 | | | Subject: A87730040 - Night
Posted Mar 29, 2012 by  Gnomon
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  | | There is no collaborative writing workshop, it was discontinued a few years back.
Thanks for writing this, but I can see a few problems with it.
1. Although this is the Earth edition of a Guide to the Galaxy, we can assume for the moment that all the readers are from Earth. We haven't yet encountered any alien cultures so we should try and write for our intended audience.
So you don't need to talk about more than one sun, although you could put it as a interesting aside that on planets with more than one sun, night would be the time when all the suns were down.
2. The entire Guide is giving recommendations on places to go, things to see etc, so the end of an Entry on night is not the place for you to provide these recommendations.
3. Some smaller problems:
"making love" and "mating" are the same thing, so you don't need to list them twice
Quarter of an hour - in many parts of the world, it takes a lot longer than that for it to get dark after the sun sets. Where I live, it is normally bright for about an hour after sunset and for about an hour before sunrise.
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| | | Subject: A87730040 - Night
Posted Mar 30, 2012 by Gnomon
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| | We worry more about quality than about length. But you're right, it might be a bit brief. You could look for more night-related things to add to the entry, rather than turning it into a complete guide to Earth.
It's certainly worth stating that some species sleep at night, some during the day, and some do both, only being active at dawn and dusk.
You could add something on where you might go to if you need to sleep at night.
You could talk about the long winter nights (particularly in more northerly climes) and what people do to occupy them - story telling, ghost stories, etc.
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| | | Subject: A87730040 - Night
Posted May 15, 2012 by Tavaron da Quirm - Arts Editor
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| | Maybe you should write a bit about animals that are active at night or plants that open their flowers at night and such? What are the reasons for being active at night and what are the most usual strategies or most interesting ones to cope? (bats, owls, lemurs, cats...)
We seem to have a whole Entry about sleep and teenagers by the way. And I recently read or maybe saw on TV something (I apologize if it was here on h2g2) about how the night and also sleeping patterns changed when there were more and more streetlights in cities. Obviously people used to sleep in 2 sessions. There are references in literature about that and I think also experiments, but I'm not sure.
I've also half-seen some stuff about what would happen if there would be no night (overheating of the planet etc) so maybe that's worth mentioning too although it seems obvious, I don't know.
You could talk about the long nights at the poles and what happens then and how people cope there. Maybe the northern lights are good to mention too, I'm sure there's an Entry to link to.
Maybe I can think of more later.
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