Of course I have not forgotten that a year encompasses just 52 weeks. But a gap year is more flexible than what we admire as the legal, orthodox, and obdurate movement of the earth around the sun. I retired in January 2024. For the umpteenth time, from the practice of clinical genetics (yes, that’s a … More Gap Year, Week 76
I have changed the way I read. I take a semi-sharpened No. 2 pencil to underline choice words and phrases and scrawl comments in margins. Before this year, I would never.
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Now I scrawl. Wantonly. … More Gap Year, Week 47
Here’s a question: what do you think I should read next? Just one book, any book. … More Gap Year, The Week of The Election
Now we wait. … More Gap Year, Week 26
Very close to the summer solstice and half way through my one-year voyage between a full-time clinical genetics practice and something to do with writing. These Gap Year posts are my secret diary (OK, not secret secret). Writers seem to be in their meeting season, though that may well be a year-long pastime. Recently I … More Gap Year: Week 24
No frills. Busy reading. I am making up for years lost, years focused on 10-page medical review articles, chapters on next-generation sequencing, neurofibromatosis, Birt-Hogg-Dube syndrome. For at least a decade, the number of novels read per year has been in the low single digits. If there is to be a transition to a life as … More Gap year, week 20
This week the journey from medicine to writing has been full of adventure. My new friend, Monika Maeckle, whose book, The Monarch Butterfly Migration, will be published in August, strongly encouraged me to attend the San Antonio Book Festival, which I did last weekend. That really got me depressed. There were just too many great … More Gap Year – Week 15
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 … More Gap Year -> Week Eleven
For the better part of a year I’ve been thinking about an MFA in writing. … More Gap Year: Week 6
Scott D. McLean, MD 