Changing Spots

I got an email from Dr. K, my graduate school adviser. I had emailed him after seeing his address in a University of Arkansas geoscience newsletter. He mentioned that the geology department had merged with the geography department and that it was much larger than when I was there. He bemoaned the fact that the department was leaning more and more toward geography and less and less to geology.

“When the last three of us geology professors retire, most of the students won’t even be able to spell geology, much less practice it.”

He also bemoaned the fact that I never became the “King of Antimony,” a title he had bestowed on me because of my thesis about stibnite, the ore mineral from which antimony is derived.

While at the U of A, Dr. K had me rewrite my thesis at least seven times, no mean task in the days before Wite-Out, and on a manual typewriter.

“It’s the academic process,” Dr. K told me. “The only way to really learn something.”

I disagreed vehemently at the time but now I’m not so sure. The first draft of a novel may take a year to write, but that is only the beginning of the work. Strangely, most books require about seven edits, and even then, there are probably mistakes lurking that subsequent readers will find. With the advent of the word processor, this process is easier, though no less time consuming.

“Didn’t know you were such a well known author,” Dr. K said in his email. “I will have to look some of your books over and make sure the sentence structure is correct.” Well it doesn’t seem to me that Dr. K will ever retire because, no matter the passage of time, a leopard never really changes its spots, and I’m not sure I could survive his “academic process” on nine books.

Fiction South