Tricia Sullivan's Blog

The reason I am in data science is to understand the tools and get just a little bit of the power inherent in the field so that I can maybe put it to some good use. I don’t know how any of this will work in my life or what I will be able to do, I don’t have a plan–but plans aren’t much good when everything’s in freefall anyway.

I’m here because Data science is the machinery of power right now. Most women are shut out of this area. We are actively shut out in myriad ways, but also we often self-...

Last night I was Skyping with an old friend. We were late because my day had not gone to plan, and we talked about the year to come. I said that I needed to improve my performance on work and referred to the fact that last year I hadn’t put in the amount of hours needed to make progress. She is also a freelancer, so we discussed our hours some length before I realised that I had just negated all of my own proclamations about the industrial paradigm for work. ‘Working hours’ is an example of...

Part 1 is here.

My first idea for good practice in energy management is to change the model of working. I’ll tell you where this is coming from based on my own experience. When I first moved to Britain with my then-husband Todd, I left a good solid teaching job behind. My first novel had just been published, I was deep into writing Someone to Watch Over Me, and Todd was sitting on a nice two-book deal with some early foreign sales, so we had a pot of cash advances. There was more money in...

I promise this post isn’t about New Year’s resolutions. Ugh.

It’s about energy, which is cyclical in biological creatures. Last few years there has been a lot of noise about the importance of sleep, as if the Productivity Culture had finally noticed that people aren’t machines that can be worked like a flax mill. We all underestimate how much rest we really need because we live in a culture that equates exhaustion with heroism. The term ‘regenerative culture’ has been floating around, too. I...

New Year’s Day. I’m up and sorting out crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, empty deodorants, dead biros, and bread bags for Terracycle dropoff. It’s kinda ick to see how much we get through. I spent months of 2019 bending my mind to taking the reduce/reuse side seriously, but there’s still plenty left to recycle because we live in the modern world and there are three teenagers in the house.

I started using Terracycle last year after reading about it on a zero-waste Facebook group. It works...

Since I had my first child almost 18 years ago, before I’m anything else I am glue. I am what holds other people’s lives together. To be glue, I need to be both invisible and reliable. It’s quite a glamorous adventure.

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I don’t think I’m any different on the page. How could I be, when for most of my adult life I have been trying to write directly out of my own lived experience?

And by ‘directly’, I mean, directly: without the medium of media acting as a buffer between the day-to-day grind...

The TLDR is: hi writing peeps, I’m back. Long version:

It’s about two years since I updated this blog. I had no plans to resurrect it until suddenly–as in, like actually yesterday, the day after the General Election–something in me spun on a dime and changed. I’m a little surprised that I feel this, but nevertheless I’m feeling with some urgency that I want to reconnect with the writing community.

Why did I step back in the first place? I have cited practical reasons in the past, and they...

Writing a report that represents the work I’ve done for the past year. The people who invest funding in you don’t let you just bumble around and get lost and acquire fleas and scratch yourself. They make you formally show what you’re doing. This is cause for screaming terrors and thirty years’ worth of stockpiled dubious coping mechanisms, including this one right here: procrastination by blogging. (Sort of like death by auto, but less blood). It’s so boring how I keep falling for the same e...

I guess this is an end-of-year post? Or maybe just a general catch-up that is long overdue. I had a new book come out this year, Sweet Dreams, and a story in Haunted Futures in which the ghost of Richard Feynman has a cameo. I finished my MSc in Astrophysics with Distinction. Two weeks after submitting my thesis I started a PhD at LIV.DAT, a joint venture between the Astrophysics Research Institute and Liverpool University that receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Counc...

On 10th October I had the honour of speaking at Ada Lovelace Day Live! 2017 as a science fiction writer among an amazing group of scientists. Now, I do know that one is supposed to announce these things before they happen in case people want to go, but it’s been extraordinarily hectic as I’ve just started a PhD at the Astrophysics Research Institute in Liverpool and I don’t quite have my sea legs yet. So this is late.

During my talk, ‘Has reality put science fiction out of business?’ I listed...