Ask the Author: John Austin
Answered Questions (7)
John Austin
Petruchio and Kathrine of Shakespeare's "Taming of the shrew". I tend to like strong, intelligent women and in the Taming of the Shrew, Kathrine is painted a wild, untamable young lady but along with Petruchio takes advantage of people's misunderstanding of her.
John Austin
I can't really answer this directly. Technical books are less about inspiration I think and more about need. Certainly, I don't have many ideas, but perhaps I am better off in that respect, since as one idea get's exhausted - first it was the metric system and then it was Sudoku puzzles - I seem to come up with one but only one new idea at a time. This makes it easier to focus on the new project whatever it may be.
John Austin
As mentioned above, I like the idea of a book on "Space Weather". I also do Sudoku puzzles, and I have just finished two books on them. One explains how to solve them and the second is a special set of puzzles with the minimum number of clues. I am slightly apologetic about these things, as perhaps many people might think that Sudoku is not a very serious activity. I certainly don't want to get distracted too much by them but when you dig deeper, you realise that it is quite amazing that such simple logical structures have surprisingly difficult and complex mathematics.
John Austin
I can't really answer this as I'm not sure if I qualify as a writer myself.
John Austin
I'm not sure if at the moment I qualify as a "writer". This is my first book, so we'll see how popular it becomes. However, that aside, putting words together and creating new material even in a technical discipline certainly gives me a buzz.
John Austin
For the "Measuring the World" book, I had spent almost 10 years living and working in the USA where they use a really rotten set of units for every day measurement. I found myself continually converting to Celsius, metres, kilogrammes etc. to make sense of it all. but perhaps the clinching aspect was that in the USA, units such as bushels are quite common yet nobody I asked could give me a precise indication of what they are (mass or volume), nor of course what are they in conventional units (litres or kilogrammes). Also, the US federal government tossed away $300 million on a Mars space programme because its engineers didn't give the correct units. Such waste!
John Austin
In writing technical books like this one, I don't believe writer's block should ever be a problem. On some days, I just like to sit down and write new material, information that perhaps has been churning around in my head for some time, but I have not yet got around to putting it down. For example, for a month or two now, I have been thinking of writing a popular science book on "Space Weather". So I have been collecting my thoughts together and one day in the new year, the temptation may get the better of me and I'll just start writing just for the joy it gives me. The nearest I would get to writer's block would occur on the day's I don't feel particularly like writing and on those days I would systematically work through my material checking facts and rewriting poorly written material.
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