Author Blogs

The worst part of being an indie author is that you are required to do all of your own marketing and promotion. You always wonder if you are missing something, some way of connecting to your audience. There’s lots of advice out there about having your own blog, so this week, I did some research of what other authors talk about in their blogs.

I was lucky enough to find a list of ‘well-crafted’ author blogs compiled by a well-known site for authors. So I checked out the first dozen or so.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the blogs I was connected to were over a decade old, even though these blogs got points for being ‘frequently updated’. In one or two cases, newer posts were easy to find; but in most of them, I was stuck with the post I landed on, looking for similarities, differences, anything that might tell me what made a successful author’s blog.

Two or three of them were down-right political in nature. I have my political views, of course, but I don’t like cramming my views down other people’s throats, nor do I like having other people’s views crammed down mine. I didn’t spend much time on those sites.

One blog page consisted of boxes with a headline in each box. The headlines did not make much sense to me, perhaps because I wasn’t familiar with that author’s work, and that’s what they pertained to.

One blog page was a guest blog by a friend of the author, who waxed poetic about how much better his life was, now that he had adopted just one of the attitudes suggested is the author’s non-fiction self-help book. Well, that was an interesting possibility... if I wrote non-fiction self-help books.

Several of them talked about their current Work In Progress, which was pretty much what I expected. But even now, I’m not sure how that can be done effectively, given a blog that gets a new post every week, which is the absolute minimum suggested by all the advice given to authors that I’ve seen.

Now, I don’t write 8 hours a day. I am an editor and publisher (and person) as well as an author, and so I spend 8 hours (and more) at my computer, I do not spend 8 hours a days working on my own stories. Not even 8 hours writing, re-writing and editing my own stories. But let’s look at some math:

Suppose an author writes 8,000 words a day ( that’s 1,000 words per hour, and boy, is that fast!) 5 days a week produces 40,000 words. To the best of my knowledge, a typical romance is about 80,000 words, so that’s 2 weeks of work, just for a rough draft. One romance writer complained that she had finished her rough draft, only to have her editor tell her it had problems, problems so bad that she (the author) was going to have to step back and rethink the entire story. And yet, that author still managed to include in her blog post an excerpt from that story.

I’m left wondering, does she include an excerpt with every blog post? Even if all she did was tell her audience about whatever she had written that week, she is basically telling them the story before it ever gets published.

And that’s during the rough draft stage. What does she do during the rewrites? More excerpts? Explanations of what she’s changed?

I don’t really understand, so I guess I’ll have to continue studying blogs by other authors, preferably more than one post by the same author. Do any of you know of an author whose blog you feel would be a good example for me to study?

In the meantime, I’ll return to writing about the science I’ve self-studied.

Whale Ancestors

Where did whales come from? How did a fish evolve to become as large as a modern whale?

Actually, whales took a round-about route to evolve into today’s huge ocean creatures. They are actually descended from a land animal.

There are plenty of clues in a whale’s body and biology that their ancestors lived on land:

* They breathe air.

* They nurse their young with their own milk.

* Their paddle-shaped flippers encase hand bones with five ‘fingers’.

* As embryos, whales have tiny back limbs which disappear before birth.

It turns out that hippos are the closest living relatives of whales, but not their ancestors. Both hippos and whales evolved from four-legged, even-toed, hoofed ancestors that lived on land about 50 million years ago. The hippo’s ancestor stayed on land, but the whale ancestor—which was about the size of a goat—moved to the sea and evolved into swimming creatures over a period of about 8 million years, which is quite fast for evolutionary processes.

When fossils of gigantic ancient whales were first discovered, they were mistaken for dinosaur fossils and given the name Basilosaurus. But later, they were recognized as mammals. These prehistoric whales were more elongated than modern whales and had small back legs and front flippers. Their nostrils were situated halfway between the tip of the snout and the forehead. They had earbones just like those of modern whales. Therefore, Basilosaurus showed the link between whales and their terrestrial ancestor.

The current theory is this: That some land-living hoofed animals favoured the flavor of plants at the water’s edge. Eating them had the added advantage of allowing them to easily hide from danger in shallow water. Over time, their descendants spent more and more time in the water, possibly in an ancient estuary, and their bodies became adapted for swimming. The front legs became flippers. A thick layer of fat called blubber replaced their fur coats to keep them warm and streamlined. Their tails became bigger and stronger for powerful swimming, and their back legs shrunk. Their nostrils gradually moved to the top of their heads so that they could breathe easily without having to tilt their heads while swimming. As these creatures began to feed on a different diet, they lost their teeth in favor of a baleen filter method of feeding.

Between these articles, there was some disagreement about what whale ancestors ate. One stated that they favored plants found at the water’s edge. Another felt they ate small land animals and fish found close to shore. Neither article had any information on the teeth whale ancestors had, so their eating preferences seem pretty much up in the air.

So, what can we learn from this tale of whales? Be careful what and where you eat? Evolution is your friend? I find myself wondering if whales would ever come back out of the water, what would they evolve to then? Some version of a goat-sized, hoofed animal again? One of the articles did mention that occasionally, a whale comes along that does have vestigial back legs that are completely encased within their body. Therefore, it seems possible that back legs could make a comeback.

