So, my first publication of 2011! Comma Press are doing something very close to my heart: commissioning fiction writers to be inspired by "eureka" moments in science across various disciplines, pairing them up with a scientist, and asking them produce short stories that explore this concept which will be published in an anthology in May.
Being commissioned is both wonderful and fairly scary. First, there was quite a detailed brief for this project. And second, it had to be a minimum of 2500 words. For someone like me who hasn't written anything over 1500 for 3 years, that was like asking me to write a novel (ok, not quite, but fairly daunting!)
Transgenic tadpoles expressing Green Fluorescent Protein
Well, I managed it by approaching it as a set of short short fictions, and got to 2500, just... And the result, We Are All Made of Protein but Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, is inspired by the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which has transformed molecular biology, as I have learned well from the biochemistry lab I am writer-in-residence in and from Nicholas Love, the researcher in the Amaya Lab at Manchester University that I was paired with. GFP allows a researcher to see inside a living organism in real time. It's amazing, as the pic above from his lab shows...
You can read my story here and Nicholas' afterword here. And there are more stories on the Comma site, for physics, chemistry and neuroscience, written by, among others, Annie Clarkson, Stella Duffy and Kate Clanchy. This is very exciting, I'm delighted to be involved...!
8 comments:
How lovely to be able to read this story on the Comma website - I can 'hear' you reading it by the fire in ireland! And the afterword is fascinating... what a great project.
Great story, Tania! And Nicholas' foreword was fascinating. He was quite right to call your story provocative and to say that it 'penetrated the human story' behind the science. It absolutely did that, and much more. Congratulations on the publication!
terrific! I'm off to read it now, in the place where it was meant to be. A great kick-start to the New Year!
Congrats on the publication! What a wonderful way to bring in the new year!
Congratulations! You always have such intriguing titles, too!
V- thanks, how I miss that Irish fireplace!
Sarah -thank you! Not sure I was trying to be provocative but then we don't always know what we are writing, do we?
Thanks, Sue
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Sue, thank you!
Tawnysha, thank you so much for stopping by and commenting, so nice of you!
Rachel, I did get quite excited about that title :)
What an unusual and exciting project. I'm going to have a read right now.
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