• Mood: procrastinatory
• Music: Joy Division: Day of the Lords

WiP Meme

There's a meme going round inviting people to post sentences or short excerpts from stuff they're currently writing. And I thought, why not? Cos even though I'm not really a writer, I'm spending a great deal of my time writing at the moment. I've mostly stuck to the one-sentence original requirement, but I only got away with it cos my sentences are way long and I overuse semicolons.

1. Thesis: results section. This is the bit I wrote ages ago, and it's been reworked to something close to its final form:
When cells were treated for 16 hours with the test compounds at a 2µM concentration, and β-gal activity was assayed in whole cell extracts, 30 compounds of the 2000 screened caused a significant induction of β-gal activity compared to untreated controls.

2. Thesis: discussion section. This is a first draft, and I tend to be quite rhetorical in first drafts, and rewrite later to sound more formal and objective:
Many conventional chemotherapeutic drugs were discovered on the empirical basis that they successfully blocked tumour growth in animal models, and their mechanism was elucidated only after they were in clinical use.

3. The paper I just submitted this week:
Further novel small molecule activators of the wild type p53 response may thus provide new therapeutic approaches.

4. The letter aimed to persuade the journal editor to publish my paper:
Reviewer 1 argues that our strategy is not novel; however, we are not aware of any reports which combine screening for inducers of transcription with measurement of genotoxicity and specific cytotoxicity.

5. A journal entry I'm working on in my head:
My first encounter with feminism consisted of rude women coming into my house and making my mother cry.

5a. And a different journal entry:
Forty years ago this month, a synagogue in London was contacted by the Czech government with a very unusual proposition.

6. A personal email I'm writing, also in my head:
You have nothing to be contrite about; either ignore him completely or make it clear that you're prepared to be friendly if he lays off the emotional blackmail.

7. This is the opening line of a story that I may just possibly be writing. I mean, probably not, cos I don't write fiction, and even if I did I don't have time to be doing so right now, and even if I did have time I probably wouldn't be able to make this story work (there's a big huge gap in the middle where I can't figure out the practicalities). Anyway, as far as I am writing a story, which is really not very far, rysmiel is mainly to blame.
They say I awoke into death. You could say they're right, but not in the way you probably think.