Friday, January 02, 2015

Weekend Reading: The Catching Up Edition

Happy new year, everyone! I'm easing my way back in from two weeks of being mostly on vacation. I polished a few pieces of writing, did about an hour of contract work, and did some business-related reading over the last two weeks, but that translates to very sporadic working. So this was my first day attempting something like fulltime, and wow, this has been an interesting day. In my defense, I'm still getting over a mild cold, and Mr. Snarky and Pumpkin were both home today, too. Petunia has pajama day at day care and definitely did not want to miss that, since she had received new homemade pajamas from my Mom for Christmas, complete with a matching set for her doll. Or, as it turns out, for her stuffed bear, who visited day care for share day today.

Pumpkin was actually pretty good about not interrupting me, but Mr. Snarky decided to clean out our hall closet (hooray!) and interrupted me quite a lot (boo).

Anyway, since I've been on vacation, I don't have that many links for you. But I do have a few, including one to an article I wrote! So let's get started.

First of all, In honor of the new year and people who may have resolved to start looking for a new job this year, I'm running a GoodReads giveaway of Navigating the Path to Industry. Two winners will be selected by GoodReads, and I'll send them paperback copies of the book. The giveaway runs until January 16. Tell all your friends!

In preparation for the giveaway (and based on some of the business-related reading I did over the holidays), I revamped the page for Navigating the Path to Industry on my publisher site. Check it out- it now includes a link to an excerpt on informational interviews. Share the link with all your friends!

I also did an interview with Chemjobber (who reviewed the book earlier), which will be in a podcast soon. I will definitely share the link when that goes live. We had a great time talking, so I think it will be fun to listen to.

In other news, I had an article published at USA Today, about why we stopped fighting the princess invasion. I decided not to link that to any social media accounts, but did reference my kids' books in my bio. It went live on Dec. 22, but I didn't find out that it was live until after Christmas. I only found out because one guy wanted to tell me that it was silly to worry about these things since boys and girls are just different. He wanted to tell me that so much that he tracked down my @wandsci twitter handle to do so. I think he completely failed to understand the point of the article, but I guess I'm grateful for his determination to tell me that I'm silly, since otherwise I might not have found out it had been published until a check arrived.

Anyway, I'm reasonably proud of how that article turned out, so by all means- share that link with all of your friends, too!

Speaking about gender stereotypes, did you guys catch the story right before Christmas about President Obama busting them while sorting toys for Toys for Tots?

I suspect you have seen this awesome photo already:




But thanks to that particular tweet, I learned that it was taken at a White House STEM outreach event, which makes it even more awesome.

My final piece of news is that I'll be writing a monthly column for Chronicle Vitae, starting this month. In fact, I have already submitted my first piece for editing (that was one of the things I was polishing over the holiday break). I won't mention that much here, but will certainly cross-promote my columns over on my "real name" account. If you want to follow my real name Twitter account or blog and don't have the info, email me at wandsci at gmail dot com, or DM me on Twitter (if we follow each other on my @wandsci account). Or keep an eye out for the occasional pseudo-self RTs I do. I suppose you could also track it down from the name that USA Today piece is published under. Or go look up my Amazon author profile, and I think you can get to my real name Twitter from there. But really, it would be easier to email me! It isn't top secret, I'm just hiding this blog from being associated with my real name on Google.

Anyway, as I was researching a point I wanted to make in that first column, I came across a great old article from Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton on why internal competition isn't such a great idea. I can think of some professors I knew in graduate school who could stand to read that article. 

That's all for now. Regular link posts should resume next week, as should regular blog posts. I have a bunch of things I want to write about right now, and past experience tells me I should get those posts written before the urge passes.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:53 PM

    Ooh, impressive on the Chronicle Vitae job!

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  2. Ooooo, congratulations!!!

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  3. I have been out of the loop and have not heard any of the info about the President (although naturally Mr. Sandwich has--he always seems to see things before I do), so thanks for sharing. I love it!

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  4. Congratulations on the USA Today op-ed! That is so awesome! And wonderfully written, too =) (Just glanced at the comments and yeah, some people apparently can't read at all, or are so blinded by their preconceptions of what an essay is about that they can't actually, um, read the essay.)

    And congrats too on the Chronicle Vitae gig! Looks like your 2015 is off to a great start!

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