For the last four days, I’ve been proofing “Dead of Winter,” the novella that I’ll be publishing with a Brian Keene novella in a book to be called Dissonant Harmonies. I haven’t looked at the manuscript for several weeks, so I was able to approach it with fresh eyes, and I was quite pleased. I only found one real typo (a missing “the”), but I made quite a few minor changes and expanded a section that was unclear to my first reader. I also noticed one verbal tic: In a 40,000 word manuscript, there were 175 instances of the word “up.” Some of them are legitimate orientational and directional usages, but a lot of things “ended up” or “wound up.” A quick skim through the MS searching for ” up ” allowed me to remove at least twenty of them.
How did I end up here? It’s the sort of phrase Osvald Knop (pronounced with a hard K), the senior of my two doctoral advisors, would probably have stopped and scrutinized after he uttered it. What does “up” signify in this context? He was a polyglot born in what is now the Czech Republic who once worked in Linus Pauling’s lab. He was around sixty when I first encountered him in a third year undergraduate inorganic chemistry course. He had a strange halting and stammering manner of speaking, the result of a rumored lab incident many years before, that rendered him difficult to understand for many, but I was fascinated by what he had to say, so I listened. He was amazingly au courant about contemporary things, and was one of my few professors who confessed to watching prime time TV shows. When we learned symmetery, he used the letter R as the object that was rotated and inverted and mirrored because it lacks internal symmetery, but has a mirror image in the Russian alphabet: я, pronounced “ya.” For the longest time, I thought he was just pronouncing “r” backwards.
I was intrigued by an assignment we did where we had to solve the unit cell dimensions based on a printout of diffraction angles. That was my introduction to crystallography, in 1983. (When I talk to young people who are distraught by not knowing what they want to be when they grow up, I tell them that I didn’t even know the field of science that I ended up specializing in existed until I was 22.) When it came time to choose an Honours Project for my fourth year, I chose Knop because I liked him and remembered that assignment. That project led to my interest in the real world of X-ray crystallography, and I went on to do my PhD with him and another faculty member. I found out today that Ossie Knop died last week at the age of 93. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in many, many years, but choosing to work with him set me on a course that defined just about everything in my life that came after. I wouldn’t be in Texas if I hadn’t liked his class. Wouldn’t have met my wife of twenty years. Life’s funny that way.
