Melissa Barton, Writer

I missed a few days and I still need to get some of the photos off my phone (from the days when I didn’t take a real camera with me), but I think Project 30 was a success for me.

I’ve seen three major approaches to projects like this:

1. Focus on your favorite type of photography and try to improve it.
2. Focus on a less comfortable type of photography and try to improve it.
3. Attempt to encapsulate your day in a photo.

I started out well within my comfort zone–macros of flowers–because flowers hold still, it’s spring (hooray!), and I’m trying to push the limits of my digital point-and-shoot (they’re pushed). By the end of the month, I had moved more towards the third approach.

I improved some aspects of my photography, and managed to create a fairly interesting (to me, anyway) account of my month: spring in Colorado, Florissant, Steamboat Springs, and my trip to Houston last week. There aren’t a lot of people in my photographs because I don’t like posting photos of people online without asking first. The main thing I am taking away from this experience is that I’ve pushed my point-and-shoot as far as it can reasonably go, and I seriously need to start looking at DSLRs if I want to take the photos I imagine.

You can see most of my photos in my Project30 Flickr Photoset.

I forgot to take photos on the the 8th and 11th (or rather, I remembered, but they’re not worth posting). It’s been a really busy week.

April 9: A tree on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus, from a bus stop.

April 10: It snowed again! Probably not the exact same leaflet from the 6th, but the same bush.

A gratuitous cat photo from the 10th below the cut. This one is always in motion and difficult to photograph (the other is low-contrast black and camera-shy and also difficult to photograph).

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I have a fairly large collection of books on writing, most of which have never been very helpful. These are the ones that I refer to frequently, or that have an impact on my writing:

Ideas into Words: Mastering the Craft of Science Writing, by Elise Hancock
ISBN 0801873304
This slim little book doesn’t talk about marketing or selling your writing at all; it talks about crafting a good science story (although the principles are broadly applicable), and does so in a clear, elegant way that makes it a genuinely enjoyable book to read. I reread Ideas into Words periodically to remind myself that science stories are everywhere, and not always obviously science.

A Field Guide for Science Writers, eds. by Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson (1st and 2nd ed.), and Robin Marantz Henig (2nd ed.)
ISBN 0195124944 (1st ed.), 0195174992 (2nd ed.)
This is cheating, because the two editions are actually completely different books, and both are full of excellent essays about writing techniques, finding stories, covering difficult science and environmental topics, marketing, and working on the PR side. Both are invaluable resources for the new science writer. The first edition is out of print, so snap it up if you find a used copy.

Word Painting, by Rebecca McClanahan
ISBN 1582970254
This is the best general book on writing craft that I’ve read. It’s about writing vivid and meaningful description, and is equally useful for the writer of creative nonfiction, fiction, or poetry. A truly inspiring book.

The Renegade Writer, by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell
ISBN 1933338008
It’s kind of a cliched book for my top 5, but this is really a very useful introduction to the business of writing and marketing yourself. Not all of the ideas are “renegade,” but the ones I’ve tried so far have generally been helpful, and it’s a nicely organized quick reference book. I also read the Renegade Writer Blog.

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments, by Jenna Glatzer
ISBN 097220265X
I find this book to be a nice compliment to The Renegade Writer, and I appreciate Glatzer’s specific examples of how she broke into trades and worked her way up to major consumer magazines.

Not on the List, Thanks to the Internet: Writer’s Market
While I liked the essays and articles on writing and selling in the front, I like not having to buy a new copy every couple years and saving the shelf space more. It’s not a comprehensive index of all publications that use freelancers, but it’s a very good starting place.

A wall on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus:

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The University of Colorado Museum of Natural History has a new informational brochure, in time for the American Association of Museums annual meeting in Denver, April 27-May 1. The UCM will be hosting the Association of College & University Museum & Galleries meeting on April 26.

As a member of the marketing committee, I drafted and edited the brochure text. The amazing graphic design was done by Kristin Weber of Sugar Design, using photographs from the museum. It’s a beautiful design, which aptly conveys what many of us think natural history museums are about: nature, people, art, and the intersections between them.

