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A dated photo of my workplace, located a half-mile underground
(Facebook friend): OMG Matt Nelson! How are you??!! What are you doing this summer?? Lolololol

Me: Nice to hear from you! I'm actually working a half-mile underground in a cutting-edge physics lab located at the bottom of a century-old iron ore mine where I'm trying to teach bored tourists about a mysterious little particle called a neutrino as well as dark matter. What are you up to?

(Facebook friend): omfg whATT?!

I've had this conversation at least five times since the start of the summer, regarding Awesome Summer Job.

I had applied for Awesome Summer Job in April, but I never expected to get it. Then I got the phone call while I was literally on my way to take my Modern Physics final.

Future Boss: Congrats Matt! We want to hire you to work in the Soudan Underground Mine! We're going to pay you well, give you free housing, and incredibly flexible schedule and a chance to flex your physics teaching muscles while working with bonafide high school physics teachers.

Me: (trying to speak while drooling out my mouth and simultaneously jizzing in my pants) THAT'S SO #$@%!!#% AWESOME! But my final is in ten minutes canicallyoubackplz?!

The lateness of the summer job threw my summer plans completely out the window. I had been intending to take a morning class from the U in Duluth that I could no longer take. I had to drop out of that while at the same time begging and pleading professors back at Drake to let me into their equivalent classes in the fall.

My workplace sort of resembles the lair of a demented Bond villain. Located 2,341 feet underground, it can only be reached by taking a cage down a small mine shaft. On one side, mine tunnels extend a mile into the surrounding rock, which visitors can travel on a historic tour. On the other side is my occupational space, where a 6,000 contraption of steel and plastic carefully monitors a pivotal particle that humanity knows almost nothing about. Every time I walk in there, the little kid in me goes apeshit at the sight of miles of cords, blinking lights and terribly complicated monitoring boxes. I get giddy when I go in there.

 My job is chiefly physics outreach. The Soudan Underground Mine has been home to physics experiments for 30 years, but only the most recent one has been open to the public for tours. I bring visitors down the cage, into the lab and explain to them that they are being shot by millions of particles smaller than atoms every second by a beam from Fermilab in Illinois. Did your eyes glaze over when you read that? My tourists' eyes do too.

I'll also be doing some design/writing work hopefully soon — wait, what?! You mean I'm going to be combining physics and journalism, two of the areas I've had extensive training in? THAT'S EVEN POSSIBLE?

Starting to see what this Summer Job is full of Awesome?

It's harder work than you'd think. I haven't nailed it all down yet, and I live in terrible fear of of the Physics P.h. Douche from MIT who will inevitably appear on my tour and stump the hell out of me. Still, I'm teaching, I'm learning, I'm thinking about a subject I'm fascinated with. 

The only real concern I have is if the Zombie Apocalypse breaks out while I'm underground. You might think the seemingly inaccessible location of the mine would be a plus... but you're wrong. Assuming Z.A. occurred within a short span of time, it would be impossible to stock the caverns with enough canned food to last until the infestation was overcome. We would have to resort to either cannibalism or bats. Ugh.

Also, the only way in or out of the mine is the mine shaft, and if the hoistman is bitten or scratched by an enraged zombie tourist, we'd be stuck down there; the only way up is a ladder that goes up the entire 2,341 feet, hitting 50 or so other platforms as it does so. Zombies would almost CERTAINLY be attracted by our zesty human flesh and throw themselves down the shaft, meaning we would have to fight off a Scad of them at every platform. Unless we could use our physics skills to invent some kind of super Zombie Zapper, we'd never see the sun again.

...but other than that, it's great!
 
Z-Z-Z-Zombies! 04/03/2010
 
I'm Script Frenzying it up tonight! I have a solid 14 pages down, only 86 left to do during the month of April. So far, I'm having a pretty good time, but then again, first drafts are ALWAYS fun. You have no constraints to work with. No critic except for the internal one, and as long as you shut him up with a little stubbornness, you're good to go.

In many, many cases, someone starts on a first draft, gets a page or two in, then gets frustrated/bored/pissed off and walks away. Forever. FOR-EV-ER. And that once golden idea you just had, well, doesn't ever come back.

How do I beat it? I'm so glad you asked. Here are five writing tips I use to crank out content.

1) Know your ending. You should have an opening A and a closing B. Anything between those two points can happen, but you must, MUST have and end game in mind. Even J.K. Rowling wrote the epilogue to Deathly Hallows way before she started writing Sorcerer's Stone. With that being said...

2) Don't set things in stone. Sure, your main character might wind up happily married with two kids, but that doesn't mean he didn't fight off three sharks, have a dangerous affair with an exotic babe and own a yellow dog named Lexington who saved his life by pulling him unconscious from a raging stream after he fell in while fly fishing. To some extent, allow the ending to change too. Maybe he has two kids with the exotic babe instead of who you thought would be his wife.

3) Write from another point of view. If you get stuck writing with one character, try analyzing the scene or situation from another character. You may not use any of the material you write, but maybe if you understand what Lexington saw and felt when he dove into the raging river to save his master, ultimately losing his life in the process, you might be able to better write about the anguish the dog owner felt afterwards. If you lose your keys, you don't stand in the same place and look for them. You get on your knees, checking under tables, trying to get a different perspective. Writing is the same.

4) Do an exercise. Sometimes people try to write cold, and get stuck after only a few paragraphs. Take some time to write something creative — get warmed up. Read a passage of your favorite book and ask yourself why you like it so much. Try to copy it in terms of style and tone.

5) If you get bored, get unbored. It's your first draft, and it can go anywhere, be anything. Throw in a car chase, a terrible secret from the past suddenly unearthed, a mysterious man with a bowie knife. Play with it! There's nothing more exciting to a writer than wondering what is going to happen next in his or her writing (except for maybe getting a check for millions of dollars from their first bestseller, but that rarely happens so we just kind of pretend it doesn't).

That's why I like Script Frenzy — I have 100 pages to write about whatever the hell I want, in a format restrictive enough to give me focus, but free enough to keep it maniacally addictive. I may not be getting a grade, but darn it, writing about zombies is fun!