Hello all of you beautiful people!

How’re we all doing?

Me, I’ve moved past despair and am now fluctuating between indignation and fatigue. No in-between. All while scurrying to finish these experiments for my paper to get published to then let me graduate.

Before I continue, I have a political checklist for folks (I will send out a larger newsletter with more actions. Things just changed so drastically from last newsletter.):

1) Call your representatives daily. Use the 5call app that provides a script. The more we contact our representatives the more scared they get (if they’re not doing their job) or the more encouragement they get.

2) Get a library card and use your library. Libraries are some of the greatest resources for free education right now, and we need to use and protect them.

3) Get rid of Amazon Prime and boycott both Amazon and Target. There is a 40-day Target boycott starting today (to protest against slashing their DEI initiatives) and a week of Amazon boycotting starting tomorrow as well (Because Jeff Bezos sucks ass and is backing Trump and Elon Muskrat). Personally, I’m doing an indefinite boycotting of these places and more until things change, but if you’re looking for things you can do, you can hop onto these nationwide boycotts now.

What I’m Doing Right Now

Tomorrow is the nationwide “March for Science” day. At 12-1pm, I’m going to go march at the state capitol with— I hope— many other people to bring attention to the administration’s attack on scientists.

I’m also blasting out information via all of my social media, like marches, or boycotts, or whatever else I think may be important.

I’m calling my reps.

I’m boycotting like no-one’s business.

What I’d like to do is start doing things locally, like building up science communication programs or actually doing science communication to the , or write articles, but I’m knee deep in science-paper-revision-purgatory. No, I don’t want to be doing online activisim, as that’s not as effective as in-person activism, but that’s how we’re rolling until I graduate. So until then, I’m acting as an amplifier.

Scicomm Projects!

I finally finished my Dungeons and Dragons science adventure! I’m so proud at how it turned out! I haven’t seen the folks I wrote it for post it online yet, and since I’m treating this as a commission, I’m not going to show the interiors yet, but it looks so cool folks! I’m so proud at how the whole thing came together. (I’m finally a D&D writer! Self-published, yes, but I’ll take it!)

On March 18th, I’m going to be giving a test-run of a workshop on “how scientists can communicate to everyone else.” It’s sneaky of me, if I’m being honest. It’s a presentation that’s supposed to go over my science paper, but I’ve presented this data to this group so many times. Sooooooo, I convinced the organizers to let me give this presentation instead. I have a captive audience. 🙂 

I do have research prepped for the videos I want to try and make, but I need to survive… waves all around me

And finally, I’m starting to work on a website. So many science writers have told me to focus on getting a website to show the wide variety of my skills. I just have to have time to spend time on researching how to use Squarespace.

Blog Posts Are Up and Running Again!

Oh, how I’ve missed these!

I finally managed to finish a blog post in the nick of time for February! (Thank you walking desks at the library: walking while typing makes me super productive).

Link to the post is here!

I had a lot of fun with this one, though it is a bit more “video game focused” than usual.

I’m debating on what my March post should be: Eugenics (and how I loathe it in general), politics in science, or choosing a topic that’s WAY out there, like nano technology in medicine.

Questions about My Book: Characters

I do kind of regret not making question on my form more specific… But we’ll work with it! I’ll answer this in a few parts, with the first part being, “How do I come up with characters”?

For those who are new here, I’m currently writing a book! It’s a dragon-rider parody book with the main character being

If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons with me (or any role-playing game, really), you’ll know that I can come up with characters immediately. This isn’t some innate gift I have, it actually comes from decades of practice.

1) I used to play with beanie babies all the time with my brothers, and each beanie baby had its own distinct personality. These beanie babies all went on extensive adventures that would last weeks and had a massive amount of lore incorporated into each adventure. From a young age, I got used to keeping track of an absurd amount of character motivations, wants and needs, etc.

2) I was trained in theater on-and-off starting at a fairly young age (thanks mom and dad!). I also did musical theater all throughout high-school. While my theater experience specifically trained me to create characters through physical expression (we did daily workshops in class to practice character traits on stage, which included ways of speaking and body language), my class was also trained on how to form and then express subtext (which is the character saying what they want without actually saying it).

3) I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons games since 2018, specializing in intrigue-based games. Within any given session, I’m playing at least 10 non-player characters with unique ways of speaking, wants, desires, and plans.

Now, I know what you’re thinking from my last newsletter: Becca crafts her characters based on the plot. Then she uses her improv skills to craft the necessary characters for the plot.

I actually don’t. Not initially, anyway. When I first create a character, I whip one up immediately on the page (like I do with DnD Non-player characters, it’s all improve) with a distinct look, way of speaking, and one desire that they’re striving to get in the scene that I introduce them in.

For example: Ruth is my main character, or my “MC.” When I created her, the only thing I knew about her as I put my hands to my keyboard is that she was going to be obsessed with dragons. For another character, I knew he was going to be a parody of the “edgy shadow boyfriend” trope that’s prevalent in fantasy. That’s it. And then I played with that in the scene I introduced them in.

However, if you know anything about me, you’ll know I carry around a notebook with me at all times. That notebook is my “testing grounds.” I write test scenes where I have character banter. I have scenes upon scenes that won’t see the light of day because those scenes had the wrong character voice, character choices, or even the wrong character. Behind the scenes fun-fact:

And that, my friends, is how I get the START of a character. I have the voice, I have the character “core,” the character’s voice, and the character’s quirks, but not much else at this point. Very 2D. But after I’ve played with the character for a bit, I can then use the plot points to craft their wants, needs, strengths, and weaknesses based on the plot.

Oh, and then I make their visial representations via heroforge (NEVER AI. Not touching that.). For some reason, having that visual really helps me flesh out the character personality as well. Like, why does this character have a scarf? What’s their color scheme? What’s their ethnicity? Seeing them really solidifies the character in my head.

That’s All For Now!

I’m really hoping I have more to show you after this month. I’m really hoping I get to tell you that I’ve revised and sent back my paper so I can start focusing on my thesis. I’m also hoping that I can tell you things are looking up politically, but that may be reaching too far.

Welp, that’s all I got. Have a great Thursday! (I’m off to go make some posters for tomorrow’s march!)