[Island Chris]

I just finished a NSF proposal Monday (January 12). It is on onshore and offshore Central California faulting and sedimentation over the last 20 million years (including recent). There are 3 co-PIs who contributed some of the text, but I was lead. A couple of days before the deadline the "Project Description" was 18 full pages; the limit is 15. I was able to get it down to 15 pages myself by getting rid of all the crap that no one would have wanted to read. Because I have many figure (16), I was likely reducing the text from 13 pages to 10. I can write well at times but have always had issues with my writing. For example, I put in too much detail, as well as stuff that does not fit the subject. Once written, it is a little hard to remove what took a long time to write (it hurts...my beautiful words!).

Because this proposal is both onshore and offshore, and is interdisciplinary (seismo-tectonics, tectonics, sedimentation, basin analysis, field geology, structural geology), it may have little chance of being funded. Specialists, as reviewers and panel members, from different areas of earth science will try and find something wrong with it.

Chris