Novels and Values

As promised, I am writing away on this National Novel Writing Month novel (cleverly titled NaNovel in my documents folder).

I have officially passed the halfway mark (en route to the official goal of 50,000 words), so I'm a bit ahead of the game so far, although I am getting to a sort of 'well, that's fine, but I've just spent 50 pages covering peoples' car trips,' and 'so how do I fill up the rest of the pages?' stage.

But, as a colleague pointed out, it could become a post-apocalyptic wasteland novel at any time and on any page, so I shall not give up hope of something interesting happening.

Meanwhile, I was interested to hear via an email to the MEDLIB-L list that one can now download PubMed search results in comma-separated value format for handy sorting in Excel and such, via FLink. You can do a search in PubMed, then go to FLink, select PubMed under 'choose a database to start,' and select 'input from Entrez history' to get a list of recent searches which can then be saved in CSV format.

I have to confess I'm not totally sure I need this for anything, but I save a lot of stuff in CSV format from queries of our OPAC, so I'm sort of preliminarily pleased that the option exists.

Now I have to get back to work. This novel, unfortunately, is not going to write itself.

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