No good denying

I have procrastinated on writing the supposed first-firstish-author paper for Angew. Chemie for a long long time. The idea of the paper originates the Japanese postdoc who started the project; I did most of the follow up work and data organization - while the postdoc went back to Japan for another postdoc position. The position in question is reputed to be particularly exhausting just like a healthy Japanese workstyle, which is the justification for my having to write up with him remaining first author if no shared authorship is allowed.

Gosh how I hate the word allowed, or showed, demonstrated, verified... Things that are rigid, factual and undisputable. I'm not good at doing this. I've been so careful to be correct and not to exhibit resemblances of demi-scientific wishful thoughts (let alone full-fledged emotions, whims and fancies that I wish constitute life instead of quantum mechanics) and I'm so sick of doing it. It's been uphill for the longest time and I've looked everywhere for fuel and couldn't find any left. C'est tout fini. Finito. I wonder if my advisor would let me go just like this though. Half-baked, uninspired, totally unlike a Stanford-trained 'scientist'. During this year's commencement when my advisor graduated her first two students, she started the descriptions of each's grad school journey that made them both resemble lab technicians. Every grad student starts out as a lab tech. Perhaps my advisor could let me go right now and just shorten the speech to end with "and so, a lab tech JY had stayed to this day. Congratulations!" I wouldn't mind in the least.

Short story-writing

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

(Source: wikipedia.org)