Marilyn's Musings

One of the things that worried me when I thought of writing as a career was that it would be a solitary occupation. I'd been a physicist for a long time. No one does physics alone, not since Newton, anyway. Who can accommodate something like a 17-mile-long tunnel to house a collider, or a 192-beam laser, in her garage? Physicists gather around huge equipment in giant laboratories these days, working as a team. My graduate school mates and I spent long hours together in the same laboratory every day, sharing power supplies, monster-mentor stories, and data. We became close friends and knew each others' families as well as our own for a few years. Decades later, we still get together for reunions. For the same decades, I'd wanted to be a published writer—something with more popular potential than my technical papers on the scattering properties of a titanium dioxide crystal. But I couldn't imagine sitting alone in a room with pen and paper, or keyboard and monitor, p...