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Writing is a big animal. A subjective animal as well when it comes to teaching our youngest writers.

Yes, Darcy! I want to share the story
of the Oldest Wild Bird in the World
with a special child(ren).
"On Dec. 10, 1956, early in my first visit to Midway, I banded 99 incubating Laysan Albatrosses in the downtown area of Sand Island, Midway. Wisdom (band number 587-51945) is still alive, healthy, and incubating again in December 2011 (and in 2012 and in 2013). While I have grown old and gray and get around only with the use of a cane, Wisdom still looks and acts just the same as on the day I banded her. . .remarkable true story. . . beautifully illustrated in color." -- Chandler S. Robbins, Sc.D., Senior Scientist (Retired), USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD.
CLICK BELOW to view
the story of the 63-year-old bird
in your favorite store.

• Kindle
• Paperback on Amazon
• Hardcover on Amazon
• Barnes & Noble (Nook)

An odd thing is happening on my current WIP: I am writing the story out of order.

Here’s the process for this story–which will change, of course, for the next story.

• Jot down rough ideas for the story. This project is book 3 in a series, so I knew the characters and setting. I just needed to sketch out the main conflict and how it fit into this world.
• Check continuity issues. Of course, this mean that I had to check continuity issues. What was the name of the homeroom teacher and how is she described. In other words, I had to dip back into the previous stories and re-immerse myself in the milieu.
• Expand the ideas. Next, I expanded the ideas to a paragraph or more for each of the ten chapters.
• Check the narrative arc and strengthen. At this level, it’s easy to see flaws in plotting: not enough tension, not enough suspense, not enough at stake, etc. I worked with story line, actually struggling for about two weeks, trying to get all the elements to work together. The result was about ten pages, or one page per chapter. These consist of snippets of setting, dialogue, or character emotions. I know roughly what story beats will be involved, though each chapter needs expansion.


Some sequences are easy to write out of order; some sequences must be written in order or the author gets confused.

• Expand. With that foundation, I am now writing out of order. The narrative arc is strong, so I’m confident that the planned scenes will actually fit into the story about where I have them now. I am confident of the content that belongs in each chapter. I’m not worrying about fine-tuning each scene, I just want something down and I can turn to any chapter/scene that I want at this point.
• Integrate. I have about six of the ten chapters written and already much has been revised. I reread the whole thing each day and find weak places to edit and continuity issued to address. This time, I mean continuity within this novel, not necessarily within the series. But I am also going back to Books 1 and 2 to change things for series continuity.
• Repeat steps as needed. I am working all over the landscape of this short novel and it’s interesting to see it unfold and how connections are creeping into the draft, making it stronger.

Will I use this process again? I don’t know. Maybe for Book 4 of this series, but maybe not for another genre or other series. Usually, each project needs its own trajectory and working method. All I know is that this is moving me forward. For now.

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Today we’d like to introduce our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Kicking us off: What is DNA and what does it do?

By Jonathan Crowe

We’ve all heard of DNA, and probably know that it’s ‘something to do with our genes’. But what actually is DNA, and what does it do? At the level of chemistry, DNA – or deoxyribonucleic acid, to give it its full name – is a collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus atoms, joined together to form a large molecule. There is nothing that special about the atoms found in a molecule of DNA: they are no different from the atoms found in the thousands of other molecules from which the human body is made. What makes DNA special, though, is its biological role: DNA stores information – specifically, the information needed by a living organism to direct its correct growth and function.

But how does DNA, simply a collection of just a few different types of atom, actually store information? To answer this question, we need to consider the structure of DNA in a little more detail. DNA is like a long, thin chain – a chain that is constructed from a series of building blocks joined end-to-end. (In fact, a molecule of DNA features two chains, which line up side-by-side. But we only need to focus on one of these chains to be able to understand how DNA stores its information.)

There are only four different building blocks; these are represented by the letters A, C, G and T. (Each building block has three component parts; one of these parts is made up of one of four molecules: adenine, cytosine, guanine or thymine. It is these names that give rise to letters used to represent the four complete building blocks themselves.) A single DNA molecule is composed of a mixture of these four building blocks, joined together one by one to form a long chain – and it is the order in which the four building blocks are joined together along the DNA chain that lies at the heart of DNA’s information-storing capability.

