I have these two novels that I'm working on; the first is a crime novel, and the second is a road novel that I write longhand, when I'm out traveling. The progress is somewhat slow. It feels like I'll never get my writing up to speed.
I have some reports and a science paper I need write before Christmas. But that's my job, and it doesn't really count. I enjoy writing the science stuff too, and my amateur fiction writing is improving my science writing, which is fine.
So, I thought that maybe it would be wise to do some smaller writing projects, just to practise, before I return to my novels. Recently I got some ideas for a series of three or four short stories, with a common vague theme: Women who struggle with Pi, you know, this math constant 3.14159265 ... and so on.
The protagonist in all the short stories is a nerdy math teacher. He is very clumsy when it comes to women, and he has realized that he will never reach to the level of his heroes, the great matematicians like Gauss, Cauchy, Leibniz and Emmy Noether.
Does that sound like a good idea for some short stories? I don't know. We'll see >:)
(I found the picture of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) on the Internet. He's well known for the statistical distribution that carries his name (the Gauss curve). He also discovered the Gauss theorem in Calculus (the Russians call it the Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem), and the method of Gauss elimination in linear algebra. Gauss is considered the last complete matematician, who mastered all the mathematical sub-diciplines of his time.)
