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How once woman went from being a SAHM of four to a published freelance science journalist |
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I'm revising this intro after more than 15 years to better reflect my intention When I started this blog in 2004, I was a stay at home mom to two small children, a college graduate with a degree in English and Astrophysics. By 2007, I had four small children, ages newborn, 2, 4, and 6. For several years, Writing.com was how I kept my sanity. This blog began, first as a way of staying connected. Later, when I worked on a novel, I used it to stoke the writing fires as I plotted out short stories and the next step of my novel. Ultimately, I moved my writing preparation to "Invalid Item"  In 2010, I became a single mom who had homeschooled her children for several years. I had a 2, 4, 6 and 8 year old and had never had a "real" full time job, since I was married while in college. Everyone told me that I would have to buckle down and take on a "real" job. Instead, I decided to attempt to live my dream: to make it as a writer. I knew that if I didn't try then, I would never really dive in. I counted my money and set a deadline. If I hadn't began making a decent (defined) amount of money after so many months, I would suck it up and get a J-O-B. After some thought, I decided to play to my strengths. I served an internship at Sky & Telescope magazine while in college and enjoyed writing about space and astronomy. With an astrophysics degree, I thought I would be able to sell myself more easily, and a small niche should be easier to penetrate. It's been about ten years since I was first paid for an article on Space.com. In that time, writing - journalism - has been my primary moneymaker. I've often thought about setting up a blog on my website - www.astrowriter.com - but just haven't gotten around to it. There are a few things I would like to share for those who are interested in scientific journalism in general. Now that I'm back on WDC, there's no reason not to combine the two and use the site blog for that sort of interaction. There are certainly plenty of folks on this site interested in the publication process. So while I'll probably meander around some, that's the intention of of this blog: to share some of my struggles as a published journalist and to help answer oft-asked questions. |
| I used to believe that I could blog every day but I'm beginning to doubt it! :D No but seriously, today's prompt is "Start your entry today with the words: “I used to believe...”", and my intro is as such. I'm trying to think about what I used to believe but no longer do - that's what 'used to' means, right? I could go serious with "I used to believe that people were intelligent but then people started worrying more about haircuts and less about life," but I'm not actually in the mood to rant. Okay, how's this: I used to believe that Pluto wasn't a planet. After the International Astronomical Society demoted it in 2006, I went along with the curve and argued their case. The reason Pluto was demoted is because, in the late 90s, we realized that it had neighbors. A lot of them. Some of them are roughly the same size, many of them are smaller. Pluto lies in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space at the edge of the solar system. In some ways, the Kuiper Belt - or Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt if you don't want to forget the Irish astronomer who also independently proposed its existence - is a lot like the better-known asteroid belt. Both contain the debris leftover from the early solar system. But while the asteroid belt is mostly rock, the Kuiper belt tends to be icy. Members of the asteroid belt are also more likely to crash into one another, so while we argue that asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu, both recently visited by asteroid-sampling missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, respectively, are primitave, they are really only relatively primitave. The Kuiper Belt, however, is likely to suffer very few collisions. New Horizons' visit to Pluto and to the Kupier Belt Object (KBO) Arrokoth showed a surprising dearth of craters, which suggests that objects in the Kuiper Belt don't bump into one another as often, and haven't for some time. I must have spent too much time with Alan Stern, however, because I'm finding myself drifting back to the other side. There are plenty of people who argue that Pluto should be a planet because it always has been, at least since its discovery in 1930. To that, I quickly counter that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, was considered a planet when first discovered for several decades before it was demoted to an asteroid, though it has regained some credibility now as a dwarf planet. And if you really want history to be your guide, well, the word 'planet' is Greek for 'wanderer' and the first planets included the sun and moon. I just don't think the historical argument is the way to go. So what's wrong with the official definition? Well, first there is the way it was passed. The IAU is the International Astronomical Union, which means that most of its members are astronomers rather than planetary scientists. A quick-and-dirty clarification: astronomers tend to study the stars, galaxies, supernova, etc, while planetary scientists tend to look at features of planets, obviously within the solar system. They are actually different fields, believe it or not, so it's like assigning zoologists to define a geology term. Or a geologist to define medical terms. Everyone would be like, WTF?! Additionally, the definition was passed during a meeting of the IAU but it was done on the last day, with little "hey we're going to be doing this" notification. I don't know if it's true for all professional conferences, which take place over a week or, for the IAU, over two weeks, but for all of the science conferences, the last day tends to be the day people are leaving so anything scheduled that day is sparsely attended. The lack of notification meant that few planetary scientists that might have shown up to vote even came to the meeting, and that even any astronomers who cared had most likely left. That's the politics of the situation. I will add that I was not a journalist at the time; that's the same year that my third child was born and I had a two and four year old, so I was busy being a stay-at-home mom. That means that the situation was explained to me, rather than taking it from my own experience. That said, I've heard the above facts repeated multiple times from various sources, most of them trustworthy, so I'm cool with them. Now let's get to the actual definition, or why you don't let geologists define medical terms. In order to be a planet, an object must 1) orbit the sun, 2) be round, and 3) be large enough that its gravity will clear away similar sized objects. 1) Orbit the sun: Nowadays, most people take this to mean 'a star', but the official definition of a planet actually says 'the sun'. The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 and by 2005 we'd discovered under a hundred, each hard-won. To me, this is the biggest sign that the people defining a planet had no idea what they were doing. That means no exoplanets qualify. 2) Be round: Pluto also falls under this category, so go team. But I'd like to take a moment to point out that, for most if not all of the exoplanets, we most likely will never be able to verify this, leaving them in a stagnant undefined zone. 3) Clear their path: This is the main argument against Pluto being considered as a planet. Because it's nestled in the Kuiper Belt, and supposedly because it's small, Pluto can't clear enough of its fellow KBOs to qualify. But if you dropped Earth in the Kuiper Belt, it also wouldn't manage to clear things out. There's a couple other issues to be argued, but I'm now having a bunch of people yelling at me, so I have to go. |
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