Technically, still week 28, by a day. The 12-month gap, to bring any newcomers up to speed, spans from January 2024, when I was employed as a clinical geneticist, to January 2025 when I hope to be a writer, thought not yet daring to be employed. This blog is my opinionated memoir of the descent … More Gap Year, week twenty something
Happy 4th of July. I lift my cup of cool pink lemonade and offer a toast: To freedom. And the character to preserve it. … More Gap Year. Week 27.
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
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
… More Gap Year, Week 22
Memorial Day is in the rearview mirror, and the summer of my Gap Year is officially here. This is shaping up to be the most important phase of the journey as I begin to seriously work on applications to low-residency MFA programs in creative writing. My heart and mind, though, remain anchored in clinical genetics. … More Gap Year, Week XXI
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
There will be a time when the soldiers will be forgotten, just a footnote dissolved in the cauldron of data that eons and events will churn and dilute, when our soil and planets, our hearts and light will return to stardust.
In the meantime, we can remember, if we so choose. Then the question is “Why?”
… More Gap Year, week nineteen
Since January I have been on this interesting journey from medicine to writing. Since Week 15, my last posting in mid-April, I have been distracted from writing by the best of all excuses – adventure and exploration, friends and family, haunts old and new. The photo here is moonrise over the Mississippi, from the shore … More Gap year, week unknown
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
Scott D. McLean, MD 