 of 5 autistics being male and with the overall picture of autism based on a male template. How do autistic women and girls deal with pressure to be "feminine" in ways that don't come naturally to them? How do they establish an identity as "autistic" when the male model of autism might not wholly apply to them? What themes do female autistic authors deal with that male authors do not? Does "the autistic experience" seem to vary across the genders?
These are the Big Themes that we'll come to again and again on this blog; if I were teaching a class in this, these would be on the syllabus. These are also the likely topics of free-standing posts in the future.
Welcome to my blog
To whomever might be reading, here's an introductory mini-post just to tell you Autist's Corner is up and running, even though there's no content yet.
I will take this opportunity to sketch, briefly, an outline of the shape I want this blog to take. The main content will be essays on the portrayal of autism, and the handling of autism-related issues, in the books I single out for discussion. There will also be the occasional essay on a single theme, in which many books are discussed in the context of one or two general points about autism writing, but mostly you'll see a near-constant 1:1 book-post ratio.
I intend to range all across genres in the books I write about here, from autiebiography (Thinking in Pictures, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere and Songs of the Gorilla Nation) to science fiction (The Speed of Dark, Oryx and Crake) to mystery (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) to other nonfiction (Diagnosing Jefferson, Animals in Translation, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, Women from Another Planet?). That's not a complete list of the books I intend to dissect here, but it's representative and will keep me busy for a while.
However, if any of you *are* reading, and anybody has a suggestion for a book that's not on the list, I'd be perfectly open to blogging about that, too.
I will take this opportunity to sketch, briefly, an outline of the shape I want this blog to take. The main content will be essays on the portrayal of autism, and the handling of autism-related issues, in the books I single out for discussion. There will also be the occasional essay on a single theme, in which many books are discussed in the context of one or two general points about autism writing, but mostly you'll see a near-constant 1:1 book-post ratio.
I intend to range all across genres in the books I write about here, from autiebiography (Thinking in Pictures, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere and Songs of the Gorilla Nation) to science fiction (The Speed of Dark, Oryx and Crake) to mystery (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) to other nonfiction (Diagnosing Jefferson, Animals in Translation, Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, Women from Another Planet?). That's not a complete list of the books I intend to dissect here, but it's representative and will keep me busy for a while.
However, if any of you *are* reading, and anybody has a suggestion for a book that's not on the list, I'd be perfectly open to blogging about that, too.
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