Welcome or welcome back to my travels between respectability and susceptibility. Less than three months ago I was an employed clinical geneticist. Now I’m the retiree ordering a cappuccino in the forenoon.
This month my plans have been to focus on nonfiction, including medicine, but I have not been especially efficient. We took a week to ski Canyons/Park City, where we really liked The Drop and Tranquility. And Kokopelli. There was slush and powder. I admired the 2nd graders in ski/snowboard school with pine boughs festooning their helmets. On the second morning a scraggly bare branch, only about yea big, was on the ground at the Sunrise lift, so I stuck in under my goggle strap in the back, a makeshift rudder or antennae, as it were, and the lift operators and loosely clustered millennials took notice. Most of their questions were silent – wry smiles, side-long glances, spilled lattes. And some statements. “You gotta tree in your head.” Or “Did you hit an aspen?”
I did my best to keep a straight face, just returning a frank stare, with a quick shrug of the shoulder (uphill side, of course – gotta be edgy) before I deployed one of my standard answers:
“Well, I’ve decided to branch out.”
“I’m opening a branch office.”
“Planted it yesterday. Hoping it will leaf out this week so I can ski in the shade.”
My wife clarified the situation by explaining that it was actually growing out of my head. She was afraid to pull it out but was consulting an arborist.
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The last few days of winter are impostors. They are, rather, the most powerful days of spring, displaying the full promise of rebirth in the very shapes of the great trees, the leaf buds stepping beyond the point of no return.
In about 2009 I wrote Ten Steps to Improve Your Genetic Health, prescriptive nonfiction, in fact the topic for my first blog entry in 2017, which you can find on my website. Now I am re-reading it to test the proposition and foundational ideas for the book – that most of the pillars of practical genetics are simple, enduring, powerful, and free – or at least low-cost. Haven’t read it all the way through in 5 years – it’s terrifying! It might not be very good. It might have aged poorly. Irrelevance! Boring! Not funny!
More than a decade ago I pitched Ten Steps to Improve Your Genetic Health to about 2 or 3 agents and sputtered to a stop because of work, apostacy, bad omens, and not having anything beyond a tepid query letter. I did not (gasp) have a proposal. I wrote a full dozen chapters before realizing that nonfiction books are pitched with only a smattering of chapters, not a finished manuscript. I guess everyone has to take their turn as a neophyte.
Last fall I took a Writers’ League of Texas online seminar – “Crafting a Non-Fiction Book Proposal” – with Jessica Wilbanks. Lots of precious metals in those few hours. Time to grit teeth, read and research and organize and write that 47-page proposal, morning work, nothing desultory. Harder than writing the book. Probably harder than the uniformity of the rejections that fate bestows upon us supplicants.
Fine. This is the way.
At least spring is here, eager for growth and undaunted, mostly, by the inevitable late freeze and a good chance of flurries.
Scott D. McLean, MD 