The order in which the four building blocks appear along a DNA molecule determines what we call its ‘sequence’; this sequence is represented using the single-letter shorthand mentioned above. If we imagine that we had a very small DNA molecule that is composed of just eight building blocks, and these blocks were joined together in the order cytosine-adenine-cytosine-guanine-guanine-thymine-adenine-cytosine, the sequence of this DNA molecule would be CACGGTAC.

The biological information stored in a DNA molecule depends upon the order of its building blocks – that is, its sequence. If a DNA sequence changes, so too does the information it contains. On reflection, this concept – that the order in which a selection of items appears in a linear sequence affects the information stored in that sequence – may not be as alien to us as it might first seem. Indeed, it is the concept on which written communication is based: each sentence in this blog post is composed of a selection of items – the letters of the alphabet – appearing in different sequences. These different sequences of letters spell out different words, which convey different information to the reader.

And so it is with the sequence of DNA: as the sequence of the four building blocks of DNA varies, so too does the information being conveyed. (You may well be asking how the information stored in DNA is actually interpreted – how it actually determines how an organism develops and functions – but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

You may be wondering how on earth ju

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By Jonathan Crowe

What links a queen honeybee to a particular group of four atoms (one carbon and three hydrogen atoms, to be precise)? The answer lies in the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which has revolutionized our understanding of how biological information is transmitted from one generation to the next.

The genetic information stored in our genome – the set of chromosomes that we inherit from our parents – directs the way in which we develop and behave. (We call the attributes and behaviours exhibited by an organism its ‘phenotype’.) Traditionally, the genetic information was thought to be encoded solely in the sequence of the four different chemical building blocks from which our DNA is constructed (that is, our genome sequence). If a DNA sequence changes, so the resulting phenotype changes too. (This is why identical twins, with genomes whose DNA sequences are identical, look the same, but other individuals, whose genomes comprise different DNA sequences, do not.) However, the field of epigenetics opens up a strong challenge to this traditional view of our DNA sequence being the sole dictator of phenotype.

So what actually is epigenetics? In broad terms, epigenetics refers to the way that the information carried in our genome – and the phenotype that results when this information is ‘deciphered’– can be modified not by changes in DNA sequence, but by chemical modifications either to the DNA itself, or to the special group of proteins called histones that associate with DNA in the cell. (It’s a bit like taking a book, with a story told in the author’s words, and adding notes on the page that alter how the story is interpreted by the next person to read it.)

But what has epigenetics to do with the group of four atoms, the one carbon and three hydrogen atoms mentioned at the start of this blog post? These four atoms can combine to form a methyl group – a central carbon atom, with three hydrogen atoms attached; the addition of methyl groups to both DNA and histone proteins in a process called methylation is a primary way in which epigenetic modification occurs. For example, the addition of a methyl group to one of the four chemical building blocks of DNA (called cytosine, C) either when it appears in the sequence CG (where G is the building block called guanine) or the sequence CNG (where N represents any of the four chemical building blocks of DNA) appears to result in that stretch of DNA being ‘switched off’. Consequently, the information stored in that stretch of DNA is not actively used by the cell; that stretch of DNA falls silent.

But what of our queen honeybee? Where does she fit into our story? A queen honeybee has an identical DNA sequence to her workers. Yet she bears some striking differences to them in terms of physical appearance and behavior (amongst other attributes). These differences are more than just skin-deep, however: the pattern of methylation between queen and worker larvae differs. Their genomes may be the same at the level of DNA sequence, but their different patterns of methylation direct different fates: the queen honeybee and her workers develop into quite distinct organisms.

Things take an interesting turn when we consider the cause of these different methylation patterns: the diets that the queen and workers experience during their development. The queen is fed on large quantities of royal jelly into adulthood, while worker larvae face a more meager feast, being switched to a diet of pollen and nectar early on. It is these diets that influence the way in which the queen and worker bees’ genes are switched on and off.

It is not just the queen honeybee whose genome is affected by the environment (in her case, diet). Mice exposed to certain chemicals during pregnancy have be

Knuffle Bunny Free: An Unexpected Diversion, by Mo Willems, was released last week.  This book is the final part of the Knuffle Bunny Trilogy. Initially I felt sad when I learned Knuffle Bunny Free would be the final installment of the “series.”  After all, I had such joy reading aloud from the first two books [...]