My website and social media bios identify me as “scholar, writer, computer geek.” Now that I’m slowly becoming more active on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/davidalexlamb.bsky.social) and Mastodon (@davidalexlamb@universeodon.com), I figured I should say a bit more about what all of that means, so people have enough information to decide if they want to follow me.
Computer geek is pretty straightforward. I’ve been programming computers (both professionally and for fun) since the fall of 1970 and have advanced degrees in Computer Science, including the PhD that got me a job as a professor. I play video games as one of my major recreational activities.
Scholar used to be straightforward: it goes with the “publish or perish” side of being an academic. If you look for things I’ve written, you’ll find professional publications from my time as a professor: a textbook and relatively few journal papers (hence my retirement at the end of 2023 at a lower rank than Full Professor). I doubt I’ll ever publish in a journal again. Am I still a scholar?
Writer requires more thought. I’ve definitely written things, but you won’t find much recently except blog posts. I’ve been writing fiction since 2006, when I wanted something to exercise my brain while on disability leave for chronic depression. It’s all in the form of partly-completed NaNoWriMo projects, plus a couple of rejected short stories. So you won’t find any of my fiction. Am I still a writer?
Mary Robinette Kowal says “you’re a writer if you write” even if you aren’t published. She discourages her students from calling themselves “beginning writers” or even “unpublished writers.” J. Michael Strazynski, on the other hand, wouldn’t have considered me one, even at the height of my professional career; he apparently has said “You’re not a writer if you write; you’re a writer if it’s the only thing you can do.” So, deciding whether I am or have ever been a writer depends on where in that spectrum you sit.
The reason I list both scholar and writer in my bio is that I am still exercising my scholarly skills, and applying them to writing. Over the years I’ve written several blog posts that amount to short scholarly essays. When I learn enough about something, I
- find a lot of sources on the subject and read them;
- make notes on what I have read;
- organize them into a survey on the topic;
- include links to all my sources so you can read them yourself and decide if my summary is reasonable; and
- try to provide some original insight to the topic (which is what makes it “original research” rather than “a list of stuff”).
These are pretty much the instructions I always gave my students when assigning a term paper. So I’m still a scholar (aside from not having to go through peer review, which is a whole complicated Thing to evaluate).
You can find most of these on my website, such as (in reverse chronological order):
- What I’ve Learned About Mastodon This Month
- Unifying Three Story Structures
- First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines
- Character Wounds and Lies
- Writing Engaging Characters
- What is a Bridging Conflict?
- Two posts about writing mysteries.
- Quirks for Characters
There may be others, and they’ll be easier to find when I get tag search implemented so you can look for “survey.” There are other posts about writing, but I don’t count them as scholarly unless they summarize and link to sources; opinion pieces don’t count.
Scholar, writer, computer geek: that’s me. I hope you find my blogs and social media posts worth reading.