So this is my new blog. I knew it was on its way and I have been dreading it for days. I have read blogs and even followed a few, but the thought of blogging my own thoughts is very foreign to me. Who am I to think I am interesting enough that someone would actually want to read – whatever I decide to write about? How can I write something new and interesting every day? Should it even be every day? Honestly, I have been at a loss to even get started.

I toyed with the idea of starting with my bio. You know, tell the world who I am, let the netizens get a taste of what I have to offer. That is the entire purpose of the website after all, to tell the world about my books (available on Amazon and Smashwords, see the links on the Books page). But beyond the stories I am telling, there is not much that is very interesting about me or my life. I’m a great guy, just kind of boring. Did you read the bio on the Home page? Did it put you to sleep?

That is my problem. I need to keep these posts interesting, so regaling the public with the totally awesome stories that my life just exudes might be the way to go. Cough – Cough. Sorry, choked on a chunk of sarcasm there. In truth, I had decided to give this a try on a weekly basis. I will attempt to post something new every Wednesday (give or take), and until the drive home from work today I had no idea what to write. Then I caught a news story on NPR that just seemed perfect for my first post on a website about books.

Has anyone read any of the works by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut? Okay, you with the hand in the air – do you remember “Cat’s Cradle”? Don’t worry, here’s a link to the plot (Wikipedia – Cat’s Cradle).  Not to give away any spoilers, but a main part of the story revolves around a substance known as ice-nine, a form of ice that is stable below 114.4 F (45.8 C). If one were to drop a crystal of this new form of ice into a glass of water, the water would instantly solidify into ice-nine. Very cool and also very scary. It’s a good thing that it is purely a work of fiction.

Or at least it was. The NPR story (here)was a report on a paper submitted to the journal Nature that details a scientist that has found a new form of ice, one that forms square crystals at room temperature (Nature article here). So the book lover in me grabbed my inner science geek by the rainbow suspenders and screamed, “Ice-nine!” Once my inner science geek had picked up his glasses and re-taped the nose piece he went online to look this up. It was somewhat exciting as Mr. Vonnegut’s book is rather apocalyptic.

What the science geek inside of me found, however, was something very interesting, but not earth shattering at all (that’s a subtle reference to the book, BTW). This is indeed a new form of the water molecule forced into a square configuration by the tremendous force of being trapped between two sheets of graphene, another fairly recent discovery of a new configuration of carbon. The reason this is new is that normally ice is a hexagon, that’s why snowflakes have six little arms. The hexagon is actually linked pyramids of water molecules in a somewhat 3-D configuration. The new stuff is flattened out to only an atom thick and the molecular bonds between the Hydrogen and Oxygen are smashed into a square.

My inner book lover nodded along with this, a sound akin to static filling his head, until he read something that broke his heart, literarily (see what I did there?). There are at least seventeen other forms of ice that have already been discovered! The one that is labeled ice IX (stupid scientists even messed that up) is formed at tremendous pressures and has nothing in common to the molecule in “Cat’s Cradle”. What a terrible injustice. I was simultaneously geek pumped and let down (that kind of validates the whole “I’m sort of boring” thing, doesn’t it?).

So that’s my first post. I’m not sure where this will take me over the next weeks and months (I hope), but I’ll see what I can come up with to stoke your inner geek or secret bookworm or whatever else you have lurking inside. Next time I’ll try to use more parentheses, too {maybe even fancy ones!}.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Drop me a line through the Contact Mike page and let me know what I did right or what I did wrong. Help me out with ideas of what you would like to see. Really, I’d like to know that someone made it to the bottom of the post.

Mike Ghere – 03/26/2015