Although I often blog about writing, today is the first time I will share a snippet of my original fiction on this site. Below are the opening paragraphs of Chapter One of the novel manuscript I have spent the past few months polishing. As you may have understood from last week's post, I am not completely satisfied with my writing. I have lost confidence. But I do want to share my writing with others. I will never attain my personal goals of publication and inspiring others if I fail to share what I have written with an audience.
sharing
Sharing Our Passions
Now that we are into May, my spring fieldtrip season is in full swing. I'm teaching classes on wetlands, wildlife, plants, and ecology every week. It's a great time to introduce students to the changes in the environment around them as spring slowly drifts into summer. Often it amazes me what things are completely unfamiliar to them, such as willow flowers, crayfish, or salamanders. But it's also exciting to introduce them to things for the first time that I usually take for granted. Even though these students are with me for only a few short hours out of their entire academic childhood, sometimes it's enough to open new doorways for them and spur them into a lifelong love of nature.
A Case of Too Many Details…
Today I was reading an article on the indictment of several coal mine supervisors for manipulating equipment and data meant to keep miners safe. Several of the miners who worked under them have developed black lung disease as a result of years of exposure to elevated levels of coal dust, levels that their equipment should have shown to be unsafe had the supervisors not told those miners to interfere with the equipment's ability to collect accurate data. So basically, the focus of the article was black lung disease and the regulations put in place by the US federal government to help protect miners from this disease as well as other mining hazards. However...
HLHumbert 