TO MY READERS, BEFORE YOU START:

Firstly, this newsletter is going to serve a slightly different purpose now, thanks to the new administration’s relentless onslaught on science and intellectualism. While I’ll still provide fun updates

If you can’t deal with politics right now, please scroll below to the Publishing: How I Plot section and you’ll be to our regular, fun scicomm content. However, I do ask that you please call your representatives— democratic or republican— and put pressure on them to uphold the constitution and protect targeted groups. Give them Hell.

And secondly—and I will be blunt here— I will not tolerate intolerance. If you support our current administration, my content is not, and will never be, for you.

Now onto some science news:

Last week, I woke up to an announcement that all federal funded grants were frozen. For context, I get paid monthly thanks to a federal training grant. No one knew if the freeze was permanent or temporary. Or if they knew, they weren’t telling me. In fact, at the time, no one was talking about it at my work.

It’s not like I could make myself free to go and ask questions, either; I had to start an long, early experiment where I took blood from colitic (inflamed gut) many mice, scored their disease progression, and then perform multiple experiments on the blood samples. And the experiments were extremely time-sensitive. I was attempting to process the chaos while having blood on my hands.

I had… well, the best I can describe it would be an “silent panic meltdown.” I had to collect blood from mice and perform my experiments while inside, I was screaming inside and feeling my heart palpations slam against my ribs.

“Ah, but Becca: terror and disarray are what they’re going for! Descending into panic means they’re winning!”

Good for them that day, I guess? I mean, I’ve been through chronic pain, multiple medical issues, and a pandemic while also struggling through a PhD. My mental stability limps along on a good day. The fact that they made me panic is kind of a sad, low bar.

Now, funding is currently “back on,” thanks to the amount of noise everyone made, but my colleagues are making plans in case the federal grants are frozen again. In fact, last night, I went to bed to the tune of the Trump administration cutting funding for the National Institute of Health (NIH, which is where most university labs get their funding, mine included) indirects, regardless of the agreed upon right. Indirects pay for support staff, health insurance feeds, pay for building maintenance, electricity, you name it. No, it was not a restful night.

Oh, AND the National Science Foundation has now been told to reject papers that include “woke” words. Many of those words apply to me, including “female” and “women.” However, the words “male” and “man” were omitted from the list. A fantastic signal from my very own government on how they view me. (Did I mention that the “women history month” page on NASA’s website is down? Check out the link below. It’s a GREAT time to be a woman in STEM-she said sarcastically)

If you’re a fellow scientist, this is me preaching to the choir. It’s been a rough week. In fact, if you’re a fellow scientist or science-adjacent worker, this may be the most boring section of the whole newsletter.

If you’re not a fellow scientist: consider this a cry for help from scientists. If you care about biomedical research, if you want the USA to continue to keep up in global science progress, if you like medicines to continue to get better, if you’d like to see me have job opportunities after graduating, start making noise.

Become political.

Call your representatives. Call even if they’re doing what you want— that’s the time to thank them over the phone.

Talk to your neighbors about it. Spread the word of what’s happening and then get them to speak out.

Use and donate to your local libraries, food banks, and other grassroots organizations.

Protect (and pay) science communicators. I’m not saying this for my benefit: I’m not paid to do science communication. I do this as a hobby, which means I’m not scared about my finances should this administration start going after science communicators. I’m fine. But many career science communicators that I know are scared, because they’re in a unique position to bridge the STEM field and community. For an administration that values misinformation and devalues intellectualism, science communicators (and educators in general, as we’ve seen with the administration’s targeting of the Department of Education) have a target on their back.

You don’t have to do all of these forms of protest at once. Choose one or two and focus on those right now and REALLY DIG INTO IT. I’ll put together a list of science communicators that you should follow in a follow up newsletter as well as more actions you can take.

I’m currently considering/working on putting together a workshop for my colleagues at the University of Utah on “how to present science to the laymen audience” (it’s a different version of my usual workshop, as this is geared to ward talking to the public). I’m also really starting to lean into making accessible videos for the public on science papers. However, I can’t stress enough how I’m not going to make a magic bullet, nor am I trying to. I’m good at presenting, so that’s how I’m going to resist.

This whole circus is also happening simultaneously with the last few months of my PhD, which are the most stressful. Yes, my PhD is still charging ahead, which feels like trying to drive the Titanic after we’ve hit the iceberg. I’m not in a fantastic position to organize protests, or write to the newspaper (the former of which I WANT to be doing) while I’m trying to keep my head up. But if you have the emotional and mental capacity to do so, start doing what you can.

Publishing Talk: How I Plot

All right! Back to the fun part of the newsletter!

We got the votes back from last newsletter on what you all want to hear about my creative writing process, and the highest votes were for how I plot!

This is a funny question, because being a Dungeon Master for Dungeons and Dragons has drastically shaped how I plot. It has simultaneously made me plan more and improve more.

