Author: Nancy E. Shaffer

NANCY E. SHAFFER has been an experimental psychologist (M.A., Cognitive Psychology, Rice University), a philosopher (Ph.D., History and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Davis), and software developer. She taught history and philosophy of science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her philosophical work has appeared in the journal Philosophy of Science and her pop-culture philosophy website, All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. Dis/inhbition is her first novel. She currently resides in Tempe, Arizona.

Maybe it doesn’t exist

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 11 Comments

Okay, you want to know what the most difficult subject to research on the interwebs is? “Scientists in fiction,” and “fiction about science.” I am trying to get a list going of novels and short stories that depict believable (or not-so-accurate) scientist characters, the scientific process, or scientific labs in contemporary fiction, that are not science fiction. But Google and LJ and Amazon keep reading that as “science fiction.”

Maybe there are no contemporary novels showing normal, everyday scientists (in a realistic or uninformed fashion). But I don’t believe that.

ETA: Or, you know, graduate school as a setting in a fictional story, as opposed to graduate schools for writing fiction.

Original fiction project – week of 11/22/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 3 Comments

Still organizing and sorting my story ideas, but I’m almost finished and December is upon us. So that means writing already, damn it, and the plan (I think) is this: morning pages. That seemed to work well for me when I was generating ideas, partly because the first-thing-in-the-morning thing kind of bypassed the critical left brain, and partly because it was only ten minutes. You can do ten minutes, can’t you? Less pressure. The other thing I’d like to try is to stick to a chronological narrative. In my earlier writing attempts on this story, I worked off prompts of various sorts, and that produced a lot of random bits. That was on purpose to generate ideas. But now I am thinking that if I want to keep my interest in the writing going, I need to tell myself a story. As in, “this happens, and then that happens, and then, what happens next?”

So that’s the plan.

Original fiction project – week of 11/08/2009

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 2 Comments

November is turning out to be a “take-stock” sort of month for me. Which makes sense. I finished a five-year-long writing project on the last day of October, and am only days away now from my birthday. Today marks the two-year anniversary of starting my present job. Pinned between those those events as I am, I feel take-stocky–cleaning the disaster zone that is my house after pouring most of my energy into writing and home improvement; organizing and filing away the piles of paper work that have just accumulated because I throw everything papery that is not an unpaid bill or obvious junk mail in a big pile; making a *budget* (eep).

And continuing the process of pulling together and collating all the ideas on my new story I’ve come up with in the last year.

I think the next step will be to pick a few of the ideas I like best, and just start writing. No outline, minimal quality control, no word count or deadline goals. And as soon as I run out of ideas, return to my giganamous idea font. And of course report in here that I am indeed doing that.