Saturday, May 30, 2009

Deadline? What deadline?

I eat deadlines for breakfast. and lunch. and dinner. and midnight snack. and the next day's breakfast...

I've been working more or less straight through since Wednesday to get this chapter finished up for the intro astronomy text. It took for flippin' ever (and much longer than expected) to straighten out all the details, like making sure the figure numbers were actually, you know, sequential. That's probably kind of important. And that the reference went to the correct figure. And so on.

But it's done. And I think it's really improved. Certainly, it's more fun and interesting. And the problems are much improved. I love writing problems. No, really. I do. I like to write problems that say 'Ok, now we've told you how it is. How would things be if it wasn't that way? What if I moved you over THERE? What if I change this one thing---how would the universe be different?' Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I just love figuring out how to get people to stretch beyond reality so they can look back and see how cool it is.

Keep your fingers crossed, because in spite of the stress of SO MANY details, I really had a blast working on it, and would like to get the contract.

1 comment:

Dan Schroeder said...

Are you writing an astronomy textbook, or just part of one? Fill me in here, eh?