I create story concepts and story beginnings all the time. Those, for me, are a dime a dozen. I can create ten story concepts in about a minute, no problem. But I’ll never put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) to . This was my problem with my one-and-only attempt at National Novel Writing month. I had this cool concept of doing a retelling of Thumbelina where she was this badass rockclimber and wilderness EMT, surviving the wilds and socio-political climate of the woodland creatures… except I had NO idea how things were going to end. I would write chapters and they’d just wander. Go nowhere. Overall, I wrote 50,000 words of zippo plot and progression.

However, when I see the ending of a story, suddenly I have a general direction.

Actually, I see both the climax and the ending. In fact, I may come up with the ending first; that’s what happened with a ghost short story I wrote back in college: I saw an image of a candle going out with no wind, and then I backtracked how I could set up for that ending (spoilers, I guess? Oops). The ending/climax is my carrot that I get to write to, and that excitement is what drives me to invest in an actual plot.

(For DnD, I tend to imaging multiple endings that I set up for, but I ultimately don’t decide what ending we ultimately get as it’s communal storytelling. And I’m fine with that; my players always come up with better endings than I do. That said, those exciting climax/endings does inspire how I craft my initial plot. I think of it as knowing what dreadful chaos will happen should my players not stop the plot 🙂 )

Then I revisit the beginning and concept of the story. Keep in mind, I generally don’t know what the heck is happening in the middle. I must firstly ask whether the ending I’ve dreamed up fits with the beginning concept, or does this feel waaaaaaay too far off of the tone and the premise? If not, I’ll gladly sacrifice the beginning, premise, etc. I’m keeping what makes me excited, and everything else will fit around it.

Once I’ve determined the beginning and ending, then I start dreaming up the ending scenes to act 1, act 2, act 3, etc. I’m very inspired by my musical theater days, where each act ends with a big bang. (In DnD, these are the villains you have to face at the end of each story arc, with each defeat bringing you closer to the ultimate big bad). And each act’s ending should be bigger emotionally and cinematically than the last (but not as big as the finales).

Now I have a beginning, middle points, and end. This is now when I go a rework my characters to have their character arcs match the middle points (that’s a whole separate video). In other words: my characters need to have desires, personality, and most importantly, the drive to do the plot. This is very much inspired by my DnD experience: the plot wouldn’t happen without the characters. If the plot happens without the characters, my players would be bored, and my characters would be boring.

So I craft exactly who I need for my exciting scenes.

What I’ve now done is created a cast of characters that will drive the plot. Having the characters really fleshed out at this point is key for my plotting, because they are the tools for betting between the key scenes.

That’s right, folks. I start improvising.

I start every chapter with a general idea of how it’s going to start, and where it needs to end. Very much like a DnD session. Every time I open up my new chapter document, however, I’m going on an improv adventure. This is where I start stitching scenes together, throwing scenes out, or changing who’s in the scenario. Like DnD, I play off of my characters, imagining how I’d respond to them as if they were my own players at a table. My goal for each chapter is progress. If I've written a chapter and I’m no closer to the cool scenes I’m planning for, I have to rewrite the chapter.

Rinse and repeat this process until the story is done! In short: I do plot the major beats of my story, but I discovery write the rest (though I provide myself the necessary tools via character motivations in order to get to the big beats).

SciComm Update

The month of February marks not only the slow decline of my sanity (thanks Trump Administration), but also the return of my regular blog posts! This month, we’re going to look at magical organic limb replacements, specifically limbs from other species added onto a character (think Link’s arm in “Tears of the Kingdom.”)

Also, I did have a post last month: http://gettingthesciencewrite.com/Updates-2025/

It’s an update for what’s to hopefully come this year. I just have to survive this month… sigh…

Coming VERY soon is my DnD science adventure module! I’m so close! If it hadn’t been for some of life’s recent complications, I would have finished the module this week. Most of my time has been working with the layout, as it involves more coding than I’m used to, and the images. I’m going to need to figure out how to make

In terms of videos, I’m still planning on making the “how to write science” and “reading science papers” video series, but the other day, I realized that I had unfettered access to all of the major scurvy papers thanks to my University library. If you don’t know me, I’m a nautical nerd and I can talk for hours about tallship history, including scurvy. After printing out an obscene amount of research papers covering scurvy, I realized that I can make a whole scicomm video about scurvy!! And I want to try something cool, where I record myself making one of my maps while my voiceover goes over the science history of scurvy. The map I want to make is of Treasure Island. I think it’s going to be so cool if I can pull it off!

That’s all for now!

I’m probably going to send out another newsletter this month, but it’s going to be more politically focused.

Thank you so much for bearing with me as I make these sudden change to my newsletter, as well as this unusually long newsletter. I’m going to be adding more “science news” in these as I continue.

Have a great Saturday!