I’ve decided to take at least a photo a day for a month, to improve my photography skills (and my looking-at-the-world skills), because I’m not sure I want to tackle a year yet. Here’s yesterday’s:

I was very excited yesterday when I noticed the trees and bushes around my apartment were finally leafing out in earnest.

Of course, this morning it snowed. That’s Colorado.

Yesterday I came across MileHive.com, a collaborative effort of Denver-area journalists and citizens. I’ve seen some projects like this before and I’ve always been skeptical, but this looks different. For one thing, it’s organized by folks with serious journalistic resumes, like Michael deYoanna. All articles are edited, so there’s quality control–I particularly like the current headline story about water shortages and Colorado’s forests. It’s written by Rick Cables, the Rocky Mountain Regional Forester, so it’s the kind of story a regular newspaper would probably see as a conflict of interest. Personally, I think the view from inside an organization like the Forest Service is as important as the view from a “neutral” journalist, provided that all affiliations are fully disclosed.

Here’s what MileHive.com is about:

So Michael [deYoanna] came back to Chad [DiPrince], shared his thoughts, and the two decided to pursue an “experiment in online journalism and forums,” a place where Michael and Chad could ask a few friends along for the ride. From there, the idea progressed to a place for a larger community, opening the floodgates for what initial projections show to be an at least workable model for a diverse, nonpartisan online news-and-views magazine. MileHive is still defining itself.

I think this site has a lot of interesting potential, and I’m excited to be getting involved (and to be able to use the photo of me sitting in a tree–it’s my favorite photo of myself, and a little too artsy for formal use).

For the February edition of Bookslut, I reviewed Chuck Thompson’s Smile When You’re Lying, a book which sets out to expose the seamy underside of travel and travel writing. My review was fairly positive, but I agree with Rolf Potts that Thompson doesn’t quite accomplish his stated goal.

All the same, there are a number of stories in the book–particularly the Caribbean and Eastern Europe chapers–that I think are well worth reading, although for different reasons than the title suggests.

Or on the business of writing, as the case may be.

1. Don’t be afraid to turn down assignments.
It can be hard to turn down assignments, especially when you’re breaking in, but taking an assignment that you’re too busy for or feel unenthused about (or that’s poorly paid) can lead to more stress than it’s worth. And stress can lead to missed deadlines and other bad things. Turning down an assignment that’s not right for you frees up your time for a better job to come along.

2. If you’re going to write for free to break in, do it for a legitimate nonprofit.
While you don’t necessarily have to write for free to break in, you’ll feel better about donating your time–and editors will respect the clip more–if it’s for a local nonprofit rather than an internet start-up zine. Donating your skills to a nonprofit you’re passionate about also helps you make contacts that can lead to paying jobs.

3. Volunteering is a great way to find story ideas.
A wide variety of people do volunteer work, from children to retired people, with all kinds of backgrounds, hobbies, and experiences. Think profiles, small business stories, human interest, and so on. You can’t always write about the organization you volunteer for because of conflict of interest, but that doesn’t mean you won’t find stories. I also think it’s important to keep your mind flexible by doing things besides writing.

I wrote this month’s University of Colorado Museum of Natural History Object of the Month, Fossil Ginkgo from Siberia. Every month the Museum website highlights a specimen or artifact from its collection of over 4 million items.

I really enjoyed writing this up–the Kudia River fossils are beautiful and strikingly different from the cold-tolerant plants of today’s eastern Siberia. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much about Kudia River in the scientific literature. I also think ginkgoes in particular are really interesting–today one species survives as the sole representative of an entire order which was once both more diverse and more widespread. Was it primarily climate change that led to the decline of the ginkgoes or did other factors come into play?

It’s a bonus that the Kudia River fossils were collected by one of my scientific heroes, T.D.A. Cockerell.

Looking at fossils from all over the world is way of traveling for me–both through space and time. One of my most profound experiences while traveling recently was seeing petrified redwood stumps in Iceland. While I knew that redwoods once grew all over the world, imagining the redwood forests of California while surrounded by the mossy volcanic highlands of modern Iceland really brought home to me how much the world has changed.

Photo: Wouter Hagens