After failing to secure a tenure track professorship, I figured I was closing the door on being a Principle Investigator (PI) even as I opened the door to entrepreneurship and founding Talus Bio. It turns out that being an academic PI and being the cofounder/CTO of a biotech startup looks pretty much the same at the day-to-day agenda: finding out how to pay for the science that will make a difference to the world. The funding sources might be a bit different (although we’ve been really lucky at Talus to have a decent track record securing non-dilutive funding from the NIH and NSF) but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of writing proposals, making slide decks, and communicating science to different audiences.
I still find it hard to sit down and get into a writing groove, despite writing (and rewriting) probably thousands of pages over the years. There’s usually some elaborate, ritualistic nature to my writing sprints (“sprint” because I can’t remember the last time I sat down to slowly, methodically write a grant or a manuscript that’s not imminently due within a week or so). For example, the setting and the mood has to be _just right_ for me to really crank out a word count. Coffee shops and bars are a particularly favorite atmosphere, and I need at least a few hours blocked off, rather than gradually chipping away with a thousand words here, or a few hundred there. Getting myself more into the habit of writing a bit every day is why I decided to take the spirit of the various November writing challenges in the form of short-form blog posts, with the ultimate goal of tapping out 50,000 words over the 30 days of November. (The controversy of NaNoWriMo as an organization aside, I think the spirit of a month-long “challenge” to write [organically, not through ChatGPT prompting, more on that later] is admirable.) Writing 50,000 words comes out to about 2,000 words a day, or ~4 pages. I imagine some days will be a single piece, albeit lengthy for a blog post on average, but I also figure some days I’ll have shorter pieces, or a series of pieces, whether due to time constraints or just how deeply that day’s theme is speaking to me.
Over the past few months, I’ve been preparing by jotting down themes, topics, and general shower thoughts that I’m using as inspirational seeds, but I’ll probably be meandering. I’ve also got plenty of “in progress” manuscripts that could use some love, but I’ll try to work on those in the background while getting my ~2,000 words in here. Generating four pages of content feels pretty daunting at the moment, but I guess that’s part of the exercise – getting to the point where four pages feels natural and is just putting my thoughts to keyboard, rather than getting caught up in a mental spiral of trying to edit my writing before I’ve even written it down. Some of the prompts are things I’ve been meaning to write for ages, like a general “Lindsay README” for colleagues and collaborators to learn a bit more about how to most effectively collaborate with me and a breakdown of scientific communication that I wish I’d learned when I was in school. Beyond professional or personal development, there will probably be some hot takes and some general musings, and some unhinged, disconnected rants.
One rule I’ve set for myself is that I won’t use ChatGPT. This year, it’s become so pervasive that I “feel” ChatGPT in just the cadence or the word choice in a piece of prose and it’s disappointing because it feels like everyone’s thoughts are being pushed through a uniformity filter, and getting stripped of personality. That said, these posts will probably end up being a bit more rambly and disjointed than if I gave them some LLM gloss. Sorry not sorry. I probably also won’t edit these very much, if at all, both in the spirit of breaking my “blank page syndrome” and also because of time.
(PS – This was not even 1000 words, so I’m definitely going to need to work my writing muscles this month!)
Lindsay K. Pino 