Come on, work with me here. If octopuses can come out of the ocean and become a terrestial bad guy, as some scientists seem to think, then surely whales can also emerge from the oceans. Given enough time to evolve.

 

https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-did-whales-evolve/

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-whales-walked-on-four-legs.html

Velociraptors

Velociraptors lived about 75 to 71 million years ago. There are 2 known species, both from Mongolia. The second species was only discovered in 2008.

They were depicted in the Jurassic Park movie as swift bipedal reptiles with a long tail and an enlarged sickle-shaped claw on each hindfoot, 6 1/2 feet tall and weighing about 180 pounds. Not so, say the scientists. They were bipedal reptiles, they were fast, and they had the fearsome claw. But they also had feathers, and were actually the size of a turkey. The raptors depicted in the movie series were based on a related genus, because the script said they had to look suitably fierce.

Instead of being 6.5 feet tall, velociraptors were as much as 6.75 feet long, snout to tail tip. Scientific artistic renditions show a very long, feathered tail. They were about 1 ft 7 inches high at the hip and weighs about 33 lbs. Although bipedal, their body and tail were roughly parallel to the ground. Their forefeet were also feathered, but were too short to serve as wings.

Their skulls grew up to 10 in long. The jaws were lined with 26-28 widely-spaced, serrated teeth on each side, more strongly serrated on the back edge than the front.

Their hands were large, with 3 curved claws. However, the structure of the wrist bones forced the hands to be held with palms facing inwards and not downwards.

On their feet, the first toe was a small dewclaw, and the 2nd held the ferocious claw spoken about earlier, which could get 2.5 inches long along its outer edge. Only their 3rd and 4th toes were used in walking or running. Although some beliere their 2nd toe claw was used for disemboweling prey, tests have proven it was most likely used for stabbing and holding, to keep their prey from escaping.

If we’re going to compare fiction to fact, then we must consider the depiction in the Jurassic Park movies of velociraptors hunting in packs. Although there are some indications of other species in the family hunting in packs, there is little to no indication in the fossils of velociraptors doing it.

Most of the known velociraptor fossils have been found in current desserts, under conditions that indicate the locale at the time of their death was also arid and covered in sand dunes, or possibly a little less arid.

Now, my first thought about incorporating velociraptors in a story involves a comedy-ish story where a town in the desert is suddenly overrun by predatory turkeys, which turn out to be—according to the local Wise Guy—descendants from velociraptors, long thought extinct these millions of years. Of course, once the raptors ate up all the local cats, dogs, and chickens, they would necessarily start picking on larger prey... large dogs, wolves, goats... children? Alas, I don’t do horror, which is where this thought is quickly leading me. Anybody out there have any other ideas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor

https://www.livescience.com/23922-velociraptor-facts.html

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/velociraptor-facts.html

Ur...

Okay, not a lot of information on this subject. Only to be expected, I suppose, since Ur is the name given to the very first super continent, which came into being about 3.1 billion years ago. At that time, the only life on Earth was single-celled, and some of it knew how to photosynthesize. And it’s called a super continent, though it was probably smaller than modern Australia.

It qualifies as a super continent because it incorporated all or nearly all pieces of land then in existence. More recently, scientists have started calling Ur and other small ‘super’ continents by the term super-cratons. The best I can figure is that a craton is a piece of land considered too small to be a continent.

Other scientists have postulated the existence of another super-craton at about the same time, which they have called Vaalbara, but apparently, the ideas of these two early cratonic assemblages are incompatible.

About 1,300–1,071 million years ago, Ur joined the continents Nena and Atlantica to form the supercontinent Rodinia. In one proposal, Ur remained the nucleus of East Gondwana until that supercontinent broke up. But in other proposals, India and East Antarctica did not collide until Rodinia formed 1,071 Million years ago. However, during that time period, the Earth’s mantle was 200 degrees C hotter than today, making many characteristics of modern tectonics rare or non-existent. This would preclude Roger’s 3 billion years ago supercontinent of Ur.

The proposal for the super-craton Vaalbara places two cratons, Kaapvall of southern Africa and Pilbara of western Australia, next to each other based on stratigraphic similarities. In Roger’s configuration of Ur, these two cratons were placed far apart during Gondwana, which is contradicted by widespread collisional events between Australia and Africa.

Yet another possible supercraton, Zimgarn, was proposed by Smirnov in 2013. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the paragraph dealing with it, so I’m mostly ignoring it. After all, I’m supposed to be studying Ur.

Geological similarities in parts of India (Singhbhum and Dharwar), western Australia (Kilbaran and Pilbara), and southern Africa (Kaapvall and Zimbabwe) indicate these area were close together in the Mid-Archaean Era. Ur was named for the german prefix meaning “original” by Rogers because in his proposal, it was the first continent. Other Archaean continental assemblages are considerably younger. In some reconstructions, the various pieces of Ur stayed near each other until the break-up of Gondwana.

So, was there really an Ur, as proposed by Rogers? Should it really be called Vaalbara or Zimgarn? Or something else entirely? I didn’t find any indication of where it was located, and given how long it supposedly existed, it could have drifted quite a ways from its original location, but still, I would have liked to see some of that type of information.

How many planets do you suppose are out there with only single-celled life and 1 large island? With such a small land mass, would it be worth it to colonize it?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_(continent)

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_(supercontinent)