More research and ideas molding in my brain

Time Spent: 3 hours

I was a bad girl last night - I did some research at the end of the evening, but was too tired to journal so I'm counting it on today's time. Bad Steph, Bad, BAD!

Anyway, I did a lot of research for today. A lot of it was going into some of the Writer's Digest links from the 100 best websites. I looked at three sites - it's like looking at any other website. One link leads to another to another. What a wealth of information! I saw link for contests, for submission venues, for articles about what it takes to get published, and that was from just one of those sites.

One link leading to another led me to Glimmer Train. They have some exciting contests going on right now, one of which is for a very short story award - in other words, flash fiction, which is my thing. And they allow 2000 words for it. HA! I can do it in 250! ;)

But from all this research I did last night and today, the thing that struck me most is some research I did on primates. I'm thinking of writing this Science Fiction story and am exploring the possibilities of writing about evolution (It will make more sense when the story's finished, I promise). Anyway, that got my mind turning with a bunch of what if's and I wonder's. The most important thing I learned is that evolutionarily (is that a word even?) speaking, humans are most closely related to a group called bonobos. We share certain social traits with them, and the main difference, besides appearance, is that humans have bigger brains and cerebral cortexes than bonobos ( a type of ape). At least that's what I got from the reading I did. Now here's the deal - I understand evolution, but I don't really believe in it. I'm a pretty literal seven day creation type person, but I also understand that the important point in Genesis is that God created us. I personally think that God created all species as they are, which means no common ancestor for the humans and the apes, but I'm also willing to be wrong because the theory of evolution is so damn interesting. Perhaps God created the common ancestors and left evolution to do the rest of the job. It's not a question I need answered now anyway. It is so interesting though to study the theory and see what biology says about evolution, and it got me thinking - what if there was another in the hominid family more advanced than homo sapiens? I was exhausted last night, yet it took me forever to get to sleep because I continued to mull this over in my mind for a while, all in pursuit of a fictional story.

So I think what I learned can be condensed to two things;
1. science is fascinating and I should consider writing about it; and
2. I shouldn't read interesting things before bed!