Hello all you beautiful people!

Alas, this newsletter is a bit late due to some health issues compounding with my PhD stress. I have the most sensitive gut now, and it apparently doesn’t take much to send my gut into a firey blaze.

My PhD is so close, and yet so far. I’m graduating in early May, but it’s looking like my defense won’t be until early June. And my deadline for my science paper’s revisions have been delayed until late April, which means I’ll only have a month (or less) to write my thesis.

…Yeeeeeaaaaaah, that wasn’t the original plan. That’s all I can say on that…

Anyway, onto the newsletter for March wrap-up!

Blog Post is Late!

It’s 80% done, but due to family visiting followed by a solid week of inflammatory bowel syndrome flaring up

But I can tell you what the post is about: I’m exploring whether or not gunpowder would be a plausible discovery in a specifically fantasy setting by going into the history of gunpowder. It’s super fun to go through the mental exercise of determining how the existence of magic changes the development of gunpowder.

I’ll send out a new newsletter once I have the blog post up!

New Scicomm Website!

Yes! You heard right! Your girl has a website!

 https://www.rebeccamellema.com/

There’s a lot of “Coming Soon” portions of the website, such as the video section, but I have a whole section on my resumé, which is the main reason why I set up the website. All of the professional science writers have told me to have a website for my future work.

Also, apparently the link to my blog post is glitching? Let me know if it’s working on your end?

Critiques are very welcome!

Freelance Science Writer Major Issues

So, as of today, I have major roadblocks for my desire to be a freelance science writer.

A lot of science journals have you pay to access their articles. When you’re

Currently, my original plan to work at a university (like the University of Washington) to allow me access to this privilege is not going to work (see cuts to universities and the NIH by our current administration). However, I was informed by a mentor that I’d be able to use my alumni status to access

Turns out… NOPE! I lose access to a truckload of scientific articles and have to pay to read them. This is a problem for me because I can’t spend money to write a scientific paper for someone. As science papers generally cite 50-60 papers, and each paper could potentially be $19.99 to access, that’s about $1000 I have to spend to write a paper *at minimum*.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a horrible business practice.

I’m going to start asking some freelancers how one gets around that, because that’s not a sustainable business model.

Scicomm Projects

I’m tempted to write a whole “letter to the editor” on how our administration is wasting our tax dollars on “studying autism from vaccines.” I have so much to write, and yet my PhD is keeping me from drafting that. It’s also keeping me from drafting my pitch for a university article… ya know what? My PhD is holding up a lot of things.

Also, I’m teaching myself animation for future scicomm videos! I’m slowly figuring out the whole process on Toonsquid app (Thank you parents for helping me get a new ipad to do animation and science art!). I don’t currently have a usable video to show off here, but I will next time! Now, this is a project I can focus on because I’m using animation in my thesis presentation :)

Book Chat: Discussion about Self-Publishing Decision

(This is a part 1 of this particular question!)

Okay, let’s answer the question: why am I choosing to self publish my little dragon rider book?

The short answer is: I don’t think it’s sellable to a traditional publisher.

I’m not saying the story is not fun. I’m not saying my writing is bad. I’m not saying people won’t enjoy the heck out of this story. But this story is nowhere close to what the market is looking for. No publisher is going to pick this up. There’s a small chance I could get an agent to maybe take a chance on my work, but I think that’s as far as I’d get in the traditional publishing route.

To give you an idea… My main character is an asexual, aromantic college student with Egyptian ancestry in a plot that makes fun of rider stories while diving into actual science. It has no romance subplot, it actively make fun of fantasy tropes, it’s campy and self-aware, and it blends the magical school genre with the mystery genre (which is not the “hot genre” combo at the moment).

Now, this makes this book an absolute blast to write. It’s the story I need right now (as the jokes I get to make about academia gives me great joy). However, it’s not a story that publishers would “bet” on, so to speak.

An author I’ve been following has also stated that dragon stories are not hot topics right now. This could change by the time my book’s ready, but that involves me trying to guess the publishing market, which is not a good use of my time. And as this is a hobby of mine and not expected, I’m not going to change course and try to write to the market. I’m going to write to a niche audience, and I’m going to have fun doing so.

And lastly, and this sucks to say, but this current administration may start pulling strings to censor books. It’s likely my book may be unpublishable through the traditional route because I hit a LOT of checkboxes on the “censoring” radar: a person of color as the main character, people with disabilities populating my setting, discussions of colonialism being brought up, plenty of queer characters, and heavy critiques of the military.

Do I know if that’s how things will work by the time I can start publishing? I don’t actually know, but with how wild things have become, I’m starting to plan for the worst. I’m expecting publishing companies to start to trend toward what the administration wants, and will be pleasantly surprised if it does otherwise.

I’ll talk in my next newsletter about why self-publishing is also on the dock: thanks to my scicomm work, pursuing self-publishing’s daunting work doesn’t scare me as it’s close to what I’m already doing.

Onward to April!

I unfortunately don’t have any DnD maps, but I have been playing with Heroforge and have been trying out new techniques to make characters and came up with this hero:

I used some double-modeling tricks to get helmet and armor for this build!

Anyhow, that’s all I have for right now. Gotta get back to work (and taxes… still have to finish that in time…)

Cheers!

-Becca